One Thing From the Book

“The specific rules varied between countries, but the template was similar. Repression was selective, confined to those who openly challenged the status quo. The number of people who fell into that category was actually very few – journalists who criticised the state or published information that cast the powerful in a negative light; lawyers who defended these agitators; and politicians and others who publicly went out of their way to “cause trouble”. The rest of the population could enjoy freedom to travel, to live more or less as they wished and to make and spend their money. This was the difference between public freedoms and private, or privatised, freedoms. For many people this presented an attractive proposition. After all, how many members of the public, going about their daily lives, wish to challenge the structures of power? One can more easily than one realises be lulled into thinking that one is sufficiently free.”

My notes

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 shattered comfortable assumptions about the balance between security and liberty. The resurgent autocrats drew strength from two forces playing out at the same time – the inherent weaknesses of democratic systems, and the actions of Western leaderships in their “war on terror”. They exploited the mismatch between the rhetorical exhortations of the Bush administration, as it pursued its “democratisation” agenda around the world, and the tawdry practices it indulged in – from the manipulation of evidence leading up to the Iraq war, to the humiliations of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the systematic use of torture in secret jails around the world, illegal “rendition flights” and the extraterritorial incarceration of hundreds of terrorist suspects at Guantánamo Bay. In order to succeed in this moral void, the new authoritarians came to a pact with their peoples. The specific rules varied between countries, but the template was similar. Repression was selective, confined to those who openly challenged the status quo. The number of people who fell into that category was actually very few – journalists who criticised the state or published information that cast the powerful in a negative light; lawyers who defended these agitators; and politicians and others who publicly went out of their way to “cause trouble”. The rest of the population could enjoy freedom to travel, to live more or less as they wished and to make and spend their money. This was the difference between public freedoms and private, or privatised, freedoms. For many people this presented an attractive proposition. After all, how many members of the public, going about their daily lives, wish to challenge the structures of power? One can more easily than one realises be lulled into thinking that one is sufficiently free.

The events of the past decade have surely undermined the claim that the enrichment of a country, or the growth of a middle class, provide an impulse towards greater liberty. Barrington Moore’s theories of “no bourgeoisie, no democracy” have surely been refuted by the past twenty years of materialist aspiration. During this period, people in all countries found a way to disengage from the political process while living in comfort. Consumerism provided the ultimate anaesthetic for the brain. What happens when the wealth disappears and the anaesthetic wears off?

The responsibility of the government is therefore a largely technical one of delivering the good life, in return for the endorsement of the electorate. Elections are in essence a report card. I promise, I deliver, you vote for me. Democracy is used to legitimise the formula. Democracy has been shifted away from any liberal assumptions, without apologies, from representation to trusteeship, from individual rights to collective wellbeing.

I ask Professor Wang Gungwu, head of the East Asia Institute, to explain the philosophical underpinnings of the Singapore experiment. He describes it as a “Hobbesian contract”. According to Thomas Hobbes’s theory of social contract, unrestricted freedoms produce a “war of all against all”. We need, we want, restrictions to save ourselves from our dark sides.

“Understanding the limits to freedom is what makes freedom possible. The greater good is impossible without some constraint on individualism. The weakness of liberalism is the unwillingness to pay the cost of membership.” — Chua Beng Huat

In his seminal 1922 book, Public Opinion, Lippmann said democracy and the media operated in an environment of low attention spans and the inability of the “bewildered herd” to come to intelligent conclusions without prompting. This herd, he argued, must be governed by “a specialised class”. That class would be composed of experts, otherwise known as elites, whose role would be to circumvent the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the “omni-competent citizen”.

Taiwan’s fraught history casts an intriguing light on the double standards of the Cold War. As long as a country was pro-Western in its geo-strategic loyalties, its approach to democracy and human rights internally was glossed over. That much applied to Chiang and his declaration of martial law. Then, just as Taiwan introduced real freedoms, it was abandoned by the West as it threw in its lot with the authoritarian Chinese mainland

The greater Western error, which was manifested around the world, was to see free markets and democracy as indistinguishable. It began with “shock therapy”, the monetarist theory that decreed the privatisation of almost anything that belonged to the state

Lilia Shevtsova, a leading chronicler of the era, sums it up like this: “The Yeltsin period gave Russia quite a few freedoms. Never had Russia been so free,” she says. “But freedom in the absence of orderly habits, with a weak legal culture and egotistical elites, led to chaos and illegality, a disregard for all taboos and restrictions. Russians – frightened by the unfamiliar freedoms and not knowing how to deal with them – swung the pendulum back towards order.” Sitting in her office on the corner of Tverskaya Street and Pushkin Square, near the old Moscow News office where dissidents would once gather, Shevtsova told me: “Ordinary people wearied of their unprecedented freedom to criticise the government because it had brought no improvement.”

The wake-up call for the UAE came in 2006. The British company P&O, which owned six US ports in its global portfolio, including New York’s, agreed to a takeover by Dubai Ports World. The acquisition was referred to Congress and to the Bush administration, which gave it the nod. The White House was keen to keep Sheikhs Khalifa and Mo happy, to show appreciation for the discreet cooperation of past years. When the deal became public, however, popular opposition led to the House Appropriations Committee voting an astonishing 62–2 to stop the takeover. That humiliation hurt in the UAE, amid allegations of dirty dealings on all sides. Bush was furious. Politicians and business leaders on both sides were chastened, and vowed to prevent a recurrence. Key to that was a public relations campaign extolling not just the financial virtues of the Emirates, but its atmosphere as an easy place to do business and relax. All outward manifestations of “fundamentalism” were played down. Religion, too, played its part in the pact.

It has long been a curiosity as to why the UAE has avoided a bombing spectacular, given the country’s geography, the ethnic mix and the number of signature buildings that would prove tempting for al-Qaeda and affiliated groups. Such a strike would prove a spectacular publicity coup for militant Islamists. It would lead to mayhem, capital flight and a collapse in confidence. The Americans know that two of the nineteen men who staged the 9/11 attacks were UAE nationals. It was said that half of the attacks’ $500,000 budget was wired to the US from Dubai. Yet the Americans directed their ire at Afghanistan and later at Pakistan, but not at the UAE, as they could easily have done. They saw that relationship as too important to jeopardise.

Pallavi Aiyar, Beijing correspondent for the Hindu newspaper, has made a study of the two countries’ systems. She offers this neat comparison: “While in China the Communist Party derived its legitimacy from delivering growth, in India a government derived its legitimacy simply from having been voted in,” she writes. “The legitimacy of democracy in many ways absolved Indian governments from the necessity of performing. The Chinese Communist Party could afford no such luxury.” If elections are not seen as the ultimate performance indicator, as they are in Singapore, are they then denuded of purpose?

Yet whereas Pakistan is dubbed a failed state and one of the most dangerous places on earth, the death toll from terrorist attacks in India exceeds Pakistan’s. This is rarely mentioned in India or in the West, because it does not conform to the narrative of a successful democracy. According to figures from the National Counter-terrorism Center in Washington, nearly four thousand people died in India from bombings and shootings between 2004 and 2007, three times higher than in Pakistan And that did not include Jammu and Kashmir. The total put India as the second most dangerous place in the world, after Iraq.

The Italian version of the pact is mutual myopia. So low is the voters’ view of the state’s ability to improve their lives that all they want it to do is to turn a blind eye to what they get up to; in return they pledge not to trouble their leaders too much either. This country at the heart of the European Union, NATO, the G8 and other international institutions is, by most barometers of constitutional and political theory, a failed state. And yet it continues to function quite happily, just as it has always done.

What happened was the narrowing of the gap between democracies and autocracies. They each began to adopt manifestations of the other, each drawing the line in their own way between private and public freedoms. With free expression in the West increasingly regarded as a problem to be managed rather than a fundamental right, with the policing of demonstrations increasingly heavy-handed, with more and more people deemed by the state to be necessary to watch, the penalties on those “causing trouble” were not so far apart anymore. What these different systems shared was the complicity of sections of the population that mattered.