Joschka Fischer wrote an
interesting article under the title: “The End of Western Opportunism,” and had
it published on August 24, 2020 in the online magazine, Project Syndicate.
In addition to being
interesting, the article is also important because the writer was the Foreign
Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany for seven years, and then became
founder of the country's Green Party as well as its leader for almost twenty
years.
The point Joschka Fischer
makes is that the West, looking at its own rise into the industrial age and the
history of its modernization, thought that China will follow a similar pattern
and eventually become a capitalist liberal democracy styled after the Western
countries. Alas, this did not happen. But after fifty years of opening itself
to the world, China has pursued a path that was never tried before. As a
result, it has done very well for itself but also became a menace to the
Western politico-economic system, according to Fischer.
Fischer sees that the
competition between the Western and Chinese systems is transforming into a
serious confrontation where both will continue to vie for a dominant position
in technology, trade, global market share, supply chains, and more importantly
in fundamental values. And so, he concluded that at the end of the day,
everything can be negotiated except the fundamental values by which the West
must stick firmly.
Has Joschka Fischer neglected
to look into something? The answer is yes, and you get a sense of what it is
when you parse the following passage in his article:
“Through it all, Western
leaders assumed that modernization and economic development would lead China
eventually to adopt democracy, embrace human rights, and the rule of law. They
were wrong. The Communist Party of China has evolved a novel hybrid development
model consisting of a one-party dictatorship, a highly competitive economy, and
a consumer society”.
Fischer has observed that
Western leaders have “assumed,” but they turned out to be “wrong.” And yet, he
did not stop and ask why this kept happening for as long as it did. Had he done
so, he would have widened his perspective enormously, and would have
encountered a plethora of leads in which to look for ways to forge a
Chinese-Western relationship that would benefit all of humanity for as long as
there will be a human species in this world and out there in the universe.
So then we ask, why did the
Western leaders go wrong making the false assumptions that they did? The answer
is that they looked at the pattern of their own development since the
Industrial Revolution, and thought it was going to serve as template for the
countries that will follow. But things did not turn out that way because of two
main reasons.
The first reason has to do
with the fact that the development of the Europeans happened organically. That
is, they were at the leading edge of science, technology and human development,
and had no pattern to follow. When a breakthrough happened in one area, it
reverberated in the other areas, causing them to also change. Thus, everything
in society moved forward at the same pace.
This happened not only on the
technical and industrial levels where the tools, the machines and the products
kept changing, but also on the societal levels where people had to adapt. That
is, in the same way that a new discovery in science has led to a new process in
industry, it happened that a new invention in technology has caused society to
change its lifestyle. It was led to adopt new methods of interaction among the
citizens, and between the citizens and their government.
The other reason why the
European pattern has failed to take roots in the emerging economies––one of
them being China––is that these economies were not going to reinvent the wheel.
The European pattern was there for them to look at and study but not to follow.
Instead of making the tools that helped make the machines that were making the
consumer products, the emerging economies bought the production machines from
the West, made the consumer products at a lower price, sold them to the Western
societies and paid for the machines they were buying from them.
Whereas the leaders of the
emerging economies welcomed the science, technology and industry of the West,
they determined that the political culture of the West was not suitable for
them and so, they decided to experiment with new systems of governance and
economics. Experimentation is what's taking place at this time in the major emerging
economies––such as China––and this does not sit well with the West that fears
being overtaken by an alien system they will not want to emulate.