In other words, a geopolitical game of Go is underway. And just when you thought that the liberal pieces had spread successfully from the Atlantic to the western edge of Russia -- and under former Russian leader Boris Yeltsin possibly to the very shores of the Pacific -- the anti-liberals made a few key moves on the margins and the board began to shift in their favor. Croatia's entrance into the EU in 2013 may well have been the high-water mark for that structure. An economic crisis in Greece, a political crisis in Great Britain, and a liberal crisis in Hungary could combine to unravel the most upbeat scenario for the recrudescence of convergence theory.
With the EU potentially on its way out, brace yourself for something considerably less anodyne.
Convergence American-Style
The United States prides itself on being an exception to the rules, hence the endless emphasis by American political leaders of every stripe on the country's "exceptionalism." The U.S. remains the world's only true superpower. It refuses to sign a range of international treaties. It reserves the right to invade other countries and even assassinate its own citizens if necessary. How could such a unique entity converge toward anything else?
These days, it's usually just right-wing nuts who sound like old-fashioned convergence theorists. They're the ones who label President Obama a secret agent of European socialism and believe that his health care plan will pollute the country's precious bodily fluids, much as Dr. Strangelove's General Jack D. Ripper worried about fluoridation. Despite the ornate fantasies of such figures, the United States has clearly moved in the opposite direction. Today's Democrats are considerably more conservative economically than the Republicans of the 1970s and the Republicans have effectively purged all moderates from their ranks in their surge rightward.
Instead of converging toward Scandinavian socialism, the U.S. has been slouching toward illiberalism for some time now. The Tea Party bemoans the "nanny" and "gun-control" state, but misses the deeply sinister ways in which that state has been captured by the forces of illiberality. The United States has expanded its archipelago of incarceration, our homegrown gulag, so dramatically that we have more people in prison -- in total and by percentage of population -- than any developed country on Earth. Our political system has been taken over by a club of the rich -- our own nomenklatura -- with corruption so embedded that no one dares call it by that name and critics instead speak of the "revolving door" and "voter suppression" and the "influence of money in politics." The deterioration of public infrastructure has, as in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, turned the country into an embarrassment of falling bridges, exploding gas lines, bursting pipelines, backward railroads, unsecured power plants, and potential ecological catastrophes.
Add in spreading governmental surveillance and secrecy, unsustainable military spending, and a disastrously interventionist, military-first foreign policy and the United States is looking a lot like either the old Soviet Union or the Russia of today. Neither is a flattering comparison. America has not yet descended into despotism, so the convergence is hardly complete. But it might be only one right-wing populist leader away from that worst-case scenario.
Where Does History End?
In the long sweep of history, development is not a one-way street that leads all traffic toward a single destination. No doubt the Romans in the first century AD and the Ottomans of the sixteenth century imagined that their glorious futures would be full of successful Caesars and sultans. They didn't anticipate any great leaps backwards, much less the future collapse of each of their systems. Why should the EU or the American colossus be exempt from history's serpentine ways?
And yet America consoles itself that what's happening in Russia and China is only a temporary detour. Fukuyama might have been premature in his 1989 declaration of history's end, but his historical determinism remains deeply imbedded in how Western liberal elites look at the world. They sit back and wait impatiently for countries to "come to their senses" and become "more like us." They arrogantly expect convergence by absorption to proceed, if not tomorrow then eventually.
But if, in fact, the signs along the highway are not all pointing toward the same destination, then maybe we should stop checking our watches to see when North Korea will finally collapse, the Chinese Communist Party implode, and Putinism grind to a halt. These are not evolutionary dead-ends awaiting another political meteor, like the one in 1989, to strike the planet and wipe them out. For all we know, they might even outlive their Western challengers. The Chinese hybrid, for instance, seems no less stable at the moment than any liberal democracy, particularly now that its economy has surpassed that of the U.S. to become the largest in the world. Nor does Beijing appear to be intent on ending its one-party rule any time soon.
Convergence theorists expected that certain global trends, from technological innovation to economic development, would push different ideological systems toward a merger at some point in the future. They may well have been right about the mechanism, but wrong about the results. A different set of factors -- global financial crisis, widening economic inequality, increasingly scarce natural resources, anti-immigrant hysteria, persistent religious extremism, and widespread dissatisfaction with electoral democracy -- is pushing countries toward a considerably less harmonic kind of convergence. Forget about the "new industrial state." Welcome to the new post-industrial despotism.
The ongoing convulsions of geopolitics are throwing up all manner of new hybrids. Many of these market authoritarian regimes are deeply troubling, the offspring of a marriage of the less savory aspects of collectivism and capitalism. But they are also potent reminders that, because we are not the slaves of history, we can transform our putatively triumphant liberalism, with all its manifold defects of corruption, inequality, and unsustainability, into something more optimal for both human beings and the planet. The bats did it, the whales did it, and even though it's not inevitable, we humans can do it, too.
John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, the editor of LobeLog, a TomDispatch regular, and the author of several books, including Crusade 2.0.
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Copyright 2015 John Feffer
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