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Through the looking glass

Francis Fukuyama. Demotix/Sergii Kharchenko. All rights reserved.TomDispatch regular
John Feffer, the director of Foreign Policy In Focus, offers
a cunning bow to the convergence theorists of the Cold War era, a crew of
thinkers who imagined that someday the two superpowers would merge into one
conglomerate creature in strangely upbeat ways. In reality, as he points
out, 'convergence' (even in an era that lacks the Soviet Union) has turned out
to be a dismally downbeat process. He does, however, skip the earliest
convergence theorist of them all, who happened to be a novelist rather than an
economist or a philosopher. I’m talking about George Orwell who, in his
novel 1984 (published in 1948 just as the Cold War was
ramping up to a low burn), imagined the convergence of the worst of west and east, of capitalist America and communist Russia, in a state so memorably
malign that, almost seven decades later, everyone, including Edward Snowden,
still remembers Big Brother.

The NSA's global
surveillance state, revealed by Snowden, managed to put even the
dreams of the totalitarian states of the previous century in the shade (and caused
sales of 1984 to spike) – and it's but one reminder of Orwell’s foresight.  So many other details
of our moment from black sites and kidnapping schemes
to torture and assassination programmes
remind us that, despite the disappearance of the Soviet Union, convergence of a
sort still seems to be on the cards. Here’s the strange thing, though: if
a kind of eerie version of convergence is indeed underway, as Feffer so
memorably suggests, in the organized precincts of what used to be called the
First and Second Worlds –- the US, Europe, Russia, and China–- in the former
Third World, or at least across vast stretches of the Greater Middle East and
parts of Africa, a process that might be called divergence seems to be gaining
strength. The power of states is weakening, fragmenting,
or simply dissolving amid the growth of extremist organizations, sectarian or
sectional militias, and terror groups.

As miraculous as Orwell was – and
in the earliest days of the television age he managed to conjure up a future
world in which the screen would be omnipresent and everyone could be
surveilled, tracked, and controlled through it – he had no way of
imagining such a strange form of divergence. Its origins
seem to lie, at least in part, in a twenty-first-century American urge to take
its much-ballyhooed role as the planet’s last remaining superpower to heart and
essentially try to rule the world.  This desire to create a
planetary Pax Americana (and an American Pax
Republicana) led the Bush administration to punch a devastating hole in
the oil heartlands of the planet, setting off a storm of sectarian chaos within
which old systems of control, already frayed, began to collapse and whose
endpoint is, at present, beyond our ken.

Convergence and divergence,
centralization and fragmentation: it’s a vision of a planet that’s not exactly
Orwellian, but certainly represents a nightmare worthy of some
still-to-be-discovered Orwell of our moment. In the meantime, while we
await the novel 2051, let John Feffer tell you about the dark,
converging world of 2015. Tom Engelhardt 

The worst
of all possible worlds

By John
Feffer

Imagine an alternative universe in
which the two major Cold War superpowers evolved into the United Soviet
Socialist States. The conjoined entity, linked perhaps by a new Bering Straits
land bridge, combines the optimal features of capitalism and collectivism. From
Siberia to Sioux City, we’d all be living in one giant Sweden.

It sounds like either the paranoid
nightmare of a John Bircher or the wildly optimistic dream of Vermont socialist
Bernie Sanders.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s,
however, this was a rather conventional view, at least among influential
thinkers like economist John Kenneth Galbraith who predicted that the United
States and the Soviet Union would converge at some point in the future with the
market tempered by planning and planning invigorated by the market. Like many
an academic notion, it didn’t come to pass. The United States veered off in the
direction of Reaganomics. And the Soviet Union eventually collapsed. So much for 'convergence theory', which like EST or cold fusion went the way of most
crackpot ideas.

Or did it?
Take another look at our world in 2015 and tell me if, somehow we haven’t
backed our way through the looking glass into that very alternative universe – with a twist. The planet currently seems to be on the cusp of a decidedly
unharmonic convergence.

Consider what’s happening in
Russia, where an elected autocrat presides over a free market shaped by a
powerful state apparatus. Similarly, China’s mash-up of market Leninism offers
a one-from-column-A-and-one-from-Column-B combination platter. Both countries
are also rife with crime, corruption, growing inequality, and militarism. Think
of them as the un-Swedens.

Nor do such hybrids live only in
the east. Hungary, a member of the European Union and a key post-Communist
adherent to liberalism, has been heading off in an altogether different
direction since its ruling Fidesz party took over in 2010. Last July, its prime
minister, Viktor Orban, declared that
he no longer looks to the west for guidance. To survive in an ever more
competitive global economy, Orban is seeking inspiration from various hybrid
powers, the other un-Swedens of our planet: Turkey, Singapore, and both Russia
and China. Touting the renationalization of former state assets and stricter
controls on foreign investment, he has promised to remake Hungary into an 'illiberal state' that both challenges laissez-faire principles and
concentrates power in the leader and his party.

The United States is not exactly
immune from such trends. The state has also become quite illiberal here as its
reach and power have been expanded in striking ways. As it happens, however,
America’s Gosplan, our
state planning committee, comes with a different name: the
military-industrial-homeland-security complex. Washington presides over a
planet-spanning surveillance system that would have been the envy of the
Communist apparatchiks of the previous century, even as it has imposed a global
economic template on other countries that enables enormous corporate entities
to elbow aside local competition. If the American tradition of liberalism and
democracy was once all about 'the little guy' – the rights of the individual,
the success of small business – the United States has gone big in the worst
possible way.

The convergence theorists imagined
that the better aspects of capitalism and communism would emerge from the
Darwinian competition of the Cold War and that the result would be a more
adaptable and humane hybrid. It was a typically Panglossian error. Instead of
the best of all possible worlds, the international community now faces an
unholy trinity of authoritarian politics, cut-throat economics, and Big Brother
surveillance. Even though we might all be eating off IKEA tableware, listening
to Spotify, and reading the latest Girl
With the Dragon Tattoo knock-off,
we are not living in a giant Sweden. Our world is converging in a far more
dystopian way. After two successive conservative governments and with a surging
far-right party pounding its anti-immigrant drumbeat, even Sweden seems
to be heading in the same dismal direction.

Indeed, if you squint at the
history of the last 70 years, you might be persuaded to believe that the
convergence theorists were right after all. For all the excitement the fall of
the Berlin Wall generated and the paradigm shifts it inspired, the annus mirabilis of 1989 may not have been the end of
one system and the victory of the other, but an odd interlude in a much longer
evolution of the two.

Bats do it, whales do it

Bats and whales don’t look at all
alike. But they both operate in similarly dark environments. Bats hunt at
night, while whales navigate the murk of the ocean. Because neither animal can
rely on visual clues, they have developed the ability to echolocate, to use,
that is, sound waves to find their way around. This clever strategy is
an example of convergent evolution: adaptation by different creatures to
similar environmental conditions.

Some social scientists in the Cold
War period looked at communism and capitalism in much the same way that
evolutionary biologists view the bat and the whale. Both systems, while
structurally different, were struggling to adapt to the same environmental
factors. The forces of modernity – of technological development, of growing
bureaucratization – would, it was then believed, push both systems in the same
evolutionary direction. To achieve more optimal economic results, the communists would increasingly rely on market mechanisms, while the capitalists
would turn to planning. Democracy would take a backseat to bureaucracy as
technocrats with no particular ideology ran the countries in both blocs in that
now-distant two-superpower world. What would be lost in participation would be
gained, it was claimed, in efficiency. The resulting hybrid structures, like
echolocation, would represent the most effective ways to operate in a
challenging global environment.

Convergence theory officially
debuted in 1961 with a short but influential article by Jan Tinbergen. Communism and
capitalism, the Dutch economist argued, would learn to overcome internal
problems by borrowing from each other. More contact between the two foes would
lead to a virtuous circle of more sharing and greater convergence. Further
exposure came with John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1967 bestseller, The New
Industrial State. From there, the concept spread beyond the
economics profession and the transatlantic alliance.  It even found
adherents, among them nuclear physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union.

In the 1970s, the coming of
détente between the two superpowers suggested that these theorists had been on
the mark. Policies emphasizing 'coexistence', adopted by each of the previously
implacable enemies and facilitated by scientific exchanges and arms control
treaties, seemed to herald a narrowing of differences. In the United States,
even Republicans like Richard Nixon began to embrace wage and price controls in an effort to tame the market, while
the rise of cybernetics suggested that computers might overcome the technical
difficulties that socialist countries faced in creating efficient planned
economies. In fact, with Project Cybersyn, an early 1970s effort to
harness the power of semiconductors to regulate supply and demand, the
government of Chile’s democratically elected socialist president Salvador
Allende planned to usher in just such a technotopia.

Of course, Allende went down in a
US-backed military coup. Détente between the two superpowers collapsed in the
late 1970s and, under the sway of Reaganism, American government officials
began to dismantle the welfare state. At the same time, the Soviet Union, now
headed by aged bureaucratic leaders like Leonid Brezhnev, sank into an economic
funk before Mikhail Gorbachev made one last desperate, failed effort to
preserve the system through a programme of reforms. In 1991, the Soviet Union
disappeared and the victory of rampant global capitalism was proclaimed.

Not surprisingly, in the early
1990s several scholars wrote epitaphs for what clearly seemed to be a
conceptual dead end. Convergence was dead. Long live, well what?

The short-lived end of history

Even as convergence theory was
bowing out ungracefully, political theorist Francis Fukuyama was reinventing
the concept. In the summer of 1989, with his controversial essay “The End of History” in which he proclaimed the
eternal triumph of liberal democracy (and the economic system that went with
it), he anticipated the central question of the era: What would replace the
ideological confrontation of the Cold War?

Several months before the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the outbreak of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia,
Fukuyama argued that communism would no longer pose an alternative to liberal
democracy and that the European Union, the “universal homogeneous state” of his
philosophical mentor, Alexandre Kojève, would ultimately be victorious. The
endpoint of global political and economic evolution, in other words, was once again
a political bureaucracy and an economic welfare state patterned on European
social democracy. For Fukuyama, the tea leaves were clear: convergence was back
as the way of the future.

What would have thrilled the
architects of European integration – and the likes of Jan Tinbergen and John
Kenneth Galbraith – was, however, a grave disappointment for Fukuyama, who was
already in a premature state of mourning for the heroism that epic
confrontations inspired.  The ideological conflict that had given shape to
the Cold War and meaning to all those who fought in its political and military
skirmishes would, he feared, be defused and diminished.  All that might
then be left would be polite exchanges over minor disagreements in a boardroom
in Brussels. The end of history, indeed!

Soon enough, Fukuyama’s thesis,
briefly hailed here as the endpoint of all speculation about our global fate,
came up visibly short as other potent ideologies reemerged to challenge the
generally liberal democratic ethos of the West. There were, as a start, the
virulent strains of ethno-nationalism that tore Yugoslavia apart and continued
to rage across the expanse of the former Soviet Union. Similarly, religious
fundamentalism, especially Islamic extremism, challenged the hard power, the multicultural
ethos, even the very existence of various secular states across the Middle East
and Africa. And the row of communist dominoes toppling eastward stopped at
Mongolia. China, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam at least nominally retained
their governing ideologies and their single party structures.

At the same time, the European
Union expanded, absorbing all of east-central Europe (except for a couple of
small Balkan states), even incorporating the Baltic countries from the former
Soviet Union. Convergence, Fukuyama-style, came in the form of acceding to the requirements of
EU membership, a lengthy process that reshaped the political,
economic, and social structures of its eastern aspirants. The war in Yugoslavia
eventually ended, and Europe seemed to have avoided a much deeper clash of
civilizations. Even in Bosnia, the Orthodox, Muslim, and Catholic factions
achieved a grudging modus
operandi, though the country remains far from a well-functioning entity.

Fukuyama had, in fact, suggested a
variant of convergence theory – that it would take the form of absorption. In
this more ruthless narrative of evolution, the blue whale survives as the
largest leviathan of the deep, while the immense shark-like Megalodon
disappears. The Soviet Union made its bid for the proletariat of the world to
unite and push capitalism into extinction. It failed. Instead, the fall of the
Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany vindicated the capitalist
theorists. So did the absorption of east-central Europe into the European
Union.

And once again, that was supposed
to be the end of the story. The EU would be a diluted version of the Sweden
that the original convergence theorists had posited – generally peaceful,
modestly prosperous, and passably democratic. The “common European home,” which
Gorbachev invoked at the peak of his prestige, might one
day even include Russia to the east and transatlantic partner America to the
west.

Today, however, that common
European home is on the verge of foreclosure.
It’s not just that Russia is heading off in an entirely different direction or
that the United States recoils from even the weak Scandinavian social democracy
that the EU promulgates. Greece is contemplating what once was heresy, its own Grexit or departure from the Eurozone. More
troubling, in the very heart of Europe in Budapest, Viktor Orban is turning his
back on the west and facing east, while anti-EU, anti-immigrant right-wing
parties are gaining adherents across the continent. A new axis of illiberalism
might one day connect Beijing to Moscow, Hungary, and possibly beyond like a
new trans-Siberian express. The vast Eurasian landmass, the historic pivot of
geopolitics, is sinking into despotism with a corporate face and cosmetic
democracy.

And Hungary is no European
outlier, despite the EU’s censure of Orban’s authoritarian tendencies. Other
leaders in the region, from the conservative Jaroslaw
Kaczynski in Poland to
the social democrat Robert Fico in Slovakia, look enviously at Orban’s
model and his political success. Euroskepticism is spreading westward, with the
far Right poised to take
over in Denmark, the
National Front capturing the most seats in the last European
parliamentary elections in France, and the recently victorious Conservative
Party in Great Britain planning to go ahead with a referendum on continued membership in the EU.

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 favour. 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 savoury 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.

This piece, including
Tom Engelhardt's intro, is reposted from TomDispatch.com with
that site's permission.