Do You Think You're Clever? (11 page)

(Oriental Studies, Cambridge)

When Chairman Mao died in 1976, he left behind a country in turmoil. Instead of the shining future he had promised, he had led China into the most catastrophic, tragic decades in its history. The scale of the disaster Mao had brought and the sheer misery is unimaginable. His master-plan for the economy, the Great Leap Forward (1958–61), in which he collectivised all farms and set up steelworks across the country, brought an agricultural downturn and famine so appalling that it claimed the lives of at the very least 40 million people. As if that weren’t enough, retiring to the back seat in admission of his failure, he then launched the Cultural Revolution in which Mao’s Red Guard of young people ravaged China’s heritage and killed, imprisoned or drove into exile hundreds of thousands of China’s brightest minds in their attack on the ‘corrupting’ and ‘bourgeois’ citadels of culture.

The China of today would have been almost unrecognisable to Mao. Bourgeois culture has arrived with a vengeance. So too, for some, has the prosperity Mao promised but never delivered. Beijing is one of the most dynamic, fastest growing cities in the world. So too is Shanghai. All across the country, there is a whirlwind of construction as the old towns are cleared away for the multi-lane
expressways, glitzy shopping malls and shimmering skyscrapers that are a symbol of the new China.

In one way, China seems to be hurtling down the route to being a consumer society like a runaway juggernaut, in a seeming triumph for Western values. On the other, it remains in the iron grip of the Communist Party. More people live without an elected government in China than do in all the rest of the world put together. At the same time as China seemed to reach the pinnacle of its new prosperity and confidence with the Beijing Olympics in 2008, so it showed its darker face in July 2009, with the disappearance of ethnic Uighur protestors that sparked a tragic series of reprisals against the Han Chinese identified with the government.

Of course, it’s impossible to say whether Mao would have been proud of China today. He was so enigmatic in his lifetime that even his best friends could not guess what he was thinking. It would be absolute folly to think that one could guess now he has been dead for more than three decades.

Mao was a firm believer in communism and an implacable enemy of the bourgeoisie and imperial culture. His thoughts expressed in the
Little Red Book
, his determined collectivisation against all odds and his resolute attack on culture all suggest a mind so set on his own unique version of Marxism-Leninism that it seems he could not possibly approve of the opening of the country to the capitalist enterprise which has changed China’s fortune. Moreover,
that opening was driven by Deng Xiaoping, the man who though once his comrade in arms had become his chief political opponent and one of the prime political targets of the Cultural Revolution. And Deng had only managed to achieve his ‘Open Door’ policy with Mao safely dead and his erstwhile allies the Gang of Four consigned to prison. Everything points to Mao being such an unyielding enemy of capitalism and the bourgeois culture that seems to be engulfing cities like Shanghai that he would have been appalled. There are certainly hard-line party members today who oppose the changes in China by invoking the ghost of the Chairman.

And yet maybe that’s all too simple. Just as Deng came to believe that bringing prosperity to people was more important than maintaining strict ideology, it’s just possible that Mao might have done in time, too. After all, his professed desire in joining the Chinese revolution was first and foremost to improve people’s lives. It might be said that many of his moves, against Deng as against intellectuals, were as much political as ideological. Maybe if he could claim responsibility for China’s recent achievements, then he would be proud.

To talk about China’s achievements is not to deny the problems. Rural poverty is still widespread. Peasants frequently suffer such economic hardship that family lives are ripped asunder as fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers are forced to live apart much of the year as they travel to the cities to seek work. Political
freedoms are still curtailed. Cities are rife with exploitation. And yet, China is already the world’s second largest economy after the USA, and is its fastest-growing. Hundreds of millions of Chinese already live in the kind of comfort and affluence that would have astonished people just a few decades ago. Since the country’s economic reforms began in 1978, 400 million people have been lifted out of poverty, and the number of people living in absolute poverty (less than a dollar a day) has been cut by more than 90 per cent. Moreover, while China’s average income still makes it a poor country, it has achieved a level of literacy and life expectancy equivalent to middle-income countries like those of Eastern Europe. Former head of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz observed when he visited China in 2005 that ‘East Asia has experienced the greatest increase in wealth for the largest number of people in the shortest time in the history of mankind’.

It’s almost certain that Mao would have no problems with the level of political control and lack of democracy that people in the West criticise China for. After all, it was he who put many of the controls in place. It’s almost certain he would turn a blind eye to the environmental damage now so widespread in China. But maybe he would have been immensely proud of China’s extraordinary economic achievements – no matter how they arrived and despite the problems among the peasants who were always the focus of his attentions. Maybe, standing atop one of the world’s tallest buildings in Shanghai, travelling the world’s fastest train from Shanghai airport, or watching China’s own space probes soar into the stratosphere, he would puff out his chest and boast in an uncharacteristically loud voice about just how far his very own revolution had brought China.

(Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Oxford)

Countless times through the ages thinkers have wondered if all the world’s problems might be solved if there was just one government for the entire world. The logic is simple. Wars seem to be fought at the behest of governments and rulers. So if there was just a single government or ruler, there would be no wars.

It’s such a beguiling vision that it crops up again and again in both fiction and philosophical and political thinking through the centuries. Back in the thirteenth century in
The Banquet
(
Convivio
), Dante argued that war would end if ‘the whole earth and all that humans can possess be a monarchy, that is, one government under one ruler. Because he possesses everything, the ruler would not desire to possess anything further, and thus, he would hold kings contentedly within the borders of their kingdoms, and keep peace among them.’ In his
Leviathan
, Thomas Hobbes talked of cooperation between governments around the world, an idea developed by Charles-Irénée Castel, Abbé de Saint-Pierre into a European federation in which sovereigns gave up their power to achieve ‘perpetual peace’. Rousseau, though, believed that such a union would never occur without violent revolution, and any institution that came into being that way would do more harm than good – a speculation that was borne out, in some ways, by Napoleon’s attempt to unite Europe under the French Revolution, which ultimately served only to unite nations in opposition.

Immanuel Kant talked a great deal about world government, and believed the culmination of human history to be ‘an international state (
civitas gentium
), which would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the peoples of the earth’. However, he also argued that, as things stand, ‘the positive idea of a world republic cannot be realised’, because of the messy mix of monarchies and despots in the
present world in which individual freedoms are far from guaranteed.

The appalling conflict of the two world wars of the twentieth century revived an interest in global government – or at least world forums. After the First World War, the victors convened the League of Nations, while after the Second World War they created the United Nations. Both of these might have governed the world by consent between individual nations, but in reality had almost no control because some nation states, such as the USA and the USSR, have proved far too powerful and self-assertive to pay much heed to the UN – an example followed even by smaller nations such as North Korea, Iran and Burma which have effectively ignored UN rulings.

In the aftermath of the Second World War and, in particular, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was perhaps the most serious political attempt in history to form a real world government. Albert Einstein was just one of many high-minded campaigners who were so disturbed by the problems of nuclear weapons that they believed a world government was the only way forward. ‘A world government must be created which is able to solve conflicts between nations by judicial decision,’ Einstein wrote. ‘This government must be based on a clear-cut constitution which is approved by the governments and nations and which gives it the sole disposition of offensive weapons.’

Ironically, one reason why Einstein’s vision never had a chance of reaching fruition was because of the stand-off between two opposing power nexuses and ideologies, both of which in their own way sought to bring the world under a single banner. On the one side was the Soviet Union, fuelled by Lenin’s vision of exporting communism to the entire world and dreaming of creating a world socialist economy governed by a ‘Bolshevik World State’. On the other was the Western world led by the USA, which sought a transcendence of nation states and capitalism around the world. The communist vision seems to have all but vanished now in face of the seeming triumph of the West, and Francis Fukuyama talked confidently in 1992 of ‘the end of history’ as the entire world moved towards liberal free-market democracy – the prelude in Kant’s view to world government. Yet, of course, the recent financial crisis and continued political turbulence around the world has shown that such optimism was ill-founded.

In some ways, the world
has
moved towards more coordinated government, if not world government. All of Europe is now under the federation of the European Union, for instance, and countries all round the world join in economic and political pacts with their neighbours. More and more, nations are attempting, superficially at least, to cooperate on key issues such as trade and the environment. While the UN may seem to be only a little more than a talking shop, Gordon Brown’s 2009 coordination of measures to deal with the banking crisis and global
recession was a tangible example of joint action by consent that is persuading experts to talk not of global government, but global governance – in which the world is not controlled by a single world government, but by coordinated transnational action under the direction of organisations such as the World Trade Organization, the G20, the IMF and so on.

Underlying it all, of course, is the behind-the-scenes power of globalisation. Economic and communications links around the world are now so strong that nations are no longer able to act entirely by themselves, while the financial clout of global corporations and banks is such that the affairs of the world are, in many ways, directed and governed on a global scale independently of national governments. In some ways, it might be said that we already have global government
de facto
in the hands of global economic powerbrokers, even if not
de jure
in the hands of an official world government. It’s in the interests of such people to keep global governance away from governments (especially global governments) – and they argue that, on the whole, the effect of too much government power is to restrict free trade and enterprise and so stifle economic growth. When France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Angela Merkel recently argued for tough global policing of banking practice, the USA and UK won the argument against them, insisting that such policies would almost certainly deepen the recession – and no doubt the financial powerbrokers breathed a sigh of relief.

Back in the 1940s and 50s, when Einstein was campaigning for world government, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley created their dystopian visions of how global government might actually turn out in
Nineteen Eighty-four
and
Brave New World
, visions of soulless worlds in which there was no room for the individual. In the face of the monolith of the Soviet Union, that fear seemed all too real. Kant argued that the main problems with world government in the present world were that it might either be too powerful or too weak, and the fear that it might be too strong seemed uppermost.

Like Orwell and Huxley, many people, at least in the West, have feared the power of over-arching government. The continued distrust of many ordinary people in Europe of increasing federalisation of the European Union shows how deep-rooted this fear is. The UK’s Labour government are generally committed to greater European integration, yet they have had to tread very carefully with the British public, avoiding, for instance, a referendum on the Lisbon treaty – fully aware that they would face an uphill battle to get it accepted. If people cannot be persuaded to accept integrated government in Europe where liberal democracy is universal, the chances of achieving it on a global scale seem remote indeed.

To most people around the world, the firmest attachment beyond family and neighbourhood is to their historic nationality. While they are willing to give their consent to be governed by their own national government, made up
of people of their own nationality, speaking their own language, they tend to resent what they see as interlopers from transnational governments. Hence, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Georgia and many other parts of the Soviet Union were quick to stake out their right to independence as soon as the USSR broke up, while Scotland has asserted its own right to govern itself within the UK.

With this kind of nationalism, a voluntary political union of the world seems as remote now as it did in Dante’s time. The British Empire brought the world closer to world government than at any time during history, controlling a quarter of the world, but it was never a voluntary union and broke up as soon as the centre proved weak enough to lose its grip, leaving new nations such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and India to emerge.

And yet an interesting thing happened recently. The election of Barack Obama as President of the USA was greeted with almost universal acclaim around the world, and Obama has become something of a hero. On a visit to Ghana in early July 2009, Obama was welcomed by crowds so enthusiastic that it was as if he was their leader, not the leader of the USA. Ghana is the rising star of African democracy – which is maybe why Obama avoided its more democratically challenged neighbour Nigeria – and one gets the feeling that if Obama was to stand as president of Africa, he would be elected by a landslide in free and fair elections. And if he was to stand as president of the world, maybe he would be elected, too. Of course, this is unlikely
to happen, but such speculation suggests that world government may not be such an impossibility after all.

Back in the mid-nineteenth century, US General Ulysses S. Grant, reflecting on the triumph of the American federation after the Civil War, commented: ‘I believe at some future day, the nations of the earth will agree on some sort of congress which will take cognizance of international questions of difficulty and whose decisions will be as binding as the decisions of the Supreme Court are upon us.’ Only time will tell.