The Committee of Public Safety

It's pronounced Vinjey

A short story that was probably by Vernor Vinge with a title I can’t remember had the following plot: Humanity was in the ascendant over the nearby stars. Mankind had only encountered one sentient race with enough raw intelligence that it could challenge it. However, that species was hobbled by short lifespans and rampant overpopulation. As a result, humanity is complacent because the aliens’s culture will never build up enough momentum to threaten it. A protagonist in the story, however, decides that mankind is growing soft and weak. He fixes the alien race’s biology so that their culture can evolve towards spacefaring, arguing that mankind needs a credible enemy in order to keep evolving.

America, with its crisis driven governmental system, may need a similar whetstone to keep itself sharp. Since the passing of the Soviet Union, America has been looking for something that can satisfy its need to struggle against something. The fare on offer has been dismal. Saddam Hussein, Mohammad Farrah Aideed, Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, all have been offered as potential supervillians to whet our appetites. However, they lack that Existential Threat to Mom, Home, Apple Pie, and All That Is Good that Supervillian Hall of Fame members Imperial and Nazi Germany, Nationalist Japan, COBRA, and Communist Russia had.

Fortunately, Azar Gat, expanding on his later chapters in War In Human Civilization has identified a promising new enemy in  The Return of the Authoritarian Great Powers: fascism:

Today’s global liberal democratic order faces two challenges. The first is radical Islam — and it is the lesser of the two challenges. Although the proponents of radical Islam find liberal democracy repugnant, and the movement is often described as the new fascist threat, the societies from which it arises are generally poor and stagnant. They represent no viable alternative to modernity and pose no significant military threat to the developed world. It is mainly the potential use of weapons of mass destruction — particularly by nonstate actors — that makes militant Islam a menace.

The second, and more significant, challenge emanates from the rise of nondemocratic great powers: the West’s old Cold War rivals China and Russia, now operating under authoritarian capitalist, rather than communist, regimes. Authoritarian capitalist great powers played a leading role in the international system up until 1945. They have been absent since then. But today, they seem poised for a comeback.

Fascism was a more formidable system than commonly recognized:

Liberal democracy’s supposedly inherent economic advantage is also far less clear than is often assumed. All of the belligerents in the twentieth century’s great struggles proved highly effective in producing for war. During World War I, semiautocratic Germany committed its resources as effectively as its democratic rivals did. After early victories in World War II, Nazi Germany’s economic mobilization and military production proved lax during the critical years 1940-42. Well positioned at the time to fundamentally alter the global balance of power by destroying the Soviet Union and straddling all of continental Europe, Germany failed because its armed forces were meagerly supplied for the task [...] All the same, from 1942 onward (by which time is was too late), Germany greatly intensified its economic mobilization and caught up with and even surpassed the liberal democracies in terms of the share of GDP devoted to the war (although its production volume remained much lower than that of the massive U.S. economy). Likewise, levels of economic mobilization in imperial Japan and the Soviet Union exceeded those of the United States and the United Kingdom thanks to ruthless efforts.

Is there a possibility that this underestimated mix of authoritarianism and capitalism is coming back?:

The question is made relevant by the recent emergence of nondemocratic giants, above all formerly communist and booming authoritarian capitalist China. Russia, too, is retreating from its postcommunist liberalism and assuming an increasingly authoritarian character as its economic clout grows. Some believe that these countries could ultimately become liberal democracies through a combination of internal development, increasing affluence, and outside influence. Alternatively, they may have enough weight to create a new nondemocratic but economically advanced Second World. They could establish a powerful authoritarian capitalist order that allies political elites, industrialists, and the military; that is nationalist in orientation; and that participates in the global economy on its own terms, as imperial Germany and imperial Japan did.

It is widely contended that economic and social development creates pressures for democratization that an authoritarian state structure cannot contain. There is also the view that “closed societies” may be able to excel in mass manufacturing but not in the advanced stages of the information economy. The jury on these issues is still out, because the data set is incomplete. Imperial and Nazi Germany stood at the forefront of the advanced scientific and manufacturing economies of their times, but some would argue that their success no longer applies because the information economy is much more diversified. Nondemocratic Singapore has a highly successful information economy, but Singapore is a city-state, not a big country. It will take a long time before China reaches the stage when the possibility of an authoritarian state with an advanced capitalist economy can be tested. All that can be said at the moment is that there is nothing in the historical record to suggest that a transition to democracy by today’s authoritarian capitalist powers is inevitable, whereas there is a great deal to suggest that such powers have far greater economic and military potential than their communist predecessors did.

China and Russia represent a return of economically successful authoritarian capitalist powers, which have been absent since the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, but they are much larger than the latter two countries ever were. Although Germany was only a medium-sized country uncomfortably squeezed at the center of Europe, it twice nearly broke out of its confines to become a true world power on account of its economic and military might. In 1941, Japan was still behind the leading great powers in terms of economic development, but its growth rate since 1913 had been the highest in the world. Ultimately, however, both Germany and Japan were too small — in terms of population, resources, and potential — to take on the United States. Present-day China, on the other hand, is the largest player in the international system in terms of population and is experiencing spectacular economic growth. By shifting from communism to capitalism, China has switched to a far more efficient brand of authoritarianism. As China rapidly narrows the economic gap with the developed world, the possibility looms that it will become a true authoritarian superpower.

Such a model would be intriguing for elites in all parts of the world:

Even in its current bastions in the West, the liberal political and economic consensus is vulnerable to unforeseen developments, such as a crushing economic crisis that could disrupt the global trading system or a resurgence of ethnic strife in a Europe increasingly troubled by immigration and ethnic minorities. Were the West to be hit by such upheavals, support for liberal democracy in Asia, Latin America, and Africa — where adherence to that model is more recent, incomplete, and insecure — could be shaken. A successful nondemocratic Second World could then be regarded by many as an attractive alternative to liberal democracy.

There may be hope:

On the positive side for the democracies, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire stripped Moscow of about half the resources it commanded during the Cold War, with eastern Europe absorbed by a greatly expanded democratic Europe. This is perhaps the most significant change in the global balance of power since the forced postwar democratic reorientation of Germany and Japan under U.S. tutelage. Moreover, China may still eventually democratize, and Russia could reverse its drift away from democracy. If China and Russia do not become democratic, it will be critical that India remain so, both because of its vital role in balancing China and because of the model that it represents for other developing countries.

But the most important factor remains the United States. For all the criticism leveled against it, the United States — and its alliance with Europe — stands as the single most important hope for the future of liberal democracy. Despite its problems and weaknesses, the United States still commands a global position of strength and is likely to retain it even as the authoritarian capitalist powers grow. Not only are its GDP and productivity growth rate the highest in the developed world, but as an immigrant country with about one-fourth the population density of both the European Union and China and one-tenth of that of Japan and India, the United States still has considerable potential to grow — both economically and in terms of population — whereas those others are all experiencing aging and, ultimately, shrinking populations. China’s economic growth rate is among the highest in the world, and given the country’s huge population and still low levels of development, such growth harbors the most radical potential for change in global power relations. But even if China’s superior growth rate persists and its GDP surpasses that of the United States by the 2020s, as is often forecast, China will still have just over one-third of the United States’ wealth per capita and, hence, considerably less economic and military power. Closing that far more challenging gap with the developed world would take several more decades. Furthermore, GDP alone is known to be a poor measure of a country’s power, and evoking it to celebrate China’s ascendency is highly misleading. As it was during the twentieth century, the U.S. factor remains the greatest guarantee that liberal democracy will not be thrown on the defensive and relegated to a vulnerable position on the periphery of the international system.