Pragmatic arguments make the case that liberal societies and polities can better provide some objective good - stability, peace and prosperity are most commonly cited, although there is no reason why similar arguments can't be made for loftier goods (beauty, for instance) or more mundane ones (street illumination, perhaps) - in a better way (more fully, more efficiently, or move sustainably) than alternative arrangements. ln the early part of this century, when challenger ideologies to liberalism were strongest in the West, this point was fiercely contested. Both fascism and Marxism promised to better deliver the benefits of modernity than liberal democracy. Indeed, much at the admiration directed towards Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Imperial Japan, and to a lesser extent Fascist Italy was inspired not by the moral or philosophical foundations of these regimes, but by their ability to get things done, like make the trains run on time, recover from the Great Depression, reestablish national might or foster economic development. Liberal societies were on the defensive, facing serious internal crises of confidence. The arguments made by the proponents of liberal democracy in this period and throughout the Second World War were primarily moral in character. It wasn't until the post-War period and the remarkable revival of democracy in Europe that the pragmatic pro-liberal position was revived. Gives the ambiguous development of Marxist counties, the debate was extremely relevant and the liberal side empirically tenable. The collapse of the Soviet Union eliminated the only meaningful competitor to the liberal side, seeming to vindicate those who argue for the pragmatic superiority of liberal systems (political, social of economic), and it is now generally taken for granted that liberal systems are pragmatically superior - certainly when it comes to development policy for poor nations, liberal solutions are the defaults offered. The 20th Century is treated as a great historical test of ideologies, one which liked democracy has passed and its rivals have failed. One does not look for answers in the dustbin of history. The appeal of Western developmental models in the developing world and the remarkable success of liberal reforms and revolutions in Eastern Europe seem to confirm this view.
There is a certain elegance to this argument, and the comfort and reassurance that it provides to advocates of liberals should be obvious. But it is deeply problematic in its basic foundations and rests as a false understanding at history.
The idea that human history comprises some kind of test for societies - that the competition between societies represents an evolutionary pressure, where success is granted to those systems that have salutary characteristics, are that in the absence of violent conflict, demonstration effects and peaceful competition will continue to apply evolutions pressure towards more competitive (understood as more productive, me efficient o more stable) forms of social organization- fails to fake into account certain basic realities of the historical process.
1. Societal competitiveness is highly contextual.
Competition between social systems has taken many different forms across time. There are periods when competition takes the form of competitive trade and development (mostly peaceful), other times when that competition is augmented by low-level endemic security conflicts, and other times when societies violently compete in wars of annihilation. The characteristics that are beneficial in one competitive environment may be hindrances in another. For instance, the Soviet system excelled at war fighting, but could not make the transition to peaceful economic competition. In 1948, it was genuinely unclear if the Soviet Union or the United States constituted the more powerful state. By 1988, after 40 years of a kind of competition the Soviet Union was unsuited for, the world-historical moment clearly favored the US. One reply is that flexibility is one element of a competitive society - liberal-democratic America was capable of demobilizing, demilitarizing and transforming itself into an economic and technological behemoth. But this begs the question of the determining factor for the type of global competition - the post-War peace was an artifact of post-War politics, and could have been unilaterally abrogated by the Soviet side. A military conflict in the late 40's between the forces of world Marxism and liberal democracy would not have necessarily ended in Soviet victory, but the triumph of the West would have been far from assured.
2. Competitiveness is not solely a product of domestic arrangements.
Some of the elements of competitiveness - productivity, for instance - do not arise solely out of domestic arrangements, but require access to external resources. The Oil Shocks of the 1970s demonstrate the vulnerability of hyper-modern economies to disruptions of raw resources. Liberal democracies, as a result of historical legacies unrelated to their domestic political and social arrangements enjoyed privileged access to strategic resources at a crucial historical moment, namely World War Two. If the Axis powers had similar access, then the conflict could have ended differently, and modern conventional wisdom would extoll the natural superiority of fascist civilization. Similarly, the development of competitive alternatives to liberal order is stymied by the dominant role of liberal power in the economic and political world system.
3. The number of competing states is too low for systemic traits to override historical contingencies
Ultimately, the ideological competition of the 20th Century occurred between a very small number of states, with the outcome of the great conflicts hinging on a very few key moments. At these junctures, shall, purely idiosyncratic factors determined victor and vanquished. A few bad decisions condemned Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, not necessarily structural weaknesses.
These criticisms are analytic, but there is of course also an empirical side to this question. If it could be empirically demonstrated that liberal institutional arrangements led to superior material outcomes than alternative configurations. Work on this his been done, with the goal of confirming the link between liberal politics and society and superior practical outcomes, most recently by the political scientists (and committed liberals) Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi. Their conclusion - no link between liberal politics and economic performance. If these most sympathetic researchers could not discern a visible relationship between regime type and economic performance, then such a link should not be taken for granted by anyone.
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