Owen argues that the way to ensure democracy's survival in the United States is to reimagine liberalism -- to view it as less about disruption and perpetual openness and more about commitment, community, and country. Liberalism must reject the "great delusion" that it can defeat autocracies everywhere and convert them into liberal democracies, yet also counter moves by China and Russia to make the world safe for autocracy. - publisher.
How should the Western world today respond to the challenges of political Islam? Taking an original approach to answer this question, Confronting Political Islam compares Islamism's struggle with secularism to other prolonged ideological clashes in Western history. By examining the past conflicts that have torn Europe and the Americas-and how they have been supported by underground networks, fomented radicalism and revolution, and triggered foreign interventions and international conflicts-John Owen draws six major lessons to demonstrate that much of what we think about political Islam is wro.
Some blame the violence and unrest in the Muslim world on Islam itself, arguing that the religion and its history is inherently bloody. Others blame the United States, arguing that American attempts to spread democracy by force have destabilized the region, and that these efforts are somehow radical or unique. Challenging these views, The Clash of Ideas in World Politics reveals how the Muslim world is in the throes of an ideological struggle that extends far beyond the Middle East, and how struggles like it have been a recurring feature of international relations since the dawn of the modern.
If it continues, deglobalization may lead not to atomization but two overlapping international orders: a liberal one (LIO) led by the United States, and an authoritarian–capitalist one (ACIO) led by China. This equilibrium could emerge because a central purpose of international orders is to preserve the domestic regimes of their Great Power sponsors. The United States and China have markedly different domestic regimes, and so as China continues to grow in power and influence, tension over the content of international order should continue to grow. I borrow from Darwinian evolution the notion of 'niche construction': just as organisms alter phenotype selection by manipulating their natural environments, states can alter the 'selection' of domestic regimes by shaping their international environments. Modes of international niche construction include foreign regime promotion, interdependence, transnational interaction and multilateral institutions. The liberal democratic niche constructed by the United States and its allies after the Second World War preserved democracy for many decades. Today, China is attempting through various means to build a niche that will eliminate the liberal bias in international institutions and safeguard its own Market-Leninist regime. The resulting ACIO would select for autocracy and hence be partially separate from the LIO, which selects for liberal democracy.
AbstractEurope is besieged from within and without by anti‐liberal threats. The rise within Europe of populist‐nationalist parties and renewed jihadist attacks interact with pressure from Putin's Russia, Erdogan's Turkey, and actual and aspiring despotisms in Muslim‐majority countries. To varying degrees these threats are reactions to the effects of 21st‐century liberalism on societies. Liberalism always has been chiefly concerned to safeguard individual autonomy or self‐legislation, but the content of autonomy has shifted over two centuries. First‐stage liberalism saw the chief threat to autonomy as the state; second‐stage, as capital; the third‐stage version now ascendant sees traditional norms and institutions as the main menace. Third‐stage liberalism in Europe (and elsewhere) distributes power towards 'symbolic analysts' and away from those adept at services or manual labour. Thus the anti‐liberal backlash: within Europe large numbers of people find themselves less autonomous, in the older senses of the word, and ambivalent about the newer notion of autonomy; while on Europe's periphery many find certain features of liberal societies unappealing and threatening. Defending liberalism will require not only devoting more resources to national security and mitigating the disruptions of economic openness, but revisiting what individual autonomy ought to mean in the 21st‐century world.
AbstractA politicalspringis an abrupt, broad, sustained increase in public dissent in a state that has prohibited it, as in Czechoslovakia in 1968 or Tunisia in early 2011. Some springs produce offspring – clusters of events within neighbouring states (civic unrest, increased state repression, co-option of dissent, revolution) and among those states (intensification of international rivalries, foreign interventions). An English Spring in 1558–9 produced such a cluster in Northwestern Europe. This article addresses the underlying causal mechanism connecting springs and their offspring, rather than the related correlational question (viz. under what conditions a spring is followed by offspring). That mechanism istransnational group polarisation, or the progressive separation of preferences across a population into pro- and anti-government groups. Transnational polarisation along a pro-versus-anti-government axis is an endogenous process triggered by exogenous events, such as violence or public demonstrations that raise the status of, or threat to, one of the groups. It presents powerful actors across states with new threats and opportunities and can help explain how the Tunisian Spring of early 2011 produced throughout the Arab Middle East infectious unrest, serial repressions and reforms, heightened international tensions, and foreign interventions.
How may we best understand the effects of the ongoing rise of China on the future of liberal democracy in East Asia? Scholars who stress hegemony tend to predict a less democratic region, while those who stress diffusion tend to predict more democracy. This paper does not attempt to resolve the question, but argues for the use of evolutionary logic to help us with general questions concerning the regional and global waxing and waning of domestic regime types. Evolution's claims about the variety, selection, and retention of traits (in this case, democracy), rightly understood, can accommodate not only the standard international diffusion mechanisms of competition, learning, and emulation, but also that of coercion. The concepts of co-evolution and niche construction are crucial: an agent may modify its environment such that one or more traits of that agent enjoy a greater reproductive advantage. Agency, then, may be not an escape from evolution but a participation in co-evolution. Intentionally or not, rulers of states may construct niches that affect the longevity of the regime through which they rule. Intentional niche constructors may promote their domestic regime, or block the advance of a threatening regime, in their own state or their neighbors via various means. I consider phenomena to which evolutionary logic would direct us concerning China and Asia today, and suggest that China's leaders are engaging in domestic and regional niche construction to preserve the power monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party. ; Wie können wir am besten die Auswirkungen des fortlaufenden Aufstiegs Chinas auf die Zukunft der liberalen Demokratie in Ostasien verstehen? Während jene Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler, die vor allem auf Hegemonie fokussieren, dazu neigen, eine weniger demokratische Region vorherzusagen, prognostizieren solche, die auf Diffusion abstellen, mehr Demokratie. Der vorliegende Artikel beabsichtigt nicht, diese Frage zu beantworten, sondern plädiert stattdessen für die Anwendung einer evolutionären Logik, die es ermöglicht, allgemeine Fragen der regionalen und globalen Veränderung staatlicher Regimetypen zu erklären. Evolutionäre Thesen über die Varianz, Selektion und Beibehaltung bestimmter Merkmale (hier der Demokratie), können nicht nur die üblichen Mechanismen internationaler Diffusion wie Wettbewerb, Lernen und Emulation fassen, sondern auch den Mechanismus des Zwangs. Die Konzepte der Koevolution und Nischenkonstruktion sind hier entscheidend: Ein Agent kann seine Umgebung modifizieren, sodass eines oder mehrere seiner Merkmale einen größeren Reproduktionsvorteil genießen. Agency kann demnach verstanden werden nicht als ein Ausweg aus der Evolution, sondern als ein Teilnehmen am Prozess der Koevolution. Die einen Staat Regierenden können - absichtlich oder unabsichtlich - Nischen konstruieren, welche die Lebensdauer des Regimes beeinflussen. Akteure, die intentional Nischen konstruieren, können das eigene Regime fördern oder den Aufstieg eines sie bedrohenden Regimes im eigenen oder auch in benachbarten Staaten mit verschiedenen Mitteln blockieren. Vorliegend werden in Bezug auf das heutige China und Asien solche Phänomene betrachtet, auf die eine evolutionäre Logik unseren Blick lenken würde. Die Analyse lässt darauf schließen, dass Chinas Führung sowohl innerstaatlich als auch auf regionaler Ebene Nischen schafft, um das Machtmonopol der Kommunistischen Partei Chinas aufrecht zu erhalten.
