Critique on 'new despots' lacks vital foundation

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This was published 3 years ago

Critique on 'new despots' lacks vital foundation

By Robert Manne
<i>The New Despotism</i> by John Keane.

The New Despotism by John Keane.

POLITICS
The New Despotism
John Keane
Harvard University Press, $69.99

During the struggle against fascism and then Soviet communism, much Western opinion believed that the future of humankind would be decided by the struggle between democracy and totalitarianism. In our era, according to John Keane in this rather extraordinary book, democracy faces a more subtle and seductive enemy.

Keane’s argument goes like this. When the Soviet empire collapsed 30 years ago, mainstream Western opinion believed that the victory of democracy was permanent, or even that history had ended.

This was quite wrong because it failed to notice that a kind of state “the world has never before known” had emerged and was growing in power. Keane insists that we call these states “new despotisms”.

Keane’s principal new despotic countries are the Asian Communist states that have opened themselves to a capitalist market — China and Vietnam, Russia, the former Soviet Eurasian republics, Hungary, Iran, the oil-rich Arab states (Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), and, rather oddly, Singapore.

What connects Keane’s apparently disparate collection of countries? Negatively, none of their rulers can be thrown from power by free and fair elections. Positively, all eschew the principal characteristics of the totalitarian states—utopian ideology and the crushing application of terror.

Under challenge, the new despotisms will turn to old-style violence. But the new despotism’s preference is capturing the allegiance of their people — what Keane calls their “voluntary servitude” — by other means.

The means are many. The new despots pretend they are champions of democracy. There is much empty talk about “the people”. Elections with foretold results help to bind subjects to leaders. Incessant opinion polls and public forums test their subjects’ true feelings. Grumbling is allowed, even encouraged, as long as it touches nothing vital, such as the Chinese Communist Party’s suppression of the Uighurs or Vladimir’s Putin’s hidden wealth.

Under new despotic rule, politically passive middle-classes emerge. Consumerism and “the spiritual comfort of shopping” are fostered. Subjects are mightily impressed by munificent regime structures, grand shopping malls or splendid beaches with imported sand.

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The new despotisms have mastered the potential of digital media, our “communicative abundance”, using it to fashion a “phantasy” upside-down world where subjects lose touch with what is real and what is fake. The social welfare some provide — health, education, housing — is real enough but aimed not at well-being but a neo-feudal lord-vassal form of dependency. It is made clear that subjects will only get what they want — schools, apartments, jobs — through “connections”. Patronage holds things together. Unlike totalitarian leaders, the new despots do not demand “perpetual enthusiasm” when “quiet subservience” will do.

In its concluding pages, where rhetoric sometimes overpowers thought, Keane suggests that new despotism poses a greater threat to the democratic world than did 20th-century totalitarianism. In part, we are threatened by the high degree of economic inter-penetration of the two systems, democracies’ “dalliance” with new despotism.

More importantly, new despotism threatens us because, in our increasingly anxious times, many people are attracted to the (spurious) offer of a world relieving them of the burden of active citizenship. And most deeply of all, because democracies are now so hollowed out — with corruption, media manipulation and radical inequality — that they are increasingly coming to resemble new despotisms themselves.

Keane’s analysis leads inevitably to this question: Is new despotism democracy’s future?

With an argument as bold, spirited and original as this, unsurprisingly there are many problems. Keane concedes that he cannot offer a “grand theory” or “general historical laws of politics”. We don’t perhaps need this but what we do need is some explanation of the rise of new despotism.

Professor John Keane.

Professor John Keane.Credit: Louise Kennerley

Keane offers none. Nor is his roll-call of which states count as new despotisms satisfactorily explained. Is a category that likens the skilful rulers of Singapore to mad dictators, such as Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, too imprecise to be helpful?

More importantly, his methodology is questionable. Keane creates what political sociologists, following Max Weber, might call an “ideal type”. Keane’s ideal-typical new despotisms are corrupt, pseudo-democratic, new media-savvy and restrained in their use of a violence he describes as velvet. Keane illustrates his portrait of new despotisms with a mountain of invariably interesting and sometimes hilarious evidence. A narcissistic dying despot, when asked whether he would like to meet his people one last time, replies “where are they going?”

Keane is not, however, interested in complications or exceptions. The leaders of Singapore were recently assessed the fourth least corrupt in the world. Are the post-communist central Asian dictatorships better understood as new despotisms or simply continuations of old Soviet-style rule?

And what is “velvet” about the violence of the Saudi rulers regarding dissidents, one of whom recently left their Istanbul consulate in several suitcases, or about the violence of the Chinese rulers regarding their Uighur Islamic minority, vast numbers of whom are currently languishing in old-style thought-reform detention camps?

Keane is right to think that terms such as “authoritarianism” or “autocracy” or “tyranny” do not capture the pseudo-democratic character and the attention to detail of the principal, contemporary non-democratic states. There are, however, problems with his attempt to resuscitate and then fit out in fresh clothing the generally abandoned concept of despotism. Despotism has long been understood to mean total, unrestrained power. The kind of power exercised by his new despotisms is nuanced, cunning and sophisticated.

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There is another problem. Keane’s concept of new despotism covers those countries European Christianity once thought of as “Oriental”. The rather vague suggestion that power-sharing democracy is threatened by new despotism is unintentionally itself Orientalist, and because of its populist undertow, rather dangerous.

Humankind faces the gravest threat in its brief history — not from the COVID-19 pandemic but from climate change, of which Keane is silent. Without the cooperation of the United States and China in this struggle, we are lost. Keane offers a rallying cry against the supposed threat of the new despotisms and in particular of China, “the global torch-bearer of despotism”. His metaphorical, radical-democratic call to arms is just about the last thing that we need at present.

Robert Manne is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University. His two most recent books are The Mind of the Islamic State and On Borrowed Time.

 Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un shake hands during their meeting in Vladivostok.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un shake hands during their meeting in Vladivostok.Credit: AP

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