The Future Is Asian

by Parag Khanna

  For ambassadors from Brazil’s vaunted diplomatic training academy the Rio Branco Institute, Asia is the new destination of choice. Flávio Damico, currently serving as Brazil’s ambassador in Singapore, puts it plainly: “We are an Atlantic country, but the future is in Asia.” As with other Latin nations, China is its largest trading partner, India the fastest growing, and ASEAN surpassing Japan. Indonesia is the home of Brazil’s largest single foreign investment in Asia, a nickel-mining operation on Sulawesi island. For Brazil and other Latin American nations, there is no tension with China as they refocus their energies on the rest of Asia. There is only upside. As Damico puts it, “We have the resources, they have the people.”

  Latin American countries need to ensure that they use Asia not just for hardware but also for software, making the most productive use of their resources. Countries such as Singapore are playing an important role in this regard. As Mexico develops special economic zones in the country’s south, it has turned to the Singaporean firm Surbana Jurong to build world-class industrial parks. Singapore is also investing in raising productivity in the country’s energy and hospitality sectors. Each year, the Latin Asia Business Forum in Singapore attracts dozens more companies from both sides of the Pacific that are looking to ramp up commercial ties. Latin American construction and architecture companies are starting to use the Singaporean VRcollab’s virtual reality software for site development, and Singapore’s Educare is rolling out its math curriculum in Colombia’s schools. Meanwhile, Singapore’s e-government services leader, CrimsonLogic, is deploying its customs clearance software solution in Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Trinidad, and Panama, whose newly expanded canal has enabled a far higher volume of container ships from Asia to efficiently reach the US East Coast, and LNG tankers from the East Coast reach Asia. One Panamanian ambassador sums up the country’s ambition as this: “We want to be the Singapore of Central America.”

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  Asia’s Technocratic Future

  Democracy is widespread in Asia, but it covers a vast spectrum of countries from those ranked higher than the United States in their democratic quality to those that give the term a bad name. Asia has top-ranked democracies such as Australia and New Zealand (which inherited British parliamentary government traditions), Japan and South Korea (whose postwar political systems were designed by the United States), and Taiwan, whose democratic model is watched closely by China (even if it is not followed). Both South Korea and Taiwan rank in the top tier of the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Transformation Index, which measures the strength of a country’s democratic consolidation and state effectiveness. The rule of law is so strong in South Korea that the country impeached a sitting president and jailed him for more than two decades and is now implementing strict term limits. Meanwhile, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines are evolving as democracies, while democracy in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar is still fragile. Asians do not lack an interest in democracy or the ability to sustain it. But they do have a no-nonsense bias in favor of pragmatic government and are culturally cautious about becoming collectively undisciplined. Mindful of the excesses of history, they are on guard to balance the progressive ambitions of stronger governments with the potential abuses of stronger leaders. They want to be more inclusive, but not at the price of effectiveness.

  The term democracy tells us ever less about how—or how well—a country is run. From Mexico to Italy, democracies today are the places where surveys show that populations have the least trust in and respect for politicians and for democracy. In Russia, Turkey, and Iran, elections are merely instruments of pacification, release valves that buy breathing space for regimes. Rule of law, meaning that laws are above the executive, looks more like rule by law, in which governments abuse the law as a tool of power. In recent years I have noticed that even when Western analysts and commentators are speaking to each other on panels or debates and are asked point-blank which countries they feel have an admirable vision and strategy for their future, they almost always answer China, India, and Singapore. The same appears to be true of the global general public. According to a twenty-five-country survey in 2017, India (53 percent) and China (49 percent) both ranked ahead of the United States (40 percent) as countries perceived as having a positive global influence.1

  Today the debate over what constitutes the best form of government and how to achieve the right balance between individual freedom and collective duty has been blown wide open. The universal challenge facing all societies is intensifying complexity at the intersection of geopolitical turbulence, economic volatility, technological disruption, socio-economic inequality, and environmental stress. This is a tall order—and there is little evidence that Western governments are best suited to adapt to these demands. As in natural evolution, success and failure are determined not by preconceived theories but by adaptability.

  The Anglo-American Failure

  There is a difference between an alignment of the stars and a gift from God. The United States’ twentieth-century ascent was the former. It built the world’s largest economy and military while Europe plunged itself into decades of warfare and Asian and African colonies remained suppressed. In the postwar decades it maintained the most dynamic and innovative economy and had a sense of purpose in leading the free world through the Cold War. Even as political parties changed, there was continuity in governance and a strong national ethos. The past generation has witnessed a significant departure from those heady days. Deregulation, deindustrialization, financialization, and politicization have combined to tear the American societal fabric. By 2014, a Gallup survey found not only that the majority of Americans are fed up with the performance of their government but also that 65 percent of them have have lost faith in their system of government.2

  The complacency with which many Western politicians continue to view the world makes no sense to millennials, who aren’t animated by the fading spirit of Western Cold War triumphalism. Common citizens of all ages have lost trust in their institutions, whether the White House, Congress, political parties, the Supreme Court, big business, or the church. They have good reason to believe the US system is “rigged”—something both Trump and the country’s more liberal scholars agree on. Prominent research underscores how the United States has reached the perverse state of democracy without governance and rights without democracy.3 The former connotes enfranchised citizens for whom services are considered a privilege rather than a right, and the latter implies a society of freedoms whose laws are not made in the public interest. On top of this, pervasive gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their voters rather than the reverse. And these conclusions were drawn before Trump’s election, which exposed how the United States’ style of democracy is as much a tool of division as of unity. Two decades ago, in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, Western intellectuals confidently presumed that Asian strongman rule would break down amid economic empowerment and rising demands for political accountability. Now they fear that their own systems are regressing into either strongman rule or rudderless democratic chaos.

  If economic growth is the foundation on which liberal democracy is built, the West’s chronically slow growth foretold today’s populism—despite its illogical and counterproductive arguments and consequences. Yet the phenomena of Brexit and Trump show how poorly the Anglo-American elites who dominate English-language debates understand their own societies. They further conflate the United States and Great Britain with the Western liberal order itself. That is not how most Europeans see it. Western civilization contains a range of regimes from US presidential republicanism to Nordic constitutional monarchies to Western European multiparty parliamentary democracies to Eastern European illiberal regimes. It is not an ideological bloc. Despite shared history and overlapping interests, there are palpable divides between the Anglo-American and continental European governance systems, with Canada much closer to Western Europe than to its US and British cousins. Recall how Americans and Brits confidently predicted that after the twin s
hocks of Brexit and Trump, a populist wave would sweep through Europe. But the Dutch, French, and German elections of 2017 showed precisely the opposite: despite populist pressures, conservative and social democratic parties aligned behind agendas of reform and solidarity. Continental Europe has maintained a larger middle class and lower inequality.4 European countries have had to raise their retirement ages and make their labor markets more flexible, but they have not dismantled their welfare states. The German system of multiparty consensus is a world apart from the US Congress. It has found compromise on immigration, social spending, infrastructure, and other issues on which parties disagree but know they must demonstrate progressive results to get reelected. The common Western predicaments of aging populations, rising debt, eroding industrial base, wealth concentration, low trust in institutions, and weakening social fabric are thus neither evenly distributed nor similarly managed across the West.

  The US political system is not the West’s leading model of good governance. Over the past decade, the US standard of living, as measured by median income, has actually fallen, while education, health care, public safety, and other areas are weakening. According to the social psychologist Steven Pinker, the United States is “backward” compared to most of the rest of its Western peers. The exorbitant privilege of controlling the world’s leading reserve currency affords the US monetary stability despite twin deficits, but it cannot mask either the country’s deep inequalities or the lack of meaningful remedies for them.5 In politics, the United States suffers from an abundance of representation and a deficit of administration. There is a great excess in the power of representatives—congressmen and senators—and a deep shortfall in the power of administrators—governors and mayors. There are too many officials trained in law and not enough in policy: Too much time is spent arguing rather than doing something. As a result, politics has gotten the upper hand over policy: “We’re getting nothing done!” the late senator John McCain lamented angrily in the summer of 2017.

  Not long ago it was said that Chinese people prefer material stability to democratic instability. Now the same seems to be true everywhere. Pew Research Center surveys conducted worldwide suggest that people do not want democracy at the price of corruption and incompetence. Rather, there is a surprisingly high willingness to consider nondemocratic forms of government not only in Asian countries (including democracies) such as Japan, South Korea, and India, but also in Western democracies, including Great Britain, France, and the United States, each of which reports more than 50 percent of respondents favorable to the notion. A prominent survey reveals that from World War II to today, the percentage of Americans who feel it is “essential to live in a democracy” has fallen from three-quarters to under one-third.6

  Global political discourse is shifting onto a postideological terrain where performance—based on measurements of high-quality governance and citizen satisfaction—is the arbiter of success. All societies want a balance of prosperity and livability, openness and protection, effective governance and citizen voice, individualism and cohesion, free choice and social welfare. Everyday people don’t measure these things by how democratic their country is but by whether they feel safe in their cities, can afford their homes, have stability in their work, have a plan for growing old, and can remain connected to friends and family. As the Anglo-American political constellation veers off course, it could learn from Asia’s leading systems, which focus on long-term vision and collective benefits rather than short-term hyperindividualism and narrow special interests. Indeed, in the aftermath of Brexit, numerous British ministers and economists offered hope in the notion that the United Kingdom would become the “Singapore of Europe”—never mind the irony of looking up to a former colony as a role model. Perhaps, however, the United States and Great Britain could both learn some lessons from Asia’s leading technocracy.

  Singapore: A Technocratic Role Model

  The idea that too much democracy can be dangerous is not an Eastern idea. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato articulated a range of possible regimes from aristocracy to tyranny and described democracy as the penultimate phase of degeneration. For Plato, the essential ingredients of a successful polis were an educated and engaged citizenry and a wise ruling class: democracy combined with political aristocracy. Democracy with neither of these attributes, he felt, would lead to a free but dangerously anarchic society vulnerable to tyranny. To ward against such decay, his preferred form of government was led by a committee of public-spirited “guardians.” Today we call such a system a technocracy.

  Technocratic government is built around expert analysis and long-term planning rather than narrow-minded, short-term populist whims or private interests. It is meritocratic (elevating competent leaders) and utilitarian (seeking the broadest societal benefit). Technocratic leaders are selected more by IQ test than by popularity contest. They are extensively educated, trained, and experienced professionals, not just pedigreed elites. Technocratic politics is not just ad hoc and reactive. Rather, technocracies are where political science starts to look like something worthy of the term: a rigorous approach to policy.

  The modern usage of the term technocracy dates to France’s humiliating defeat by Prince Otto von Bismarck’s Prussia in 1870, after which the elite École Libre des Sciences Politiques (now the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, or Paris Institute of Political Studies) was founded to train political and diplomatic leaders in the hope of turning the Third Republic’s fortunes around. In the late nineteenth century, though admiring the German state’s organizational design, future president Woodrow Wilson pleaded for Americans to take seriously the “science of administration.”7 Americans have forgotten that it was twentieth-century technocratic interventions that propelled the country to the peak of its greatness: the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era through far-reaching policies such as housing settlements for the poor and curbs on corruption in federal agencies and Congress, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s post-Depression New Deal created large professional bureaucracies such as the Social Security Administration, and President Harry Truman’s post–World War II Federal Highway Administration completed the nation’s transportation infrastructure. Silicon Valley became the epicenter of innovation not through the accidental comingling of sunny weather and venture capital but with strategic support from the Pentagon to develop industries from radar to semiconductors to the Internet and GPS. These are the technocratic foundations of America’s strength, even as they are now held in disdain by those who label professional bureacracies a “deep state.”

  If there is anything about the United States today that Asians want to emulate, it is not Washington’s politics but Silicon Valley’s story of “managed innovation.” Billions of people around the world are rightly amazed by the United States’ dynamism and resilience: no other nation in history, democracy or otherwise, has created such a high standard of living for 300 million people. But countries without its geographic size, depth of capital markets, generations of industrial innovation, and scale of talent—which includes every other country in the world—cannot afford to experiment arbitrarily with their precious limited natural or human resources until they get lucky. When countries fail to live up to their strategic ambitions or their citizens witness democracy failing to deliver on its promises, they turn to technocracy to get things done right.

  Across Asia, from Moscow to Muscat and from Dubai to Beijing, the most admired and closely studied government today is that of Singapore.8 Many Asians can relate to its colonial inheritance of a parliamentary system. Numerous Asian nations also had one very strong postcolonial leader who shepherded them through the vulnerable early decades, though none as charismatic and effective as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. Lee believed that the phrase “law and order” has the terms reversed: order matters first and foremost, then law. In its early years, Singapore’s town hall meetings featured Chinese, Tamils, and Malays bickering with one another in their own languages, so Lee imposed English on
them. Bandits used to kidnap and extort both locals and foreigners; Lee made those crimes punishable by death. Today Singapore has no private ownership of guns, virtually no crime, and total public safety. It ranks as one of the world’s richest and best-educated countries, has the highest-quality infrastructure and most effective government, and is one of the easiest places to start a business. According to Save the Children, only in Slovenia do children grow up in a social environment as safe and healthy as Singapore’s. It was well-deserved when, in 2005, Time magazine hailed Lee Kuan Yew as a “philosopher king” for the success of his transformation of Singapore into a first-world entrepôt and an inspiration to China. There is a standard retort that the lessons of small countries cannot be applied to large ones. But today some of the largest and most populous countries on Earth are trying to make themselves into big Singapores.

  Asians far and wide look to Singapore’s technocratic approach to responding efficiently to citizens’ needs and preferences, learning from international experience in devising policies, and using data and scenarios for long-term planning. Though Singapore institutionalized its technocracy before allowing democracy to unfold fully, today the government tries to marry the virtues of democratic inclusiveness with the effectiveness of technocratic management. Democratic feedback is crucial for governments to ensure that they are on the right track, but democracy is not an end in itself. Many Western commentators celebrate the theater of politics as if it were the embodiment of pure democracy. But democracy does not guarantee achievement of the higher goal of effective governance and improved national well-being. Indeed, too much politics corrupts democracy, and too much democracy gets in the way of policy. Politics is about positions, policy about decisions; democracies produce compromises, technocracies produce solutions; democracy suffices, technocracy optimizes.