Politics
The Global Rise of
Putinism
Photo by Russian
Presidential Press and Information Office
“Abe tightens grip on power as Japanese
shun election.”
So ran the page one headline of the Financial
Times on the victory of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Sunday’s
elections.
Abe is the most nationalistic leader of
postwar Japan. He is rebooting nuclear power, building up Japan’s military,
asserting her rights in territorial disputes with China and Korea. And he
is among a host of leaders of large and emerging powers who may fairly be
described as the new nationalistic strong men.
Xi Jinping is another. Staking a claim
to all the islands in the South and East China seas, moving masses of Han
Chinese into Tibet and Uighur lands to swamp native peoples, purging old
comrades for corruption, Xi is the strongest leader China has seen in decades.
He sits astride what may now be the
world’s largest economy and is asserting his own Monroe Doctrine. Hong Kong’s
democracy protests were tolerated until Xi tired of them. Then they were swept
off the streets.
Call it Putinism. It appears to be
rising, while the New World Order of Bush I, the “global hegemony” of the
neocons, and the democracy crusade of Bush II seem to belong to yesterday.
Narendra Modi, leader of the Hindu
nationalist party who was denied entry into the United States for a decade for
complicity in or toleration of a massacre of Muslims is now Prime Minister of
India.
“Members of the rightwing Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh,” the FT reports, “the Organisation of
National Volunteers that gave birth to the Bharatiya Janata party headed by Mr.
Modi — have been appointed to key posts in the governing party and cultural
institutions.”
“Nationalists have railed in public
against the introduction of ‘western’ practices such as wearing bikinis on the
beach, putting candles on birthday cakes and using English in schools — all to
the chagrin of fretful liberals.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
is another such leader.
Once seen as a model of the enlightened
ruler who blended his Islamic faith with a secular state, seeking friendship
with all of his neighbors, he has declared cold war on Israel, aided the
Islamic State in Syria, and seems to be reigniting the war with the Kurds,
distancing himself from his NATO allies and the U.S., and embracing Putin’s
Russia.
Not since Ataturk has Turkey had so
nationalistic a leader.
And as the democracy demonstrators were
routed in Hong Kong, so, too, were the Tahrir Square “Arab Spring”
demonstrators in Egypt, home country to one in four Arabs.
With the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the
Muslim Brotherhood came to power in free elections, but was then overthrown by
the Egyptian Army. General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi is now president and rules as
autocratically as Mubarak, or Nasser before him. Thousands of the Muslim
Brotherhood are in prison, hundreds face the death penalty. Yet, despite the
military coup that brought Sisi to power, and the repression, the American aid
continues to flow.
What do these leaders have in common?
All are strong men. All are nationalists.
Almost all tend to a social conservatism from which Western democracies recoil.
Almost none celebrate democracy or democratic values the way we do. And
almost all reject America’s claim to be the “indispensable nation” or
“exceptional nation” and superpower leader.
Fareed Zakaria lists as “crucial
elements of Putinism … nationalism, religion, social conservatism, state
capitalism and government domination of the media. They are all, in some way or
another, different from and hostile to, modern Western values of individual
rights, tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and internationalism.”
Yet not every American revels in the
sewer that is our popular culture. Not every American believes we should impose
our democratist ideology on other nations. Nor are Big Media and Hollywood
universally respected. Patriotism, religion, and social conservatism guide the
lives of a majority of Americans today.
As the Associated Press reports this
weekend, Putinism finds echoes across Central and Western Europe. Hungary’s
Viktor Orban has said he sees in Russia a model for his own “illiberal state.”
The National Front’s Marine Le Pen wants
to bring France into a new Gaullist Europe, stretching “from the Atlantic to
the Urals,” with France seceding from the EU superstate.
“Of the 24 right-wing populist parties
that took about a quarter of the European Parliament seats in May elections,
Political Capital lists 15 as ‘committed’ to Russia,” writes the AP.
These rising right-wing parties are
“partners” of Russia in that they “share key views — advocacy of traditional
family values, belief in authoritarian leadership, a distrust of the U.S., and
support for strong law and order measures.”
While the financial collapse caused
Orban to turn his back on the West, says Zakaria, to the Hungarian prime
minister, liberal values today embody “corruption, sex and violence,” and
Western Europe has become a land of “freeloaders on the backs of welfare
systems.”
If America is a better country today
than she has ever been, why are so many, East and West, recoiling from what we
offer now?
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