Английский язык для специальных и академических целей: Международные отношения и зарубежное регионоведение. Часть 1 - [64]

Of course, there are still some viable alternatives to western liberal democracy. Chinese state capitalism is making headway in many parts of the world, including Africa. Democratic populism, of the kind practised by Hugo Chavez, has plenty of adherents in Latin America. But these alternatives are rarely, if ever, treated as even hypothetically viable futures for a country such as Britain. I chaired an event recently in Cambridge at which Seumas Milne of theGuardian, perhaps the most conventionally left-wing journalist currently writing for a mainstream publication (during the 1970s mainstream writers who shared Milne's views were legion), described the current failings of liberal democracy: botched wars, rapacious banks and energy companies, deep-seated inequality, under-resourced public services. His largely middle-class audience was with him every step of the way. But when someone asked what the alternative was, and he said we should run our economy more like the Chinese run theirs, there was an uncomfortable silence. Suddenly he was on his own. Discontented Britons who as a corollary embrace the idea of Chinese-style state capitalism are vanishingly rare.

Britain today is a very different country from what it was in the 1970s. It is more comfortable and much more tolerant of different personal lifestyles, even as it is less tolerant of extreme political views. Above all, it is vastly more prosperous. It is true that the effects of the present economic crisis are far-reaching and serious: many people who considered themselves comfortably off have found that it is increasingly hard to sustain their standard of living. The squeeze on living costs is being felt by a large proportion of the population. At the same time, the disproportionate rewards being enjoyed by those at the very top are both more visible and more pronounced than ever. This is a much more unequal society than it was 40 years ago. Nonetheless, all this is happening from what is by any historic standards a very high base of material security (excepting the pockets of true deprivation that prosperous societies such as ours still allow to grow up in their midst).

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There is extensive historical evidence that once they pass beyond a certain level of material prosperity democratic societies are very unlikely to experiment with alternative forms of government. The costs of the disruption are not worth any possible reward. The cut-off point is usually put at around $7,000 per capita GDP. During the dark days of the 1970s, even as it contracted, the British economy remained well above that level — but not so far as to be out of sight (per capita GDP was roughly $15,000 at the start of the 1970s). By 2008, per capita GDP in Britain was close to $40,000 and although it has fallen since, it has not fallen far (and not below $37,000). If we couldn't face the economic and social disruption of drastic political change in the 1970s, we are hardly likely to be keener on it now.

By contrast, there is almost no historical evidence to tell us what happens when an exceptionally prosperous democratic society like ours suffers from widespread institutional failure and enters a period of decline. The level of prosperity that Britain has achieved is far too recent a phenomenon for there to be useful historical examples to draw on. Perhaps the only real point of comparison is with contemporary Japan. Since the early 1990s the Japanese economy has largely stagnated and its political institutions have struggled to adjust to the challenges they have faced. Japan entered a period of crisis two decades ago in which it seemed to get permanently stuck.

At the start of the “lost decades” in Japan there were frequent warnings of impending disaster — could a democracy survive if it stopped delivering significant economic growth? It turns out that Japanese democracy could survive. Things in Japan never got so bad as to shake the system out of its torpor, but that means they also never got bad enough to bring the system to its knees. At no point has there been the prospect of a military coup. The political technicians simply muddled through as best they could, patching things together and hoping for better days. Over the past year there have been signs that better days are finally returning for the economy, although, as many Japanese are aware, they have been here before. One feature of drawn-out crises in which nothing gets sufficiently broken for anything to get finally fixed is that they are full of false dawns. In Britain we might right now be experiencing the first of many.

Britain is not Japan. British civil institutions are both more flexible and less socially cohesive than their Japanese equivalents. We are able to adapt to our failings more quickly — and we may need to, because we do not have the protection of extensive family and corporate support systems to paper over the cracks. But in one respect, Britain does resemble Japan. Japanese public life, though relatively rigid in institutional terms, has long been rife with scandal. It is the form in which political outrage gets expressed: business, media and political figures are all often brought down by the exposure of their personal failings. Similarly, one of the distinctive features of the present crisis of British democracy is the extent to which it has been dominated by scandal. It has been the exposure of individual misdeeds that has generated most of the outrage. Fred the Shred, Jimmy Savile, Rebekah Brooks, Sir Peter Viggers of duck-house infamy: these are the targets of public dismay and disgust. One reason why the present scandal over GCHQ surveillance is yet to have a similar impact is that in the faceless world of high-level espionage it is by definition much harder to find an individual to blame. Even the phone-hacking scandal only really took off when the public was able to put a face to the injustice: Milly Dowler and her family.