They mean business

As Beijing and Moscow flex their muscles, some see a rising tide of authoritarianism. But don't call it a Cold War, says Alan Philps.
The combination of sport and spectacle at the Olympic Games has a tendency to crystallize the political spirit of an era. Olympic bureaucrats continue to insist that politics and sport are separate, but it is hard not to recall the unforgettable political displays of Games past: Hitler showing off the power of the Nazi party in 1936; two American athletes giving the black power salute in Mexico City in 1968; the Soviet Union revealing itself as a modern superpower in Moscow in 1980; and now, the once "sick man of Asia" coming out as an economic giant in Beijing.

The Beijing Games are not yet over, but already the era they usher in has a name: the Age of Authoritarianism. The term was coined in a Financial Times column by its American editor (and Russian expert) Chrystia Freeland, who sees the triumph of liberal democracy - as proclaimed loudly since 1989 - being checked by an authoritarian revanche. It is a catchy label, to be sure, and it looks likely to stick.

The opening ceremony proved once again that the dictatorships put on the best shows. With its computer-generated footprints in the sky and the lip-synching nine-year old girl, it was a hi-tech update of the old communist art form of socialist realism - where reality is improved in the interests of propaganda.  The Chinese Communist Party has stood firm against western calls to respect human rights and democratic freedoms. But this did not stop George W Bush from attending the opening ceremony. The Olympic sponsors - Coca-Cola, Visa, Kodak, McDonalds - are the flower of American capitalism, and they do not give a fig for Tibet.

But it is the re-emergence of Russia as a belligerent power that confirms Freeland's intuition. By invading Georgia -  albeit in response to provocations - the Russians have humiliated Bush, who was unable to do anything to protect his protégé, Mikheil Saakashvili. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has done his part by reviving the rhetoric of the Cold War to portray oil-rich Russia as a resurgent threat to the West. As Freeland writes: "Figuring out how to contain the 21st century's monied authoritarians is our most pressing foreign policy dilemma."

There is no contesting the crisis of confidence among the democracies. The inexorable march of democracy and human rights that was predicted in the 1990s has juddered to a halt at the gates of Beijing. The Beijing Olympic slogan, One World, One Dream, seems to mean the opposite: there are many paths to prosperity, not just the American way. "Name and shame works with countries dependent on the West, but China is no longer such a country," Andrew J Nathan, a China scholar and human rights activist at Columbia University, wrote despairingly.

In Britain, one of the foremost commentators of the Left, John Kampfner, is writing a book on what he calls "the assault of global wealth on democracy". He will be travelling to Russia, China and Singapore to look at "a modern form of authoritarianism, quite distinct from Soviet Communism, Maoism or Fascism" which, he writes, is providing a good life and "the ultimate anaesthetic for the brain". The thesis of the Age of Authoritarianism seems to be catching on in America. In The New York Times Bill Keller, who covered the collapse of the Soviet Union, has endorsed the theory, albeit in a reduced form as "springtime for autocrats". In the neoconservative Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan catches the mood of despair among the world's democracies: the excessive optimism of 1989 has been replaced by excessive - and, he believes, unjustified - pessimism.

Despite the gathering consensus, it is misguided to see China, Russia and other less democratic nations as the new enemy, on the other side of a new fault line from America and Europe. For a start, the democracies are not blameless in the collapse of the post-Cold War order in Europe. The politics of Nato since 1989 seemed designed to awaken Russia's injured pride: America pursued a triumphalist policy that treated Russia as the defeated enemy; the Europeans fell prey to wishful thinking, creating their common European home while ignoring the Russian giant left out in the cold.

Democracy may work in the US - even though only half the registered voters turn out for presidential elections -  but from a Middle Eastern perspective it looks less like a panacea. The checks and balances of the US constitution and the power of the American media did not prevent the invasion of Iraq under false pretences. Western credibility has not survived the fiasco in Palestine, where a clean election produced a clear majority for Hamas. This being the "wrong" result, it was brazenly ignored by the US and the European Union, who set about trying to reverse it.  On the other side of the Green Line, Israel may be a functioning democracy, but that has hardly made life any easier for the Palestinians - rather the voting system seems to have given ever more power to the extremists.

There is a more personal reason why I am sceptical of grand theses. I was at the Moscow Olympics in 1980 as a humble Reuters trainee. This was a time when the Kremlin was on the march and America in retreat. Soviet troops had seized power in Afghanistan, while Washington was reeling from the Iranian revolution. It seemed only months before Russian soldiers would be dipping their boots in the waters of the Gulf.

It was a tense occasion. A western boycott of the games led to many empty seats. The tussles between the media and the authorities in Beijing are as nothing compared to the media war in Moscow: one British newspaper headlined its coverage of the opening ceremony: "The sham and showmanship of the eerie Games".  The paper added a cut-out-and-keep guide to Moscow showing 26 prisons, detention centres and psychiatric hospitals where dissidents were incarcerated and abused.

I remember clearly what happened when I showed this caustic coverage to the Soviet "gilded youth" - students at the top universities from the best families - who were deputed to show the foreign press around. They were shocked to the core. Behind their outrage I saw the yearning for Russia to be accepted by the Europeans as part of the civilised continent, not Siberian barbarians, as the Cold War stereotype had them.

This was a sign of the weakness of the ruling class - no longer ruthless leather-jacketed commissars, but sophisticated young men wanting to go skiing in Gstaad. Everyone knows what happened next. Before the decade was out, the communist party was collapsing, the empire was breaking free and the country fell apart. At its moment of greatest pomp, the USSR was tottering. Are the Beijing Games the swansong of the Chinese Communist Party? It would be foolish to predict it. The Chinese party cadres have all studied the collapse of the Soviet Union and conclude it came for a lack of will and inability to try new methods. The Chinese are tougher and more sophisticated. They have a pact with the people: prosperity and consumer goods in return for leaving the big decisions to the party. Control of the media is subtle but total. Citizenship has been redefined as consumership.

I do not see the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party filled with yearning to be accepted. China is, after all, the Middle Kingdom, and does not suffer from any sense of being at the edge of the world. Nor is it broke, as the Soviet Union was in the 1980s; in fact it is completely the opposite. Profligate America depends on hard-working China to buy up its treasury bills, which is why Bush had to appear and why Coca-Cola would never take part in any boycott.

But still China faces many challenges, the Communist party most of all. The time of greatest danger is when the ruling party becomes a fast track to riches, as is the case now. Russia, for its part, is not going to be a superpower again, however much McCain may try to revive the Cold War. Russia depends on exporting energy, which is not the stuff world powers are made of. Its population is declining, and its education and health systems are in poor shape. Rather than projecting power abroad, it will be hard pressed to defend its vast territories from its land hungry neighbour - China.

The emergence of the authoritarian countries will have a salutary effect on western policy. After so much loose talk on the progress of the world towards the sunny uplands of liberal democracy, it is time to return to reality and see that, even if the economy is globalised, the world is not yet one. Everything should be clear by 2014 when Russia holds the Winter Olympics in Sochi, just 25km from one of the flashpoints of the war in Georgia. Perhaps it will be another eerie, security-dampened occasion like 1980, at which Russia re-emerges as a new superpower. But I doubt it. Russia will probably have found its place among the nations by then - but I guess Georgia may boycott.
Alan Philps, a former Moscow correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, is associate editor of The National. @email:aphilps@thenational.ae