Peter Beinart and Jonah Goldberg clash over Time’s decision to anoint Russia’s Vladimir Putin as its "Man of the Year", but perhaps Beinart should have debated with The Economist. Beinart’s premise is global: Putin deserves the award because he is representaive of an authoritarian, anti-globalization trend challengling the neo-liberal consensus. I suspect Goldberg (he believes US General David Petraeus deserves the honor) disagrees because he can’t hang with a global topic, and has to stick to domestic issues. (Note: Viewers can access Beinart/Goldberg on "What’s Your Problem?" either at TNR – subscription-required – or at NRO-TV for free)
Firstly, Time’s justification for its award includes useful information.
Russia’s revival is changing the course of the modern world. After decades of slumbering underachievement, the Bear is back. Its billionaires now play on the global stage, buying up property, sports franchises, places at élite schools. Moscow exerts international influence not just with arms but also with a new arsenal of weapons: oil, gas, timber. On global issues, it offers alternatives to America’s waning influence, helping broker deals in North Korea, the Middle East, Iran. Russia just made its first shipment of nuclear fuel to Iran—a sign that Russia is taking the lead on that vexsome issue, particularly after the latest U.S. intelligence report suggested that the Bush Administration has been wrong about Iran’s nuclear-weapons development. And Putin is far from done. The premiership is a perch that will allow him to become the longest-serving statesman among the great powers, long after such leaders as Bush and Tony Blair have faded from the scene.
But all this has a dark side. To achieve stability, Putin and his administration have dramatically curtailed freedoms. His government has shut down TV stations and newspapers, jailed businessmen whose wealth and influence challenged the Kremlin’s hold on power, defanged opposition political parties and arrested those who confront his rule. Yet this grand bargain—of freedom for security—appeals to his Russian subjects, who had grown cynical over earlier regimes’ promises of the magical fruits of Western-style democracy. Putin’s popularity ratings are routinely around 70%. "He is emerging as an elected emperor, whom many people compare to Peter the Great," says Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center and a well-connected expert on contemporary Russia.
Putin’s global ambitions seem straightforward. He certainly wants a seat at the table on the big international issues. But more important, he wants free rein inside Russia, without foreign interference, to run the political system as he sees fit, to use whatever force he needs to quiet seething outlying republics, to exert influence over Russia’s former Soviet neighbors. What he’s given up is Yeltsin’s calculation that Russia’s future requires broad acceptance on the West’s terms. That means that on big global issues, says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and former point man on Russia policy for the Clinton Administration, "sometimes Russia will be helpful to Western interests, and sometimes it will be the spoiler."
I think the major weakness of Time‘s premise is, that it doesn’t challenge the argument that Putin is a long-term improvement over President Boris Yeltsin. The Economist does try to tackle Putin’s strongest propaganda point.
Even without endorsing Mr Putin’s rule outright, Time largely swallows the Kremlin’s version of Russia’s past and present. Yet as Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss point out in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, it is far from obvious that autocracy has been good for Russia, either in economics or in the growth of modern, efficient and accountable state institutions.
Russia’s economy is certainly doing better now than in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin, but any comparison based on that must also include the wildly different starting conditions and external environments. “Even in good economic times, autocracy has done no better than democracy at promoting public safety, health, or a secure legal and property-owning environment,” they note.
Russia’s economic history lends itself to sharply different interpretations. An excellent recent book by Anders Aslund, “Russia’s Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed”, gives Mr Putin and his team high marks for their economic policy in the early years of his rule, particularly the unglamorous but vital fiscal reforms of 1999-2001, which ended an era of chaos in Russian public finances.
But Russia’s recent political history tends to attract criticism from all corners. The audible but mostly invisible feuds inside the Kremlin, and the total secrecy about political decision-making, make even the stability so praised by Time look precarious. Even Mr Putin’s biggest fans would find it hard to argue that he enjoys a robust debate with critics, or promotes a fastidious separation of business and political interests.
McFaul and Stoner-Weiss – who compare autocracies to hares and snails, and democracies to tortoises – are even more on Beinart’s point, so perhaps Beinart should just junk Goldberg and debate guests.
The conventional explanation for Vladimir Putin’s popularity is straightforward. In the 1990s, under post-Soviet Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, the state did not govern, the economy shrank, and the population suffered. Since 2000, under Putin, order has returned, the economy has flourished, and the average Russian is living better than ever before. As political freedom has decreased, economic growth has increased. Putin may have rolled back democratic gains, the story goes, but these were necessary sacrifices on the altar of stability and growth.
This narrative has a powerful simplicity, and most Russians seem to buy it. Putin’s approval rating hovers near 80 percent, and nearly a third of Russians would like to see him become president for life. Putin, emboldened by such adoration, has signaled that he will stay actively involved in ruling Russia in some capacity after stepping down as president this year, perhaps as prime minister to a weak president or even as president once again later on.
Authoritarians elsewhere, meanwhile, have held up Putin’s popularity and accomplishments in Russia as proof that autocracy has a future — that, contrary to the end-of-history claims about liberal democracy’s inevitable triumph, Putin, like China’s Deng Xiaoping did, has forged a model of successful market authoritarianism that can be imitated around the world.
This conventional narrative is wrong, based almost entirely on a spurious correlation between autocracy and growth. The emergence of Russian democracy in the 1990s did indeed coincide with state breakdown and economic decline, but it did not cause either. The reemergence of Russian autocracy under Putin, conversely, has coincided with economic growth but not caused it (high oil prices and recovery from the transition away from communism deserve most of the credit). There is also very little evidence to suggest that Putin’s autocratic turn over the last several years has led to more effective governance than the fractious democracy of the 1990s. In fact, the reverse is much closer to the truth: to the extent that Putin’s centralization of power has had an influence on governance and economic growth at all, the effects have been negative. Whatever the apparent gains of Russia under Putin, the gains would have been greater if democracy had survived.
(…)
As Putin and his team devise schemes to avoid a real handover of power later this year, their contortions to maintain themselves at the head of the Russian state seem much more successful than their efforts at improving governance or growing the economy at a faster pace. World energy and raw-material prices make sustained economic growth in Russia likely for the foreseeable future. But sustained autocratic rule will not contribute to this growth and, because of continued poor governance, is likely to serve as a drag on economic development in the long term. Russians are indeed getting richer, but they could be getting even richer much faster.
The Kremlin talks about creating the next China, but Russia’s path is more likely to be something like that of Angola — an oil-dependent state that is growing now because of high oil prices but has floundered in the past when oil prices were low and whose leaders seem more intent on maintaining themselves in office to control oil revenues and other rents than on providing public goods and services to a beleaguered population. Unfortunately, as Angola’s president, José Eduardo dos Santos, has demonstrated by his three decades in power, even poorly performing autocracies can last a long, long time.
For me, Russia’s economic predicament is just the icing on this argument, but Putin’s 1999 Dagestan-oriented coup de main is the cake. But,I think Russia is far less convincing of an autocratic model than, say, Singapore. Vladimir Putin would never be a man of the decade.
Tags: anti-globalization, autocracy, boris yeltsin, checnya, dagestan, democracy, development, man of the year, oil, vladimir putin
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