Otherwise, the surprise gets rather lost.

The current US government has about 33% approval and only about 25% think that the country is heading in the right direction; so it must be illegitimate.

Japan is fortunate, in that all the different sources of legitimacy are lined up:

democracy
monarchism
ethnic, linguistic and liberal nationalism
stability
rule of law
capitalism
pacifism
external threat (China, mainly)

and I may be forgetting some. The presence of democracy in the list of legimacies is enough to make it not suck – there is no actual need to behead the emperor.

Opposing them, you only have fringes like the RAF, Aum and that samurai author guy.

If those had been pointing in different directions, say:

it had not been legally a democracy before it was one pragmatically

the emperor had decided to get actively involved in politics and/or criminality

the government had passed laws confiscating the wealth of the rich

the major religion had an obvious interpretion that made the constitution blasphemously immoral

WWII had left it still governing Manchuria

it would no doubt feel like a very different country.

China does have many of those problems. For example, marxism does have an obvious interpretation under which ‘to become rich is glorious’ is not entirely kosher.

Democracy as a legitimising force does undoubtedly exist. It is hard to see how the chinese elite can avoid making use of it, other than by starting a war.

The legitimacy question is truly a maze, but a crucial one I think. You might be interested in some scholalry work that is discussing this question for the Chinese case. For instance the German Gunter Schubert is challenging the “implicit” Western understanding that non-democratic regimes are automatically illegitimate. He links the question to political reform in China. One of his articles can be found here.
http://www.asienkunde.de/articles/SchubertHebererA99.pdf

“For most Western Scholars, this problem is unsolvable. China is destined to become democratic, as it is perceived as being deeply affected by discontentment among the people caused by unbalanced economic growth, flagrant cadre corruption and aggravating social cleavages. Serious protest and upheaval in the countryside and the ailing industrial centres, the formation of underground resistance by clandestine religious groups and the (alleged) estrangement of a growing middle class from Communist ideology and the Party’s power monopoly. In addition to these points, there are the tensions that exist between the central and the local state, which are set against a backdrop of legal fuzziness, fiscal competition, illegal rent-seeking and insufficient financial resources for many local governments. These are just some of the points made to illustrate the declining capacity of the state in contemporary China. According to certain predictions, the decline will eventually result in a fade-out of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Of course, no serious scholar can say when this will exactly happen.

…

But although China’s present-day problems often evoke the image of an authoritarian government struggling for sur-vival, a closer look at the effects of political structural reform since the Tiananmen tragedy might indeed suggest that Communist one-party rule is more stable and actually enjoys more legitimacy now than at any other time since the early 1990s.”

You might also be interested in a related academic debate about “authoritarian resilience” in China by scholars such as Andrew Nathan, Bruce Gilley etc.

Chris

In fact, if such a statement were true of Japan wouldn’t that mean by your theory that it would score below average on most measures of suck (very well put, btw)? It doesn’t, so I’d take that as evidence that the assertion is wrong.

Similarly, I have a sneaking suspicion that if one were to investigate the Chinese sense of nationhood one would find a little more sense of shared legitimacy than that which you describe. So in this part of his argument, my guess is that Barnett is viewing China (and definitely japan!) through too liberal a filter. He can’t imagine that a non-democratic society could find a source of legitimacy and assumes they are all just thronging about waiting for democracy so they can become legitimate (in whose eyes? His, is whose). This neglects the evidence that a lot of the current strife in China seems to be in reaction to market reforms and in defense of the old system (i.e. communism) and in any case requires the ludicrous assumption that the revolution successfully united all of China for 50 years despite having no support. I suppose it could be true, but it could also very easily be liberal self-deception.

(and sorry for assuming it was your view).

And that’s not ‘my’ theory: the original post said:

a single-party state that bases almost all of its legitimacy on rising income and development through export-driven growth

My point is this: what can replace it when that ‘wow’ factor goes away?

I’m not quite sure what you are arguing here, but despite your uncertainty on this point, and Radek’s evasions above, the gap between China’s rich and poor classes is very real and growing. It’s not a “garden variety case of… peasants migrating to the cities”. As well as problems with economic planning in urban industries and with urban infrastructure which hold back urbanisation, China’s Hukou system of residency permits severely restricts Chinese rural residents who wish to migrate to urban areas.

Split the world up into 100 or so nation-sized regions, 20 year time periods, over the last 200 years, for a sample size of 1000. Name one such chunk that lacks such a source of shared legitimacy, and scores average or above in terms of common-sense measures of lack of suck in the lives of the people it covers.

-cronyism, thy name is Friedmanesque globalization;

-cronyism, thy name is good old “sovereign” statehood;

-there is a better way, Grasshopper Kwai Chang Caine, etc.]

My glory is merely alliterative, my friend. Otherwise, pedestrian logic and mundane insights are my stock-in-trade.

I think you have misunderstood me…

No biggie. The “proto-shogunate” bit just evoked the whole narrative of “feudal aversion to modernity” often used to frame Japanese authoritarianism. And yes, the brass had much more influence in pre-war Japan than under Bush’s gang of manxome cronies. That’s the problem with historical analogies, especially the provocative ones.

Just nitpicking, I guess.

At any rate, I do agree with the point that, contra Friedman and his McDonalds, international economic integration and economic growth are not an absolute guarantee of peace and democracy.

Not only is nationalism, under the appropriate circumstances, a rich source of “political capital” for governments to undermine democracy at home and international legality abroad, but, just as importantly, among the juridical persons active in the international sphere there is nothing that remotely approaches a monopoly or near-monopoly of the use of force by an accountable actor charged with the “protection of property”, “contract enforcement” and such. That this is so patently, painfully, embarrassingly obvious highlights both the sheer Panglossian idiocy of Friedman’s flat Earths and the dangers and evasion of drinking the protectionist hemlock.

“Drinking the protectionist hemlock” is a distracting image. What the fuck. Style and no substance just because we can.

Whether “free” markets, without proper oversight, turn out to be reasonably competitive ones is an additional, certainly not irrelevant question. Very few Libertarians are willing to answer that one (in fact, several stars of the movement like von Mises or la Rand never saw an anti-trust law that they liked).

There’s this naive depiction of XIX century globalization that states that its demise, in the fires of WWI, was a “mistake”, both foolish and tragic, made by nation state actors. Apart from presenting the century of colonial expansion or the Crimean or Franco-Prussian wars in a somewhat idyllic light, this view ignores that the closest thing to a formal framework for regulating international relations they had at the time was probably Victoria’s “matronate” i.e. her good offices as hub and procuress of European royalty. Otherwise, the conviction that “trade follows the flag” ran deep and it was in hindsight perhaps not surprising that the whole thing exploded in everyone’s faces.

.
Without a nationwide shared sense of legitimacy