Liberal Democracy: The Experience of Germany, Japan & India and Why China’s Riches Won’t Bring It Freedom

Liberal Democracy: The Experience of Germany, Japan & India and Why China’s Riches Won’t Bring It Freedom bloom.bg/18aqGBb

By Pankaj Mishra, the author of “From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia,” and a Bloomberg View columnist, based in London and Mashobra, India.

Japan, the first non-Western country to try to become modern, became an economic and military power without enshrining liberal concerns for individual rights.
Before Japan, there was Germany, another society that embarked on industrialization relatively late compared with the rest of Western Europe, and was modernized by a strong centralized state.
Neither Germany nor Japan embraced the traditions of Anglo-American liberalism, which encouraged individualism, laissez-faire economics and a fundamental distrust of state power. Individual rights were subordinated to the economic and military imperatives of countries lurching late into the modern world.
Few Japanese wished to criticize the slogan “fukoku kyohei (富国強兵)” (meaning “enrich the country and strengthen the military”), as their country rapidly modernized in the late 19th century under the not-so-benign gaze of the U.K., Russia and the U.S.
Even during the politically favorable conditions of Taisho Japan or Weimar Germany, liberals wanted the state to devise and implement social-welfare policies for the benefit of the working poor. Reacting against modern capitalism’s built-in inequalities, they trusted in bureaucratic management of the economy (prefiguring in some ways the liberal New Dealers of the U.S.).
Many Indian liberals, too, stressed state initiative in many areas of public life. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, implanted representative democracy by ensuring that individual consent, periodically sought through elections, legitimized the great power of the Indian state.
Yet his liberalism had a communitarian and paternalistic bent. The state was to hold great prescriptive powers in the realm of the economy. The Indian constitution held that free speech, too, could be circumscribed in favor of the public good.