Ольга Кравцова - Английский язык для специальных и академических целей: Международные отношения и зарубежное регионоведение. Часть 1

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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.

Scandals are not the same as full-blown political crises, although it is often tempting to confuse the two. Crises can sometimes transform politics. Scandals rarely do. One reason why we often inflate the significance of democratic scandals is that all of them exist in the shadow of the greatest scandal of them all, which did result in a full-blown crisis and widespread political change. The Dreyfus affair, which split fin de siecle French society and reconfigured the power of the French state, is the scandal against which all others are measured. Every now and then the exposure of misdeeds in high places does indeed overturn the established order. But Dreyfus is the exception, not the rule. Most democratic scandals have very limited effects. They create a huge amount of fuss for a short period of time. Usually they offer moments of catharsis: a resignation, a trial, a conviction. What they do not produce is structural change.

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Here a comparison with the 1970s is instructive. It was not an age of great political scandals in Britain, though we had our usual share of embarrassments and fall guys, from Lord Lambton to Jeremy Thorpe. The true sense of crisis that gripped the western democracies coincided with the most significant democratic scandal since Dreyfus: Watergate. The ripple effects from Watergate contributed to a growing feeling in the middle of the decade that western democracy was rudderless, its most important player turned in on itself in a never-ending bout of recrimination and political bloodletting. Europe's democratic politicians often complained during the 1970s about the excessive power of the United States. But they also complained when that power went missing. Recent criticisms of the US, fuelled by the hair-raising spectacle of a government shutdown taking the country to the brink of a catastrophic default, follow a similar pattern. We don't like American democracy to overshadow ours, but nor do we like it when America's politicians neglect the rest of the world to pursue their endless infighting. We don't want America's politicians telling us what to do, but nor do we want them turning their backs on us.

As it was unfolding, Watergate looked like it might be a watershed, and Nixon's resignation was widely regarded as the moment for American democracy to renew itself. Yet in retrospect its significance seems very different. Like most scandals, Watergate constituted a diversion rather than a decisive break with the past. American democracy absorbed the shock and moved on. The properly significant change occurred later in the decade, during the Carter administration, when a structural shift took place from the remnants of the New Deal economy to the finance capitalism that ultimately let rip in the Reagan years. At the end of the 1970s, Wall Street took over from main street as the dominant force in US political life, a position it has occupied ever since. Watergate provided some of the cover for this to happen. It generated first outrage and then a widespread feeling of disillusionment, once it became clear how little of substance had changed. Distraction followed by disillusionment are often the circumstances in which democratic politicians feel emboldened to try something new.

In 1975 another widely read publication appeared under the title The Crisis of Democracy. This was the report of the Trilateral Commission, which had been asked to look into the possibility that western democracy was at the end of the road. One of its co-authors, the American political scientist Samuel Huntington (later better known as the author of The Clash of Civilisations), shared the general feeling that western democracy was in deep trouble, weighed down by inflationary pressures, international discord and intellectual grandstanding. However, he pointed to a way out of the mess. It would not require the voters to ramp up their demands on the politicians: Huntington thought that this was what had caused the trouble in the first place. Instead, rescue would come when the public became so tired of the disappointments of democratic politics that they more or less lost interest in it altogether. At that point, the politicians might finally have the room to attempt reform. Huntington's prognosis, cynical and disillusioned as it was, turned out to be prescient. What provides the space for change is not public anger; it is growing public indifference.

The current spate of British scandals looks different because there are so many of them: it is not just one institution but the whole edifice of public life that appears to be fraying. Scandal on this scale might provide the impetus for wholesale reform — yet I rather doubt it. More likely is that it multiplies the distraction. If anything, we are suffering from scandal overload: as each institutional exposure is followed by another, as yet more scapegoats are found and as politicians reposition themselves to withstand a fresh bout of public anger, it is harder than ever to find a focus for deep-rooted change.

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Scandals in democracies allow the public to vent anger without undermining the basis of democracy — we fixate on the misdeeds of a few people at the top, which helps to preserve the underlying structures intact. This represents one of the basic differences between democracy and the alternatives. Under autocratic regimes, an outburst of public rage can be fatal because the system lacks the means to accommodate it. That is why autocrats are so scared of scandals (witness the efforts by the Chinese state to limit the effects of the Bo Xilai affair). The distraction of Watergate helped American democracy to survive the 1970s: it allowed citizens to let off steam without resulting in an implosion of the entire system of government. It was the regimes that couldn't accommodate popular anger, including the communist states of eastern Europe, that eventually fell apart.

A multiplication of scandals gives the appearance of the build-up of a huge head of steam for change. But in fact it means the steam gets let off in lots of different places at once, which makes it even harder to channel public anger in any one direction in particular. The response is far more likely to be fragmentary than coherent: endless firefighting rather than a concerted effort to build a better system of government. At the same time, we are still a long way from the state of public indifference that might give the politicians room to undertake bolder experiments. The risk is that a fragmentation of public attention coincides with a deepening sense of resentment at the ineffectual attempts by politicians to make a tangible difference. For now even the moments of catharsis are proving elusive.

The digital revolution exacerbates this risk. The multiplication of scandals is in part the result of the emergence of information that has long been suppressed. In the absence of secrets, public anger never completely goes away: there is always something new to rail against. Democracy in Britain is more secure than it was in the 1970s because of the absence of ideological alternatives and because of the material comfort in its foundations. But it faces a challenge that did not exist four decades ago. Constant scrutiny of a surfeit of information fragments more than just attention spans. At the end of the 1970s the two main parties together commanded the votes of over 80 per cent of voters on a turnout of over three-quarters of the electorate. Now Labour and the Tories share the support of barely two-thirds of those who vote on turnouts of less than two-thirds of the total electorate — and both figures are likely to keep falling.

The risk for British democracy is not of permanent crisis. It is of a permanent state of scandal obscuring the underlying crisis of elitist managerial politics and thereby making it harder to fix. It is increasingly difficult to envisage the circumstances in which politicians get the space to try something new.

The advantage of democratic systems of government is that they adjust when they have to, trying something new until they find something that sticks. They are broadly experimental and adaptable. British democracy is much more secure than it was in the 1970s, yet it is also much more fragmented. Together, these two factors leave its adaptability in question. With these factors in play, it may be that the crisis has to get a lot worse before the conditions arise in which significant change is possible. But the crisis is real and bad enough already, and wishing for worse in order to galvanise the prospects for institutional change is playing with fire. Although the leaders of both main political parties like to compare themselves with Margaret Thatcher in her role as steely-willed game-changer, no one wants to go back to the high-stakes politics of the 1970s. British democracy recovered from the travails of that decade. The present state of British democracy is a reflection of how far removed we are now from those looming fears of imminent collapse. This time the danger is different. We face the risk of getting stuck where we are.