On November 22, the website of the Russian Council for International Affairs published an article entitled "The Sixth Plenum and the Democratic Summit", written by the Director of the Council, Andrei Koltunov, and the full text is excerpted as follows:
One of the most important achievements of the recently concluded Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was Beijing's resolute rejection of Westernization as a way to modernize China's society and national economy in the future. The CCP and the Chinese government will continue to maintain and develop a well-functioning system that has worked well for 70 years.
The "end of history" did not happen
Allow me to assert that the outcome of the Sixth Plenum of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China is nothing less than a manifestation of a more universal global trend: the world was, and will remain, very diverse in terms of national political systems, social development models, and economic strategies. Moreover, this diversity is likely to grow further as individual countries and societies "mature" and complicate, and the new generation of political elites in major powers fades. Instead of witnessing the "end of history" predicted in the past, we will find that competition between different models of social development is intensifying and more multifaceted.
How to deal with this reality? Efforts may be made to view it as a positive trend that can enhance the overall stability of the international community. After all, the more diverse and complex a system is, the more stable it is when it deals with various blows and turbulence in the external environment. Let's use biological examples to make a simple and crude analogy, a wild forest is an extremely diverse and complex ecosystem, which is less affected by abnormal weather or even natural disasters than the single crop farmland cultivated by humans. Since the elevation of diversity and complexity is regarded as one of the manifestations of social progress, we in today's society should focus on effectively controlling the competition between countries and societies, so that unavoidable competition will ultimately bring us benefits rather than harms.
Another reaction to this reality is a desperate (but desperate) struggle against social, political, and economic diversity, an attempt to impose a model of development on countries as superior to the rest. At present, it seems that the Biden administration of the United States has chosen precisely this response. The White House began an ideological crusade against China, Russia and other countries that had deviated from the "Western standards of liberal democracy" in their own development. In order to prove that it has the right to influence the main direction of global political development, the White House announced that it will hold a "democracy summit" from December 9 to 10 to "promote democracy" at home and "oppose dictatorship" externally.
America's rejection of pluralism is alarming
As the summit has not yet taken place, it seems unfair to draw conclusions to the initiative early. However, the US leadership's efforts to erase the pluralism of the world today and regress to the monotony of black and white in confrontation between democracy and dictatorship cannot but be alarming. In this coordinate, the international system is thoroughly divided into us and them, good and bad, our own and outsiders, modern and stale, legal and illegal. The new international order, if built on such a shaky foundation, is certain to be unstable and unsustainable: any major international crisis or acute regional conflict is highly likely to destroy it.
Theoretically, all States, without exception, should resolutely confront corruption, political paranoia, abuse of power and gross violations of human rights in the same way that social inequality, apartheid and ethnic discrimination, and the selfishness of elites should be confronted. In practice, however, the leadership of all countries has sought a fragile balance between individual freedom and national security, social stability and economic growth, and immediate and longer-term goals of social development. Specific to everything, from neighboring countries to the psychological characteristics of a leader, many factors will have an impact on the balance of the system. More problems arise if certain countries, in order to strike such a balance, inadvertently or intentionally violate their international obligations, including human rights, countering extremism or fighting corruption.
Regrettably, there is no political system today that can cure all the problems mentioned above. We can only be cautious in determining that some systems are better than others in their overall response to individual problems. For example, we can now be sure that China's system is better at dealing with COVID-19 than the United States.
History in recent years has shown that Russia is clearly superior to the EU in terms of the efficiency of making diplomatic decisions, its ability to mobilize the necessary resources quickly, and the consistency of its foreign policy. However, this partial advantage alone makes it impossible to judge that Russia's political system is generally more desirable than that of the EU.
The United States is not qualified to be a model for democracy
A strict distinction between democracy and dictatorship is no easy task. After all, both have diversity and grayscale. There are various transitional and mixed regimes between typical Western democracies and traditional dictatorships. Therefore, any group of "real democracies", no matter how it is selected, has a certain degree of subjectivity and will be vulnerable to criticism.
If the purpose of the Democracy Summit is to address the many issues of improving national governance effectiveness at the global level by comparing the various specific practices carried out by various countries, then there is no need to make the summit "unique" and mainly invite Friends and Allies of the United States to attend.
If Washington's aim is to once again publicize the political, social, and economic model of the United States to the world, then it should postpone the period and first rectify the domestic order: after all, with the current political and social status quo in the United States, the American model is obviously not qualified for other countries and societies to be taken as the standard.
If the summit's primary aim is to isolate Beijing and Moscow in international politics, the United States may be overwhelmed, at least for the foreseeable future.
Different societies and countries around the world have the inalienable right to explore their own political and social development paths, and to some extent, this is also their obligation. Regardless of success or failure, every attempt is a contribution to the experiment of the whole human society. Only history can judge which models are ultimately efficient, fruitful, just, and successful, and which are thrown into the garbage heap that holds the falsehoods and misdirections of mankind. History also wields many means of punishment for some leaders who believe that only they can monopolize absolute truth and replace the world's existing diversity with universal models imposed on others.
Source: Reference News Network
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