authoritarian deliberation

There’s some interesting stuff coming out of the Chinese Internet research Conference: some of it applies here. Take this, for instance:

In a similar vein, at the Chinese Internet Research Conference last week Jiang Min, an Assistant Professor at UNC-Charlotte, presented a paper titled Authoritarian Deliberation: Public Deliberation in China. Her argument centers around the idea - oft overlooked by Western punditry - that it's possible to have substantial amount of public deliberation about policy within an authoritarian state. Different authoritarian states have different levels of deliberation, and it's no substitute for the "democratic deliberation" in democratic countries when it comes to the ability of the governed to influence their government. Thus political deliberation needs to be divided into two categories: democratic and authoritarian. Within the "authoritarian" category, China is seeing growing amounts of deliberation taking place thanks to the Internet.

I think this is something important to stress. Modern authoritarianism is a basically centrist proposition; bound up with and justified by a combination of patriotism and performance legitimacy rather than ideology. It operates on a spectrum that allows some forms of participation and debate. Countries on that spectrum have vast internal differences: China, Iran and Russia are obviously very different countries. None of them are North Korea, Zimbabwe or Myanmar. All of them practice forms of authoritarian deliberation: various forms of public participation underpin and legitimate their rule. In fact, this is what they have in common, what identifies them as a category.

The problem we have here is that there’s no clear category distinguishing this group of nations: authoritarian tends usually to describe a practice rather than a state of affairs. People make the distinction between elections on the one hand and dictatorship on the other. Provided we are not North Korea, we are free. And anyone in between is headed in one direction or the other. But the countries in this twilight region are quite happy to stay there. In fact, they regard it as the end state of their political development – a state neither fanatical nor free, with everything and everybody more or less under control.

Whether he knows it or not, this is what the Davis affair is about: Britain’s ongoing slide into the twilight zone, the realm of authoritarian deliberation, a land of social cohesion and national conversations. All the people in favour of 42 days and all the rest of it see themselves and this as sensible and moderate and their opponents as deranged utopians. Around them is a great administrative mush which either thinks the issue is irrelevant or so unimportant that it can be traded for sometimes farcical concessions. Behind them exists a massive and rapidly growing policing, technology and security lobby. It’s the opposition that is moved by points of ideology and principle. The general political establishment has already gone over.