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Wanted: CEOs from India

Within less than a decade, the evocative term illiberal democracy has spawned a literature that is still expanding. Fareed Zakaria used the term in an article in the Foreign Affairs Weekly that he subsequently expanded in The Future of Freedom.

The relation between democracy and capitalism as a facilitator economic system has engaged political scientists for long. Marx was the first to point out that it was the economic structure of the society that determined the political superstructure. Capitalism, according to him, was therefore essentially linked to the development of democracy.

Zakaria showed how the reverse is not possible. Capitalism can develop without democracy taking root but democracy is difficult to nurture in the absence of sound institutions like the ones capitalism spawns. This includes the politico-legal framework to enforce contract. Writing about Russia’s trouble with market economy, former Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan also came to the similar conclusion. Watching the growth and expansion of the Asian economies like Singapore and Hong Kong makes that difference quite clear. Nearer home, Pakistan has been one where the vestiges of a feudal structure survives and often engulfs democracy as market economy is yet to take deep root.

Zakaria’s latest book, The Post American World, moves away from this theme to explore the new debate engaging the world. After the end of cold war, the fall of the Berlin Wall ended one of the superpowers, it was the US, the only superpower in a unipolar world which became the subject of scrutiny. Zakaria has identified 1979 as the year when the erstwhile USSR met its hubris by marching into Afghanistan. Later historians would ponder if the invasion of Iraq in 2005 did the same to US.