• 要警惕西方推销“普世价值”背面的政治图谋


    庞卓恒 

        

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        《环球视野》编者按:一个时期以来,有关“宪政民主”和“普世价值”这个话题在众多媒体上出现的频率比较高,并倍受人们的关注。之所以如此,是因为它对国家的政治改革走向有着不可否认的影响。
        本期转载的这篇文章也是谈这个问题的。原题为《凭什么说西方式民主具有“普世价值”》。此文从西方国家向发展中国家输出所谓“民主制度”和“普世价值”的政治目的,以及它给发展中国家所带来的灾难性后果,进行了有理有据、令人信服的论述和剖析。作者在文章中不仅讲的是真话,而且是真理,读后切实使人大有耳目一新的感觉。
        本刊转发此文,目的是为了使广大读者看到“普世价值”的背面有政治,从而引起对这个问题的高度重视和警惕。因为,西方国家向发展中国家大力推销的“民主制度”和“普世价值”,自然也包括我国在内,并且是他们“输出”的重点国家,其目的并不是让中国人民得到所谓“普世”的真正由劳动人民当家作主的“民主制度”,而是为了西化、分化中国,使中国成为西方的附庸。    
        在“普世价值”这个华丽迷人的外衣下,包藏着西方不可告人的图谋和祸心。如此说来,这个问题就不只是概念之争,而是关系到我国国家安危的重大原则之争。对此,我们不能不慎察之,警惕之。
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        西方式的民主制度是否具有“普世价值”或“普适价值”,我们可以从施行那种制度的实际效果来作判断。
        首先可以从近几十年间西方国家向许多发展中国家输出那种民主制度的效果来作判断。
        不久前,美国胡佛研究所高级研究员拉里•戴蒙德撰文指出,虽然1974年以来已有90多个国家“过渡到民主政体”,但“民主俱乐部的大多数成员(还有一些老成员)都表现不佳”。在一些国家,“精英们的行为无所顾忌,为所欲为。如果举行竞争性选举,那选举就会变成血腥的零和争斗,各方都孤注一掷,谁也输不起。普通百胜不是真正的公民,只不过是有权有势的地方首脑的依附者,那些地方首脑又是更加有权有势的庇护人的依附者。权力和地位的极端不平等造成了垂直的依附链条,它的稳定性通过庇护关系、胁迫和在选举中对种族的自豪感和偏见的煽动而得到保障。官员以政府为攫利财源。强势者榨取弱势者。”(美国《外交》杂志2008年3、4月合刊)在这样的事实面前,谁还能说西方式的民主政体是具有“普世价值”的、普遍适用的民主形式呢?
        那种民主制度在它的母国的施行情况又怎样呢?我们且以当今的美国为例,看看它究竟是一种什么样的民主。
        不久前,担任过克林顿政府司法部长的罗伯特•奈克教授在美国《外交政策》杂志发表文章,题为《资本主义怎样扼杀民主》。该文提要指出:“人们认为自由市场导致自由社会。然而当今气势汹汹的全球经济正在销蚀着全世界生活在民主制度下的人民的权力。在迎接你的这个世界里,资本的利益压倒了公共利益,政府充当大企业的后台。”奈克指出,“民主并不仅仅是指自由和公正的选举过程。它是一种唯有靠公民联合起来促进公共利益才能实现的制度”;“民主被削弱,主要是因为公司为了在全球争夺消费者和投资者。不惜投入空前巨额的钱财进行游说、公关,甚至给予贿赂和酬金,以寻求能够使他们胜过竞争对手的立法。由此引发出争夺政治势力的军备竞赛,它掩盖了普通公民的声音。例如在美国,国会全力投入的那些斗争,那些消耗了全体国会成员数周乃至数月时间的斗争,都具有互相竞争的公司或行业之间的争斗的特色”。(美国《外交政策》杂志2007年9、10月合刊)
        在美国实行自由选举的情况又怎样呢?2008年4月23日出版的《华盛顿邮报》刊登了一篇专栏作家斯提芬•利维的文章,题为《每个选民都是一个微观目标》,其中说到,美国两党争取提名为总统候选人的政界头面人物都请了一些软件公司利用所谓“微观目标锁定”技术为他们搜寻可能对他们胜选产生重大影响的选民群体,把他们作为重点争取目标。他们要搜集的重点目标的资料“包括一些公开的项日,如党派归属,按邮政编码估计的收入水平和住房状况,还有相当详细的消费偏好,诸如开什么车,到哪里度假,喜欢什么娱乐”。“把那些特性和行为的信息与其对社会和政治问题的态度联系起来,其价值就不可小视了。“例如,共和党头面人物罗姆尼前些时候争取共和党总统候选人提名时,曾委托一家软件公司为他寻求可能争取的选民群体。他的稳固票源来自“乡材俱乐部共和党人”,那是一些有钱人,十分关心有利于他们发财的财政主张。那家公司发现,还有另外一个群体,虽然不大相信罗姆尼,但有可能接受他的经济政策。这些人“不如乡村俱乐部的人那么有钱,但消费习惯却同那帮势利之徒极为相似,开运动车,去影剧院,买天然食品”。而且,“他们认同他们竭力模仿的那些人赞同的政策”。于是,给那些竭力模仿者打电话宣传罗姆尼的税收政策,果然取得了成效。作者对这样争取选票的作法深表忧虑,说道:“如果候选人的目标就是那样的微观目标,那些候选人还可能是正人君子吗?”
        历史和现实的无数事实都证明,西方那种民主制度决不具有什么“普世价值”或“普适价值’”。
        既然如此,为什么有人硬要宣扬它具有什么“普世价值”或“普适价值”呢?美国新保守派代表人物、现任共和党总统候选人外交政策顾问罗伯特•卡根,对此曾有过十分坦率的表白。
        2007年9月2日,英国《星期日泰晤士报》刊载了卡根的一篇文章,题为《世界在分裂……民主遭围攻》。该文声称,当今世界已经重新陷入“自由主义和专制主义之间”的“意识形态斗争”;说什么美国面对着中国、俄罗斯等“‘专制国家”的挑战,应该奉行“旨在推广民主并旨在加强民主国家间的合作”的政策,“应该与其他民主国家联手,建立新的国际组织,既反映又推进它们的共同原则和目标”。就是这个卡根,在今年1月接受德国《时代》访谈时,直接说到了怎样促使中国“民主化”的问题。他说:“从美国的角度看,合作的目的始终是:与中国合作是为了改变这个国家。中国人也完全明白这一点。这是自由世界观:我们与中国人做生意越多,他们就会变得与我们一样。我认为应该更多地考虑在这种经济战略中所缺乏的东西:支持持不同政见者致力于中国的政治开放。”(原载德国《时代》2008年l月17 日1期)
        值得注意的是,卡根在这里不但十分坦率地表明了他们在中国推行西方式的“民主化”的政治目的,而且还说“中国人也完全明白这一点”。我想,这是必须警觉的。
        (《环球视野》摘自2009年1月6日《中国社会科学院报》原标题为《凭什么说西方式民主具有“普世价值”》)
     
     
    How Capitalism Is Killing Democracy

    By Robert B. Reich
    Foreign Policy, September/October 2007

    It was supposed to be a match made in heaven. Capitalism and democracy, we’ve long been told, are the twin ideological pillars capable of bringing unprecedented prosperity and freedom to the world. In recent decades, the duo has shared a common ascent. By almost any measure, global capitalism is triumphant. Most nations around the world are today part of a single, integrated, and turbocharged global market. Democracy has enjoyed a similar renaissance. Three decades ago, a third of the world’s nations held free elections; today, nearly two thirds do.

    Conventional wisdom holds that where either capitalism or democracy flourishes, the other must soon follow. Yet today, their fortunes are beginning to diverge. Capitalism, long sold as the yin to democracy’s yang, is thriving, while democracy is struggling to keep up. China, poised to become the world’s third largest capitalist nation this year after the United States and Japan, has embraced market freedom, but not political freedom. Many economically successful nations—from Russia to Mexico—are democracies in name only. They are encumbered by the same problems that have hobbled American democracy in recent years, allowing corporations and elites buoyed by runaway economic success to undermine the government’s capacity to respond to citizens’ concerns.

    Of course, democracy means much more than the process of free and fair elections. It is a system for accomplishing what can only be achieved by citizens joining together to further the common good. But though free markets have brought unprecedented prosperity to many, they have been accompanied by widening inequalities of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and environmental hazards such as global warming. Democracy is designed to allow citizens to address these very issues in constructive ways. And yet a sense of political powerlessness is on the rise among citizens in Europe, Japan, and the United States, even as consumers and investors feel more empowered. In short, no democratic nation is effectively coping with capitalism’s negative side effects.

    This fact is not, however, a failing of capitalism. As these two forces have spread around the world, we have blurred their responsibilities, to the detriment of our democratic duties. Capitalism’s role is to increase the economic pie, nothing more. And while capitalism has become remarkably responsive to what people want as individual consumers, democracies have struggled to perform their own basic functions: to articulate and act upon the common good, and to help societies achieve both growth and equity. Democracy, at its best, enables citizens to debate collectively how the slices of the pie should be divided and to determine which rules apply to private goods and which to public goods. Today, those tasks are increasingly being left to the market. What is desperately needed is a clear delineation of the boundary between global capitalism and democracy—between the economic game, on the one hand, and how its rules are set, on the other. If the purpose of capitalism is to allow corporations to play the market as aggressively as possible, the challenge for citizens is to stop these economic entities from being the authors of the rules by which we live.

    THE COST OF DOING BUSINESS

    Most people are of two minds: As consumers and investors, we want the bargains and high returns that the global economy provides. As citizens, we don’t like many of the social consequences that flow from these transactions. We like to blame corporations for the ills that follow, but in truth we’ve made this compact with ourselves. After all, we know the roots of the great economic deals we’re getting. They come from workers forced to settle for lower wages and benefits. They come from companies that shed their loyalties to communities and morph into global supply chains. They come from CEOs who take home exorbitant paychecks. And they come from industries that often wreak havoc on the environment.

    Unfortunately, in the United States, the debate about economic change tends to occur between two extremist camps: those who want the market to rule unimpeded, and those who want to protect jobs and preserve communities as they are. Instead of finding ways to soften the blows of globalization, compensate the losers, or slow the pace of change, we go to battle. Consumers and investors nearly always win the day, but citizens lash out occasionally in symbolic fashion, by attempting to block a new trade agreement or protesting the sale of U.S. companies to foreign firms. It is a sign of the inner conflict Americans feel—between the consumer in us and the citizen in us—that the reactions are often so schizophrenic.

    Such conflicting sentiments are hardly limited to the United States. The recent wave of corporate restructurings in Europe has shaken the continent’s typical commitment to job security and social welfare. It’s leaving Europeans at odds as to whether they prefer the private benefits of global capitalism in the face of increasing social costs at home and abroad. Take, for instance, the auto industry. In 2001, DaimlerChrysler faced mounting financial losses as European car buyers abandoned the company in favor of cheaper competitors. So, CEO Dieter Zetsche cut 26,000 jobs from his global workforce and closed six factories. Even profitable companies are feeling the pressure to become ever more efficient. In 2005, Deutsche Bank simultaneously announced an 87 percent increase in net profits and a plan to cut 6,400 jobs, nearly half of them in Germany and Britain. Twelve-hundred of the jobs were then moved to low-wage nations. Today, European consumers and investors are doing better than ever, but job insecurity and inequality are rising, even in social democracies that were established to counter the injustices of the market. In the face of such change, Europe’s democracies have shown themselves to be so paralyzed that the only way citizens routinely express opposition is through massive boycotts and strikes.

    In Japan, many companies have abandoned lifetime employment, cut workforces, and closed down unprofitable lines. Just months after Howard Stringer was named Sony’s first non-Japanese CEO, he announced the company would trim 10,000 employees, about 7 percent of its workforce. Surely some Japanese consumers and investors benefit from such corporate downsizing: By 2006, the Japanese stock market had reached a 14-year high. But many Japanese workers have been left behind. A nation that once prided itself on being an “all middle-class society” is beginning to show sharp disparities in income and wealth. Between 1999 and 2005, the share of Japanese households without savings doubled, from 12 percent to 24 percent. And citizens there routinely express a sense of powerlessness. Like many free countries around the world, Japan is embracing global capitalism with a democracy too enfeebled to face the free market’s many social penalties.

    On the other end of the political spectrum sits China, which is surging toward capitalism without democracy at all. That’s good news for people who invest in China, but the social consequences for the country’s citizens are mounting. Income inequality has widened enormously. China’s new business elites live in McMansions inside gated suburban communities and send their children to study overseas. At the same time, China’s cities are bursting with peasants from the countryside who have sunk into urban poverty and unemployment. And those who are affected most have little political recourse to change the situation, beyond riots that are routinely put down by force.

    But citizens living in democratic nations aren’t similarly constrained. They have the ability to alter the rules of the game so that the cost to society need not be so great. And yet, we’ve increasingly left those responsibilities to the private sector—to the companies themselves and their squadrons of lobbyists and public-relations experts—pretending as if some inherent morality or corporate good citizenship will compel them to look out for the greater good. But they have no responsibility to address inequality or protect the environment on their own. We forget that they are simply duty bound to protect the bottom line.

    THE RULES OF THE GAME

    Why has capitalism succeeded while democracy has steadily weakened? Democracy has become enfeebled largely because companies, in intensifying competition for global consumers and investors, have invested ever greater sums in lobbying, public relations, and even bribes and kickbacks, seeking laws that give them a competitive advantage over their rivals. The result is an arms race for political influence that is drowning out the voices of average citizens. In the United States, for example, the fights that preoccupy Congress, those that consume weeks or months of congressional staff time, are typically contests between competing companies or industries.

    While corporations are increasingly writing their own rules, they are also being entrusted with a kind of social responsibility or morality. Politicians praise companies for acting “responsibly” or condemn them for not doing so. Yet the purpose of capitalism is to get great deals for consumers and investors. Corporate executives are not authorized by anyone—least of all by their investors—to balance profits against the public good. Nor do they have any expertise in making such moral calculations. Democracy is supposed to represent the public in drawing such lines. And the message that companies are moral beings with social responsibilities diverts public attention from the task of establishing such laws and rules in the first place.

    It is much the same with what passes for corporate charity. Under today’s intensely competitive form of global capitalism, companies donate money to good causes only to the extent the donation has public-relations value, thereby boosting the bottom line. But shareholders do not invest in firms expecting the money to be used for charitable purposes. They invest to earn high returns. Shareholders who wish to be charitable would, presumably, make donations to charities of their own choosing in amounts they decide for themselves. The larger danger is that these conspicuous displays of corporate beneficence hoodwink the public into believing corporations have charitable impulses that can be relied on in a pinch.

    By pretending that the economic success corporations enjoy saddles them with particular social duties only serves to distract the public from democracy’s responsibility to set the rules of the game and thereby protect the common good. The only way for the citizens in us to trump the consumers in us is through laws and rules that make our purchases and investments social choices as well as personal ones. A change in labor laws making it easier for employees to organize and negotiate better terms, for example, might increase the price of products and services. My inner consumer won’t like that very much, but the citizen in me might think it a fair price to pay. A small transfer tax on sales of stock, to slow the movement of capital ever so slightly, might give communities a bit more time to adapt to changing circumstances. The return on my retirement fund might go down by a small fraction, but the citizen in me thinks it worth the price. Extended unemployment insurance combined with wage insurance and job training could ease the pain for workers caught in the downdrafts of globalization.

    Let us be clear: The purpose of democracy is to accomplish ends we cannot achieve as individuals. But democracy cannot fulfill this role when companies use politics to advance or maintain their competitive standing, or when they appear to take on social responsibilities that they have no real capacity or authority to fulfill. That leaves societies unable to address the tradeoffs between economic growth and social problems such as job insecurity, widening inequality, and climate change. As a result, consumer and investor interests almost invariably trump common concerns.

    The vast majority of us are global consumers and, at least indirectly, global investors. In these roles we should strive for the best deals possible. That is how we participate in the global market economy. But those private benefits usually have social costs. And for those of us living in democracies, it is imperative to remember that we are also citizens who have it in our power to reduce these social costs, making the true price of the goods and services we purchase as low as possible. We can accomplish this larger feat only if we take our roles as citizens seriously. The first step, which is often the hardest, is to get our thinking straight.

    Robert B. Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. This article is adapted from his book, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

     

     

     

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