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Impacts- Econ Good- Democracy
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Impacts- Econ Good- DemocracyEconomic decline causes multiple sites of state failure and democratic backsliding Ferguson 9 Niall ,Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 87 Issue 7/8, July/aug 9) ET Will this financial crisis make the world more dangerous as well as poorer? The answer is almost certainly yes. Apart from the usual trouble spots -- Afghanistan, Congo, Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Somalia, and Sudan -- expect new outbreaks of instability in countries we thought had made it to democracy. In Asia, Thailand may be the most vulnerable. At the end of 2007 it reverted to democracy after a spell of military rule that was supposed to crack down on corruption. Within a year's time the country was in chaos, with protesters blocking Bangkok's streets and the state banning the People's Power Party. In April 2009 the capital descended into anarchy as rival yellow-shirted and red-shirted political factions battled with the military. Expect similar scenes in other emerging markets. Trouble has already begun in Georgia and Moldova. Then there's Ukraine, where economic collapse threatens to trigger political disintegration. While President Viktor Yushchenko leans toward Europe, his ally-turned-rival Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko favors a Russian orientation. Their differences reflect a widening gap between the country's predominantly Ukrainian west and predominantly Russian east. Meanwhile, in Moscow, Putin talks menacingly of "ridding the Ukrainian people of all sorts of swindlers and bribe-takers." The Crimean peninsula, with its ethnic Russian majority, is the part of the "Near Abroad" (the former Soviet Union) that Putin most covets. January's wrangle over gas supplies to Western Europe may have been the first phase of a Russian bid to destabilize, if not to break up, Ukraine. The world's increasing instability makes the United States seem more attractive not only as a safe haven but also as a global policeman. Many people spent the years from 2001 to 2008 complaining about U.S. interventions overseas. But if the financial crisis turns up the heat in old hot spots and creates new ones at either end of Eurasia, the world may spend the next eight years wishing for more, not fewer, U.S. interventions. Economic decline collapses democracy - empirically proven Friedman '5(Benjamin, Prof of Political Econ @ Harvard, The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/07/meltdown-a-case-study/4049/ Aug 5, ) ET Not just in America but in the other Western democracies, too, history is replete with instances in which a turn away from openness and tolerance, often accompanied by a weakening of democratic institutions, has followed economic stagnation. The most familiar example is the rise of Nazism in Germany, following that country's economic chaos in the 1920s and then the onset of worldwide depression in the early 1930s. But in Britain such nasty episodes as the repression of the suffragette movement under Asquith, the breaking of Lloyd George's promises to the returning World War I veterans, and the bloody Fascist riots in London's East End all occurred under severe economic distress. So did the ascension of the extremist Boulangist movement in late-nineteenth-century France, and the Action Française movement after World War I. Conversely, in both America and Europe fairness and tolerance have increased, and democratic institutions have strengthened, mostly when the average citizen's standard of living has been rising. The reason is not hard to understand. When their living standards are rising, people do not view themselves, their fellow citizens, and their society as a whole the way they do when those standards are stagnant or falling. They are more trusting, more inclusive, and more open to change when they view their future prospects and their children's with confidence rather than anxiety or fear. Economic growth is not merely the enabler of higher consumption; it is in many ways the wellspring from which democracy and civil society flow. We should be fully cognizant of the risks to our values and liberties if that nourishing source runs dry. Impacts- Econ Good- DemocracyDirect correlation between economic growth and social/political progress Friedman 6 (Benjamin, William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University, THE MORAL CONSEQUENCES OF ECONOMIC GROWTH, http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/friedman/files/The%20Moral%20Consequences%20of%20Economic%20Growth.pdf, February 6, AD: 7/6/09) The link between economic growth and social and political progress in the developing world has yet other practical implications as well. For example, the continuing absence of political democracy and basic personal freedoms in China has deeply troubled many observers in the West. Until China gained admission to the World Trade Organization in 2002, these concerns regularly gave rise in the United States to debate on whether to trade with China on a “most favored nation” basis. These concerns still cause questions about whether to give Chinese firms advanced American technology, or allow them to buy an American oil company. Both sides in this debate share the same objective: to foster China’s political liberalization. How to do so, however, remains the focus of intense disagreement. But if a rising standard of living leads a society’s political and social institutions to gravitate toward openness and democracy—as the evidence mostly shows— then as long as China continues its recent economic expansion, Chinese citizens will eventually enjoy greater political democracy together with the personal freedoms that democracy brings. Since 1978, when Deng Xao-Ping’s economic reforms began, the Chinese have seen a fivefold increase in their material standard of living. The improvement in nutrition, housing, sanitation, and transportation has been dramatic, while the freedom of Chinese citizens to make economic choices—where to work, what to buy, whether to start a business—is already far broader than it was. With continued economic advance (the average Chinese standard of living is still only oneeighth that in the United States), greater freedom to make political choices, too, will probably follow. Indeed, an important implication of the idea that it is in significant part the growth rather than just the level of people’s living standards that matters for this purpose is that the countries in the developing world whose economies are actually developing, like China, will not have to wait until they achieve Western-level incomes before they experience significant political and social liberalization. Download 0.75 Mb. Share with your friends:
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