Paper presented to the U.S.-China Security Review Commission

The asymmetry of rationalities

Is China unstable?

Michal Korzec

Institute of Political Studies

Polish Academy of Sciences

Warsaw

Hall of the States, Suite 602, Friday, 2002-05-10, 08:30 a.m.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Die welt ist was die tatsache ist. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian philosopher wrote that in the trenches of the First World War in 1916. His treatise was published as Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. He published it in German and many translations were attempted. My translation is: The world consists of facts, it is useless to argue with facts.). Interpretations are free.

As you know at present (Liaoyang, Daqing) the powers that be in China are haunted by the specter of a Chinese Solidarity (actually these powers have been haunted by that specter since the formation of Solidarity in august 1980). In that context I would like to stress, qiangdiao, the following points.

Solidarity was an anti-communist movement based on social-catholic ideology: the state (or national community) has to care for the workers. Today the polish workers are the most pitiable, keliande, victims of transition. The rustbelt factories retrench them, they strike and protest, but nobody cares anymore. The polish Liaoyang's and Daqing's are not news anymore, not even for the Polish press. Solidarity movement has disintegrated the moment that its leaders and advisors had the illusion that they have won the state power and moved into ministries, and comfortable government limousines. In the case of minor Solidarity intellectuals like me, into smaller government limousines and diplomatic compounds. The problem was not our corruption and greed for power (although yes, we did and do have thieves and small tyrants among us former idealists). The problem was that we had not the faintest idea what to do after our limited revolution except copying the models of America and Europe. We did not think for a moment about the problem of the asymmetry of rationalities: what works rationally in America does not necessarily work in Poland. Or in China. So we ended up with a nice American protectorate (very nice protectorate indeed and there is nothing wrong in being an American protectorate since it provided us national security for the first time since more that two hundred years) and a dumping ground for overproduction of global markets, destroying our industries and employment. Only very recently consumers' optimism is rising and many middle scale high-tech enterprises have appeared. And yes, our government is stable and our foreign policy has remained unchanged since 1990.

So our experience is not only useful to Chinese workers as a beacon of hope but also as a warning light. The Chinese authorities know that and have given wide propagandistic circulation among the Chinese population of our failures.

Globalization, similarly as power, ranks among those phenomena that are perceived indirectly, discerned not in and of themselves - but through their consequences. Defining the ontological status of such phenomena is by no means easy. As their causative agency gathers concrete form gradually, through conforming itself to the substance it acts upon, the universality and, at the same time, the peculiar amorphousness of globalization and power resemble the manner of existence once ascribed by late-medieval philosophers to light. Those thinkers believed light to be both homogenous and concomitantly responsible for the heterogeneity of the world. Upon encountering the resistance of primary matter, light rebounded in the form of particular images or 'luminous species'. Turning to an examination of power and globalization from the perspective of Buddhist ontology, one might say that both phenomena are present in the world as 'impetus toward'. This quality, which on its own is neither existence nor non-existence, describes the state of both, as per how they evoke changes in the world of entities, transforming existence into non-existence and back again. That 'towardsomeness' activates various aspects of a given thing and gradually, in step with successive permutations, leads to an extraction of its ultimate essence. The vehicle of 'towardsomeness' - and, thus, of globalization and power - is time. The essence of such phenomena is becoming, not being. Both power and globalization give affirmation of themselves through their results, by which they are cognizable. The asymmetry of rationalities combines both phenomena (power and globalization) and serves as a power vector of global logic in acting upon peripheries and semi-peripheries. This results from the ability of global logic to impose institutions and procedures that are rational from its own perspective, but not from the perspective of scale and the level of development (historical time) of the peripheries.

The above attempt to grasp the unique ontological status of globalization and power is crucial to my further considerations. Once, when I was writing about real socialism's ontology, the Hegelian category of 'appearance' (Das Schein) imparted me with a sudden flash of understanding and thus became similarly crucial, indeed illuminating. For real socialism was something other than what its ideology posited. Nonetheless, the premises of its ideology could

not be discarded, even though their prescribed conceptualization of reality hindered the intellectual effort to lay bare the reality of real socialism and made control of that reality impossible. Their rejection would not only have exposed naked power and absurdity, but would also have destroyed real socialism's internal rationality (its manner of making its individual elements intelligible) along with the discourse community existing within the party apparatus. Moreover, those premises, through the activities they engendered, did have real effects, though not the ones intended. In time this reality of real socialism took on flesh in the form of vested interests. Such a state of affairs, together with the fact that it never became fully discerned and identified, worked not merely to impede reform, but to deepen the chaos. Said chaos, in turn, became one of the causes of the series of the top-down revolutions that ended communism. Once it was recognized that the theoretical monopoly on power did not entail a genuine capability of controlling reality, the decision was made to share power in the aim of regaining steerablility of the system. Without understanding the manner of real socialism's existence - in other words, it's 'appearance' - the manner in which that system ended cannot be adequately understood.

The etiological force of both globalization and power makes them fundamental categories in social analysis. A whole array of other phenomena, ones of greater measurability and visibility, do not possess such causative force and thus are to be placed in the realm of 'misleading metaphysics'. More and more often one has the impression that the state has become just such an epiphenomenon.

Globalization compels us to analyze power in a new way. What is necessary is a shifting of accents from relational power (where X possesses such critical means as the authority enabling him to assert his will vis-a-vis others) to power understood as the comprehensive property of the system. What is at issue is the steerablility of the system as a complex institutional whole. I refer to the power of the system over itself and not to the domination of one milieu over others. At issue is not government, but governablility. The latter depends primarily upon the quality of institutional solutions (within which, the nature of ties between constituent elements) and upon the manner of conceiving reality.

Treating power as a property of the system - not of individual people or offices - is not something completely new. Thomas Aquinas once stressed that 'the order determines power'. Seven centuries later, the American functionalist Talcott Parsons stated that power is the resource of the system as a whole, the capability to mobilize will and resources, and a catalyzer, so to speak, facilitating the intercourse of subsystems. Both of those thinkers took for granted a uniformity of standards of rationality and the systemic nature of the whole they described. We today face a new challenge, as neither of those assumptions is beyond dispute.

Nonetheless, relational power is not set to vanish completely, although globalization has led to its deconstruction and to new configurations. The otherwise 'modern state', with its defined center and hierarchically ordered, logically uniform procedures, no longer exists. It has transformed into a network state, whose dense network of interconnecting ties often extend well beyond nominal borders and, indeed, gravitate toward external centers of disposition. Something that may be observed in this vein is that certain institutions composed along specific subnetworks have been adopted in areas exhibiting an incommensurate developmental level. This leads to a situation within which - even when all the institutional networks are based upon the economic rationality of the market - there is one logic for the local, 'young' market (whose overriding directive is the accumulation of capital, and whose institutional infrastructure is poorly developed) and another logic for the mature market, one poised for expansion. The self-same systemic solution, like that of liberalizing financial operations, has a diametrically different meaning (economically, as well) as regards a given market's 'historical time', i.e., its scale and degree of maturity.

The co-appearance of multiple logics and standards of rationality within a system is fostered by the fact that the traditional prerogatives of the state are currently carried out on many, often supra-state levels - or by the commercialized state-sector (in another dimension of the institutional realm). The commercialized state-sector carries out the former tasks of the state (health care, retirement pensions, etc.) through the aid of market mechanisms, thereby hearkening to other, non-administrative standards and principles of regulation.

The state is therefore becoming a multidimensional entity in the sense that a portion of its functions is currently performed with reference to commercial logic, not to administrative-political logic. This fundamentally alters the circumstance of power, for the traditional instruments of coordination and control that remain at the disposal of governments turn out to be less than effective in application to actors who take their cues from the rationality of the market.

This deconstruction of the prevalence of the state, something underway on many levels and in many spheres, directly impinges on the conditions hitherto relevant at the helm of statecraft. This is so because the scale and 'historic time' (developmental stage) which a given level refers to, along with the logic (i.e., the specific principle of regulation) of a given sphere of the institutional realm, ascertains just what is rational from each particular perspective. Indeed, each type of institution determines its own reality. An observation made by Peter Winch in this vein is fitting. In answer to the question what is reality? Winch once explained that our concept of what belongs to the sphere of reality is contained in the very concepts we apply. Thus, the realities of the administrative and commercialized segments of the state are incongruent. This is also true of the realities at the macro- and micro-economic levels, true of the world of financial capital operating in virtual space vis-à-vis the world of the significantly less mobile production capital, and it is true of global capital vis-à-vis the yet nascent capital of the postcommunist countries. The scale of operations for these particular actors, their institutional resources and time-horizon, their readiness to take risk of various natures, and, finally, the objective of their market operations (accumulation, expansion, survival) create divergent premises in regards to the same situation. What this describes is not a simple conflict of interests, but a conflict of standards of rationality. For rationality refers to a comprehending of what is correct within the framework of given premises and a given way of conceiving reality. In adopting divergent premises, each actor may, in the very same situation, make a rational choice, though choosing a diametrically divergent alternative. Conversely, we would find ourselves contending with a conflict of interest were all actors to be operating within the bounds of the same, shared premises, yet with the nature of their 'game' precluding that all be able win at the same time.

In network systems we must contend both with conflicts of interest as well as with the altogether rarely analyzed conflicts underway between standards of rationality. Not all standards of rationality and ways of schematizing phenomena (i.e., the realities generated by institutions) are coequal in this. Currently what seems to dominate is global logic and the attendant phenomenon of the asymmetry of rationalities. For globalization has become a special selection mechanism that coerces peripheries and semi-peripheries to observe sets of rational procedures and institutions that are often inappropriate for their scale and historical time.

This propensity of global logic is, in my view, equally as important as the factor of virtual financial operations, which, after all, were introduced into the global economy by that very logic. These two factors manipulate space-time both in how they flatten out time and violate institutional hierarchy and in how they reformat space and impose institutional homogeneity. Moreover, neither factor is neutral from the point of view of the development and steerability of the countries of the periphery and semi-periphery. The fact that the phenomenon of the asymmetry of rationalities remains unappreciated results from an ahistorical approach to the market (typical of dummied-down liberalism) on the one hand, and the periphery's penchant for neotraditionalism on the other. Said neotraditionalism selectively draws upon both its own and foreign historical experience only to construe a pastiche that fails to duly consider context, the range of the possible, and the evolutionary development of institutional forms that provided their societal meaning.

What is rational from a global perspective (and imposed within the framework of the asymmetry of rationalities) may well prove irrational on a smaller scale. It turns out, for instance, that certain phenomena seen as pathological from the perspective of postcommunist economies are rational from the broader perspective of regional interests (the EU) and global logic (i.e., production effectivity). The fact that a complete capitalist revolution did not occur in Poland is negative from the perspective of development examined on the scale of Poland's national economy, but it is logical seen from a broader perspective. >From the perspective of what has been economically rational for Poland's scale and historical time there is a long list of undertakings that are plainly absurd. This includes: the market sale of and cashing out on reserves and resources from the previous system (this in absence of permanent mechanisms of capital accumulation); the excessive tempo of growth in consumption fueled by demand placed on hold during communist times (in Poland this has exceeded the rate of growth in national income by nearly twofold and is accompanied by underinvestment); import for assembly nearly five times higher than investment import, along with a monetary and financial policy that has enabled banks to profit not through investment activity but through speculation; and finally the still dominant logic of redistribution (initially through the help of 'power rent taken from political capital, and today through clientelist seizure of a portion of the commercialized public funds). At the same time, however, these very facts are to be clarified and made sensible from the perspective of global economic rationality. For this latter does not require, in the aim of fulfilling its end-result logic, the emergence of a new group of producers and a new influx of goods. This is rational from the perspective of capital already invested on a global scale.

The above well illustrates the functioning of the global asymmetry of rationalities. Its logic constrains peripheries to resign from standards, institutions, procedures, and local advantages rational for their scale and historical time on behalf of adopting standards of larger scale and more advanced development. This occurs not in a blunt way, but rather through a subtle system of reward and punishment, the latter including the threat of being left outside the flow of global capital. The global selection of institutional solutions takes place discreetly, but no less swiftly for that. Certain solutions adopted at the state (economic) level cause an immediate decline (or rise) of the indicators of investment and credit risk. This in turn determines the chances for development in a more decisive manner than can any state-scale administrative or political measure whatsoever.

Examining the fate of the postcommunist countries from this perspective we may say that their adoption at the beginning of the transformations of a rationality ill-suited to their scale and historical time (which most fully describes Poland, hence the greatest present level of crisis) engendered four negative consequences.

First, as I have mentioned, the adoption of an inappropriate rationality has encumbered the completion of the capitalist revolution. What has been achieved is simply the cashing out on resources and the mobilization of reserves along with the change in the form of ownership and the liberalization of the market. What has yet to transpire is the institutional consolidation of the second phase of the capitalist revolution, that is, the emergence of structures of capital accumulation capable of self-replication and generating innovation. Thus, and in accordance with global logic, the postcommunist economies have first and foremost become a theater for instituting the values of the internationalized production-trade-finance ensemble. At the same time, domestic capital has been relegated to ever more pathological strategies, thereby deforming both the market and the state. The debility of internal mechanisms for the economic accumulation of capital in the postcommunist countries has led to a situation where instead of a progressive independence (articulation) of the economy, what we observe is rather a progressive dependence on external capital sources. The initial form of that lack of independence was what I have already referred to as political capitalism, i.e., the shifting of costs of private accumulation to the state sector of the economy. Political capitalism, however, did exhibit certain merits as a means of redeployment, i.e., as a means of transferring property from the state sector to private hands. Moreover, political capitalism constituted a substitute for the non-existent institutions of 'contract civilization'. For the dense network of personal loyalties did engender the trust so necessary on the market and did extend the time-frame of binding decisions. The potential for dependent accumulation in accord with this formula (strengthened as it was by 'power rent') expired in the mid-1990s and was replaced with a new formula, that of 'public sector capitalism'. This was also dependent in that it constituted a unique form of the direct colonization of the state through the take-over of a portion of commercialized public funds. The dispersal of wherewithal which accompanied that formula, along with the rapidly deepening deficit in public finances, has shown that the economic rationality of that formula is even more inappropriate than that of political capitalism. The current efforts to concentrate the state's control in commercialized (and partially privatized) companies are taking place without the state's being a majority shareholder and without it having the requisite administrative instruments. The goal of this 'stateless state capitalism' is no longer so much the accumulation of capital, as the accumulation of trust - this time not through personal connections, as in political capitalism, but through transforming the institutional configuration. Greater trust (built upon the state as guarantor) lowers risk. Lowered risk, in turn, reduces transaction costs and improves ratings by foreign capital and international institutions. This, in turn, could encourage private capital to enter into plans for infrastructural investment prepared by the government in the aim of ending economic slowdown. The consolidation of state control in strategic sectors also offers a chance for Poland to play a role in Central Europe's regional economic strategy vis-à-vis global challenges. The formula sketched above of state capitalism (with a weak state in the background) is, so far, the third stage in the quest for a developmental strategy of domestic postcommunist capital within the context of the global asymmetry of rationalities.

The second consequence of the global asymmetry of rationalities is the profound deformation of public discourse and the systemically conditioned non-steerability of postcommunism. This is because postcommunist society, with regard to the obstacles here described, has not been able to create a sensible 'concept of self', nor, in consequence, 'self-recognition' and 'self-referentiality'. The latter acts as a source of legitimization and - first and foremost - as a spontaneous instrument of wide-ranging selection of institutional solutions. Such 'narcissism', as it were, which protects the system's identity through having been ingrained into the process of socialization and reproduced via public discourse, is one of the basic mechanisms guaranteeing steerability in today's complex social systems. In the age of globalization what is at issue is not the reproduction of borders, but the process of recognizing one's own systemic logic, its institutional core, and the parameters necessary for its preservation. Said 'self-recognition' is significantly impeded when procedures and institutions exist within a given system that ostensibly belong to the sphere of homogenous rationality (e.g. economic), but in fact draw upon the sundry logics introduced by markets of divergent scale and historical time. The veiledness of this collision (i.e., the discreet - and completely ignored in public discourse - functioning of the global asymmetry of rationalities), coupled with the obdurate rationalization of incommensurate rational solutions (prompted by political correctness as well as concealed interests), have resulted in the fact that it is now global logic itself that does the choosing, and not systemic self-referentiality. In such conditions it is not even possible to elaborate a realistic concept of the 'common good'. Also lacking is a certain 'anthropological rationality' that would indicate to individuals the means for their smooth functioning in the system. When such a rationality does appear, then it usually does so as a derivative of the 'functionalization of pathologies' mechanism, which indicates how to violate the public good with impunity in the pursuit of personal gain. For indeed, the existing system is constructed in such a manner that asocial patterns of behavior, based on a hidden redistribution, are eminently functional due to the existence of not fully articulated, dependent capitalism.

Within the context of a multiplicity of institutional logics (a multiplicity of 'realities', as Winch would say), the sine qua non of the system's steerability is its capacity for meta-regulation. In other words, the capacity for regulation of the regulations, for constructing institutional 'bridges' to soften the collisions of divergent logics (and even the power to suspend them if they threaten to upset the balance or to obstruct the developmental opportunities of the whole), and, finally, the capacity for management of the intercourse between subsystems of divergent standards of rationality such that they interact harmoniously and not intensify dysfunction. It is also essential to avoid the joining of subsystems of divergent developmental levels (historical time) without the appropriate 'shock-absorbers' and 'transmission systems'. In the absence of the latter, the conjoining of mechanisms that are rational locally may cause a precarious increase of disequilibrium and lead to spiraling crisis.

A relevant example of this is the Russian crisis of 1998. There, owing to cross ownership, the conjoining of institutions of markets operating in accordance with divergent logics (i.e., the internationalized and politicized financial market and the local production regimes of survival based on barter) increased the level of peril for the reason that it had disclosed the superficiality of standards of economic rationality. Accompanying this was the accelerated withering of the Russian state's ability to play the role of shock-absorber and guarantor on those two types of markets. This directly contributed to investor panic. The cause of the said conjoining of subsystems of divergent logic was the expansion of the financial oligarchy made possible thanks to Yeltsin's principle of 'stocks in exchange for extending credit to the state'. The means for stopping the spiraling crisis was the severing of connections and renewed 'desystematization' of the whole. The crisis in the state's institutions that this caused was overcome (at least in the eyes of observers) by supplementing institutions arisen from democratic elections with solutions evincing what I call 'military form without military substance'.

The current (2002) crisis of public finances in Poland, gradually metastasizing into a general economic crisis, is also connected with the absence of meta-regulation. On the one hand we observe an absence of transparent regulations at the junction of two of the state's subsystems having divergent logics: to wit, the 'budget' state and the 'commercialized' state. The 'gray area' existing within the state at the junction of these subsystems permits the uncontrolled, mutual acquisition of debt (at high rates), the ignoring of mutual obligations, and the concealment of deficits. This plunged public finances into deeper anarchy, the deficit for 2002 amounting to approximately 11% of GNP. On the other hand, similarly as in Russia, the spiraling crisis in Poland was set into motion by a defective conjoining of areas having two divergent policies.

The first of them is the policy of high interest rates upheld by the Polish National Bank (NBP) and the Board of Monetary Policy. This policy has its roots in the global asymmetry of rationalities, i.e., in the premature liberalization of the financial markets and the risk for investors which is compensated for with high interest rates. This policy, yoked to a rigorous monetary policy, gradually made the stability of the Polish economy dependent on the influx of speculation capital - the pathology thereby having submitted to functionalization. The second policy (in this instance pursued by the Minister of Finance) is that of fixing high state interest rates tied to the delays in regulating the monetary obligations inside the state. In 2001 not only were those rates raised to 30%, but they were tied to bank rates (at the level of twice the current Lombard rates). This in turn not only furthered the shifting of real power to the NBP (and gave rise to suspicions of a banking coup d'etat), but it became the defective bridge leading to spiraling debt. The state interest rates radically increased the obligation of the 'budget' state toward the 'commercialized' state, which fact increased the budget deficit. The existence of that gaping hole, in turn, is blocking the lowering of the banks' interest rates - and they (via a defective bridge, one connecting both types of interest rates) stabilize the high state rates that generate the deficit. All of this taken together works toward a deepening of the recession (expensive credit, the drying up of industrial liquidity) and intensifies the spiraling crisis.

The next stage of the observed breakdown of capital circulation (with self-serving accumulation in the banking sector through high interest rates, speculation, and servicing the state's debt) is the intensification of transfers of capital abroad. The financial sector of the economy sees its rational realization on a scale broader than the domestic economy, leaving production behind. This should be treated as a specific pattern of selective integration with the world economy, different than regional or branch of industry. Such a pattern of integration leads directly to the collapse of a national economy's rationale within its own borders. Lurking behind that spreading destruction of the domestic economy (with the horizon of economically rational action shifted to the broader scale) lies the asymmetry of rationalities as a power vector of global logic.

The application of meta-regulation requires us to take into account the earlier mentioned category of space-time - that is, to be cognizant of the fact that the meaning of a given element (procedure, institution) changes in regard to the scale and historical time of the system within which any such procedure or institution is composed. The very thing that is rational locally leads to the emergence of spiraling crisis when conjoined on a larger scale with a system (a market) of a divergent logic. What is therefore necessary is for us to liberate ourselves from essentialism and the category of 'difference' that is typical of the Western paradigm of identity on behalf of a multi-evaluative logic. In accord with the latter, the meaning of a given element of an institution is changeable and depends upon its functional relationship with the given whole. Meta-regulation is not a form of power that can be broken down as can be traditional power, that is, in reliance on an analysis of the division of labor. For meta-regulation demands that we take a bird's-eye view, that we observe the phenomenon of steerability from the simultaneous perspective of numerous subjects and numerous different systems of the division of labor, ones of a diverging logics. The domain of meta-regulation, after all, is that of the relations between subsystems, each of which has its own principle of regulation and division of labor. This all requires a departure from our culturally ingrained approaches to conceiving the situation. What is especially important is the unique capacity of viewing the world from a non-solipsistic perspective. What this concerns is to discourage the construction of a model of power that begins 'from me'. For the desired model is to be created not so much from the starting point of the individual (who constructs the realms of power concentrically, outward from him, or situates him in a defined position within the power hierarchy), but rather must grasp the realities of power having many centers, each with differing principles of regulation. In 'desolipsizing' the world, meta-regulation at the same time resigns from ethical conceptualization, which also is at variance with the manner of conceiving power in Western civilization.

The third consequence introduced by the global asymmetry of rationalities is the rampant disorder within systemic autoregulation. The co-appearance within a single system of a multiplicity of logics, ones often colliding with each other or demanding divergent time sequencing (i.e., alternation, and not simultaneous application - vide the mistake of simultaneously applying rigorism to both financial and monetary policy), destroys the dynamism and internal, cyclical autoregulation proper to each policy The outcome of this is deepening chaos, the inability to make long-term decisions, and impotence at the helm. Disregard of the fact that the order of steps taken determines their results places instruments, institutional logics, and policies at variance with each other. What this leaves is an inert system incapable of autocorrection and self-regulation. The global asymmetry of rationalities aggravates this problem by systematically disrupting the sequence of introducing procedures and institutions and pitting solutions derived from divergent historical times against each other. The malapropos virtualization of economic transactions that has accompanied globalization even in economies in the early stages of building capitalism has two dramatic repercussions. First, it accelerates the outflow of capital. Secondly, it leads to a clash between the decision model based on an analysis of real financial flows and the model of options typical of future markets. Both of these models in radically different ways respond to the risk factor present upon the young postcommunist markets. Lack of certainty increases the value of options and reduces the value of the real assets possessed by local producers, ones lacking institutional patronage. The diverging levels of risk for both types of operations in that 'game of uncertainty' creates a situation where the domination of the economy by the logic of virtual operations perpetuates both institutions and procedures of a high degree of uncertainty, which fact further hinders the accumulation of national capital. For said accumulation functions primarily in the sphere of production, which is deprived of access to the kind of financing that would permit participation in virtual transactions.

The fourth consequence of the asymmetry of rationalities is the crumbling of the most basic foundations of the social order. Clear hierarchies are disappearing, as is the gradation of recognizable and hitherto universally acknowledged statuses. And yet such a gradation is necessary - particularly in postcommunist peasant societies - in order that the governed and those governing experience a relationship that defines power. From this perspective the mighty structural power of meta-regulation (exercised most often by functional, not political, institutions and offices) remains invisible, as it were. Especially in Poland this permitted the carrying out of an ever more consolidated coup d'etat in the banking sector. The invisibility of structural power (in other words, meta-regulation) is also connected with the fact that this type of power evades the common person's symbolic understanding of power as referring to uniform, hierarchically organized standards of rationality contained in interpersonal categories, and as power over people and the distribution of rare and desired goods. Meta-regulation does not easily succumb to politicization for the further reason of its relativism, its referring to relational norms (i.e., harmony, the equilibrium of a given level, internal rationality, and space-time vis-à-vis essence as the factor defining an element's meaning), not to absolutes.

However, if those with power are unable to discern the new dimensions of power's circumstance and persist in techniques now exhausted of their causative power, then not only do they become comical (which in and of itself undermines the relationship to power), but they also quickly fall into cynicism and policies of advocacy.

Meta-regulation does not only depart from politics, but must in fact precede it. In order for state helmsmanship to be effective we must recognize the disparities between the divergent logics woven into the fabric of globalization, endeavor to harmonize them, and uphold the point of view appropriate to the scale and historical time of one's own system, economy, or country. Said disparities usually elude typical political notions that conceive 'today' in terms of 'yesterday'. Yet it is no longer the disparities between actors and social groups represented on the political stage that require identification and solution, but rather the collisions between rationalities that continually evolve in space and time and are shrouded from view by a stratagem of turning a blind-eye.

When time, scale, and context - not intentions and permanent, 'essential' properties - decide on the meaning and effectiveness of the instruments of power, ethical judgments also become more difficult. The ethics of power gradually becomes supplanted by the esthetics of an insiders' technocratic game, something that is fostered by the invisibility of structural power. The invisibility of power is also connected with the crumbling of the system of authoritative communication. The nomadic quality of the elites in this age of globalization has brought about a waning of respect for authorities. In the past such authorities had the capacity to emanate their power, in the sense that they were able to position themselves as the center that defined norms and standards. Even myths - once the basic tools for facilitating the experiencing of the relationship to power on the popular level of awareness - are undergoing such erosion. The end of absolutist beliefs in experiencing the world has likewise caused the vanishing of narrative forms capable of containing substance. This was the onetime service of myth. The juxtaposition of symbols characteristic of the form of myths, along with their repeating and predictable dynamism, in the past elicited similar emotional responses regardless of specific substance or content.

The inability of those having power to conduct authoritative communication is not the only reason for the vanishing of the most elementary bases necessary for the palpable experiencing of the relationship to power and the ideas of social order. As Foucault once demonstrated, the reproduction of the power relationship requires the constant confirmation by those governing of their right to establish standards, to demonize, and to 'produce truth'. In the latter instance what is at issue is the formulation of an intrasystem strategy, an 'anthropological' rationality marking out for individuals the paths for their smooth functioning. This is difficult today because the global asymmetry of rationalities widens the chasm between the micro level and the macro level (submerged to a much greater degree in the virtual economy). For what is rational on one level may well block rational, individual adaptation on another. In the context of vanishing borders (something intrinsic to globalization) it is also ill-advised to arbitrarily resort to ostracism as a technique confirming the power relationship.

Inasmuch as the above is accompanied by an atomization of society (because the commercialization of the state's societal tasks has weakened the citizens' sense of coresponsibility and willingness to participate unmotivated by self-interest) and those with state power lose the ability to be 'high-handed' (because in the network state no one possesses the capability of carrying out radical change - it is impersonal global logic that has the greatest influence), then all the more so is one struck with the impression that there is a veritable vacuum both of power and lasting societal bonds.

In this situation a certain ersatz order (in the sense of the repeatability and predictability of functions) arises in the form of 'rote helmsmanship' on the one hand, and the 'functionalization of pathologies' on the other. The former, associated with material flow regulated by the technical division of labor as well as by 'rigid' expenditures, is paired rather more readily with mere management than with state power. The functionalization of pathologies (i.e., when pathological mechanisms become functional elements of the system and, for instance, increase its stability) cannot, due to its nature, create a symbolic and normative tribune. The emergence of this mechanism is the result of political choices made in the past. Later, however, this mechanism became a part of the system and achieved independence from the political sphere. This was able to occur, as the mechanism proved adept at reproducing itself outside politicians' purview and even against their will. In this sense the functionalization of pathologies indeed creates the undergirding of a particular order, though it be an order that rather more exposes the impotence of state power than reproduces it. This the case, the state is revealed to be merely a façade, and governing amounts to but ploys designed to forestall the disclosure of that fact.

To recapitulate, power conceived as the capability of the system as a whole to maintain its steerability (that is, the system's power over itself) stems from an array of factors. As per the global phenomenon described here of the asymmetry of rationalities, what I would assign preeminence is the ability to maintain rational institutions and procedures in keeping with the scale and developmental level of a given system. Such maintenance of one's own 'space-time' requires open discussion concerning the asymmetry of rationalities, as well as the existence within the system of the capability of choosing solutions. Further factors include: the manner of conceiving reality (within which, an appreciation of the issue of historical time); the quality of authoritative domestic communication, (within which, the ability of the system to recognize itself); and lastly, the range and quality of meta-regulation. A principle known in traditional Chinese political philosophy comes to mind here, namely, that a state endures as long as the interests of the whole it represents are taken into consideration within the decision-making process. The injunction is to 'be present', to 'be counted' even when one has no hope of being able to bring uniformity to the decision process pertinent to one's own area; to maintain the capability of 'wu wei' (non-action) and not violate the natural, autoregulation of processes; and to contextualize, to alter the meaning of elements through the reconfiguration of the relationships those elements are built into. Finally, and most importantly, this is to be achieved by remembering first of all that meaning is a derivative of the way the whole of space is organized, and not of its individual elements. Secondly, this is to be achieved by remembering that time brings out ever new aspects of the process of globalization, whereas the occurrence of disparities between those aspects (and subsequent strata of 'directed space') is something natural. Hence the emphasis on harmonizing, attaining equilibrium, and indeed meta-regulation. It would seem that the foregoing principles of the traditional Chinese philosophy of power retain their validity today too, in the era of globalization.

The majority of the methods cited above for securing steerability remain to be institutionalized. For such institutionalization would demand a perception of power that does not spring directly from the division of labor and hierarchical order that eludes being grasped symbolically. What would also be necessary is an understanding of the crucial role of the factors of time, space, and the scale of interaction which at each juncture define the rationality (or its lack) of a given solution.

This requires us to break from our culturally conditioned, dualistic logic based on permanent, essential identities determined in accord with categories of difference and the principle of non-disparity. For Western civilization this entails a profound transformation of our epistemology - indeed, a transformation of our civilization. For the new methods of state helmsmanship require a departure from the linear conception of causation and a greater emphasis on recognizing structures within their specific space-time. Thus, the object of analysis (whose character determines the meaning of individual elements) becomes that of 'directed' organization of space together with its 'disposition'. And it is these spaces, each with its own rationality, that enter into relations with each other.

Specific aspects of globalization are carried out not only in divergent dimensions of social reality, but also throughout said reality's various levels and in its historically defined institutional layers. From the cross-section arises the concrete, 'directed' space. From this perspective, globalization is at one and the same time a process both indivisible (in that all its aspects are essential) and discontinuous. For each 'directed space' - embedded as it is in time, and in which a given aspect of globalization is carried out - creates its own reality and internal logic. It is only meta-regulation that can (potentially) harmonize these divergent logics - if only through demonstrating how they interact with each other and then manipulating those interactions (e.g., by introducing institutional buffers and shock-absorbers). The arbitrary deconstruction of these 'directed spaces' and the open-ended replacement of their elements (due to the hidden pressure of global logic) exceed the compass of meta-regulation. And although, as we see in the case of postcommunism, such a replacement is possible (as when the global asymmetry of rationalities imposes 'higher' institutions, supplanting elements of a given level); this is not a neutral operation. For it leads to a disorganization of the internal rationality and autoregulation of the space-time made to submit to such manipulation.

This picture is made even more complex by the fact that globalization conforms itself to the substrata it acts upon. When, in a given region of the world, there is no economic dimension in a shape which global logic may penetrate directly neither liberalized market nor category of 'capital', global logic first acts in the political realm by creating potential political gain in institutional transformation. This is what happened during the final phase of communism. The global asymmetry of rationalities favors especially one tier and one dimension of the multi-dimensional matrix of the many 'directed spaces'. The 'favorites' become so by virtue of the logic of the most institutionally mature market and its economic dimension. This violates the equilibrium of the matrix; it compels one set of dimensions to replace the functions of others; and, finally, it flattens out not only time, but also imposes institutions of a higher order, supplanting at various levels solutions that are rational within their proper historical time and scale. This destroys steerability and especially the capability of recognizing oneself and of autoregulation in the less developed systems, gradually weakening their 'systemness'. In the case of the postcommunist countries, this discreet institutional invasion in fact hinders the completion of the capitalist revolution.

* * * * *

The rest is propaganda, propaganda that Western officials like to hear and which I also had to loyally serve and parrot in my line of duty as the counselor (occasionally even temporary consul and charge d'affaires)of the embassy of the Republic of Poland (not: Polish People's Republic) in that capital of that amazing diguo that is the PRC. Loyally serve, zhongchen (loyal to the sovereign), zhongshun (loyal and obedient), even parrot the line. One must do that, one can do that and one does not need to be stupid when doing that. But it helps, of course, to be stupid when parroting propaganda.

You all should, by all means, take notice of our wonderful fairytale how we toppled down communism heroically and all by ourselves. You can find Lech Walesa The way of the hope for a few dollars in any second-hand books Internet store. Try to find on the Internet one or two or three of the speeches of my former boss (former minister of foreign affairs) prof. Bronislaw Geremek to be informed on our point of view on the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe. Our present post communists who are in power now also parrot this official point of view. American officials love to hear our former and present high-ranking communist (present-day social democrats) present our official point of view. I am not cynical; I am not saying there is absolutely no truth in our wonderful story (after all Lech Walesa got not only a Nobel Prize, but was also an Olympic flag bearer at Salt Lake City). After all I was an emigrant and an exile from Poland, bu shou huanyingde renwu, during most of my life.

I do not, absolutely do not think that China will ever in our lifetime have a civil society in our sense of the word. I only think that in that East Asian way (see Japan, for example Karel van Wolferens 'The Enigma of Japanese Power') of 'authoritarian rule of law' or 'illiberal rule of law' the Chinese authorities are proceeding to construct from above (so defiant of Western history) a "civil society" - simulation. With, by the way, a little help from those hard-working people from the Ford Foundation in Beijing. Let not commissioner Arthur Waldron and his American Enterprise Institute find out.

By the way. I do think that also in the PRC the renmin will witness one day Fukuyama's 'end of history'. But I am afraid, just like all of you, that that end is not near. I certainly do not expect to see it in my lifetime. Big trouble in China, yes. The coming of a liberal democracy, no. But I also sometimes have a sentiment for China the way it is, not the way it should be. Societies before the advent of the Western civilization did have some merits. Gemeindchaft, not gesellschaft. Is some popularity of the communitarian movement in present-day USA not a proof that these values also exist in the home of the brave and the free?

But I assume lady and gentlemen that you would like to hear my bottom line on the question: Is there a possibility for a Solidarity-like movement to arise in the People's Republic of China. My bottom line is: no. Two necessary, if not sufficient, conditions conditioned Solidarity: the Catholic Church and longing for independence. These conditions are not met in China. Of course a contingency of peasant unrest, come-back of Falun Gong, sudden cristalisation of workers unrest, student movement and a conflict at the top of the Party-State could destabilize the present status quo in China. I do not think such a development would be beneficial to China and the world.

But a specter of Solidarity roams through China. And with ghosts (gespaenste) one never knows.

Michal Korzec (and Jadwiga Staniszkis)




Dr Michal KORZEC

Address: 05-807 Podkowa Lesna, Klonowa 5, Poland

Tel./fax. (48-22) 729 12 89. E-mail: mkorzec@isppan.waw.pl

Born in Poland 1945. Middle schools in France and in the Netherlands. M.A. Theoretical Physics University of Amsterdam 1971 (master thesis about phase transitions). Same university M. A. Sociology 1975 (master thesis about mathematical sociology and the beginnings of life insurance science) and doctorate economy 1988 (about economic reforms in the People's Republic of China). Editor of a Dutch encyclopedia 1970-1974. Author of a sociological bestseller about cultural changes in the Netherlands 1938-1978.

Researcher, lecturer (associate professor) at several Dutch universities 1974-1997. Accredited Dutch correspondent in Beijing 1983-1985. Counselor of the Polish Embassy in Beijing 1999-2000. Associate professor (adiunkt) Institute of Political Studies Polish Academy of Sciences 1999 - now. Consiliero of the Polish - Chinese Parliamentary Group.

7 books in Dutch, one in English (Labour and the Failure of Reform in China, McMillan/St Martin's Press 1992). A considerable amount of substantial publications in a few languages in the fields of general relativity theory, mathematical sociology, gender studies, civilization theory, Soviet studies, China studies, history of the Cold War, income distribution. No books in Polish. Writes at present a habilitation State and Administrative Law in the People's Republic of China. Publisher (American, European or Chinese) desired. Keeps (generally speaking) deadlines.

Fluent in Polish, Dutch, English, French, German, Russian and Chinese. Reading ability in some other European languages. Some understanding of Yiddish and (Torah) Hebrew. Studied Japanese and Korean, three months for each language. Result: reading capability of hiragana, katakana and hangul. Without any understanding.

Wife: Prof. Dr Hab. Jadwiga Staniszkis

Son: David Korzec (1985)

Likes: Paul Krugman. Dislikes: George Soros.

Citizenships: Polish and Dutch