As good as it may sound, it is the power politics that dominates our political sphere
The need of the hour, at both domestic and international levels, is to strategize goodness. By goodness, I understand well-intentioned and well-planned promotion of the welfare of the maximum number of people through increasing and improving the chances of sustainable human well-being. The politics inspired by this need to formulate a strategy based on goodness I call good politics. This good politics, I, moreover, posit as moral because it has the potential to lay down clear guidelines for identifying right and wrong behaviour in public life. Good politics is opposed to power politics. Power politics is preoccupied exclusively with the maintaining or increase of power. Power politics, no matter how counterintuitive it may sound, is, in fact, naive politics. Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, defines naivety as the lack of experience, wisdom and judgement.
Power politics, as naive realism, lacks experience in two ways; first, it is limited in outlook because it is devoid of any experience of any other form of politics which may have had as its supreme goal not the accumulation of power but that of goodness; this makes power politics highly egoistic whereby its agents fall into the trap of chauvinism, on one hand, and that of self-aggrandisement, on the other. Second, it fails to derive any lesson from its own experience but the one which prioritises the ever-intensifying pursuit of power and this is what creates a lack of wisdom in the practice of power politics because wisdom is nothing if not the art of remembering experience and deriving lessons to avoid past mistakes and pitfalls. It lacks judgement because it confuses the means and ends of politics and constructs the concentration of power as the highest aim of politics.
It is difficult for the pundits and practitioners of naive realism to see that all the horrors in the form of colonial subjugation, wars, famines, genocides, poverty, terrorism etc, since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, can be traced to the aggravations of power politics. To expect power politics to deliver a durable peace for all is like hoping that the best way of reducing pollution is by creating more pollution.
It can always be said in the defence of naive realism that there are two types of power politics. The first kind pursues power only as a means to practice what I have called good politics. The second is the kind that pursues power as an end in itself. And that power as means is inevitable while power as an end in itself is undesirable. While the argument has the appearance of logical rigour, it is, in fact, crude because it fails to understand that all pursuits of power as a means are, in fact, hidden forms of the pursuit of power as an end in itself. The history of the 20th century is replete with examples the analysis of any one of which will explode this untenable argument.
The question then is: what makes good politics different? Good politics is based on mature realism because it arises from the quest to find and institutionalize decent sustainable solutions to the fundamental human needs of satisfying hunger, finding shelter, craving for affectionate care and prolonging existence. Good politics has no place for ambition that promotes selfishness of conduct. Rather, it promotes the pursuit of excellence understood as the ability to argue and act rationally, innovatively, and pragmatically in order to deal with the ever-increasing complexity of human society caused principally by the increase in numbers to which the decent satisfaction of human needs leads. Unlike power politics, good politics educates, organizes, and mobilizes people themselves to solve these problems. The state based on good politics facilitates this collective mobilization.
One might ask why, if good politics is so good, is power politics still the dominant kind around? The answer to this is simple: politics, more so than science, tends to be path-dependent and while paradigm shifts leading to radical changes in world-view occur in science, almost all shifts in politics are and have been new ways of doing the same power politics. A radical paradigm shift that shall displace power politics permanently and establish good politics has not occurred in human history so far. It will not be wrong to say that in politics we are still living in the geocentric age.
Today, the peaceful development of China is an instance of good politics simply because it has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. The US has also created a domestic society which is a robust example of freedom, equality, and individual initiative. The real challenge for both the US and China today is to find viable strategies to not only widen the domestic reach of welfare but also to peacefully internationalise these instances of their respective domestic good politics. There is an elaborate global financial architecture for the flows of financial capital. Perhaps, a global mechanism for ensuring the free movement of social capital should be created. The world has an International Monetary Fund of questionable value. Should we rather not have an International Fund for Social Capital to ensure global exchanges in trust, reciprocity and cooperation?
The writer is a senior policy analyst in an Islamabad-based think tank and can be contacted at [email protected]
