Democracy and Growth in the Twenty-first Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy

307 Pages·2018·3.496 MB·English

by  Francesco Grillo, Raffaella Y. Nanetti

DEMOCRACY AND
GROWTH IN THE
TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY
Th e Diverging Cases
of China and Italy
Francesco Grillo and
Raffaella Y. Nanetti
Democracy and Growth
in the Twenty-first Century
“All social and political systems need to evolve so as to survive and thrive,
adapting to changing times and technologies. Francesco Grillo and Raffaella
Nanetti pose the right questions about our overly-rigid liberal democracies,
while illuminating the challenge through a powerful comparison between their
own sclerotic Italy and the currently more adaptive authoritarian China”.
—Bill Emmott, former Editor of The Economist
and author of The Fate of the West
“By now the literature on China is huge, yet this book stands out in terms
of originality and quality. China’s economic and technological advancement is
systematically linked to its political system. The comparison with Italy is useful
to understand what Western democracies may learn from China’s case”.
—Romano Prodi, former Prime Minister of Italy
and President of the European Commission
“This book compares China and Italy, providing a novel perspective. The
Chinese people need to find the future direction to maintain sustainable inno-
vation and growth after 40 years of economic success. China may draw some
lessons from Italy on how to keep the balance between democratic governance
and innovation. Can we have Democracy promoting innovation and innova-
tion promoting democratic governance at the same time?”
—Liu Jianxiong, Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
“When considering matters of innovation and growth, great value comes from
comparing case studies that differ significantly from one another. Patterns that
may be invisible in one single context can pop into view when carefully con-
trasted and compared. This book occupies valuable terrain between long-term
structural features, and medium-to-short-term adjustments subject to politics
and policy manipulation. It confirms Francesco Grillo’s and his coauthor’s
unique capability to master different academic approaches to make sense of
a problem which is going to be fundamental. Their four-sided approach to
explaining innovation is eminently applicable in these and other settings where
stakeholders seek to advance innovation”.
—Ernest Wilson, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication,
Los Angeles, USA and visiting fellow at Stanford University, USA
“This book offers an interesting view on how societies manage or misman-
age innovation strategies in practice and how the wider political and institu-
tional context acts as the intermediary in converting the stated policy goals
into actual outcomes. Francesco Grillo and Raffaella Nanetti show how liberal
democracies could learn from other regimes in this conversion process without
at the same time compromising their core principles. Solutions to such fun-
damental problems are never simple, but the comparison of the Chinese and
Italian case outlined in this book makes it apparent where one could start”.
—Mihkel Solvak, Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu, Estonia
“How can democracy can still benefit from a knowledge-based society? How
and to what extent are our social systems increasing their ability to transform
information into knowledge and wisdom as we need to face the big global
challenges? This book addresses in a very original and provocative way some of
the basic issues we need to face nowadays at the global level. I strongly suggest
this reading as one of the most interesting contributions to the international
debate you can currently find”.
—Stefania Giannini, Assistant Director General for Education at UNESCO,
Former Italy’s Minister of Education Universities and Research
Francesco Grillo · Raffaella Y. Nanetti
Democracy and
Growth in the
Twenty-first Century
The Diverging Cases
of China and Italy
Francesco Grillo Raffaella Y. Nanetti
Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies University of Illinois at Chicago
Pisa, Italy Chicago, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-02013-2 ISBN 978-3-030-02014-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02014-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018961426
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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To my father the first to teach me that you are what you know.
—Francesco
To take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward,
and unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.
—James Wilson, Businessman and founder of The Economist
Preface
As Xi Jinping repeatedly reminds, China has still to “solve major dif-
ficulties” in order to transform an economic miracle that lasted four
decades into a “moderately prosperous society in all respects”. And yet
it is extremely interesting to look at China when we are in search of
solutions for a crisis of the West which is serious and deserves the best
intellectual resources we are capable of. In a nutshell, this is the rea-
son which has made the authors invest energy and dive with enthusi-
asm into this book and has been the motivator for so many people who
helped us in China, Italy and elsewhere with this research undertaking.
The age is gone when Western intellectuals used to come back from
visiting a country supposed to be on the verge of developing what
would have ultimately been ‘the perfect society’, saying that in Moscow
even the snow was whiter. Today there are no longer models to be
exported and the Chinese leadership knows this better than many of his
admirers.
China is a country governed by one of the best trained and selected
political leaderships which has experimented innovative methods to
develop policies and which is using technologies to solve problems in
original and interesting ways. We will argue that the Chinese approach
ix
x Preface
to progress is one of the interesting methods to tackle the “innovation
paradox” which is, as we will try to explain, one of the greatest chal-
lenges that define the twenty-first century. And yet it is a leadership
confronted by some major intellectual and political puzzles. This work
is an attempt to describe both the nature of China’s success and to bet-
ter understand how it can continue to grow avoiding middle-income
traps and solving those puzzles.
As a matter of fact, a key difference between today’s China and the
Soviet Empire that fell in 1991 is the unique Chinese capacity to com-
bine pragmatism and vision, humbleness and ambition. They have the
advantage of a framework they call “ideology” but this ideology is con-
stantly tested and adapted through “practice”.
The other difference is that today the West is weaker than it used to
be when it was challenged by the Soviet Union during the “cold war” or
even by Japan at the start of the 1990s. In terms of today’s challenges,
China is strong relative to the West. And yet in our work, we will argue
that a stronger West suits China well.
The West is weaker not as much in terms of its economy; even
though our research shows that our capacity to create prosperity from
technological progress has declined. We are weaker politically because
we hold on to a mode of experiencing democracy which became obso-
lete in its participatory structures, while we are still a long way from
providing an alternative theory on how complex societies should be
governed.
Italy provides an interesting case as one of the core countries of the
liberal democracy order which has been a pioneer of a wider European
decline. We offer an interpretation of the crisis which goes beyond anal-
yses which seem to be short-sighted and recommend a framework for a
“renaissance” which is still possible. After all, Italy is the country where
the idea of the West itself was arguably born through the vision of its
artists and it is not a case that Italy has anticipated an economic, cul-
tural and symbolic decline which is now shared by the countries par-
taking of the post war world order: France, Spain, Germany, the United
Kingdom and the USA.
Above all, the West is weak in terms of its current collective psychol-
ogy, which is betraying the yearning to explore, that combination of
Preface xi
enthusiasm and curiosity which was powerful enough to define what
the West is about. The West used to make history; it is now waiting for
history to happen sitting in front of the screen of a TV set.
This is why an intellectual travel to China is still what it must have
been for Marco Polo at the sunset of the Middle Ages: one of the most
effective ways to recover the memory of what we are about. It should
also be an opportunity for the East to better engage, void of reciprocal
prejudices, with the West in the reflection on democracy of the future
and its relationship with innovation and prosperity in the twenty-first
century: a discussion which is going to be central in London, Rome and
Brussels as well as in Beijing.
However challenging, it will be the debate of the next decade.
Essential for its consequences on the policies to be chosen and imple-
mented, the relationships between people and institutions, the indus-
trial and environmental strategies to be envisioned and pursued, the
business ventures to be encouraged. It will be crucial to learn from each
other to navigate more wisely unchartered waters and to develop the
intellectual instruments needed to make sense of a mutation that we
still have to fully understand.
The objective of this book is to start a debate relevant for policy mak-
ers, public opinions and intellectuals and to offer fresh ideas—like the
ones we offer at the end of sections on China and Italy, as well as in the
concluding chapter—needed to move knowledge forward.
Pisa, Italy Francesco Grillo
Chicago, USA Raffaella Y. Nanetti