Apropå det faktum att teknokratins fråga återaktualiserats i relation till Covid-19 – såg en intressant artikel i The National Interest.

Texten framhäver det som många befarat – att en Asien-inspirerad teknokrati nu står högre i kurs än innan pandemin. Detta är såklart en del av en större rörelse, som började tidigare än så. (Det geopolitiska kring BRI är såklart viktigt – för mig var Sri Lanka-fältarbetet 2009-2011 en ögonöppnare.) Dock är det intressant att vi här ser hur teknokratin kan framställas som alternativet till en post-truth-korrumperad demokrati:

Asia has also fully emerged from China’s shadow in the “end of history” ideological debate. Indeed, if there is a political system that has emerged victorious from the coronavirus pandemic, it is Asian democratic technocracy. China’s resilience has put paid to the notion that China’s Mandarins are merely East Asian versions of Soviet apparatchiks. But more significantly, Asia’s gold-standard democracies such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have proven to be global role models for their blend of competence and transparency. They embody a far more balanced and healthy relationship between rationalism and freedom than America or Britain today. These societies are the vanguard of what I call the “new Asian values” of technocratic governance, mixed capitalism, and social conservatism that are far more likely to become a global set of norms than post-truth Western democracy. From restoring pride in experts to massive economic bail-outs to restricting ‘fake news,’ Asian approaches appear to have already gained favor in the West. Bottom line: While amateur political scientists talk democracy, professional state administrators talk governance.