Management
II. Qualitative Attributes
2.3 The Political Utility of Crisis
2.3.1 Utility One: Shifting the Dominating Paradigm with Decisive Intervention
The perception of crisis is likely to come hand in hand with popular aspirations for change and a resolute break with the past – only at this time can the political possibilities for paradigm shifts become more favourable (Imershein, 1977). The incompetent ought to be dismissed, the fortress must be stormed and a new departure has to be made. When it comes to the question of crisis resolution, the imperative of decisive intervention or the need to impose a new trajectory upon existing institutions comes very naturally.
As mentioned above, ‘one’s crisis is often another’s opportunity’ (Rosenthal and Kouzmin, 1997:285). This critical conjuncture provides maximum opportunities for actors competing for the dominant crisis discourse and response. According to Gramsci, an ideological struggle, i.e. a war of position, will take place out of which a state and hegemonic project will be forged (Gramsci, 1971, cited in Hay, 1996a). The new project that triumphs often belongs to proponents of the most influential crisis discourse, because the underlying contradictories are defined in the most favourable terms to them, upon
which the ‘new’ cures are prescribed. In the words of t’Hart, ‘the most important instrument of crisis management is language. Those who are able to define what the crisis is all about also hold the key to defining the appropriate strategies for [its] resolution’ (t’Hart, 1993:41).
There are numerous examples where politicians define a situation as a crisis so that they may intervene in order to overthrow the dominant paradigm that ‘results in’ the constructed crisis. Most notable is the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978–9 in Britain, in which the ‘New Right’ defined waves of industrial conflict and economic dislocation as a crisis of corporatism (Hay, 1996a). Their crisis narrative succeeded and paved the way for the new, neoliberal paradigm of economic management under Margaret Thatcher. The applicability of Hay’s insights may go beyond democratic politics and explain paradigm shifts in authoritarian systems as well, such as in China. At about the same time as the ‘Winter of Discontent’, Deng Xiaoping utilised the failures of the Cultural Revolution and ascribed these to the then still-dominant Maoist paradigm. In doing so, he thus removed ideological and ideational barriers to the reform and opening paradigm. To a lesser extent, Hu Jintao utilised SARS as a symptom of a crisis with Jiang Zemin’s developmental paradigm that focused almost exclusively on GDP growth. He then introduced the Scientific Development Concept (SDC) as a more sustainable alternative growth model and highlighted this as his contribution to the CCP’s ideology. But, just as utilising crises to shift dominant paradigms in democratic politics is not to alter the democratic regime, in authoritarian systems there is usually a limit to which this strategy can be played out; as such, it is about changing the paradigm within the system but not the system itself, so the line of anything that undermines one party rule should never be crossed. For example, Deng Xiaoping questioned the legitimacy of the Maoist paradigm but he was much more hesitant to question the legitimacy of Mao Zedong as the paramount and principal
founding leader, because the latter had been internalised as part of the CCP’s regime legitimacy.
Unsurprisingly, as we shall see throughout the thesis, no matter how reformative the new project appears to be, in reality, the resulting changes never occur absolutely and can only be measured in relative terms. For instance, Thatcherism brought about economic paradigm change in the forms of privatisation, restrictions on labour movement and financial liberalisation in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. Similarly, Reaganism injected more elements of neoliberalism into the U.S. economy in the 1980s through tax cuts and curbing welfare expenditure. Nonetheless, few would suggest that as far as the conduct of politics and economic governance are concerned, the reformative state projects of Thatcherism and Reaganism represented sea-changes or resolute breaks from the old paradigms and altered the ‘basis of polity in the United Kingdom and the United States’ (Breslin, 2008b:215).
The connection between the crisis discourse and the crisis resolution we discussed above implies that the so called ‘decisive intervention’ is not only targeted at the crisis in essence – i.e. contradictions and failures that are selected to sustain the crisis narrative – but also at the crisis as a phenomenon and ‘discursive construction’ (Hay, 1999b). It is thus argued that crisis management only aims at defusing crisis rather than solving the basic problems that create it (Swaine, 2005). Hence, any seemingly epoch-making shifts made in the post-crisis era should be treated carefully if they involve both crisis as a phenomenon and crisis in essence. They are perhaps not as different as their proponents assert.
To borrow a metaphor from everyday life, your computer crashes (phenomenon) owing to software errors (contradictions) and you reboot (intervention) the machine to get it working again. Yet the reboot in its own right does not necessarily correct the software failure – it is merely an interim solution in which the original software is simply reloaded
into the system. This temporarily fixes the computer (making a difference) but does not necessarily prevent the computer from crashing again from the same cause. In this case, the intervention (reboot) addresses the phenomenal crisis (system crash) more than the substantive crisis (software errors), and is logically akin to our discussion of the relationship between the ‘decisive’ intervention and the crisis.