As Kagan says, ‘Thanks to decades of remarkable growth, the Chinese today can argue that their model of economic development, which combines an increasingly open economy with a closed political system, can be a successful option for development in many nations.’

Moreover, he says, considerable other examples of this already exist in history: Chile under Pinochet. South Korea under General Lee.

It’s not surprising that, as Buruma has recently argued in the New Yorker, Third World dictators should be attracted to this model. Who wouldn’t prefer to make deals in a country without independent trade unions? Who would turn down the chance to redesign entire cities without public interference?

The recent manifestation of this phenomenon is perhaps most perceptively discussed in current international events by Remnick’s writing on modern Russia.

Russia today, he argues, is ‘deeply apolitical and immensely more supportive of Putin than it ever was of Yeltsin or Gorbachev. Masha Lipman calls this Putin-era phenomenon the country’s “non-participation pact”: the public agrees not to meddle in politics in exchange for the chance to take part in the consumer benefits of the Russian energy boom.’

Any form of trade off between political rights and economic success is of course a chimera. Russia’s recent economic success appears more due to the price of natural gas rather than a discovery of a new political economic model. Yet, the significant part of this shift is its impacts on the ideology of the state. Remnick cites Albats, a Russian radio host who notes : ‘You can call Putin or Medvedev a fool, which, of course, was totally impossible in Soviet times, but you might get into trouble if you look into their pockets. You cannot say you’ve heard that So-and-So has sent x trillion dollars to this or that offshore account. These people are total conformists, total pragmatists, they have no interest at all in ideology. They care about their power and their assets.’

This in a nutshell is Patten’s argument. A non-participation pact with citizens makes a mockery of the values that states wishing to “buy into” the current order are supposed to have.

Patten’s remedies for this situation are somewhat contradictory. He sees regional participation as being a possible remedy for the situation, believing that a responsibility to protect is currently absent in Asia, and that regionalism aids that. He forgets, of course, that the nation currently most important to any regionalist agreements (China) is one of the staunchest supporters of the ideal of non-intervention.

However, his overall theme of a need for regional economic cooperation as a basis for agreement due to the only concordance of ideals in Asia being that of a relatively liberal trade agenda seems far more plausible than any belief in a concordance of ideals in the security arena. The question then becomes one of whether the world can simultaneously stomach the discord between acceptance of liberal trade regulations and rejection of liberal political ideals that Patten also identifies.