The year 2012 will go into the history books as one of contrasting transitions. China’s five- year cycle for Communist Party congresses and leadership turnover overlapped with the U.S.’s four-year electoral calendar. And if that once-in-20-years coincidence wasn’t enough, Egypt’s rocky shift from dictatorship to democracy continues to remind us of what transition looks like in the absence of a predictable institutional framework.
The confluence of Chinese and American transitions marks an extraordinary historic development. The last time this happened, we might not have been able to predict the impeachment of Bill Clinton or the Supreme Court deciding the 2000 presidential election in Bush v. Gore. But any reasonable observer would have expected that presidential elections would continue in their ordinary course, and that the crises associated with impeachment and an uncertain electoral outcome would be resolved in a regular fashion, not by palace coups or purges.
looking beyond borders 