SOS Democracy. The great global democratic setback.
After three decades of significant progress, democracy has ceased to advance globally. Is this a pause or a regression in history? Some are concerned about the rise of authoritarian regimes and failures such as the Arab Spring. Even Francis Fukuyama, while not rejecting the idea of the "end of history," warns that the victory of the democratic model is not guaranteed and that everything depends on the values that citizens are willing to fight for.
By: Thomas L. Friedman (excerpts)
Source: The New York Times
Since 2006, the number of democratic regimes in the world has stagnated. Several large countries have regressed in terms of freedoms. And even some Western democratic regimes are beginning to show signs of slowing down and revealing problems. In a global trend, democracy appears to be in recession.
In an essay titled “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession,” published in the Journal of Democracy, Stanford University expert Larry Diamond explains: “Around 2006, the expansion of freedom and democracy in the world entered a stalemate. Since then, there has been no increase in the number of electoral democracies, which has fluctuated between 114 and 119 (about 60% of the world's countries).
The number of democracies, both electoral and liberal, began to decline from 2006 onwards, before stabilizing. Since 2006, the average level of freedom in the world has also deteriorated slightly.
“Since 2000,” says Diamond, “25 democracies have collapsed – not only due to military coups or authoritarian leaders, but also due to subtle and progressive degradations of democratic rights and procedures.
Some of these phenomena occurred in political systems of poor quality. But in all these cases, reasonably free and fair multi-party electoral competition was either eliminated or degraded far below the minimum standards of a democratic regime.
Russia under Vladimir Putin and Turkey under Erdogan are just two of the most visible examples of this trend, shared by Venezuela, Thailand, Botswana, Bangladesh, and Kenya. In Turkey, writes Diamond, the AKP (Erdogan's party) is increasing "party control over the judicial system and public administration. It arrests journalists and intimidates dissidents in the press or academia. It threatens companies that finance opposition parties. Under the pretext of alleged coup attempts, it multiplies arrests and legal proceedings whose true objective is to remove inconvenient people from public life. This coincides with an impressive and increasingly blatant concentration of personal power in Erdogan's hands." There is no denying it: The foundations of the rule of law in Turkey are being eroded.
New generation of autocrats
For its part, Freedom House, a group that assesses the degree of respect for democratic values, found that between 2006 and 2014, there were far more countries where freedom decreased than those where it was strengthened. This trend was particularly pronounced in Sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa, where declining transparency, the collapse of the rule of law, and increased corruption are becoming the norm.
Where does this trend come from? One reason, according to Diamond, is that autocrats have a strong instinct for self-preservation. They learn quickly and adapt easily. They have developed and share “new censorship techniques and legal strategies to restrict the scope of civil society protection associations and prevent them from receiving international support.” This is without any counter-strategies being presented to them. Old habits of corruption and abuse of power were camouflaged during the 90s and 2000s, after the democratic explosion that followed the end of the Cold War.
However, "the corrupt autocrats felt that the pressure had eased and that they were once again able to govern as they pleased."
An important factor in all of this was China's rise to a leading power. Not guided by democratic standards nor viewing corruption abroad as an evil, China dethroned the United States as the main provider of aid to much of Africa. This occurred while Russia increased its aggression, undermining any democratic tendencies manifested within its borders.
Last but not least, after 9/11, the United States allowed the "war on terror" to supplant the promotion of democracy as the main priority of its foreign policy. Ultimately, any autocrat who arrests terrorists can expect to be exempt from US retaliation.
A dysfunctional system
The most unsettling aspect of democratic backsliding, Diamond adds, “is the decline in democratic efficiency and self-confidence,” in the US and the West in general. After years of hyper-polarization and parliamentary gridlock, and suspicions of irregular campaign financing, the United States, considered the world’s most important democracy, is increasingly dysfunctional and proving incapable of passing something as basic as a state budget.
“The world sees this,” says Diamond. “The propaganda of authoritarian regimes exploits the difficulties of American democracy, to discredit democracy in general and immunize authoritarian governments against US pressure.”
Diamond urges democrats not to lose faith. Democracy, as Churchill said, is the worst form of government except for all the others. It stimulates people's imagination like no other system. But this is only true when great democracies appear as a model worth following.
Stagnation or decline?
“Is Democracy in Decline?” asks the Journal of Democracy in a special edition. This magazine is published by the National Endowment for Democracy, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting democracy worldwide and funded by the U.S. Congress. To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the magazine opened its pages to renowned columnists, including political scientist Francis Fukuyama and historian Robert Kagan.
Larry Diamond, the editor-in-chief, signs an article on the "democratic recession," an idea that was soon questioned by political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, who believe that "the expectation surrounding the rapid democratization of the world in the 90s was excessive," summarizes the Canadian weekly magazine MacLean's. "The real trend of the last decade is the resistance of democracy, in a darker democratic context," write those two authors.
(*) A renowned columnist and former Middle East correspondent for The New York Times, Thomas Friedman covered the 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by George N. Bush. He won three Pulitzer Prizes for journalism. Author of several works, his book *The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century* has been translated into Portuguese. In 2013 and 2014, he collaborated on a documentary series about climate change, "Years of Living Dangerously." Between 2003 and 2007, he had already produced six documentaries for the New York Times and Discovery Channel partnership, covering political and economic topics.