Some thoughts: the time of monsters
Global democracy is declining. What can we do about it?
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Antonio Gramsci
“Is global democracy doomed?” was probably an unthinkable question just ten years ago. A coup attempt in the United States was also one, and it happened. So plenty of people might be asking themselves that question now. Freedom House, V-Dem, and The Economist all make the claim. Countries that were once reasonably stable democracies are now trending dangerously, or running at full steam, towards the opposite direction. It cannot be a coincidence that most of the planet’s leading democracies are becoming substantially weaker simultaneously.
There’s two faces to this. On the one hand, the most brutal and repressive regimes on Earth are ascendant in power and influence. On the other, the leading free nations are becoming weak, stagnant, and prone to flights of authoritarianism themselves. Of the 41 main democracies in the globe, 25 suffered significant declines lately. Centrist parties, committed to norms and standards, are losing and ceding ground to extremist parties - and in the worst cases, accomodating them. Prospects, generally speaking, are grim: an ascendant China and an increasingly disfunctional United States are contesting the position of global hegemon, and other significant nations like Russia and India become more tyrannical while potential counterparts like Japan and Europe wane.
Autocracies are bolder, more aggresive, more vicious. Myanmar’s military junta returned to power after a brief democratic interregnum, and it is currently ethnically cleansing its Rohingya minority. Russia’s Putin blatantly interferes in other countries’ elections, murders higher and higher profile figures with impunity, and is currently engaging in one of the most extensive anti-LGBT campaigns on the Earth. China is sterilizing entire ethnic groups, violating international law to seize lands, and betting on totalitarianism to extents not seen since the Cultural Revolution. The list goes on and on. Viktor Orban, Andrzej Duda, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, are moving more and more towards becoming fully fledged autocrats.
The loss of moral leadership of the main democracies isn’t a separate phenomenon, or an uncorrelated one. After Trump’s tactics to overturn a free and fair election failed, many wannabee Trumps imitated his techniques: Bolsonaro, Fujimori, etcetera. None have, so far, mimicked his support for violent mobs to forcefully seize power, although that is a bar so low it’s in the vicinity of the planet’s core. Israel’s Netanyahu attempted sinister power grabs right before petty infighting among his often at-odds partners destroyed his ethnonationalist coalition from within. Vox, Front National, AfD, surged in power numerous times. For even democratic parties, coziness with and accomodation of Russia and China became closer to the norm than to the exception.
2018, 2019, and 2020 saw some of the largest protests in history: the Yellow Vests, the Hong Kong protests, the Chilean protests, the BLM protests, the Cuban protests, the list goes on and on. Autocracies, such as Cuba, China, and Venezuela violently repressed protestors. Democracies tried, to some extent, to accomodate them; Latin America appears to have been best at this. But a world where a poor, small, unstable continent has the strongest commitment to democratic accountability is a world where global democracy doesn’t have a bright future.
It is probable that some nations ceased to be democratic weren’t remaining as such for long. Such could be the example of Tunisia, a long-time autocracy currently in the middle of a demcoratic crisis, since the President dismissed the Prime Minister and Parliament (a power he has, constitutionally speaking) and assumed power - and the body that would have to keep him in check, the Constitutional Court, never had any members appointed.
We can’t really pinpoint a single cause to this phenomenon, but in general, the economic ascent of China increased its power. The Iraq War reduced Western prestige, fueled discontent in numerous countries, and enabled terrorist groups to emerge in the Middle East. The tepid recovery of most countries after the Great Recession fed into discontent with established politics, and increasing inequality only worsened it. Social media allowed for the organization of various protests and movements, ranging from the protests of the Arab Spring to the neonazi protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. The refugee crisis after the Arab Spring only empowered the far right (and, in various weird ways, the far left), and so did the emergence of ISIS.
There won’t be a single solution, since “all major democracies declining significantly at once” isn’t a single, or simple, problem. Developed and developing democracies need to strengthen themselves, politically and economically, and build treaties and partnerships with each other to counterbalance less democratically inclined nations. It won’t be a simple undertaking, but it would be a possible one. We should hope that it happens.
I find it quite interesting that plenty of those far right parties that enjoyed significant political momentum seem to have suffered from attempting to be too "Trumpian", without considering whether that would work in the local political context.