The question of democracy: is it winning or losing the global contest?

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This was published 6 years ago

The question of democracy: is it winning or losing the global contest?

By Nick Miller

When you think about the death of democracy, you probably envision something like the 1973 Pinochet coup in Chile: a crescendo of civil, social and economic crises culminating in a dramatic military intervention: jets shrieking overhead, buildings burning, defiant radio speeches followed by despairing surrender.

But there is another way to break a democracy, warn two Harvard professors who have made it their life work to understand this process.

“Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote in their new book, How Democracies Die, now sitting prominently in bookshop windows.

“(These are) presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power.”

Protesters near the democracy monument in Bangkok this month. They are calling for a restoration of democracy after the 2014 coup.

Protesters near the democracy monument in Bangkok this month. They are calling for a restoration of democracy after the 2014 coup.Credit: AP

The authors say scholars – including themselves – are increasingly concerned that democracy may be under threat worldwide, even in places where its existence has long been taken for granted. They point to populist governments assaulting democratic institutions in Hungary, Turkey and Poland; to extremist forces shouldering their way into the political conversation in Austria, France and Germany.

According to one count, between 2000 and 2015 democracy broke down in 27 countries, among them Kenya, Russia, Thailand and Turkey.

The old-fashioned military coup hasn’t gone away: witness the end of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014.

Former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, who was imprisoned after being ousted in a military coup.

Former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, who was imprisoned after being ousted in a military coup. Credit: AP

But these are the exceptions, Levitsky and Ziblatt say.

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“Blatant dictatorship – in the form of fascism, communism or military rule – has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means.”

Killing democracy

Take for example Hugo Chavez, elected Venezuelan president on a wave of popular anger against a corrupt government elite, promising an “authentic” democracy. By the mid-2000s the Chavista regime had closed a TV station, arrested and exiled opposition politicians, judges and media figures, and eliminated presidential term limits.

A supporter waves a flag displaying the image of late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez during a pro-government rally against US President Donald Trump in Caracas, Venezuela, last August.

A supporter waves a flag displaying the image of late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez during a pro-government rally against US President Donald Trump in Caracas, Venezuela, last August.Credit: Bloomberg

Chavez’s death from cancer was followed by a brief democratic revival. But last year his successor, Nicolas Maduro, moved emphatically to autocracy: tossing political opponents in prison and using his security forces to quell demonstrations with lethal force.

Maduro, alongside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is part of a new breed dubbed “democratic authoritarians”. Maduro has proudly declared this year’s election will be a chance for “democratic renewal”. But the opposition will boycott the farcical poll: his political opponents are either under arrest, barred from office or have fled the country.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan salutes with children in commando uniforms as he addresses the members of his ruling party at the parliament in Ankara on Tuesday.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan salutes with children in commando uniforms as he addresses the members of his ruling party at the parliament in Ankara on Tuesday.Credit: AP

Or, for an even more recent example, look at South Africa, where Mandela’s democratic revolution was subverted into a corrupt kleptocracy, with one party holding an apparent monopoly on power. South Africa may not have fallen off the edge, but it certainly teetered over it.

“Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance,” Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote. Courts are gradually stacked, media bought off or bullied into silence, opponents find themselves facing tax or corruption allegations.

Then African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma, left, with his 33-year-old wife Nompumelelo Ntuli in 2008.

Then African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma, left, with his 33-year-old wife Nompumelelo Ntuli in 2008. Credit: AP

Like the metaphorical boiling frogs, the populations of these countries may not even notice. In Venezuela in 2011, a survey found a majority of citizens gave their country a score of at least 8 out of 10 on a scale where 10 was “completely” democratic.

“Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible,” the professors warn.

Decline and fall?

Last year The Washington Post newspaper was fiercely teased over its new motto “Democracy dies in darkness” – coined by the newspaper’s former editor Bob Woodward. A HuffPost political reporter announced their new slogan would be a Game of Thrones-inspired “The night is dark and full of terrors”.

Don’t be so fast to mock, say Levitsky and Ziblatt.

“For us, how and why democracies die has been an occupational obsession. But now we find ourselves turning to our own country.

“Over the past two years we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States, but that we recognise as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other places. We feel dread, as do so many other Americans, even as we try to reassure ourselves that things can’t really be that bad here.

“American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies, intimidate the free press and threaten to reject the results of elections. They try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, including the courts, the intelligence services and ethics offices.

“Are we living through the decline and fall of one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies?”

Of course, the democratic cup may not be half-empty.

Economist and author John Kenneth Galbraith once noted that the best way to get a lucrative book contract in a hurry was to pitch “The Crisis of American Democracy”.

Donald Trump.

Donald Trump.

And sitting right next to Levitsky and Ziblatt on bookshop tables is Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, in which he goes to painstaking lengths to combat the spreading pessimism about the general state of things, which he blames on short-sighted, disaster-fetishising media and a dark game of “one-upmanship” among the intelligentsia.

Pinker devotes a chapter to democracy, which he says has reliably risen around the world in waves.

The great "Enlightenment experiment" – American constitutional democracy – spread to Western Europe in the 19th century, only to be pushed back by fascism. By 1942 there were just 12 constitutional democracies in the world, at least by modern standards of what a democracy looks like.

The second wave of colonial independence lifted the number to 36 recognised democracies by 1962, though this was again pushed back with the rise of military juntas in places such as Greece and Latin America, authoritarian regimes in Asia and Communist takeovers in Africa, the Middle East and South-east Asia.

By the 1970s there was widespread pessimism about the future for liberal democracies.

West German chancellor Willy Brandt said at the time: “Western Europe has only 20 or 30 more years of democracy in it; after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship.''

US senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said liberal democracy on the American model “is where the world was, not where it is going”.

Waves of change

But democratisation’s third wave erupted in the 70s and 80s, in Europe (west then east), Latin America and Asia. By 1989 Francis Fukuyama famously proposed the “end of history”, a consensus on the best form of governance.

Since then, Pinker writes, Fukuyama has become a “punching bag” for editorialists commenting on the latest bad news, “gleefully announcing the return to history”, citing theocracy in the Muslim world, authoritarian capitalism in China, populist victories in Poland and Hungary and power grabs by autocrats in Turkey and Russia (“the return of the sultan and the tsar”, as Pinker puts it).

“Historical pessimists, with their customary schadenfreude, announced that the third wave of democratisation had given way to an ‘undertow’, ‘recession’, ‘erosion’, ‘rollback’ or ‘meltdown’. Democratisation, they said, was a conceit of Westerners projecting their tastes onto the rest of the world, whereas authoritarianism seemed to suit most of humanity just fine.”

But Pinker contends that democracy’s third wave is “far from over, let alone ebbing, even if it has not continued to surge at the rate of the years surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall”.

In 1989 the world had 52 democracies, defined by the Polity Project as countries with a score of 6 or higher on their scale, up from 31 in 1971. This number grew in 90s, then again with the 21st century colour revolutions including Croatia, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. The total at the start of the Obama presidency in 2009 was 87, and by 2015 it was 103 – a year which saw transition to democracy in Tunisia solidified, and positive movements in Myanmar, Burkina Faso, Nigeria and Sri Lanka.

Aung San Suu Kyi, a one-time symbol for democracy whose reputation has been tarnished.

Aung San Suu Kyi, a one-time symbol for democracy whose reputation has been tarnished. Credit: Juanita McCleary

Of all people living in the 60 non-democratic countries today – 20 full autocracies, 40 more autocratic than democratic - four-fifths live in China. And Russia and China are incomparably less repressive than under Stalin, Brezhnev and Mao, Pinker says: “Even ‘not free’ is not what it used to be.”

The exceptions

Of course, he acknowledges there are exceptions.

“The latest fashion in dictatorship has been called the competitive, electoral, kleptocratic, statist or patronal authoritarian regime,” he wrote. Putin’s Russia is the prototype.

Vladimir Putin, pictured in flying gear in 2005, faces an "election" this year virtually without an opponent.

Vladimir Putin, pictured in flying gear in 2005, faces an "election" this year virtually without an opponent.

“The incumbents use the formidable resources of the state to harass the opposition, set up fake opposition parties, use state-controlled media to spread congenial narratives, manipulate electoral rules, tilt voter registration and jigger the elections themselves.”

Joan Hoey is the editor of the Democracy Index, an annual report from the Economist Intelligence Unit which since 2006 has ranked the state of democracies around the world.

They take 60 measures and combine them into a single ranking. They call it a “thick” measure, which looks beyond electoral process, pluralism and civil liberties. They want to measure the functioning of government, political participation and culture, to go deep into the substance of what the word "democracy" really means.

Their latest report in 2017 was not comforting. No region improved its score on the previous year, and some 89 countries were marked down.

The “democracy recession” is reflected in some of the oldest democracies in the world: in Western Europe, where the EIU found declining popular participation in elections and politics, declining trust in institutions, a growing influence of unelected and unaccountable institutions and a widening gap between political elites and electorates.

Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen has locked up or exiled his political opponents.

Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen has locked up or exiled his political opponents.Credit: AP

They also saw a decline in media freedoms and the erosion of civil liberties, including curbs on free speech.

“We’ve seen increasingly declining popular participation in elections, in politics in general, falling membership rolls in political parties,” Hoey said. There was an “incredible, long-term decline in trust in political institutions”.

Trump was a beneficiary rather than a cause of the decline in American democracy. He benefited from the alienation of the electorate.

“You see it everywhere – in the UK and France and other mature democracies. The social democratic parties have particularly lost touch with their base – it’s cataclysmic.”

Voters feel disdained and ignored, they feel their interests are not respected, Hoey says. “People are looking elsewhere.”

And elsewhere they find populist strongmen, or radical parties that claim to give the disenfranchised a voice.

<p>President Donald Trump toasts Philippines strongman Rodrigo Duterte, and his partner Honeylet Avancena.

President Donald Trump toasts Philippines strongman Rodrigo Duterte, and his partner Honeylet Avancena.Credit: AP

The increasing power of populists does not necessarily mean these countries are no longer democracies, she says, despite the attacks on media and independent institutions.

“In many ways this reaction, this populist upsurge is an expression of a democratic deficit, of problems with actually existing democracy.”

Philippe Marliere, professor in politics at the University College London, says populism isn’t an ideology so much as a “strategy to seize power”.

“Movements with a charismatic leader try to occupy the ground of disillusion and anger,” he says. “They find a way to address a population directly – they play a political game.”

Modern social media has facilitated this game, he says – it helps the movements mobilise followers, tap into a mood of anger against the elites, to find people who feel left behind by globalisation. And the public is more educated, more critical and reflective: primed to reject old established political parties.

However Hoey says even if populism in one country might help shake up moribund political elites, it could have troubling knock-on effects elsewhere.

“If the oldest democracies in the world aren’t leading by example, it’s very difficult for those in the Middle East or Africa or the former Soviet Union who are fighting for democracy, and it’s less pressure on autocrats and dictators. They are free, really, to continue as they are.”

The rules-based order

Pinker is sceptical of indexes such as Hoey’s – he worries that democracy is “a word that has developed such an aura of goodness as to have become almost meaningless”, and the various indexes’ checklists “embrace a hodgepodge of good things”.

“[There is a] civics-class idealisation of democracy in which an informed populace deliberates about the common good and carefully selects leaders who carry out their preference. By that standard, the number of democracies in the world is zero in the past, zero in the present and almost certainly zero in the future,” he says.

Pinker says one of the forces preventing a real retreat of democracy is a growing global consensus over human rights, with instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “drawing red lines around thuggish governmental tactics”.

This is a view supported by Australia’s own foreign minister, Julie Bishop.

Though far too much the consummate diplomat to bluntly call out autocrats, Bishop is clearly aware of the global trends.

In a speech to King's College London's Menzies Centre for Australian Studies on Monday, Bishop quoted Henry Kissinger in describing this moment in history as a time “chaos threatens side by side with unprecedented interdependence”.

“We have elevated defending, promoting and strengthening the international rules-based order as our highest priority,” she said.

Search for “international rules-based order” – a phrase that neither trips off the tongue nor pops up in everyday conversation – on the foreign minister’s website and you find hits in an impressive 1125 different speeches, articles and interviews.

That’s more times than “refugee” (944) or “Russia” (920), ISIS (292) or Daesh (256). Or, for that matter, Malcolm Turnbull (544).

It’s a go-to phrase for Bishop when she wants to summarise what we’re about – the network of alliances, institutions and conventions that have evolved since World War II and give structure to the way nations clash over trade, territory or human rights.

This is the fertile soil on which Australia has thrived in the last century, economically and in terms of influence. We’re not powerful enough to impose ourselves on opponents, so we need a level playing field and strong umpires.

Bishop doesn’t believe it’s under direct assault (expect by a few pariah states such as North Korea), but she implies it is under threat from nations who “fall for the temptation of ignoring international law and rules for narrow advantage and short-term gain''.

“The rules-based order can quickly fray; indeed it will fray if it is perceived that advantage can be gained by flouting it or working around it.”

There must be strong incentives for all to abide by the rules-based order, and strong disincentives for those considering the alternative, Bishop said.

If we believe in democracy, and if we believe it benefits us to see democratic, outward-looking countries across the globe, Australia has to look beyond its borders and work to make it happen.

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