Sunday, July 16, 2023

NIALL FERGUSON;" Biden Says Democracy Is Winning. It's Not That Simple." | Bloomberg July 16, 2023 at 12:00 AM EDT

Democracy is not in recession. The invasion of Ukraine has elicited real democratic unity. The response to the challenge posed by China is weaker, but it is real.

The idea of a global descent into illiberal democracy or electoral autocracy is exaggerated by dubious statistics.

But the future of democracy hinges, as it always has, on how far voters in the most important democracy are willing to vote their rights away. And the mechanisms to persuade them to do so have never been more powerful. Democracy is on a roll. The question is whether it is rolling toward a cliff edge. We shall find out in less than 16 months.

Biden Says Democracy Is Winning. It's Not That Simple.

The strategy of aligning democracies against autocracies could have an American Achilles’ heel.

By Niall Ferguson

July 16, 2023 at 12:00 AM EDT

Is democracy on a roll? You would think so if you listened to President Joe Biden’s speech at last week’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

It was vintage Biden, the rhetoric alternately soaring and stumbling. He started with “the transformational power of freedom” in Lithuania and its Baltic neighbors as they broke free of Soviet rule, lighting up “the flame of liberty.” The enlargement of NATO and the advance of democracy are one and the same, he argued, because the alliance is “bound by democratic values.”

The war in Ukraine, the president declared, is a war between a coalition of democracies and a Russian autocracy that poses a threat “to democratic values we hold dear, to freedom itself.” In the same way, the Quad partnership between Australia, India, Japan and the US is “bringing major democracies of the region together to cooperate, keeping the Indo-Pacific free.” Biden depicted the world in Manichean terms, divided starkly between the democracies, united in “the defense of freedom,” and their benighted foes, who would prefer “a world defined by coercion and exploitation, where might makes right.”

Fine words. But what if democracy, far from being ascendant, is really in retreat? For the past few years, my Hoover Institution colleague Larry Diamond has been warning of a “democratic recession.” As he put it in a recent Foreign Affairs essay: “In countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Hungary, and Turkey, elections have long ceased to be democratic. Autocrats in Algeria, Belarus, Ethiopia, Sudan, Turkey, and Zimbabwe have clung to power despite mounting public demands for democratization. In Africa, seven democracies have slid back into autocracy since 2015, including Benin and Burkina Faso … the world is mired in a deep, diffuse, and protracted democratic recession.”

Each year, the nonprofit Freedom House publishes its Freedom in the World report. The latest edition states that “global freedom declined for the 17th consecutive year” in 2022. These and similar assessments remind me of Fareed Zakaria’s warning back in 1997 that the future — “from Peru to the Palestinian Authority, from Sierra Leone to Slovakia, from Pakistan to the Philippines” — would belong to “illiberal democracy.”

So which is it? We all know Winston Churchill’s witticism that “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” He uttered those words in the House of Commons in 1947, the year after his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri. But Churchill drew no distinction in either speech between liberal and illiberal democracies.

In that regard, the specter at the feast in Vilnius last week was the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who nearly — but not quite — agreed to lift his veto on Sweden’s NATO accession. Two months ago, Erdogan was reelected, winning 52.1% of the vote in the second round of his country’s presidential contest. But here’s what Freedom House has to say about Turkish democracy:

In Turkey, a failed 2016 coup attempt has cast a long shadow over political rights and civil liberties. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan … used the incident to justify the removal of key democratic checks and balances and the elimination of political rivals. … Ahead of the [presidential] vote, the government adopted a new law to control the selection of judges who will review challenges to election results, and approved a “disinformation” law that could further stifle opposition campaigns and independent media.

Freedom in the World classifies Turkey as “Not Free,” awarding it just 16 out of a possible 40 for political rights and 16 out of 60 for civil liberties, for a total freedom score of 32 out of 100. By way of comparison, Sweden gets full marks on both counts. Lithuania is at 89/100. Ukraine is at 50.

As everyone knows, democracy was invented in ancient Athens in the 5th century BC. But only in the past century has it been widely and durably adopted as a form of government. Why was democracy previously so short-lived? Because classical and Renaissance political philosophy taught that democracy was inherently unstable. The rule of the people was an ephemeral staging post between aristocracy or monarchy and tyranny.

This was a great concern of America’s founding fathers, which was why they were so careful to separate and limit powers in the Constitution. Even in the 19th century, the French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville regarded the US as exceptional. His conclusion was that democracy could never work in France. Too many of his compatriots preferred equality to liberty. That was why they ended up with a Napoleon twice.

Today, about half of all countries are democracies. According to the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project, which is headquartered at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, 90 of the 178 countries for which data were available in 2022 recently held truly free and fair multiparty elections. The oldest democracies in the world — all over a century old — are Switzerland (174 years), followed by Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Finland, the UK, the US, Canada and Sweden. In other words, long-lived democracy is an Anglophone and Nordic phenomenon. (Switzerland should be disqualified for not allowing women to vote until 1971.) Only 24 democracies are more than 60 years old. Twenty are less than 19 years old. Moreover, of the 90 democracies, only 32 qualify as liberal democracies, meaning that they not only allow all adults to vote but also protect civil and political liberties through such institutions as independent courts and a free press. . ."

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