Actually you should collect them in a scrapbook like ever football pictures: democratic heroes. Hoping that someday they will add up to a democratic revival, to a new era, to the Democratic Twenties. Because democracy could use some heroism.
Geopolitical retrospectives have read for years as a triumphal march of autocrats. The 10s were years when the law of the fittest re-captured the world stage. China definitively manifested itself as an autocratic center of power. Russia, a nearly-forgotten autocratic power, backed off conquering Crimea and supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Turkey slipped into semi-autocracy after the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. And the United States elected a right-wing populist president with Donald Trump.
The twenties also did not start cheerfully. Russia further squeezed democracy, with the poisoning and arrest of activist Alexei Navalny as the low point for the time being. China banned criticism of President Xi Jinping and called to order entrepreneurs who had strayed very far from the Communist Manifesto. Alibaba founder Jack Ma, who gave a controversial dinner for kings and prime ministers at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019, was suddenly missing for three months. Tennis star Peng Shuai temporarily disappeared after accusing a former deputy prime minister of sexual assault. In Belarus, the wimpy autocrat Aleksandr Lukashenko turned out to be a potentate. And on January 6, 2021, supporters of a US president who lost the election stormed the Capitol. America!
Report after report underpins the shift from democracy to autocracy
Report after report underpins the shift from democracy to autocracy. According to the American NGO Freedom House, democracy has been losing ground for 15 years. According to NGO IDEA, there have been more every year for five years in a row countries that become more autocratic than countries that become more democratic. The 2021 Freedom House report was titled: Besieged Democracy (Democracy under Siege).
There are 196 countries that are members of the UN, but only 23 pass for full democracy. Together they account for only 8.5 percent of the world’s population. At the top of the list of countries that are quickly sliding into autocracy are two member states of the European Union: Poland and Hungary.
The diagnosis ‘democratic recession’, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken calls it, has often been made. Now is the time to push back.
Hence my scrapbook for men and women who, like Navalny, stand up at the risk of their lives against the regime that gags them. In that category belongs Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who became opposition leader in Belarus, fled to the Lithuanian capital Vilnius and had to leave her husband in a Belarusian prison. Hong Kong’s resistance heroes, such as Tony Chung and Nathan Law in their twenties, are also given a place of honour. Behind Navalny, Tikhanoskaja and Law hide thousands of anonymous heroes – in Russia, Belarus, Hong Kong, in Myanmar, everywhere where freedom is not common.
The resistance heroes are moral winners, but political losers. They cannot cope with the supremacy of the autocratic state, which considers itself untouchable and does not have to take responsibility. Autocrats rely on repression (and a 24/7 police force), professional propaganda (with accomplices disguised as journalists), and a network of loyal oligarchs (with a twist of corruption), Anne Applebaum analyzed in a beautiful piece in The Atlantic. And then the autocrats help each other as well. When mass demonstrations in Belarus cornered Lukashenko, Russia sent aid.
The resistance heroes also need help. But how do you organize that?
Not so long ago, the democratic West was so self-confident that democracy was exported with flying colors. This summer, however, the attempt to make Afghanistan a democracy ended in utter chaos after nearly two decades – the worst loss of face to the West since the US retreat from Saigon in 1975. After the traumatic fall of Kabul, ‘nation-building’ discontinued for the time being.
The democratic West switched from offensive to defensive. To put a stop to declining democracy, Joe Biden convened a summit of Democrats in December. It was intended as a coaching moment, ‘a round of applause for yourself’. It was, columnist Janan Ganesh observed in the Financial Times, also a sign of weakness: if there are no problems, you don’t have to meet.
After the traumatic fall of Kabul, ‘nation-building’ done for now
Democracy, we now see sharply again, you cannot inject from the outside as a vaccine against Covid, even if you chase after it an international force and billions in support as a booster. The resistance heroes know that large-scale support is not in it – if that is a realistic option. The idea of western occupation of Belarus is absurd.
So back to modesty and small steps. An entire democracy industry has grown to support freedom struggles – think of the NGOs that champion human rights and the organizations that closely observe democracy. Western parliamentarians are also happy to help foreign opposition leaders. Tikhanovskaya spoke for the second time in the European Parliament last month. A delegation of MEPs flew to Taiwan, which feels threatened by China. The visits are mutually beneficial: the opposition leader gets a podium, the parliamentarian polishes his resume.
Visibility helps, as does money. The European Union is allocating 1.5 billion euros over the next seven years to support democrats. The US laid on Biden’s democracy summit $425 million on the table.
But democracy cannot be bought with money and good will alone. Democracy has to prove itself. The Democracy Summit Wasn’t Much, But Biden Was Right About One Thing: Democracy must show that it is able to provide prosperity and security to free citizens.
Democracy must first and foremost be defended at home. That does happen. Brussels is not going to just accept undermining the rule of law by Warsaw and Budapest. And more and more attention is being paid to the dark sides of Chinese investments in Europe and the export of European top technology to China.
But the free West can also still be abused as a willing accomplice. Paris ships weapons to the Middle East in family packaging, London is a real estate paradise for kleptocrats and Amsterdam is happy to assist with paperwork for dubious money flows.
The Russian NGO Memorial, which has been threatened with closure, has been receiving money from the West for years, founded by the dissident Andrei Sakharov and custodian of the memory of Stalin’s prison camps. Three years ago I was a guest there, accompanied by the Dutch ambassador. In a crowded basement in the center of Moscow, the leadership thanked them for money and attention. But she also had a message: take care of your rule of law, the European rule of law is our example. The best way to support human rights in Russia is to uphold their own democracy, was their lesson. While the West cannot export democracy, it can try to be a beacon for the heroes in the scrapbook.
#Democracy #injected #vaccine #Covid