Fading democracies

S P SETH

Increasingly there is something unsavory about old democracies like the US and UK. Not that their example was ever terribly inspiring. The US practiced institutionalized slavery, and its Afro-American citizens are still subject to discrimination, notwithstanding the fact that Obama is now the country’s President. For instance, a raft of legislation by some states in the United States requiring identity papers for voting is patently intended to curb the country’s black population from exercising their electoral rights. In other words, Jim Crow laws, in another garb, are once again making their appearance to negate the progress made under the country’s civil rights legislation. In the case of the United Kingdom, its so-called democracy was very selective and discriminatory, with colonies simply acting as the fodder for its prosperity. And they had to wait till they were considered ready to become self-governing and eventually independent.

The question then is: how did the US and UK become the world’s ‘model’ democracies? The simple answer is that their power and prosperity built on the sweat and labor of other people-- slaves in the US, and colonies for the UK-- gave them the ‘right’ to set universal standards which others had no choice but to follow. And it continued even as the old order built on slavery and colonies started to ebb away.  With a new order that emerged after WW 11, the victorious western bloc managed to create and command new international institutions, set up new models and norms that every other country needed to follow. Those who didn’t were denied access to capital, technology and political legitimacy, thus facing the prospect of being condemned to backwardness and poverty.

In other words, it was a new version of colonialism where the imperial power, comprising the US and its western allies, created an economic and political cartel, with the supposedly newly independent countries continuing to provide the raw materials and other sinews of prosperity. These new nations (the former colonies) came to be categorized as the ‘third world’ to the ‘first world’ comprising the US and its partners. The Soviet Union, a wartime ally of the western nations but with its own ideological and power ambitions, refused to submerge into the US-led cartel, thus starting the long Cold War between the US-led camp (called the ‘free world’) and Soviet-led bloc, behind an ‘iron curtain’. They constituted the ‘second world’.

The world now had a new hierarchy of the ‘first world’ (the US and its western allies), the ‘second world’ (the Soviet-led bloc) and the ‘third world’, the lowest order comprising former colonies and countries in the Western Hemisphere under US control. And when the Soviet Union collapsed due to a variety of reasons, the United States and its allies declared victory for the capitalist system and western democracy, holding it as a model for the rest of the world. Francis Fukuyama, a US academic and political philosopher, declared it the “End of History” in his book. He argued that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government, “ and as such constituted the “end of history.” At the time, there was a lot of cheerful jubilation and those even mildly questioning this thesis were, more or less, consigned to purgatory.

Another important global political development was the change of political direction in China in the eighties from Mao’s creed of perpetual revolution to a new emphasis on economic growth. This change would be effected through the continued monopoly power of the Communist Party of China (CPC) under the leadership of its powerful leader, Deng Xiaoping.  The CPC vehemently rejected the western political model of multi-party democracy, considered too risky for China’s stability. But the party’s monopoly power was challenged in 1989 by a students-led democracy movement that was crushed with the use of military force at the behest of the party’s supreme leader, Deng Xiaoping.

 After some internal party struggle in which the CPC’s general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, a Deng appointee, was purged and spent rest of his life under house arrest, China returned to its path of making the state strong through faster economic growth. And that model is continuing to this day, making China the world’s emerging superpower. But the politics of monopoly power wielded by the party is now creating problems arising from entrenched corruption in the system and lack of transparency and accountability. In other words, even though China is emerging as a superpower, its political model of one-party state lacks drawing power. It will, therefore, remain a distant second in terms of exercising soft power that the US still commands. Even some of the top CPC leaders send their children for advanced education at universities in the US and UK.

However, the US and the United Kingdom are increasingly seeking to exercise the attributes of a surveillance state and thus losing their high moral ground. They have often strongly criticized countries, like China and Russia, for doing exactly the same to control their citizens and to stifle debate and dissent. The attributes of a surveillance state are revealed by the whistle blower, Edward Snowden, by leaking the workings of the US National Security Agency which spies on millions of its citizens and foreigners through phone taps and a whole range of electronic data mining from internet servers and social media sites. Snowden was granted asylum in Russia for one year, now extended for another three years, as no other country wanted the US wrath on its head by doing the same. His asylum in Russia has caused serious friction in US-Russia relations, now worsened by the Ukranian crisis. The sort of pressure and coercion applied by the US to nab Snowden is just unbelievable, as if one person holds the key to unraveling the US state.

The US must be a very fragile state if it would feel so vulnerable to the activities of a lone whistleblower. It is not that Snowden was a spy working for material gain. From all that has come out so far, here is a young man with a conscience who felt strongly about the workings of his state where every citizen was vulnerable, if its intelligence agencies chose to hunt him out. Another lone whistle blower, Bradley Manning, who leaked a swathe of cables to WikiLeaks because of his troubled conscience, is now serving a long prison sentence for his act; while Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is cooped up in the Ecuador embassy in London for fear of ending up in the US for publishing the stuff passed on by Manning. All this doesn’t reflect well on a country, like the US, which is so proud of its democracy. 

Note: This article first appeared in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au  

  

Ukraine: the politics of a plane disaster

S P SETH

One would expect that the horrible tragedy in which 298 people died, when the Malaysian airline plane was brought down over eastern Ukraine, would create a spontaneous outpouring of sympathy and compassion for the families of those so tragically cut down. But such is the primacy of politics that, depending on which side you are on, the entire thrust appears to be how best to blame the opposite side. As far as one can see, and hopefully that would hold, there is no suggestion that the civilian plane and its passengers were deliberately targeted. Whoever and from wherever in Ukraine the missile was fired, the civilian plane was an unintended target.

There are two competing narratives, with the US and its allies’ making the most running as they control much of the international media. According to this narrative, a missile fired by Ukrainian separatists, operating in eastern Ukraine, brought down the Malaysian plane. And that the missile in question was supplied by Russia and, possibly, operated by Russian trained personnel or even Russian nationals operating as separatists. Therefore, Russia is the real villain, with or without its direct involvement, because of its support and encouragement of separatism, which created the conditions for such a tragedy. The UN Security Council resolution, calling for an independent investigation of the “downing” of the Malaysia plane, would hopefully throw light on this, though the investigation is hampered because of the unsettled situation in the region.

The argument goes that since the plane tragedy is a byproduct of Russia’s involvement in separatism in eastern Ukraine, Russia must not only dissociate from the Ukrainian issue but also help Kiev put together the sundered country by prevailing on Russian-speaking Ukrainians to lay down their arms. In this narrative, the real issue is Ukraine’s unity threatened with Moscow’s intervention on behalf of the rebels. And the plane tragedy unfortunately is a convenient political tactic to pile up more pressure on Moscow. In the event that Russia is not complying, the US and European Union have imposed further sanctions intended to hurt its economy. The death of 298 passengers, on its own, is a terrible disaster. But by making it a political football, it tends to cheapen us all. A letter-writer in the Sydney Morning Herald highlighted the cheap political scoring going on when he pointed out, “But when the American ship USS Vincennes shot down an Iran Air A300 in the Persian Gulf in 1988, the 290 civilian passengers killed were largely Iranians.” The correspondent John Clark added, “I cannot remember the Western world making very much of a fuss about this tragedy.”

The competing Russian narrative, of course, denies any role in the whole plane saga and/or the Ukraine’s political crisis. They blame Kiev for trying to impose a military solution to the country’s crisis by sending in troops and air force to crush the separatist rebellion in the country’s eastern region, rather than seeking a political solution through dialogue. And there is a suggestion that this might have caused a stray missile from the government side to hit the Malaysian plane, though there is no proof so far that Kiev or, for that matter, the separatists were responsible for the tragedy. The west blames Russia for fomenting, encouraging and aiding separatists in eastern Ukraine thus creating a situation conducive to such a tragedy. Moscow similarly blames the US for having, in the first place, encouraged a coup to bring down the duly elected Ukrainian regime, followed by elections in which almost half the country in the east and south didn’t participate. In other words, the present Ukrainian government, in the wake of the “coup” and following the less than credible elections, has problems of legitimacy.

Moscow wants a political dialogue between Kiev and the separatists. The plane disaster and the international outrage over it has only emboldened Kiev to push with its military solution through sending in tanks, troops and air force to impose unification. This has sent civilian population fleeing across the border into Russia that might bring it into the conflict directly or indirectly. Which, in turn, is likely to bring in the US and its European allies to impose more economic sanctions and even some sort of military involvement. Russia, on its part, has retaliated with its own economic sanctions on the west by imposing a wide-ranging ban on food imports from these countries.  Where will all this end up is anybody’s guess?

Even though the international investigation into the downing of the Malaysian flight has still to come to any conclusion, if that were possible in the circumstances, the US and its European allies have already judged that Russia and Ukrainian separatists were to blame. They have thus taken on themselves the role of the prosecutor, the judge and the jury. In this way Russia is being painted as a pariah state, unless it were to dissociate from the rebels. Better still, it should help Kiev to put down the rebellion in the east. The US and its allies sense that Moscow is on the defensive and if the political and economic pressure is maintained, it might wilt. And that, in due course of time, Ukraine will be coopted politically, economically and militarily into the European Union and, eventually NATO, thus completing Russia’s encirclement and dashing Putin’s vision of recreating a competing version of a new/old power centre.

Will it be that easy for the US and its allies to humiliate Russia once again, after the collapse of the Soviet Union? They obviously think that it will, if the pressure is maintained. The basic strategy is to deny Russia access to western capital markets through a graduated process of economic sanctions on Russian banks, energy companies and other economic enterprises. Until recently, the key European countries, Germany and France in particular, weren’t as enthusiastic about this blanket US strategy, as they have considerable stakes in trade and investments with Russia. How will Moscow deal with such concerted pressure against the backdrop of the moral opprobrium, deserved or not, of the Malaysian plane disaster? So far, Moscow has been dealing with it by toning down its support for the rebels, although how far this will last is difficult to predict with the Kiev forces making significant gains against the separatists? At the same time, the US and Europe will press home their political advantage to make Ukraine into a frontline state of the EU and, later, of NATO. How these competing games will eventually play out will remain to be seen?

Note: This article first appeared in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au