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