Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl & Thomas Wright

Author:Colin Kahl & Thomas Wright [Kahl, Colin & Wright, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: political science, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Diplomacy
ISBN: 9781250275752
Google: PggQEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2021-08-24T00:01:53.443523+00:00

THE GLOBAL DEMOCRATIC RECESSION

In 1991, the late Harvard University political scientist Samuel Huntington coined the phrase “the third wave” to describe a surge of political liberalization and democratic governance across the globe that started in the 1970s and 1980s and accelerated after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union two years later. According to Huntington, the first wave involved the gradual spread of democracy in the nineteenth century, and the second occurred in the decades after World War II. Each wave was followed by reversals, with some countries slipping back into autocracy. Yet even if it felt like a two-steps-forward-one-step-back development, the aggregate number of democracies worldwide increased.30 Then, as the Cold War ended, former Soviet republics and communist nations in eastern Europe moved toward greater political freedom. The end of superpower patronage also forced many military regimes and one-party dictatorships in the developing world to transition toward democracy. As a result, the third wave accelerated.

Using data from the organization Freedom House—which annually scores countries based on ten measures of political rights and fifteen measures of civil liberties—and other sources, Stanford University’s Larry Diamond estimates that by 1993, the majority of countries with a minimum of 1 million people (seventy-seven in total) were democratic. According to Diamond, the number of democracies peaked in 2006 at eighty-six.31 Another analysis, by the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem), based on an even more robust database of political indicators from 1789 to the present, found that the number of democracies reached its height at ninety-eight in 2010.32

Then things took a turn. During the 2010s, a “third wave of autocratization” took hold.33 Trends were particularly bleak in the years immediately preceding the pandemic. According to Freedom House, twenty-two of the forty-one countries consistently rated “free” from 1985 to 2005 registered a net reduction in freedom in the five years before COVID-19 emerged.34 V-Dem found that democracy declined in twenty-six countries in 2019 alone. For the first time since 2001, the majority of countries (ninety-two) were autocracies, and for the first time since the end of the Cold War, the majority of the world’s people (54 percent) did not live in a democracy. All the trends seemed to be going in the wrong direction: 35 percent of the global population lived in countries undergoing autocratization, while only 8 percent lived in countries that were becoming more democratic.35

Some democracies in this period fell from uprisings and coups. For example, in 2013, Egypt’s military rode popular unrest to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohamed Morsi. In Thailand in 2014, a coup replaced a fragile democracy with a military junta. But more often, democratic backsliding emerged from illiberal leaders duly elected—such as Vladimir Putin in Russia, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh, Narendra Modi in India, Jaroslaw Kaczyński and Andrzej Duda in Poland, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil—who then chipped away at the institutional checks and balances, norms, and civil liberties that undergird free societies.

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