Democracy by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2024-05-16T20:00:00+00:00

Kaja Kallas has been the Prime Minister of Estonia since 2021, the first woman to serve in the role. The leader of Estonia’s Reform Party since 2018, she was a member of the European Parliament between 2014 and 2018. Before entering politics, she was a lawyer specialising in European competition law.

WHAT THE WEST FORGOT ABOUT DEMOCRACY

Erica Benner

Democracies have always presented themselves as beacons of human progress. In 431 BCE, the statesman Pericles declared that Athens’ democracy was ‘the school for all Greece’ – while over the past two centuries, democracy warriors everywhere have measured their countries’ success or failure by comparison with Western models: American, British, French, Swedish. It’s harder to do so now that these formerly self-congratulating democracies are doing battle with new and older demons. Today, millions of people around the world crave freedom from authoritarian rule. Yet when they hear almost daily that the liberal heartlands are plagued with inflation, strikes, high crime rates, gun violence and voters who care little about truth, many of them doubt that democracy is the best alternative.

In 2024 more people than ever before will vote in national elections, in countries containing nearly half the world’s population. But even where elections are not just window-dressing for authoritarian rule, today’s voters worry that deep-faked misinformation, rigged electoral procedures or outright fraud might drown out their already small voice. And even where authoritarian-leaning candidates suffer apparently legitimate defeats, the fear that they and their supporters might reject election results looms ever larger – not least in the world-leading democracy, the United States.

‘So many people I know are giving up on democracy,’ said my new friend Vaibhav when we met while travelling through Xinjiang in western China last summer. He worked at an international bank in Hong Kong, and lived there through the pro-democracy protests in 2019–20, then strict lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of the sceptics were Vaibhav’s colleagues from East Asian countries and his native India. Feeling helpless about politics but wanting to do some good in the world – even bankers worry about losing their souls, he insisted – they focus on what they call ‘development’: improving technological knowhow, winning new markets and beating their rivals for the sake of country as well as company. ‘They think we should give more power to technocrats, or to leaders who offer a clear vision for our country.’

Other doubters were still reeling from the results of controversial popular votes in Britain, the US and beyond. If democracy can’t deliver leaders or policies that command widespread trust, they ask, how can it help us navigate dangerous global rivalries, brutal wars, climate disaster and digital technologies that mislead citizens and split them into warring camps?

The spread of global pessimism about the superior merits of democracy can be deeply unsettling for people whose political mindsets were configured during the Cold War. Growing up in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, I was taught that democracy was unquestionably the best kind of government ever invented, getting better and better each decade.

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