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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The underlying idea of democracy — that governments are accountable to the governed — is still valued in large parts of the world. How else is one to explain the fact that more than half the world’s population will be voting this year? Yet the world has also been in what Stanford University’s Larry Diamond calls a “democratic recession” for almost two decades. The power of autocratic China has risen. Vladimir Putin has throttled democracy in Russia. Authoritarianism is triumphing in many countries. The re-election of Donald Trump, after his attempt to overthrow the result of the last US presidential election, would also be a decisive change in the world’s most influential democracy.
Yet, what is going on is not mostly a loss of confidence in elections themselves. After all, authoritarians often use elections to sanctify their power. As Francis Fukuyama argues in his recent book, Liberalism and its Discontents, “[I]t is the liberal institutions that have come under immediate attack”. He is referring here to core constraining institutions — courts, non-partisan bureaucracies and independent media. We are seeing a loss of confidence in liberalism, the set of beliefs that seemed so triumphant after the fall of the Soviet Union.
What then is liberalism? I addressed this in a column published in the summer of 2019, in response to a claim by Putin that “the so-called liberal idea . . . has outlived its purpose”. Liberalism, I argued, is not what Americans usually think it is, because their country’s history is unique. What liberals share is trust in human beings to decide things for themselves. That implies the right to make their own plans, express their own opinions and participate in public life.
Such an ability to exercise agency depends on possession of economic and political rights. Institutions are needed to protect those rights. But such agency also depends on markets, to co-ordinate economic actors, free media, to debate truth, and political parties, to organise politics. Behind such institutions are values and norms of behaviour: a sense of citizenship; belief in the need to tolerate those who differ from oneself; and the distinction between private gain and public purpose needed to curb corruption.
Liberalism is an attitude, not a complete philosophy of the world. It recognises inevitable conflicts and choices. It is both universal and particular, idealistic and pragmatic. It recognises that there can be no final answers to the question of how humans are to live together. Yet there are still underlying principles.
Societies based on liberal principles are the most successful in world history. But both they and their ideas are also embattled.
As the Centre for the Future of Democracy noted in a report published at the end of 2022, Russia’s invasion galvanised support for Ukraine among western liberal democracies. But the opposite has happened in much of the rest of the world. “As a result, China and Russia are now narrowly ahead of the US in their popularity among developing countries.” This is surely sobering. Moreover, adds the report, based on surveys that cover 97 per cent of the world’s population, this “cannot be reduced to simple economic interests or geopolitical convenience. Rather, it follows a clear political and ideological divide. Across the world, the strongest predictors of how societies align . . . are their fundamental values and institutions — including beliefs in freedom of expression, personal choice, and the extent to which democratic institutions are practised and perceived to be legitimate.”
A neat way of looking at this is provided by the “Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map”, from the World Values Survey. It maps values on two axes: one shows the focus on “self-expression” relative to “survival”, the other shows the focus on “secular” relative to “traditional” values. Notably, different regions of the world are in very different places. The emphasis on self-expression (a core liberal value) is relatively high in western Europe and English-speaking countries, with African-Islamic countries at the opposite end. Interestingly, “Confucian” societies are higher on secular, against traditional, values than the US. The big point, however, is that differences in values are profound. Some aspects of liberalism — free markets, for example, — travel quite easily, but others — changing gender norms, say — do not.
Yet the resistance to liberalism is evident not only abroad. It is also domestic. Fukuyama brings out, for example, how the progressive left and reactionary right agree on the centrality of group identities to US politics. They agree, too, that their differences are over which groups hold power, rather than over how best to create equal opportunities for individuals. But clashes over power are a zero-sum game. Moreover, the “progressive” left seems to have forgotten that, in an identity war, minorities are almost certain to lose. Why are these activists unable to understand that obvious point?
With liberalism embattled not just across the world, but even in its heartlands, it is easy to believe that the future lies with authoritarian politics and traditional social values. If so, this century might echo the previous one, albeit without that era’s revolutionary fervour. The appeal of the “great leader” who will take everything upon himself seems eternal. So, too, are the comforts of tribalism, traditional hierarchies and timeworn truths. So, too, is the charisma of the revolutionary prophet who promises to transform a society for the better. Conflicts over power and ways of life are inevitable.
Moreover, freedom will always mean difficult choices. It is necessarily limited. It does mean responsibility, anxiety and insecurity. Yet freedom is precious. It must be defended, however difficult that task might be.