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On Democracy

This month US president Joe Biden will host an important virtual forum in Washington called the Summit for Democracy to which 110 countries have been invited. Promotion of democracy has been a fixture of US foreign policy for more than a century. Woodrow Wilson took America to WWI in order to “make the world safe for democracy.” Ronald Reagan said that “democracy is worth dying for because it is the most honorable form of government ever devised by man,” which implies that it is a divine mission to liberate people in non-democratic countries. George W. Bush built on this idea, pushing what he called “Freedom Agenda.” He tried to democratize the Middle East and Afghanistan at a huge cost of blood and money. After four years of relative withdrawal from the democracy obsession under Trump, Biden has again brought the idea of spreading democracy to the center of US foreign policy.

The Biden administration has effectively divided the world into two halves. Roughly half of the world’s countries were designated as democracies and were invited to his summit, while the other half were found insufficiently democratic to merit an invitation. Indeed, Washington appointed itself to be the appraiser of democracy, and the grader of other countries according to western yardsticks. For example, Turkey, Hungary, Singapore, Serbia and other countries where democratic elections are held regularly were not invited. But India, Poland, Pakistan and the Philippines which according to different rankings fare worse, and where human rights abuses occur, were invited, in part because they serve Washington’s geopolitical agenda.

History shows that Washington’s commitment to democracy goes only as far as its interests allow.

Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran prime minister in the 1950s, Salvaotre Allende the president of Chile in the 1970s, Lula de Silva, president of Brazil in the 2000s, Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, Viktor Yanukovych president of Ukraine, and Tayip Erdogan president of Turkey were all democratically elected – whether for the benefit or detriment of their people is an entirely separate question. But their election was insufficient for Washington to accept them as legitimate leaders, and the US took active measures to replace them with more US-friendly leaders. On the other hand, Washington had no problem engaging and even arming ruthless dictators when it suited its interests. It supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran; it cozied up to the House of Saud to ensure oil price stability; it supported, Anastasio Somoza (Nicaragua), Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), Mobutu Sese Seko (Congo), Augusto Pinochet (Chile), Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the former shah of Iran), Mohammed Zia ul-Haq (Pakistan), Syngman Rhee (South Korea) and Suharto (Indonesia) – just to prevent them from falling on the side of the Soviets.

Democracy, it seems, is the best form of government as long as it is governed by US-friendly regimes.

We are living in an era of great changes in the international system and many of our conventions, including the superiority of the democratic system, are being tested. The Greek philosopher Aristotle used the term telos as a way to inquire into the grand objective of everything in nature. The telos of a seed is to grow a tree. The telos of the state is first and foremost to defend its people from external enemies but also from each other, and to enable the conditions for a society to function, giving individuals not only the basic conditions to survive but also the opportunity to elevate themselves and fulfil their dreams.

For generations, it has become an article of faith that democracy is the one superior form of government which all nations and cultures must aspire to. In his book The End of History Francis Fukuyama argued that the universalization of Western liberal democracy is the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution. Or in the words of Winston Churchill, “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.” This dogma has been inculcated in the brains of millions of schoolchildren and students through the media, academia and politicians.

Then came Covid-19. The current pandemic is a unique event in human history. It is not the first time countries are called to deal with disruptive events. Wars, natural disasters, terrorism, etc. have always been part of the human experience. But Covid-19 is the first time since the establishment of the nation state that all countries of the world are facing the exact same challenge at the exact same time. Each and every one has to deal with the exact same opponent – a tiny virus – at the exact same time. Each country adopted a different strategy to deal with the challenge based on its culture, national character, political system and economic conditions. Some, like China, opted for zero infection policy. Others completely opened their economies and borders. While others have hybridized and zigzagged between the two approaches. Some impose limits on movement, force vaccinations and mandate masks. Others not. All of this enables us to do something we could not have done till now – to compare how different societies and forms of government cope with a similar situation.  

We can also measure with empirical data the impact of our policies. How many got sick? How many died? What was the impact on growth, household debt, mental health, level of social cohesion, etc.If one is to judge by the axiom that the role of government is to protect its people, the evidence is that liberal democracies have been ineffective in protecting their people. Democracies were among the worst performers in dealing with the pandemic.

Of the top 100 countries with the highest death rate per 1,000,000 people, 85 are the very same democracies invited to Biden’s Summit for Democracy. Of the more than 5 million people who died from Covid-19 more than 80 percent lived in democracies. Not only did democracies fail to defend their people, in the name of democracy and freedom they left their borders open, importing the virus, as they valued continuous international travel more highly than protecting their population.

Of course, Covid-19 performance is only one metric to judge the efficacy of democracy. There are many others which one can look at but none is as empirical and comparative. Democracy may be a better system in ensuring people’s right of expression, organization, and other elements of life which can contribute to happiness, but when it comes to ensuring life itself it left much to be desired. Of course, we can test other variables: drug addiction, crime, homelessness, depression, suicide, incarceration, etc. But the Covid stress test should give us all a pause.  

If we are indeed in a “beauty contest,” let’s develop metrics and mechanisms to compare state performance rather than falling into simplistic binary choices between democracy and authoritarianism.

Instead of going to the Washington summit to test against a set of metrics dictated by the west, let’s join in a summit to define a new set of human development metrics - happiness, opportunity, optimism about the future – and test against them.

We must accept that just like democracy comes in various shades of gray so does authoritarianism. Not all democracies work for their people, and not all authoritarian regimes fail their people. We must also accept that there is no one-size-fits-all form of government. Each society is best suited to determine its best form of government based on its own unique culture, history, values and understanding of the role of the individual in society. Who decides? The people, not the empire du jour.

As China and the collective west are now in a strategic rivalry that is to some extent ideological, I want to make a point about the state of the West. America is not only a country. It’s an idea. The American idea, which developed in the middle of the 19th century, comprised three elements: that all people are created equal, that all possess unalienable rights, and that all should have the opportunity to develop and enjoy those rights. Securing those three elements required “a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.” Over time, racial, gender, ethnic and religious barriers were eroded and the western society became more pluralistic.

But now both Europe and America are in the process of over-compensation. Their need to repent for past sins – slavery in the case of America and colonialism in the case of Europeans – result in the abandonment of their core culture in exchange for the elusive vision of multiculturalism, identity politics, globalization and the rise of the world’s fastest growing religion – “new-paganism” – the amalgamation of climate hysteria, rejection of traditional family values, cancel culture, preoccupation with sexual identity, and obsession with self-gratification.

For many, this is what democracy is all about. For me it seems more like cultural anarchy and historical amnesia.

At the same time, while western democracy is confused and in search of a way, non-democratic countries increasingly realize that instead of emulating the mistakes of the west they must craft their own style of representative government, one that suits them – not the people in Brussels and Washington.    

The constitution of the United States is a fascinating document. But what appealed to me the most in it is the humility expressed by its first line: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union…” By using the term “a more perfect union,” rather than “a perfect union” the constitution acknowledges that democracy does not lend itself to perfection. It has an inherent capacity to improve and self-correct, but it can never reach perfection. All one can do and should do is to strive for improvement. It is true for democracies, but it is no less true for all other forms of government.

（Dr. Gal Luft is co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. Above is the full transcript of Dr. Gal Luft’s speech for the International Forum on Democracy: the Shared Human Values” held in Beijing on December 4-5.)

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