THROUGHOUT history, the human desire for individual freedom and dignity has been in conflict with the collective fear of insecurity and disorder. As the late Nobel Prize-winning economist, Douglass North, asserted with co-authors John Wallis and Barry Weingast in their seminal book, Violence and Social Orders, until about two or three centuries ago, the natural state of human civilization was one of closed or limited access to power and wealth. Power was exercised and wealth was extracted on the basis of personal ties and hierarchical relations of domination and exploitation. This did not generate economic development, but it did solve the first-order problem of all human societies – controlling violence.

Development got going, and eventually democracy as well, when impersonal rules and formal organizations – what we call ‘institutions’ – emerged to protect property rights, facilitate the free movement of goods and individuals, ‘ensure open entry and competition’ in markets, and constitutionally limit the power of those in control of violence. Since the 18th century, the story of political development can be seen as a struggle between rule by personal ties, through closed access, and the rule of law and institutions, through open access.

The last two centuries have seen progress toward ‘open access’ orders, featuring democratic governments and reasonably open and competitive markets (though North, Wallis and Weingast stressed that only a few dozen countries had attained the truly liberal institutions, with a democratic rule of law, that qualify as fully ‘open access’ orders). But history teaches us that progress is not linear and irreversible. Each of the two previous waves of democratic expansion identified by the late Samuel P. Huntington have been followed by ‘reverse waves’ in which the number of democratic breakdowns greatly exceeded transitions to democracy. The first reverse wave, beginning in the 1920s, brought a halt to the long slow expansion of democracy in Europe and the Americas, and culminated in the global calamity of fascism and World War II. The second reverse wave, beginning in 1958, ended a number of weak and tentative postcolonial democracies but gave way in the mid-1970s to a third wave of global democratic expansion.

The third wave has transformed global politics to an unprecedented degree. By the late 1990s, it had established electoral democracy as the dominant form of government in the world, with about 60 per cent of the world’s states and at least a significant presence everywhere but in the Middle East. Well over a third of all countries had also become liberal democracies, with reasonably good protections for human rights, accountability, and the rule of law.¹ With the spread of democracy came the unification of Europe and an overall decline in civil and inter-state warfare (despite the impression given by the headlines).

This was also a historic period of global progress in economic development and human health and well-being. To be sure, the bulk of this progress, particularly in poverty reduction, came in authoritarian China – leaving democrats globally squirming in discomfort with the comparison to democratic India’s more lacklustre progress. However, in Africa the reverse pattern prevailed: Most of the gains in economic growth, life expectancy, and education came in the region’s democracies and near democracies, which were also as a group distinctly less corrupt.

 

The first ten to fifteen years following the end of the Cold War were a heady period for democrats globally, epitomized by Francis Fukuyama’s famous formulation (and book), The End of History. The demise of communism globally and the rapid expansion of democracy, with liberal norms and aspirations, seemed to Fukuyama and many others to mark a kind of final triumph of the democratic ideal and model. In the future, Fukuyama argued, there could well be setbacks and rivals, but there would not be again a global ideological rival to the incomparable pairing of liberal democracy and market economies. As global integration proceeded under these norms, and even China began to embrace capitalism, the grand ideological contest of systemic models seemed to be over.

However, the new century has left us no shortage of evidence to underscore that history is not so clear and linear. Already, by the early 2000s, I believe (and was saying at the time) that there was evidence that a ‘third reverse wave’ might be gathering shape. The military coup in Pakistan seemed to be a harbinger of possible future breakdowns of shallow democracies, and many of the new ‘democracies’ in Africa seemed tentative and weak at best. But as the twenty-first century unfolded it became increasingly apparent that the greatest danger of democratic rollback was not in the old-fashioned form of military coups or blatant executive seizures of power – such as Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian declaration of a state of emergency in 1975. Rather it came in the more subtle and incremental form of the gradual degradation of constitutional constraints, checks and balances, and civil liberties by ruling executives and parties. These new enemies of democracy were typically no less corrupt and greedy for power than their blatantly authoritarian kin, but they were constrained by local and/or international norms from behaving in blatantly authoritarian fashion.

 

Around this time, comparative political science scholarship on regimes took a sharper, more focused look at this phenomenon of ‘hybrid regimes’, which combined features of genuine multiparty electoral competition with serious abridgement of the freedom and fairness of that process, and of the accountability and transparency of governments once ‘elected’. In a breakthrough for the field, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way gave the name ‘competitive authoritarianism’ to a set of regimes that had the outward form of multiparty democracy, including the significant presence of opposition in the parliament (and even in control of some sub-national governments), but where the political playing field was so distorted by ruling party advantages, weak institutions of restraint, and media distortions that the electoral process could not be said to be free and fair.

In their pathbreaking book on the subject, Levitsky and Way analysed why some competitive authoritarian regimes in the post-Cold War period made transitions to democracy and others not, but no less noteworthy was the gradual descent of a number of countries – including Venezuela and Russia early in the new century, and then Honduras, Nicaragua and, more recently and consequentially, Turkey and Bangladesh – from electoral democracies into competitive authoritarian regimes. And of course some of these countries, including Russia and now Turkey, have kept deteriorating into more brutally repressive autocracies. Now, under a new abusive president, Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines is in danger of treading the same path.

 

This regression from democracy to competitive authoritarianism has always come in illiberal democracies, that is, democratic regimes that already had serious problems with respect to human rights, corruption, political inclusion, and the rule of law. Over the past decade, it has been the leading factor in a persistent global democratic recession indicated by the following facts:

* For each of the last eleven consecutive years, beginning with 2006 and running through 2016, more countries have declined than have gained in their levels of freedom (that is, political rights and/or civil liberties, as measured annually by Freedom House).

* Since 2005, there has been no net overall improvement in the number of democracies in the world, nor in the number and proportion of liberal democracies.

* The rate of democratic breakdown (whether gradual or sudden) has been accelerating, and in the last decade it was twice the level (17 per cent of all democracies in that decade) of what it was two decades before.

* Many of the states often characterized as electoral democracies (by Freedom House and others) have such serious distortions of the electoral process, and/or civil liberties, and or accountability, that they are more properly classified as competitive authoritarian regimes. These include Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania. One used to have to argue about Turkey, but after Prime Minister – now President – Recep Tayyip Erdogan has so thoroughly decimated independent actors in the party system, the judiciary, civil society, and the mass media, no one can any longer maintain with a straight face that Turkey is a democracy.

* A number of established democracies – some reasonably liberal, like South Africa and Brazil, and others illiberal like Indonesia and the Philippines – have faced growing problems of corruption, executive abuse of power, or ethnic and religious intolerance. In short, the quality of democracy is slipping and so probably is its stability.

* Many authoritarian regimes have become more openly and ruthlessly authoritarian, and the big ones – particularly Russia, China, and Iran – have been developing more technologically sophisticated mechanisms of control and preemption of opposition, while coordinating more closely with one another. They are also much more active in using ‘soft power’ to promote authoritarian counter-norms and even infiltrate and corrupt democratic processes in other countries, as Russia famously did in the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign.

 

By 2015, I was seriously worried that these trends were increasingly threatening to graduate from a mild democratic recession to a severe one, if not a third ‘reverse wave’ in which, for some period of time, there would be significant decline in the number of democracies in the world. And something else was becoming a matter of concern: A right wing populist government in Hungary had managed to entrench itself in power, marginalize the opposition and impose constraints in the society and the judicial system, and modify the constitution to entrench its advantages. It had done so under an exceptionally deft and skilful demagogue, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who railed against liberal elites and the arrogance of European Union bureaucrats who were allegedly robbing the country of its sovereignty. Then in 2015 a right wing, anti-immigrant populist party, Law and Justice, swept to power in Poland, first in the presidential election in May and then in the more important parliamentary elections in October.

Suddenly there were two important post-communist European countries in which deeply illiberal – and arguably anti-democratic – political parties had come to power and begun to dismantle the liberal architecture of institutions – rules and courts and independent media and civil society organizations – designed to monitor and limit the arbitrary exercise of executive power. This process has probably advanced so far in Hungary that it is no longer a real electoral democracy, and some observers think the only reason Poland has not crossed that line is because the new ruling Law and Justice Party did not win a sufficient parliamentary majority to amend the constitution.

 

The right wing populist electoral victories in Poland were followed in 2016 by two electoral earthquakes: the Brexit vote in the UK in June and the election of Donald Trump in November. Each of these insurgent campaigns mobilized populist grievances against what were depicted as corrupt, arrogant liberal establishments that had grown distant from and contemptuous of the concerns and needs of the embattled ‘real people’, the hard working ordinary citizens whose cultural identities were being trampled by immigration and whose jobs were being taken by the impersonal forces of globalization. Along came populist parties and leaders who skilfully exploited these anxieties, claiming that they were the one true defender of these people, the true heart of the country, who had been written off by the elites – that as a result of immigration, globalization, and the loss of sovereignty, the country was facing a deep crisis, and, in the words of Donald Trump, ‘I alone can fix it.’

 

Unfortunately, we are not nearly out of these illiberal woods. First, the disruptive effects of Brexit will change the economic and political landscape of Britain – and what remains of Europe – for a long time to come. Second, Donald Trump is now president of the United States for a fouryear term, and he is doing exactly what he said he would do to build walls, restrict immigration, bully allies, and rip apart liberal norms and institutional practices. Third, there is a wave of elections coming in other European countries in 2017, and it is quite possible that other right wing, nativist populist parties and leaders will make dramatic gains in France, Austria, the Netherlands and Italy. There is a decent chance that Marine Le Pen, leader of the farright, antiimmigrant National Front party, will win the presidency of France. Both the farright (and some observers say, neoNazi) Freedom Party in Austria (which narrowly lost a recent presidential election) and the ultranationalist Dutch Party for Freedom stand a good chance of vaulting from third to first place in these elections and then taking the lead to form a new government.

All of these parties and leaders share a common core character and narrative. Beneath their hostility to immigration and globalization, their tirades against intellectual and bureaucratic elites, and their anxiety over the loss of national sovereignty is, as the Bulgarian intellectual Ivan Krastev has stressed, a deep hostility to pluralism in general – religious, ethnic, and political. Thus they wish to resurrect and defend the national essence of their countries against all sorts of corrosive, dark, and alien forces.

Respect for pluralism is the core principle of liberal democracy in several senses: tolerance of ethnic and religious minorities; acceptance of the equal worth and promise of all individuals, irrespective of gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, religion, nationality or other status characteristics; peaceful cooperation and exchange with other peoples and nations; tolerance of political opposition and dissent; and a humble recognition that democracy requires political pluralism, and thus limits on the power of ruling parties and executives. In its intrinsic hostility to pluralism, right wing populism is not just illiberal, it carries within it at least the seed of an assault on democracy itself.

 

In their resistance to the whole liberal world order – impersonal rules, open markets, open borders, gender and racial equality, international cooperation – the populist right in Europe and the United States shares something else in common: a sympathy (if not admiration) for Vladimir Putin, and a readiness to lift the sanctions that have sought to contain and punish his aggression against neighbouring countries.

They are at one with Putin in seeking to roll back the tide of cultural pluralism and tolerance and reassert the traditional national essence of the country in ethnic and religious terms. And they maintain that amid the threat of terrorism from these alien (radical Islamist) forces, order must take precedence over freedom. This requires a strong individual leader who will defend the country’s sovereignty, restore its cultural integrity (read, homogeneity), and bring back jobs that have been exported to low wage countries. And as he did in the United States and is now apparently doing in several European countries, Vladimir Putin is only too happy to use his digital armies of hackers, trolls and bots to discredit liberal political forces and help his right wing illiberal kindred spirits come to power wherever possible.

 

What does all of this mean for India today? Several things; none of them good. First, liberal democracy has entered a new era of difficulty, and potentially faces a crisis. We will need to wait to see how far President Trump will go – or will be allowed to go by the Congress and the American people – in rolling back pluralism, freedom, and constitutional constraints. And we will need to wait to see how far the right wing populist fever spreads over the continent of Europe in 2017. This could be a fever that breaks soon, or a long lasting malady at the core of the world’s liberal democracies, which renders them, at a minimum, less liberal, less pluralist, less democratic, and less welcoming.

Second, with the United States and the European Union preoccupied with their own struggles over policy, pluralism, and constitutional constraints, they are unlikely to pay close attention to declines in fidelity to liberal and democratic principles abroad. Already, authoritarian rulers like General Abdel Fattah elSisi in Egypt and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda perceive that they now have license to govern as autocratically as they wish, so long as they cooperate with the US and Europe on key security and geopolitical questions. If Prime Minister Modi decides to get a little rougher with civil society or the media or opposition parties – who in the West is going to notice or care? Well, plenty of liberals, but for the time being, they are no longer in power in the countries that matter most.

And third, there is a diffusion effect that follows from the growth of illiberal norms, rhetoric and practices among the world’s most advanced democracies. There is a new illiberal and quite possibly authoritarian zeitgeist sweeping across the world. The authoritarian strains in Prime Minister Modi’s pattern of politics and governance – the cult of personality, the nationalist and religious chauvinism, the direct and hierarchical relationship with mass constituencies, the undermining or circumvention of institutions – and the strain one sees at the helm of a number of Indian states unfortunately fit the spirit of these times.

 

Globally, this moment will not last a long time, simply because the educated publics of the advanced liberal democracies will discover sooner or not too much later that nativist populism is not a formula for national progress or the economic rejuvenation of vulnerable middle and working class groups. But populism may distribute economic goodies to core constituencies for a time, before the bills come irreversibly due, and politically quite a lot of damage can be done to liberal norms and institutions, which will take a long time to repair.

Those who believe in pluralism, tolerance, freedom, the rule of law – and hence liberal democracy – cannot be passive in the face of these onslaughts. West, East, North, and South, civil societies face the common challenge of finding new and innovative ways to reach ordinary people and try to persuade them that illiberal populism is a siren song that mobilizes identity at the price of freedom and just development.

 

Footnote:

1. I count as liberal democracies those countries with a 1 or a 2 on both Freedom House scales of political rights and civil liberties, where a score of 7 is the worst. Because of persistent deficits in the rule of law and individual rights, India has long scored a ‘3’ on civil liberties, and hence is not counted for this purpose as a liberal democracy.