The Illiberal Democracies
The Cold war ended with the defeat of the USSR and Communism. Democracy came out as the winner and solution for all the problems in the world such as war, tyranny, poverty, etc. Almost 30 years have passed but still, democracy has been seen struggling. It was seen as the solution to wars and tyranny but it created wars. Its goal was to spread freedom but it was seen that it was suppressing the right of freedom of different states and it was challenging their sovereignty. Thus democracy failed to achieve its objectives and was not able to continue on its true path.
Despite democracy won but still there is a continuous struggle between democracy and authoritarianism in the present world. Democracy has receded since 2005. The number of democratic countries which was increasing after the end of the Cold War has slowed down. There is a threat to democracy as the only successful and dominant system in the world. As in the world’s major powers such as in Russia and China, authoritarianism has increased. There is more and more repression of opposition and NGOs systematically. This shows that they have not accepted the supremacy of democracy as a successful system. So the clash is inevitable between them. A kind of new Cold War will be emerging between the political ideologies or between the civilizations as Samuel Huntington predicted. Because many scholars saw democracy as the new form of Western Capitalism as they say it is derived from Christianity, closely related to the Protestant ethic. So not all the civilizations of the world may accept this typical form of system. Because as Huntington explained in The Clash of Civilizations that, “Civilizations represent enduring differences among peoples not only based principally on religion but also on the cultural factors, such as language, history, customs, institutions and the way people subjectively identified themselves.”
Democracy is not the end of history. Anarchy is the only end that is inevitable due to the presence of the power struggle and competition in the world. Thus peace can never be maintained in between this anarchic world. Thus democracy is successful and the only dominant ideology will never be successful. Because democracy is only part of Western Civilization, not part of universal values. Moreover, several so-called democracies only held elections but did not have civil societies which is the ultimate goal of liberal democracy. They have failed to protect individual rights and to provide them free institutions. They have been accused of suppressing their minorities and igniting violence and failed to provide freedom and justice to them. Such as India, who declares itself as the biggest democracy of the world has failed to provide justice and freedom to its minorities such as Christians and Muslims who have been killed on a large scale by their state-sponsored RSS extremist Hindu group. It has also failed to provide freedom to women who are being raped on daily basis and the Indian government has failed to do anything in this regard. The Indian army is continuously doing unstoppable genocide in Kashmir and is not ready for Plebiscite proposed by the United Nations. Similarly, we can see the barbarous tyranny of Israel on Palestinians, the Middle East, and the third world countries where there is no positive peace due to violence due to different reasons for not providing basic rights to their individuals. The formation of Israel as a state is itself a big question. It clearly shows the hypocrisy of the West in its pursuit of democracy in the world. They are the illiberal democracies.
Fareed Zakaria a realist and foreign policy analyst says in this regard that,
“The United States should go more slowly in promoting democracies in the world. Instead of searching for new lands to democratize and new places to hold elections, the United States and the international community should work to consolidate democracy where it has taken root to encourage the gradual development of constitutional liberalism across the globe.”
Indeed Fareed Zakaria raised a genuine point. If one state itself is not in its pure form of democracy then how can it promote democracy in different parts of the world? Isn’t it the hypocrisy of the highest level? Also, how can one say that the world has reached its end of political ideology when all the world did not have democratic states, and those who call themselves democratic states are not practicing democracies. The world has seen hypocrisies of democratic states such as of US when the traditional and old democracies rejected the idea of the United States to construct new democracies in the Middle East and were also against the war in Iraq. If the democracy could not hold the Western allies on the same platform then of which use is democracy? The United States intervened unilaterally which shows it does not matter if states are democratic or not they will try to pursue their interests either in fair or in a foul way. Nothing is permanent for a state but its national interests. The United States wanted to preserve its liberal hegemony at any cost thus it intervened in Iraq and Afghanistan opposing the international law. Unilateralism and preemption are simply undemocratic ways. If it is a state who believed in democracy and was a real democracy then it would have focused on diplomacy, not on intervening and starting a war. Because democracies believe that diplomacy is the real power and diplomacy peace can be preserved in the world. Also, it is the democracy that shapes international law which determines the legitimacy to use force or not. Institutions such as the United Nations helps to narrow the ideological differences which reduce the influence of the balance of power. But all this useless because democracies did not practice it when their interests matter because they are illiberal democracies.
