There is a dangerous lack of leadership from the democratic powers. This vacuum is threatening the already weak structure of international governance and allowing authoritarian regimes to sense that their hour has come. This has the further danger that the inherent brittleness of authoritarianism will lead to its inevitable collapse.
Nonetheless, the authoritarians are doing well. There has been no world outcry when Russia annexed Crimea, a large part of Ukraine, and it is now seeking to destablise the east of the country. China’s economy has become central to the world despite the Communist Party remaining in total control of society and the economy. In Asia, the army has staged a coup in Thailand and it is not clear if the generals will allow democracy to take root in Myanmar. As Michael Ignatieff wrote in the New York Review of Books recently, the handshake between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping heralded the emergence of an alliance of authoritarian states with a combined population of 1.6 billion, stretching from the Polish border to the Pacific and from the Arctic Circle to the Afghan frontier.
This zone includes more willing members like recalcitrant state of North Korea and despotisms like the central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, but it also includes less willing subjects like Georgia, Armenia and Moldova, with Ukraine on the front line at the moment. Ignatieff might have added that in the Far East, Japan and South Korea are also facing authoritarian pressure from China along with maritime nations like the Philippines and Vietnam as China seeks to establish its unilateral control over the South China Sea regardless of any international law.
The US is the world’s premier power and democracy. It is supposed to be the leader of the established world order and champion of managing our affairs through international law and multilateral bodies that take into account the variety of interests that any community of almost eight billion people must incorporate. But the Obama administration has not lived up to the soaring rhetoric of its president when he first came to power. His Cairo speech to the Muslim world remains one of the best calls to action for mutual respect and joint responsibility to manage world affairs, but the words have not been matched by action and Obama’s administration has muddled through the past six years, even if it has the fading virtue that it is not the Bush administration with its pernicious doctrine of “preemptive” military action.
In addition, the much admired institutions of American democracy have set a very poor example to its allies and friends by allowing its policy-making to become deeply polarised, which has paralysed the administration. Obama’s failure to act against the government’s use of gas in Syria is only one example and if his negotiators do manage to strike a deal with Hassan Rouhani’s Iran in the next few months it is still very doubtful that Obama will be able to get it ratified in Congress.
The democratic world needs some inspiration. It is crying out for a grand figure like Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Gandhi who were able to both trigger extraordinary change while remaining true to deeply held humanitarian principles. This new inspiration must obviously be personal, but must also allow some institutional development so that it can move outward from the person and affect change. It is time to rekindle the willingness of different people and nations to submit their sovereignty to work within the bounds set by international laws and memberships of multilateral bodies.
It is hard to argue that Winston Churchill (and Clement Atlee) or Franklin Roosevelt (and Harry Truman) offer the same level of personal genius, but in the aftermath of the Second World War, they were all working from democracies and at that time they set in train a renewed sense of global governance that worked very well for a long time. It is only now that their institutions are failing and need renewal, but that, afterall, is their fault after 70 years.
Active membership of the United Nations should not be seen as a sign of weakness and invading other countries should be the act of a pariah nation. It is important to end the destructive cynicism and unilateral opportunism with which major powers treat the UN and bodies like the International Monetary fund, World Trade Organisation, Conference for Climate Change and the Law of the Sea.
To this end, all states should sign these treaties. It is wrong for a democracy like the US to opt out of the Law of the Sea or the International Criminal Court. It indicates to the authoritarian governments that the world leading proponent of human rights in not all that serious about them. In addition, the Big Five should embrace change and promote new permanent members of the UN Security Council. It is not a private club for former world powers and the existing super power, but should be a vibrant expression of the multipolar world that is coming.
Such clear commitment to making the global institutions more responsive to their publics would go a long way to start to rebalance the democratic deficit in the world today.
