Of Course They Gave Up on Democracy
Today’s political crisis is of the West’s own making.
By Ivan Krastev and
Mr. Krastev and Mr. Holmes are the authors of “The Light That Failed: A Reckoning.”
“It is a paradox of democracy,” the historian Jill Lepore recently wrote, “that the best way to defend democracy is to attack it, to ask more of it, by way of criticism, protest, and dissent.” If she is right, then the post-Cold War decades, when democracy’s triumph seemed indisputable, left it alarmingly defenseless.
In 1989, when Vice President Dan Quayle nonsensically remarked that “I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy, but that could change,” we all dutifully relished the gaffe. But he turns out to have been right. What once seemed foreordained has mysteriously slipped our grasp. And not only have democracy and capitalism fallen into disarray worldwide, the uncritical idealization of democracy and capitalism after 1989 is at least partly responsible for our current woes.
At the end of the Cold War, democratic capitalism suddenly became synonymous with modernity. To be modern meant to adopt Western values, attitudes and institutions. Imitating the West was almost universally judged to be the fastest route to freedom and prosperity. The major divide in the world was no longer between the “Free World” and Soviet Communism but between exemplary Western democracies and their struggling emulators in the East and South. The tacit assumption, at the time, was that the East would undergo a radical “transition” while the West would be cryogenically frozen in its victory laurels. At this time, American constitutional lawyers had little time to reflect critically on their own democracy, so busy were they ghostwriting constitutions for the new democracies in the East.
In the 1990s, the geopolitical stage seemed set for a performance not unlike George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” an optimistic and didactic play in which a professor of phonetics (“the West”), over a short period of time, succeeds in teaching a poor flower girl (“the Rest”) to speak like the Queen and feel at home in polite company (“to become a liberal democracy”).
But the radical makeover did not play out as expected. It was as if instead of watching a performance of “Pygmalion,” the world ended up with a theatrical adaptation of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” a horror story about a man who decided to play God by assembling human body parts into a humanoid creature and fell victim to his own misguided experiment in self-duplication. Turn-of-the-century confidence in the global spread of liberalism has been shattered, two decades later, by a global backlash against it.
But how did the East’s zealous wish to imitate the West, which was matched by the West’s keenness to export its beloved political and economic models, contribute to the current crisis?
We argue that seeing democratization after the Cold War as a troubled and troubling process of political imitation helps us understand three critical ways in which an unjustifiable over-idealization of capitalism and democracy in the early years after the end of the Cold War helped bring about the wave of authoritarian and xenophobic anti-liberalism currently engulfing our world.
First, a crisis in the Western model itself — such as the financial shipwreck of 2008 — was bound to destabilize those countries in the West’s periphery that had committed themselves to copying Western-style liberal democracy. This explains why even countries that survived the Great Recession economically unscathed were politically destabilized by it. Poles attracted to illiberal populism did not start to question democracy and capitalism because they saw their economic prospects deteriorate. In fact, over the previous three decades, Poland’s GDP has tripled. The country has not undergone a recession since 1992, social inequality has declined and a majority of people report being satisfied with their lives. Nevertheless, many Poles and other East Europeans were shocked at the deepening crisis of democracy and capitalism in the West, especially after 2008. An important reason for the unforeseen appeal of illiberalism in the East was therefore the shocking crisis of liberalism within the West that they once idolized.
Radically restructuring a country’s political and economic system by imitating Western models had another pernicious, unanticipated effect. Imitation is necessarily an asymmetrical relationship between a superior model and its inferior imitators. Over time, this implicit moral hierarchy was bound to incubate feelings of humiliation, dispossession and resentment.
Ivan Krastev is a contributing opinion writer, the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies, a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and the author, most recently, of “After Europe.”
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