What kind of blog is this?

Lipah, Bali

As those of you (the few, the proud, the faithful) who read my other blog Graydon's Travels know, I usually write about travel, often by bicycle or on foot, sometimes in Stanley, the pickup truck-camper combo that my partner and I drove around southern Africa for the better part of a year.  I write about scenery and wildlife and history and culture and birds, but very rarely about politics and current affairs, except when they impinge directly on the stories of my trips.  This doesn't mean that I don't have opinions or interest in this things, but rather that they don't really fit into what I most want to write about.  I am actually very interested in following the goings-on in the world, particularly events that affect the quality of life for ordinary citizens of the world.  I've been a lifelong fan of The Economist magazine, and have subscribed off and on (whenever I've been sedentary and stable long enough) to the Guardian Weekly.  As well my travels have brought me face to face with a lot of the geopolitics of the world all over the world, making my trips a sort of field school in current affairs.

This is where this blog comes in.  It's an experiment; I know from experience that I often go long periods of time without catching up on my travel blog; my friend and fellow blogger Kent Foster once dubbed me, not entirely inaccurately, as "the world's laziest blogger".  So, despite being passionate about travel, I can't always motivate myself to update Graydon's Travels regularly; let's see if my commitment to current affairs is any stronger!

My first post is not intended to be one of those "the world is going to hell in a handbasket" screeds that I hear often.  I think there are a lot of positive developments in the world economically, socially and culturally.  I do think, however, that in the field of politics, a lot of the progress in how we as humans govern ourselves and structure our societies has slowed or even reversed in the last few years, and I wanted to look at what has been going on in three related areas:  authoritarianism, populism and ethnic (or religious) nationalism.  Today's initial post will consider authoritarianism.

The Axis of Authoritarianism

The retreat from democratic ideals can be seen all over the world, nowhere more clearly than in this excellent map from The Economist.  All the countries in the world are given a score out of 10 by the Economist Intelligence Unit.  In the words of the accomanying article, 

The index, which comprises 60 indicators across five broad categories—electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties—concludes that less than 5% of the world’s population currently lives in a “full democracy”. Nearly a third live under authoritarian rule, with a large share of those in China. Overall, 89 of the 167 countries assessed in 2017 received lower scores than they had the year before.  Norway remains the most democratic country in the ranking, a position it has held since 2010, and western Europe accounts for 14 of the 19 “full democracies” that make up the ranking’s top tier. 

Looking at the map, certain countries stand out, generally not for the right reasons.  The US, for the second year running, has a score just under 8, leading to a classification as a "flawed democracy".  The first year of Donald Trump has certainly undermined any sense of the US being any sort of beacon to the rest of the world about how to run a modern democratic society.  A good book I read recently, The Storm Before the Storm:  The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, by one of my favourite history podcasters, Mike Duncan, draws parallels between the decay of the institutions and unwritten political and social norms that held the Roman Republic together, and a similar decay over the past 20 years, and certainly over the past two years.

Turkey is another country that has dropped steadily over the past decade as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become steadily more authoritarian and intolerant of dissent, particularly in the 18 months since a failed coup attempt.  His mass purges and arrests of tens of thousands of teachers, professors, doctors, police officers, judges and even scientists have been positively Stalinist in their scope and style, while his ranting and casual accusations of Nazism against European countries during the campaigning for a constitutional referendum marred by evidence of serious fraud are straight from central casting for "evil tinpot dictator".  For a country that fifteen years ago seemed to be progressing towards a future as an integral part of Europe, this is a depressing development.

Russia is rated as an authoritarian state, as indeed are most countries of the ex-Soviet bloc.  The trajectory of Vladimir Putin's Russia since 2000 has been a steady return to the anti-democratic strongman days of Lenin, Stalin and Peter the Great.  As a fan of Russia, the Russian language and Russian literature, it's been depressing to watch after the heady days after the collapse of the USSR.  Russia's active attempts to meddle in elections in the West and to sow distrust in the democratic process in general has been one of the notable low in the world over the past decade, but particularly over the last two or three years.  The fact that Donald Trump is so vehement in his assertions that Putin played no part in trying to affect the 2016 US elections is one of the many black marks against the Trump presidency.

There is a definite axis of authoritarianism visible on the map, stretching from a band across central Africa through the Middle East, across the ex-USSR and ending in China and North Korea.  The sad thing in Africa is that countries that were once held up as examples to their neighbours have slid backwards, often when a president comes to the end of his constitutionally mandated term and then decides to change the constitution so that he can continue bestowing his brilliance on his grateful populace indefinitely.  Museveni in Uganda, Kagame in Rwanda, Nkurunziza in Burundi, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Kabila in DR Congo, Lungu in Zambia; the list goes on.  Even South Africa under Jacob Zuma has seen a marked decline in its democratic credentials. And Ethiopia, widely praised abroad for its long run of high economic growth, is a deeply authoritarian state full of political prisoners and ruthless repression of dissent.

China and North Korea deserve their own paragraph.  North Korea is probably the most repressive country on earth (although Freedom House ranks war-torn Syria and deeply dysfunctional Eritrea as worse), a hermetic police state with a vast cult of personality that has given rise to the first-ever Communist hereditary monarchy, now in its third generation.  It is hard to see how the North Koreans will survive indefinitely as starving pariahs, but they have managed amazingly well at staying independent for the past 65 years, so I wouldn't bet against them.  China has always had deeply authoritarian internal policies (not just under the Communists; the First Emperor, the Han Dynasty, the Qing Dynasty and the Kuomintang all based their government on control and power), and now, despite an economic opening-up that has turned China from the Sick Man of Asia into an industrial and financial behemoth, that new power and technological knowledge is being used to clamp down harder on political dissent and the inhabitants of Xinjiang and Tibet.  Much is being made of the "Chinese model" of development, of sacrificing political liberty for economic well-being in countries around the Global South, and it's certainly an attractive idea for countries run by repressive kleptocrats: "This is all for your own good.  Imagine how poor we'd be if we weren't a police state!"  Donald Trump's admiration for Xi Jinping certainly helps burnish China's reputation around the world.  China is belying the widely held belief that as repressive countries become wealthier, they inevitably become freer.  

Another one of the ways in which Donald Trump has blighted the worldwide reputation of the US has been his open admiration for authoritarian strongmen like Turkey's President Erdogan or the murderous, thuggish Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.  He also, as all American presidents of recent decades have done, whole-heartedly embraces the medieval fundamentalist theocratic police state of Saudi Arabia, one of the bottom 10 countries in the world in terms of political and social freedoms.  Trump himself has so far been unable to exercise his own authoritarian fantasies, although recent reports of wanting a huge military parade in Washington DC reek of banana republics and North Korea.

Europe too has seen a marked uptick in authoritarianism, or at least self-avowed "illiberal democracy", with Hungary and Poland as the poster children.  Only a generation removed from the euphoria of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, it seems almost inconceivable that substantial numbers of citizens of these countries are allowing hard-won liberties and freedoms to be curtailed again.  Part of the explanation is surely the second leg of our Triple Crown of democratic decline:  populism.  But that will have to wait for the next post.

One final quote from the Freedom House 2017 report.  They had the following to say about the decline of democratic and civic freedoms around the world:

All of these developments point to a growing danger that the international order of the past quarter-century—rooted in the principles of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law—will give way to a world in which individual leaders and nations pursue their own narrow interests without meaningful constraints, and without regard for the shared benefits of global peace, freedom, and prosperity.

The troubling impression created by the year’s headline events is supported by the latest findings of Freedom in the World. A total of 67 countries suffered net declines in political rights and civil liberties in 2016, compared with 36 that registered gains. This marked the 11th consecutive year in which declines outnumbered improvements.

While in past years the declines in freedom were generally concentrated among autocracies and dictatorships that simply went from bad to worse, in 2016 it was established democracies—countries rated Free in the report’s ranking system—that dominated the list of countries suffering setbacks. In fact, Free countries accounted for a larger share of the countries with declines than at any time in the past decade, and nearly one-quarter of the countries registering declines in 2016 were in Europe.

I hope that you enjoyed this first post; please let me know what you thought!