There are many more examples. Across the world, analysts and researchers are pointing to evidence that global democracy is backsliding, and the big picture is not pretty.
The Economist Intelligence Unit, the London-based research and analysis group, quantified the decline with a report released Wednesday. The annual survey, which rates the state of democracy across 167 countries based on measures including electoral processes and civil liberties, found that just 8.4 percent of the world lived in a full democracy last year, while more than a third lived under authoritarian rule. The global average score fell to 5.37 out of 10 on the democracy index — the lowest rating since the EIU began the index in 2006.
Others have come to similar conclusions. Freedom House, a nongovernmental, nonpartisan advocacy organization established in 1941, released a report in October that found that the state of democracy and human rights had worsened in at least 80 countries since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
There is no question that democracy is declining, but it’s harder to explain exactly why. One reason is the still-raging pandemic, a public health crisis that saw many nations impose unprecedented restrictions. “Confronted by a new, deadly disease to which humans had no natural immunity, most people concluded that preventing a catastrophic loss of life justified some temporary loss of freedom,” the Economist wrote this week in a summary of its sister organization’s index.
But the threat to democracy did not emerge with the coronavirus. Data from Freedom House shows that more than 100 countries have seen their levels of freedom decline since 2016, while only a handful have seen gains. The EIU’s global democracy index, meanwhile, has been dipping each year since 2015. What’s happening to democracies right now looks like less of blip — and more of a trend.
That idea challenges the notion, once popular in the West, that globalization would lead to an increasingly democratized world. Even rare success stories can be reversed, as we saw in Myanmar this week, while countries with entrenched democratic traditions can see those norms shattered, as we may be seeing in India.
Often, it is not democratization and human rights that transcend borders, but repression. A report released Thursday, also from Freedom House, found that there had been 608 cases of “direct, physical … transnational repression” since 2014, which the organization defines as including state-sponsored assassinations, abductions, assaults, detentions and unlawful deportations.
Such cases include Saudi Arabia’s killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul and the attempted assassination of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in England, which made headlines and spurred outrage. But they are only the tip of the iceberg, with China, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia and Turkey named by Freedom House as perpetrators of extensive and violent silencing campaigns.
“Modern authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia do not sit passively behind iron curtains” anymore, Freedom House’s Mike Abramowitz and Nate Schenkkan wrote for The Washington Post on Wednesday, noting that modern technology and travel had allowed governments to keep pressure on dissidents abroad like never before.
Democracies can further repression, too. For four years, Trump’s flouting of norms within the United States, with his cries of “fake news” and persistent spread of misinformation, were echoed worldwide. “The war on truth in India is very much like the war on truth in the United States,” Vidya Krishnan, a journalist with the pioneering Indian magazine the Caravan, observed this week.
The storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6 left foreign pro-democracy groups that had allied with the United States disillusioned and defeated. “Our main ally in the fight for democracy has tumbled,” Venezuelan activist Jorge Barragán told The Post at the time. “What does that mean for us?
New U.S. leadership is not likely to answer that question on its own. When the Myanmar military announced a state of emergency and arrested Suu Kyi and her allies this week, it justified the moves by making unfounded claims of electoral fraud. To many observers, those accusations sounded familiar. “The Myanmar military has done what Trump tried to do,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch tweeted Monday.
For those who favor democracies and human rights, reversing the trend will not be easy. Before he entered office, President Biden touted the idea of hosting a global democracy summit during the first year of his term. That may rally like-minded countries to address some of the problems seen in places such as Myanmar and Russia.
Some critics have asked, fairly, how the United States and its allies can expect to lecture anyone on democracy when their own systems are under strain. Autocratic leaders, meanwhile, suggest that there are simply different systems in the world: When he spoke remotely at the World Economic Forum last week, Chinese leader Xi Jinping decried a rise of “ideological prejudice” and “hatred.”
But no nation can exist in a bubble, spared from the broader shifts in geopolitics. And in the battle between democracy and autocracy, it looks like the latter is gaining ground.
