Turpe
est aliud loqui, aliud sentire
A
Challenge to Modern Democracy
The
formation and consolidation of the digital society as a result of the rapid
spread of modern information technologies, artificial intelligence, robotics
and genetic engineering create a new reality, demanding the improvement of the
corresponding democratic order.
The transformation of democracy should
include both proper adjustment of legislative acts and the development of new
legitimate standards, as well as the creation of the necessary conditions for
the growth of a person as a full-fledged member of the digital society.
This means that the current system
of democracy in its essence should become more humane!
Since any reformation of power actually threatens the property of the
elite of state power, which has often been acquired as a result of illegal
actions and corruption, those who represent power and those close to power-wielding
agencies, using any authority and financial resources at their disposal, always
and everywhere desperately and at all costs fight and will always fight for the
continued preservation of the acquired status
quo: by engaging the repressive apparatus subordinate to politicians,
spreading disinformation, preaching populism and using demagoguery. Actually
ignoring the interests of the majority of the electorate and in every way
interfering with, and even torpedoing, the implementation of reforms so
necessary for society, which, in their opinion, could jeopardise the stability
of the stagnant political regime.
The
Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
'A must-read. Acemoglu and
Robinson are intellectual heavyweights of the first rank . . . erudite and
fascinating' Paul Collier, Guardian
By the authors of the
international bestseller Why Nations Fail, based on decades of
research, this powerful new big-picture framework explains how some countries
develop towards and provide liberty while others fall to despotism, anarchy or
asphyxiating norms- and explains how liberty can thrive despite new threats.
Liberty is hardly the
'natural' order of things; usually states have been either too weak to protect
individuals or too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism.
There is also a happy Western myth that where liberty exists, it's a steady
state, arrived at by 'enlightenment'. But liberty emerges only when a delicate
and incessant balance is struck between state and society - between elites and
citizens. This struggle becomes self-reinforcing, inducing both state and
society to develop a richer array of capacities, thus affecting the
peacefulness of societies, the success of economies and how people experience
their daily lives.
Explaining this new
framework through compelling stories from around the world, in history and from
today - and through a single diagram on which the development of any state can
be plotted - this masterpiece helps us understand the past and present, and
analyse the future.
'An intellectually rich
book that develops an important thesis with verve' Martin Wolf, Financial
Times, on Why Nations Fail
What’s
Behind the Crisis of Democracy?
Dec 4, 2019 HAROLD JAMES
In democracies
around the world, voters increasingly feel as though most of the major choices
affecting their lives have already been decided through existing legal and
international frameworks. But while rules-based technocracy – and corporatism
before it – may have been well-suited to monolithic forms of identity, it no
longer suffices.
There is no longer any
denying that democracy is at risk worldwide.
Many people doubt that democracy is working for them, or that it is working
properly at all. Elections don’t seem to yield real-world results,
other than to deepen existing political and social fissures. The crisis
of democracy is largely a crisis of representation – or, to be more
precise, an absence of representation.
Recent elections in Spain
and Israel, for example, have been inconclusive and frustrating. And the United
States, the world’s longstanding bastion of democracy, is in the midst of a
constitutional crisis over a president who was elected by a minority of voters,
and who has since made a mockery of democratic norms and the rule of law.
Meanwhile, in Britain, which
will hold a general election on December 12, the two major parties and their
respective leaders have become increasingly unattractive; but the only
alternative – the Liberal Democrats – has struggled to fill the void. Only
regional parties – the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru in Wales, and the
Democratic Unionists in Northern Ireland – are commanding any credibility. And
in Germany, an apparently exhausted “grand coalition” has become a source of growing
disillusion.
To many commentators,
today’s democratic fatigue is eerily similar to that of the interwar years. But
there is an obvious difference: that earlier crisis of democracy was
inextricably linked to the economic misery of the Great Depression, whereas
today’s crisis has arrived at a time of historically high levels of employment.
Though plenty of people today feel a sense of economic insecurity, the response
to the current crisis cannot simply be a repeat of what came before.
During the interwar years,
democratic governance was frequently remolded to include different forms of
representation. The most attractive at the time was corporatism, whereby
formally organized interest groups negotiated with the government on behalf of
a particular occupation or economic sector. The expectation was that
collectives of factory workers, farmers, and even employers would be more
capable of arriving at decisions than elected representative assemblies, which
had come to be seen as cumbersome and riven by intractable political divisions.
The interwar corporatist
model now seems abhorrent, not least because it was associated with the Italian
fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. For a time, though, Mussolini’s approach was
attractive to politicians elsewhere, including those who did not think of
themselves as occupying a political extreme. For example, US President Franklin
D. Roosevelt’s original vision of the New Deal comprised many corporatist
elements, including price controls, which would be negotiated by unions and
industrial organizations. If we have forgotten about these corporatist
provisions, it is because they did not survive a 1935 decision by
the Supreme Court, which ruled Title I of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery
Act to be unconstitutional.
But, of course, elections
and pseudo-elections during this period were also producing dictatorships, not
just in Europe but also in Asia and South America. And owing to these
catastrophic failures, democracy came to be circumscribed in the post-war era,
both by new domestic constitutional and legal boundaries and through international
commitments.
In the case of continental
Europe and Japan, democracy was largely imposed as a consequence of military
defeat, which meant that its rules were set from the outside and not subjected
to any formal challenge. Thereafter, European integration – in the form of the
European Economic Community and then the European Union – manifested as a
system of adjudication and enforcement in the service of established norms. And
more broadly, international agreements became a way of implying that certain rules
were unbreakable or simply inevitable; they could no longer be contested,
democratically or otherwise.
These new legal constraints
were, of course, augmented by military considerations. International alliances
were presented as the means for maintaining domestic security. NATO, in the
famous words of its first secretary-general, Lord Ismay, was
meant “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and Germans down.”
This uniquely successful
arrangement for ensuring post-war stability was disintegrating even before the
sudden decline in US legitimacy following the 2003 Iraq War and the 2007-2008
global financial crisis. When French President Emmanuel
Macron recently used extreme language to describe the EU as standing “on the edge of a
precipice” and NATO as brain dead, he was being entirely accurate. Under
President Donald Trump, America – and thus NATO – is no longer capable of
strategic thinking, nor willing to safeguard transatlantic interests.
The post-war order was often
criticized for not allowing any genuine democratic choice. Accordingly, Western
political scientists started talking about widespread demobilization. And well
before a new German radical right appeared, prominent German intellectuals had
concluded that voting was unimportant, that modernity is about rule by
self-constrained moderates on behalf of the immobile – a “lethargocracy.”
The modern challenge, then,
is to achieve greater democratic inclusiveness. Old-style corporatism cannot be
the answer, because most people no longer define themselves solely or even
largely by one occupation. By the same token, the argument for an international
rules-based technocracy now looks tired and lazy, even though international
institutions (including the EU and even NATO) are still needed to provide
public goods.
Nowadays, personal identity
is determined by a complex array of factors. Most people think of themselves as
consumers, producers, lovers, parents, citizens, and breathers of the same air,
depending on the context. More frequent and clearly defined choices are needed
to translate the complexities of selfhood into political expression.
Fortunately, current
technologies could help. Digital citizenship – through electronic voting, polling, and petitioning – is one obvious
solution to the problem of declining participation. Of course, it is
important to think through which decisions we subject to new, more direct
methods of deliberation and voting. Such mechanisms should not be used for
major, defining choices that are inherently controversial and divisive; but
they could help with more quotidian, practical issues such as the location of a
rail or road system or the details of emissions control and energy pricing.
This vision of democratic renewal would work most
effectively in smaller countries like Estonia, which has pioneered digital
citizenship and e-residency.
Individual cities could do the same, thereby offering lessons for larger
polities. Thinking locally about the problem of
representation may be the first step toward overcoming the crisis of democracy
globally.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/crisis-of-democracy-failures-of-representation-by-harold-james-2019-12
Dictators Without
Borders
Living in a democracy is no longer
protection from authoritarianism.
JAN
21, 20205:45 AM
Donald
Trump’s election in 2016 sparked a veritable cottage industry of commentary
about the decline of democracy and the rise of authoritarian forces. Essays
like Masha Gessen’s “Autocracy:
Rules for Survival” and books like Steven Levitsky’s How
Democracies Die made the rounds among jittery Americans
suddenly wondering if they would recognize the end of American democracy when
it came. Three years later, it’s clear that, if there’s a tipping point where a
country goes from “free”
to “not free,” the U.S. is still far from it. That House
Democrats were able to impeach Trump without fearing for their lives
demonstrates that reality. And yet, the impeachment inquiry also highlights the
degree to which this president has managed to carry out brazen displays of
authoritarian behavior with no consequences thus far.
Much
of the early handwringing focused on whether the United States could ever
transition from a democratic republic to an authoritarian regime. It
downplayed the degree to which authoritarianism is not just a political system
but a type of political behavior that can happen in democratic systems as well.
Commentators also missed that authoritarianism is increasingly global: The U.S.
hasn’t gone from being a “free” to a “not free” country so much as the
distinction between those has blurred.
This isn’t
quite what we thought the age of Trumpian authoritarianism would
look like.
The
impeachment inquiry focuses on Trump’s apparent effort to leverage state power
to discredit and undermine a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.
A leader targeting political opponents with trumped-up charges or selective
investigations is textbook authoritarian behavior. When Vladimir Putin’s chief
opposition rival, Alexei Navalny, is targeted
with embezzlement charges, or when thousands of potential rivals of
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are imprisoned
based on conspiracy theories, we recognize this sort of abuse of
power for what it is. But there’s a wrinkle in Trump’s case: He tried and
failed to wield the American justice system against other enemies (James Comey
and Hillary Clinton) and so resorted to leaning on the mechanisms of power of a
foreign nation—one much more vulnerable to corruption and influence. Tellingly,
he has also called on China, an authoritarian state, to investigate the Bidens.
This
isn’t quite what we thought the age of Trumpian authoritarianism would look
like. We are accustomed to thinking of authoritarianism vs. democracy as a team
sport: the Axis against the Allies, the Soviets against the West. But that
traditional understanding might not make sense anymore, as governments reach
beyond their borders to inflict state pressure and violence.
Leaders
of authoritarian countries are increasingly able to pressure and silence
critics in the “free” world. Leaders of democracies can enlist authoritarian
governments against their own critics. Globalization may once have been thought
of as a force that undermined authoritarianism, but lately it seems to be the
democrats who are playing catch-up.
A
useful framework for our current moment is suggested by the Dutch political
scientist Marlies Glasius, who proposes that
we devote less attention to identifying authoritarian regimes and
more on authoritarian practices. Freely elected leaders like
Rodrigo Duterte, Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump are not “authoritarian” in the
same way as leaders of China, Saudi Arabia, or Russia, where opposition groups
are barred and elections are either fraudulent or nonexistent. But that doesn’t
mean that they can’t take authoritarian actions. Recent events in India, where
widespread protests have broken out against a proposed law that
bars Muslims from the same path to citizenship enjoyed by migrants of other
religions, makes this very clear. India is still “the world’s largest
democracy” and Modi enjoys popular legitimacy. That hasn’t stopped him from
pushing a policy apparently inspired by the police
state of Myanmar.
Glasius
defines authoritarian practices as “actions … sabotaging accountability to
people over whom a political actor exerts control, or their representatives, by
disabling their access to information and/or disabling their voice.” They
enable domination and subvert the channels by which people are supposed to be
able to make their preferences heard in a democratic society. Subverting the
justice system to selectively investigate a government rival is just such a
practice.
What
does that look like in practice? The most blatant examples of globalized
authoritarianism are when governments actually kill
or attempt to kill their critics in other countries, as Saudi Arabia
did in the case of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, or Russia allegedly did to
Sergei Skripal, the former spy who was poisoned along with his daughter in
England in 2018. The leaders of democracies have been all-too-willing to brush
aside these incidents in order to preserve economic or security relationships.
But
other expressions of authoritarian power are becoming much more subtle and
difficult to trace.
World
superpowers have, for example, newfound abilities to censor or chill speech
outside their borders. By acting as gatekeeper to the massive Chinese audience,
for example, the country’s government has essentially
acquired final cut privileges on films shown abroad as well as
in China. In an effort to avoid Chinese ire, filmmakers have gone as far as
to digitally
re-edit the 2012 Red Dawn remake to make the
villains North Korean instead of Chinese and cast white
actress Tilda Swinton to play a Tibetan sorcerer in Doctor
Strange.
Last
year, long-standing concerns among China watchers about Beijing’s ability to
carry out censorship on a global scale burst into the public consciousness in a
high-profile dispute between the Chinese government and the NBA. After Houston
Rockets executive Daryl Morey’s tweet in support of the Hong Kong protesters
was met with a furious reaction from China, the NBA’s second-largest market,
the league went through a grim cycle of damage control and self-censorship,
following in the footsteps of brands from Marriot, to Delta, to BMW that have
found themselves targets of Beijing’s ire after perceived slights. The English
soccer team Arsenal is now facing
a similar dilemma to the Rockets’ after a star player spoke out
about the treatment of the Uighurs.
Referring
to another company’s surrender to Chinese government sensitivities, China hawk
Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted, “Recognize
what’s happening here. People who don’t live in China must either self censor
or face dismissal & suspensions. China using access to market as leverage
to crush free speech globally.” Rubio is correct, here. And if he thought about
it a little harder, he might consider how the president he backs has openly
solicited Chinese help to pressure his own domestic critics.
Why
is authoritarianism globalizing? For one thing, countries are more economically
interdependent than ever before. During the Cold War, East bloc countries
sought to prevent their citizens from having access to American consumer goods.
Today, China and the United States are strategic and ideological foes but
deeply enmeshed in each other’s economies. China is both making and consuming
those consumer goods. This interdependence creates leverage: Countries like
China can use the size of their markets to induce foreign firms and governments
to play by its rules, even when those rules run contrary to those other
countries professed political values.
The U.S. has
also engaged in authoritarian acts abroad, and long before Trump.
It
was once hoped that improved communications technologies and the internet would
undermine authoritarian governments by allowing their citizens access to
forbidden information. Instead, those same communications channels can be just
as easily used to spread authoritarian propaganda and misinformation.
The
nature of warfare and geopolitical competition has also changed. Rather than
direct military conflicts between national governments, today’s wars are more
likely to resemble the one in Ukraine, a muddled conflict between militias and
proxy forces that has aspects of both a full-fledged occupation and a civil
war. Putin’s Russia has been particularly good at exploiting the ambiguity of
conflicts like Ukraine and Syria to bolster its own global influence.
Major
powers like the U.S., Russia, and China were once fairly forthright in divvying
up the world into spheres of influence and ideological blocs. Today, they
insist that they are respecting other countries’ sovereignty and not imposing
their values abroad, while doing just that.
The
U.S. has also engaged in authoritarian acts abroad, and long before Trump. One
of Glasius’ primary examples is “digital surveillance such as that practised by
the US National Security Agency and revealed by the Snowden leaks.” The U.S.
has long leveraged
its dominant position in the global financial system to compel
other countries to comply with its sanctions, launched covert drone strikes
outside of declared battlefields, turned over terrorist suspects for
interrogation by governments with less scrupulous human rights laws, and backed
coups as part of the Cold War’s ideological competition. In recent days, the
Trump administration has escalated an international crisis with Iran by
assassinating a senior military official in a foreign country with barely an
attempt to ground that action in domestic or international law. The fact that
the target of the strike, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, had himself made a career of
expanding the Iranian state’s authoritarian violence to neighboring countries
only highlights how this kind of transnational violence is becoming normalized.
We
can argue about whether these practices by the United States are
“authoritarian” themselves, but they certainly provide all governments with a
playbook of how state-sponsored violence and coercion can be projected abroad.
It
might seem ironic that globalized authoritarian practices are becoming more
common in an era of backlash to globalization. Some of the same governments
carrying out these practices are also reinforcing their borders, cracking down
on international migration, walling
off their communications infrastructure, and stamping
out any forms of ambiguity when it comes to citizenship or
territorial control. The borders that these governments enforce serve to
control and monitor the activities and movements of their citizens while
leaders are free to reach across those borders to commit (and sometimes
collaborate on) authoritarian practices. If they manage to enrich themselves
through these practices, a world of offshore tax havens and ambiguous legal
jurisdictions—a world the British journalist Oliver Bullough has termed “Moneyland”—is
at their disposal.
This
is a challenge for anyone pushing back against authoritarianism. It feels as if
half the world is erupting
in protest against corrupt and anti-democratic government
practices right now, but these movements have failed to connect across borders
and circumstance. Moments of transnational solidarity are rare enough to
be treated
as curiosities. “Global” justice bodies like the International
Criminal Court are hamstrung in their ability to bring human
rights abusers to justice by national jurisdiction and state sovereignty. But
there are positive signs as well. Human Rights Watch’s just-released 2020
World Report, which focuses on the threat Chinese censorship poses
to free expression outside China’s borders, suggests awareness of the new
dynamic is growing. And several presidential candidates—notably
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—have explicitly linked the fight
against authoritarianism globally to tackling corruption and inequality at
home, an acknowledgment of the transnational nature of the problem.
In
an era where authoritarian actors are reaching across borders and
collaborating, it’s time for advocates of democracy to do the same.
The Crisis of Democracy:
Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission
The report observed the political state of the United States, Europe and Japan
and says that in the United States the problems of governance "stem from
an excess of democracy" and thus advocates "to restore the prestige
and authority of central government institutions." https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1120175.The_Crisis_of_Democracy
Democracy in Retreat
Freedom in the World 2019
In 2018, Freedom in the World recorded
the 13th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. The reversal has
spanned a variety of countries in every region, from long-standing democracies
like the United States to consolidated authoritarian regimes like China and
Russia. The overall losses are still shallow compared with the gains of the
late 20th century, but the pattern is consistent and ominous. Democracy is in
retreat.
In states that were already authoritarian, earning Not
Free designations from Freedom House, governments have increasingly shed the
thin façade of democratic practice that they established in previous decades,
when international incentives and pressure for reform were stronger. More
authoritarian powers are now banning opposition groups or jailing their
leaders, dispensing with term limits, and tightening the screws on any
independent media that remain. Meanwhile, many countries that democratized
after the end of the Cold War have regressed in the face of rampant corruption,
antiliberal populist movements, and breakdowns in the rule of law. Most
troublingly, even long-standing democracies have been shaken by populist
political forces that reject basic principles like the separation of powers and
target minorities for discriminatory treatment…: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2019/democracy-in-retreat
GDP Is Not a
Measure of Human Well-Being
OCTOBER 04, 2019
Economic growth has raised living standards around
the world. However, modern economies have lost sight of the fact that the
standard metric of economic growth, gross domestic product (GDP), merely
measures the size of a nation’s economy and doesn’t reflect a nation’s welfare.
Yet policymakers and economists often treat GDP, or GDP per capita in some
cases, as an all-encompassing unit to signify a nation’s development, combining
its economic prosperity and societal well-being. As a result, policies that
result in economic growth are seen to be beneficial for society.
We know now that the story is not so simple – that
focusing exclusively on GDP and economic gain to measure development ignores
the negative effects of economic growth on society, such as climate change and
income inequality. It’s time to acknowledge the limitations of GDP and expand
our measure development so that it takes into account a society’s quality of life.
A number of countries are starting to do this.
India, for instance, where we both work advising the government, is developing
an Ease of Living Index, which measures quality of life, economic ability and
sustainability.
When our measures of development go beyond an
inimical fixation towards higher production, our policy interventions will
become more aligned with the aspects of life that citizens truly value, and
society will be better served. But before we attempt to improve upon the
concept of GDP, it is instructive to understand its roots.
The
origins of GDP
Like many of the ubiquitous inventions that
surround us, the modern conception of GDP was a product of war. While Simon
Kuznets is often credited with the invention of GDP (since he attempted to estimate
the national income of the United States in 1932 to understand the full extent
of the Great Depression), the modern definition of GDP was developed by John
Maynard Keynes during the second world war.
In 1940, one year into the war with Germany, Keynes,
who was working in the UK Treasury, published an essay complaining
about the inadequacy of economic statistics to calculate what the British
economy could produce with the available resources. He argued that such data
paucity made it difficult to estimate Britain’s capacity for mobilization and
conflict.
According to him, the estimate of national income
should be the sum of private consumption, investment and government spending.
He rejected Kuznets’ version, which included government income, but not
spending, in his calculation. Keynes realized that if the government’s wartime
procurement was not considered as demand in calculating national income, GDP
would fall despite actual economic growth taking place. His method of
calculating GDP, including government spending into a country’s income, which
was driven by wartime necessities, soon found acceptance around the world even
after the war was over. It continues to this day.
How
GDP falls short
But a measure created to assess wartime production
capabilities of a nation has obvious drawbacks in peacetime. For one, GDP by
definition is an aggregate measure that includes the value of goods and
services produced in an economy over a certain period of time. There is no
scope for the positive or negative effects created in the process of production
and development.
For example, GDP takes a positive count of the cars
we produce but does not account for the emissions they generate; it adds the
value of the sugar-laced beverages we sell but fails to subtract the health
problems they cause; it includes the value of building new cities but does not
discount for the vital forests they replace. As Robert Kennedy put it in his
famous election speech in 1968, “it [GDP] measures everything in short, except
that which makes life worthwhile.”
Environmental degradation is a significant
externality that the measure of GDP has failed to reflect. The production of
more goods adds to an economy’s GDP irrespective of the environmental damage
suffered because of it. So, according to GDP, a country like India is
considered to be on the growth path, even though Delhi’s winters are
increasingly filled with smog and Bengaluru’s lakes are more prone to fires. Modern
economies need a better measure of welfare that takes these externalities into
account to obtain a truer reflection of development. Broadening the scope of
assessment to include externalities would help in creating a policy focus on
addressing them.
GDP also fails to capture the distribution of
income across society – something that is becoming more pertinent in today’s
world with rising inequality levels in the developed and developing world
alike. It cannot differentiate between an unequal and an egalitarian society if
they have similar economic sizes. As rising inequality is resulting in a rise
in societal
discontentment and increased polarization, policymakers will need to
account for these issues when assessing development.
Another aspect of modern economies that makes GDP
anachronistic is its disproportionate focus on what is produced. Today’s
societies are increasingly driven by the growing service economy – from the
grocery shopping on Amazon to the cabs booked on Uber. As the quality of
experience is superseding relentless production, the notion of GDP is quickly
falling out of place. We live in a world where social media delivers troves of
information and entertainment at no price at all, the value for which cannot be
encapsulated by simplistic figures. Our measure of economic growth and
development also needs to adapt to these changes in order to give a more
accurate picture of the modern economy.
How
we’re redefining development in India
We need alternative metrics to complement GDP in
order to get a more comprehensive view of development and ensure informed
policy making that doesn’t exclusively prioritize economic growth. We’re seeing
some efforts already, such as Bhutan’s attempt to measure Gross National
Happiness, which considers factors like equitable socio-economic development
and good governance, and UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI), which
encapsulates health and knowledge apart from economic prosperity.
As a step in this direction, India is also
beginning to focus on the ease of living of its citizens. Ease of living is the
next step in the development strategy for India, following the push towards
ease of doing business that the country has achieved over the last few years.
The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has developed the Ease of Living
Index to measuring quality of life of its citizens across Indian cities, as
well as economic ability and sustainability. It is as well expected to evolve
into a measurement tool to be adopted across districts. We believe that this
more holistic measure will provide more accurate insights into the state of
development of the Indian economy.
The end goal is to have a more just and equitable
society that is economically thriving and offering citizens a meaningful
quality of life. With a change in what we measure and perceive as a barometer
of development, how we frame our policies will also catch up. In an economy
with well-being at its heart, economic growth will simply be another tool to
guide it in the direction that the society chooses. In such an economy, the
percentage points of GDP, which are rarely connected with the lives of average
citizens, will cease to take the center stage. The focus would instead shift
towards more desirable and actual determinants of welfare.
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