Strongmen strike back [Robert Kagan] (fb2) читать постранично, страница - 3

liberalism as they had before. They struggled just to survive. The right-wing dictatorships that depended on the United States for money and protection had to at least pay lip service to liberal principles and norms, lest they lose that support. Some held elections when pressed, provided space to “moderate” political opponents and allowed liberal international nongovernmental organizations to operate within their borders, monitoring their human rights records, working with civil society and training political parties — all as a way of avoiding potentially fatal economic and political ostracism.

As the scholars Yong Deng and Fei-Ling Wang have noted, even Chinese leaders after the Tiananmen Square repression in 1989 lived in “constant fear of being singled out and targeted” by the “international hierarchy dominated by the United States and its democratic allies.” The Chinese toughed it out, but many autocrats in those decades did not make it. The Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, Haiti’s Jean-Claude Duvalier, Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner, and the South Korean military junta were all forced out by a Reagan administration that had quickly abandoned the Kirkpatrick doctrine. Over the next decade and a half, others followed. In 2003, 2004 and 2005, the post-communist autocrats in Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Ukraine all gave way to liberal forces that had received training and support from liberal nongovernmental organizations, which the dictators had permitted to avoid alienating the liberal world.

A lone Chinese man stands in the path of tanks at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Estimates said that as many as 10,000 people died during nearly two months of pro-democracy protests. (Jeff Widener/Associated Press)

The authoritarians’ weakness reinforced the belief among liberal democracies that ideological competition had ended with the fall of communism. In the brief era of liberal hegemony that followed the end of the Cold War, we did not worry, because we did not notice, as authoritarianism gradually regained its power and its voice as liberalism’s most enduring and formidable challenge.

In Russia, for instance, we believed that communism had been defeated by liberalism, and in a sense it was, but the winner in post-communist Russia was not liberalism. The liberal experiment of the Boris Yeltsin years proved too flawed and fragile, giving way almost immediately to two types of anti-liberal forces: one, the remnants of the Soviet (and czarist) police state, which the former KGB operative Vladimir Putin reestablished and controlled; the other, a Russian nationalism and traditionalism that the Bolsheviks had tried to crush but was resurrected by Putin to provide a veneer of legitimacy to his autocratic rule.

As Putin dismantled the weak liberal institutions of the 1990s, he restored the czarist-era role of the Orthodox Church, promised strong leadership of a traditional Russian kind, fought for “traditional” values against LGBTQ rights and other gender-related issues, and exalted Russia’s special “Asiatic” character over its Western orientation. So far, this has proved a durable formula — Putin has already ruled longer than many of the czars, and while a sharp economic downturn could shake his hold on power, as it would any regime’s, he has been in power so long that many Russians can imagine no other leader.

The few autocracies that survived the era of liberal hegemony did so by refusing to make concessions to liberal norms. Either they had the strength and independence to weather liberal disapproval or they had something the United States and its democratic allies needed — or thought they needed. The Chinese had both, which allowed them simply to crush all liberal tendencies both inside and outside the ruling oligarchy, and to make sure they stayed crushed — even as China’s leadership made the tricky transition from Maoist communism to authoritarian state capitalism. Most Arab dictatorships also survived, either because they had oil or because, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States returned to supporting allegedly “friendly” autocrats against radical alternatives.

The examples of autocracies such as Russia and China successfully resisting liberal pressures gave hope to others that the liberal storm could be weathered. By the end of the 2000s, the era of autocrats truckling to the liberal powers had come to an end. An authoritarian “backlash” spread globally, from Egypt to Turkey to Venezuela to Zimbabwe, as the remaining authoritarian regimes, following Putin’s example, began systematically restricting the space of civil society, cutting it off from its foreign supporters, and curbing free expression and independent media.

The pushback extended to international politics and institutions, as well. For too long, as one Chinese official complained in 2008 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the liberal powers had determined the evolution of international norms, increasingly legitimizing intrusions into the domestic affairs of authoritarian powers: “You Western countries, you decide the rules, you give the grades, you say, ‘You have been a bad boy.’ ” But that was over. The authoritarian governments of Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Iran all worked to weaken liberalism’s hold. Their different ideological orientations, which Americans regard as all-important, did not make them lose sight of their common interest as non-liberal states. The result, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov put it in 2007, was that, for the first time in many years, there was real competition in “the market of ideas” between different “value systems.” The West had lost “its monopoly on the globalization process.”

The authoritarians now have regained their confidence and found their voice in a way they have not since 1942 and, just as was true in the decades before World War II, the most powerful anti-liberal regimes “are no longer content simply to contain democracy,” as the editors of the Journal of Democracy observed in 2016. The regimes now want to “roll it back by reversing advances dating from the time of the democratic surge.”

These authoritarians are succeeding, but not only because their states are more powerful today than they have been in more than seven decades. Their anti-liberal critique is also powerful. It is not just an excuse for strongman rule, though it is that, too. It is a full-blown indictment of what many regard as the failings of liberal society, and it has broad appeal.

The Berlin Wall, which separated Soviet-controlled East Germany from West Berlin, had stood for 28 years before it was opened in 1989. (Carol Guzy/The Washington Post)

It has been decades since liberal democracies took this challenge seriously. The end of the Cold War seemed like indisputable proof of the correctness of the Enlightenment view — the belief in inexorable progress, both moral and scientific, toward the achievement of the physical, spiritual and intellectual freedom of every individual. History was “the progress of the consciousness of freedom,” as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel put it in 1830; or as Francis Fukuyama wrote in “The End of History and the Last Man” in 1992, there were fundamental processes at work dictating “a common evolutionary pattern for all human societies — in short, something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy.”

The premise underlying these convictions was that all humans, at all times, sought, above all, the recognition of their intrinsic worth as individuals and protection against all the traditional threats to their freedom, their lives and their dignity that came from state, church or community.

This idea has generally been most popular in relatively good times. It flourished during the late 19th and early 20th century before being dashed by World War I, the rise of communism and fascism, and the decline of democracy during the 1920s and 1930s. It flourished again after the end of the Cold War. But it has always been an incomplete description of human nature. Humans do not yearn only for freedom. They also seek security — not only physical security against attack but also the security that comes from family, tribe, race and culture. Often, people welcome a strong, charismatic leader who can provide that kind of