Why is democracy struggling so much around the world? Francis Fukuyama on the recent history and unwritten future of the open society. The Long Game Why is democracy struggling so much around the world? Francis Fukuyama on the recent history and unwritten future of the open society. Anastasiia Krutota For 17 years, democracy has been in decline globally. According to Freedom House, a Washington-based research organization founded in 1941, not only has the number of democracies dropped; the democratic health of many countries that remain democraciesâincluding the biggest among them, the United States and Indiaâhas deteriorated as well. Now [Tunisia]( the birthplace of the Arab Spring, has fallen back into dictatorship, while [Sudan]( a great democratic hope after the 2019 overthrow of the Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashir, is engulfed in a chaotic civil warâwith two factions battling each other and both attacking the Sudanese people. Meanwhile, one of the worldâs most powerful authoritarian states is more than a year into a horrible conflict it started by invading its democratic neighbor with the dual aim of controlling it and rolling back democracy regionally. Why is all of this happening? Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow with the Freeman Spogli Institute and the director of the Ford Dorsey Masterâs in International Policy program at Stanford University. Heâs written widely on development and international politics, including in his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Manâwhich has appeared in more than 20 foreign editionsâand most recently, [Liberalism and Its Discontents](. Fukuyama sees a daunting set of shifting challenges to democracy in the worldâfrom the rise of newly powerful authoritarian alternatives; to escalating internal conflicts; to challenges from media, technology, and even human psychology. But over the long term, he still sees democracy as more resilientâand authoritarian alternatives as weakerâthan either might seem. This article is part of a [series]( in partnership with the [Human Rights Foundation](. Fukuyama is a speaker at the [Oslo Freedom Forum]( this week. J.J. Gould: Why is democracy faltering in so many places? Francis Fukuyama: Itâs a complicated phenomenon with a lot of different dimensions. Thereâs a geopolitical dimension: From the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 roughly to the time of the financial crisis in 2008, the United States was really the only superpower in the worldâand could set a lot of global rules to follow its liberal-democratic ideas. Since, weâve seen the rise of two great authoritarian powers, Russia and China, and the emergence of an era when the U.S. is no longer the only superpower. These rising powers donât just represent alternatives to the Western order shaped primarily by the United States, either; they have agendas that deliberately challenge this order and the liberal-democratic ideas itâs based on. In Russiaâs case, thatâs most obviously been by invading Ukraineâwhich isnât just an attack on Ukrainian democracy but a challenge to the entire order that took shape after 1991, when democracy spread into the former Soviet Union and formerly communist countries in Eastern Europe that it had dominated. In Chinaâs case, Beijing clearly feels that the Westâand the United States in particularâhas humiliated it by dominating the international system, keeping China from its rightful place. And the challenge from China is a challenge from a much bigger, much more sophisticated power than Russia. Advertisement But then, along with this geopolitical dimension, thereâs been an internal challenge across many countries that have been established democraciesâin the upsurge of intolerant, right-wing populism. Weâve seen this around the world, including in places like Hungary and Poland, but above all in the United States and in Indiaâthe worldâs two largest democracies. Here too, the causes are complicated. Within rich societies, globalization had the effect of creating inequalities, and a lot of working-class people started to feel their jobs were being taken away by elite decision-makers, as these jobs moved overseas. At the same time, much of the fighting has ended up being over cultural issues. A few years ago, those centered on immigration; now they center on issues of civil rights and gender rights, like opposition to critical race theory, transgenderism, and so on. And these two dimensions have joined, in a way, because the one hope Vladimir Putin has for prevailing over Ukraine, as I see it, is that Donald Trump is reelected and the Republicans return to power in the U.S., where they could well switch sides in the war. I think thereâs another internal challenge, though, thatâs coming from progressivesâin the United States and in other democraciesâa lot of which centers on orthodoxies about identity and a lack of toleration toward views that question them. In certain spaces, like universities and Hollywood and the artsâmore culturally elite types of spacesâthat kind of orthodoxy can be very smothering. So thereâs a left-wing illiberal tendency weâve seen spreading as well. And the two tendencies, right and left, have been feeding off of each other. I really think a lot of the support for Trump and now Ron DeSantis, and other populist conservatives, for instance, comes out of a reaction to whatâs been happening on the progressive left. Aziz Acharki More from Francis Fukuyama at The Signal: âWeâve seen a waning of mainstream or legacy media sourcesâtelevision networks, public broadcasters, major newspapers, and so onâand their displacement by alternative kinds of media. On the one hand, thereâs been a proliferation of niche media properties for fragmented audiences; on the other, thereâs been the rise of big social-media platforms, and media companies dependent on them, with business models that thrive not on providing high-quality information or interpretations but viral content. The second has contributed very significantly to political polarization, particularly in the United Statesâbecause virality in news media favors more extreme voices over more moderate or measured, or empirically grounded ones. In this respect, I think, things are apt to get worse.â âMany authoritarian systems look extremely strong and competentâup to the point when they collapse. And weâve seen some big authoritarian failures over the past yearâin Iran, with everything that led to the killing of Mahsa Amini and the protests following it; in China, with the zero-covid policy; in Russia, with the biggest failure of them all in the invasion of Ukraine. The disaster of this war is something that wouldnât likely have happened if Russia were a more liberal society, if it werenât just Putin ultimately making all the decisionsâthough he had to create buy-in from his society before he could go ahead with this one. The zero-covid policy in China, too, was the product of a single leader at the top, Xi Jinping, who continued with the policy way beyond the point when it made any plausible sense. And in Iran, although the protest movement has died down, society is seething and itâs increasingly clear that a majority of Iranians donât see the regime as legitimate anymore.â âThe main thing democracy has going for it is the fundamental lack of any coherent alternative. Which was really the issue I was trying to address in my End of History book back in 1992. This wasnât an argument that democracy would necessarily triumph everywhereâcertainly not in the next generation. It was an examination of the question of whether there was another political system thatâs coherent, stable, flourishingâand not democracy. And I simply donât see that in the world. Which means, in the end, people are going to have to come back to democracyâif they want to have economic prosperity, if they want individual freedom, if they want to have security. I think this is what can give us the most optimism that, in the long run, thereâs going to be a return to democracy around the world.â [Continue reading ...]( [The Signal]( explores urgent questions in current events around the worldâto support it and for full access: [Subscribe now]( The Signal | 1717 N St. NW, Washington, DC 20011 [Unsubscribe {EMAIL}](
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