The future of democracy
Toomas Hendrik Ilves on why liberal democracy matters
Authoritarians deliver fast results but repress individual freedoms and the rule of law that a just society requires, says a former president of Estonia
MY FATHER WAS a teenager in 1940 when the Soviet Union invaded Estonia. An orphan and poor, he was largely oblivious to the changes—until June 14th 1941. On that day, working a summer job at the railyards in Tallinn, he saw thousands of Estonians pushed at bayonet-point into hundreds of Russian cattle cars, 30 or 40 to a wagon. Men, women and children were separated and sent to different parts of Siberia.
All throughout the night my father ran between trains, bringing water to those locked inside. Out of all the tragedies of the 1940s, this was his most traumatic. When, as a child, I asked him, “What are communists?”, his answer was, “People who take you from your home and send you to Siberia stuffed in a cattle car.”
Today, liberal democracy is on the defensive. It is regarded as just one of any number of political systems, and not even all that essential, even in the eyes of some people in the West. Yet as national leaders gather at the Summit for Democracy this week, it is important not to lose track of what is meant by “democracy” and “the rule of the people”.
A place to start is to ask what the concept means to anyone who has lived in a non-democratic state. Their answer will not be “free and fair contested elections”. Of course, elections are important as a way to make political decisions by giving people a choice. But elections are the end of a set of democratic practices and institutions—not the pinnacle. They are what happens when a society enjoys the rule of law, individual rights guaranteed by those laws, and self-governance generally.
The dire and the not-so-mild
However, the absence of liberal democracy—and the values it upholds like laws and rights—is dark. It is what my father witnessed as a teenager: mass deportations in cattle cars. It is what gave rise to Siberian gulags and Nazi concentration camps. It means confiscation of homes and property; denying schooling and jobs to the children of the repressed; restrictions on travel; midnight arrests by secret police. It leads to extrajudicial killings; people “disappeared”; lives destroyed.
It means censorship—and self-censorship, for fear of being critical of the regime. In many cases it means suppression of your culture if it is not permitted. In less extreme forms, a weakening of liberal democracy invites corruption: crony deals and family connections. It’s the untalented daughter of the party or corporate bigwig who gets a scarce seat at a good university, or the son, driving drunk, who slams into a pedestrian but never faces charges.
This is what the world looks like to those living outside democracies and are victims of authoritarianism. It is far bleaker than the alarming but milder democratic backsliding that is happening in the West, from Donald Trump discrediting the American election because he dislikes the result, to Poland’s ruling party undermining the judiciary to pursue its political agenda. Yet these actions should not be considered mild at all: they are deeply worrying. They are the harbingers of what can come next.
Apologists for authoritarianism, whether in Soviet times or today, stress how it is more efficient; how decisions are made quickly without the ponderous debates that characterise democracies. That is true; reaching consensus is slow going. As Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist, notes, democracy’s “vetocracy” can stymie needed projects such as the development of infrastructure. However, no one goes to jail for disagreeing; no one is “disappeared” because they belong to the opposition. Progress is slower but when it is finally achieved, there is no need to cover-up the process—or clean up the blood.
Losing democracy, a trend over the past decade, happens in much the same way as a character goes bankrupt in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”: “gradually, and then suddenly”. At first the changes are minor—a shift in tone, a reinterpretation of rules, a weakening of independent oversight. It’s just enough to get political opponents and independent media howling (which they do anyway) but not so much to cause unease in the public.
Then one day—as has happened in so many cases—the real consequences begin (as described by writers such as Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera, and repeated over the past two years in Hong Kong). Election results are manipulated; opposition groups are silenced; arrests or disappearances begin. The first steps matter: politicising the courts erodes the rule of law. Rich cronies of a leader seizing control of, or bankrupting, opposition media silences a free press. Once lost, democracy is harder to restore than it was to destroy.
This is why recent examples of backsliding are so disturbing: we’ve seen them before. In Hungary, the ruling party has done so much to undermine democracy by following the gradualist playbook—controlling the media, packing the courts, changing the constitution, neutering civil-society groups and fining opposition parties—that the country wasn’t even invited to the democracy summit. In 2018 it forced the closure of Central European University, a blow to intellectual life in the whole region.
What must be done
The challenge for democracies today is how they assert themselves in the face of autocracy. Half a century ago the world was simpler. The West stood for freedom and the Soviet sphere made little pretence that the state and party, not self-governing individuals, held control. Now, insidiously, the threat to democracy comes from within as much as from without. People in democracies need to reaffirm their commitment to it, not just counter the threats of authoritarian countries, which benefit from democracies’ internal self-doubt.
It hardly helps that some elites in democracies have become veritable partners in crime, by in effect colluding with authoritarian countries in return for business or donations. The cronies’ cash is laundered, or the country wins respectability by financing research but insists on erasing criticism. Even the world’s oldest publisher, Cambridge University Press, caved in and removed critical commentaries at China’s behest for fear of losing lucrative income, before reversing course amid an outcry in 2017. Those who co-operate with oligarchs and dictators for material gain are making the same corrupt bargain struck in earlier generations by careerists who enabled the rise to power of fascists and communists.
A process of renewal is needed. Democracies should look inwards to reform their own practices in order to strengthen their system of governance. It begins by admitting the seriousness of the challenge for ourselves, not others. It requires a demand by democracy’s demos—the people—of equality before the law in all spheres, that rights and privileges are not for just those in power.
Prime Ministers should not allow Christmas parties to take place at 10 Downing Street while the nation is barred from having large gatherings. Members of the European Parliament who are paid to lobby for authoritarians must be thrown out. New laws must require presidential candidates to release their tax returns and ban senior government officials from lobbying for foreign governments and firms. Conflicts of interest among politicians, and pay-to-play schemes granting cronies special treatment, need to be exposed and prosecuted.
The citizenry in democracies has been lulled by the victory against authoritarian rule when the Soviet Union collapsed 30 years ago. Convinced that “we won, therefore it can’t happen here,” we feel immune to the threat, and believe authoritarianism is something that happens to others, not us. Yet at home we let the corruption slide, the slow creep of one set of rules for those in power, a different set for the rest. Yet we are on the same slippery slope as those we criticise elsewhere.
There is a lesson in the history of Estonia. A classic story told by my father and others, though probably apocryphal, has it that when they arrived as refugees in Sweden, someone asked, “Why did you come here?” They replied: “We were rounded up and deported by the Soviets.” The Swede innocently inquires: “Why didn’t you call the police?”
There is a sardonic truth that we rely on liberal democracy as a system of government to secure our rights—and only really recognise it by its absence.
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Toomas Hendrik Ilves was president of Estonia from 2006 to 2016.