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The Times - The flame of democracy fading
Demonstrations over the Olympics remind us that freedom is losing out to authoritarianism, by Gerry Baker

The 2008 version of the battle is lower key but this little struggle is a mirror on the most important simple political fact of our times - the global struggle for supremacy between liberalism and its enemies.

When the Cold War ended, it was widely assumed to mark the glorious culmination of the steady march towards freedom that had characterised human history. This is an old temptation of historians: the belief - call it Hegelian or Whiggish - that some great unseen hand was moving humanity in a direction called progress.

For a while it looked right. Since 1974 90 countries have become free. By 2000 60 per cent of the world’s people lived in democracies. Even holdouts against the tide seemed only to make the point. In the 1990s the persistence of communist rule in China was treated as the exception that was merely testing the rule. The Chinese leaders were on the wrong side of history. The economic liberalism they had embraced as a defensive mechanism would soon force a political revolution.

But for the past few years democracy has been in global retreat. Notwithstanding a small occasional triumph here and there, in Latin America, Africa and in Eastern Europe, the tide has been turned.

The most significant defeat of all has been in China, where the success of limited capitalism has not been matched by political freedom. … China’s success is no longer seen as a temporary aberration, a sort of unsustainable balancing act that would sooner or later collapse. It is viewed increasingly by ambitious autocrats everywhere as an alternative model to the vexingly unpredictable Western version. Its biggest recruit is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which steadily tightens its grip on the reins of political power as its business leaders exploit the lucrative opportunities of free global markets. …

In many ways, it is the fact that this struggle seems less urgent to us that makes us less well placed to win it than we were in the Cold War. For one thing, despite our fears of Soviet communism, we were never in any sense economically dependent on what that failed system had to offer. Today China, with its vast store of US Treasury bonds has American prosperity in its grip. Russia, with its stranglehold on continental energy resources, can intimidate Europeans. That’s why George Bush would never boycott the Beijing Olympics and why the Europeans, in a cringing genuflection to Russian “concerns”, recoiled energetically last week from proposals to expand Nato.

Meanwhile, the global struggle against Islamism weakens the resolve, resources and unity of the West, while Russia and China deflect jihadism’s ambitions through useful accommodations with its practitioners in Iran, Syria and Palestine.

Above all, we in the democratic world, fattened by prosperity and complacent in the inevitability of the victory of our values, are more prone than ever to the corrosive luxury of self-questioning…

For liberalism to prevail it will not necessarily require open confrontation or military buildup, or even the empty gestures of Olympic boycotts. But it will require a good deal more willingness by the West to defend itself and its interests and to stand up for liberal democracy around the world rather more effectively and enthusiastically than of late.

And there you have the world in a nutshell. Brought to you by a bunch of guys in tight shorts and a lot of silly talk about the nobility of throwing a ball around on a beach.