European war 6 191411/6/2022 ![]() ![]() Meanwhile, the European Union now hosts a member state that even the European Parliament says “can no longer be considered a full democracy”: Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which has become a robber’s roost of Kremlin influence, nepotism and rightist populism. Freedom House downgraded Turkey from “partly free” to “not free” four years ago. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey remains in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with a NATO troop-strength second only to the United States. But even as the world’s police-state bloc has consolidated its gains in the United Nations bureaucracies and through forums like the Shanghai Cooperation Council, some key democratic “allies” have insisted on straddling both worlds. ![]() #EUROPEAN WAR 6 1914 FREE#“For the first time since 2001, autocracies became a majority of the world’s political regimes, comprising 92 countries hosting 54 per cent of the world’s population.” The greatest external threat to the world’s free countries is the expansionist anti-democratic belligerence of Xi Jinping’s China, Putin’s Russia and Ali Khamenei’s Iran, along with their constellation of client states. The details are in the devil’s bargains that democracies make with police states in trade concessions and in dubious concordats of the kind the Biden administration in the United States is stubbornly attempting to revive in the Obama-era nuclear deal with the theocrats in Tehran.Ī tipping point of sorts was reached two years ago, the V-Dem Institute concludes. It’s not that free trade is necessarily bad for democracy, so long as the benefits are spread widely and those who are left behind aren’t abandoned to the arbitrary undulations of the free market. “Since 1992,” the V-Dem Institute found, “an unprecedented 36 democratic regimes have broken down and autocratization processes have been set in motion in more countries than ever before.” That’s when globalized free trade really started to take off. By the time Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-on war of conquest in Ukraine last February, democracy was already in the 17th year of its global retreat, according to Freedom House’s measures (countries with aggregate-score declines have outnumbered those with gains every year for 16 years running).Īccording to the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, however, the withering has been underway for much longer, more like three decades - almost from the moment the Cold War ended. The current upheavals in Iran hold out hope not only for the emancipation of the people of that country, but for the democratic resistance worldwide, and it comes not a moment too soon. It is about the possibility of a democratic future.” “It is about policies of mass death and about the meaning of life in politics. ![]() “This war, in other words, is about establishing principles for the 21st century,” is the way Yale University historian Timothy Snyder puts it. The outcome of the war in Ukraine should be expected to determine democracy’s worldwide prospects for decades to come. But now, brute force is back in a big way - on Europe’s front porch. This has presented challenges that are more complex than the brute-force menace of the Cold War days. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
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