A recent study by Stockholm University in Sweden indicates that 72% of the world’s population lives in countries considered autocratic. Only 13% are governed by full democracies, a rate comparable to 1986, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which must immediately force us to ask a question: wasn’t the fight against communism, organized around the former Soviet Union, intended to establish universal democracy? If it was, then humanity has failed, at least so far.
The Enlarged West – its hegemonic politicians, its organic intellectuals, its journalists, and other spokespersons, as well as most of its citizens – tends to point the finger at the “others” (the Russians, the Chinese, the Africans, the Arabs, the “Bolivarian”, whatever that is), blaming them for their alleged inability to live in democracy. The rise of the Far Right in their countries should force them to abandon that moral superiority complex called “Eurocentrism” but let no one expect that to happen: most Western democrats will not hesitate to ally themselves with the Far Right and fascism if their class interests are at stake; they are already doing so, all over the place.
I am not referring only to obvious cases, such as the alliance with countries that are between open dictatorship and muscular, authoritarian “democracies”, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Hungary, Israel, and others, to mention only the present cases. Nor am I only looking at the process of normalization of the Far Right in the countries of the Wider West, which may even lead it to come to power or close to it. I ask: when a country with the democratic, social and “internationalist” tradition of Sweden does not hesitate to betray an entire population (the Kurds) in exchange for its entry into NATO, what can we say about the state of democracy in the Wider West? But it is more than that. In a hard-hitting text published on July 2nd and to which I had access via social networks, Brazilian journalist Milly Lacombe translated Churchill’s famous phrase about the relativity of democracy into words. “In the United States, when Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were competing for a place on the Democratic ticket to face Donald Trump in 2015, every trick was played to get Sanders out of the game. Because he spoke words like “revolution” and said he would go after billionaires, Sanders was not a legitimate actor for American democracy. He danced. And Hillary lost to the Nazi-fascist,” she wrote, showing the limits of democracy (and, it should be reiterated, its relationship to class struggle).
To avoid misunderstandings, I should clarify that I have no qualms about sharing Churchill’s certainty that democracy, despite its limitations, is the best regime available, and therefore worth fighting for. But, like most democrats in the Global South, I insist on two points: first, democracy without a social dimension is nothing but fiction, which puts it at permanent risk; second, democracy cannot be implanted by force of cannon and drones from outside, as the well-thought-out democrats of the Wider West, including the “neoliberal Left”, that perverse oxymoron of our times, would have us believe.
The question that needs to be asked is: why, 34 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is democracy not moving forward? The current universal crisis of democracy has several causes, but the main one is the deliberate and structural attack of techno-financial capitalism on the social dimension that it needs to maintain and develop. The erosion of the welfare state created after the end of World War II, the financialization of the economy, the deregulated use of technology and the selective globalization of capital explain the various crises, doubts, disturbances, and internal attacks on democracy; externally, the “democracy versus dictatorship” rhetoric that the Wider West insists on to justify its interventions in other countries barely conceals the current struggles for control of markets.
In this crisis, there is therefore no good or bad. The various actors should remember a Cameroonian proverb that advises not to point the index finger at anyone in order to accuse them; in such cases, the thumb always turns against the accuser.
*Angolan writer and journalist. Director of Africa 21 magazine. Article originally published in Diário de Notícias.
