THE GLOBAL ORDER IS NEARING A TIPPING POINT

The global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail.

The current state of global freedom should raise alarm among all who value their own rights and those of their fellow human beings. To reverse the decline, democratic governments need to strengthen domestic laws and institutions while taking bold, coordinated action to support the struggle for democracy around the world. In less free countries, democrats must unite to resist the encroachment of unchecked power and work toward expanding freedom for all individuals. Only global solidarity among democracy’s defenders can successfully counter the combined aggression of its adversaries.

Autocrats have created a more favorable international environment for themselves over the past decade and a half, empowered by their own political and economic might as well as waning pressure from democracies. The alternative order is not based on a unifying ideology or personal affinity among leaders. It is not designed to serve the best interests of populations, or to enable people to improve their own lives. Instead it is grounded in autocrats’ shared interest in minimizing checks on their abuses and maintaining their grip on power. A world governed by this order would in reality be one of disorder, replete with armed conflict, lawless violence, corruption, and economic volatility. Such global instability and insecurity would have a significant cost in human lives.

Authoritarian powers have taken careful note of fractures in and among democracies and moved to widen them whenever possible. Authoritarian leaders are no longer isolated holdouts in a democratizing world. Instead they are actively collaborating with one another to spread new forms of repression and rebuff democratic pressure. While many democracies have continued to respond to sham elections and coups with measures like sanctions and the withholding of aid, the impact has been diluted by autocratic alliances.

Democratic countries have not yet built stronger and more mutually enhancing linkages between their big-picture geopolitics and their second-order decisions about democracy support such as how democratic action is funded, which agents of change are best supported, and where and when is conditionality appropriate. In nearly all Western states, pronouncements about the relationship between democracies and autocracies in the international system remain strikingly disconnected from their practice of democracy support.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will change the relationship between these two levels and calls for a tighter nexus between the geopolitical and operational levels of democracy-related issues across the international system. Pragmatic alliances might be necessary but should be nested within a denser network of democratic initiatives. For the community of democratic nations, the policy focus would be better placed on affecting meaningful change at the operational level of the democracy agenda rather than on an abstract and sweeping democracy-autocracy binary.