There are offensive moments and there are defensive moments. We live a story whose end cannot be predicted. There are no universal laws that pre-fix the future. It may be that the Western imagination is not exhausted. The West continues to be the starting point of different transformations worldwide. The democratic revolution started once in the United States and Europe, continues its march.
By Fernando Mires,
posted June 10, 2023 in polisfmires.
Democracy as a form of government, but more: as a form of politics, has been and still is expansive and conflictive. Having arisen from and against non-democratic orders, it is seen by them as a threat. This is how it has been at least since its pre-modern and modern renaissance. Timidly reappeared in the Magna Carta of the English, constitutionally enshrined in the North American revolution, expanded militarily through France, this political spirit born under the lights of Athens, has continued its ascending line, not vertically, but zigzagging. This means that there have been periods of boom and periods of withdrawal, and even of democratic regression. Well, here we will venture the thesis that we are currently in a retirement and, perhaps, a retreat. Looking from a macrohistorical perspective , this withdrawal and/or setback would not surprise us if we take into account that the line that leads to the democratization of nations has gone through two consecutive periods of very high growth. One, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, in 1945. The other, after the collapse of the Soviet empire, in 1989-1990.
THE DEMOCRATIC REASON
To avoid confusion, we must specify what we mean when we talk about democratic nations.
As we have hinted in other texts, we refer to two levels. A formal one, namely democracy as a form of government and a broader and more informal one, namely democracy as a way of life. The form of government alludes to the institutionalization of a system of freedoms and rights consecrated by tradition, by culture and by a Constitution that governs all the inhabitants of a nation who make up a citizenship, a political concept that post-cedes theconcept population demographic. Democracy as a way of life, on the other hand, supposes a questioning of everything that within a democracy is not democratic, or is ceasing to be so.
To say it by way of example, the nineteenth-century democracies integrated anti-democratic structures in contradiction with the national Constitution (slavery in the United States, for example). Today’s, not so much. What does the example tell us? Something very simple: democracy is not an established order but one in permanent formation, an order that is not static but in movement. This means that democratization never ends within a democracy. Democracy is selfreproduction, or in the words that Niklas Luhmann made fashionable at the time, it is autopoietic . What was democratic yesterday may not be tomorrow.
The realization that without democratization there can be no democracy has led many to say that the only true democracy is liberal democracy. Of that we are not very convinced. The reason is the following: Liberalism is an ideology, and democracy is a field for the recreation of ideas and ideologies, but in itself, it cannot be governed by an ideology, however democratic it may be. What we are sure of, and in this there is a certain consensus, that democracy, in order for it to exist, must be constitutional and institutional.
The government of the people, that is, democracy in the literal sense, can only exist within a framework determined by laws and institutions. Seen this way, all democracy is delegative. Historical experiences seem to confirm this statement. In every country where direct or grassroots democracy has been attempted (councils, soviets, juntas) ferocious autocracies have appeared.
THE AUTOCRATIC THREAT
Now, democracy, the one we know, which some call liberal and others simply constitutional and institutional, is currently being questioned from outside and from within democratic nations. In the terms popularized by Hungtinton, we would find ourselves facing the advance of a very high anti-democratic wave. Everything indicates that the history of the 21st century will be marked by this global contradiction, that is to say, by a non- civilizing or even cultural clash between democratic movements and anti-democratic movements.
The fixed point of that contradiction has become evident with the invasion of Putin’s Russia into Zelensky ‘s Ukraine . For this reason, among those of us who have incessantly condemned the Russian aggression, the opinion prevails that, although it took place in Ukraine, it was an aggression against the entire world democratic order.
Putin, effectively, went over all the post-war agreements, both geographical, military, and political. He himself made his intentions very clear, a few days after the invasion. At the Beijing Olympics, Putin and his colleague Xi Jinping publicly released a communication according to which both remain united in following a common strategy: nothing less than organizing a new world order. An order that can not only be understood as economic ( economic orders are not imposed, they simply appear) but a new political order, opposed to the Western one, or more directly, to the democratic one. If there was a disagreement between the two mega-dictators, it is not in the ends, but in the means.
China, following its geostrategic interests, has expressed its opposition to the use of nuclear weapons; And rightly so: China is interested in the economic survival of the West , if only to continue copying its scientific and technological inventions, the basis of its global growth. And the Chinese communists are interested in domination, not the destruction of the planet. Hence, China’s strategic friendship with Russia plays an ironically regulatory role in the eyes of Western rulers. A fact that has led some of them, Macron and Lula among others, to have illusions about the pacifying role that Xi could play against Putin during the war in Ukraine. But they are deceived. Xi is as interested as Putin in diminishing the principles of Western democracy, now globally hegemonic .
It is no mystery to anyone that the Charter of the United Nations is seen from Beijing as an imposition of Western culture on nations that come from other traditions. For China, much more important than a world democracy, is to cement the principle of self-determination, that is, that the rulers of each nation can commit the crimes they decide, without exposing themselves to the dictates of external interference. According to the Chinese vision, the United Nations should limit itself to being a mere consultative body. Although it may seem paradoxical, China – calling itself communist – is in favor of a geopolitical neoliberalism that allows all the autocratic powers on earth to act with impunity.
From the Chinese perspective, the constant appeal to human rights in democratic countries is part of an imperialist discourse aimed at subjecting ancient cultures to Western cultural patterns. Let us remember, to give an example, that on his last visit to Germany, the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, surprised the press with this sentence: «you have Kant and Hegel, but we have Confucius and Lao Tze «. He wanted to say that you have to accept the cultural differences between nations, something that no one in the West has questioned. German Minister Baerbock , surprised by her Chinese colleague, just gave her best smile. If she hadn’t been diplomatic, the obvious answer would have been: “what separates us from you is not philosophy but two forms of government, one that has been chosen by a party and another that has been chosen by the citizenry through the universal suffrage». Or also: «one who does not accept the universality of human rights and another who thinks that humans have rights for the mere fact of being human, regardless of traditions, religions and cultures.»
The historic dictatorial embrace of the Beijing Olympics, and the joint declaration in favor of a new world order, was a bipartisan confession that the Russian occupation of Ukraine is for Putin and Xi only a piece in the political and anti-democracies, for the sake of creating a new world political order under Sino-Russian hegemony. In other words, the invasion war is not only against Ukraine, not even against the US, but against the democratic West.
Without speculating too much, we could deduce that the Chinese political leadership was already informed of the invasion of Ukraine before that fateful 24-F-22 was put into action. For precisely these reasons, the most lucid rulers of the Western world fully understand why it is necessary that Russia not only not win, but also completely lose the war.
THE THREE SEGMENTS OF ANTI-WESTERN BARBARISM
The truth is that after the Olympic Games, the task undertaken by the two anti-democratic presidents has been to form an alternative world bloc to the Western bloc, one in a position to dispute the US and Europe, not just economic hegemony , also the political and the military. In fact, they must have noticed that there are a large number of scattered nations in the world, openly opposed to the US. Most of these nations are ruled by dictatorships and autocracies. Probably for this reason, Xi Jinping decided to modify the World Cup speech of Mao Zedong, who he tries to present as his historical successor.
According to the Maoist division, the world was divided between dominant nations (including the USSR) and subaltern nations (“villages that surround the big cities”, in its metaphorical expression). China, according to Mao, was destined to become the vanguard nation of the world anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist revolution. For Jinping, the division is different: the world, according to his perspective, is divided into two blocs: the Western nations led by the United States and Europe, and the anti-Western nations, led by China. That this is the same division that Biden made, between democracies and autocracies, Xi avoids mentioning. Like all dictators, Xi and Putin think that the height of democracy is the one they represent in their respective countries.
China and Russia, or rather, Russia under the leadership of China, are trying to establish themselves as the leading nations of the anti-Western – read anti-democratic – counterrevolution of our time. To facilitate the explanation of this thesis, it seems convenient to provisionally divide the anti-Western support block into three large segments .
1. Second rank economic and military powers, above all North Korea, Iran, Syria
2. Non- Western but also not (yet) anti-Western nations , such as India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil
3. Poor nations governed by autocratic regimes or simply by precarious democracies, as are a large part of African nations and a fluctuating part of Latin America.
The first segment is the hard core on which the Sino-Russian axis rests. These are nations dominated by governments that have made anti-Westernism a profession of faith, a doctrine and even, in the case of Iran, a holy war. It was Putin, before Xi, who discovered the possibility of grouping Islamic nations in an anti-Western orientation. That happened in 2013, when taking advantage of the US trauma left by the intervention in Iraq, and no less than in the name of the war against international terrorism , it unleashed a war to the death against the para-democratic organizations that emerged in Syria during the so-called “Arab spring”. This strategy called «scorched earth» would later be put into practice in the invasion of Ukraine.
The war in Syria was a Russian colonialist invasion of Syria, carried out with the complacency of Western governments. As a result, Syria became a Russian colonial condominium. Years later, China, through the geopolitical application of its economic power, would be in charge of mediating between Syria and the rest of the nations in the region, reintegrating the al-Assad dictatorship into the Arab League. The fact that al-Assad was received with open arms by Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia must be put into the positive account of Chinese international politics.
Islamic nations, including Turkey, until recently locked in hegemonic wars (the bloodiest, that of Yemen, will be negotiated with Saudi Arabia and Iran with Chinese sponsorship) are being convinced by China of the need to postpone their bloody differences and unite under the protection of the same roof. Needless to say, that ceiling is China. In short, for both Putin and Xi, the time has come to form in the Islamic world a kind of religious-military community, radically anti-Western, under the economic protection of China and the military of Russia .
The US has already lost its political hegemony over Saudi Arabia, and probably over all the region’s oil lords. One more sign that the West will suffer this and other losses in the course of the confrontation against the Sino-Russian axis. Putin, for his part, could fulfill part of his utopia, that of wresting from the West the clientelistic space that the USSR had exercised over despotic «Arab socialism» (Iraq, Yemen, Lybia , Sudan and Egypt) but this time, under the leadership of China and Russia.
Regarding the second segment, made up of that nondescript group made up of the so-called emerging nations, Xi Yinping takes advantage of the irreversible economic and financial dependence into which some nations have fallen with China, to order them politically under his leadership. The idea of a Peace Club, formed by emerging powers under Chinese leadership, apparently intended to mediate between the West and Russia in the war on Ukraine, has no other purpose than to remove «intermediate countries» from the Western political orbit. First, financially. Second, it is the current step, diplomatically.
The attempt to politically dress up governments like Maduro’s, carried out by Lula at the Brasilia summit, must be understood as part of a geopolitical unification project with continental connotations, within the framework that gives rise to the formation of a new bi -polar political order . The fact that after Brasilia, Maduro appeared in Saudi Arabia advocating for a new world order, shows the level of organization reached by the autocratic bloc in formation. The strategy, evidently, is to expand China’s zone of influence in Latin America, beyond the three anti-democratic nations (Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela) into a third segment, made up of the poorest nations, which are also the ones with the more precarious political structures. Faced with this segment, Xi Jinping becomes a «Third World» and even a Maoist. The case of a very poor Honduras, ridiculously breaking with Taiwan (which is not a legally constituted nation) may seem very tropical, but in a certain way it reveals an anti-American predisposition, cultivated for years by the region’s elites .
In the South American context, it is useful to look at the case of Brazil, a nation that belongs to the second and third segment at the same time. Since long before Lula’s second government, Brazil has depended more on the Chinese economy than on the North American and, in general, the Western economy. The role conferred by Jinping on Lula seems to be to bring together the majority of Latin American governments, in the orbit of the «neutral countries». The strong anti-American ideological predisposition displayed (not only) by the Latin American left, can facilitate this mission. Galeanism as an ideology has outlived Galeano. Assuming the role of victims has the additional effect of absolving the Latin American political classes of all the atrocities they have committed and will continue to commit.
BUT THIS STORY IS NOT OVER
In short, the political West, since the invasion of Ukraine, has been under threat . This does not mean falling into catastrophic predictions, in the style of those of Spengler, Toymbee and Huntington. It simply means accepting that we are facing the emergence of a new anti-democratic and world political order, and that in the course of its formation, the West will have to go on the defensive.
There are offensive moments and there are defensive moments. We live a story whose end cannot be predicted. There are no universal laws that pre-fix the future. It may be that the Western imagination is not exhausted. The West continues to be the starting point of different transformations worldwide. The democratic revolution started once in the United States and Europe, continues its march. But not only social relationships continue to be democratized, but also those related to corporeality and intimacy. The gaps that separated the sexes, and the forms of sexual being (genders), are being closed.
In the scientific and technological, artistic and cultural spaces, the West continues to be the vanguard. To all this it adds an energy revolution whose global consequences are still not predictable. Innovations in wind and solar energy, to name just two, will have an impact on nations that bet all their growth on an economy based on the exploitation of fossil energy. Many of those nations are ruled today by autocratic governments.
It is true that there is strong anti-Western resentment – often understandable – even within the West itself. But it is also true that the majority of young people in undemocratic countries want to be, or become, Westerners, and not just in the realms of junk consumption , as imagined by authoritarian governments.
The West is much more than McDonald’s. This is how some dictatorships have understood it. Every woman who fights for the right not to wear a headscarf is a Western enemy in the Iran of the ayatollahs. Every gay beaten up in the streets of Moscow is a Western enemy in Putin’s Russia. Every dissident student or intellectual sent to prison is a Western enemy in Jinping China .
And perhaps there is something even more important. While in anti-Western countries there is an enemy called the West, in that virtual non-place called the West, there is no enemy called the East. In Western countries, the Orient is no more than a geographical notion, never a geopolitical or cultural unit. For anti-democratic governments, on the other hand, the West is a political and military enemy that must be defeated and subdued. But apart from that, nothing else unites them. If the anti-Western hatred disappears, they will once again be enemies of each other.
The West, in short, is not at war against any East. Beyond being a geographical notion, the Orient does not exist as a political unit. Much less as a way of life. And after all, no one can be defeated by an enemy that doesn’t exist. Even to be anti-Western, the enemies of «open society» (Popper) need the West.
Published in Montevideo on June 22, 2023