Two types of threats to freedom and democracy

Photo by Leah Kelley

BY MADALIN BLIDARU

The recent years have witnessed increasing vulnerabilities for freedom and democracy around the world. For a young generation that has been growing with an ever-expanding democratic space, a late millennial in my case, what is happening today was inconceivable until it started unraveling with individual and collective rights undermined from the interior of the democratic system and from their outside. 

Compared to the previous generation, we are also less organized, despite the contribution of social media to some protest movements. Moreover, apathy and dissatisfaction cannot replace the action necessary to support our democratic way of life. As if that was not enough, the pandemic made it worse, with governments unwillingly to return to the pre-pandemic democratic standards and pushing as far as possible the rollback of emergency measures, some of them used, in many places, to disable the conditions for freedom in a democratic society. 

There are two types of threats to freedom and democracy based on their origin; one relates to the statute of the citizen in a democratic society, the other to the freedom of the collectivity in which that citizen is entrenched; the first one is weakened by populist and authoritarian rulers, others by the guns and shadows of larger bellicose groups threatening to oppress. These threats are the ones fostering national and international unfreedom.

A Eastern European perspective on the national unfreedom 

In Eastern Europe, the fall of the Communist regimes came with the prospect of accountability based on a rule of law system, as well as with the choice and rotation of elites through free and fair elections. Based on these steps, a minimum set of individual freedoms and liberties could be guaranteed. 

The issue of compliance with the particular international tools that supported the development of human rights institutions, up to this day, remains disputed. However, the one party-states that dominated these societies did not allow for a real expression of the basic civic and political rights. Established in 1949 to work on democracy, rule of law and human rights, the Council of Europe was the main standard-setter in the post-Communist countries in these areas, together the democratic and market transition assistance from the United States and other advanced democracies, with the motivation of joining in the future the European Union for the development funds and NATO for the security dividend. 

This path made the progress visible as long as there has been an incentive to achieve it, but, once in, there was a steep change from democratic transition to democratic backsliding. And once they have reached these clubs, complacency, democratic fatigue, institutions built around individuals and reactionary forces contributed to the current crisis of human rights and fundamental freedoms. 

Unsettlingly, the newcomers into politics cannot persuasively convince the electorate why we need democracy, why the rights of the citizens are better projected in a liberal democratic system or why public participation and engagement is essential to ensure that this process delivers the optimum outcomes. These shortcomings helped authoritarian political entrepreneurs to fill this void and, without defenders, to undermine the meaning and expression of democracy, with freedom as a collateral victim. 

Hungary is not the single hybrid regime that succeeded in reversing the democratic transition in Europe while proclaiming the victory of illiberal democracy, in fact of authoritarianism. Similar trends are visible in the neighboring countries, with citizens witnessing how they lose their access to rights, watching how independent media ceased to exist and public institutions are used against civil society, how the judiciary institutions are failing to act and, more importantly, feeling how they lose the promise of accountability.  

The results are visible not only in politics, institutions, and culture, but also in the economy with an unfinished transition to a market economy, weak institutions, concentration of economic and political power, capture of public funds by vested interests and misallocation of resources. The economic and political causes of democratic decline are interlinked, showing why strengthening the formal and informal frameworks for rights and liberties, anticorruption and institutional consolidation, as well as promoting market liberalism must go hand in hand. 

The emergence of the international vectors of unfreedom 
Ukraine is probably the best example of the risks of international unfreedom. An autocratic state, threatened by the democratic, sovereign choice of a neighboring nation, started an unjustified war of aggression to limit the prospect of democratic, liberal prosperity. To some extent, it translates into a war against liberal democracy. 

We cannot ignore the capacity of those promoting alternative forms of governance to mingle with meanings, the meaning of ‘democracy’ being contested both by China and Russia. However, their discourse of contestation, which, ironically, can be freely promoted in the Western liberal democracies’ digital public space by their state institutions, is rather focused on some specific descriptors of ‘democracy’, since they openly reject liberalism and the freedoms supporting this system. 

Even in extraordinary times, as in the case of the COVID-19, the citizens of liberal democracies had access to rights and fundamental freedoms to an extraordinary greater extent than the citizens of the contestants of our form of governance. Let’s just watch what is happening in Shanghai under the lockdown that started in March 2022 or how Russia favored vaccine diplomacy instead of vaccination campaigns that could have boosted the immunity of its own people. And, even in war time, it is improbable that there will be a situation like the latest cases in Russia, in which those having the courage to call the war in Ukraine what it is, a war, risk up to 15 years of prison.

To reduce these threats it remains relevant to look also behind the political dimension. The economic well-being achieved by non-democratic actors, based on their capacity to trick the well functioning of certain global economic systems (trade, intellectual property, etc.), opened a pandora box for the countries in transition, putting on the table attractive short-term alternatives. And, together with their capacity to collaborate, they succeeded in testing the resilience of the democratic systems. 

Nevertheless, every test allows us to reflect, debate, and analyze, to engage with various perspectives, and to find solutions to strengthen the democratic standards and to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms both at home  and abroad.

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Madalin Blidaru is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, a policy-oriented researcher and a political analyst specialised in International Relations, mainly EU foreign policy, EU neighbourhood, regional governance and interregional relations.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.