Brian Wong, Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Political Review, speaks to Larry Diamond, political scientist and activist renowned for his analysis of and defense of democracy in his writings. As a prolific advisor to dissidents and democratic politicians around the world, Larry Diamond’s “Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency” (2019) was freshly released in June 2019, two weeks prior to when this interview took place.
Larry Diamond is one of the best-known academic defenders of democracy as an ideal and virtue in the contemporary age. It is thus both unsurprising yet pleasantly refreshing that in the professor’s highly packed schedule, we manage to sit down over a coffee at the 2019 27th Estoril Political Forum, a well-attended gathering of scholars, students, and political figures from across both sides of the Transatlantic Relationship.
Our conversation began with my question as to whether Larry believes that there exists a crisis in democracy today, and what, if at all, could be done about it.
Larry concurs with the overtone of my question, noting that there is a crisis that has been gaining momentum since 2006. Democracy’s global trajectory could be characterised by a gradual transition towards stagnation at the turn of the millennium, followed increasingly by recession – in both civic freedoms and political liberties across the world. He gestures towards the Freedom House, the Economist, and a variety of democracy-related projects (with which he has been involved in both advisory and participatory capacities) as evidence for this worrying trend.
Turning to specific examples to substantiate his thesis of the “steady erosion in a number of democracies”, Larry demonstrates both his erudite knowledge of democracy’s developments under particular circumstances and a keen eye for flagging patterns where others could not. Beginning with sub-Saharan Africa, a region for which Larry notes there exists a historical tendency amongst theorists to downplay or neglect the strides made in democratisation, he warns of the perils as democracy recedes in the region. Both Kenya and Tanzania are alarming, paradigmatic examples of rights-abusing authoritarian regimes that seek to capture and monopolise power.
On the larger Muslim majority countries – some of which he writes about in his seminal anthology on Middle Eastern democracy – he observes the “cessation in democracy” in Bangladesh and Turkey; whilst the recent municipal election results in the latter – in which the opposition to Erdogan won an upset victory against the politically well-endowed establishment – offers some glimmer of hope, Larry is alarmed about the death of democracy in Bangladesh, a country of 200 million people about which there has been surprisingly little interest and coverage internationally. From Pakistan to the Philippines, Bangladesh to Turkey, democracy has witnessed a substantive rollback.
“In the Philippines, democracy is hanging by a thread because of abuses under Duterte.”
Even amongst historically developed democracies, there are worrying trends, such as the rise of illiberal, xenophobia nationalism amongst the European right. Larry cites Poland and Hungary as particular examples, where the crackdown upon political dissent and civil liberties in Orban’s Hungary, against a backdrop of inaction from the European Commission, is eroding the country’s moral and political infrastructure.
We conclude our survey of democracy’s regress around the world with a few observations from Larry: “liberal democracies are becoming less liberal in many cases; electoral democracies have either become more illiberal or even ceased to be democracies. The movement has been a negative one, where countries “have been squeezing competitiveness out of politics and their civil societies”. Authoritarian regimes have become more brutal and totalistically authoritarian. There exists a worrying downward trend amongst countries at various stages of economic and political development.
There exists an age-old debate in democratic theory concerning the dialectics between substantive and procedural views of democracies. The former envisions democracy as encapsulating particular values and principles that extend merely beyond the right to vote; whereas the latter embraces a more substantively minimal yet procedurally rigorous imagination of democracy as constitutive of enactment of decisions by the people, with no exceptions apart from those that are demanded by the preservation of procedural justice. The former is embraced by theorists such as Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls, whereas the latter is adopted by Jeremy Waldron and, in a variant that focuses heavily on leadership, Joseph Schumpeter. I ask Larry about his thoughts on the dangers of procedurally democratic institutions proceeding leaders that are substantially un-democratic, as seen in the US, Italy, or Hungary. How are we to make sense of such cases?
Larry responds by noting the importance of being clear and precise about the terms employed in our political discourse. To the extent that countries can replace their leaders in reasonably free and fair elections, they could indeed be called democracies. He distinguishes between the degree of liberalism and the extent of democratic-ness in his answer, with the latter mapping onto a relatively procedural conception of democracy, whereas the former embodies a far wider set of normative ideals that overlap greatly with what is referred to as ‘substantively democratic’ above. For instance, Mexico (in July 2018) is a useful example – a significant outsider took power despite lacking institutional or establishment backing. In many ways, the rise of Loprador is testament to the existence of democracy in Mexico. Yet concurrently, Mexico remains a deeply illiberal state, with rising levels of crimes, systemic corruption, and drug trade remaining endemic issues.
I probe Larry as to whether he thinks the liberal-democratic distinction here is merely artificial – after all, does it not seem that illiberalism could also ‘percolate’ through to undermining the viability of democracy?
Larry agrees: problems of illiberalism fester and mutate – “it’s hard to keep them from infecting the minimal procedural elements of democracy”, such that the electoral process itself could eventually be jeopardised by illiberalism. There’s always a question, he remarks, as to how long and securely a very illiberal democracy could survive as a democracy – if at all. Here he highlights the proliferate challenges across the world today as liberal democracies become increasingly illiberal, through tools such as executive action.
“There’s Chavez in Venezuela, Erdogan in Turkey, Orban in Hungary, and Duterte in the Philippines. When executives develop projects of constraining civic pluralism and dissent, and if these projects are not interrupted or constrained, a downward slide towards electoral authoritarianism becomes inevitable.”
Such regression plays out in two crucial senses. The first is where the most plausible constraints on power – such as the media and public spaces for civic pluralism – are no longer anything near a level playing field between the establishment and the opposition. Without level playing fields, even if there exists some degree of electoral competition, the country loses its ability to remain democratic. This does not imply that opposition cannot surmount the obstacles and win – as per Ukraine; yet it suffices to say that democratic elections ought not require opposition to “mobilise extraordinary margins of victory” that overwhelm authoritarian obstacles in order to prevail. The second consists of the transformation of electoral administrative systems, through mechanisms such as gerrymandering, into authoritarian tools for power consolidation. Once formalistic structures and institutions become coopted, the encroachment of authoritarianism becomes unassailable and systemic.
I push back against Larry’s liberalism-democracy cut in light of some of his answers – I raise the culturalist view that we need a thicker conception of democracy other than Robert Dahl’s minimalist approach (embodied in his analysis of polyarchy), so as to capture many of the conditions Larry points to as being favourable or conducive towards democracy’s viability.
Larry resists this thought, in observing astutely that there ought to be a separation between the prescriptive (“what should we do in order to facilitate democracy?”) and the interpretive/analytic (“what should we understand or take to be the core definition or concept of democracy?”). Indubitably, we need civic and elite cultures embodying democratic norms and respect for the opposition, in order for democracy to remain viable; for political competition to evolve past being a primordial zero-sum game. If such cultures are absent, we may “get through an election or two, or maybe three, as the country stumbles on; yet eventually, things implode.” He points to Kenya and Bangladesh as examples for this.
Yet concurrently, he holds that “it is [not] intellectually useful to incorporate a democratic culture dimension into the definition of electoral democracy”, for this conflates what is probabilistically likely (the facilitation of democracy) with conceptually true (the definition of democracy). Larry suggests that we treat culture as an important independent variable, but not as a constitutive component of the analysis of democracy.
Our conversation turns to a perennial question for the West’s foreign policy – the West appears to be excessively amenable to particular regimes with abhorrent human rights records, in ways that map onto the West’s geopolitical interests and strategies. At best this seems to suggest a problematic inconsistency in the West’s foreign policy, often dressed up in the name of realpolitik; at worst it ostensibly signals that the West is willing to throw democracy under the bus where and only if convenient. I thus ask him for his thoughts on how the West ought to balance – if at all – between upholding democracy and its core strategic interests.
Larry adamantly problematicises my characterisation – Western aid and ‘moderating strategies’ can cut either way in both promoting democracy or reinforcing authoritarianism, even for its staunchest autocratic allies. Yet aid that comes from China, Russia, or Saudi Arabia is likely to lean only in one particular direction – in favour of authoritarianism.
“It’s clear today that the autocracies have the world – authoritarian powers around the world are now intensely focused on trying to prevent further People’s Power revolutions.”
The authoritarian regimes’ encroachment signifies their desires to shore up counterparts in different regions, generating momentum for democratic reversal and ensuring that they would end up with a friendlier world of authoritarian demonstration effects and zeitgeist. One objective is to avoid democratisation in their respective regions, so as to keep their people away from “infection by the virus of democracy”; another is to establish useable models for reference and analysis.
Larry defends the West, in noting that whilst in Eastern Europe and Latin America during the Cold War, the self-anointed “liberal West” did opt to shore up military dictatorships and pro-Western authoritarian regimes, the dominant effects of Western investment – since the Cold War – have been largely to encourage and support democracy. I express my scepticism regarding the extent to which the promotion of democracy has not in fact been utilised to advance the West’s ulterior motives (commercial or otherwise), a challenge to which Larry ripostes with the intuition pump:
“Would you prefer, as a democratic activist, funding from China or the USA?”
Perhaps the answer is less clear than Larry thinks; that the reader may have mixed intuitions about the answer – but such variations in intuitive reactions perhaps in turn tell more for the divergence in values and political cultures amongst individuals from different nations, than against Larry’s optimistic faith in the West’s enduring advancement of democracy. I bring up the archetypal line adopted by China on “pluralism”, that the Chinese state’s official justification for its reluctance to undertake democratisation revolves around some skepticism towards meta-narratives and the view that countries could flourish without democracy (each to their own).
Larry finds this line remarkably uncompelling, and empirically fading into irrelevance. As someone who is well-versed in the history of China’s trajectory of political liberalisation (and its setbacks), the scholar flags that whilst the “pluralism” defense had historically been China’s primary line up till the last turn of the decade, it has shifted – since 2010 – into adopting a more assertive and self-confident stance that democracy is an inferior model to authoritarianism in its ability to make “necessary and practically demanding decisions”. This trend in Chinese politics is an “under-appreciated, maybe sometimes too subtle to be noteworthy evolution in China’s articulation of normative dissent” towards the ostensibly Western notion of democracy.
“This narrative is a part of the changing zeitgeist, gaining momentum under ruling elites who do not want democracy themselves.”
How does Larry view the argument that democracy is a distinctly Western notion, unsuited to cultures that deem it inappropriate for their unique “national circumstances” (a line often articulated by trenchant nationalists in China, Russia, and elsewhere)?
Larry is unconvinced: he notes that every country has signed onto and committed themselves to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and pursuant covenants of rights [this is not technically true – in that the declaration was adopted by a 1948 motion with 48 countries in favour and 8 countries abstaining), and – given this to be case and the fact that no country could de facto uphold these rights without democracy – there are compelling reasons to deem both human rights and the value of democracy as universally endorsed.
Is democracy necessary for the preservation of human rights? I invite Larry to elaborate on his thoughts here. The professor delves into two separate cases – the first concerns village elections in China, which had “some real promise and impact in their early years after their introduction in 1989, but just haven’t gone anywhere or scaled up enough to have significant impact on national politics and rights at large of Chinese citizens.” His second example is Singapore, where arrests and violations of freedoms of speech are frequent and persistently a threat – there is no independent judiciary in the island nation, he opines. The first example serves to illustrate the structural necessity of full democracy for genuine upholding of liberties; whereas the second, as an oft-cited counterexample to Larry’s instrumental thesis concerning democracy, is less of a successful counterexample than of a citizenry that fundamentally lacks secure guarantees to their rights and political status.
Larry further notes that there exist broad support and aspirations for democracy in almost every culture and country – perhaps a sweeping generalisation for some, but for others, a valuable clarification in times when reality and propaganda are increasingly intertwined. When confronted with the examples of the Arab Spring, Larry suggests that whilst in the Arab world, “they’ve certainly been sobered and shocked by the Spring’s developments and been made wary of radical political change”, the broad barometer is tilted in favour of greater opening-up and contestation in political structures.
Preemptively or defensively, the professor wishes to make one point very clear, “No country in the democratic West is arguing now or anytime in the past that every country should instantly democratise.” Even the most assertive of past American administrations – e.g. under Bush Junior – have emphasised that countries need to find their own timetables and paths towards democracy.
Here I enter with a worry that many liberals possess regarding this somewhat ‘softer’, if not pragmatically caveated, stance on democratisation. Some worry that “finding own pace” is precisely an excuse that is employed by many regimes to deflect and defend against petitions for them to pursue democracy. Larry admits that this is a legitimate worry, but we both agree on the fact that it’s hard to systemically seek a resolution to this concern.
Given his past expression of skepticism towards an overtly deterministic reading of economic development’s connection with democratic flourishing, I press on with the question: Does Larry believe that the prerequisites for a flourishing democracy should be connected with economic development then – per Przeworski’s (et al. 2000) argument?
Larry is swift to respond by noting that the study I cite concluded its empirical research period in 1990, with much that had occurred since then. There is a pressing need to update the research – in that whilst it is still true that there exists a (negative) correlation between probability of democratic failure and level of economic development,
“We need to know that a number of poor countries have survived such economic crises – some are hanging by a thread, but they have survived longer than what would have been expected.”
On the upper end, the argument has collapsed. The initial finding was that from 1950 to 1990, not a single instance of country with per capital income higher than a particular threshold of 6,000USD (~11,000/12,000USD today) would lose its democratic status. Yet Larry opines that Russia was effectively above this threshold and still receded away from democracy in the early 2000s; he also raises Hungary and Turkey as further counter-examples of countries that democratically backslide despite income levels being higher than the above threshold. The takeover, he flags, is that political scientists must be humble and wary of writing off any country (or taking any country for granted).
“History is not to be taken for granted. Neither is democracy.”
Both Larry and I concur that one of the major causes of the slide into authoritarianism may be the lack of articulation of democracy’s virtues. Larry suggests that, “we have to go back to arguing for democracy and freedom and rule of law, appealing to first-principle arguments even amongst liberal democracies.”
First-principle arguments matter for several reasons. Firstly, if we are to justify democracies on purely instrumentalist grounds, we become vulnerable to contingent empirical or temporal fluctuations – for instance, the cynic could always pluck a failing democracy out of thin air and juxtapose it negatively against the relatively affluent and rapidly developing China. Purely instrumental arguments are uninspiring.
Moreover, if we return to first principles and consider the irreducible principles and tenets of human dignity, freedom, and rights, we may find it easier to articulate the importance of transcendental principles that peak to innate human aspirations and needs. Larry dismisses tenets of Maoist and Stalinist ideologies as lacking in “utopian vision” (although perhaps many activists and autocrats who rose to power on waves of communist delusions would beg to differ), contrasting them against the reinvigorating essence of pro-democracy narratives.
As a political theorist, I take to offering two normative critiques of what Larry envisions to be a reasonable defense of democracy (synthesising both its pragmatic appeal and normative justifications that we have previously discussed). The first is the critical attack – that the fetishisation of democracy is the byproduct of an ideological hegemony that manifests itself through a “pro-democracy” false consciousness; the second is a neo-Hobbesian argument, that security and stability may – at times – come above popular democracy as a means of reflecting or serving the genuine General Will of the public.
Larry dismisses the former challenge on the grounds that the faith and buy-in towards democracy is “rarely seen amongst the grassroots of societies”, and certainly not “viewed by most individuals as such”. On the second, he concedes that especially at the current critical juncture in global politics, this charge is potentially a highly severe threat to public dialogue and perceptions about democracy. This goes back to episodes such as the traumatised public consciousness in Egypt in response to the Arab Spring.
Yet Larry eloquently emphasises the following points: “All instances of state collapse in the past have occurred in authoritarian regimes.”, and “The problem isn’t democracy per se, but elite defection from democratic norms that brings on crises of political instability.” To some critics Larry may well be playing an elaborate No True Scotsman game here; to others he is offering a much needed, empirically grounded riposte to the political fake news that proliferates across online media.
“If you can sustain democracy, build democracy, you’re going to have greater order and political stability. The only country that isn’t relatively unstable or in the grip of serious violence in Central America is Costa Rica – and it’s no coincidence that it is one of the most democratic states in the region.”
Larry calls for us to move away from the belief that we need authoritarianism to preserve stability, but to move towards a vision of democracy that is truly founded upon the rule of law, informed by constitutional principles that give everyone an inclusive stake in the process, such that they do not turn to violence. “There is nothing organic and stable about the repressive and corrupt management of one ruler.”
We close our discussion with a brief overview of where the professor is heading next with his research. Larry offers us an exclusive preview – after his latest book, he plans to conducting a predominantly synthesising task in his next project, resurrecting his massive online course on liberal democracies and rewriting a textbook on democracy that would be widely disseminated across the world. Through this, he hopes to distill what “we’ve covered and learnt from the past”, and “help us inform our future generations working on democracy”.
Larry Diamond is a thinker and scholar – but he is also a trenchant and strident activist. For some he may be overtly obsessed and unnuancedly committed to democracy – yet for others, his voice is much needed in an age of political relativism and sliding into authoritarianism. Democracy is in crisis, and it falls upon us to solve it. Could Larry’s words here comprise a core dimension of our future direction? Only time will tell.