The Conversation: Will Democracy Prevail?

Edited by SERGE SCHMEMANN
© 2015 The New York Times
Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate

Featured image:
Attendees gather for the annual Athens Democracy Forum on Sept. 15, 2015. (The New York Times)

 

In an era of growing inequality, debt crises and the rise of islamist extremism, democracy is under pressure.

Is the democratic system of government working? What challenges have arisen in the past year that democracies are struggling to cope with? The Athens Democracy Forum is convened every year by the International New York Times, with the support of the United Nations and the city of Athens, to examine the state of liberal democracy around the world.

This year, the flood of Syrian and other refugees into Europe, the drumbeat of terrorist attacks and the agonized debate over Greece's debt gave a special urgency to the discussions. We offer here edited and abridged excerpts from three of the panel discussions.

The moderators:

• Serge Schmemann, member of the Times editorial board
•  Liz Alderman, chief European business correspondent for The Times
•  Steven Erlanger, The Times' bureau chief in London

The participants:

•  Paula Dobriansky, former U.S. undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs
•  Eric X. Li, venture capitalist and political scientist in Shanghai
•  Benny Tai, associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong and co-founder of the Occupy Central with Love and Peace movement
• Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate and Times columnist
• Alan Rousso, managing director for external relations and partnerships at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
• Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service and chair of the board of trustees at the University of London
• Ed Husain, senior advisor and director of strategy at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation
• Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore

IS LIBERAL DEMOCRACY UNIVERSAL?

Serge Schmemann: Liberal democracy is under challenge. For much of the world, the democracies of the United States and Europe are no longer perceived as a "shining city on a hill." Russian and China argue for an authoritarian version they regard as better suited to their cultures; Islamist extremists wage a murderous campaign for a new caliphate. Can we still argue that liberal democracy as we know it in the West is universal?

Eric X. Li: I'm a venture capitalist. And as a venture capitalist, whenever I analyze a situation, I look at the track record. Here is what I see:

We're in Athens, and even the democracy established here had a very short track record. It survived for maybe 200 years. Then for a couple of thousand years there was no democracy, yet in that period we created marvelous civilizations, great music, great art, great culture.

With the Enlightenment, democratic ideas came back. But the version that Western democracies are selling to the rest of the world still has had an extraordinarily short track record.

After the Cold War, an enormous number of countries converted their political systems to electoral democracies. The majority of those countries have done poorly, especially in the developing world. They're still mired in civil disorder, war, poverty.

In China we have a different system. It had a lot of problems, a lot of disasters, in the initial period. But in the last 30, 40 years, it hasn't done so badly. China, under the one-party state, has lifted 650 million people out of poverty.

Benny Tai: In Hong Kong democracy has not been "sold" to us. It is a need. People need food, they need to have their material needs satisfied, and then they need to have a sense of security. And once people have filled those needs, they want freedoms, and then they want to feel secure that their freedoms will be protected; they want rights. So we start to care about the rights of other people and about putting constraints on government. One way to do it is to select our leaders.

Democracy is an evolving process. Not just in the system, but also in the consciousness of the people. I am not arguing that we need to have the kind of electoral systems as in the West overnight.

Paula Dobriansky: Democracy is not in retreat. Eric cited a number of countries and areas which he said were being challenged economically. There might be economic challenges, but political rights have been maintained. And countries keep moving toward democracy.

Burma has decided to hold elections. I was in Burma not too long ago, and I saw quite a change from where it was economically before. In Ukraine, people demonstrated because they wanted the choice of joining Europe, and also rejected corruption.

Democracy is not a linear process. There are constant changes, ebbs and flows.

Li: Let's make a bet. Ten years from now, are we betting the people of Ukraine and people of Burma will be living in economic prosperity, free of corruption? I'd bet against that.

Dobriansky: I'd bet that the people of Ukraine and the people of Burma, if given the opportunity, and if they are not threatened or prevented, will advance themselves economically and gain new political rights.

Schmemann: Let me return to you, Eric. You had mentioned that as a venture capitalist, you look for systems that work. There are a lot of very successful venture capitalists in the States, as far as I know, who are certainly not hampered by the system, and support it.

Also, on the betting front, I would bet that in 10 years there are going to be many, many people in China who share the feelings of the Occupy Central people in Hong Kong.

Li: Well, it's possible. But I think it will depend on how democracies perform in the next 10 years. I'm respectful of democracy. The troubles with democracy come from the notion that it is universal and permanent and the best thing we've got.

The Chinese are and should be open to alternatives; I don't think they should close their doors on democracy. But I don't think they should do what many Westerners are doing, which is rejecting any alternative.

Tai: Agreed, agreed.

Dobriansky: No one is imposing democracy, and no one should. You can't take, say, the model of democracy as it is in the United States and transplant it to another country. Models are different. But it is clear what constitutes a democracy and a democratic process and what doesn't.

Democracy is not just about an election or two; it's about institutions, about freedom of the press, about freedom of religion, about checks and balances. It's about rule of law, the universal protection of human rights. Those concepts can be expressed in various ways in different societies.

IS INEQUALITY "THE CHALLENGE OF OUR TIME"?

Liz Alderman: If you have more money, do you have more freedom of speech? What does this mean for democracy, if the rich have more influence than the majority of the people? What can be done to address it?

Paul Krugman: When the financial crisis hit, many people expected a replay of the New Deal, where in response to the failure of unregulated capitalism, you would have a return to institutions that promote a middle class; a turning away from worship of the market and a movement toward greater equality.

By and large it has not turned out that way. In Europe, the middle class has been disempowered, not empowered. Fears of another economic crisis, anxiety over debt, have been used as hammers with which to smash the institutions that have in the past provided some bulwark against extreme inequality.

It has been an enormously undemocratic process. European policy is determined by technocrats who have no idea what to do except to smash the power of workers.

Alan Rousso: We know from studies that it's very rare, if not unheard of, for countries once they reach a certain level of economic development to reverse course and become non-democracies.

So when we talk about democracy being in crisis, I don't see established democracies in developed countries becoming nondemocracies. I don't really see those countries in transition in southeastern Europe, in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, suddenly throwing democracy overboard.

There are challenges to democracy. It doesn't always function perfectly. It may mean that parties rise and fall. It may mean that people are out in the streets. But they still prefer a democratic way of solving problems.

Krugman: Yes, the odds of seeing any major democratic nation declare itself no longer a democracy are quite low. The chances of its ceasing to be in practice a democracy are very different — a situation in which a fairly small oligarchy gets to define the parameters of acceptable discussion, the policies that are on the table, what is considered to be respectable and responsible. Europe has become a society of countries that are democratic in form, but they are increasingly undemocratic in terms of how they are actually run.

There's some evidence that at current levels of inequality, reducing inequality is actually favorable for growth. But the more important point is there's not a shred of evidence that it hurts growth. Reducing inequality is something we can do, and there's no reason at all to believe that it will cripple the economy or discourage the job creators.

ARE WESTERN DEMOCRACIES THE MORTAL ENEMIES OF ISLAMIC EXTREMISTS?

Steven Erlanger: I had just moved to Berlin when the 9/11 attacks happened in New York. Most of the plotters were from Hamburg, so I spent much of the next year chasing Mohammed Atta. Atta had been a student of urban design, and his thesis was about Aleppo, in Syria. What radicalized him in part was the fact that Aleppo was being destroyed, he thought, by modern development. Today, Atta is dead and Aleppo has been destroyed by Islamic extremism. Syria, too, has been destroyed. That gives me the sense that Islamic extremism is not the simple thing that we think it is.

Ed Husain: I think it was an Italian philosopher who said that the discourse of the disorganized majority is controlled by an organized minority. That's exactly what we're seeing played out across the Middle East: We have a very organized minority of jihadists who dominate the global Muslim agenda.

What's their attitude toward democracy? It's that popular sovereignty violates God's sovereignty. Shariah, or Muslim law, must be sovereign, and anything that violates that must be opposed.

Then there are Islamists, like the Muslim Brotherhood, whose game is to use democracy to get into power. But they don't get democratic culture, the rule of law, as we saw with Mohammed Morsi in Egypt.

And there are the Arab political regimes, whether dictatorships or monarchies, who talk democracy but take every measure to contain it, control it, and keep it at bay for all kinds of political short-term calculations — supported by most of our governments in the West.

Kishore Mahbubani: We are entering a new era of world history, different from what we've had in the last 200 years, marked by two factors: the end of the era of Western domination of world history, and a world that is becoming smaller and smaller. We live side by side, cheek by jowl with each other.

The confluence of these two factors is aggravating relations between the Western world and the Islamic world. Many in the West want to say that the problem is over there, and do not consider the possibility that the West may be equally responsible for the problem.

The largest Islamic democracy in the world, and a successful democracy, is in Indonesia. They're modernizing and succeeding. But they also contain the seeds of anger that have led to the creation of ISIS.

They look at the number of bombs and drones that have killed Muslims over the last 10, 15 years. They see daily that Muslim lives have become inconsequential. So it's not surprising that 25,000 young people, many of whom know nothing about the Arab world, go and fight in ISIS.

If you chop off ISIS without dealing with the larger problem, another ISIS will come.

Husain: This has been in our midst since the early 1990s. That's when we had another huge conflict going on in Europe: the Bosnia conflict where, between 1991 and 1995, white, blond, blue-eyed Muslims were killed for being that — Muslims — in the midst of Europe.

We had at our universities in Britain young activists who had been given political refuge — Omar Bakri Muhammad, Abu Qatada and others — and who radicalized an entire generation of young Muslims like myself, born and raised in the U.K. Their argument was attractive: if young, white, blond, blue-eyed Muslims who were integrated into the fabric of Europe, who ate pork and drank alcohol, could be killed, what then for people like me? What future did my generation have?

In the intervening 20 years, we've had the embodying and the embedding of this extremist ideology of jihadism, Salafism, Islamism, whatever you wish to call it — distinct from the religion of Islam — in which young Muslims born and raised in the West who do not feel they belong.

Jihad is attractive. Young Muslims — not all Muslims, probably 1 percent or thereabouts — have grown up in the last 20 years believing in a utopia, in the promise that we will see a caliphate in our time.

And there is an afterlife element: a literalist reading of scripture that says that we're heading toward the end times.

ISIS has capitalized on these sentiments: that we are in the end times, and it's now incumbent upon their followers to migrate to a Shariah land, to a caliphate that God protects. And if you die in this process, you will receive heavenly rewards.

What ISIS offers these young people is a sense of dignity, of purpose, of defying every odd that's thrown at them by the modern world.

Sir Richard Dearlove: I think we need to be cautious about making legal changes to cope with the problem. This needs to be done with precision, with thoughtfulness, and not in a state of panic.

Panic makes for bad laws — you only have to look back at many measures that were brought in, in 2004. Fortunately, many of them had sunset clauses, so they could be revised. I don't think we should go down the same track again.

We haven't mentioned migration, which is perhaps the most potent issue, politically, in Europe. But if we're to solve the problems driving the problems — a strategic approach to the complete destabilization of the state in Libya and Syria, and this takes us into the fundamentalist issue — we have to start putting this first in our priorities.

Mahbubani: When I was young, when I was studying at the University of Singapore, and when I went to Malaysia, to the University of Malaya, there were lots of young Muslim women. Guess what they wore? Miniskirts.

Today, I go to the same campus, and 100 percent of the women are wearing the hijab. Why? Technology. It has shrunk the world.

It actually began in the 1980s, when the West sponsored the jihadists to fight in Afghanistan. And after you won the war in Afghanistan, you walked away, and left Osama bin Laden behind with all the weapons. Then there was the invasion of Iraq — the military was destroyed, the Baath party was destroyed, and you left a political vacuum.

To avoid a recurrence, please go back and understand what went wrong before to ensure we don't repeat the mistake.

Dearlove: I'm slightly concerned by the turn of the argument that it's all the West's fault. What alarms me now is the failure of the powers-that-be in the Middle East to approach their own problems. For example, Turkey could have solved the problem of ISIS very quickly had it wished to do so. The Egyptian have very powerful armed forces. Are they deployed? They are not.

I originally started life as a historian, and the destruction of cultural heritage by religious movements has a long-established history. The driver, usually, is theological and political — to assert the identity of your particular movement. As a messianic movement, ISIS is largely acting in character.

We all wish to prevent this, because our society values cultural heritage very highly. And of course, it's because we value it so highly that ISIS make a point of behaving in the opposite manner.

Husain: There is an impulse to go back, in an age of confusion, in an age of modernity, to black and white, right and wrong, heaven and hell.