Larry Diamond is a scholar in the field of democracy studies. A Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, U.S., he has published extensively. In a new book, to be published next year, he inquires into the global crisis of democracy. In this interview, Professor Diamond speaks of modernising the rules-based order, strong leaders, and why India must reconsider its electoral system. Excerpts :
There is a rising tide of populism and nationalism across the world. Is the global liberal democratic system in a free fall?
It is not in a free fall, but we should not take anything for granted. Samuel P. Huntington, in The Third Wave, talked of waves of democracy expanding. The two previous waves of democratic expansion ended tragically with reverse waves of democratic implosions and what seemed like the march of authoritarianism — in the 1920s and ’30s. That led to horrible crimes against humanity and the Second World War, and then the wave of post-colonial democracies in the late 1950s, ’60s, and the early ’70s, all the military coups in Latin America, and so on. So, we are trying to avoid the third reverse wave of democratic breakdown. That’s what free fall would look like. You would have loss of confidence in democracy, and what would seem like uninterrupted ascendance of major authoritarian regimes. We are not there yet, but there are signs that we are beginning to approach that abyss and that is what is so alarming.
I think democracy is secure in India, but it is not in a number of other countries. There are countries that could be said to be democracies, but are increasingly illiberal democracies at risk of no longer being democracies. Look at the Philippines. They elected a president a couple of years ago [who has] now presided over a murderous wave of vigilante violence against alleged drug traffickers. More than 12,000 people have been killed in extra-judicial [ways]. The President has forced [out] the Supreme Court Chief Justice, he has jailed one of the leading senatorial rivals... This is very dangerous stuff. This contempt for democratic norms and the rule of law is spreading in a lot of places.I don’t think Hungary can be called a democracy any more.
You have some elected democracies that are descending into what we call competitive authoritarian regimes. Some like Uganda and Cambodia are no longer the slightest bit competitive. They are now really despotisms with a meaningless façade of electoral competition. And deeply authoritarian regimes are becoming even more deeply authoritarian — for instance, Russia. And China, where you now have the social credit system. All the data that social media collects is being mashed up into one comprehensive score of citizen loyalty. And we are creeping towards a situation where anyone who expresses criticism of President Xi Jinping or the Chinese Communist Party might find, not that they will be thrown in jail, they just won’t be able to buy a train ticket or have their kids go to college.
The rules-based order of the West is under threat. How do you see its future?
We need to decompose the concept of rules-based order into several components. There was a kind of rules-based order of the Treaty of Westphalia in Europe. Whoever managed to get power in a country could do whatever the hell they wanted as long as they did not cross the border and violate the sovereignty of other people or oppress or conquer other people. That cannot be allowed to fly in the post-World War II period. Sovereignty is — and must continue to be — an important principle but it’s not an absolute principle. The rules-based order is heavily rooted in the rules and institutions that were set up after World War II, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. India was an important voice from the political South in supporting and affirming them. Those rules are a part of what’s under assault, as well as the basic norm against aggression and conquest.
Look at how many countries in Southeast Asia have conflicting claims in the South China Sea, if you extend their land borders by a reasonable amount under international law into the South China Sea. Why should China, just because it has military power and the most powerful dredging ships in the world, be able to pull sand from beneath hundreds of feet and pile it up in new islands and say these are our islands? Why should China be able to defy a ruling of the International Court of Arbitration in favour of the Philippines? No one is doing anything to defend it.
The international rules-based order is not just a matter of defending human rights, it is a matter of defending basic principles of sovereignty and respect for the rights of other nations, and willingness to arbitrate disputes.
This does not mean that the rules and institutions that were set up as part of the “liberal international order” after World War II don’t need some adjustment. I believe that India should be given a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. I think we certainly could modernise the World Bank. Why should the president of the World Bank always be an American? I would be fine if the next president of the World Bank is from India. I would like that person to care about good governance and accountability and that is why I would not like to have a Chinese president at the World Bank. If you get an Indian president at the World Bank, you are going to get at least something of an independent professional; if you get a Chinese president, that person’s going to answer to the Chinese Communist Party. That, more than anything else, expresses the difference between India and China. There is a lot we can do to modernise the rules-based order, but it’s important that for the future of freedom and peace that it be defended.
There is a rise of strong leaders in traditionally strong democracies. Why is this happening and to what extent is social media aiding this?
Certainly there is a broad anxiety in the world about economic conditions, social pluralism and identity, how people are going to fare in a world of diversity. Of course, it’s always possible for this to be rubbed raw by loud social media voices. But we need to be cautious about the role of technology because we’ve had strong men before in the history of democracy. There were violent conflicts between ethnic groups, not only before social media, but before radio, television or newspapers. So, part of what’s happening is speed. One of the things that social media does is enable people to descend into filter bubbles that reinforce opinion. It also enables a ruler to have a direct relationship with his followers and to mobilise them instantly at his command.
We need to keep in mind that many of the leaders who are using these tools and mobilising a lot of anxieties are perceived to be, or aspire to be, strong men who do not have strong majorities. U.S. President Donald Trump lost the popular vote. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan keeps winning elections with less than 50% of the popular vote. The system is rigged in [their] favour and the population is divided. Of course, I will let Indians decide how to classify their Prime Minister. I think Narendra Modi’s followers regard him as a strong leader. Whether he falls into the category of the strongman ruler is a different story.
I think it’s hard for a system as pluralistic as India’s to yield to authoritarian temptations. There is so much diversity in India and decentralisation of government.All Indians hopefully look back on the experience of the Emergency and draw appropriate lessons from it.
Over the last few years, democratic institutions and the media have been under pressure in India. What is your assessment on that?
It is for Indians to judge whether they think this is a problem in India. The general point that stands all around the world is, if you erode checks and balances, you may purchase some temporary ability to make decisions. But you are buying a lot of negative side-effects in terms of the decline in protections for individual rights, in the rule of law and the deliberative aspects of democracy that are very important.
It’s a matter of widely accepted analysis of the Indian political situation that the Opposition has been in disarray. It’s hard to have an effective counterweight to a ruling party if you don’t have a party that leads that. The problem with the first-past-the-post system in India is that it really requires two principal parties. And if one of those semi-disintegrates, it creates instability. I think India really ought to reconsider its electoral system. One possibility would be proportional representation, though that could fragment the system even more. But the reform that’s gaining the most interest now is something called the instant runoff. The beauty of it is you keep all the existing single-member electoral districts. The difference is that instead of having whoever gets the most votes win, you give people a ballot where they can rank their choices. And if no candidate gets the majority of the vote, and if their candidate — the one whom they voted first — gets the least number of first-place votes, that candidate is eliminated, and the votes for him or her, including your vote, are distributed to the second preferences of the voters. And a just redistribution of the votes keeps happening until a candidate gets a majority of the vote, sometimes in a final round between two candidates.
Think about what that would do in a lot of electoral districts. First, it wouldn’t matter if parties formed coalitions or not. But they would certainly have to form tacit alliances because they would have to compete for the second and third preference votes of other parties and this might induce greater moderation. It usually makes for greater civility in electoral campaigns because if you thrash your opponents, you know you might need some of those second preference votes in order to win. It would ensure that in districts across India, whoever was elected in a district was at least minimally acceptable to a majority of the voters. It’s an experiment, but I think it’s time for India to at least talk about it.
Economic growth is increasingly concentrated in a small percentage of the population. Can we say that India is in a gilded phase of growth like the one the U.S. went through in the past?
It’s wonderful to have high rates of economic growth and it’s also absolutely necessary to lift people out of poverty. It’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. We need to worry about the distribution of growth as well. That means on the one hand we have to provide incentives, an enabling environment that unleashes entrepreneurial energy, innovation and risk-taking. Here, I think, one of the great insights of Prime Minister Modi is that he understood that unless you lift some of the regulatory burden of what was the called the administrative raj, the state just seemed to be intervening everywhere and requiring licenses and permits for everything. So streamlining of regulatory burdens and facilitation of entrepreneurship and capital formation are extremely important to generate more rapid economic growth in India. But it’s really important for the future of India that India avoids paying two horrible prices for achieving that. One would be inequality, which is entirely avoidable. If you have proper policies of taxation and an effective and reasonably non-corrupt state, we can redistribute some of that growth into education, health and social services. Second is that the world just cannot have this growth come at the expense of a massive increase in carbon emissions or other forms of pollution.
