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As the one hundredth anniversary of the beginning of World War I approaches, one may encounter some rather strained attempts to compare the current global balance of forces to that in Europe in 1914. I recently visited several countries in south east Asia and a different comparison struck me, the similarities between now and the 1930s, weak democracies and strong dictatorships.
This comparison “jumped off the page” after a week in Bangkok, followed by several days in Hanoi - a journey from a country with weak and faltering formal democratic institutions to an apparently stable one with an authoritarian regime (bordering on a country with a considerably more brutal dictatorship, China).
In The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm argued that the conflict between capitalism and communism determined the course of the twentieth century. This confrontation of socio-economic ideologies without doubt dominated European and global history, especially after 1945. But another, inter-related confrontation that determined the course of the century was authoritarianism versus democracy. The capitalism-communism conflict seems but a moment of history for people in their forties and younger. However, the danger of a rising authoritarian wave is as imminent in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth.
In most countries of Europe in the 1930s the contest between authoritarian and democratic visions of society dominated the political struggle. The exceptions were Italy where the fascists had already established an extreme version of authoritarian rule, and Britain where a rigid class structure gave stability to superficially democratic institutions. By the middle of the decade, capitalist authoritarian regimes were clearly on the rise in Germany and much of central and eastern Europe (e.g., Hungary and Poland), as well as Portugal, with Spain soon to join the anti-democratic camp.
Indeed, in very few of the industrialised countries in the late 1930s did democracy seem the stronger trend. Among the large countries only in the United States was there an unambiguous shift towards strengthening popular participation. Ironically enough it was during the presidency of patrician Franklin D Roosevelt that trade unions asserted themselves as a major political force (which would not survive much past mid-century).
Now, well into the twenty-first century it is even more difficult to find a major country with vigorous and democratic institutions, certainly not in the United States nor in Europe. In the United States the confrontation between a well-funded right wing Republican Party and the middle-of-the road Democrat Party dominates politics, one doctrinaire and aggressive, the other muddled and vascillating. The anti-democratic trend is demonstrated by passage of laws restricting the right to vote in Republican controlled states, linked to the racist xenophobia of the Tea Party. In the White House sits a Democrat apparently unconcerned by a massively intrusive national security complex.
In Europe anti-democratic trends are if anything stronger. Britain probably has the most extensive video surveillance network in Europe (see recent articles in the Guardian), as well as legal restrictions on the right of assembly, designed to reduce public protests (as we find in Spain). In addition, the Conservative-dominated coalition government’s brutal attack on poor households receiving social support in effect legalises civil rights violations. Surveillance, attacks on the poor and the government fanning fears of immigrants combine to make a potent anti-democratic package.
On the continent pre-existing authoritarian tendencies enjoyed a quantum leap under the EU-wide austerity regime fostered by the German government under the cover of the European Commission. The unelected governments in Greece (2011-12) and Italy (2011-13) represent the most obvious and shocking examples of the authoritarian trend. Much more serious in the long term is the EU fiscal compact (officially named the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union).
This treaty, which came into effect at the beginning of 2013, severely limits the authority of national parliaments to set fiscal policy. The treaty and additional measures demanded by the German government remove fiscal policy from public control (with monetary policy in the hands of the European Central Bank and beyond national accountability). This process in which major decisions are taken away from the electorate fundamentally undermines public faith in the democratic process.
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