A Time of Unease and Challenge for Democracy

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/world/democracy-challenges.html

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This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum, which concluded last week in the Greek capital.

ATHENS — Clear blue skies over the 10th Athens Democracy Forum could not dispel the unease. There was, for the first time, talk of possible nuclear war. Sabotaged Nord Stream gas pipelines spoke of a bitter winter to come. Inflation in Germany — a country that has never forgotten the horror that followed soaring prices in the 1920s — shot up to over 10 percent.

On the day the gathering closed, last Friday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia annexed 40,000 square miles of eastern and southern Ukraine, making them part of a Russian “motherland” he says he will defend with all means at his disposal.

The world’s democracies will be tested in standing up to Mr. Putin’s threats and his contempt for international law. This was clear from sharp exchanges that suggested, as President Emmanuel Macron of France has said, that “demographically speaking” a majority of the world does not stand with the West. India and China have been reluctant to take sides on the war. Much of Africa, still smoldering over colonialism and wary of Western promises, leans toward Russia, which is a significant arms supplier to the continent.

When Jeffrey Sachs, the director the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, advanced the view that the United States is a “white-dominated racist society,” no better than Russia with its “culture of authority,” or China with its “best-informed professionals in the world,” his moral equivalency met with applause. The world’s leading powers should talk, he said, not try to prove the superiority of one model over another.

The war, in Mr. Sachs’ view, was provoked to a significant degree by NATO through its expansion to Russia’s borders. He also suggested that if the war went nuclear, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, would be most to blame for shunning negotiation and pursuing a rash all-or-nothing course.

Jaroslaw Kuisz, a Polish journalist, was among those incensed. Referring to the collapse of the Soviet empire 30 years ago and Mr. Sachs’ role at the time in ushering Poland from central planning to a market economy, he said: “It is fascinating to me that you promised liberty to these societies. That they would get out of 300 years of subjugation, get out of this horrible sphere of influence, move toward self-determination and respect of human rights.” And now?

Such charged moments have long defined the Athens Democracy Forum, convened by the Democracy and Culture Foundation in association with The New YorkTimes. The capacity for civilized disagreement is the sign of any healthy society.

Mr. Kuisz spoke of a Ukrainian child without two legs and one hand whom he had met, and a mother from leveled Mariupol desperate over her missing son. Without Mr. Putin’s violent obsessions over the nonexistence of a Ukrainian nation, that child would still have those limbs and that mother her son. Tens of thousands of people, Ukrainian and Russian, many of them young, would still be alive.

In the face of what John le Carré once called “the classic, timeless, all-Russian, barefaced, whopping lie,” it helps to recall one simple fact: Mr. Putin started this war, nobody else.

Do not tell Poles they should trust in the kindness of strangers. Nor Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. They have known Soviet totalitarianism; they are unsurprised by the imperialist revanchism now emanating from Putin’s Russia.

Their intransigence in confronting Moscow will likely cause strains within the 27-nation European Union. Countries like France, Germany and Italy will be more inclined to seek a negotiated compromise, even if one seems inconceivable for the moment. On one thing everyone at the forum agreed: The war in Ukraine will be long.

The longer it is, the more escalation is possible. It takes only an accident, or an incident. Not since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 has the potential unleashing of terrible destruction upon humankind seemed so close at hand.

Christopher Clark, an Australian author and history professor at Cambridge University, called his book on the accumulation of decisions, big and small, in July 1914 that led to World War I “The Sleepwalkers.” Are today’s leaders the sleepwalkers — in another time of rising powers, economic transformation and unpredictable forces — ushering the world, despite themselves, toward conflagration?

It is the nature of tragedy, as in Ernest Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, to come upon the world “gradually, then suddenly.”

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, sounded a note of optimism in a speech to the forum. “I am deeply convinced that democracy will prevail,” she said, adding that “democracy may not be perfect but it is perfectible.” The flexibility and capacity for reinvention of democratic systems far exceeds that of autocratic regimes, she noted. “Democracy is promise,” she said.

It has also, in recent years, been a disappointment. For many citizens, democracy’s promise has proved empty. Anger has radicalized Western societies. A sense of exclusion has led to the proliferation of extreme movements and wild decisions, like Brexit (no panacea, after all, as Britain is now learning.)

Ece Temelkuran, a Turkish writer, spoke forcefully of the rising inequality produced by globalized capitalism that makes nonsense of democracy’s promise of a fair shake for everyone.

Bombarded by social media, bereft of any shared notion of truth, consumed by often irrational fears, polarized into rival tribes, rattled by the pandemic, isolated by remote work, Americans have a harder time persuading the world that their democratic society is the answer. Europeans, in some regards, are not far behind.

Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-British businessman who has plowed part of his fortune into improving governance in Africa, asked why on earth Africa should take the West as a model. He cited a politicized Supreme Court in the United States, the storming of the United States Capitol on Jan. 6 last year, European hoarding of promised vaccines for Africa, soaring inequality, gerrymandering to suppress American voters’ rights, and the widespread disgruntlement and sense of exclusion that has led to the rise of the far right from Italy to Sweden.

Why indeed? Perhaps because neither Mr. Putin’s repressive Russia, nor President Xi Jinping’s surveillance state in China, is an attractive counter model. Yet to many, a Chinese-Russian dominated world is alluring, if only because it is not the West, whose sins — colonialism, racism and the war in Iraq among them — are not forgotten. It was clear in Athens that a reconfigured world of great power rivalry, where America’s sway is no longer determinant even at a time of war in Europe, had taken form.

Crisis is also opportunity. Democracies may be shaken, but a stirring in them of resolve and new ideas is palpable. The European Union has been galvanized by war on its doorstep and by the Covid-19 pandemic to advance toward a more federal Europe in which fiscal, defense, energy and foreign policies are better integrated. Progress will be slow, but the direction seems set.

Among the students at the forum a passionate engagement in rethinking democracy and a strong commitment to save the planet were evident. It is clear to them that the nation-state cannot be the framework for addressing the core problems of our age, chief among them climate change, which has no respect for borders.

Three students — Michel Castrezzati, Elena Vocale and Larissa Möckel — from the International Youth Think Tank outlined an initiative to repurpose economics to establish broad well-being rather than growth as the measure of a successful society. Carsten Berg, a political scientist and fellow of the Berggruen Institute, cited Ireland as an example of the way citizens’ assemblies, formed of randomly selected citizens, can restore a sense of participation to democracies whose institutions seem remote. If juries function, why should such assemblies not?

There is a theory that autocracies have the edge in staying in power at times of crisis because they are not subject to the winds of political change. But slow to anger, democratic societies are capable of fierce resolve.

Karolina Wigura, a Polish historian and sociologist, suggested that pessimism about the future of democracy, in her own country and elsewhere, was overdone. The situation was not “black or white, it’s more like a zebra,” she said.

Nuance is not much favored in this age of declamation, of all or nothing, of presumption of guilt, of refusal to compromise. But most of life lies in the gray zones. Democracies are clumsy but adaptable. They are not monochrome. Perhaps Poland, even in its illiberal turn, is indeed — like Italy and Sweden — on the difficult road to a society where there is less contempt of one faction for another.

Isaiah Berlin wrote in “The Crooked Timber of Humanity” that “no perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.”

Democracy is imperfect, and in that imperfection likes its distinctive humanity, its elasticity, its terrifying fragility: the quality that every quest for utopia ends up crushing on the way to terror.

The belief that the democracies of the world, for all their flaws, embody values of liberty, openness, the rule of law, freedom of expression and human rights was nowhere more evident than in the words of Alexander Chekmenov, a Ukrainian photographer. He has captured in his photographs the everyday bravery of people — a baker, a sous-chef, a railway conductor — whose country was attacked simply because it wanted to forge its own democratic future. He believes Ukraine’s struggle is essential to ensuring the world does not descend once again into tyranny and horror.

“This will end with our victory, which will be the victory of all the civilized world, of light over darkness, of good over evil,” he said.

Roger Cohen, who was a moderator at the Athens Democracy Forum, is the Paris bureau chief of The New York Times and a former foreign editor and columnist.