You have to face the facts, in the end, the good guys won’t win. It is the hard fact that Chrystia Freeland exhibited the other day in front of the Brookings Institution. Dictators are not an endangered species. On the contrary, they gain muscle, confidence, adapt. You only have to see how the Chinese power is now the leader in security technology, spying, thanks to cameras and algorithms, on every gesture of every citizen.
Despite the trillions of dollars spent in Afghanistan by the Americans and their allies, including Canada, the obscurantists are firmly back in power. Beards grow, women suffer. Even in Iran, unless the army decides to take up the cause of the brave women exposed, it’s a safe bet that the misogynists will have the last word, that of force.
Freeland is far from the only one to explain that the progress of democracy has reached a ceiling and that we must resolve it. But his speech delivered in Washington offers an excellent summary of the state of thinking on the issue and a contribution to the ways of imagining the future.
The wind of peace and freedom
I like the way she did not throw stones at those who, like the political economist Francis Fukuyama, announced “the end of history”, that is to say the definitive victory of the ideals of democracy , human rights and the free market. They were (we were) not wrong to think so, at least to hope so and to want to push the wheel. In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the democratization of Eastern Europe, Latin America and several Asian countries, the first African elections with alternating of ruling parties, the peaceful abolition of apartheid in South Africa and the end of the civil war in Ireland, the winds of peace and freedom were blowing strong and, it seemed, steady.
The conversion of Mao’s China to free enterprise, the continuation of political repression, of course, but the gaining of freedom for the Chinese in other aspects of their lives, as was the case in Russia, pointed to the decline of the ‘arbitrary. The Arab Spring, then, expressed a seemingly insatiable thirst for change.
Except for the disastrous American invasion of Iraq, for which local people and the world continue to pay the price, the approach of democracies to dictatorships was one of companionship, of engagement. By dint of trading with them, signing treaties, exchanging our professors and our students, training their judges (which Quebec has done for China), sending them our films and our TV shows, they will end up well — it was the bet — to slide, quietly, on the good side of the force.
Freeland chose the date of the entry of Russian tanks into Ukraine to mark the transition from yesterday’s optimism to today’s realism. In my opinion, we have to go back further in time. The failure of the Arab Spring, particularly in Egypt, has given the measure of the power of the forces of regression in these societies. Radical Islam, first, the desire for military control, then.
The consolidation of Vladimir Putin’s power in Russia, his brutal elimination of freedom of the press and expression and the assertion of personal power by Xi Jinping already offered, for 10 years, the proof that the politics of engagement now resulted in zero democratic return.
In fact, we have witnessed a reversal of the trend, with the Russians and Chinese increasing their incursions into third countries, particularly in Africa and sometimes in Eastern Europe. To retain local autocrats who prefer the model of profitable despotism to that of democracy, which has the defect of replacing the certainty of the language of arms with the unpredictable results of the expression of the ballot box.
Our strategic supplies
Dictators have come up with their own version of engagement. Spying and looting of our technologies, first (we know that Huawei owes a lot to its copies of our Nortel), large-scale espionage, second (the director of the FBI says he opens two investigations every day on Chinese spies in American territory), and finally the storming of our social networks to heighten our internal tensions and pervert our elections. The Russians are the champions of this undermining enterprise, followed by the Chinese and the Iranians.
The findings of Freeland and several others therefore do not come too soon. We have left the historical phase of the expansion of freedom and entered the phase of the resilience of autocracies and their own ambitions. Collaboration with these regimes remains essential for global issues: climate crisis, pandemics, in particular. But the knowledge transfer channels opened yesterday for a noble purpose have become harmful to us, and we must review them one by one.
In particular, we cannot rely on hostile regimes for our strategic supplies of technologies, rare minerals, gas and oil, and health equipment.
Lucidity and idealism
Freeland also invites us to officially renounce any attempt, from the outside, to modify the political nature of these regimes. If democracy were to one day triumph there, it would necessarily be thanks to a local situation that we can neither foresee nor govern, and certainly not because our armies or our secret agents will have come to impose it or
scheme.
This new world is more murky than the one once opened up by the fall of the wall. Lucidity prevails over idealism. It is impossible to know for how long we will have to resolve to lower our expectations, to put the planetary flag of freedom at half-mast. To envision the distant day when we can raise the democratic flag, we can only rely on one of our wisest mentors, Captain James T. Kirk of the ship USS Enterprise. He offered in The final frontier this response to Fukuyama: “We’re not quite done with the story yet, nor her with us. »
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