The Return of Conflict, the Retreat of Democracy (Open Society Foundation)

Mark Malloch-Brown: Thank you for that warm introduction and it is great to be back here.

And what an extraordinary international backdrop to our gathering this evening.

For any speaker giving something called the “Churchill Lecture” at the RCDS, an attempted coup in Russia is not a bad set-up!

Both the latest events there and the whole of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine have demonstrated the disruptive potency of regimes like his which have driven a knife deep into Europe’s economic and quite possibly political stability.  

But Yevgeny Prigozhin’s success at marching two-thirds of the way from Rostov to Moscow also demonstrates how regimes like Putin’s are inevitably more fragile than they look from the outside. 

By their very nature, such regimes leave their leaders out of touch with their different constituencies, unable to adapt, and without an exit strategy for their leadership. 

They are like porcelain: shiny on the outside, perhaps, but brittle and prone to cracking and sudden fragmentation. 

So it is that we end up with the remarkable prospect of a mercenary chief with the CV of a former petty criminal and hot dog vendor from St. Petersburg threatening to bring down the leadership of a nuclear-armed state spanning 11 time zones.  

Our political system here in the UK may be far from perfect. 

But our unwritten constitution has still over the last couple of years proved a better mechanism for removing failing leaders than Russia’s (and ones whose faults are rather less than those of Mr. Putin).  

Defaulting to removal by short-order chef and war criminal is not an ideal mechanism for regime change—and as we can see, not even necessarily a successful one. 

*** 

In that respect, the latest events in Russia do indeed make an apt set-up to what I want to discuss here.  

We live in an age of crisis, in which democracy and multilateralism are both on the back foot.  

We can put quite precise numbers on that gloomy reality.  

On democracy, Freedom House's latest annual report shows 2022 to have been the 17th consecutive year in which it deteriorated in more countries than it improved.

Another prominent study published in 2020 by the Bennett Institute at Cambridge University and drawing on 3,500 country surveys over some 25 years found support for democracy to be at a low ebb—although its participants turned out to be disenchanted with the incumbents more than the system itself.

Meanwhile we can read something of the state of multilateralism and the rules-based order from moments like the UN General Assembly votes on Russia’s illegal assault on Ukraine.  

On 23 February this year 32 countries—including the world’s two most populous, India and China—abstained on a resolution calling for an end to the invasion. 

Another measure is the state of global development, which on many measures has gone into decline.

The UNDP’s Human Development Index, which I was the guardian of for some years, has fallen for the past two years in a row—the first time in its history that has happened—and fallen back to 2016 levels. 

By many measures we have lost a decade or 15 years of development progress in terms of poverty and life expectancy because of the COVID crisis and its aftermath. 

More than 345 million people face high levels of food insecurity, more than double the number in 2020. And some 60 percent of low-income countries are in or near debt distress. 

We can also look at measures of global conflict.

Analysis by The Economist shows that where in the mid-1980s the average ongoing conflict had been raging for 13 years, the figure by 2021 was 20 years. 

In 2020, the number of state-based conflicts reached a remarkable 56, the highest figure not just since the end of the Cold War but since the end of World War II.

These are the statistics of a world on fire. 

A world where the architecture of both democratic national governance and multinational international governance is weakened, with the Bretton Woods institutions created for the very different world of the immediate post-war era showing their age.  

Adam Tooze, the excellent economic historian, has popularized an old idea, “the polycrisis,” coined by the French sociologist Edgar Morin in the 1970s.  

This refers to crises interacting with and exacerbating each other, collectively amounting to disruption greater than the sum of its parts.  

Tooze argues that the climate crisis, the rise of artificial intelligence, nuclear proliferation, economic dislocation, the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath, and geopolitical turmoil all reinforce each other.  

He cites the example of how the war in Ukraine disrupted grain and fertilizer exports, driving up prices, and contributing (alongside climate change) to hunger and thus conflict. 

And he goes on to argue that this is a unique moment with quite unanticipated potential consequences in terms of global stability. 

Consider the related case of the now-escalating war in Sudan. 

This is not just a story of a power struggle between the ruling General al-Burhan and his rival Hemedti's paramilitary forces.  

It is also the story of a desperately poor country hit by climate change that has seen locust infestations, crop failures, and almost a million people affected by flooding in 2020; 

A country that received over 70,000 refugees from its war-torn neighbor, Ethiopia, a third of them children; 

A country that has been heavily exposed to those surges in grain and fertilizer prices caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine; 

A country that has suffered especially from the collapse in international aid spending since the pandemic; 

A country that has long struggled with ethnic, religious, and geographic divisions as well as urban-rural tensions and conflict between herder and farmer, now exacerbated by climate-induced land pressures. 

And last, but not least, a country that has received mixed diplomatic signals. Regional and global rivals from the Gulf to Egypt and the US to Prigozhin’s Wagner Group have picked sides and fueled this fight. 

*** 

The first crucial question for organizations like mine, Open Society Foundations, looking to find purchase in such a broken order is: what went wrong?

To answer that question, I would like to begin with some reflections on the recent past. 

I spent significant parts of my career, during the 1990s and the 2000s, in senior roles at the World Bank, at the United Nations Development Programme, at the United Nations under Kofi Annan, and then as a British minister. 

During that time, we— by which I mean we in those international institutions—were able to realize some significant achievements. 

For example, I am proud to have helped make the Millennium Development Goals a reality.  

It was a historic step towards a genuinely ambitious, collective agenda for governments around the globe. 

Kofi deserves a lot of the credit for the multilateral achievements of that time, which saw real leaps forward in terms of both democracy and development around the globe.  

But he would also have been the first to say that the circumstances too made those advances possible.  

At the time many of us dared to wonder whether the 1990s and (to a lesser extent) early 2000s were the new normal. 

One did not have to sign up wholesale to the idea that the fall of Soviet communism had marked “the End of History” to get the sense that the world seemed to be on a better course: more united, more cooperative, more capable of common action on common goals. 

The Berlin Wall had fallen. The West seemed triumphant and the so-called Washington Consensus was on the march.  

Democracy and globalization were spreading around the world, seemingly in tandem.  

I even wrote a book about this and daringly call it “The Unfinished Global Revolution.” 

Leaders like Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK captured the zeitgeist of an era that dared to believe that it had broken free from old trade-offs—that in some magical way values had substituted for national interests in terms of the foreign policy of the time.  

These circumstances defined the global order of the time.  

When governments strayed from what seemed to be the dominant credo of liberal democracy, the West could “name and shame” their leaders—or in other words threaten to use its geopolitical power to impose, encourage, or incentivize its ideological preferences.  

The demise of the Soviet Union had apparently left no other genuinely rival poles of power in that prevailing global order. So it was the West’s way, or else. 

But they were often pushing at an open door.  

The marriage of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism seemed to be the surest path towards stability, security, and broad-based prosperity. Globalization and the benefits of growing global interconnectedness helped to make those benefits a reality.  

Those forces of liberal-democratic capitalism and multilateralism had at their disposal the stick of “name and shame” and the carrot of results: rising living standards in a system in which ordinary people seemed to have a voice. 

*** 

Both the stick and the carrot are less effective than they used to be. 

The stick of the Washington Consensus and “name and shame” has succumbed to the rise of China and other non-Western states. 

Today’s polycrisis world is poly-centric! The West is no longer dominant.  

It is in many respects a welcome shift to see this greater diversification of power towards new centers, but also one that has uncomfortable side-effects for believers in liberal-democratic, open societies. 

A potent example of this emerging new order was demonstrated by Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Washington last week. 

In the past the US State Department might have condemned the measures his government has taken against India’s Muslim minority.  

A letter signed by 75 members of Congress had asked President Biden to raise these human rights issues during the visit.  

Modi celebrated with the biggest White House state dinner ever—with international expressions of concern brushed off as unwarranted interference. 

Former President Obama was condemned by Indian ministers for raining on Modi’s Washington parade by telling CNN that Muslim rights were at risk. 

And of course, speaking as I do to many Indian friends both in the government and in the opposition, there is no doubt that in their eyes the diminution of Washington’s moral authority to condemn internal affairs in India was pushed forward rapidly by four years of President Trump and the diminishment that led to of Washington’s moral standing in the world. 

Yet none of this push back would matter so much if democracies and multilateralism were still seen by the citizens of India and elsewhere as the best way of securing broad-based prosperity, stability, and both individual and collective agency.  

And in India, Mr. Modi remains a wildly popular, democratically elected leader; a majoritarian leader, but nevertheless one who enjoys strong support. 

In many countries that is not true, and we are seeing a move not just against democracy but a loss of faith in the system itself. 

For many, where there is rising inequality—one of the many features of our age—there is a widespread belief that countries have been captured by self-serving elites. 

In Nigeria’s recent election youngsters demonstrated against corruption and swore allegiance to the third-party candidate, but when it came to election they failed to turn out in the numbers anticipated. 

They had lost faith in the system. They simply did not believe that democracy was going to deliver a fresh choice, a break with the old establishment parties that have dominated modern Nigeria. 

*** 

Today there are two rival, contradictory models. 

On the one hand is a vision of democracy, and with it, multilateralism, based on individual rights.  

A vision that Western intellectuals and mainstream politicians (though not only Western ones), and groups like Open Society Foundations hold dear. 

On the other hand is an alternative theory of democracy promoted by China and others which is on state rights.  

We should not underestimate the potency of that alternative theory. 

I have talked already about our age of polycrisis. 

It has exposed, especially to lower and middle-income countries, how little agency they have and how little control they have over their own destinies, even now. 

Countries feel buffeted by events, whether the climate crisis, the spread of AI and its potentially devastating impact on labor markets, or geopolitical turmoil and its economic knock-on effects.  

In such a world, the notion of subordinating individual rights at home and multilateral cooperation internationally to a strong and decisive state can exert a powerful appeal—both on elites and ordinary people. 

China’s rapid rise has of course burnished that model, and the state capitalist growth formula associated with it, in the eyes of many around the world.   

It is a model explicitly founded on concrete results.  

“It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice,” as Deng Xiaoping once said of his country’s hybrid of Leninism and capitalism. 

But it is also founded on governments which are not just strong at home, but strong abroad—exerting agency over their nation’s position in the world, seeking to trade with China not just the US, not humbly shuffling into the voting lobby against Russia because Washington or Brussels demands that they do, but rather free of colonial inhibitions and finally able to exercise their own sovereignty and make their own choices. 

The neoliberal economic order of the past four decades has drawn to a close. 

As the historian Gary Gerstle puts it in his excellent book on this subject, like the New Deal order of the mid-20th century before it, that neoliberal order is “losing the capacity to exercise ideological hegemony.”  

First came the 2007-8 economic crisis, exposing the folly of market fundamentalism.  

Then came the mounting polycrisis, exposing the folly of the minimalist state. 

We have seen a new recognition of the value of state resilience and capacity. 

Just read US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s recent speech at the Brookings Institution in which he argued that:  

“A shifting global economy left many working Americans and their communities behind. A financial crisis shook the middle class. A pandemic exposed the fragility of our supply chains. A changing climate threatened lives and livelihoods. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine underscored the risks of over-dependence.” 

Sullivan went on to recall how: “The American middle class lost ground while the wealthy did better than ever. And American manufacturing communities were hollowed out […].” 

His remarks underscore again that this is a contest about delivery.  

That we are entering an era of bigger, more active states is, I believe, beyond doubt. 

The question is what form they take. 

Will it be one that upholds individual rights and is prepared to pool elements of its sovereignty in rules-based international institutions to address global problems like the climate crisis? 

Or will it be one that hoards power and covets its own rights, a Hobbesian Leviathan posing as the only meaningful force standing between contemporary societies and collapse?  

It is a contest that will be determined by results. 

By which model can “catch mice,” to use Deng’s formulation. 

Which can generate broad-based prosperity, stability, and the settled consent of its populations.  

It is an argument that would have been familiar to Winston Churchill, after whom this lecture is named.  

To cite the famous quote from a House of Commons speech in November 1947, a time of the Iron Curtain drawing across Europe:  

“Many forms of government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of ministers who are their servants and not their masters.” 

So speaks a great wartime leader whose faith in the checks and balances and controls of democracy was not shaken by the absolute power of leadership during a war. 

When it comes down to it, Churchill’s case concerns not just the abstract principles but the legitimacy that comes with real outcomes. 

That is what makes democracy the least-worst of systems.  

*** 

I am convinced that ensuring that the “open society” model prevails is essential to restoring and renewing international order and tackling that polycrisis successfully. 

Remaking the case for democracies that deliver the best possible—or least-worst—of outcomes by: guarding individual rights and freedoms first, putting the active and entrepreneurial state at their service, subjecting it to their will, and working with other states towards common goals. 

And working towards a new multilateralism capable of producing concrete progress on the challenges of our time. 

These are formidable tasks, the work of the coming decades.  

Open Society Foundations are seeking to contribute to their fulfillment.  

Our resources and freedom give us staying power to be a patient long-term investor in these issues.  

We can invest where timescales do not need to be months. 

We have supported thinking on an inclusive successor economic model, backing economists like Mariana Mazzucato who works across town at University College London, whose calls for an entrepreneurial state for over a decade now were long ahead of their time, and others who have worked on issues of job guarantees and basic incomes on order to leaven out the worst inequality in our modern society. 

We have also invested in a new generation of Black leadership and activism in the US and here in the UK as well. And we support pioneering projects on the “standing forest economy” in the Brazilian Amazon—projects showing how preservation and prosperity can go hand in hand, and making sure that those who are economically marginalized by their education or class or ethnicity are given a more inclusive place at the table. 

These are projects concerning the world not just of now but the world of 2040, 2050, 2060. 

We can be both urgent and patient.  

In our age of polycrisis we really are on a war footing. 

***  

Those of us who believe in open societies and in a state with individual rights at its heart cannot succumb to fatalism. 

Yes, our vision of democracy and multilateralism has suffered major blows in recent years. 

We face a formidable challenge in retooling it for the future and showing that it can deliver the results people want to see. 

But we should not overestimate our rival, the alternative model. 

Which brings me back to where we started, and the remarkable prospect of a short-order chef from St. Petersburg taking on Vladimir Putin. 

The state rights-led approach, with fewer constitutional and societal checks and balances, has its overwhelming weaknesses too. 

As I observed at the start, it can resemble porcelain: shiny in the right light to the outsider, yes, but highly breakable on the inside. 

And bereft of an exit strategy change and renewal are delayed until infirmity or the assassin’s bullet does what an election would have efficiently done sometimes decades sooner. 

Even China, the poster boy of this system, has shown certain weaknesses in recent years, with Xi Jinping’s Zero COVID strategy failing and major demographic challenges in the coming years.

An over-inflation of the property market accompanied by a youth unemployment rate that has now hit more than 20 percent—an omen of pressures to come.

Perhaps, we put democracy on a pedestal; too quick to reach for the words of a Churchill or other Western statesman and philosophers to give it blessing.  

Now it needs to come down from that pedestal into the slums of Mumbai and the villages of Africa and the rainforests of Brazil, as well as frankly into cable networks and newsrooms of the US. 

It needs to win the argument around real solutions to real problems. 

This is a pedestal, or perhaps, a statue worth toppling.

Let us bring democracy back to people. 

Thank you very much.