The Crisis of Democracy

This article is adapted from a speech originally made by Kofi Annan at the 2017 Athens Democracy Forum on 13 September 2017.

I have been a tireless defender of democracy all my life because I am convinced it is the political system most conducive to peace, sustainable development, the rule of law and the respect for human rights, the three pillars of any healthy and democratic society. As the UN Secretary General, I oversaw the creation of Democracy Day and the UN’s Democracy Fund, to support grassroots democracy around the world. Since leaving the UN, I have set up the Electoral Integrity Initiative with a group of concerned organisations and individuals who seek to promote the legitimacy of elections as a fundamental pillar of democratic practice. The Kofi Annan Foundation and its partners have just held regional conferences in Latin American and Southeast Asia, which highlighted the challenges democracy faces in those regions, but also peoples’ commitment to its ideals.

We have to admit that democracy is experiencing a crisis of confidence. Not only does it face increasingly assertive opponents, but growing numbers of its beneficiaries either take it for granted, or else doubt its merits. Even in democracy’s historic heartlands, we are witnessing a shift in the perceptions and practice of democracy evidenced by ever lower levels of voter participation, falling membership of political parties and declining trust in politicians and institutions. According to Pew, less than a fifth of the American population trust their federal government to “do the right thing most of the time”. It used to be three fourths in 1958. Congress, for its part, has a 69% negative rating. This is based on the perception that democracy isn’t delivering. Governments appear powerless in the face of such challenges as the Euro crisis, the migration crisis, or the debt crisis. This has set the scene for the resurgence of populism – charismatic individuals or fake prophets promising simplistic solutions to people’s grievances through radical policies that dismiss institutions and laws as either irrelevant or inconvenient.

What are the factors driving these challenges to democracy? I see at least three.

First, growing inequality within countries. The uneven benefits of globalisation are dividing societies into winners and losers on an unprecedented scale. Global markets are creating billionaires, whilst the incomes of the middle and working classes in developed countries have stagnated and their livelihoods are becoming ever more vulnerable to technological change and global competition.

Second, governments are looking increasingly powerless in the face of the imperatives of the global economy and the ever-growing web of regional and global agreements they have entered into. In Greece for example, there is a widespread perception that the EU prioritised the protection of the big European banks’ balance sheets over the protection of the Greek population, whose incomes fell by about a third.

Finally, there is a crisis of effectiveness. Democratic government is compared unfavourably with the concurrent success of authoritarian regimes, which seem to enjoy record rates of growth.

These are all real and serious problems that we cannot dismiss, lest the populists of both left and right continue to gain ground. Be that as it may, we need to put these concerns into historical perspective. The setbacks of the last decade have to be set against remarkable gains since the end of the Second World War, when there were only twelve fully-fledged democracies. Today there are 117, and elections, however flawed, have become almost universal, illustrating the power of legitimacy they offer. Polls show that most people around the world aspire to more freedom, more rule of law, more accountability and more say in politics. In short, democracy remains a universal aspiration.

Why? Because it actually delivers: of the twenty countries with highest levels of human development as measured by the UN’s human development index, nineteen are liberal democracies. Democracies are also less vulnerable to famines and conflicts. Most importantly, however, as my friend Amartya Sen has cogently argued, freedom itself is development. Subordination to the caprices of other human beings, rather than to the law, is a source of despair to the human soul. I am sceptical about the sustainability of “authoritarian growth”. In most cases, both historically and globally, those regimes become fragile when growth slows or ends, because they have no other sources of legitimacy. So rather than looking for alternatives to liberal democracy, we should instead seek to reform our systems through concrete measures in at least three areas.

First, we need to make our democracies more effective. We must harness new technologies and management techniques to overhaul the administration of the state to make our democracies less bureaucratic and more responsive to families and individuals, especially those who cannot afford high-priced lawyers and lobbyists.

Second, we need to tackle inequality, both economic and political. Governments must work to fairly redistribute the benefits of globalisation by restricting tax avoidance and evasion schemes, and most importantly, discouraging tax havens.

Third and finally, we need to champion democracy. The victory over Nazism, fascism and communism were also ideological struggles that were won on the battlefield of ideas as well. Yet many of the tools of that battle have been abandoned or are underfunded today. Democracy’s enemies are spending billions to undermine it, both in practice and through misinformation. In a world of “alternative facts”, who do we believe? We know that armies of state-financed trolls are creating “AstroTurf movements” to sow the seeds of mistrust and disunity to weaken our democracies. We must not let them win by abdication. Democracies have to reclaim the lost ground by defending and promoting liberal ideas, just as they did against democracy’s past ideological enemies.

Athenian democracy illustrates that practice never meets the ideal – women could not vote and slavery was common practice. We should remember that democracy is always a work in progress. We must cherish, reform and defend democracy, or else it may be lost for future generations. As another great democrat who drew inspiration from ancient Athens, Thomas Jefferson, put it, “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”