![]() Freedom House reckons that 2013 was the eighth consecutive year in which global freedom declined, and that its forward march peaked around the beginning of the century. Even though around 40% of the world’s population, more people than ever before, live in countries that will hold free and fair elections this year, democracy’s global advance has come to a halt, and may even have gone into reverse. The progress seen in the late 20th century has stalled in the 21st. By 1941 there were only 11 democracies left, and Franklin Roosevelt worried that it might not be possible to shield “the great flame of democracy from the blackout of barbarism”. ![]() In the first half of the 20th century nascent democracies collapsed in Germany, Spain and Italy. During the 19th century monarchists fought a prolonged rearguard action against democratic forces. In the 18th century only the American revolution produced a sustainable democracy. After the fall of Athens, where it was first developed, the political model had lain dormant until the Enlightenment more than 2,000 years later. But stand farther back and the triumph of democracy looks rather less inevitable. Such hubris was surely understandable after such a run of successes. A report issued by America’s State Department declared that having seen off “failed experiments” with authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government, “it seems that now, at long last, democracy is triumphant.” Representatives of more than 100 countries gathered at the World Forum on Democracy in Warsaw that year to proclaim that “the will of the people” was “the basis of the authority of government”. By 2000 Freedom House, an American think-tank, classified 120 countries, or 63% of the world total, as democracies. The collapse of the Soviet Union created many fledgling democracies in central Europe. ![]() Decolonialisation created a host of new democracies in Africa and Asia, and autocratic regimes gave way to democracy in Greece (1974), Spain (1975), Argentina (1983), Brazil (1985) and Chile (1989). In the second half of the 20th century, democracies had taken root in the most difficult circumstances possible-in Germany, which had been traumatised by Nazism, in India, which had the world’s largest population of poor people, and, in the 1990s, in South Africa, which had been disfigured by apartheid. Yet just a few years ago democracy looked as though it would dominate the world. Even in established democracies, flaws in the system have become worryingly visible and disillusion with politics is rife. Where autocrats have been driven out of office, their opponents have mostly failed to create viable democratic regimes. In 2004 Mr Yanukovych was ousted from office by vast street protests, only to be re-elected to the presidency (with the help of huge amounts of Russian money) in 2010, after the opposition politicians who replaced him turned out to be just as hopeless.ĭemocracy is going through a difficult time. This is what happened in much of the Arab spring, and also in Ukraine’s Orange revolution a decade ago. The new regime stumbles, the economy flounders and the country finds itself in a state at least as bad as it was before. But turfing out an autocrat turns out to be much easier than setting up a viable democratic government. The world applauds the collapse of the regime and offers to help build a democracy. Regime-sanctioned thugs try to fight back but lose their nerve in the face of popular intransigence and global news coverage. Yet these days the exhilaration generated by events like those in Kiev is mixed with anxiety, for a troubling pattern has repeated itself in capital after capital.
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