The West is losing the Diplomatic war
The West is losing the Diplomatic war
As Putin hosts the BRICS, advocates of liberal democracy urgently need a new story
You could be forgiven for not noticing that Vladimir Putin is currently hosting the annual meeting of BRICS nations. But while the news cycle has its eye on other things, we ignore events in Kazan this week at our peril.
In case you don’t know, BRICS is a geopolitical grouping, founded in 2009, originally comprising Brazil, Russia, India and China. South Africa joined a year later, and at the beginning of this year, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates also became members. Argentina was slated to join at the same time, but following the election of the anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei, at the end of 2023, its application was withdrawn.
The first thing you notice about the members of BRICS is that, with the honourable exceptions of Brazil and South Africa, they are not democracies (although Ethiopia was until quite recently).
Generally, however, the smaller members of BRICS have more in common with the two great powers, Russia and China - anti-democratic, authoritarian, little regard for the rule of law or press freedom - than they do with the values of western liberal democracy.
With other non-BRICS countries also in attendance, including Turkey, and with UN General Secretary António Guterres due to put in an appearance, as Arthur Snell says in this excellent post:
‘There is no way around the fact that this represents a diplomatic triumph for Russia, even if several of the attendees have spoken out against the invasion of Ukraine on previous occasions.’
If it represents a diplomatic triumph for Putin, then it is a disaster in the making for the west, and yet another sign that western values no longer count for very much in many parts of the world.
Ostensibly, BRICS exists as a forum through which its members can cooperate on investment and trade, and that’s no bad thing. It probably says more about the current political situation that it now counts the likes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE among its number (not that geopolitics can ever really be separated from economics).
Of course, it’s to be expected that Russia and China make every effort to co-opt any such grouping in furtherance of their own expansionist and anti-democratic goals. But if liberal democracy is to have any chance in the world, it’s crucial that these two powers be isolated.
Such isolation requires serious diplomatic efforts to court the other BRICS members. And in order to succeed in this, advocates of the western way of doing things will need to start telling a quite different story. They will also need to work much harder at convincing waverers that a relationship with the west could be mutually beneficial.
If I was an Indian, a Brazilian or a South African looking at the post-colonial relationship between the western powers and my country, I would conclude that rather than being driven by a desire to extend the reach of western liberal values, it was motivated largely by the determination of the richest countries in the world to preserve their dominant economic position.
Having visited Brazil, India and South Africa, the latter two within the last year, I can attest not only to the enormous economic potential of these nations, but also the degree to which the idea and experience of political freedom is firmly embedded in their respective cultures.
Brazil is now once again led by a serious politician in Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. South Africa is being dragged kicking and screaming out of the mire of political corruption by President Cyril Ramaphosa. And while Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is castigated in the west as a populist demagogue, intent on cementing his power by whipping up communal tensions, on my recent visit it proved very difficult to find anyone who didn’t support his efforts to crush petty corruption and improve the lot of the vast majority of Indians, who remain desperately poor.
I make these observations only to demonstrate that each of these countries is already heavily culturally invested in the western values of freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and is therefore ripe for some diplomatic courting.
Time for some honesty
It’s not good enough for us western liberals to stand atop our ivory towers and proclaim that liberal democracy is the best version of political organization available because it, well, it just is. The United States may be on the verge of voting in to power an autocrat who shows distinct fascist tendencies. As much as we educated westerners like to believe it, democratic outcomes are not, generally, determined by appeals to reason, especially if those appeals willfully ignore the ongoing failure of western liberalism to deliver economic outcomes that ensure the majority of citizens believe they have at least as good a chance in life as their parents’ generation.
Persuading people in India, Brazil and South Africa not to support leaders who cosy up to autocrats, demands the same kind of honesty required to persuade enough putative Trump voters to reject his brand of anti-democratic authoritarianism: an admission that the economic changes of the last four decades have not served the majority of people well, anywhere in the world.
Sure, globalisation and the economic dynamism enabled by deregulation has allowed the generation of considerable new wealth. But in the zero sum game that John Bunzl has termed Destructive Global Competition, there have been more losers than winners. If we have learned anything from the last four decades, it is that wealth generation alone is not a sufficient condition for a thriving democracy. It is the way wealth is distributed that determines the effectiveness of democracy as a vehicle for safeguarding majority interests.
I am not saying that everyone who votes for Trump on November 5th will do so because they feel worse off than their parents. Let’s face it, the richest man in the world is his biggest cheerleader. What I am saying is that the conditions in which would-be demagogues like Trump, and psychopaths like Musk, are able to hijack democracy for their own ends would likely not exist had our economic efforts been focused a little more on the distribution of wealth over the last 40 years.
Former US Labor Secretary and prolific substacker, Robert Reich, included in a recent post a recording of a speech he made way back in 1994. It includes this paragraph:
‘My friends, we are on the way to becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and disillusionment are easily manipulated. Once unbottled, mass resentment can poison the very fabric of society, the moral integrity of society, replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate. Today the targets of that rage are immigrants and welfare mothers and government officials and gays, and an ill-defined counterculture. But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow?’
Fully thirty years ago, a mainstream American politician (albeit a pretty unusual one) warned against the likely consequences of an economy which he already recognized was neglecting the interests of ordinary Americans.
His message applies equally in Brazil, India, South Africa and elsewhere, where the same neoliberal economic system has promised so much, but delivered very little for too many people.
Apart from a few exceptions like Mr Reich, politicians today have no idea what kind of story they should be telling to prevent the collapse of democracy. Which is why, in my next post, I shall attempt, on the eve of her first budget, to persuade Britain’s new Finance Minister that unless she changes her story, the social improvements promised to voters by Britain’s new Labour government will not be achieved.