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Will COVID-19 Kill Democracy?
With global democracy under strain, could the virus be its death knell?
Democratic Recession
It’s become common to hear that democracy is under threat across the world. The dreams of people in the early 90s that democracy would spread throughout the globe after the fall of communism, as best exemplified by the ‘end of history’ thesis by Francis Fukuyama, now seem hopelessly naïve. Instead, we have begun to see the ‘democratic recession,’ where tyrants, strongmen and dictators have arisen in countries which had previously been solid democracies.
Across the Middle East, the early ambitions of the Arab Spring have died as the region’s largest country has seen its brief experiment with democracy ended by a core of military officers.
The region’s oldest democracy has now been usurped by a ruler who sees himself as a modern sultan and seems determined to recreate a neo-Ottoman empire, and crush the experimental democracy of the Kurds.
To the north, the chaos of post-Soviet Russia has produced a rapacious elite which is held in place by an intelligence-oligarchical complex that has developed postmodern methods of undermining truth and controlling opposition which are seeping into the West.
