The American wordplay
IN his address to the second in-person Quad summit held in Tokyo on May 24, US President Joe Biden said, ‘Prime Minister Modi, it’s wonderful to see you in person and I thank you for your continuing commitment to making sure democracies deliver, because that is what this is about: democracies versus autocracies. And we have to make sure we deliver.’
For all its claims of respecting democracy, the US doesn’t hesitate to support dictators if its interests demand.
Two months earlier, Biden was in Warsaw to underline NATO’s unity to meet the challenge of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In a speech on March 26, he reminded the world of the ‘power of the people’ in the face of a ‘cruel and brutal system of government’. The totality of the speech indicates that he was referring to the Cold War and the ideological struggle between the West and the Soviet Union, though he avoided using the words Cold War and communism. At the same time, seeking to link the Cold War times to present contestations, Biden implied that then too there was a ‘battle between democracy and autocracy’. However, the word autocracy was not generally used by the US during the Cold War. The popular formulation was ‘the free world versus godless communism’.
Through the Cold War, the US stressed that its system was based on freedom, respect for individual rights and choices while communism crushed individual rights and aspirations by punishing dissent. It also emphasised that communism sought to spread its predatory wings throughout the world and had to be contained. Today, as the West and its allies seek to meet the political and diplomatic challenge of an aggressive China in the Indo-Pacific and worldwide, and of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, it is making the same ideological points in a different vocabulary, necessitated by changes in China and Russia.
China and Russia, decades ago, consigned to history their communist economic systems which were based on full state ownership of all economic assets as well as denial of any private enterprise. Now, private enterprise is the norm, though within the parameters set by the state; in China’s case determined by the Xi Jinping-controlled party and in Russia’s by President Vladimir Putin. The political systems of both countries, though, are in the control of strong leaders. Besides, in China the Chinese communist party does not allow any other vehicle of political expression. As the economic ordering of these states has changed, the West cannot call them communist. Hence, the use of the term ‘autocracy’, which implies one-man authoritarian rule unconstrained by state institutions. The ‘democracy versus autocracy’ binary therefore is the replacement of the Cold War binary of ‘free world versus evil and godless communism’.
The end of the Cold War witnessed a reassertion by the West and its allies on the nature of global order, which they premised on an expansion of democratic polities which would be committed to an open and rules-based system. Now, Biden is asserting that the world’s leading ‘autocracies’ — China and Russia — are undermining the rules-based international order by their policies and actions which are violating the sovereignty of states and eroding the institutional structure which is upholding global order. And he is placing all this in the ‘democracy versus autocracy’ binary. Certainly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is indefensible and China has become aggressive.
History bears witness to the non-static nature of global orders. What is common to all global orders are the dichotomies that are underlined by states that uphold international order and benefit from them. These states always project their systems as enlightened and on the right side of history, holding at bay the forces of darkness and barbarism. It is fascinating that the West is now emphasising that a global order based on the ascendancy of democracies ‘which can deliver’ is threatened by autocratic polities. The US is finding it necessary to show that democracies can ‘deliver’, perhaps, inter alia, because of the different way in which China and its own system handled the Covid pandemic.
Through the Cold War period, the US and its allies enjoyed greater prosperity than the communist countries. They attributed this to the advantages of the market economies. The West also outstripped the communist world in science and technology with the beginnings of the digital age. In some areas, especially those related to the military, space and nuclear, the Soviet Union managed to compete, but by the 1980s, it had become clear that it was lagging behind. However, the rise of China has been astonishing in the past three decades in manufacturing, and increasingly, in technology. This is leading it to assert that unlike the democracies, its own system is ‘delivering’ growth and making its people prosperous. It is also pointing to the ‘success’ of the way it has handled the pandemic and is contrasting it with the performance of the democracies in pandemic management. It is in this context that Biden’s praise of Modi for making sure that democracies deliver has to be placed. Modi would be gratified by Biden’s assessment that India has done well in its overall management of the grave global dislocation because of the pandemic, the consequent international economic difficulties which have been further compounded by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the test of the performance of a government does not lie in the views of outsiders, but of its own people.
For all its claims of respecting democracy, the US did not hesitate to support the most autocratic dictators during the Cold War who terrorised their peoples as long as its interests were served. In some cases, it deposed popular governments, as in Iran and Chile, and replaced them with ruthless dictators. All this was justified in the cause of democracy against communism! Today, too, the US does business with autocrats if its interests demand. So much for ‘democracy versus autocracy’.
