In defence of democracy – not double standards
Year of elections – and wars
I’m going to talk about two problems today – and possible solutions. The first is the weaknesses in democracy exposed by this record year of elections. There are many elections that matter this year although the possibility of a second term for Donald Trump ranks above all others in its implications. Many leaders at Davos last week cited it as their biggest geopolitical risk.
But more important: these elections are a test of the health of democracy. Is it giving voters what they want? And what their countries need? Often, no – and that matters for confidence in the world order which these countries want to uphold.
The second point I want to discuss is the charge of double standards against the West, and particularly the US. It’s an old accusation, with much force to it, that has become white-hot in the arguments over Ukraine and over Israel’s actions in Gaza following Hamas’s attacks of October 7. I feel I have spent the past few months outside the UK, in the Middle East or in India, hearing this accusation at top volume.
The charge is that the West writes the rules to suit itself: that it cares about Ukrainian suffering not Palestinian; that it defends international law in Ukraine but not the West Bank or Gaza (or Iraq).
If countries which support Ukraine and are working for peace in the Middle East don’t recognize how powerful this charge has become and answer it, they will fail to help solve either conflict – or others, such as Sudan, that deserve their help. Nor will they understand how this charge is a threat to the waning respect for old principles of world order and the contest over new ones.
From Chatham House’s creation in the year after the end of the First World War, with the aim of bringing rational, independent thought and discussion to the world’s worst problems, we have taken a leading role in such discussions.
The weakness of democracy – and how to repair it
Let me start with my first point: that this year of elections shows how democracy is strained, with implications far beyond any country’s borders.
The prime requirement of democracy is that power should change hands without dispute. What you want to see is Liberia, in November, where George Weah, the football legend who became president, accepted defeat graciously. Not, in contrast, what happened in the neighbouring state Sierra Leone where a disputed election led to a coup attempt.
Rule of law and the judiciary can play a critical role. In November, I met at Chatham House a delegation of supreme court justices from across Africa. The group included one from Malawi, very pleased that in 2022 our members voted to give the Chatham House prize to Malawi’s constitutional judges, for their courage in the defence of democracy, demonstrated in their historic ruling to annul the May 2019 presidential election.
In South Africa, this year’s national election, the most hotly contested since Nelson Mandela’s 1994 victory after the end of apartheid, will show whether the ANC can retain a parliamentary majority – and if not, whether it is prepared to share power. In Indonesia, 26 years on from the country’s democratic transition, the contest is seen as a test of whether the old powerbrokers will let new faces through.
Other polls will test voters’ desire to resist autocratic tendencies. The election of the independence-favouring Lai Ching-te as Taiwan’s president this month has brought a comparatively muted reaction from China, but tension could still rise in a way that makes life in Taiwan very difficult.
India’s national election this spring will almost certainly give prime minister Narendra Modi a third term; the question is how he uses it. While crediting him with aiding India’s economic growth of more than 6 per cent, our team has been concerned, as have many, about state harassment of media and think tanks, lack of protection for minority rights and erosion of the independence of the electoral commission.
We will watch the European Parliament elections in June closely for what they say about voters’ fear of immigration and support for parties that claim they can stop it.
We will look at these elections too – and the UK one – for whether politicians can persuade voters to make difficult choices about taxes and the cost of public services. Both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have been honest about the challenges, but unrealistic expectations will be Starmer’s biggest problem if he makes it to Downing Street as polls suggest.
As I said at the start, the implications of Trump II looms above the other possible results. That is partly because of his scepticism of NATO, his boasting of ending the Ukraine war in 24 hours (presumably through a deal on Russia’s terms) his unquestioning support of Israel and his antagonism towards China.
For those who say his first term did not do much damage to international order, one answer is that he took the US out of the JPCOA, the deal to curb Iran’s nuclear programme; Iran’s acceleration of its work since then has left it a threshold nuclear weapon state. But it is also because of Trump’s contesting of the 2020 election, despite no credible evidence that the vote was ‘stolen’.
Chatham House does a lot of work on what leaders and voters can do to bolster democracies. It is not that our experts think democratic governments are beyond reproof or that other models have no merits. But we have taken the view, over the decades, that democracy tends to deliver for citizens more of what they want.
Leaders therefore need to address the problems of running a democracy in tough times, the point we make in a forthcoming report on the hardest choices for the UK in its foreign policy.
Democracies need to get their constitutions and economies in order. If they want to be a model for others, they need to show that the model works. That is why, in the UK, reforming the House of Lords and observing international law would help its global reputation.
If leaders do these things, they will be in a better position to defend their model of government. For all my warnings, 2024 should also be seen as a chance for democratic renewal. It is a chance for leaders to renew the mandate from their citizens. Authoritarian leaders can only envy this mandate – that is why they have sham elections.
If democracy is under threat, so is world order
If democracy is under threat, so are elements of world order. Of course, not every democracy is in the mould of the US, UK and the other old, so-called liberal democracies. ‘Liberal’ is one of the most overused words in politics and it does not mean that democracies are liberal in their culture and social practice.
But they do share basic freedoms and principles necessary for democracy to work, the constitutional meaning of ‘liberal’. As Martin Wolf of the Financial Times has put it, ‘the ability to exercise agency depends on possession of economic and political rights and the institutions needed to protect those rights.’
Those are also among the central principles of the web of treaties, institutions and codes of conduct woven together over the past 70 years. They include a respect for international law, including the laws of war.
Some of these principles and institutions have been strained for a long time, for instance the United Nations Security Council, on which we have worked extensively at Chatham House. But more widely, the consent of many countries for supporting the old order is unravelling.
That is partly because of the accusation from many countries that those who wrote the rules 70 years ago wrote them in their own favour and respect them only when it suits them. This accusation needs to be answered, if support for international law and institutions is to continue.
I want for the second strand of this talk to look at this accusation of double standards launched at the US and the West, all the more since October 7.
Double standards in war – and beyond
The charge of hypocrisy is an old one. It runs like this: ‘the West cares about democracy but not when it wants to install leaders it likes in other countries. It respects sovereignty except when it doesn’t, say, in Iraq. It argues for self-determination in Taiwan but not in Catalonia. It supports human rights, but not in countries from which it needs oil. It defends human rights until it gets too difficult - as in Afghanistan’.
These accusations, unanswered, give those who want to undermine the West a weapon even when their own hypocrisy is luminous.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, claimed at the Doha Forum in December that ‘the rules were never written down’. That is flatly untrue; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a breach of articles 2.3 and 2.4 of the 1945 United Nations Charter, which Russia accepted when it took on the seat of the Soviet Union. All the same, Russia, an expert in linguistic warfare as well as the physical kind, has weaponized the ‘double standards’ accusation.
Some inconsistency is undeniable. Western governments do have some defence, I think that their foreign policy must be shaped by calculations of national self-interest.
As democracies, they cannot depart far from this. But they should be able to show that the record is broadly compatible with underlying principles if they are to urge those principles on others – and they have not always been able to do that.
This charge of double standards has been brought to new heat by Gaza. Israel’s pursuit of Hamas in response to the attack of October 7, when Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took around 240 Israelis hostage, has cost more than 25,000 Palestinian lives, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.
‘You rate Israeli lives as more important than Palestinian lives’ is the accusation. ‘You talk about laws of war, but Israel has broken them’ is another.
You could hear a version of this accusation after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One senior official from the UAE last year, a country which abstained in the UN vote condemning the invasion, said to me ‘your countries just care about your wars, and blue-eyed refugees, not our wars and our refugees’. India, which also abstained, complained of European countries’ failure to support it when China encroached over its border in 2020.
Myself, I think this charge of double standards over Gaza is well founded in two respects.
First, Western countries, above all the US, allowed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to fester and Israel to abuse its power in expanding its settlements into the West Bank onto land earmarked for any future Palestinian state.
They allowed Israeli governments to push Palestinian claims off the agenda, reckoning that the issue would just go away. Some Arab governments were complicit; one senior Gulf official suggested to me, with a shrug, just two weeks before October 7, that Israel ‘will have taken’ the West Bank with its settlements within 15 years.
The second respect is the nature of Israel’s response in Gaza. There are not many countries that initially denied Israel a right to respond to the deliberate slaughter of October 7.
But Israel’s bombardment and constraint on humanitarian aid has lost it much of the world’s support – rightly, I think. It is entirely possible to condemn Hamas and now to criticize Israel for its response.
Even the US and the UK, some of Israel’s warmest supporters, have said so. Former allies such as Turkey and Jordan have distanced themselves with fury.
What should be done?
So, what should be done to answer the double standards charge and uphold respect for international law?
On the Israel–Hamas conflict, the US and Europe should make clear to Israel that while its wish to eradicate Hamas is justifiable, it is pursuing a military course unlikely to achieve that goal, and the level of civilian casualties is intolerable.
What is more, it has fallen into the trap Hamas has set: of reacting in a way that loses the world’s support. The US and Europe should join with Israel’s Arab neighbours in pushing it now to recognize Palestinian rights and statehood. We have held private roundtables in the Gulf on the way ahead.
In return, the US and Europe could press for wider recognition of the damage to security and to international law of Russia’s war in Ukraine. They are right that the world is less safe if Russia is ‘rewarded’ for its invasion of another country, a point that Chatham House has made in our research and in our extensive scenarios workshops.
This does mean that they must continue their own support for Ukraine, but they can legitimately push others, such as Turkey, to acknowledge the threat to the principle of sovereignty as well as European security from keeping an open door to Russia.
Beyond those two headline grabbing conflicts, though, the older democracies need to recognize how divided the world has become.
That is a point powerfully made by John Ikenberry, the US academic, in the current issue of International Affairs, the academic journal we have published for over a century which brings together the foremost thinking on global problems.
It means recognising that many countries want a new bargain in global governance, one which will require concessions from western countries. They want money, too, but if that is not available in the quantities demanded – and it is not likely to be, from highly-taxed, indebted countries – then a sharing of power will have to take its place.
In its earlier years, Chatham House contributed to the creation of the UN and the Commonwealth. We are now doing a lot of work on global governance - on peace and security, digital government and the environment, all underpinned by the country and regional expertise that sets us apart.
Our multilateralism conference in October, held with the Open Society Foundations, looked at practical ways of improving the Security Council and bringing together new mediators.
As James Cleverly, then foreign secretary, said at the opening of our London Conference in July (an argument he later made in Lagos too), the UK now understands that international membership of global institutions needs to be reformed – including that of the Security Council.
We are encouraging old groups to welcome new members, conscious that countries are increasingly forum shopping – look at the expansion of the BRICS, or the Third South meeting in Kampala – just finishing tonight – of the 135 nations of the G77 plus China.
Last year, I said that we wanted the G20 to admit the African Union, which I’m glad to see happened under India’s presidency of the G20.
Last year, we supported Mozambique in its first ever year on the UN Security Council (and we have a Mozambiquan policy analyst here feeding into the permanent mission in New York). The Commonwealth will discuss its future direction with a new secretary-general this year and we are hosting debates with the candidates.
It also means offering help for the resolution of conflicts that do not command headlines in western media, a point made by Comfort Ero, President of International Crisis Group, at Chatham House earlier this month.
That might include Sudan and the eastern Congo (where the UK’s refusal to name Rwanda as the principal source of external support for the M23 rebel group contrasts with what the US and EU have done).
At Chatham House, our analysts were prescient about the Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. Looking at Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, we have pointed out how if stability is made the priority over accountability, it can perpetuate elite control and corruption.
Countries will look to climate finance promises this year to see if other countries will make good on their professed intentions. I share some of the cautious optimism of Bill Gates when he spoke at CH this year: on governments taking climate change more seriously and on progress in agreement.
But this year matters. Chatham House played a significant role – including suggesting the title – for the 144-country signature Emirates Declaration on food, agriculture and climate. We have a project to advance high level discussion between the UK and China on climate. We are looking, too, at new agreements, alliances and understandings on debt relief, the governance of AI, health security and refugees.
Richer countries and older democracies want a lot too from others. They may want to reinforce or adapt old treaties on asylum and refugees without which they may find it hard to control migration, as our International Law Programme has explored. They want curbs on misinformation and cyber warfare and perhaps new treaties for space, the polar regions and seabed.
But they will be able to secure this only as part of new agreements, in which they give as well as take. They will have to sell this commitment to their voters at home and this is how – by pointing out the ways in which they stand to gain if they take part in a new bargain.
In conclusion
In order to uphold support for international order, richer countries need to take part in a more complex and balanced exchange, one that recognizes how uneven many countries feel the past order has been.
It needs to be one that democratic voters will support too, at a time of tight finances. Politicians in this year of elections must be honest with voters about the trade-offs needed to solve problems at home and abroad.
Above all, though, leaders and voters must see this year of elections as the opportunity it is: to renew the mandate that voters give their leaders – a legitimacy that is the envy of autocratic leaders.
It gives them the basis to forge new international pacts to solve the world’s most serious problems. That is why, across the slate of issues we choose to focus on here at Chatham House, from the resolution of conflicts to the environment and the governance of new technologies, 2024 looms as such an important year.
