September 21, 2023
The Threat of an Authoritarian Century
Across much of the world, the ideas of a democratic liberal political order, of multilateral international collaboration, and of liberal free-market capitalism are now in retreat.
by Azeem Ibrahim
The world is in turmoil. Only thirty years after the fall of the USSR and the collapse of its proxy network in Eastern Europe, a land war is being fought in Europe between a democracy and a dictatorship.
When the Cold War ended, we could have scarcely imagined that in just three decades we would be where we are now. We know now that the collapse of the USSR in 1991 did not bring about “the end of history” as prophesied. Instead, it bred complacency among the leaders of the Western democracies, great complacency which has sowed the seeds for the current global anti-democratic reckoning.
Across much of the world, the ideas of a democratic liberal political order, of multilateral international collaboration, and of liberal free-market capitalism are now in retreat. Challenged not by a socialism as an alternative global, and universalist vision, but by an atavistic retreat to nativist, nationalist, and populist politics. This has been affecting both mature democracies and those states that made tentative steps toward a liberal political order in the aftermath of the Cold War. The result has been both a rise of authoritarian regimes, often through the degeneration of what were previously more functional democracies, and the decline of multinational coordination among countries now more likely to stress the primacy of the nation-state as the focus for the formulation of practical policies.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/threat-authoritarian-century-206808
