In 1992 Francis Fukuyama published one of the ultimately most influential and also most ridiculed essays in modern thought: the end of history. Fukuyama argued that the liberal democracy, epitome of the Western political model, was the ultimate milestone in human evolution. That if we understood our history as an inexorable path towards progress, progress, its most perfect, free, fair and prosperous form, ended in liberal democracies.
Fukuyama published his essay in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and during the demolition of the communist bloc. For a time, those ideas seemed plausible. As Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes would later recount in The Light That Failed, much of the political and intellectual elites of Eastern Europe or Asia looked to Western liberalism with admiration. Hungary, Poland, India or China, in a way, aspired to be like the West.
It did not last long, at least in comparative terms. The illusion of mimesis carried with it an implicit failure: the imitators of the West would be just that, imperfect copies or less accomplished than the original. When the economic and political model of liberal democracies falters during the financial crisis of 2008, many governments, disenchanted with the liberal transition of their countries, look for other paths. Some where they mark the times, that do not go in tow.
This process has been discussed at length in recent years at the risk of renewed authoritarianism that has been installed in many countries, and has also put a question mark on that model to which Fukuyama attributed the end of all political and ideological discussion. Has liberal democracy failed as a universal aspiration for all future progress? In other words: will liberal democracies be the redoubt of a handful of Western countries, their particular ways of life, while others choose different paths?
If in 1995 the answer to the question was “no”, in 2022 is “yes”. And the data confirms it. The rise of various forms of authoritarianism, from open dictatorship to “illiberal” democracies, has coincided with a stagnation of the Western, liberal model. This chart from Our World in Data illustrates this based on data collected by Regimes of the World, a classification system developed by various political scientists. If in the year 2000 53% of the world population lived under “democracies”, today the figure has been reduced to 29%.
There are several explanations for the phenomenon, addressed on other occasions. The first is the democratic abandonment of two great demographic heavyweights, first China, immersed for decades in a process of concentration of power and repressive practices, and later India, dismissed as a “democracy” in recent years. Both bring together a good part of the world population. His explicit rejection of the forms and habits of liberal democracy makes his followers a minority.
Along the way, they have been transformed into “elective autocracies”, hybrid regimes where there is no counterweight of powers but where the rulers submit to certain validation at the polls. It is this category, along with another hybrid, the “electoral democracies“, the one that brings together the largest number of people in the world. Its natural definition is not the absence of elections. It is voted. And there is even a certain popular will. Its definition is rather the collapse of the institutions that do support democracies liberal (judicial independence, distribution of powers, freedom of the press, political plurality and a long etcetera).
The matter is complex and requires deeper explanations and nuances. From a critical point of view, many of the definitions of what constitutes a democracy or not, such as that of The Economist, is nothing more than the sum of a handful of closed variables. As soon as one of them registers any transgression, the country’s “democratic” score drops. This has clear limitations and does not help to understand the complex nature of political systems.
Nevertheless, one thing is obvious. While the world population has not stopped growing since the 1970s, the number of people living under a democracy has remained relatively stable, if not decreased. This has an immediate consequence: an ever smaller percentage of the global population is governed by a democratic system. If the end of history was near, of course, it is time to postpone it for a few decades. Liberal democracy is no longer the beacon in which other countries look at each other. Now it’s just another system.