Ben Ansell is a professor of comparative democratic institutions at the University of Oxford's Nuffield College. He is a fellow of the British Academy and the host of the What's Wrong with Democracy? podcast. This article is published as part of NPR's 2024 Year of Global Elections series.
Thirty-five years ago, political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote perhaps the best-known statement on the then-apparent triumph of liberal democracy. "The End of History?" was published in 1989 in The National Interest as the Berlin Wall fell, seemingly ushering in a wave of regime change that would overwhelm every last dictatorship.
In Fukuyama's telling, the idea of liberal democracy was an end point to which every country would gradually travel, even if haltingly. The rival ideologies of the 20th century — fascism, nationalism, communism — had lost the battle of ideas. In Fukuyama's own words, "The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism." This triumph was one of both economic liberalism — mass consumerism — and political liberalism — free and fair democratic elections, the rule of law and free speech.
The Berlin Wall has fallen. But new walls have risen
But did the West really triumph? The 1990s were the apex of hubris — perhaps unsurprisingly given they were the very last decade of a very long millennium of human history. The new age of the 21st century has, however, not been the utopia envisioned at the fin de siècle. According to scholars at the V-Dem Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden, the average level of democracy in the world reached its peak in the first decade of the new millennium but has been in decline since then. Not much of a decline to be sure — only back to the levels of the mid-1990s — but the tide of democratization has ebbed.
And if we dig a little deeper, the picture is more concerning, because democracy has weakened substantially in some of the world's largest countries. Adjusting for population, the average level of democracy is back to its level in 1989. The Berlin Wall has fallen. But new walls have risen.
This pattern has been international, from Turkey to Venezuela to India. Turkey witnessed allies of its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, attempt to remove term limits. Venezuela tipped almost completely into autocracy during the regimes of Hugo Chávez and now President Nicolás Maduro — most recently producing an election whose results favoring the opposition were blithely ignored by Maduro, who has cracked down on protest instead. Finally, India, the world's most populous democracy, has teetered on the brink of being downgraded to an "electoral autocracy" by social scientists, because of restrictions on free speech, religiously polarized politics and attacks on the independence of the judiciary.
Year of global elections, but not always democratic ones
So we began 2024 in a state of potential democratic peril. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa declared that this year we would discover whether democracy "falls off a cliff." Why 2024 in particular? It is the year when the greatest number of people ever have been able to vote in elections.
Elections, yes. But not always democratic ones. Half of the world's population — 4 billion people — live in countries where elections took place this year. But only around half of those elections were in countries where they could be viewed as free and fair.
The major elections in the U.S., France, the U.K., South Korea, South Africa and Brazil, while sometimes occurring in fraught and polarized conditions, were conducted peacefully and without fraud. But democratic elections in India were marred by the disqualification and arrests of opposition leaders, and those in Mexico were tarnished by violence; elections in Turkey and Pakistan witnessed accusations of voter fraud and party interference; and in some particularly authoritarian cases, such as Venezuela, Bangladesh and Russia, the elections were systematically biased in favor of the ruling party.
That Russian President Vladimir Putin and Venezuela's Maduro held elections they had no intention of abiding by if they lost suggests that the phrase "year of elections" hides many sins — and that Fukuyama's view that liberal democracy was on a perpetual march forward was overoptimistic.
A battle between nationalism and liberalism
But Fukuyama's argument was about the power of ideas, and perhaps we can chalk up one victory for him here. The idea of national elections, even when they are not taken seriously, has come to prevail everywhere in the world, save in the very few countries that lack national elections, such as China and Saudi Arabia.
And that means democracy will always be in with a fighting chance — because sometimes manipulating an election can backfire, as Sheikh Hasina, the erstwhile prime minister of Bangladesh, learned this year. Bangladesh's opposition boycotted the country's obviously unfair elections. Hasina "won" the elections but had to resign later in the year because of a mass uprising incited by the government's heavy-handed reaction to protests about job quotas.
What's more, in competitive elections in India, South Africa and Turkey, strongman leaders and dominant parties had to accept disappointing election results and a revitalized opposition. The year of elections has shown us that democracy has indeed survived, perhaps even been bolstered. However, the "liberal" part of liberal democracy is in widespread retreat.
National elections are now dominated not by liberals seeking to expand individual rights and international freedoms, but by nationalists emphasizing border control, national identity and the need to abandon international commitments. Such nationalists are no longer confined to the "periphery" of the West — Hungary, Poland and Turkey — but to its long-standing core: the U.K., France, Germany and the United States.
Nationalist parties surged in elections to the European Parliament, the British general election, the French and Austrian parliamentary elections, the Romanian presidential election and German regional elections. Rather than producing a wave of nationalist leaders, this has instead led to chaos. Countries long dominated by mainstream parties now have starkly fragmented electorates and embattled governing coalitions. In Germany, this has forced new national elections; in Romania, the canceling of the second round of its presidential election; and in France, the total collapse of now-former Prime Minister Michel Barnier's government.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's recent victory on the back of an "America First" campaign shows just how powerful nationalist messages have become electorally, even in the most long-standing liberal democracies. There is an irony to Trump's victory. While President Biden and Vice President Harris argued that Trump was a threat to democracy, he has been its great beneficiary in this election cycle: A discontented electorate took its opportunity to "throw the bums out."
Still, Trump has shown less interest than most American presidents in promoting or securing democracy abroad. His vision is one of nation first, universal liberal ideals last. Liberalism has not triumphed. Even in America, its ancestral homeland, it is battered and bruised.
Fukuyama ended his famous essay with a tongue-in-cheek remark that we would come to feel nostalgia for the era of history in a posthistorical world of universal liberal democracy. We would tire of "centuries of boredom." Alas, no such worry was necessary. History remains very much alive. We are today witnessing a battle between nationalism and liberalism that will write our own time indelibly into the history books of tomorrow.
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