{"id":38193,"date":"2018-03-31T06:00:10","date_gmt":"2018-03-30T19:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=38193"},"modified":"2018-03-29T12:08:46","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T01:08:46","slug":"threat-western-democracy-starts-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/threat-western-democracy-starts-home\/","title":{"rendered":"The threat to Western democracy starts at home"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/strong><\/p>\n

Four days before the United Kingdom\u2019s 1924\u00a0election, the Daily Mail <\/em>published a letter purportedly written by Comintern Chairman Grigori Zinoviev calling on British Communists to mobilise \u2018sympathetic forces\u2019 in the Labour Party to support an Anglo-Soviet treaty and to encourage \u2018agitation-propaganda\u2019 in the armed forces. The letter was found to be fake\u2014forged by anti-Bolshevik White Russians or perhaps Britain\u2019s own secret service\u2014but not before it caused the defeat of the UK\u2019s first Labour government.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s Russian disinformation campaigns, part of the Kremlin\u2019s hybrid war against Western democracies, seem to have much in common with the infamous Zinoviev letter. But is their impact really comparable? Would Western democracies really look different today without Russian subterfuge?<\/p>\n

According to G\u00e9rard Araud, France\u2019s ambassador to the United States, Russian electoral interference and manipulation, if left unchecked, could pose an \u2018existential threat\u2019<\/a> to Western democracies. In other words, an autocrat ruling over an impoverished country with an oil-addicted economy smaller than that of Brazil is supposed to be capable of bringing down the world\u2019s major democracies.<\/p>\n

France\u2019s own presidential election last year seems to challenge Araud\u2019s reading. Russia\u2019s cyber-campaign against the centrist Emmanuel Macron\u2014meant to aid the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen\u2014included everything from the publication of baseless claims that Macron is gay to the diffusion of fake documents claiming that he has an offshore bank account. Yet, today, Macron is France\u2019s president, and Le Pen is struggling to rebrand her party.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that Russia cannot be a dangerous spoiler. Nor is it to diminish the risks of social media warping users\u2019 views of reality by facilitating the spread of biased and even outright false news (though many experts believe that the internet is far more effective at producing \u2018slacktivism\u2019 than actual political mobilisation).<\/p>\n

But the Western liberal order is not in crisis because of Russia. Western democracies must take responsibility for a crisis that, ultimately, is homegrown\u2014nurtured by its leaders\u2019 own failure to confront effectively the challenges of globalisation.<\/p>\n

The most worrying feature of the 2016\u00a0US presidential election was not the Russian trolls and bots that attempted to sow opposition to Hillary Clinton. Rather, it was that 61\u00a0million American citizens blindly believed the flagrant lies of Donald Trump, the most uneducated and mendacious presidential candidate in US history. It did not help, of course, that Clinton\u2014enabled by an obstinate Democratic Party establishment\u2014ran a weak and visionless campaign that ignored the mounting anger of millions of voters who felt left behind by globalisation.<\/p>\n

Moreover, it was not Russian President Vladimir Putin who created the ethical crisis afflicting Western capitalism. That was achieved by US bankers, who, taking advantage of deregulation and financial interconnectedness, misguided the global economy to the 2008\u00a0financial meltdown. US\u00a0politicians then refused to implement adequate new banking regulations, much less punish those who had caused the crisis and profited handsomely along the way. In Europe, similar ethical and political failures in response to globalisation have fueled widespread support for populists of the right and left.<\/p>\n

Populist parties once confined to the political fringe did not win nearly half the vote in Italy\u2019s recent election because of Russian disinformation campaigns. They won because of mounting anger towards a corrupt political establishment that has failed to address major economic problems, from financial instability to high youth unemployment. Italy\u2019s persistent regional inequalities were also on vivid display: whereas the prosperous north favoured the anti-immigrant League party, the more populist Five Star Movement received most of its support in the poorer south.<\/p>\n

Putin may benefit from such electoral outcomes, but that doesn\u2019t make him responsible for them. National politicians\u2014from the Brexiteers to Trump\u2014are the ones espousing divisive policies, refusing to acknowledge the importance of cooperation and ethics in policymaking, lambasting traditional elites and state institutions, and praising autocrats, including Putin himself. The campaign slogan of Italy\u2019s League party\u2014\u2018Italians first\u2019\u2014could not be a more direct tribute to Trump\u2019s nationalist approach.<\/p>\n

Media have served to reinforce these narratives. Yes, Russians have been found to be behind some of the \u2018fake news\u2019 spread via social media. But in the UK, for example, tabloids owned by Rupert Murdoch and Jonathan Harmsworth, better known as Lord Rothermere, did much more to sow opposition to the European Union before the Brexit vote.<\/p>\n

History, too, has played a role. The Euroskepticism of Eastern Europe\u2019s \u2018illiberal democracies\u2019 reflects deep-seated religious and authoritarian traditions, which have impeded these societies\u2019 internalisation of the EU\u2019s post-modern culture of secular tolerance and universal values. Poland\u2019s combination of fierce anti-Russian sentiment and extreme religious nationalism illustrates this dynamic.<\/p>\n

The fact is that the West is beset by deep social inequalities, reinforced in recent decades by poorly managed globalisation. At the same time, its political establishment has become increasingly disconnected from the public, much as it did in interwar Europe\u2014a development that fueled the rise of fascism and populist authoritarianism. <\/em>This dynamic is particularly apparent in the EU, where many decisions are in the hands of a distant and unaccountable bureaucracy lacking in sufficient democratic legitimacy.<\/p>\n

Russia does not pose an existential threat to Western democracy. The Soviet Union represented a far more formidable challenge, and it ended up collapsing under the weight of its own economic failure. Russia\u2019s internal problems\u2014not just economic stagnation, but also demographic decline\u2014are of a similar scale.<\/p>\n

But this does not mean that Western democracy is safe. To protect it, Western leaders must confront their own shortcomings. That means upgrading institutions, improving democratic accountability, reducing economic and social inequality, and striving to ensure that globalisation works for all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Four days before the United Kingdom\u2019s 1924\u00a0election, the Daily Mail published a letter purportedly written by Comintern Chairman Grigori Zinoviev calling on British Communists to mobilise \u2018sympathetic forces\u2019 in the Labour Party to support an …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":484,"featured_media":38195,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[106,1932],"class_list":["post-38193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-democracy","tag-the-west"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe threat to Western democracy starts at home | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/threat-western-democracy-starts-home\/\" 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