Decolonising democracy – part one |
In the first of an eight-part series, political theorist John Keane examines the effect of disruptions to the world order on democracy and its future.
Our world is passing through a moment of mounting political nervousness and confusion about the breakdown of the post-1945 rules-based international order. Some spectators speak of its terminally catastrophic breakdown. Others say we are returning to an era of ‘sovereign’ nation state rivalry or instead predict its replacement by a new world order variously described as ‘multi-polar’, ‘heteropolar’ or as a form of ‘new medievalism’.
There is general agreement that in fields such as cross-border investment and trade, migration, environmental protection and nuclear policy, states and regions need resilient and predictable rules of the game. On the other hand, there is a surplus of conflicting opinion about how to define the old order, why and to what extent it is nowadays crumbling, and whether a new and more desirable world order is on the horizon.
How to make sense of the global order has become a profoundly political matter. The struggles among IR scholars and pundits about how to categorise the world are perplexing. Especially bothersome is their silence about the impact of the crumbling global order on the spirit and substance of democracy.
That’s why the following notes aim to make better sense of chaotic trends around the globe by focussing on questions about democracy and its future. This is an unfamiliar interpretation, a perspective so far largely missing from the commentaries offered by public intellectuals, journalists, think tank reports and government documents.
The broad thesis is that our world is witnessing the breakdown of an empire that once played the key role in building and securing the complex of global rules-based institutions – where some, mostly rich, white and privileged, liberal democracies flourished. The weakening global........