The West very badly needs a victory in the war for democracy. Current protests in Burma seem to offer a chance to capture at least one rogue state but, lately, the Western drive for democracy has been contained more than it contains. Think of the recent record. Stalemate in Lebanon and the Ukraine. Stasis in Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Syria and North Korea. In Iraq, democracy is hanging on by the skin of its teeth.  Pakistan is going through a time of troubles. Most of North Africa is reversing itself into authoritarianism. 

It is not that democracy itself has gone into reverse since 2003, only that lines have been drawn. The West seems not to have the resources to push the boundary much further. Minor retreats seem more likely than major victories. The clever money knows that Burma is partly a Chinese client state and that Beijing, not Washington, will have the most influence on how much liberation is tolerable in Rangoon.  

Two global camps are now emerging around very different visions of economic development (liberal capitalist and national-authoritarian).  They are far from internally coherent. Europeans and other sympathisers of liberal capitalism and liberal democracy are more than secretly embarrassed by American-Israeli adventurism, but there is good reason to believe that China finds small national-socialist and national-communist states like Burma and North Korea to be equally troublesome.  

A whole range of countries wobble on the boundary between the camps. Some, like Ethiopia and Egypt, are clearly more aligned to the West yet they refuse to fit into the model assigned to them by Western NGOs. Others, like Syria and the Central Asian Republics, flirt with the West periodically only to retreat to the protection of their traditional patrons in a crisis. A very few, such as Pakistan, are being destabilised precisely because neither camp can quite decide which is more important, country stability or participation in their grand strategic objectives.

It is too easy to put this down to a loss of moral high ground arising out of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo or the burst bubble of American military power within Iraq. This assessment suits Western liberals because it allows them the hope that all will be well once the Bush Administration has been disposed off. This is quite probably stuff and nonsense! All the players know that the US can still blast most countries into the stone age but that it is politically constrained from doing so. These constraints are now independent of whoever happens to be President. 

Freedom House added grist to the political mill this week by issuing its own claims about the retreat of democracy. It noted the Chinese approach to economic development without political liberalization as the mood of the moment. In Asia, recent coups in Thailand and Bangla Desh make a ‘win’ in Burma fairly imperative. US-style democracy is looking very ragged across the world. But , if this is so, why should it be? Here are six simple reasons ...

First, most populations want or need economic development second only to stability and a lot more than 'freedom'. ‘Trickle-down’ is just not working quickly enough. It requires someone to trickle. To make the system work requires not only big men' but a technocratic middle class that is Westernised in aspiration, led by smooth-talking besuited MBAs and professionals who speak English with an American accent. Such a new class with links to the international market begs for a nationalist back-lash simply by existing. We saw it emerge personally in Russia in '92. We also see this phenomenon wherever the technical skill-sets required for economic liberalism result in the hiring of 'exiles', educated in the West, who create resentment in the 'old country'. The result is that a countervailing and highly intelligent siloviki-class emerges that is very eager to prove that native minds are sharper.

Second, the democratic socialist alternative to classical liberalism has been completely subsumed under the category of liberal internationalism. Conservative paternalism has also been killed off by global markets.  No moderate space is left between rampant globalised capital and state power.  It becomes logical for some communities to choose state power where a conflict arises.

Third, the link between democracy and peace (an important factor in many ex-communist states) has been broken under the current US Administration.  This is not just a matter of disgust at Iraq but a wider preparedness of democracies to use military force for allegedly humanitarian ends, a process originating with Kosovo in 1998 but reaching its vicious apogee in Gaza, Helmand Province and in countless unrecorded actions across the Sahel.  The West appears to be a destabilising force to those not included in its counsels.

Fourth, Western-style democracy is now associated with direct subversion against the national interest or as fig-leaf for the maintenance of power by old elites and new business interests (the classic 'bazaar'). The 'colour revolutions' certainly required significant infusions of cash by 'big men' or the support of networks of privately funded NGOs who appeared (whether truly or not) to be doing the bidding of the State Department.  The wealthy, unfairly insofar as most are not interested in politics, have come to be seen as potential manipulators of democracy and their purpose as solely to open up markets and hand over national resources to their cronies.

Fifth, although there are very serious human rights abuses in the non-democratic world, the Guantanamo experience and the conduct of the war on terror has lost the West its moral high ground.  It has made the two systems equivalent. In other words, thuggery is something both sides do.  The difference between good and evil is no longer as clear cut as it was in the ideological struggles of the 1940s where mass bombing of cities by one side (ours) could still be seen as (just) morally superior to a regime that used genocide as an end in itself.  Whatever you think of Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the numbers actually killed by their decisions would appear (so far) to be substantially less than those who have died as a result of decisions by Messrs Bush and Blair.

Sixth, democracy is associated with a new wave of private capitalist incursion into energy-rich countries which is far too easily linked to imperialism. Although the West looks on sovereign funds with concern, the 'East' finds it difficult to disentangle large private corporations from their Governments.

For these reasons (important to them if not to us), democracy has not been looking so ‘hot’ lately.

We should also not underestimate internal Western cynicism about its own political class. Although democracy is not under threat in the West, largely because it is ‘locked in', this is partly because the majority of Westerners share Churchill’s view that it is the least worst option. 

But the ‘least worst’ option for us is not necessarily the ‘least worst’ option in those countries that are seeking rapid and stable economic development on a poor capital and technical skills base. Freedom House notes the durability of the Chinese model in this context. It also gives us a hint as to why international relations will continue to be fraught.

The group generally most targeted in these ‘economic’ states by their governments are journalists, academics and intellectuals. This sub-class, mostly liberal from Riyadh to Harare and back again, speaks most easily to its equivalents in the West. It is classically cosmopolitan. The global class interest of this relatively tiny group, but one with strong shared values, can and will sustain a formidable lobby in favour of a particular universalist ideal of liberty - and it will receive Western backing. Prime Minister Brown has, for example, been swift to back the Burmese protesters and to condemn Mugabe. In this, he is in tune with British intellectual opinion.

This class also tends to demand freedoms for 'out' groups (like gays) who challenge the instinctive conservative habits of communities that are going through the trauma of rapid modernisation. Type-cases in the UK include Peter Tatchell, the undoubtedly physically brave Australian-British gay activist, or the hardened but aging '68 left-liberals whose history was that of the fight against Pinochet and apartheid but who now find themselves challenging nationalist dictators like Mugabe and who refuse to be seduced by the anti-imperialism of Ahmedinejad or Chavez.

This is a new form of sub-class war in the making. It increases international tension through the pressure of NGOs and Western lobbies on Western governments, it moves the erstwhile centre-left into opposition to the new rising powers and it unintentionally encourages repression of this same class within the emerging world as de facto ‘subversives’.

It also suggests the strengthening within the West of another trend that we have noticed. This is the growing Californian-style association of anarcho-libertarian market, environmentalist and libertarian-left thinking. Old-style left-liberals have a real problem coping with the phenomenon of Governor Schwarzenneger. This Republican is now closer to their concerns than any 'really existing' Communist or third world revolutionary. So we may now expect a ‘perfect storm’ around the Chinese hosting of the Olympics next year - a political dictatorship is holding a global event in a polluted city. Wow! San Francisco meets Beijing in a knock-out ideological struggle where Right and Left seem to have reversed polarities.

Freedom House is both correct and extremist in its definitions of democracy. There are signs of new forms of community consultation, decentralization and other forms of political organization that are not necessarily liberal but have democratic characteristics  There is a major debate on 'deliberative' democracy in Chinese policy circles, though more in private than in public. Iran, Venezuela and Russia are democracies of sorts. Islamist democracy (as in Turkey) challenges Western support for some conveniently pro-Western secularist dictatorships and offers a model that might yet be taken up by the Muslim Brotherhood.

These ‘democratic’ experiments are not liberal or liberal-capitalist. They are excessively flexible about the rule of law and the separation of powers. Yet, in these states, it is also hard for a private interest (like a Berlusconi, a Thaksin or a Murdoch) to buy its way into power or influence because the State plays such a strong countervailing role. The political price for this is that, just as Western freedom can help guarantee the ability of single or combined accumulations of capital to seize effective control of the political process, a nationalist determination to stop this happening can result in a proportionate loss of freedom, allegedly to ensure the ability of the State to resist external subversion that might result in the seizure of national assets for private interest. We worked in Russia in '92 and we saw some of these thefts under our very eyes so the anxiety is not entirely specious.

The Chinese way is one type of adaptation to global reality. The Russian version is an act of resistance from a people not yet ready to be globalised. Iranian resistance is seen (from within) as the protection of a distinctive culture from apparently universalist principles that might enhance minority and women's rights but would also, in practice, hand national assets over to foreign oil interests. A similar motivation of nationalist resistance to the theory of ‘trickle down’ inspires Chavez.

The hardening of these two systems, liberal capitalist and 'resistance', are logical responses to the actions of one another. Both are defining their borders and turning into camps. History is with the West if global prosperity increases - and with the 'resistance' if growth falters.  Neither can be regarded, as some would have it, as intrinsically good or evil. They are just different - and very, very complex.

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