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Terry Glavin: Democracy is in retreat, and that works fine for Carney

This is the world as it is, apparently

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We’re now in the 20th consecutive year of freedom’s retreat around the world, says the venerable American institution Freedom House, and the current backsliding has lasted longer than the descent into fascism during the 1930s. Established in 1941 to persuade Americans to join the fight against the Nazis, Freedom House has been closely tracking democracy’s ebbs and flows since 1973. Among the findings in its latest annual report:

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Military coups, the suppression of peaceful protest and the consolidation of executive power combined to damage a wide array of fundamental freedoms in countries around the world last year. The citizens of 54 countries experienced a deterioration in their political and civil rights. Among the diminishing ranks of the world’s countries Freedom House rates as “free,” the decline of democratic rigour in the United States was greater than in any other nation state.

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This is not just some isolated opinion.

The V-Dem Institute for Democracy also published its annual report last week. Based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, the V-Dem Institute takes an even harsher view. V-Dem’s trend-analysis database reaches all the way back to the French Revolution in 1789, and here’s V-Dem’s assessment of the state of affairs this year: Democracy has regressed to levels we haven’t seen since 1978, long before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact states.

For the average citizen in Western Europe and North America, the hollowing-out of democracy is occurring most noticeably in the “ongoing autocratization” in Donald Trump’s America. V-Dem’s analysis finds that for the first time in more than 50 years, the United States cannot be classified as a liberal democracy. It’s still an electoral democracy, but it’s exhibiting the alarming signs of a rapid degeneration into autocracy.

Three out of every four people on earth now live outside the embrace of full democracies. V-Dem counts 92 autocracies and 87 democracies around the world, but the boundaries between tyrannies and free countries are more permeable than ever.

There is no longer an Iron Curtain separating democracies from police states. Over the past 20 years, migration flows, political influence operations, the phenomenon of “elite capture,” transnational repression of diaspora communities and enormous sums of money in foreign direct investment have undermined, compromised and enfeebled democratic institutions and alliances, often under the cover of free trade.

The new American doctrine of “flexible realism” outlined last November in President Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy purports to put the United States’ national interest before all other considerations. It also represents the abandonment of an American foreign-policy commitment to democratic ideals that goes back generations. The new policy affords President Trump a licence to bomb or betray any country he wants, restrained only by his own moods and by his own sense of morality: “It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

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But Canadians should be careful not to get too huffy about this. The doctrine of “values-based realism” outlined by Prime Minister Mark Carney in his remarks to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January purports to cleave to Canadian values in a “pragmatic” commitment to international law, sovereignty and territorial integrity. But it also allows Prime Minister Carney to climb into bed with anyone he wants: “We actively take on the world as it is, not wait for a world we wish to be.”

As Ukraine continues to put up a gallant fight against Vladimir Putin’s invading army and a constant Russian barrage of missile strikes and drone bombardments, President Trump has consistently sided with Putin in his “peace talks” interventions, hobbled European efforts to arm and aid Ukraine’s democracy and undermined Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelenskyy at every opportunity.

Similarly, while Carney talks a good line about trade cooperation among middle powers against the spectre of the world’s lawless hegemons, his singular “world stage” contribution to date was the multifaceted strategic partnership he entered into in January with the world’s most predatory, hegemonic and determinedly anti-democratic police state: The People’s Republic of China.

Carney’s “Economic and Trade Cooperation Roadmap” with Beijing binds Canada to limitless Chinese acquisitions in energy and agriculture. And the RCMP is now bound to a formal collaboration with Beijing’s dreaded Ministry of Public Security, which is notorious for its rigid enforcement of ideological conformity and persecution of pro-democracy elements from Hong Kong to Xinjiang and from Shanghai to Tibet.

Europeans should be careful to mind their tone about the United States, too. While democratic values flourish within the European Union, and especially in the Baltic States and Scandinavia, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

Victor Orbán’s Hungary, which has consistently sabotaged the European Union’s efforts to aid Ukraine, is a strategic ally to both the Trump administration and Putin’s oligarchy in Moscow, and Orbán’s autocratic tendencies are being replicated in Slovakia, Croatia and Slovenia. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, has dropped several notches in V-Dem’s indices, too, with its expansion of powers over electoral commissions and its trespasses on free speech rights in the Policing Act of 2022 and the Online Safety Act of 2023.

While the United States has always been the international community’s backstop for global human rights activism and democracy promotion, it has now vacated the field entirely. It’s no longer even clear how Trump’s America fits within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As the U.S. Congress has allowed the White House to usurp its powers, it’s an open question whether what has come to pass as U.S. foreign policy is more accurately understood as a function of the interests of the Trump family and its various billionaire hangers-on.

As the world’s democracies descend into a leaderless disarray, the United Nations’ police-state bloc is increasingly coordinating and institutionalizing its alliances. In its just-published Authoritarian Collaboration Index: Mapping the Global Autocratic Ecosystem, the organization Action for Democracy has tracked a transition from largely ad-hoc arrangements to patterns of disciplined collaboration led by China and Russia, engaging Iran, Central Asian strongman regimes, Latin American caudillo states, Arab dictatorships and several semi-democracies, such as Turkey and Egypt.

“These forums, congresses, coordination frameworks, and state-aligned networks lower the transaction costs of cooperation by institutionalizing elite contact, standardizing narratives, and providing recurring venues through which actors exchange operational practices, messaging strategies, and personnel,” the study found.

With the advent of digital transnational repression and the emergence of Artificial Intelligence in the autocracies’ global toolkit, the conflict between democrats and despots should be expected to deepen, perhaps especially in countries like Canada. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has long described Canada as a “permissive environment” for foreign interference, especially by Beijing and its proxies in this country.

The multidisciplinary Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy was way ahead of the curve, years ago, in detecting Beijing’s election-campaign subversions in Canada. On Monday, Citizen Lab founder Ronald Deibert told the House of Commons’ Subcommittee on International Human Rights that Canadians should brace themselves for a “tsunami” of transnational repression in the coming months and years.

Deibert cited three reasons: The sudden descent of the United States into authoritarianism, the rapid and widespread deployment of Artificial Intelligence technology, and “Prime Minister Carney’s adoption of a realist-inspired ‘variable geometry’ foreign policy for Canada.”

Don’t be surprised, Diebert said, if the White House pressures Canada to assist “repressive efforts that violate our Charter protections and other principles and values.”

And don’t be surprised if the Carney government actively takes on that role, accepting the world as it is, not waiting for a world we would wish to be.

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