We have not heard the expression “the free world” for some time, and we certainly did not hear the president of the US referred to as “the leader of the free world” when Donald Trump was in office, but when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, these terms were commonplace in discussions of international politics.
Despite having fallen into disuse, they are no less relevant today.
At the end of World War II, European, North American and other democracies recognized that they were confronted by the military and political threat of their erstwhile ally, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. They described themselves in short as “the West.”
The US diplomat George Kennan used this word in his famous 1946 “Long Telegram” from Moscow, in which he outlined the fundamental challenge to the West’s freedom and way of life posed by a system whose view of reality was incompatible with that of open capitalist societies.
“Free world” was an overused term. It sometimes incorporated countries that were anything but free — such as some around the Mediterranean that were run by unelected generals — and it occasionally performed a propaganda function: How could anyone be opposed to freedom?
Still, the concept was a useful way of defining the cooperation of countries that were by and large liberal democracies with social-market economies.
These countries had governments that their citizens could replace in peaceful and fair elections.
Political majorities were constrained by respect for minority opinions. Such societies had constitutional checks and balances, the rule of law and allowed — indeed, encouraged — freedom of the press and of inquiry, religion and dissent.
Moreover, they were joined in alliances, not subjugated by big and bullying neighbors.
To be sure, these democracies were far from perfect. They made mistakes, sometimes falling short of their own standards and values (although they usually knew when they were doing so). Under their notion of governance, the law served the people and not vice versa.
Citizens did not fear a knock on the door in the dead of night, and prosperity grew and spread — if not always as widely as one would desire.
The acknowledged leader of this alliance of countries with shared principles was the US president. The US had played a crucial part in the victory over fascism, Nazism and brutal nationalism, and thereafter set about building an international rules-based order to which all would be subject and in which all could thrive in peace.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the overwhelming consensus within liberal democracies was that the collapse of Soviet communism meant victory for them — the free world.
Liberal democracies again face huge challenges in defending their values and rebuilding a global order that Russia and China (with its surging economy) will accept in good faith and according to which they will conduct their relations with others.
How should those who live in open societies and want them and their values to survive set about defending the free world today?
They could start by recalling some of the messages in Kennan’s telegram to his political masters in Washington.
The US “must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of [the] sort of world we would like to see,” Kennan said. “We must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society.”
This is one of the many challenges confronting US President Joe Biden’s administration. Trump was a bruising mercantilist nationalist who believed in neither allies nor universal human rights.
While he correctly highlighted some of China’s worst behavior, he disdained the US’ traditional friends, largely ignored Russia’s brutishness and failed to provide any vision of freedom and democracy to mobilize supportive international opinion.
For Biden, the international agenda starts at home: defeating the COVID-19 pandemic, rescuing the US economy, healing racial divisions and restoring decency, dignity and responsibility to US public discourse.
To the world, he has already said that he is prepared to work with China, and even Russia, in trying to tackle global problems like climate change, but not with the US playing the role of supplicant.
China, for example, is arguably more challenged by global warming than any other country.
The Biden administration can cooperate with other developed countries in an alliance of the free to provide COVID-19 vaccines to poorer parts of the world, and to help them with sustainable development aid, rather than saddling them with huge debts to finance questionable projects, as China is doing.
These countries should make it clear that, domestically and internationally, they want to tackle wealth inequalities and apply the global rulebook on trade and human rights fairly to everyone.
Furthermore, liberal democracies must offer economic and security protection to those who are bullied and threatened by China or Russia. Freedom must be seen to be universally applicable.
We have to stop individual countries from being coerced into actions that are plainly detrimental to their own interests.
The best way to defend liberal democracy is to practice it at home and abroad with the “courage and self-confidence” that Kennan touted at the dawn of the Cold War. This is also the best way to ensure the survival of our own conception of human freedom — and survive it will.
Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and a former EU commissioner for external affairs, is chancellor of the University of Oxford.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Last week, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda Gates, said in a statement that they have decided to end their marriage. The news immediately caused a global sensation. When my daughter heard that I was going to write a newspaper op-ed to comment on the matter, she made sure to remind me not to focus on the divorce agreement or the handling of the world’s richest couple’s wealth. Instead of talking about how much money Melinda Gates would get from the divorce, my daughter wanted me to focus on the many sacrifices she has made, and on her many
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) expressed “deep concern” over the staggering rise of COVID-19 cases in India, and offered to supply medical equipment and vaccine doses to the country, but his overtures sparked debate in India’s academic and political circles about his sincerity to help, particularly as it was followed by a vulgar display of schadenfreude over the hundreds of thousands of cremations of deaths caused by the virus in the country. The vast majority of Indians were already angry and frustrated with Beijing needling the country on a number of issues, including imports from China, which were abruptly stopped
Explore within a 160km radius of central Taiwan and you would stumble across some of world’s most majestic mountains, breathtaking lakes and awe-inspiring valleys. You would also find 95 percent of the world’s most advanced chipmaking. While lacking the same postcard views as Yushan or Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) is still a treasure. The company went from being the upstart of a government industrial think tank to the most crucial chip supplier in the world, but even as it has grown into a US$540 billion company, management has stubbornly kept all state-of-the-art manufacturing capacity at just three
Given China’s regional might, it is little surprise that the nation casts a long shadow across Asia — including in its media coverage. However, we are now seeing a disturbing trend of Western media casting a favorable light on China, right as it stands accused of suppressing democracy in Hong Kong, interning Uighurs and obscuring investigations into the origins of COVID-19. At the same time, important coverage of Asian democracies, such as Taiwan’s 20-place leap in the Democracy Index last year — in the midst of a pandemic that brought major constrictions of democratic rights in many places — gets
RSS