Two weeks into the war and Russia is still not isolated, as the main American newspapers recognize. Now it was the Washington Post, “Outside the West, Putin is less isolated than you might think.”
Europeans such as Le Monde point out that “Putinophilia” in Africa, for example, “is first and foremost a rejection of the West.”
And a report by the Crisis Group, a think tank in Brussels, lists some of the biggest focuses of resistance to this West that turns against Russia: China, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Emirates, Iran, Israel, Turkey, Kenya, Africa of the South, Brazil and Mexico. I could add Southeast Asia and many other countries in Africa and Latin America.
At the bottom of this non-alignment, in addition to the recent economic strength “of the rest”, the withering away of liberal democracy takes place. This is what another European report points out, from the Swedish institute V-Dem.
The study was being completed when the war broke out. He then recalled warnings, “for years, that the global wave of autocratization would lead to war.” It evaluates data for 202 countries, starting with 1789, the year that opened the French Revolution.
By 2021, the focus of the report, “the level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen has dropped to 1989 levels”, that is, “the last 30 years of democratic advances are now eradicated”.
Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, although still an “electoral democracy” in the ranking, heads the “top 10” of the most autocratizing countries, which includes other large emerging countries such as Turkey and India, both already “electoral autocracies” (pictured above).
The West is not immune. Also in the ten countries that have moved the furthest away from democracy, Poland appears — the spearhead in US and European efforts against Russia.
“Six of the 27 members of the European Union are now autocratizing”, underlines the study, speaking of “wave”. Not even the United States escapes, also classified as autocratizing in the year.
A hallmark of 2021 was the “epidemic of coups d’etat”, five of them military and one self-coup, “a record for the 21st century”, which until then counted 1.2 per year on average.
Also “a record 35 countries experienced significant deterioration in freedom of expression,” according to V-Dem.
