The End of the Freedom Recession

For the past fifteen years or so, the world has been in a “freedom recession” or a “democratic recession.” The 1990s and early 2000s saw a sustained burst of liberation following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since then, however, dictatorship, authoritarianism, and strongman rule have reasserted themselves across the globe.

But are things beginning to turn the other way again?

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The post-Cold War global advance of freedom was sustained for two reasons.

First, after the Soviet collapse, some former Soviet republics or Soviet-aligned countries remained under the control of old Soviet-era apparatchiks who either had to fade away or die off before their countries turned toward more free systems. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that after the Cold War, the people of these countries had more contact with free countries in the West and were more open to outside cultural, intellectual, and political influences, and so over a decade or so they moved on from the habits of thinking that supported the old regimes.

The prime example here is Ukraine, whose Orange Revolution in 2004 was its break from the past and the beginning of a two-decade-long struggle to join the free nations of the European Union.

The second reason was that the Soviet collapse discredited dictatorship in general as a model of government. It was “the god that failed,” and people began to talk about a “Washington Consensus.” This was originally the name for a set of free-market reforms prescribed to former Soviet economies, but it came to stand for a wider openness to relatively free markets and a free society as the model for the future.

The prime example here is probably India, which in 1991 began to abandon a system of centralized planning loosely inspired by the Soviet Union and subsequently broke free from 40 years of economic stagnation.

But the cultural roots and habits of dictatorship are hard to eliminate, and the lust for power never really goes away. By the early 2000s, the dictators began finding ways to reconstitute their power, looking for new rationalizations, new reasons for grievance against the West, and new ways of manipulating the public to gain power. The leader in this effort was Vladimir Putin, who pioneered a new model of authoritarianism built around appeals to nationalism and religious traditionalism (which is really just the old model of fascism).

But such a system is still not superior to a liberal society. For all our problems, we are in much better shape and our societies are far more attractive and rewarding for those who live in them. So the reconstituted illiberal societies are living on borrowed time, and we should expect, at some point, a recovery from the freedom recession.

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We Love NATO?

If such a recovery happens, I think we will look back and see the war in Ukraine as the turning point.