Why Ethnonationalism Matters

Churchill famously quipped that, “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms”.

Looking around the world at other regimes it’s hard to argue against Winston, and yet the system somehow seems to be failing the “demos” it’s supposed to protect and uplift. How can this be? Listen, I will tell you a secret: democracy is not a cause, it’s a consequence taking credit for a cause. 

In his 2011 opus, “The Origins of Political Order”, Francis Fukuyama outlined the prerequisites for democracy. His major two necessary conditions were economic, a democracy is impossible without an annual per capita income of less than $10,000, and institutional, democracy is impossible without rule of law. In Fukuyama’s analysis democracy is not the impetus for a process but the culmination of a process. Fukuyama also outlines the hazards of democratic rule being implemented before these necessary conditions are met. A democratic government imposed upon an economically and institutionally immature state will, according to Francis, merely become a vehicle for a proprietorial political elite ruling through clientism and patronage.

Fukuyama was writing in 2011 in defence of the series of American wars in the Middle East and suggesting that these wars would, or were intended to, remove obstacle to democratic rule, in countries that had, or were capable of achieving, the economic productivity and institutional legal frameworks necessary for this transition. The neocon justification for these wars, that Fukuyama was upholding, was that the only obstacles to democratisation in the countries targeted, were despotic rulers and corrupt clerical regimes; remove the despots and theocrats and, voila!, the democratic impulse would surge to the fore.

Fukuyama is a liberal writing in defence of the liberal world order, but Francis’s defence of warmongering on behalf of democracy exposes some truths about democracy that terminally challenge the liberal consensus. The liberal myth is, or was proselytised to be, that giving the people the right to determine the destiny of the state is the first path toward the realisation of safe, stable and affluent countries. In order to defend a series of catastrophic regional wars Fukuyama exposes this charming children’s story as nonsense. Wealth, stability and safety do not create democracy, they are in fact essential foundations for the possibility of democratic systems of government. The question that then arises is, is democracy even necessary for the manifestation, or continuation of these positive outcomes? In 20011 it could still plausibly be argued that this was the case; a decade an a half later the eclipse of the Western democracies by Russia, China and militarily by Iran, emphatically reveal any such argument to be obviously false. The East is indeed Red, China is communist and rich. Vladimir Putin is simply the first post-communist Tsar.

Meanwhile the West is in a state of internal upheaval. The democratic governments are locked in a struggle against a wave of “populism”. Populism is governing in conformity with the will of the people. If democracy is fighting populism, democracy clearly isn’t what it claims to be.