John Kampfner was Editor of the New Statesman from 2005-2008. He was the British Society of Magazine Editors Current Affairsous Editor of the Year in 2006.

Why is it that so many people around the world appear willing to give up freedoms in return for either security or prosperity? From John Stuart Mill to Jeremy Bentham, from Sigmund Freud to Franklin Roosevelt, this question has been posed down the generations. Invariably we are told that it is either an obvious choice or a false choice. “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” declared Benjamin Franklin in 1755.

If only it was as simple as that. The first part of my journalistic career was spent in the 1980s in the former Soviet Union and other countries that were generally described as “dictatorships”. Freedom of expression, movement and association were heavily curtailed. These restrictions affected every part of people’s lives, although they varied from country to country and from regime to regime. The lack of private freedoms was as vivid as the more politically charged restrictions on the press and politics. Citizens had no ability, and no right, to decide on where they lived, what they could buy and, in some cases, the relationships they could enter into. The dividing lines with the West, with democracies no matter how imperfect, were clear.

I witnessed first hand the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR. I remember spending the evening of 25 December 1991, when the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin and replaced by the tricolour of the new Russia, in the company of Lev Kerbel, a much-decorated sculptor. Kerbel was born on the day of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. He made his name creating giant monuments to Lenin and Marx from Prague to Pyongyang. I had first met him in the autumn of 1985, just as his last great offering to the people of Moscow had been unveiled, the marble and granite monument to Lenin dominating October Square. The floor space of his studio was crammed with Lenins and Marxes, along with a Stalin lying in state, Italian Communists, Bashkirian poets, composers, soldiers and female collective farm workers with their headscarves signifying youthful purpose. The wall in his kitchen became a visitors’ book.When I returned many years later I saw that Boris Yeltsin had signed his name close to mine.

Over tea and brandy, watching the television coverage of that momentous December night on his small, flickering screen, Kerbel reminisced about a system in which he and millions of others had been cocooned. He was fearful of the future, but over the coming months he settled into the new world of the rynok, the market, with reasonable ease.He learned about commercial contracts, and started producing sculptures for the new generation of oligarchs, either of themselves, their wives or their mistresses. His daughters began to work for American television and he went on holiday to the Canary Islands.

The enduring ideological divide since the Enlightenment, the battle between liberalism and autocracy that had split Europe in the twentieth century, had been won. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism would, Francis Fukuyama predicted, lead to the “end of history” and “the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.

Fukuyama’s argument was always more complex than is usually represented, but for more than a decade the debate about democracy and democratisation was reduced to this simple matrix. Throughout this period it was assumed that freedom, liberty and human rights were intertwined with democracy, and that democracy was inextricably linked to the free market. They not only thrived together, but they needed each other to survive.

The West’s “victory” in the Cold War appeared to confirm the supremacy of both ideology and business model. As Margaret Thatcher had once promised, it did not matter whether you started with political freedom or economic freedom: you would end up sooner or later with both. Thatcher was tapping into a rich vein of Anglo-Saxon thinking, which saw free markets and liberal democracy as mutually reinforcing. Capitalism is “compatible only with democracy”, wrote the American Christian social theorist Michael Novak in 1982 in his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. “While bastard forms of capitalism do seem able for a time to endure without democracy, the natural logic of capitalism leads to democracy.” Under Communism neither the Soviet Union, nor China, nor their satellites had posed an economic threat, let alone a meaningful ideological one. The assumption was that post-Communist Russia and China would move warmly into the West’s economic and political embrace.

The number of countries embracing multi-party elections and other facets of democracy had already begun to increase. By the time the so-called “third wave” of democratisation began in 1974 in Portugal, barely a quarter of the world’s states met the minimal test: a place where the people were able, through universal suffrage, to choose and replace their leaders in regular, free and fair elections. Over the course of the next two decades, dictatorships gave way to freely elected governments in southern Europe, Latin America, then in East Asia. Finally, an explosion of freedom in the early 1990s liberated Eastern Europe and spread democracy from Moscow to Pretoria. This shift coincided with an unprecedented moment of US military, economic and cultural dominance. Arguably, this movement reached its peak in June 2000 at the first meeting, in Warsaw, of the grandly titled Community of Democracies. Spearheaded by the Clinton administration, states as disparate as Chile, the Czech Republic, India, Mali, Portugal and South Korea vowed “to respect and uphold core democratic principles and practices” of free and fair elections, freedom of speech and expression, equal access to education, rule of law, and freedom of peaceful assembly.

Representative democracy expanded rapidly; by 2000, 120 out of the 192 nation states of the UN could broadly be defined as democratic. For the first time democracy had acquired majority status in the world.Yet, as the writer Paul Ginsborg points out, at the very time it appeared to be dominant, liberal democracy had actually entered a profound crisis.“This was not a crisis of quantity; quite the opposite. The crisis, rather, was one of quality,” Ginsborg writes.“While formal electoral democracy expanded with great rapidity all over the world, disaffection grew in democracy’s traditional heartlands. It was expressed in a number of different ways – declining voter turnout, declining political participation (more people were likely to be members of civil action groups like Greenpeace than of a mainstream party) and a loss of faith in democratic institutions and in the political class in general.”A new German word meaning disenchantment with politics, Politikverdrossenheit, officially entered the lexicon in 1994. The concept was expressed in other, more dramatic ways, such as the anti-globalisation protests of Seattle and Genoa. Tellingly, the gulf between rulers and ruled was treated by the elites with relative equanimity. Politicians made speeches about the democrat deficit, but appeared comfortable with a status quo that rendered to them notional constitutional legitimacy – or, in the case of George W. Bush in the election of 2000, a dubious judicial legitimacy.

By the start of the twenty-first century, the rise of China and the resurgence of Russia posed a new and immediate challenge. Capitalism had been embraced beyond the West, and adapted to purpose. As a mechanism for the acquisition of wealth, it was proving remarkably malleable.Authoritarian capitalism was becoming a formidable adversary. The market had been decoupled from democracy; more than that, it was embraced with alacrity by those very elites the West thought it had defeated. The forces of globalisation and unrestricted transfers of wealth and assets reinforced the hubris of the new and old capitalists.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 shattered comfortable assumptions about the balance between security and liberty. The resurgent autocrats drew strength from two forces playing out at the same time – the inherent weaknesses of democratic systems, and the actions of Western leaderships in their “war on terror”. They exploited the mismatch between the rhetorical exhortations of the Bush administration, as it pursued its “democratisation” agenda around the world, and the tawdry practices it indulged in – from the manipulation of evidence leading up to the Iraq war, to the humiliations of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the systematic use of torture in secret jails around the world, illegal “rendition flights” and the extraterritorial incarceration of hundreds of terrorist suspects at Guantánamo Bay.

In order to succeed in this moral void, the new authoritarians came to a pact with their peoples. The specific rules varied between countries, but the template was similar. Repression was selective, confined to those who openly challenged the status quo. The number of people who fell into that category was actually very few – journalists who criticised the state or published information that cast the powerful in a negative light; lawyers who defended these agitators; and politicians and others who publicly went out of their way to “cause trouble”. The rest of the population could enjoy freedom to travel, to live more or less as they wished and to make and spend their money. This was the difference between public freedoms and private, or privatised, freedoms. For many people this presented an attractive proposition. After all, how many members of the public, going about their daily lives, wish to challenge the structures of power? One can more easily than one realises be lulled into thinking that one is sufficiently free.

The model is Singapore, the state in which I was born, and which has long intrigued me. I am constantly struck by the number of people there I know – very well travelled with long stints at Western universities – who are keen to defend a system that requires an almost complete abrogation of freedom of expression in return for a very good material life. This is the pact. In each country it varies; citizens hand over different freedoms in accordance with their own customs and priorities. In some it is press freedom; in some it is the right to vote out their government; in some it is an impartial judiciary; in others it is the ability to get on with their lives without being spied upon. In many it is a combination of these and more. In the global order of the past two decades, the alliance of political leaders, business and the middle classes was the key. The arrangement was built on a clear, but usually discreet set of understandings. What mattered in all these societies was that the number of people who benefited from this deal gradually increased, and that the state remained flexible enough to meet their various needs. These needs could be summarised as: property rights, contract law, environmental protection, lifestyle choices, the right to travel, and the right to earn money – and keep it. The people who mattered – the wealthy and the aspiring wealthy – were to be protected against the use of arbitrary state power. But could such protection be provided without the tools of conventional democracy, such as free elections and open media? That was the conundrum that authoritarian capitalists faced.

The most obvious practitioners were countries such as China and Russia, where a critical mass of people (perhaps a minority, but a sizeable one none the less) believed that an excess of freedoms would damage economic growth, political stability or social harmony. The state, if it was clever, provided limited, but visible outlets for dissent – the arts, perhaps, or newspapers with small circulations – while maintaining its grip on mass audiences. Its most important task was to co-opt vested interests, the most important of which was business, both domestic and international. As Chris Patten recalled from his experience as governor of Hong Kong, the most persistent critics of his attempts to instil an element of democracy to the colony before its handover to China were US and UK business leaders in the region.Why rock the boat, they asked him? I remember hearing similar voices of resistance in Russia. I lost count of the number of Western bankers and others who were genuinely disdainful of the democratic changes that were introduced in the 1990s. Why, they wondered, jeopardise potentially lucrative contracts for the sake of an experiment inimical to Russian history?

Western business found common cause with a new generation of Western-educated counterparts in Russia and China. Many would insist that an authoritarian regime, as long as it was stable, provided an attractive proposition for wealth creation. The corporate elite helped sustain the political elite. This was Deng Xiaoping’s compact with the post-Tiananmen generation. The debate on political reform of the 1980s gave way to more consideration of how best to open up the ruling Communist Party to greater scrutiny and accountability, without “destabilising” a political structure that had delivered three decades of high growth.

The pact belonged not just to states in transition such as these. It belonged also far closer to home, to the so-called democracies. It was played out in different circumstances and cultures, and at different speeds. We all did it. We are still doing it. We each choose different freedoms we are prepared to cede. Citizens in both systems have colluded, but those in the West have colluded the most. They had the choice to demand more of their governments, to rebalance the pact between liberty, security and prosperity, but for as long as the going was good they chose not to exercise it.

The context changed during 2008 as years of steady growth ended spectacularly. The collapse of the banks led not only to economic crisis but called into question the future of governments that had derived their legitimacy through securing sustained wellbeing for their peoples.Yet far from unravelling the pact, the global financial collapse enhanced it.Western countries that had dismissed the idea of the state as an economic force were forced to rehabilitate it. In conditions of insecurity, and with the state once again intervening wherever it saw fit, the conditions were propitious for it to assume even greater control over other aspects of people’s day-today lives. The clamour for security that was exploited after the terrorist attacks on New York in 2001 was adapted for the new “emergency”.

Freedom For Sale does not look at tyrannical regimes that rule by the barrel of a gun, where families and parents denounce each other, where the state is an unambiguously malevolent force and there is no element of consent. This is not about Zimbabwe or North Korea or Burma. In these countries there is no pact between the government and the people, but an instinct simply to survive. Nor do I focus on countries with their own particularities, such as Israel, or Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela or post-apartheid South Africa. Instead, in the course of a year’s travels, I focused on countries that, whatever their political hue, had accepted the terms of globalisation. As a result their priorities began to merge into one. I talked to intellectuals, journalists, lawyers, cultural figures, politicians, and ordinary people I happened to come across, asking them the same question that I framed at the start of this essay: why have freedoms been so easily traded in return for security or prosperity?

I begin with Singapore, with the remarkable socio-economic experiment of Lee Kuan Yew. Singapore is often perceived as a one-dimensional consumer paradise. It may in part be that, but it also asks more fundamental questions about our priorities. On independence from Britain, it had the same per capita GDP as Ghana. In the past forty years it has grown to become one of the world’s economic miracles, an island of stability in a region of upheaval. I look at the vicious defamation culture, in which the authorities prosecute local citizens and foreigners alike for the slightest criticism; I assess an electoral system in which constituency boundaries are rigged and opposition activists are regularly jailed.Yet the achievements are striking. Previously fractious ethnic groups – the majority Chinese, Malays and Indians – live in relative harmony; through remarkable social housing and public services, all the population is well catered for. The pivot is a middle class that, with some exceptions, is comfortable with a pact in which their private space is unimpeded, as long as they do not interfere with the public realm.

In China, the officially described “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreigners was followed by the Maoist era of uniformity and seclusion. Progress has been remarkable in the past three decades and it has taken place within a system that interprets the theory of democracy in accordance with its needs. Corruption, human rights abuses and environmental degradation have accompanied a one-party structure that has depended on economic growth to keep itself in power. Yet, in my various trips, I noted the porous nature of the pact. Free speech, even if formally circumscribed in China, particularly on the Internet, is alive and well on the street and in semi-private situations. The government is trying to manage and channel it, through a combination of technology, modern-day “spin” techniques and brute force.However, the middle classes have no vested interest in granting the vote to hundreds of millions of poorer people with different political priorities. The lack of democracy is, for the moment at least, part of the deal. The government knows that the delivery of comforts to the private realm will determine its success.

I move on to Russia, which I have been visiting regularly for thirty years. I focus on people I have known from a time when the expression “to get hold of” was more important than “to buy”, when foreign travel was allowed only through officially sanctioned groups. These friends celebrated the failure of the coup of 1991 and the subsequent collapse of their autocratic system. They discovered new freedoms and revelled in them, before Boris Yeltsin consolidated his power by manipulating an election with the tacit approval of the West. Democracy became associated with chaos and sleaze. The ascent of Vladimir Putin in 2000 was in keeping with his time, his security clampdown coinciding with a surge of wealth thanks to the global price of oil and gas.As their country became richer and more assertive, my friends would recite a slogan of the only three Cs that were important to the New Russians – Chelsea, Courchevel and Cartier. While doughty journalists and human rights campaigners continued to ask questions, the vast majority acquiesced in the pact. These jet setters continued to fear that their fortunes and their properties could at any point be seized. That is why they took their money abroad. But they enjoyed the fruits of their private freedoms, and left the siloviki – the politicians who hailed from the security elite – to rule unimpeded.

The next chapter looks at the most curious symbol of the global pact – the United Arab Emirates, specifically the brazen and gaudy city of Dubai and the more discreet and oil-rich Abu Dhabi. A saying during the boom times on the floors of finance houses went: “Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai or goodbye”. From young British traders, to Russian mobsters and B-list celebrities, the ruling sheikhs offered steady wealth from property deals to tax-free salaries in return for keeping out of trouble. In Dubai they were even more accommodating, putting religious concerns to one side to allow Westerners to lead their lives as they wished, prosecuting them for sexual or drunken displays only in extremis. Monuments to conspicuous wealth sprung up all around, as hotels and apartment blocks vied with each other for luxury. The sheikhs believed their model was immune to the Western economic crisis. Dubai, in particular, took a major hit. So what will come out of a pact that was built purely on money?

The second part of the book looks at the countries that profess adherence to democracy. I begin with India, which prides itself on having the world’s most populous multi-party system. As China’s economy soared ahead, parts of India’s corporate elite wondered whether their form of governance was an impediment to prosperity. India’s rich devised its own pact. It would provide for itself the basic services that the state had failed to deliver; it would make few demands. In return, it would require the government to leave it alone to make money, and to keep the poor away from its door. This arrangement was challenged less by the global economic crash, more by the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in late 2008. For the first time, the affluent classes were caught up en masse in the violence that has long afflicted India. They demanded protection.

Of all the countries in the world, why choose Italy? It matters, not because of any geo-strategic relevance, but because it serves as an example of a sham democracy. In terms of its institutions, Italy fails on almost every count. The three checks on the executive – parliament, the media and the judiciary – have seen their independence and authority eroded. Corruption is rampant. And yet, three times its voters have chosen in Silvio Berlusconi a man noted for his financial irregularities, his affection for autocrats like Putin and his general vulgarity. He has outwitted his opponents with consummate ease, and is seeking to expand his powers. It is easy to dismiss Berlusconi and his antics. But his enduring popularity among a large swathe of the population highlights the extent to which notional democracies can thrive and even depend on the
same exercise of arbitrary power that authoritarian states are criticised for.

In 1997, the accession of a centre-left government in the UK that prided itself on its liberties should have been an inspiring moment.Yet, in a decade, Britain has gone a long way to dismantling its liberties. It now possesses a fifth of the world’s closed-circuit television cameras; it has some of the world’s most punitive libel laws, and has recently imposed a law, under the guise of anti-terrorism, that allows for the arrest of anyone taking photographs of the police or members of the armed forces. A government that was seeking one of the longest terms of pre-trial custody for terrorist suspects proudly brandishes its authoritarian credentials, arguing that they are generally well received by the public. In many cases they are, particularly before they are closely analysed. I look at a government that confused the benign role of the state in producing a more equitable society with the malign role of the state in seeking to clamp down on public freedoms. I am keen to understand how British society seems so ready to acquiesce in the erosion of those freedoms until rather late in the day.

My last destination is the United States, where the pact has been played out most visibly. The chapter traces the effects on society, at home and abroad, of 9/11, the Iraq war and the abuses that surrounded the “war on terror”. Bush’s neo-Conservative mission had grown out of a mixture of hubris and frustration. The removal of Saddam Hussein would be the catalyst for the overthrow of dictators in the Middle East and beyond. That it failed was the result not just of double standards but of a deeper confusion about “democracy promotion”. Was democracy an end in itself? Or was it a means to an end? Should multi-party elections be encouraged in states where the outcome might produce regimes hostile to the West and to the concept of liberal democracy, or might internally produce ethnic or political instability? Domestically, Bush presided over a security clampdown that was rarely challenged by mainstream politicians or public opinion. The US media showed itself to be supine, failing to hold power to account on many of the gravest issues. To what extent would the arrival of Barack Obama reverse the democratic erosion at home, and America’s loss of democratic credibility abroad? Certainly, the nature of his election victory provided a much-needed boost to the credentials of America’s constitutional democracy. Yet those hopes for a fresh start were offset by the dramatic collapse in the US and global financial systems. The cruel irony was that a new administration, in which many around the world had pinned their faith, began its work just at a time of eroding American power.

In a different age, Oswald Spengler famously predicted that “the era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom is nearing its end”. The Decline of the West was written some ninety years ago, in the fallout from the First World War, the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles and the start of the Great Depression. The masses, he wrote, “will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them”. With global markets in the throes of fresh decline, and with the old certainties destroyed, is the Spengler vision about to haunt us again? The challenge this time around is more subtle and sophisticated; the world is less fiercely differentiated between opposing systems. For twenty years the Washington Consensus proselytised the mutually reinforcing creeds of free markets and liberal democracy. The rise of authoritarian capitalism removed the link between them. Then, from mid-2007, the collapse of the neo-liberal Anglo-Saxon financial school became as much a crisis for the Western political system as it did for economics.

The events of the past decade have surely undermined the claim that the enrichment of a country, or the growth of a middle class, provide an impulse towards greater liberty. Barrington Moore’s theories of “no bourgeoisie, no democracy” have surely been refuted by the past twenty years of materialist aspiration. During this period, people in all countries found a way to disengage from the political process while living in comfort. Consumerism provided the ultimate anaesthetic for the brain. What happens when the wealth disappears and the anaesthetic wears off?

My discoveries are discomforting but it is more useful to understand than to judge. It has always been the instinct of the politician to seek power and to hold on to it, by fair means or foul. Less understood are the reasons why so many of us – in authoritarian and democratic states alike – succumb, and why so few of us ask why we do it.Whatever systems we happen to live under, our priorities are more similar than we would ever want to admit.

© John Kampfner 2009

Bookmark to

Add your comment