Content area
Full Text
Since the great financial meltdown of 2008, it has become commonplace to think of the West as being in normative retreat. The meltdown has undercut the perception that Western economic systems are superior, touched off an ongoing crisis in the Eurozone, and seen the sitting prime minister of an EU country (Hungary's Viktor Orbán) openly doubt whether liberal democracies can remain globally competitive. In parallel, revelations about NSA surveillance and the release of the U.S. Senate report on CIA torture have reinforced perceptions that the United States acts hypocritically and applies double standards when it comes to so-called values issues.
Beyond vocal criticism of the West as a problematic champion of democratic norms, a larger international backlash against liberal democracy has grown and gathered momentum. Over the past decade, authoritarians have experimented with and refined a number of new tools, practices, and institutions that are meant to shield their regimes from external criticism and to erode the norms that inform and underlie the liberal international political order. The important debate about whether there has been a democratic recession over the last decade-about how to understand these trends and how to classify stagnating polities and decaying institutions-also requires us to examine the broader global political changes and systemic shifts that have produced new counternorms and counterpractices.1
Policy makers and academics have been hesitant to acknowledge some of these recent cross-regional trends. Many deeply held and still highly influential assumptions about the nature of the liberal political order, the normative fabric of global governance, and the diffusion of democratic norms are products of the years just after the Cold War. Back then, in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union had just collapsed and former communist countries had begun economic and political transitions, liberal-democratic values appeared triumphant and free of significant ideological competition. At the same time, U.S. power was unrivaled, U.S. control of global institutions was strong, and there was a broad perception that a U.S.-led liberal world order would continue to set the rules, standards, and norms for international interactions. In light of the "pushback" that authoritarian regimes are now carrying out, upbeat assumptions about liberal democracy's effortless dominance require careful scrutiny.
The truth is that norms privileging state security, civilizational diversity, and traditional values over...