2009 was a bad year for democracy

Freedom House today released its annual flagship publication, Freedom in the World. The results were discouraging:

In a year of intensified repression against human rights defenders and democratic activists by many of the world’s most powerful authoritarian regimes, Freedom House found a continued erosion of freedom worldwide, with setbacks in Latin America, Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East. For the fourth consecutive year, declines have trumped gains. This represents the longest continuous period of deterioration in the nearly 40-year history of Freedom in the World, Freedom House’s annual assessment of the state of political rights and civil liberties in every country in the world.

Democratic setbacks occurred  for a number of different reasons, such as authoritarian upgrading, coups, and threats from non-state actors, such as criminal organizations and terrorist groups. However, even if the setbacks to democracy have no common theme, they do show one lesson. The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial on the report sums it up nicely:

The recent reversals coincide, however, with America’s own waning interest in democracy promotion. This didn’t start with the Obama ascendancy. Chastened by the 2006 midterm election debacle and sinking public support for his Mideast policies, President Bush took rhetorical and practical emphasis off his own flagship foreign-policy agenda.

The current Administration has changed the focus entirely. In its dealings with Russia and China, strategic issues trump any talk of democracy or human rights, which earlier this year in Beijing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton notably called a distraction to bilateral relations. Ditto in Iran.

If in the days of Jack Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, we worked to fashion the world into a better place guided by the belief that the urge to live in freedom is universal, today we act as if we are resigned to taking the world as it is. We used to nudge countries toward liberal democracy. Now we assume the price of nudging is too high.

Meanwhile, the enemies of democracy have set out to undo the gains of the post-Berlin Wall era, and many are succeeding.