Read the full transcript of Russian and European Politics scholar Richard Sakwa in conversation with Norwegian writer and political activist Prof. Glenn Diesen on “Democratism & Liberal Authoritarianism”, July 1, 2025.
Introduction
PROF. GLENN DIESEN: Hi, everyone, and welcome. Today we’re joined by Professor Sakwa, Europe’s leading Russia scholar and a very prolific writer. So welcome back to the program.
RICHARD SAKWA: It’s my pleasure to be with you.
Defining Democratism: Beyond Traditional Democracy
PROF. GLENN DIESEN: So I wanted to discuss a concept which you coined—democratism—because I thought this was a very powerful concept. Many people do recognize some strange developments in our Western democracies. Democracy entails accommodating political pluralism, tolerance for opposing views, active participation by the public in political processes, and accountability.
But these days, democracy appears to be defined, or at least practiced, more by rituals. We all get to vote, but in the name of defending democracy, we often see undemocratic tendencies. I thought a good place to start would be if you can flesh out this concept of democratism. What does it actually mean and why does it differ from democracy itself?
RICHARD SAKWA: Thanks. In terms of coining it, you’re absolutely right that I’ve been using and working with this term for nearly a decade now. But a few years ago, I discovered that another great scholar, Emily Finley, was working on a parallel track, and she then brought out a book called Democratism. Her book is rather different—her angle is different than mine, but importantly, it is complementary.
The Intellectual Foundations of Elite Intervention
Basically, Emily Finley, in her book Democratism, argues that in the Enlightenment—in particular the Enlightenment thinkers—she focuses a lot on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and some of the great ideologists of American independence, Jefferson and others. She argues that there was always a type of substitution at work, that in the discussions of democracy, it was always interpreted in the fact that elites would effectively interject themselves between the popular will and policy outcomes.
I’ve rather simplified her analysis, which is very rich—a marvelous book, actually. But what she’s saying, I think, is establishing the intellectual foundations of this tradition of democratism in Western public intellectual thinking. So there’s the first point: there’s always been this sort of tension within democracy that you can’t allow democracy to become too direct, too decisive. There has to be some sort of intermediate way of dealing with it.
That tradition, by the way, has been continued by a whole stack of thinkers—Christopher Lasch and others—who talk about the way that technocratic elites have substituted for the popular will. Of course, one would argue that populism is a backlash against that.
Elections as Regime Plebiscites
The second track is that in the contemporary world, which is what I’m focusing on, there is in elections and in contemporary political life a type of thinking—to use Carl Schmitt’s 1920s or earlier great legal philosophy—a type of state of emergency is operative today. The feeling that our society is under threat, that there are things higher than democracy which we have to defend, which of course is a respectable position.
In this type of emergency, elections then become no longer a simple choice of different governing parties or different governing ideas. It becomes once again a type of plebiscite on the nature of the regime itself. This goes back to the very early elections in independent Russia in the 1990s, for example, the presidential election of Yeltsin in 1996—the idea that at stake wasn’t just simply who was going to become the leader, but whether communism would return. It was becoming, in other words, about the nature of the system, a systemic thing.
That sort of thinking, which I call democratism, has now become pervasive. We’ve seen it in recent elections in Romania, we’ve seen it constantly in elections in Georgia and elsewhere. Elections become not simply a question of government, but a question of regime type.
Geopolitical Dimensions
A third element today in the discussion of democratism is how all of that has become bound up with geopolitical considerations. So it isn’t just simply a regime type—whether democracy or so-called autocracies or illiberal regimes of one form or another—but that if people vote the wrong way, that undermines the geopolitical framework of the contemporary world. In our case, it undermines what I’ve called lately the political West.
This particular power system was established after the Second World War, fed by Cold War ideology—the idea that the West itself is the land of the free against the land of autocracy, despotism, totalitarianism, and so on. As you’ve written as well, this undermines the ability for engagement, for pragmatic interaction.
All of that has come back with a vengeance in contemporary Western political life. This political West is clearly challenged by internal divisions, the Trumpian phenomenon, and so on. But nevertheless, this hegemony of the political West—that is NATO, that is European Union—has to be maintained at all costs, and if democracy has to be managed, then so be it.
The Ideological Element
The final thing, maybe a fourth aspect, is that there is an ideological element as there was in the first Cold War. This ideology of liberal globalism is a universalistic one. It’s obviously fed by end-of-history ideologies, this vision that there’s no really substantive legitimate alternative. If there is no substantive legitimate alternative, then of course you’ve got to defend the only legitimate form, and all means, including administrative measures, are appropriate.
Of course, this leads to many accusations that the West has become neo-Soviet and has assumed the face of its erstwhile enemy. So those are sort of four pillars on which we can base contemporary ideas about democratism.
Historical Roots and Development
PROF. GLENN DIESEN: But where’s the root of this? How did it intensify to this extent? I know you went back to argue that this has always been some idea behind this—that you always had to have some elites intervening between the public will and the people.
One could put John Stuart Mill in there as well, because he was, of course, a big advocate of liberalism, and he saw already at his time that liberalism and democracy kind of went hand in hand as long as people voted for the liberal reforms away from the Victorian traditional way of organizing society.
But he also recognized if people would start to vote the wrong way, as you put it, that it would be better to have liberal elites who would then do what’s best for society.
You also see, especially throughout the 19th century, a lot of concern about the uninformed masses as democracy or the right to vote would be expanded. How do you deal with these people? But how has it developed over time? Because you make the point now that it’s become more so than in the past.
RICHARD SAKWA: Yeah, so two things there. The first one: there are intellectual traditions. Building on Emily Finley, who started that intellectual debate, I think you’re absolutely right that clearly what we’re talking about is a phenomenon which is deeply embedded in Western political philosophy. It could even go all the way back to Plato and his vision of a philosopher king—that you really have to have that democracy itself is a dangerous thing.
Aristotle has a marvelous analysis of the dilemmas, hence the vision. The view that emerged is that mixed government is the best one which can balance. And of course, democracy itself was, for most of Western political history, considered a dangerous element for the reasons you’ve just outlined—that it would lead the dark and unwise masses to intervene in affairs that should be left to those who know better: the philosopher king, the elites, or the landowner gentry in 18th, 19th century Britain and so on. So this is a very long tradition.
The Hobbesian Vision and Modern Breakdown
But you could say maybe more specifically—and Finley touches on this or analyzes this—is that the Hobbesian vision of the Leviathan is always standing guard over liberal democracy. There is a suppressive element right at the very heart of Western political philosophy, which was managed in the 19th century, the age of mass democracy, by ensuring that this management system was internal to democracy itself.
Political parties organized and limited political engagement. Another way in which it was limited and engaged was the Disraeli option—the fact that the British working class, so many of them voted for the Tories, for Disraeli, for the Conservatives. It’s because, in other words, structures of hegemony, leadership dominance. And of course, once the mass media got going—the yellow press from the 1890s onwards, the Daily Mail in the United Kingdom—you could constantly win by establishing this dominance of a certain conventional viewpoint.
Perhaps today the reason why that internal suppression, if you like, without needing the stick or the coercive measures, is breaking down—in other words, hegemony, both on the geopolitical level of the United States and its allies and internally within liberal democracy has broken down. Political parties have—certainly in the United Kingdom—volatility of electorates. Our dear Labour Party in the United Kingdom is a very unconvincing vessel for change or any intellectual agenda, real vision of how the United Kingdom should be governed.
So that, in other words, the sense that—Peter Mair put it well, I think 15 years ago in his book Ruling the Void—there’s a void there. Perhaps this is why democratism has bubbled to the surface. The Disraeli-style ways of managing a mass electorate are failing. Therefore more coercive measures, the Leviathan approach has come to the fore.
Democracy as Ideology: The Universalist Problem
PROF. GLENN DIESEN: To what extent is this a problem that democracy became an ideology? Because you wrote in one of your papers that democratism is to democracy what Marxist-Leninism is to socialism.
When I saw it, I thought a bit about economic liberalism, because if you read the economic liberals from John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, from the economic perspective, many of them were concerned about the concentration of wealth, the oligarchy. They were mainly for taxing rent seekers to perhaps finance what is of the common good—that is infrastructure, which can elevate economic competitiveness, improve people’s lives, education, all these things.
But when we talk about economic liberalism today, it’s become something very pure, something very neoliberal, that nothing should interfere with the market. Society becomes an appendage to the market. There should be no interference. And if more and more power concentrates with the oligarchy and capital, then it’s not a problem. This goes very much against what Ricardo was referring to.
So I thought about this regarding political liberalism as well. Is this the historical development of democracy becoming an ideology? Because in ideology we often end up embracing very universalist concepts. And as soon as it becomes universalist, it begins to conflict with the tolerance for alternatives. It becomes less accommodating of pluralism, which is kind of the idea of democracy to begin with—that you have different ideas of what the democratic system should be.
The Hungarian Example: Democratic Norms vs. Popular Will
To what extent are we accommodating of this? I know this becomes a very wide question, but for example, these days it’s very common to criticize Hungary, that it’s undemocratic. People refer to its views on gay parades, the LGBT stuff. But if they have a majority who say we want to have limitations on this—they argue we want to protect their children from this—and a majority of Hungarians are for this, it’s nonetheless argued that this goes against democratic norms.
I’m not saying that the Hungarians are right and, for example, the British would be wrong. But irrespective of who’s right or wrong, there’s very little acceptance of any counter perspectives or arguments or different ways of organizing society, irrespective of what people actually support or the arguments they make.
In other words, it’s this universalism which keeps pushing for there being only one model which everyone has to conform to. It seems very difficult to accommodate democracy within this very strict framework. Is this because it’s an ideology? How do you see this? Because it’s very strange sometimes to watch the denunciation of democracies who are doing it incorrectly, or as you said, people who vote the wrong way.
The Economic Foundations of Anti-Democratic Neoliberalism
RICHARD SAKWA: No, there’s two big things I think, in your question just now. The first one is on the economic side of things. And you know, my view is that neoliberalism by its very essence is anti-democratic. It turns citizens into consumers. It makes them passive recipients of market forces. It believes that any attempt to intervene, to manage the market, as Hayek would say to serfdom, is bad. And of course this is the whole Milton Friedman, Hayek school of thought which has dominated for the last 40 years. But also perhaps because that ideology is now unraveling, perhaps there’s yet another reason that there’s more active managerial intervention in elections.
So on you say these economic liberals and the way this has worked out. Just two things on that in the sense the first, the first 40 years after 1945 were a time of the social democratic moment. The belief that states, the Keynesianism and so on should intervene to manage market affairs that you know, many arguments about embedded liberalism of the sort you’ve talked about the last 40 years have been dominated by the disembedding, allowing market forces to rip to and in fact delegitimating democratic interventions to limit market forces to tax.
Some of these huge tech giants, for example, we can see how power is being exerted against governments and governments and a nation state itself is the vehicle in which to control these huge transnational economic forces of our time. So we’re moving into a third phase. I mean we had the social democratic moment, we had the neoliberal moment. Now we’ve got full scale plutocracy, if you like, which isn’t exactly democratic.
You know, the Jeff Bezos Amazon, which you know, on turnover say of 20, 30 billion in England, I don’t know, in the United Kingdom pays 18 million in tax. I mean the disproportionately so extraordinary, which means that people can no longer have the services which allows Amazons to become, and that is exactly it, citizens. When citizens become consumers, they lose an ability to actively intervene in the management of public affairs.
The Post-Liberal Moment and National Security Overreach
So that is the first side. I mean you mentioned, I mean Adam Smith of course had, as you’ve written about, not just about the wealth of nations, but also about the morality of the market. And those debates seem to have been overshadowed in recent times. And just one final point on this, Naomi Klein’s marvelous book the Shock Doctrine shows how neoliberalism is then implemented across the world when states are in crisis.
There’s a second thing, you know, you mentioned about, you know, this post liberal moment and we are, we’ve now entered where classic liberalism is being undermined both by insurgent outsiders, if you like, by populists. You’ve mentioned, you mentioned Hungary and some other states where they quite openly espouse a type of illiberal democracy.
But it’s also post liberalism is effectively accepted internally because we have certainly in the United Kingdom and I think elsewhere in the second Cold War today, which has been going on now for a decade now, intensifying, is that national security concerns should trump democratic will.
And for example, the example on that would be, you know, where there’s much talk of remilitarization, using military Keynesianism to re-industrialize Western Europe to flagging West European economies. Well, and led above all by Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission. Well, I don’t remember being, we’re not in the European Union now, but I don’t remember European publics being asked about it.
And I don’t remember being asked in our election in July 2024 whether we as a British citizen and as European citizens are willing to sacrifice welfare, development, infrastructure and so on in favor of a militarization. A five NATO meeting in June, for example, the NATO summit, which countries pledged to spend 5% on military and military related activity? Well, is that a democratic decision?
It’s a classic case of democratism where decisions are taken without any, even nowadays, even a genuine nod to the fact that we need to have this ratified by publics. It’s not. It’s catastrophic position. And democratism has reached a level at which it undermines the very legitimacy of democracy itself because it doesn’t seem to be working.
And when elites tried to impose very dangerous situations because they’re inconstantly. My vision of democratism, this ideology, as you say it, is absolutely right. Democracy or when these ideas become an ideology, they lose that flexibility, they lose adapted, they lose pragmatism. Ideology, by definition, it tends to abstract from reality and this is exactly where we are.
So as you say, democratism is reaching such a point. And of course just one final point is first, there’s always a backlash. There’s always a backlash in populism. The fact that today I live in the county of Kent in England, in the last, this last May, May 2025 local government elections, the Reform Party, this is Nigel Farage, won 57 out of 82 seats on Kent County Council. And this is an untested party with no coherent program. And why did it. I’d understand why so many people voted for it, voted for reform. And of course reform is now riding high in our opinion polls. Well, this tells us, I think something about the state of democracy in the UK and the world today.
The Evolution of Populism: From Democratic Mechanism to Elite Scapegoat
PROF. GLENN DIESEN: Well, the concept or the topic of populism though is it’s all something that changed because we’ve had debates about populism since well, at least the 19th century. And usually what it meant was when you had a political elite which became more and more disconnected with the public to the extent they no longer had the democratic mandate or representation anymore.
And then in that gap, when you have this gap between the public and the leaders, you would have populists coming along. They see this vacuum. Sometimes they take advantage, sometimes they don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t have solutions. But at least they are coming in and recognizing this gap. And this is why the rhetoric is always us, the people, versus them, the elites.
But this is from Bernie Sanders to Barack Obama. They refer to themselves as populists, not because of something negative, but they did this because they recognized that the elites no longer, well, had this democratic legitimacy anymore. At least they were challenging it.
But now it seems as if the word populist is anyone who deviates from this elite consensus. So we have this more and more policies which you can’t really contest. And whoever deviates from it or challenge it is now a populist. And populism is now overwhelmingly, it seems, a negative word indeed. You hear politicians talk about the need to fight against populism, to purge it from society.
This is, you know, you can also conceptualize, I guess, populism as a democratic mechanism. That is, if you have a consensus around the political elite establishment, they were following the same line, which they no longer suit the public. And then in this vacuum, you have an alternative coming along. And now it seems as if a key goal to protect democracy is to eradicate this populist group who obviously occurred or emerged in the vacuum by a political elite no longer responding properly to the public. How does populism then fit into this concept of democratism?
Populism: Progressive Tradition vs. European Skepticism
RICHARD SAKWA: Just on the US Populism, you say, Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama, of course, there is a very powerful and positive progressive populism in the United states from the 1890s onwards, which in the Gilded Age, they then challenged those big monopolists, JP Morgan and so on, and they achieved major effective and good correction in US Policy. So breaking up Standard Oil, et cetera. So it was. That’s why the United States, the populist tradition, is perhaps seen in a slightly more positive line as really energizing the popular interface or interaction with democracy.
In Europe, of course, it’s far more negative. We go back to the Poujadist movement in France of the petty bourgeoisie in the 1950s, and it’s always had that sort of rather negative connotation. Until then, of course, we had talking still of France in Macron’s first term in France because they were articulating the concerns of those, you know, we call in England the left behind the outsiders. And in that case green agenda trying to put up diesel prices or energy prices. And of course in the countryside you need to have a car and so on.
So. And the Gilets Jaunes was suppressed with unprecedented and appalling violence. One has to say. But this is where populism puts on the agenda things that the normal democratic puritans fails to do. So it’s a way of re-energizing politics, but at the same time its primitive tropes, you know, the masses know have some sort of innate knowledge better than elites. And of course that is a false, you know, and blaming abstract elites for all of the faults in society is no solution at all either without a coherent program.
The Challenge of Genuine Democratic Renewal
So and then of course you could say where does genuine movement? And of course the other. But you know, in my view questionable approach is this illiberal or post illiberal approach which again undermines the rule of law, undermines genuine popular engagement. For example, the gay pride march in Budapest in Hungary just recently, at the end of June 2025, it was clearly, you know, mass protest about it. And that’s not the way you need to divine to devise ways of gauging public opinion, mobilizing debate and so on. The same goes in Poland about abortion laws.
So yeah, how do we do it? Because against democratism they really building on those four blocks which are the intellectual tradition has to be re-energized really that democracy. And what are we really talking about? We’re talking about the genuine, what we would call agonistic debate about issues of genuine importance to the people, which isn’t hijacked by this ideological interpretations of geopolitical struggle.
The presentation of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea as an axis of evil ready to be ready to pounce on us at the moment of weakness. In other words, then national security as to democracy. So we need a full fiant intellectual work. There are sort of we’re toiling away today in that garden to try to re-energize and re-envision what democracy must be. And it has to have ideas, it has to have analysis, but also it has to believe that ultimately we have to win people and talk with people.
And in my view there is a desperate need for change. And it is reflected in the fact, for example, in 2016, Bernie Sanders you mentioned won 22 Pioneers. In 2016, unfortunately, democratism intervened and the Democratic Party used administrative measures to ensure that Hillary Clinton was the candidate in 2016. And look the outsider, Trump won.
Because, again, you know, Trump could be called many things, I suppose populism might as well be one of them. So, you know, as a populist insurgency with a totally incoherent policy agenda, yet to. If you’re going to call him a populist, and in his second term as well, he asks some of the right questions, and our mainstream politicians do not have the courage to do so at the moment.
Macron doesn’t. Merz, Friedrich Merz in Germany doesn’t. Keir Starmer has no idea even of how to formulate the sort of correct questions because of very limited political imagination. And the Labour Party is no longer a movement, it’s become a machine which basically expels dissidents, suppresses debate, suppresses democracy within the party, by the way, which would be a fine beginning to democratize the United Kingdom.
So, I’m sorry, that’s quite a long answer. But in a sense that, you know, populism, all these elements are part of this, you know, what we could call this great polycrisis of our times. And it’s very, very hard to navigate within that. And I think, you know this. That’s why I’m so glad that, you know, we decided today to talk about democratism, which of course then implicitly says, how do we get back to some sort of vision of genuine, competitive, pluralistic democracy, tolerance, pragmatism in international politics as well.
The Geopolitical Dimension of Democratism
PROF. GLENN DIESEN: I did. It struck me another one, a key thing, though, is democracy. And the concept of democratic peace, which has been so dominant in the west, especially after the Cold War, suggests that democracy leads to more peace. Exactly, because the public, which does not gain or want war, has an ability to restrain its political leaders.
But you see a bit of a contradiction these days. You see that democracy itself is used as an instrument of great power politics. You create consensus in society, democracy is important. And then, well, we represent democracy. Everyone else, our opponents are against it. So in other words, to preserve democracy, we can’t challenge policies.
And you see, translated into geopolitics and the liberal hegemony it used to be in the 90s, less controversial. You went to countries such as Poland, and if they were all democratic, the more democratic they were, the more pro Western the policies will be. So kind of liberal hegemony became quite natural. Power were concentrated in the West. The more democratic these states will be. So, yeah, freedom is the hegemony of the West.
But again, once you begin to expand this EU, NATO blocks to the east, this becomes more tricky. And obviously Ukraine was the key challenge in 2014 when you had a democratic revolution, as it’s referred to, but only 20% of the public then really wanted to be part of NATO. So. And this, this is when it becomes a bit tricky because we hear arguments that, well, they don’t really know what’s good for them. They’ve been subjected to propaganda, they haven’t been informed that NATO is actually a peace project.
And we begin to justify a bit like the. Yeah, like we asking for a philosopher king to explain to the Ukrainians that they don’t know what they want. If they were really democratic, this is what they would want. They would want to be a part of our military bloc. And I thought, yeah, this was problematic.
But you see this expand now as well. We saw the. Romania voted the wrong way. They had to do a do over. Georgia obviously voted the wrong way. Moldova had to be also held in the hand. So make sure that, yeah, they would also vote the wrong way. Sorry, vote the right way. Moldova, Hungary also, sometimes Poland, they also vote the wrong way.
It seems as if the geopolitical scope here is one of the key areas where the concept of democracy is used to limit what we’re allowed to say or what we’re allowed to actually vote for. Well, I’m in Norway, though, and we have a former foreign minister and defence minister arguing that if you’re arguing that NATO expansion provoked war in Ukraine, you know, this is what Putin says. So this is Russian propaganda.
But. So we don’t discuss overwhelming evidence anymore. We just say, well, anyone who will repeat this is now essentially a traitor. They are repeating the propaganda of the Russians. So we’re allowed to have democratic debates, but it has to be narrowed in within the confines of, yeah, this was unprovoked. The Russians are evil, they want to restore empire and we have to send all the weapons we can. As long as you conform to this, we’re allowed to have open debates and discussions and even democracy, but this is where we restrict ourselves.
So how do you see the. I guess to what extent has the geopolitics of the post Cold War era contributed to democratism?
Liberal Globalism vs. Sovereign Internationalism
RICHARD SAKWA: 100%. Thank you. You ended up exactly where I hoped you would end. But in a sense that here we could have. I mean, there’s so many things there. The fourth pillar of democratism I mentioned was this geopolitical one which you’ve been discussing.
And as you say, it then is presented that joining NATO is the democratic thing to do. Joining the European Union is the democratic thing to do. It may well be in certain circumstances be the democratic thing to do, but in other circumstances it is not. And where both these European, or in this case, or the political West’s models become an ideology moving to the west become no longer a practical response to security, both external and internal, it becomes just simply an abstraction, as you said, an ideology imposed. And therefore that opens the door to democratism.
When the actual people are opposed, as they were in Ukraine to joining NATO in 2014, the majority were opposed, yet they were benighted and they had to be led by. And if they weren’t going to be led, they have to be coerced into it. And of course, this then provoked the conflicts which have now exploded in a way that they have most tragically.
So democratic peace, it was assumed to be the same as equivalent to ultimately liberal hegemony. It had no room for other alternative forms of engagement. And the way I put this is that in the post pen, post Cold war years, since 1989, effectively, we’ve had a. Well, since 1945, we’ve had a huge tension between on the one side, liberal globalism, and this is US led liberal globalism. Markets, free markets, rule of law, good stuff, many good things in that package. But there’s also many bad things, if you can say the way I would suggest it is a tension between commonwealth, the good things, open markets, good engagement, where citizen economic initiative can be rewarded adequately with defensible preoptic acts. That’s a good thing. I mean, I support that.
But at the same time it’s in the mailed fist of empire of liberal hegemony, which you mentioned. So there’s that tension there. And the way I then see this tension playing out is that you have on the one side the concept, concept of liberal globalism, that is that universalism you’ve just mentioned, where there is no room for alternatives. Liberal globalism, it’s a global agenda. Any other alternative, let alone a socialist one.
By the way, you may have seen that, I think yesterday or this week, the Czech parliament has voted to ban, to ban the Communist Party in Czech Republic, Czechia, which was one of the governing parties in coalition not long ago. So banning a Communist Party, just like Ukraine, by the way, banned the Communist Party after 2014. Well, as long as the Communist Party is not calling for violent overthrow of the government, it’s a perfectly legitimate stance. So again, that’s the way that geopolitics interacts with democratic procedures giving rise to democratism.
But the way my big point is that you have liberal globalism on the one side, countered by what I would defend, which is sovereign internationalism based on the United nations charter of 1945, who we’re basically celebrating in these days, 80th anniversary of the adoption of the charter back in June 1945. So it’s a. There’s tension and liberal internationalism is. Sorry. Sovereign internationalism respects the nation state as the framework for democracy and expression of the popular will, in short, democracy and on the other side, internationalism, multilateralism, rule of international law, insofar as such a thing exists in a substantive sense, but based on the normative and the values of the UN Charter, instead of which there’s liberal globalism undermines that, and that is opening the door.
Can I just add one more point is that you mentioned these East European countries. My argument now I’m beginning to understand. We need to understand what actually happened in 1989, 91, when the communist regimes fell. And instead of there being a genuine redemocratization of these societies with genuine geopolitical pluralism and contestation within them, of course there was plenty of that in the early days. But ultimately what has triumphed in Eastern Europe is what we could call a negative revolution that it became overwhelmingly priority simply to accept the expanding political west, NATO, European Union and all of the associated, even if you like, the liberal penumbra associated with it of a New York feminist intellectual, which I would rather like these people. But nevertheless, that vision of how society should be run.
But many societies says no. The election of now as the president of Poland just recently was suggesting no, we have a different vision of how society should be managing. Get an emphasis on the family. Another traditionally conservative forms. So we have this tension between liberal globalism and sovereign internationalism. That is the determination today. And democracy can only take place within the framework of sovereign internationalism, whereas liberal globalism gives rise to democratism. And that is the big division of our times. And that’s what this war is all about. Ultimately.
The Crisis of Democracy and the Need for European Independence
PROF. GLENN DIESEN: No. I want to explore this concept myself more in academic work. Democraticism, because it is fascinating how this democracy becomes, I guess, a slogan for often restraining popular will, but also what was intended to create a more benign international system is now effectively become the war drum. Whenever we speak of democracy, there’s. This is usually used in some geopolitical struggle. So. Well, before we wrap this up, do you have any last thoughts?
RICHARD SAKWA: I think that just one of the frightening things of our times is that the crisis of US democracy, and I think few people would argue that there isn’t such a thing, has become generalized is that there’s much personal criticism of Donald J. Trump, but I’m not sure whether there’s an effective criticism of a systemic crisis in the United States that gave rise to the Donald J. Trump who is the subject of such great criticism.
And what we see in the United States is the emergence of democratism, obviously given huge impetus by the allowing of unlimited election funding through Citizens United judgment a few years back. And so this vast amount of money which has allowed the oligarchs, and now of course the techno oligarchs really to dominate the public agenda through in elections and such like.
But that makes it all the more incumbent upon us in Europe, I mean in the United Kingdom, in Norway and in Finland and so, and in all countries to say, my view has always been that we needed a neo Gaulist, if you like, a pan European approach to these things. This is not anti American, it’s post American. We want to work government and we all have many, many friends in the United States. But it’s not a question of, it’s a question of saying, look, we need to move to a post hegemonic world in which nation states we as societies take control of our own destiny.
This also means fundamental challenge against that neoliberal dominance of those huge transnational corporations. I mean, who governs us? I’m not sure whether it’s not Amazon anymore or whatever really is deciding in setting the agenda. I mean, our British capitalism is so weak now, it’s been so thoroughly penetrated by US capital. I’m not sure that the British government has got any serious room for maneuvering.
So we need a fundamental manifesto of rethinking of some of the fundamental issues of our time. And for me, as a genuine deep in the world European, we have to do it on a pan European framework. But not the European Union as it exists today, which has become a geopolitical project. Not just undermining but actually repudiating the very fundamentals in which the European Union was established was as a peace project. And as I said, no one asked us, but it’s now become a war project and it’s very dangerous.
In other words, we need a fundamental reform in order. In short, my slogan is if we want a program of redemocratization, we really think need to think as Europeans and not simply as part of a sub or vassal states in the political west vassals of a state that is in itself in crisis, which is the most frightening and paradoxical thing of all.
The Manipulation of Civil Society Through NGOs
PROF. GLENN DIESEN: Final thought was, sort of criticism of Trump. But what is interesting with his, with his, some of his ideas or policies is a lot of things have been exposed. For example, when he cut funding to all these NGOs and USAID and they discovered that the vast majority, for example, of Ukrainian media are now financed by the United States government.
And I criticized myself how, for example, NGOs have been used by governments to effectively hijack civil society of other countries. And I was criticized in this country because when I criticized the NGOs which are financed by our government and American governments to manipulate, for example, civil society in countries like Ukraine or even our own country, I was told, well, this is very anti democratic thing to say because these are democratic institutions and if I. Doesn’t matter who they’re financed by, who what they’re, who they’re staffed with or the political objective they’re pursuing, they establish institutions which you call them democratic and now they are immune to criticism effectively.
So it’s a very strange, strange how democracy as a concept has mutated into meaning essentially anything.
RICHARD SAKWA: Yeah. I mean, just to add to that, in Georgia, a population of 3.5 million, and according to some estimates there were 30,000 NGOs, mostly funded from abroad. Well, that really undermines the very genuine grassroots democracy in that country because it means that their gender is set in Washington D.C. or somewhere else, rather than by agonistic debate between participants in Georgian public sphere.
Fortunately, by the way, the optimistic note is that in Georgia there has been this revival and there’s intense debate in Georgia which I think is very, very healthy. And I look forward to more of those sort of Georgian style debates. It’s just beginning in Georgia, but it’s there. And the sense that to expose, because what you just said about NGOs is a classic feature of democratism is that that democracy is something from abroad. Whereas, by definition, democracy has to be responsive to the needs, concerns and aspirations of a people in a, in a nation state themselves.
Closing Remarks
PROF. GLENN DIESEN: (00:46:17 – 00:46:44): Yes. Or NGOs, do they spread democracy or do they undermine democracy? This should be at least a discussion should be allowed to be held. This is in a democratic society.
Anyways, Professor Richard Sakwa, thank you so much for your time and I will add some links to your recent books in the descriptions, which I highly recommend. Thank you so much for your time.
RICHARD SAKWA: (00:46:44 – 00:47:06): It’s my pleasure. Thank you very much.
Related Posts
