Are Rumours of the Death of Democracy Exaggerated?

By 1989, the verdict was clear: the Soviet Union had atrophied much faster than the US, and its empire collapsed, the victim of its own errors and contradictions.

Today, the concept of competitive decay of ideological and political models seems to be relevant once again.

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that the liberal democratic ideal had become "obsolete."

Yet the crowds of protesters demonstrating in the streets of Moscow and, much more spectacularly, Hong Kong, suggest that the authoritarian model has plenty of problems of its own.

True, worried democrats now fear that the world has entered a third, darker phase of its postwar history.

The first phase, from 1945 until 1989, was dominated by the Cold War. The second, between 1990 and 2016, represented a fragile victory for liberal democratic regimes.

But now, the argument goes, the world is in a new, dangerous populist era that began with the victory of the Brexiteers in the United Kingdom and the election of President Donald Trump in the US.

Yet this interpretation may reflect the current general mood of pessimism and resignation as much as objective reality.

Populism itself is currently under attack in several Central European countries, including the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania.

And in France, President Emmanuel Macron is defending the classical liberal democratic model far more robustly than many of his critics had expected.