林中斌 部落格 / Blog Chong-Pin Lin

A future haunted by ghosts of the past

SEWELL CHAN, The New York Times, SEP 22, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/world/europe/a-future-haunted-by-ghosts-of-the-past.html?_r=0

  accessed Sep 23, 2016

• 第四屆世界民主會議在雅典召開，結論是民主政治陷入險境。
• 會議本來要慶祝民主，卻變成「焦慮的烤問」。
• 匈牙利總理Victor Orban 2014年再度當選，擁抱“非自由式民主”(illiberal democracy)限制人民權利和自由。
• 其他類似民選政府限制人民自由包括土耳其、波蘭、俄羅斯等。
• 商業威脅民主有3方面：

       --銀行(造成金融危機)

       --媒體(高度集中化)

       --壟斷(不受管制)

A wave of migrants and refugees, the largest since World War II, has strained the fabric of societies across Europe. The American presidential election, with the unusual campaign of the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, has focused the world’s nervous attention on strains in the United States.

 To varying degrees, countries including Turkey, Poland and Hungary have clamped down on journalists and judges. Governments have struggled to respond to the challenges of religious extremism and gaping disparities in wealth and income. In the United States, Mr. Trump has scorned democratic traditions, arguing that outsourcing of jobs, immigration and terrorism have created a mess and vowing, “I alone can fix it.”

 Among the government officials, scholars, activists, journalists and others who gathered last week for the fourth-annual Athens Democracy Forum, organized by The International New York Times, the mood was glum, if not despairing. They agreed that democracy was in danger, and liberalism — civil rights, the rule of law, the protection of minorities — even more so.

 “The crisis we find ourselves in today is one in which we have started to question the very fundamentals on which our democracies have been built — our moral values of openness and equality, our fundamental freedoms, our resilience and, most importantly, what unites us, what binds us,” said Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European Union’s commissioner for migration, home affairs and citizenship.

 Mr. Avramopoulos, a former foreign minister and defense minister of Greece, said the greatest threat to Europe came not from migration or terrorism but from the demons within. “What I believe can weaken us is what comes from inside: the rise of nationalism, populism, demagogy and xenophobia — the rise of dark ghosts from our recent past,” he said.

 The conference itself, said Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist who delivered the opening speech, was conceived as a “confident celebration” of democracy but instead became an “anxious interrogation.”

 “I am pessimistic in the short term, optimistic in the long term, particularly as I won’t be around to see if I was right,” he said. Pessimistic, he said, because “the problems are deep, can no longer be ignored, and cannot be righted in short order.”

 Mr. Cohen said there was some truth to the criticism that political and economic elites have profoundly failed their citizens. Free trade and large-scale immigration have produced enormous gains for those at the top of the ladder, but broad gains in prosperity have been elusive, he said.

 Among the results: The anxiety that propelled Britain’s decision, in a June 23 referendum, to leave the European Union, and the ascent of anti-establishment politicians like Mr. Trump and the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

 In the long run, though, Mr. Cohen is upbeat: “The democratic idea is stubborn.”

 At the core of the conference were four panel discussions on Sept. 15, addressing the intersection of democracy with migration, authoritarianism, capitalism and religion. Below are highlights:

 MIGRATION

 Are democratic societies prepared to deal with large-scale movements of people fleeing persecution and violence?

 “Under no circumstances do you shut the door to someone whose only crime is that they were born in a war-torn or impoverished country or region,” said Stavros Lambrinidis, the European Union’s special representative for human rights and a former foreign minister of Greece. “At the same time, you must make sure that you address the root causes of these problems.”

 Mario Monti, a former prime minister of Italy and a former member of the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, lamented that “the short-term nature of political discourse” had made it increasingly difficult to engage in the kind of reasoned, nuanced policy debates necessary to deal with thorny issues.

 Lucas Papademos, a former prime minister of Greece who is also an economist, said it was “not realistic” to “keep the doors totally open” but urged recognition of the long-term benefits of migration: replenishing an aging work force, supporting welfare and pension systems, and assisting entrepreneurship.

 Just as efforts to lift people out of poverty must be balanced against the impact on the environment, the rights of migrants have to be balanced against the need to keep societies safe, Mr. Lambrinidis said. “Sustainable security, like sustainable development, has to become the new paradigm,” he said.

 Mr. Papademos pronounced himself worried about the future of the European project, saying that conflicts abroad, and the resulting exodus of people, were “threatening the cohesion” of Europe and turning the “bedrock” of values upon which the European Union was built into “quicksand.”

 Mr. Monti sees signs that “international integration is moving backward,” as societies turn against the free movement of goods and people.”

 He pointed to a lack of leadership in Europe. “Whereas in the past, member states considered Europe a huge investment in their own long-term interest, now most leaders see Europe as a useful consumption good that you can try to squeeze in order hopefully to generate more short-term domestic political consensus,” he said.

 AUTHORITARIANISM

 As democracies falter, candidates promising quick fixes through sheer force of personality have captured the imagination of voters. Alison Smale, the Berlin bureau chief of The New York Times, moderated a discussion on the appeal of the “big man.” (The candidates seem invariably to be male.)

 Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis, who was the United States ambassador to Hungary from 2010 to 2013, recalled the rise of Viktor Orban, who became prime minister a few months after she arrived in Budapest.

 The previous government, led by Socialists, was widely seen as discredited after the global financial crisis, she said, and Mr. Orban swept to power after urging voters to give his nationalist, conservative party, Fidesz, a supermajority in Parliament.

 Once in office, Mr. Orban passed legislation deploring the Treaty of Trianon, which in 1920 set Hungary’s borders after World War I, while strengthening the government’s control over news outlets, the judiciary, universities and local governments. Mr. Orban even embraced the term “illiberal democracy,” arguing that his mandate from voters (he was re-elected in 2014) justified restrictions on civil rights and civil liberties.

 Mr. Orban set an example that has been emulated by the far-right government that took power in Poland last year, Ms. Kounalakis said.

 Christiane Amanpour, the CNN journalist, described her experiences interviewing strongmen, including Robert Mugabe, the longtime president of Zimbabwe; Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president who was ousted in 2011; Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader who was murdered by a mob in 2011; and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has led an authoritarian turn in that country.

 “I’ve interviewed a lot of these people who have come in as democrats and turned into authoritarians, never-ending rulers,” she said, describing Mr. Erdogan’s outrage when she asked him about his request that Germany prosecute a satirist who had mocked him. “He was shocked that I would ask him that question,” Ms. Amanpour said.

 Ms. Amanpour, who grew up in Iran when it was led by an authoritarian shah, said control of the news media was the first point on the authoritarian agenda. “None of these authoritarians could have a lock on so-called success if they didn’t have a compliant media,” she said, noting crackdowns on the press in Russia, Poland, Turkey and elsewhere.

 CAPITALISM

 Concerns about the ability of governments to rein in capitalism were brought to the fore during the 2008 global economic crisis and continue to reverberate around the West.

 At a panel moderated by Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Nobel-laureate economist, Yasheng Huang, a professor of global economics at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, said the allure of the business strongman was unsurprising since many chief executives “rule their own companies” as unquestioned leaders.

 Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister of Greece and one of the best-known critics of economic austerity in Europe, said there were three threats to democracy from the rising power of business: the banking sector (which helped cause the financial crisis), the news media (which has been increasingly consolidated) and monopolies (whose concentrated power defies attempts at regulation and control). “I’m afraid that the political-democratic realm is not doing very well,” he said.

 Mr. Varoufakis did not blame businesses for the austerity policies, which he believes have contributed to a series of economic crises in Greece. “My experience in Europe is that business was much more progressive in demanding an end to austerity, and is to this day, than governments are,” he said.

 Does economic development eventually lead to democratic reform, as Seymour Martin Lipset and other political scientists proposed in the decades after World War II?

 Mr. Huang was not optimistic. “Before the current leadership,” he said, “China has had generations of leaders who were not democrats, but trending toward the liberal direction.” That has stopped with Xi Jinping, China’s paramount leader since 2012.

 “This is one of the big problems with an authoritarian system because the leadership selection is a very unpredictable process,” Mr. Huang said. “Nobody knew the characteristics of this current leader before he was selected. He had a lot of room to maneuver and he decided to move backward.” Private-sector confidence in China is declining, and people are taking money out of the country, he added.

 RELIGION

 “The more that people of different faiths can interact to pursue some common goal, the more well-off we are as democracies,” said the Rev. Chloe Breyer, an Episcopalian minister and the executive director of the Interfaith Center of New York, reflecting a common belief in the United States.

 Serge Schmemann, a member of the Times editorial board who led the discussion, said he wanted to steer clear of familiar debates about Islam in public life. He invited two men born in the Soviet Union — Natan Sharansky, a Jewish human-rights activist who is now chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, and Sergei Chapnin, a former editor of the official journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church board — to talk about the misuses of faith.

 Mr. Sharansky said that during his days as a human rights dissident, religious people were “by far our strongest, best comrades in arms.”

 Mr. Chapnin lamented the co-opting of the Russian Orthodox Church by President Vladimir V. Putin’s government.

 As the identity of the Russian government changed from “democratic state to empire,” church officials agreed to make their faith “a church of empire,” he said. “We have a kind of post-Soviet civil religion based on Orthodox traditions — or incorporating Orthodox elements — but in fact this is not the true spiritual tradition,” Mr. Chapnin said, adding that he believed “the church is in crisis now.”

 As for the threat of religious extremism to liberal democracies, Ms. Breyer said of Western societies: “We should be much less apologetic about teaching the good things about secularism, the Enlightenment, to people who are very religious and haven’t necessarily encountered those values. We should not treat traditions as though they were static.”