 I'm Salvatore Bobonis, and today's lecture is Illiberal Democracies. Liberal democracy may have triumphed in the West, but many intellectuals and political leaders in non-Western countries have very different ideas about just what democracy should mean. China and Vietnam, for example, share a Leninist conception of democracy in which the Communist Party rules on behalf of the people. In other, less ideological countries, democracy has come to mean winner-take-all elections. In general, representative democracy has not turned out to be as much of a challenge to the entrenched in traditional elites as has the liberal exchange of ideas reflected most of all in a free press. Contrary to popular perceptions, Iran has been for decades perhaps the most consistently democratic country in the Middle East. This U.S. file photo shows the American flag being burned by students on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979 after student protestors had taken over the U.S. Embassy. And ever since 1979, Iran has been viewed as a totalitarian country in the West. Yet, pre-1979, Iran was ruled by an unelected king, the Shah of Iran, who was put in place by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in a coup in the 1950s. So if anything, Iran has gone from being a country ruled by a king under American tutelage to being a country that has, well, at least the forms of democracy. It has had regular contested elections every four years since 1980, both parliamentary elections and presidential elections. It has regular alternation in power with a two-term limit, so an eight-year limit on how long a president can serve. It has broad enfranchisement, unlike its regional competitor Israel, where many, well, where Palestinian citizens of Israel are only partially enfranchised and where non-citizen Palestinian refugees are completely disenfranchised. By contrast, Iran has pretty much complete enfranchisement, including women and religious minorities being able to vote. In that sense, Iran represents a complete contrast to all of the Western-friendly governments of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, all of the other Gulf countries, which are complete non-democracies ruled by kings and other elites. Iran does have a, quote-unquote, supreme leader, a kind of religious king who holds the ultimate reins of power through the power of appointment, the power to dismiss governments, et cetera. But to put it in context, the United Kingdom has a queen who is also nominally the head of the Church of England and who has the power, again, in theory, to dismiss governments. In practice, the Queen of England, who is also the Queen of Australia, dismissed the Australian government as recently as 1975. So you don't have to go back to ancient history to find the kings and queens of England interfering in politics, at least as recently as the late 20th century. This was occurring even in such a developed Western liberal democracy as Australia. So while Iran's supreme leader certainly has undemocratic powers of a kind that we would not today accept in Western Europe, North America, or other developed regions of the world, it's not so far out of place as it might seem, even compared to our own not-so-distant past. Yet, on the other hand, Iran is a deeply illiberal country, with respect for the supreme leader strictly enforced and the expression of alternative views severely curtailed. And in this illiberalness, it is not unlike many countries throughout the developing world, from Turkey on one side of Iran to Azerbaijan on another side of Iran to Pakistan and Afghanistan on a third side of Iran. So the countries throughout the region that are democracies like Iran are also illiberal democracies. That means that major media outlets are controlled by the state, and not just by the state, they are in effect controlled by government. This is a big contrast to England, where the BBC is controlled by the state, but it is not controlled by the current government of the day. It is the British Broadcasting Corporation, not the Tory Broadcasting Corporation or the Labour Broadcasting Corporation. And changes in government only result in very small changes in the kinds of political reporting done by the BBC. The same would be said of national public radio in the United States or the ABC in Australia, Deutsche Welle in Germany. Many Western countries have state-supported broadcasters, but these state-supported broadcasters are not controlled by the government of the day. Also in Iran, newspapers and magazines must be licensed, and they are actively censored by the government. Satellite dishes are prohibited so that people are not allowed to watch television coming from other countries. Many external news websites are blocked. The government maintains an active censorship of the internet. And anti-government bloggers can even be thrown in jail for insulting the government or the usual pretext is that they have insulted the Supreme Leader himself, who is a religious figure of the leading Ayatollah in Iran. But the Iranian example shows that illiberal democracy is possible even in relatively modern countries that are open to the world and hold regular elections. Iran is no Saudi Arabia. I mean, here's a photo of a café in central Iran. We see women wearing headscarfs, but we don't see women in full burqas. We don't see men in traditional Arab dress, Iran's a non-Arab country, but in any case we don't see men in traditional dress. People are drinking coffee in a café that would not look out of place in Sydney, London, or New York. A lifestyle where people have free discussion in their private lives, who dress in a Western manner, who live Western-style lives, but who simply don't become anti-government bloggers, that kind of lifestyle is possible even in a very illiberal country like Iran. Of course, even in the most illiberal countries, there is still a coffee and broad consumer culture that is completely compatible with their illiberal conceptualizations of democracy. So here's a photo of the fanciest, newest Starbucks in Beijing, and if you wanted to have meetings at a coffee shop where you discussed politics and criticized the government, you could probably do so completely under the radar in a place like this. The tables are not wired with recording devices, nobody would be hovering over you trying to hear what you say. Don't go on the internet and be an anti-government blogger, certainly don't try to write an anti-government report in a newspaper, but in people's private lives they can hold pretty much whatever private views they want. Countries like China and Iran and other authoritarian countries around the world have in a way made peace with Western consumer culture and even with Western ideas of personal freedom as long as that personal freedom does not enter into the public sphere. Now let's face it, how many of us are ever going to be anti-government bloggers, even in our own liberal countries where we have the full freedom to do so? Very few of us are going to do that. And this is what illiberal countries have discovered, that they only have to repress the views and the expression of a very small number of people in order to maintain a highly illiberal form of democracy. In the communist democratic ideologies of countries like China and Vietnam, there is a notion that there is government of the people by the people and for the people, just as there is this notion in Western liberal democracies. But they conceptualize serving the people in a very different way. Perhaps I should have put in this lecture the famous communist slogan from Mao Zedong that it's hanging right in Tiananmen Square, serve the people, the motto of the Communist Party of China. But their idea of serving the people is very different than a liberal idea of conserving the people. So in a liberal democracy, policies are thought to emerge from a free exchange of ideas. All the people who want to express themselves in newspapers and blogs on television and call in shows, and the best policies emerge from this free exchange of ideas. The communist conceptualization of democracy is that policies should be formulated by a technocratic elite, a group of people whose job it is to have the interests of the people at heart. In liberal democracy, leaders have a responsibility to follow the programs that they espouse. One of the greatest insults, one of the most embarrassing things that can be said about a Western political leader is that he or she said one thing and did another, that the person was inconsistent, or in the words of George W. Bush criticizing his rival John Kerry, that he was a flip-flopper, that he changed his mind, and somehow changing one's mind is the cardinal political sin, because by changing one's mind a leader has sought election by espousing one point of view and then acted on a different point of view while in office. In the communist conceptualization of democracy, leaders have a responsibility to govern in the interests of the people whatever those interests might be. So if the interests of the people change, the government's response in theory should change. In the liberal point of view, criticism of democracy keeps governments accountable. Governments have to face the music of constant criticism by their critics in the public sphere. But in the communist point of view, criticism of government undermines the interests of the people. After all, if a group of technocrats are explicitly charged with evaluating carefully all of the policy options and coming up with a policy that's best for the people, criticizing them merely prevents them from doing their job. In theory, it means that you are against the people if you criticize those who are advancing the interests of the people. Finally, in liberal democracy, there's a basic idea that the people can take care of themselves. It is an insult to call a politician paternalistic, or in the British context there have been accusations of the nanny state, the government interfering in the lives of ordinary people when people are much more capable to decide for themselves what to do and what they want in life. The communist approaches completely the opposite, that the people have to be cared for, that people are not capable of making the best decisions for themselves, and even if they did make the best decisions for themselves, those decisions might be bad for other people or bad for society as a whole. So in the communist technocratic approach, the people are cared for by the government instead of taking care of themselves. Which is not to say that communist countries like China are not responsive. In fact, the Chinese government has started to equate democracy with the idea of responsive rather than representative government. Most famous example of this are protests over land seizures. Here you see one of the famous cases of an island house. This is a person who refused to sell his house to developers when the entire block surrounding this house has been sold off. And so the developers simply demolish every single house around, leaving the person's property intact while, as you can see, isolating the person in a sea of wasteland. These kind of hardball tactics by developers in China have come under protest, popular protest, and in fact in many cases the government has put a hold on development or punished politicians, even removed local politicians from office who promoted development and illegal land sales or pressured land sales that resulted in situations like this. So the Chinese communist leadership has become increasingly responsive to people even to the point where local leaders are being judged on the number of protests occurring in their jurisdictions. Leaders are considered successful if they're able to manage their provinces or manage their prefectures or cities with a minimum of public protest. On the other hand, protests demanding liberal values, the right to free expression, are quickly and often brutally suppressed in China. We shouldn't forget the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest movement or the June 6, 1989 repression of that movement with tanks and live battlefield ammunition in which the People's Liberation Army, so-called, the Army of the People's Republic of China, simply ran over protesters with tanks and shot them down with machine guns. The footage of this was caught live on camera by Western and Chinese cameramen. It's widely available on the internet. If you haven't seen documentaries of the June 4th repression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement, I certainly suggest you look at some of those documentaries on YouTube. Perhaps the biggest argument against illiberal democracy is not theoretical. We can have these theoretical discussions between which is better, liberal democracy in which the people fend for themselves, or illiberal democracy in which government takes care of the people. This is maybe a valid philosophical discussion to have. The biggest problem is not theoretical, the biggest problem is practical. Illiberal democracy just doesn't seem to work, or at least it doesn't work as a form of democracy. We can't really find or point to really maybe not more than one country in the world that has a relatively successful illiberal democracy that is still responsive to the people. Perhaps the only one in the world, and it's often held up as an example, is Singapore. Singapore is an odd country or city-state in many ways, and it's often held up as an example of a repressive illiberal democracy where the government maintains tight control of the press, but nonetheless allows a wide degree of freedoms in other ways, and even its repression of the press while widespread is not brutal. People are not being murdered in Singapore for their views in the way they are in China, Russia, Bangladesh, or Central Asia. Leaving Singapore aside, the problems with illiberal democracy are that first, power is unaccountable. It's wonderful to have the ideal of serving the people, but most leaders once they get into power start to serve themselves, their families and their friends, not the people that they're supposedly accountable to. Second, horrific abuses of human rights are common in illiberal democracies. People being abducted, murdered in the night, disappeared, just thrown in jail with no access to the outside world. Illiberal democracies all over the world from China to Cuba to Iran are all guilty of terrible widespread abuses of human rights. Now that said, illiberal non-democracies like Saudi Arabia are also guilty of horrific abuses of human rights, so these abuses are not restricted to illiberal democracies. They're characteristic of illiberal regimes of all kinds. Third, corruption is so widespread that it becomes thoroughly institutionalized. And again, this is a result of power being unaccountable. Once there is, once there are no, there's no freedom of expression and no freedom to expose wrongdoing, people start doing wrong, safe in the knowledge that their wrongdoing will never come to light. And ultimately in illiberal democracies, as in dictatorships, people too easily become a resource to be exploited rather than being respected as the foundation of government and society. There's a sense in which liberalism is the embodiment of respect for the people. When the people are respected, then the rights of the people are respected and government has to be more modest in its claims to represent their interests of the people. If democracy as such was born in America and spread throughout the world, liberalism was born in England and remains primarily a western, not a worldwide phenomena. There are many more democracies in the world than there are liberal regimes. And there are precious few liberal regimes today that are not also democracies. Democracy is widespread, and of those democracies, a few are also liberal democracies. The fundamental liberal ideal is that of freedom. And in its broadest sense, this is a presumption that people can do whatever they want so long as it does not directly harm others. In the British tradition, liberalism has come to be identified with negative freedoms, and thus with the political right. The Liberal Party in Australia, the Tory Party in the UK are both parties that espouse liberalism as an ideal, but liberalism in the sense that powerful people should not face restrictions in the way they use their money. Companies should not face restrictions in the way they operate in the marketplace. People should not be taxed unnecessarily. That is the British conceptualization of liberalism has deep traditions as freedom from government interference, freedom from public oversight. In the American tradition by concept, liberalism has come to be identified with positive freedoms, and thus with the political left. In the American tradition, liberals are people who espouse not just freedom from government interference, but freedom to do things. So for example, if you want to have true freedom of speech in the American liberal tradition, that implies that the government must help people have the freedom to express themselves in a wider public setting. For example, through subsidies for the press or through equal time laws that allow multiple viewpoints to be expressed on television and broadcast media. Positive freedoms also imply that economic prosperity must be widespread. In order for people to have the freedom to flourish in life, they have to have access to good jobs. They have to have social insurance against adverse outcomes in life. Thus, while liberalism in the British meaning has come to be associated with center-right politics, liberalism in the American tradition has come to be associated with center-left politics, with the Democratic Party in the United States as opposed to the Republican Party. The neoliberal movement of the middle of the 20th century and going through to today represents a resurgence of British, or quote-unquote 19th century conceptualizations of liberalism in the United States, and this rebirth of British-style liberalism, of 19th century liberalism in the United States, has now gone global. So now, when we speak of neoliberalism in Australia or the United Kingdom, in a way we're just talking about British liberalism. But British liberalism seen through an American 20th century lens, which now becomes neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is simply the British conceptualization of negative freedoms pulled through an American way of thinking in the late 20th century. Liberalism is connected to democracy mainly through the fundamental freedom of the press, and more broadly freedom of speech and freedom of association. Liberalism is required for the successful operation of democracy because it prevents government from becoming too powerful. It makes government accountable to the people it purports to represent. Two ways of thinking about how freedom of the press, freedom of the speech, and freedom of association promote democracy in the contemporary world are the monetary democracy of auditing organizations. This idea comes from John Keane, a University of Sydney political scientist, who writes about the fact that NGOs and government commissions and investigative journalists constantly monitor the operation of democracy, raising the alarm if government in liberal countries does something that it's not supposed to. A broader concept of how liberal freedoms ensure democracy is the counter-democracy of the French political scientist Pierre Rosanvallon. Rosanvallon talked about counter-democracy as a combination of oversight, prevention, and judgment, oversight being roughly similar to John Keane's idea of monetary democracy, but also prevention, meaning that the people up front have some, by getting politicians to put their ideas into the public domain, people have the ability to prevent outcomes that they don't want through elections, and that people also have the ability to hold government accountable through judgment, that is, through the court system. So Rosanvallon views the liberal restraints on power and democracy more broadly than John Keane. John Keane focuses on the associational freedoms of NGOs and other organizations, operating to keep government honest. Rosanvallon also sees elections and court systems as part of that process of keeping government honest and restraining the leader's power. Liberal traditions are strongest in the English-speaking countries, weaker in continental Europe and East Asia, and nonexistent elsewhere outside India. The influential Reporters Without Borders, the Reporters Sans Frontières, RSF Index, actually makes continental Europe the most free area for the press, but press freedom is not the beginning and end of the liberal tradition. Press may be freest in parts of continental Europe, but liberal traditions run much deeper, I think, in France, Britain, United States, Canada, and Australia. Also on the Reporters Sans Frontières Index, India scores particularly poorly. You see it here in red, classified alongside Russia and Kazakhstan, but I think, in fact, India clearly has much deeper liberal traditions than Russia or Kazakhstan. The RSF Index puts a large amount of weight on the safety of reporters, which is not surprising given that it's produced by an association of reporters, and in fact, reporters in India do face personal security challenges due to terrorism and politically motivated murders. But in India, these challenges are not associated with government repression in the way they are in Russia, China, Kazakhstan, and even Turkey, and other countries in the region. The liberal tradition of freedom of expression is particularly under threat in Muslim majority countries, even those that are not widely considered extremist. So in places like Bangladesh, where this photo is from, there have been many murders of journalists, or in this case the murder of a university professor for expressing views, particularly if the views expressed in any way challenge contemporary conservative Muslim orthodoxy. The murders in countries like Bangladesh, but also they've occurred in Malaysia, Indonesia, and throughout the Middle East have been particularly gruesome. This professor in Bangladesh, who was murdered by an extremist Muslim conservative organization, was hacked to death with machetes. So these have been really horrific murders of people on the basis of their speaking out in the public realm. And this repression has become, well, so severe as to be considered intolerable and to drive many reporters and public intellectuals to become refugees from these countries, leaving Muslim majority countries for the West. The most famous case of this was the Iranian novelist and journalist, Salman Rushdie, who was famously extremist, who was very prescribed in Iran in the 1980s and threatened with a global death sentence. But again, it's worth noting that Salman Rushdie is still with us, whereas many of these intellectuals in more conservative Sunni Muslim countries have been assassinated. Yet these liberal freedoms that we take for granted are not only under threat in ultra-conservative Muslim countries, they're also under threat in the English-speaking countries themselves. Even if the repression of freedom is not as gruesomely visible, it's nonetheless pervasive. First is the extreme concentration of press ownership. One thing that neoliberalism has brought about, the kind of British tradition negative freedom to do as one pleases, this has brought about an extreme concentration of ownership of the press. If you let people do what they want, rich people will buy newspapers and television stations. The most extreme example of this is Rupert Murdoch, who left Australia first for the UK and then for the US to build ever bigger media empires of newspapers and television stations that would pedal his point of view. So neoliberalism implies perhaps that the government will not censor what is said on Fox News. But Rupert Murdoch will, as the owner of Fox News, and as the press becomes increasingly concentrated in a small number of owners. And as public broadcasters, like National Public Radio in the United States, the BBC in the UK, and the ABC in Australia, as public broadcasters come under increasing pressure to be defunded, we are seeing the rise of this negative freedom of expression. Anyone who has the money can have a viewpoint replacing the positive freedom of expression of the government ensuring that everybody has a platform on which to express herself or himself. Second has been the extreme persecution and prosecution of whistleblowers. The two most famous cases are Bradley or Chelsea Manning. Bradley Manning is a coincidentally transsexual US, a transsexual US, a transsexual military analyst who divulged secrets of war crimes in Afghanistan to the press and via WikiLeaks, but ultimately to the press. And for divulging the evidence of these war crimes, now Chelsea Manning has been subjected to extreme forms of psychological torture in US prison, including being held for weeks at a time in 24 hour super bright lighting naked on a cot, unable to have any privacy, naked on a cot being videotaped 24 hours a day in extreme light. No privacy, no sleep, what can only be called psychological torture for having the, well, the temerity and the good conscience to reveal war crimes committed by the US military in Afghanistan. This treatment contrasts with the treatment of whistleblowers in the Vietnam War, who typically were not even prosecuted if it turned out that the behaviors that they publicized actually were crimes. The second example is Edward Snowden, the US CIA private contractor who revealed again enormous evidence of illegal actions, illegal surveillance by the US National Security Administration and has paid for it with permanent exile. He lives in Russia in Moscow, unable to return to the US because of, well, very legitimate fears that he would suffer the same sort of treatment as Chelsea Manning. Western governments, especially in the English speaking countries, the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand have conducted extensive spying on private communications to the point where virtually all private communications are being intercepted and monitored by their respective governments. This is an enormous invasion of privacy that would have been unimaginable to people in English speaking countries 100 years ago. 100 years ago, if it were discovered that the governments were recording the address of every letter sent and received by the every household in the UK or US, this would have been a completely shocking revelation, yet today we know that the US and UK governments collect the details of every email and every phone call placed in the United States and United Kingdom. Now, they don't read the contents all the time, but they do in every case collect the to and from information, yet that passes largely without comment in our supposedly liberal societies. Finally, at a very deep level, at a very sociological level, politicians and senior civil servants are increasingly isolated from serious questioning by the press and from the people they represent. One reason for the popularity of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States election in 2016 is that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders actually seem to answer the questions that are asked of them, and this is an enormous contrast with other candidates who for the most part only repeat scripted, vetted statements that have been formulated well in advance. Candidates simply do not react or interact with the people in our contemporary leading democracies. And if candidates don't, civil servants do even less. Most civil servants in the English-speaking countries are under strict orders, not to talk to the press because the government does not want alternative viewpoints being aired. Many of us, especially in the social sciences, believe that this is extremely corrosive to the future of democracy. It may be convenient for government to prohibit civil servants from talking to the press, but it's certainly not a good thing for democracy itself. Key takeaways. First, illiberal democracy is common around the world, and may be even more prevalent than liberal democracy itself. Second, the Chinese government has tried to replace representative democracy with the idea of responsive government. And third, liberalism is concerned with both positive and negative freedoms, but perhaps most importantly of all with the freedom of the press, which has to be construed both in a negative way, freedom from control by government, but also in a positive way, freedom to have many viewpoints heard in the public sphere. Thank you for listening. I'm Salvatore Bobonis. You can find out more about me on my website at SalvatoreBobonis.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter on global affairs.