Guardian UK: The markets distrust democracy. Just ask the masters of Beijing and Moscow

[marmar]

The markets distrust democracy. Just ask the masters of Beijing and Moscow
Why is the democratic world faring so much worse in this crisis than its authoritarian rivals? It's the austerity, stupid

Jonathan Freedland
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 November 2011


How will historians remember 2011, the year which, according to the satirists at the Onion, has already used up the next decade's entire supply of news? Some wonder if the Arab revolutions put 2011 on a par with 1917, when the Ottoman Empire broke up. Perhaps it will stand alongside the great European upheavals of 1848 or 1989. Or there might be a mixed story to tell, with 2011 remembered as the year when democracy was demanded in one part of the world just as it was exposed as paralysed and impotent in the face of economic crisis almost everywhere else.

Democracy's humbling has been most dramatically visible in Greece and Italy, where elected leaders have been pushed aside in favour of technocrats and fixers, elevated without so much as shaking a single voter's hand. Their mission will include the surrender of much economic sovereignty, putting those decisions further out of the reach of their own citizens. What Greeks and Italians endure today, other eurozone nations might well face tomorrow as they are told to make similar sacrifices of autonomy to save their economic skin.

Whether in Europe or beyond, democratic leaders have seemed powerless to beat back the engulfing global crisis, the failure of the G20 at Cannes exposing their weakness for all to see. And yet, according to one who was there, the leaders of the world's authoritarian states – China, Russia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia – had a spring in their step in Cannes, confident that they could face down whatever the economic meltdown threw at them.

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In the end, democracy will surely prove its innate strength. Putin's tsarist rule – which, like that of the Saudi royal family, is reliant on extracting resources from the ground – cannot last for ever. But 2011 has punctured the sense of easy supremacy democratic societies used to enjoy. To reassert themselves they might have to break from the rules now choking them, and insist that it is people, not markets, that are sovereign. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/15/markets-distrust-democracy-beijing-moscow