Excerpt below:
“Many have observed the authoritarianism underlying the campaign of US presidential hopeful Donald J. Trump, most vividly brought into relief by the attempts to quash protest, to muzzle the press, to stoke violent confrontations, and to deny culpability for any of it. The Harvard scholar Pippa Norris has recently warned that Trump is part of a larger pattern in the West, citing radical populists like France’s Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.
But in fact authoritarianism is on the rise nearly everywhere. Charges of heavy-handedness, disdain for opposition and critical press, and strong-arm tactics have been leveled against the likes of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Shinzo Abe, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, and even Aung San Suu Kyi. Parochial factors have no doubt played important roles, but cannot account for what appears to be a phenomenon occurring on a global scale.
I believe the international authoritarian moment can be explained by three, interconnected factors. Trends dating back decades, but really coalescing in the 1990s, have helped to weave together the global economy and make each country more interconnected and interdependent than ever before. Companies around the world raced to adapt, initially just to survive growing competition. If they were successful, they sought to take advantage of the new environment, using rewritten trade rules from the 1970s and 1980s and incentivizing tax opportunities to create sprawling, multinational corporate entities with disaggregated chains of production. Because of their unimaginable reach and power, these entities have grown increasingly unaccountable—no government, not even that of the United States, has the ability to provide true oversight over them.
The systems of global corporatism are already bigger than any one person or group, and people the world over are feeling increasingly anxious. They have sensed a loss of control over their lives and the conditions that inform their communities. It is no longer enough to plan to go to school and to work hard in order to secure a good job with a secure future.
The Long War has fed these insecurities, multiplying concerns for economic well-being with those for personal safety. Planning for the future has seemed more and more difficult as energies are diverted to the struggles of daily life. Public health threats like Ebola and Zika coupled with terrifying weather conditions have further amplified the sense that forces beyond anyone’s control could destroy us at any moment.
These threats transcend borders, easily crossing from one part of the world to the other. Both drones and terror actors can survey anyone, strike anywhere. The World War II generation faced down crises of this magnitude and came up with a loose consensus to prevent future catastrophes: structures to uphold and promulgate the umbrella concept of human rights domestically and internationally including laws, courts, and treaties; structures to manage Great Power politics and the general welfare; and the ever-growing democratization of sovereignty.”
This article was originally published in Quartz. Read the entire article here.
Manu Bhagavan is a historian and author or (co-) editor of 5 books, most recently the critically acclaimed THE PEACEMAKERS / INDIA AND THE QUEST FOR ONE WORLD (HarperCollins India, 2012; Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He teaches at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, The City University of New York, where he is Professor of History and Human Rights. Manu has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, President of the Society for Advancing the History of South Asia, and Chair of the Human Rights Program at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute. Manu regularly comments in the media on matters related to India, foreign affairs, the United Nations, and human rights issues.
