Over the past two years, the world's attention has been captured by previously unimaginable -- even rapturous -- changes throughout parts of the Arab world, Africa, and Asia, where political openings have been born in some of the most repressive and unlikely societies on Earth. In Burma, where only six years ago a thuggish junta ordered the shooting of red-robed monks in the streets, the past two years have seen a formal, and seemingly real, transition to a civilian democratic government. In Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, longtime autocrats were toppled by popular revolutions, and citizens in these states seemed at last to be enjoying the trappings of freedom.
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"The Arab Spring is the triumph of democracy," Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki, a former human rights activist, told the Guardian in 2012. The Arab peoples "have come up with their own answer to violent extremism and the abusive regimes we've been propping up. It's called democracy," wrote New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
Don't believe the hype. In reality, democracy is going into reverse. While some countries in Africa, the Arab world, and Asia have opened slightly in the past two years, in other countries once held up as examples of political change democratic meltdowns have become depressingly common. In fact, Freedom House found that global freedom dropped in 2012 for the seventh year in a row, a record number of years of consistent decline.
The Arab Spring has not only led to dictators like Syria's Bashar al-Assad and Bahrain's ruling Al Khalifa family digging in across the region, but it has also pushed autocrats around the world to take a harder line with their populations -- whether it's China censoring even vague code words for protest or Russia passing broad new treason laws and harassing human rights NGOs. As Arch Puddington, Freedom House's vice president for research, put it, "Our findings point to the growing sophistication of modern authoritarians.… Especially since the Arab Spring, they are nervous, which accounts for their intensified persecution of popular movements for change."
But it's not the Arab Spring alone that's to blame. According to Freedom House, democracy's "forward march" actually peaked around the beginning of the 2000s. A mountain of evidence supports that gloomy conclusion. One of the most comprehensive studies of global democracy, the Bertelsmann Foundation's Transformation Index, has declared that "the overall quality of democracy has deteriorated" throughout the developing world. The index found that the number of "defective" and "highly defective democracies" -- those with institutions, elections, and political culture so flawed that they hardly resemble real democracies -- was up to 52 in 2012.
In another major survey, by the Economist Intelligence Unit, democracy deteriorated in 48 of 167 countries surveyed in 2011. "The dominant pattern globally over the past five years has been backsliding," the report says. We're not just talking about the likes of Pakistan and Zimbabwe here. Thirteen countries on the Transformation Index qualified as "highly defective democracies," countries with such a lack of opportunity for opposition voices, such problems with the rule of law, and such unrepresentative political structures that they are now little better than autocracies.
Even countries often held up as new democratic models have regressed over the past decade. When they entered the European Union in 2004, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia were considered success stories. After nearly a decade as EU members, however, all of these bright lights have dimmed. Populist and far-right parties with little commitment to democratic norms gained steady popularity; public distaste for democracy increased; and governments showed more willingness to crack down on activists. Hungary has deteriorated so badly that its press freedoms rate barely better than they were under the communists.
Meanwhile, as European democracy falters, old-fashioned coups are returning elsewhere. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, coups had become rare by the late 1990s. But between 2006 and 2012, militaries grabbed power in Bangladesh, Fiji, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, Madagascar, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Thailand, among others. In places like Ecuador, Mexico, Pakistan, and the Philippines, where the military did not launch an outright coup, it still managed to restore its power as a central actor in political life.
This is also true across the Middle East, where the Arab uprisings appear to be entrenching the power of militaries, sparking massive unrest, scaring middle-class liberals into exodus, and empowering Islamist majorities. Protesters may have bravely challenged leaders from Yemen to Egypt, but it's the loyalty of the military that has determined whether these rulers stay in power.
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