Democracy is not in decline. The nation-state is.
That distinction — between democracy and the nation-state — might seem strange because it is so rarely made. When people around the world talk about democracy, we talk about democracy almost exclusively at the national level.
We see this every year, when think tanks issue rankings on the state of democracy that consider the national governments only.
International IDEA, a Sweden-based intergovernmental organization, declared in issuing its Global State of Democracy Report that democracy remained in decline because only one-in-four nations were becoming more democratic, while four-in-nine nations were becoming less so.
Similarly, Freedom House, based in Washington, D.C., points to growing numbers of nation-states with problematic elections and armed conflict to declare that this is the 18th consecutive year of decline. Varieties of Democracy, a global think tank, says that democracy has been in decline for 15 years because the share of the population living in nations that are becoming more autocratic is higher than the share living in democratizing countries.
To be sure, these national level trends are not good news. But they paint a misleading picture of the state of democracy on this planet, for three big reasons.
The first is rather obvious. Democracy is self-government, the business of everyday people governing themselves. And most democracy on this planet takes place where people live, in cities and local communities, rather than at the national level.
Second, these global rankings of democracy rest heavily on elections, which are only one democratic process. Yes, trust and participation in elections is declining. But other forms of democracy — direct democracy (initiative and referenda), participatory democracy (as in budgeting), deliberative democracy (like citizen assemblies) and digital democracy (platforms like Pol.is and Decidim) — are growing, especially locally.
The third reason is the most fundamental. Nation-states everywhere — be they more democratic or more authoritarian — are in crisis, with their rulers losing the ability to govern their own countries. The United States, as a nation, is in danger of breaking apart. So too is Russia, which is caught up in a war in Ukraine, and suffering long-term declines in the health and life spans of its people.
Why is this happening?
Nation-states simply can’t manage up or manage down in the 21st-century world. Looking up, nation-states have proven incapable of solving planetary problems and addressing planetary threats — climate change, technological advances, disease, religious-oriented terrorism. Looking down, nation-states can no longer unify their peoples. Instead, national leaders routinely exploit divides to maintain power; almost all wars are now civil wars inside nation-states that are breaking down.
The void left by the decline of the nation-state is frightening. But that same void is also an enormous opportunity for democracy, especially democratic forms being practiced on the local level.
Tellingly, democracy is finding ways to grow even inside hostile and authoritarian nation-states. Turkey, with a religious autocrat as prime minister, has seen a wave of democratic participation in its cities, particularly Ankara and Izmir. Syria, ruled by a ruthless dictator, is the site of democratic cantons along its border with Turkey. Myanmar, in the midst of a crackdown by its military rulers, is sprouting new forms of local self-government.
Attacks on democracy also are redounding, to democracy’s favor. Ukraine, in the midst of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, is awash in ambitious local plans for rebuilding cities in more democratic ways.
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Around the world, alliances of cities are working together to address climate change, poverty and other problems that the failing nation-states can’t solve. These alliances, which often combine democratic processes with technocratic expertise, point the way to a brighter future, in which stronger and more democratic local governments handle more of their own problems, together.
Visions of a local-planetary replacement for the nation-state system might be dismissed as implausible, but the modern nation-state is less than a century old. It is obviously vulnerable.
And democracy is our best bet to replace that system.
Joe Mathews is a columnist for Zócalo Public Square.
