To analyse. The virtual democracy summit convened by US President Joe Biden in December 2021 was disappointing. The list of guests, sometimes controversial, like the platitude of the exchanged remarks had led to classify among the false good ideas the initiative put forward by the Democrat during the presidential campaign of 2020. Yet, three months later, the brutal assault given by the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, to a sovereign State, Ukraine, after the temptation of its dismemberment, illustrated by the recognition of separatist entities by Moscow, gives it a whole new meaning.
The separation of the world into two camps, that of the democracies and that of the autocracies, materializes dramatically in the indiscriminate bombardments by the Russian army of the towns of a country which has never threatened its powerful neighbour. The vibrant plea of President Volodymyr Zelensky in favor of Ukraine’s entry into the European Union, Tuesday 1is March, also relativizes the still virtual question of his country’s membership of a NATO presented as expansionist. The trigger for the ousting of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 had already been his opposition to an association agreement with the Europeans.
Behind the current war is that of models, and Ukrainians have long since chosen the set of norms that govern democracies. That of Ukraine is still imperfect, if we trust the American organization Freedom House, financed by the federal state, but it is the objective that it has set itself with constancy for more than a decade. , wanted to remind the Ukrainian president.
“Autocratic Virality”
It is, however, a model on the defensive, as regularly reminded by the status reports of the same American institution. It was down in 2021 for the sixteenth year in a row, with sixty countries having recorded a decline, to the point that the V-Dem Institute, another observatory, attached to the University of Göteborg, in Sweden, financed in particular by the World Bank, now speaks of “autocratic virality”.
As Emmanuel Macron estimated, on Wednesday March 2, in his speech on the war in Ukraine, “Democracy is no longer considered an indisputable regime, it is called into question, before our eyes”. The Russian conquest of Ukraine would mean a further setback.
The first sentence of a dispatch prematurely published by the Russian agency RIA Novosti on February 26, on the faith of an instantaneous collapse of Ukraine, confirms this in its own way. “A new world is being born before our eyes”, begins this text bloated with ethnonationalism. Such, in any case, is the Russian intention, that of closing the parenthesis opened by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Other powers, starting with China, are also part of the questioning of democratic norms.
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