The geometry of progress
Dear friends,
Happy New Year. I hope you all had a restful break.
What a year 2024 will be for global politics. Over its course, countries with a cumulative population of over four billion will go to the polls. As many commentators have observed, given the wider state of democracy and development globally there are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the upcoming elections.
While the amateur historian in me bridles at the idea that somehow democracy itself wins or loses permanently this year, the former political consultant in me knows to expect some surprising wins and losses leaving forecasters and pundits with egg on their faces. Nevertheless, the outcomes of some elections already seem depressingly apparent. Russia’s presidential vote in March will not be remotely competitive. It is already clear that Narendra Modi will sweep to victory at India’s more democratic election later in the spring.
Meanwhile the United States may well be about to experience its ugliest campaign in living memory, a contest between two flawed candidates - one alarmingly so - both of whom risk failing to meet the aspirations of young Americans.
In other words: the biggest ever year in election history is far from the same thing as the most democratic year in history. And especially at a time when successive studies show autocracy to be on the rise globally, as noted in this recent Financial Times report.
Our Open Society Barometer global poll conducted last summer, which we will be repeating this year, provided alarming evidence of that. Of our respondents around the world, 58% said they feared that political unrest in their country could lead to violence in the next year, with the figure rising to a remarkable 67% in the U.S. and 66% in France:
We at OSF will be watching these elections closely. But as we do so, we will aim to avoid either of two fallacies, one implicitly over-optimistic and one implicitly over-pessimistic.
The first is the fallacy of equating voting with democracy. The act of casting ballots is of course a necessary condition for a full democracy, but by no means a sufficient one unless wider conditions like rule-of-law, pluralistic institutions, free media, and minority protections are also present.
The second fallacy is to deem these elections “referenda on democracy”. As I write in my public letter to our wider network of friends and partners, to the extent that the upcoming votes are fair and free they are referenda on people’s lived experience. Even where voters believe in democratic principles, if they also feel that incumbent leaders and systems are not generating the security they seek - physical, economic, societal, environmental, digital - it is only natural that they should cast around for alternatives that purport to offer solutions.
We should thus never succumb to the fatalism that deems citizens who vote for authoritarian parties and candidates irredeemably and permanently lost to the cause of liberal democracy and open societies. Winning back their trust means delivering concrete results, and palpably attending to the prevailing sense of insecurity.
The world this month
If insecurity defines the domestic and international politics of our age, that is because it also defines the more fundamental character of these Hobbesian times. The past month brought an opportunity to reflect on that breakdown of rules and order in the form of the 75th anniversary, on 10 December, of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Presenting my reflections on its meaning, as president of OSF, meant striking a balance: how to celebrate and uphold the value of the UDHR while acknowledging that the anniversary comes at a time when the global state of human rights leaves all-too-little to celebrate? You can view my bid to chart an appropriate middle way in the below video.
The anniversary also presented another, parallel balancing act: how to shore up what remains of the global human rights architecture while promoting innovation, agitation, and constructive disruption? I sought to explore this question in a comment piece for the Financial Times, arguing that while the United Nations still has a vital role to play, we must seek more bottom-up ways of securing human rights: moving beyond “naming and shaming” and integrating expanded rights into wider big-tent campaigns for social and economic reform; backing coalitions-of-the-willing that can move ahead of universalist legacy institutions; and investing in and trusting local, place-based civil society leadership rather than merely seeking to seed human rights from afar.
That geometry of progress - rooted in local conditions and the everyday priorities of ordinary citizens - was much on my mind in the final weeks of 2023. In my previous letter I mentioned my upcoming trip to Zanzibar for the mid-term review of the International Development Association and to Dar es Salaam for the annual board meeting of BRAC, by some measures the world’s largest development NGO. As I explained on-stage with Ajay Banga in Zanzibar, my choice to attend the IDA summit rather than COP28 was rooted in my view that only progress on concessional finance for the world’s poorest countries can lock in the all-encompassing coalition for decarbonisation needed in and beyond Dubai. You can watch my fireside chat with Ajay in full from around the 56:30 point here.
My meetings at BRAC in particular have lingered on my mind. The organisation has developed into a remarkable network of services encompassing micro-finance and mobile banking as well as social enterprises and even a university. Its Ultra-Poor Graduation approach - a sequence of efficient interventions combating the most severe cases of material deprivation - aims to move 4.6 million households out of extreme poverty by 2026, enough to prove the concept and hopefully crowd in support for a much larger next phase.
BRAC has managed to navigate this huge expansion of poor people’s access to life-changing opportunity despite challenging conditions in its home country of Bangladesh, which has just held a much-criticised election and has imposed an equally criticised jail sentence on Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of BRAC’s peer Grameen.
In Tanzania I found myself urging my friends at BRAC to recognise that they are more than a multifunctional development agency; they are also a human rights agency. For the bottom-up human rights renewal I advocated in my FT piece begins with the sort of work BRAC does on the ground: expanding the agency of ordinary citizens by undergirding a basic degree of security and dignity in their lives and opening up to them the tools - education, cultural voice, political and legal agency - by which they can advance and protect their rights.
It was a similar story at the COP28 summit. As my OSF colleague Yamide Dagnet wrote from Dubai, this had an imperfect result, with governments finally recognising the need to exit fossil fuels but agreeing only vague language on dates and benchmarks. Greater grounds for optimism could be located in what might be called the COP trade fair, where social entrepreneurs and technologists on the summit’s fringes grasp towards solutions often far ahead of national governments in ambition and originality. Here too, the impetus stems from below, from coalitions of private-sector and civil-society actors. This sort of action too deserves a place in a more expansive conception of the human rights cause.
What, however, of the awful human rights tragedy in the Middle East that continues to horrify us all? The Israel-Palestine conflict strains the limits of my wider arguments in this letter. After all, what good was civil society activism in stopping the horrific Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians of October 7? What good is that activism within Israel now as the Netanyahu government exceeds all reasonable bounds constraining the collective punishment of civilians in Gaza? As a veteran observer of the UN Security Council I should never be surprised by its members’ collective lack of courage and consistency, but one longs for it to stand up unequivocally for international law and condemn the unacceptable by both sides. To show some conscience, as some of its members have tried to do.
All of which brings my reflections back to where they began: the elections of the year ahead. The world cannot do without bottom-up change, rooted in neighbourhoods, workplaces, and public squares. But the potential of that bottom-up change also depends on events at the ballot box. So: onwards, to a year that will need a full-spectrum defence of open society values. As I write in my public letter, we at OSF hope and believe that our new and more focused operating model - which will take shape over the next months - will enable us to maximise our impact in the service of that mission.
News and updates
You can read my assessment of the prospects for multilateralism over the next 12 months in Project Syndicate’s Year Ahead 2024.
Following the conclusion of the brief humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, I spoke to Sky News about the urgent need for a new and more sustained pause in the conflict that could evolve into a serious peace process.
Ahead of the Annual Meeting in Davos of the World Economic Forum I have written for its website on “How to rebuild trust in institutions”, reiterating my call for paradigm shifts that produce genuinely improved concrete results for citizens.
Amid the gloom, an item of good news: as this November’s US general election looms closer, OSF is rallying to the side of women and young people in America, “linchpins of democracy” as Alex Soros rightly puts it, with a $50 million investment to boost nonpartisan civic engagement within those groups.
My colleague Natalie Samarasinghe, our Global Director of Advocacy, shared her reflections on the UDHR anniversary here.
As in my last letter, I would like to use this opportunity to share a couple of external pieces that deserve your attention. Comfort Ero and Murithi Mutiga of Crisis Group penned this masterful assessment of the crisis of democracy on the continent for Foreign Affairs, citing our Open Society Barometer polling. And let me give the final word to Fareed Zakaria and his succinct portrait of the state of the world in the year ahead for CNN.
Next week OSF colleagues and I will be in Davos. I confess that, much as we value the chance to attend and participate in its debates, I wonder where the gathering fits on today’s rapidly shifting global landscape. Can the summit and its core of Western elites and massive trade and investment delegations from countries like India and China either understand or keep up with the pace of change over the next years? I will share my impressions from the Swiss Alps in my next letter to you all.
Regards,
Mark