Democracy isn’t declining; it’s the nation-state

Democracy is not in decline. The nation-state is.
That distinction — between democracy and the nation-state — might seem strange because it is so rare. When people around the world talk about how democracy is doing, 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.
Take International IDEA, a Sweden-based intergovernmental organization that, in its Global State of Democracy Report, declared that democracy remained in decline because only one in four nations was becoming more democratic, while four in nine nations were becoming less so.
Similarly, Freedom House, based in Washington DC, points to growing numbers of nation states with problematic elections and armed conflict to declare that this is the 18th consecutive year of decline.
And 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 democratising 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 most people experience the ins and outs of their day-to-day existence — in 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 citizens assemblies) and digital democracy (platforms like Pol.is and Decidim) — are growing. Their use has become even more commonplace at the local level.
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. Germany is losing its dynamism and cohesion, for sure, but so is China.
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 handling planetary forces and threats — climate change, finance and capital flows, 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 between groups of people inside nation-states that are breaking down. Many civil wars have been internationalised by other nation-states, as in Sudan’s current civil war, fueled by Russia and the United Arab Emirates, which has displaced millions, starved hundreds of thousands to death, and caused the destruction of the city of Khartoum.
The void left by the decline of the nation-state is frightening because it could lead to violence as our world’s governance infrastructure falls apart. But that same void also represents an enormous opportunity for democracy, particularly those forms of democracy being practised more often on the local level.
Attacks on democracy also are redounding to democracy’s favour. Ukraine, amid Vladimir Putin’s invasion, is awash in ambitious local plans for rebuilding cities in more democratic ways.
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 nation-state idea dates only to 1648, and the modern nation-state is less than a century old. It is obviously vulnerable.
And democracy — and particularly the people-driven forms of democracy now on the rise at the local level — is our best bet to replace that system. ©Zócalo Public Square
Joe Mathews is a columnist for Zócalo Public Square and the founder of the planetary publication Democracy Local.