The Rebirth of the Liberal World Order?

Vladimir Putin's war on Ukraine has given the world's democrats a new sense of unity and purpose. Galvanized by a sense of common threat and existential peril, the Western democracies have slapped biting sanctions on Russia, boosted weapons and aid shipments to Ukraine, and upped military spending dramatically. This energetic and coordinated response by the Western democracies contrasts with their tepid responses to the past decade of democratic malaise, marked by grave—though slow and surreptitious—authoritarian attacks. The Russian invasion may also undermine the emerging "authoritarian international" because the conflict has proved far more difficult and costly to Russia than expected. Whether the invasion proves a turning point for the liberal world order depends partly on whether the world's democrats can hold together through the crisis.

The world seemed to stand at the threshold of a dark era when Russian rockets bombarded Kyiv on the night of Thursday, February 24. Many feared not just for Ukraine but for the security of Europe. Otherwise, the obvious question is about inspiration: would an unprovoked attack by Vladimir Putin inspire similar aggressions against vulnerable democratic neighbors from other authoritarian powers? Might China seize the moment to move against Taiwan? Was a period of expansionist authoritarian rule upon us? Some of those things may pass. Whatever happens next, though, Russia's savage assault on Ukraine has already wrought one of the worst humanitarian crises in Europe since the Second World War.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine came after more than a decade of grave-but also mostly subtle and ambiguous-assaults on democracy. First, the authoritarian populists in Europe and the United States emerged from within the democratic system. For the most part, they avoided an overt assault on democracy via military coups, open attacks on civil liberties, or -with the partial exception of Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. presidential contest-attempts to steal elections. Instead, the main threat to the democratization of the West today comes through more subversive strategies in politicizing state bureaucracies and infiltrating independent media. Hence Viktor Orbán in Hungary and the Law and Justice party in Poland do not send oppositionists to prison nor attempt to steal elections - they just fill up the bureaucracy with apparatchiks. These governments haven't imprisoned journalists; instead, they've silenced them by helping their friends take ownership of media companies. Reliance on such non-violent, apparently legal measures with a view to monopolising political control has obscured the attack on democracy. It wasn't until Orbán had committed eight years of authoritarian abuse that Freedom House stopped labeling Hungary as Free. And despite the dramatic denigration of democratic norms in Poland, Freedom House still designates that country as Free today.

In a somewhat analogous manner, Chinese and Russian efforts at influencing regime outcomes beyond their borders also have been ambiguous, much more oriented toward degrading the quality of democracy than dismantling it wholesale. Since 2014, the information warfare that Russia has conducted against a number of Western democratic elections has been designed principally to foment tribalism and polarization rather than to attack democratic institutions directly.1 In the former Soviet states, Russian actions have varied. Under the previous decades' President Vladimir Putin, the Russian government in the 2000s worked behind the scenes in support of pro-Russian autocrats like Ukraine's Viktor Yanukovych-but also to undermine anti-Russian autocrats in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan-on the other. During the early 1990s and under Putin's predecessor President Boris Yeltsin, for example, the Russian government had gladly backed the pro-Russian democratic opposition in Ukraine.

Until recently, the gravest Russian aggressions against the liberal order were its 2008 invasions of Abkhazia and Ossetia in Georgia and of Crimea in Ukraine in 2014. Those attacks, however, targeted areas far from the center of Europe and thus did not appear to threaten core Western interests. These regions were already centers of pro-Russian sentiment, and thus Putin could claim with some credibility that sizeable elements of the local populations in these areas favored the Russian incursions. Last but not least, in Crimea, the original Russian intervention was masked, relatively bloodless. Indeed, the 2014 invasion was carried out by so-called "little green men" not wearing any insignia on their uniforms. According to some, this operation inaugurated a "hybrid" warfare that relied less on conventional forces and much more on the "extensive and wellcoordinated use of intelligence, psychological warfare, intimidation, bribery, and internet/media propaganda."2