Li Xing

Opinion | Why the global democratic alliance is nothing more than a Western fantasy

The West likes to argue that market capitalism and political liberalism go hand in hand; in reality, the former has proved far more powerful than the latter

Having made countries around the world economically interdependent, the West should not expect them to jeopardise their global links by taking political sides

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Li Xing

Published: 3:30am, 12 Jan 2023Updated: 4:02am, 12 Jan 2023

US President Joe Biden has framed the Ukraine war as a battle between “democracy and autocracy”, while also claiming that “the West is now stronger, more united than it has ever been”.

During a recent visit to Taiwan, former Danish leader and Nato secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that, when combined, the world’s democracies represent 60 per cent of the global economy, providing an overwhelming deterrence to Beijing’s ambitions regarding Taiwan.

The irony is that, if we applied this logic to the Ukraine war, the US and Europe would have already won. In reality, the question is why there is no global democratic alliance on the war, with two of the world’s largest democracies, India and Indonesia, preferring not to take sides or calling for negotiations.

Contrary to Biden and Rasmussen’s postulations, the Ukraine war is widening the global disparity between attitudes to the US, China and Russia. Cambridge University recently released a report that merges data from 30 global surveys spanning 137 countries.

It found that, “Among the 1.2 billion people who inhabit the world’s liberal democracies, three-quarters (75 per cent) now hold a negative view of China, and 87 per cent a negative view of Russia. However, for the 6.3 billion people who live in the rest of the world, the picture is reversed. In these societies, 70 per cent feel positively towards China, and 66 per cent positively towards Russia.”

Why is the world so divided over such a simple issue of political correctness in Russia’s invasion of a sovereign state? The answer lies in the contradiction between the West’s two inherent identities which tends to generate double standards when dealing with global affairs.