The ethics of responding to democratic backsliding abroad

The forthcoming article “The ethics of responding to democratic backsliding abroad” by James Pattison is summarized by the author below.

The past decade has seen many previously liberal democratic states weaken or abandon key aspects of their liberal democracies and take authoritarian turns. This poses a major dilemma for remaining liberal democratic actors. What should they do? It might seem that it is vital for liberal actors to adopt a strong line. They should, the thought goes, react firmly to protect the civil and political rights of those affected to avoid being complicit, as well as to maintain their own integrity. Yet reacting robustly might push backsliding states further towards aligning with authoritarian global powers and weaken the prospects of collective action to tackle key global challenges.

In “The ethics of responding to democratic backsliding abroad”, forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, I consider how states should respond to democratic backsliding in other states. To do this, I consider three potential approaches.

The first (the ‘complicity-based approach’) holds that states and other liberal democratic actors should avoid being causally involved in backsliders’ violations of democratic freedoms. On the face of it, this seems attractive. It seems wrong to be likely to contribute causally to others’ wrongdoing when this has major effects for backsliding. Yet, I argue, this approach is limited because engaging with democratic backsliders may not make much of a difference causally because they will engage with other states instead and because the effects can be very small. In addition, taking a strong line on avoiding complicity can sometimes make things worse overall.

The second approach (the ‘integrity-based approach’) holds that engaging with democratic backsliders undermines a liberal actor’s integrity. Against this approach, I argue that maintaining liberal integrity is not a weighty consideration and that liberal integrity is not always jeopardised by engaging with democratic backsliders.

Instead of these two approaches, which focus on the ‘internal’ elements of backsliding, I defend a third approach – the ‘responsibility-based approach’. This emphasises the need to take seriously ‘external’ backsliding, that is, the external impacts of a state’s democratic backsliding. Backsliding states not only violate their own citizens’ rights; they also have poorer records in dealing with key global challenges, from climate change to refugee protection. In addition, they risk leading to a form of the global order where these challenges are more likely to go unmet. The responsibility-based approach holds that these external effects of backsliding need to figure majorly in the response to backsliding, alongside the internal effects of backsliding on democracies. In practice, this requires rejecting from approaches that require clean hands and ensuring integrity, to one that is focused on reducing the global array of harms that backsliding can cause.

About the Author: James Pattison is a Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester. Their research “The ethics of responding to democratic backsliding abroad” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.