2022, year of first global war of dictatorship against democracy

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy)In this 21st century, the world is capitalist and globalized and disputes are focused on the way countries are governed. There are two options; democracy, based on freedom, the respect for human rights, the alternance of power, and the rule of law, or dictatorship, violating freedom and human rights in order to indefinitely concentrate all power. Russia’s invasion into Ukraine has branded this year, 2022, as the year in which “the first global war” took place with the axis of confrontation of dictatorship against democracy.

The post WWII (1945) bipolar world, had the economic-political systems of Capitalism against Communism as its axis of confrontation. With the fall of the Berlin Wall (1999) and the dissolution and failure of the Soviet Union (USSR) (1990-1991), Capitalism was established as a universal system prompting and fueling the acceleration of globalization.

Europe’s Council describes globalization “as the growing and greater economic integration of all of the world’s countries as the result of the liberalization and the ensuing increase in the volume and variety of the international trading of goods and services, the decrease in the freight costs, the growing intensity of international penetration of capital, the immense growth of the world’s work-force and the accelerated world-wide diffusion of technology, in particular, communications.”

Notwithstanding their system or type of government, today all of the world’s countries are immersed in capitalism and globalization with the advantages and challenges that are brought along by them. The acceleration of globalization is based on the triumph of capitalism as a system and the political management of each independent State has gone back to the oldest dispute over the organization of human society, that is; the confrontation between freedom and oppression that are projected, implemented, and practiced in democracy and dictatorship, respectively.

Democracy is “the political system in which the sovereignty of the State rests in the people who exercises it, either directly or through representatives.” It is “the type of the State’s organization in which collective decisions are adopted by the people through a direct or indirect mechanism of participation that confers legitimacy to their representatives.” Described by Sir Winston Churchill as “the worst system of government designed by mankind, excepting all others,” is recognized by the Interamerican Democratic Charter as the “right of the peoples of the Americas.”

The practical features of democracy are; the granting of a sovereign peoples’ mandate to their governments, the “temporariness” of such a mandate that has to be discharged subject to “the rule of law” meaning, with compliance to the laws, and the obligation of holding the incumbents “accountable.” In a democracy the owner of the power are the peoples, not the government.

Dictatorship is the political regime that, either by force or violence, “concentrates all power in a person or group or organization and restrains human rights and basic individual freedoms.” It is an “oppressive regime of one sole leader, or a reduced group of leaders and a scarce or null tolerance of political pluralism and freedom of the press.” In a dictatorship, the peoples’ sovereignty is supplanted, by force or violence, to rest in the hands of groups who in order to indefinitely hang-on to power implement and exercise “State-terrorism.”

State-terrorism, a highlighted feature of dictatorships is “the use of illicit and criminal means by the government with the purpose of instilling fear in the population and reach their objectives by producing behaviors in the population that would otherwise not be possible.” This is why dictatorships have political prisoners and exiles, judicialized political persecution, manipulation, and control of all branches of government, and wherein “organized crime” wields power.

A factual and objective assessment in the Americas and the world shows that in the year 2022 it has been revealed the world is divided between democracies and dictatorships and that the determinant fact that has highlighted this historical milestone has been Russia’s invasion to Ukraine that has unleashed the first Global War, so-called because at the battle front between two States, there is not one country that has not been impacted by the conflict.

Americas’ dictatorships; Cuba and its satellites Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua and the other dictatorships of the world such as Iran, North Korea, China, and others, are clearly aligned and support the invasion of another dictatorship, Russia’s invasion. All of them wield power through violence and seek to indefinitely hold-on to power at the expense of human rights and freedom just as criminal and not political organizations would do.

*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas