It is a strange paradox that despite being portrayed as noble and forthright, the bedrock of democracy is capitulation. If you care about something you'll fight for it, but democracy requires that if you lose the vote you will lay down your metaphorical arms and accept the legitimacy of your opponents. It is the hardest thing in the world to do, so hard that the world's oldest democracies haven't yet mastered the discipline: whether it is the British Left questioning the democratic legitimacy of a coalition representing 59% of the vote or the American Right taking war measures against a law passed by a twice-elected President with a Senate majority, House popular majority and the approval of the Supreme Court. As John Stewart said after Obama's election as Glenn Beck began his rabble rousing: "The opposition won an election and now they're doing things you don't like - I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing... that's not tyranny, that's democracy". Yet despite the friction and hypocrisy and idiocy frequently displayed by those living under the rule of those they hate, on a deeper level we do, in fact, accept it. The proof of this is becoming ever more clear over the last couple of years, as a series of foreign crises have demonstrated that by comparison we're doing rather well.
Quite what history will name these flare-ups I don't know, but I think canny historians will group them, because there are certain common elements that say something about the state of democracy outside the West. I can list Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, Thailand, Iran, Venezuela, and others amongst those countries who have dealt with protests of varying scale and success over the last few years. What they have in common is that they take place in highly compromised democracies in which the protesters were outnumbered at the polls. It is important to remember that Morsi won a presidential election fairly, that Erdoğan enjoys wide support, that Yanukovych was duly elected president in 2010, and so on. What we are seeing, I think, is a new post-ideological world order in which a number of middle-ranking powers test out what I would call "democratic thuggery". The key exponent of this is Putin, but Berlusconi, Erdoğan and Zuma amongst many others practise it to varying degrees. It entails, broadly, the brute facts of democracy without any of the attendant supporting infrastructure - free press, strong courts, civil society etc, backed up by strong nationalism, religious renewal, strong-man posturing and a cronyistic kleptocracy. It is, in other words, an ideology of power, retaining just the tiniest hint of respectability enough to balance all the other interests solidly on the side of the current ruler for as long as possible. It usually requires the majority support of a conservative countryside, a majority that forms one side in the democracy-as-cold-civil-war model that these autocrats use.
It is not sustainable, and right now the semi-democracies are beginning to tear themselves apart. And at the heart of the democratic thuggery problem is that of populaces unwilling to accept thugs who win elections. The Egyptian counter-revolution of the military in 2013 was achieved because the Muslim Brotherhood's vast support in the countryside didn't translate to the urban populaces who hated them. Those populaces would rather ignore a fair vote than suffer the rule of people they don't like, and sure enough the Egyptian people ousted a fairly elected leader. This is justified only in the case that Morsi was dismantling democracy at the time, the jury is out on that question. Otherwise the opposition should have waited until the next election to vote him out. The Ukrainians should have waited to oust Yanukovych democratically, and the Thais have no mandate to remove Shinawatra from power. I say this despite supporting the protesters' causes in each case. The problem is that the western media can all too easily play up the revolution angle while dismissing the discomfort of the largely rural support base of the thug in question. Many Russians were appalled by what Pussy Riot did, and many Iranians think of their urban liberal cousins as shameful. Their voices carry democratic weight. The world is not divided into a fight between just liberty and tyranny, but rather between people who frankly can't stand to live in the same country as one another, and it is this hatred that allows new thugs to rise and play factions off against each other. Sisi is the terrifying example - adored by the liberals of Egypt as a scourge against Islamism, his nascent autocracy is for them the lesser than the evil of actually sharing a democracy with Egypt's conservatives.
So what is the hope that the developing world can learn a discipline of submission that even two-century old democracy is uncomfortable with? Small at the moment. We will see a lot of this over the next fifty years, but my advice will always be the same: continue protesting, petition your leaders peacefully with grievances and build, however slowly, a winning coalition within the country for proper democracy. An endless ding-dong between cities and countryside will not advance the cause of liberty. Any revolution that has to deal with an opposition that could credibly win an election will not lead to a happy nation. The work of democracy is hard, and Ukraine is going to have a hell of a time of it. Let us hope they learn the virtues of patience and the importance of Enlightenment institutions as the immovable scaffolding of true democracy.
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