Each month, Frédéric Munier, Director of the School of Geopolitics for Business at SKEMA Business School, publishes a column in the magazine Pour l’Éco. He is now pointing to a trap set for liberal democracies, which are increasingly in the minority. When they apply double standards in their external interventions, they undermine the basis of their credibility.
In his latest book, Le Triomphe des émotions (The Triumph of Emotions), Dominique Moïsi stresses the importance of anger and resentment, but also fear in inter-state relations. Viewing the world through the prism of these extreme feelings gives rise to narratives so contradictory that they justify bias and blindness on the part of all stakeholders, and give rise to accusations of double standards on all sides.
The current war in Gaza is a case in point: while the Israelis have been quick to denounce any minimisation of the bloody attacks perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October, Arab countries are denouncing the US refusal to condemn the terrible Israeli reprisals in the Gaza Strip and, more generally, Western support for Israeli colonisation of the West Bank. Both sides accuse the other of crimes against humanity, minimising the other’s suffering, and ruining any hope of lasting peace in the region.
Selective indignation
Using “double standards” as a form of selective indignation is obviously nothing new. The real change lies elsewhere, however, in the fact that Western preferences are no longer being tolerated by a growing number of countries in the South. These countries, through their votes or abstentions at the UN, are now making their voices heard in a very different way to their counterparts in the North.
Of course, some of these countries also apply double standards by refusing to condemn the war waged by Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, or by turning a blind eye to Bashar al-Assad’s crimes or the treatment of the Uyghurs… But have China and Russia ever claimed to govern in the name of universalist and generous values?
The other side of the coin
Western democracies find themselves in a much more serious situation: by trampling underfoot the humanist and liberal principles that are supposed to constitute them, they are weakening themselves.
European countries learned this the hard way when the nations they colonised turned the right of peoples to self-determination against them in order to claim their independence. And the United States is paying the price today: its illegal intervention in Iraq in 2003 and its hitherto unconditional support for Israel have earned it unanimous condemnation from countries that may be far from democratic models, but that carry weight today.
There is a great risk that Western democracies will suffer from the double standards they have long practised. Do they have the resources to withstand this risk? Nothing could be less certain. Remember that only 13% of the world’s population currently lives in a democracy, compared with 72% who live in illiberal countries, and that the share of democracies in global GDP fell from 56% in 1992 to 39% in 2022!
This article was originally published in French in Pour l’Eco.
