Autocrats, Kleptocrats and Populists

Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Browne, set out so powerfully and as others of your Lordships have reinforced, the situation today is an extremely distressing and depressing one. Countries such as India, which once rightly took pride in its democracy, have shown increasing disregard for basic human rights. Countries such as Turkey, which once stood on the very threshold of the European Union, have similarly regressed. One could go on. However, I want to do something different. There is no point in working for a co-ordinated response to defend democratic norms and values unless we have confidence in those norms and values in the first place. Whereas their abiding validity would once have been seen as obvious and taken for granted, it is now in different ways being subtly undermined. There are several reasons for this.

First, there is the widespread relativism of our times: the view that one stance on life is as good as another, that truth in any serious sense is unobtainable and we cannot and should not make judgments about how other societies operate.

Secondly, there is the widespread feeling that attempts to bolster or create democratic regimes in other parts of the world have been failures leading to massive loss of life, and that we should no longer intervene elsewhere on the assumption that they need democracy.

Those two tendencies have come together in some minds to conclude that different societies just do things differently from ourselves and we should simply accept that. We should put aside the arrogance of liberal progressivism and not assume that other countries would be better off if they had what we have.

The salutary point in this critique is that we should put aside any sense of arrogance and acknowledge that our democracy is deeply flawed. We should also acknowledge that if we are simply talking about the way of life of another culture, whether it is Chinese, Arab or indigenous, of course we should acknowledge that people choose differently and that they do so all adds to the variety and richness of human existence. But when it comes to democratic norms, we are talking about something different. At its heart is the most fundamental value of all: the equal dignity and worth of every human being, whatever their gender, religion, race or sexuality. This belief, rooted in the Christian faith and built on by secular rationalism, is indeed foundational for Western culture but is, I believe—somewhat unfashionably today in some quarters—a universal truth. That is why we have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the range of other covenants and conventions that flow from it. That is the first point.

Secondly, there is the knowledge, derived of bitter experience, that state power has to be contained. It is this that led the great Reinhold Niebuhr to write that our

“capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but”

our

“inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

It was a combination of these two factors—the equal worth and value of every human being and the need to protect him or her from the overweening power of the state—that led to the great human rights movement after World War II. The insight of those giants who brought about that achievement still stands today. Human rights and the democratic norms which go to protect them are not just part of a way of life which people are free to choose or reject as they prefer. They are, I believe, universal moral insights now, quite properly, expressed in legal norms. Of course, I am familiar with the Marxist argument, which has some truth in it, and excessive liberal individualism does indeed need to be balanced by the insight that we are social beings, and persons only in and through our relationship with other human beings.

Whatever flaws there are in our democracy—and they are manifold—and whatever lessons need to be learnt from ill-judged foreign interventions in the past, we should not give up on the idea that democratic norms and values are a real achievement and are worth aspiring to for all human societies, not because they are Christian or Western but because the insights they express and safeguard belong to humanity as such. It is worth making a co-ordinated response because they are worth defending, and they are worth defending not just in terms of practical political steps that can and should be taken but intellectually and morally against certain insidious currents which have the effect of undermining their universal validity.