Next year, an Arab country will host the G20 summit for the first time. What country has earned this honour? Such recognition as a player in this powerful global club? Its impressive climb in this regard is even more remarkable given that only a few short months ago, this Arab state was supposedly on its way to pariah status.
That’s right. Saudi Arabia is hosting the 2020 summit, managing to not only overcome the reputational damage of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the country’s consulate in Turkey less than a year ago, but also doing so just weeks after more grisly details of the killing were revealed. Saudi officials were reported to have referred to Khashoggi as “the sacrificial animal” while discussing how he was to be dismembered. Saudi’s moment of coming in from the (relative) cold even had an official photo at last week’s G20 summit. All the world leaders lined up, looked at the camera and waved, apart from Donald Trump and Mohammed bin Salman – lost in mutual adoration – who only had eyes for each other.
Vladimir Putin’s comments to the Financial Times at the G20 about the death of liberalism (an idea that has “outlived its purpose”) could not have come at a more appropriate moment. It felt like a eulogy to the memory of Khashoggi’s murder. Putin’s just a troll, some said, best ignored. He wants attention, it’s a diversion, have you seen the state of Russia’s economy? And how do you define liberalism anyway? All this is true. Putin might not be the best qualified political scientist to define what liberalism is and when it is in decline, but I think it is fair to say that liberalism is not in the greatest of health.
Before we get lost in definitional defensiveness, I don’t mean the everyday sort of liberalism, one that is probably better described as cosmopolitanism. The kind that makes you look around your diverse locality, the quiet tolerance of the majority and think that all is well. Not the kind of liberalism that is borne out by polls showing that there is increased acceptance of immigration or LGBT people. Or the liberalism of technical democracy, where we still elect leaders in free and fair(ish) elections. This is corporate campaign liberalism, new Arsenal kit launch, urban fist-bumping liberalism.
What is in trouble is the liberalism that underscores political process, legislation and mobilisation. We live in a time where individual liberty and the spoils of freedom are meted out based on a racial and economic hierarchy, where political victories are won by promising that rights and privileges will be taken away from those who haven’t “earned it” – the poor, the undocumented and the simply different – a divide between the deserving and the undeserving. It is more than rhetoric; lives are directly affected by this, further disenfranchised by the loss of benefits, the impossibility of full and legal settlement in a new country, and the everyday stigmatisation of Muslims. “Plain speaking” and being “done with political correctness” is cover for this segregation of rights.
That was the most chilling aspect of Putin’s comments – it is not hard to imagine them being spoken by a supposedly more genteel western politician. Criticism of multiculturalism, scaremongering on trans identity (“They claim now that children can play five or six gender roles,” said Putin,) and the rhetoric of the elite abandoning the “real people” is all too common. As much as we try to put clear daylight between the state of Anglo-American liberalism and Putin’s shambolic dictatorship, the more the facts confound us.
Donald Tusk, presumably imagining himself in a sort of West Wing version of the EU, disagreed so much with Putin that, unfortunately, in his indignation he ended up reinforcing the point. What Tusk finds “really obsolete is authoritarianism, personality cults and the rule of oligarchs”. Authoritarianism, personality cults and the rule of oligarchs? We certainly could not see that in the UK, where the Conservative party is on its way to self-destruction while it drags the country with it for the sake of power sought through appealing to an authoritarian populist streak. And where a man such as Boris Johnson is about to become prime minister on the back of a personality cult worshipped by a narrow Conservative electorate, and billionaires (we don’t call them oligarchs here, that’s reserved for foreigners) are investigated for breaking the law in funding political campaigns.
Just to drive Putin’s point home even more brutally, Trump exchanged some friendly badinage with the Russian president at the beginning of their first formal meeting at the summit. Referring to journalists, Trump said, “Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, isn’t it? You don’t have this problem in Russia but we do.” Putin responded, in English: “We also have. It’s the same.” A warm chuckle followed. A few days later, Trump became the first sitting US president to set foot in North Korea after making overtures to Kim Jong-un. Trump looks no longer like an anomaly – more like a member of the demagogue gang.
There is still a fixation on the practical differences between straight dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia, Russia and North Korea and western countries where the practical processes of universal suffrage and rule of law are still in place. No one is seizing power by force or suspending constitutions here. But the belief in this rigid distinction is a narcissism that fails to account for all the ways a liberal order can be undermined within the confines of what appears a robust democracy. Putin put it rather well when pressed by the FT on the fact that he was handed power from Boris Yeltsin 20 years ago. He shrugged: “So what?”
Sitting in the UK as Johnson is about to be the second unelected PM in a row, ruling a party and a country paralysed by a hastily and poorly planned referendum, I would say the same to those who argue that at least we live in a democracy. So what?
• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
