Chad Satterlee | Democracy promotion is not a coherent basis for defending Taiwan

The concept of democracy occupies a central place in this debate.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recently declared: "The truth is that Australia and China have very different political systems."

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton talks of an "arc of autocracy" in which China is a central link.

At the heart of these statements is the fact that political parties in Australia, the US, and Taiwan compete in and lose elections. The Party cannot lose elections in China. Many people view such defeats as the hallmark of democracy.

A probably more influential, though not incompatible, way of defining democracy says that voting is not enough by itself. In turn, other desirable conditions required for voting to be meaningful are listed.

This includes equal capacity for citizens to vote and stand for office, freedom of political association and expression, freedom of information, and so on.

The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) index is the most rigorous attempt to measure these and other commonly desired conditions. It combines these measures into an overall democracy score for different countries over time.

According to V-Dem's 2023 report, on a scale from 0 ('very autocratic') to 1 ('very democratic'), Australia scores 0.81, the US scores 0.74, Taiwan scores 0.73, while China scores 0.04.

Now the judgements of country experts are, controversially, relied on to assign numbers to many of the conditions. "Free and fair" elections are judged on a scale from 0 to 4.

Picture the following hypothetical scenario.

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Most polling expects the opposition to win the upcoming Australian federal election. But the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Nine Network, both state-owned, are stacked with pro-government journalists. The managing director of the Seven Network openly served as media advisor to the prime minister's campaign. Opposition party attempts to buy advertising from the major private media outlets are turned down.

The prime minister disappears days out from the poll. The media reports that he has the flu. We learn he actually had a heart attack after the election.

Finally, there are allegations of vote fraud in a number of electorates. This was probably not widespread enough to change the final outcome. The government wins the election and the opposition peacefully concedes.

This is more or less the Australian equivalent of the 1996 Russian presidential election. In that contest, the US-backed Boris Yeltsin defeated his leftist challenger Gennady Zyuganov against overwhelming odds.

Whether this was, in the words of then-US president Bill Clinton a "free and open vote for Russia's democratic future", is in the eye of the beholder. The V-Dem index gave Yeltsin's term a score of 0.5.

Would Clinton have reacted in the same way if the above events were exactly flipped in favour of Zyuganov?

Such murky circumstances are not historically unusual. And they speak to a glaring omission in most lists of desirable democratic conditions.

Ours is a time of heightened geopolitical rivalry. In this environment, some countries are "expected" by external powers to behave in certain ways, while often being formally free to behave otherwise.

Look at Ukraine and Taiwan.

Surely another desirable democratic condition, then, is the substantial freedom to act against external expectations?

We might incorporate this into V-Dem as a "freedom from external expectations" index, where 0 is "not free at all" and 1 is "very free".

Assigning numbers here involves considering the likely consequences of non-compliance.

In a 2019 foreign policy debate during which the prospect of non-compliance with US expectations was raised, the Chicago-based professor of international relations John Mearsheimer warned Australians: "When [the US is] not happy, you do not want to underestimate how nasty we can be. Just ask Fidel Castro."

Yet the US never managed to remove Castro from power, and Cuba still exists today. On the other hand, Castro was an unusually strong leader.

So, how free does this make Australia on our external expectations measure? Readers can assign a number for themselves.

The framing of the conflict over Taiwan as a defence of democracy in many ways parallels the Vietnam War.

The US and Australian backing of the South Vietnamese was initially justified as a first line of defence against the spread of socialism.

As the conflict wore on, many began to realise that even a united socialist Vietnam would ultimately remain a small South East Asian country-one unlikely to pose a threat to the West.

This has proven to be the case ever since the socialist North Vietnamese defeated the South and reunified the country. Indeed, socialist Vietnam was briefly invaded by socialist China in 1979. This helps to explain current friendly US-Vietnam relations.

China is now a very big and rich country. But like Vietnam, it once faced overwhelming external expectations. Like the North Vietnamese, the mainland Chinese socialists won a civil war, the latter against political forces backed by both the US and Soviet Union.

The difference is the South Vietnamese forces did not have a nearby island on which they could evacuate. Enter Taiwan. China views Taiwan's reunification with the mainland as unfinished business, as a matter of national sovereignty. Taiwan objects.

In the end, no country is a "real" democracy. There are only countries which perform better or worse on some desirable conditions over time.

Remember, it was not too long ago that many US Republican Party politicians were actively trying to reorganise institutions so they could not lose an election.

Ukraine's latest V-Dem score is just 0.23.

Justifying one's participation in a war based on an ever-changing sliding scale makes very little sense.

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