sgusers5的部落格

pub_date:Who exactly are the good and the bad guys in Kiev and Bangkok?MEMBERS of the contingency of the-End-of-History pundits in the West who not long ago were predicting that democracy and liberalism would spread from here to eternity have been down in the dumps in recent years.新蒲崗迷你倉 And no one can blame them for that.After all, discovering that countries that have MacDonald's do go to war against each other, that the Colour Revolutions turned out to be grey, that the Freedom Agenda fizzled into a gloomy reality, and that the Arab Spring was followed by cold Sunni and Shiite winters, can be a dispiriting experience for the true believer in the unrelenting global progress of Democracy and in the notion that free and open elections would bring about freedom and prosperity.Hence, we were told that the march of liberal democratic ideas - including secularism and women's rights, respect for minorities - would follow democratic elections until the ultimate victory. But religious fundamentalism, ethnic identity, and just the old notion of nationalism, proved to be more powerful ideas, as the Global Me gave way to the Tribal We, not only in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Libya, but even in the advanced industrialised nations of the European Union.Most recently, the political turmoil in Ukraine and Thailand - two countries that have overcome decades of authoritarian rule, embraced democratic principles and conducted a series of free elections - demonstrated that in itself the promotion of global democracy doesn't necessarily help create the foundations for a stable legitimate liberal order; and that if anything, it can (re)ignite old and new sources of political conflict and volatility.In a way, the Western media seemed to be experiencing a hard case of cognitive dissonance in its reporting and analysis of the demonstrations taking place in Kiev and Bangkok, and have been unable to decide who exactly are the "good" and the "bad" guys in these respective crises.Hence, many analysts portrayed the protests in Kiev as spontaneous and spirited resistance led by a well-educated and Internet-wired generation of young Ukrainians who reject the state capitalism advanced by its current government backed by Moscow.But, there is a major problem with this bullish storyline. The Bad Guy in this narrative, Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych, came to power through the kind of open and democratic elections that the leaders of the so-called Orange Revolution of 2004 had advocated.Or to put it differently, the young and liberal protesters in the streets of Kiev had a chance to sell their policy agenda to the Ukrainian people. And they lost the electoral battle. But instead of waiting for the next election in order to make their case again to the Ukrainian voters, they are refusing to play by the democratic rules they supposedly cherish and are demanding that Mr Yanukovych and his government resign.In some respects, the political crisis in Thailand can be seen as a mirror image of the one taking place in Ukraine. Supporters of Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister and billion迷你倉ire who had left the country following a corruption conviction against him, have won every free and open election for more than two decades. That includes Thaksin's sister Yingluck, who leads the current government.But like in the case of Ukraine, it is becoming difficult to pinpoint the good and the bad guys in the Thai political narrative. The current government has been accused of corruption and authoritarian practices and it is mobilising its supporters among the lower middle class by promoting a populist agenda.The anti-government forces, on the other hand, consist of members of the educated and well-to-do elite who, not unlike the Ukrainian opposition, have failed to win democratic and free elections and are now demanding that the elected government be ousted from office.Moreover, in the same way that free elections in Middle Eastern countries such as Iraq and Lebanon helped expose and heighten regional, ethnic and sectarian frictions, the elections in Ukraine and Thailand have had a similar effect of highlighting and intensifying deep-seated divisions that have less to do with political ideology per se and more with culture and history. It's the identity, stupid!In Ukraine, these divisions reflect the historical antagonism and the different sense of national identity between the Ukrainian speakers in the Western and Central parts of the country who tend to ally with the opposition groups and the Russian speakers in Eastern and Southern Ukraine who back the current government.In Thailand, the political crisis is pitting the uneducated masses who have been powerless for most of the country's history against the members of the Thai establishment, represented by the bureaucracy, the military, the courts and the monarchy, who do not want to lose their privileges.But like in Ukraine, these political divisions are also rooted in cultural - and to some extent, ethnic and linguistic - differences between southerners and northerners.The political crises in Ukraine and Thailand suggest that the simplistic notions of political development promoted by many Western intellectuals and politicians who assume that American and western European models can and should be embraced by everyone and everywhere are misplaced.Even in the case of the US or, say, France, these societies have gone through a long and messy process of political change before they embraced their current forms of liberal democracy.Moreover, any attempt to force countries such as Ukraine or Thailand to accelerate this process of change can backfire and ignite instability and even lead to civil war.Contrary to their leaders, the American people may have recognised this complex reality. As the latest Pew Research opinion polls suggested, a majority of Americans have no interest now in making the world safe for democracy and want the US to "mind its own business". To put it bluntly, the American people have given up on the global liberal democratic revolution, and all they want, to paraphrase what Stalin once said about socialism, is to attain liberal democracy in one state - in this United States.迷你倉將軍澳