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31 J. Pol. Stud. 1 (2024)

handle is hein.journals/jlo31 and id is 1 raw text is: 2024 Harrison. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons-Attribution- Noncommercial-Share Alike License 4.0 International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-no-sa/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the same or similar license to this one. Journal of Political Studies Vol. 31, No. 1, January-June, Summer 2024, pp. 01-11 Is the West Wobbling on its Democratic Pedestal? Dr. William Harrison Associate Professor of Political Science Fairmont State University Fairmont West Virginia United States of America Correspondence: wharrison@fairmontstate.edu ABSTRACT The West has been arguing for decades that the Developing World and Post- Soviet World should be democratic. It argues that democracy is the best form of government and that countries around the world should embrace democracy or face certain kinds of punishment such as a reduction in development aid. It is not the purpose of this paper to argue the benefits of democracy over other forms of government but instead to argue that, with democratic norms under attack in much of the West, that the West is no longer in a moral position to claim to be the promoters of democracy internationally. This paper will discuss events, laws, and actions by Western Countries that are inimical to democracy and argue that if the West wants to regain what it sees as the democratic moral high ground it must alter its policies to being more democratic itself Keywords: Democracy, Laws, Government, Development, Western Introduction Ry09, 2024 The United States and Western Europe have for decades held themselves up to the Revised: rest of the world as beacons of light in a world beset by governments who are February 02, unresponsive to the needs of their people. The West has argued that it is critical for 024 0 countries across the globe to be more like the West and embrace democracy. 2024 Democracy, after all, provides governments that at least in theory represent the will Published: of the people of the countries in question. June 10, 2024 To this end the West has attempted various means to enforce democratic norms on much of the rest of the world. It has done this through a variety of tactics. These include public information on how democracy helps societies, and on the success of Western sponsored democracies in places like post-World War II Germany and Japan, whose regimes flourished after rising from the ashes of that terrible conflict. The West points to more recent successes in Eastern Europe where formerly communist countries like Poland, Czechia, and Croatia have become free democracies and been accepted into membership of the European Union which holds itself up as a democratic model to be emulated by the rest of the world. Indeed, these countries have prospered peacefully after the overthrow of Fascism, Communism and after an end to some of the wars spawned by the collapse of the communist world. 1

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