Killed or maimed 100,000 people, mostly women and children? Supplied weapons for your mates to do that? No problem! The Economist will not downgrade your governance marks for such inconsequential sins. If you’re a westerner, that is. Richard Cullen reports.
The Economist, a leading British weekly, is a flagship Western media outlet which has championed the superior wisdom of the Western perspective on how the world should be organized since its foundation in 1843. It recently published the Global Democracy Index for 2024, which categorizes 167 jurisdictions worldwide. This catalogue is compiled by its sister organization, the Economist Intelligence Unit, which appointed itself in 2006 to carry out this annual democracy survey. This year it confirmed why this annual review is now morally insolvent.
The assessment regime
First, we need to examine the way in which this EIU index claims to measure “the quality of democracy across the world”. The EIU explains that its assessments are based on 60 indicators grouped into five categories measuring:
Electoral process and pluralism,
Functioning of government,
Political participation,
Political culture, and
Civil liberties.
Jurisdictions are then slotted into one of four categories. These are (with indicative examples) full democracies (Norway), flawed democracies (US), hybrid regimes (Hong Kong) and authoritarian regimes (China).
The latest report laments that 2024 has witnessed another worldwide “democratic decline” so that the average score across all jurisdictions now stands at 5.17, the lowest score ever in the history of the index.
Genocide in Gaza
Next, we need to consider how, over the period of this latest assessment, Israel has carried a continuous, genocidal, ethnic cleansing attack on Gaza, an enclave with more than 2 million people over which Israel has long exercised near total terrifying power. Israel has made no secret of its present desire to empty Gaza of Palestinians completely. Over a hundred thousandPalestinians living in Gaza have either been killed or maimed (see this link).
This mass savagery has unfolded in reprisal for a terrifying assault on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 by Hamas, which has long governed Gaza. Hamas is designated as a terror group by the West (see this link). Around 1,200 Israelis and others were killed by Hamas – and by Israeli fire as it responded to the assault.
In 2022, prior to the commencement of the Gaza genocide, Amnesty International condemned Israel’s apartheid system of ruling the estimated 5.5 million Palestinians under its control across all of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). Amnesty described this as “a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity” (see this link).
In January, 2024, the International Criminal Court found there was a plausible case that Israel was committing acts of genocide in Gaza (see this link).
In a landmark ruling in July 2024 the ICJ declared that “Israel’s occupation of the Gaza strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, was unlawful, along with the associated settlement regime, annexation and use of natural resources” (see this link).
In November, 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former defence minister Yoav Gallant and certain Hamas leaders (see this link).
In February, 2024, Human Rights Watch said that Israel continued to engage in acts of “collective punishment that amount to war crimes [which] include the use of starvation of civilians as a weapon of war” (see this link).
Israel has treated all these judicial findings and human rights criticisms with comprehensive contempt, issuing intense threats and fevered antisemitism claims. America has now backed-up these Israeli crackdowns with its own regime of presidential sanctions attacking the ICC (see this link).
In fact, from day one, the US has been staggeringly complicit in this genocide, which has been live-streamed around the world ever since October 2023 (see this link).
The new Trump administration continues to support President Biden’s obscene level of backing for Israel (see this link). This support has provided armaments, military equipment, general funding and constant logistical wherewithal, all of which have been crucial in maintaining the astonishing mass-murder scorecard associated with this exceptional attack on the most basic human rights of over 2 million people.
The distinguished former American diplomat Chas Freeman lately argued that: “The hateful things Israel is doing have made it the most hated society on the planet. Netanyahu is seen as the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler and Israel is a pariah everywhere outside the West” (see this link).
Warping the assessments
Now you might think that this horror story of continuous, gross inhumanity in Gaza by the Israel-American tag-team may help explain that “democratic decline” – noted above – which concerns the Economist. Not a bit of it. Jurisdictions are marked out of 10. Norway, at the top of the list of 167 jurisdictions scored 8.69. Afghanistan, at the bottom, scored 0.26. For 2024, neither Israel nor the US have budged. As in the previous year, Israel has scored 7.80, while the US has scored 7.85, just as it did the year before.
Much as they rightly detest it, Palestinians in the OPT are ultimately entirely controlled in their daily lives by the State of Israel. For the EIU, the fact that Israel – throughout this latest assessment period – has carried out horrific mass murder and committed terrible crimes against these residents whom it brutally controls is apparently a matter than can simply be excluded from the assessment process.
The colossal back-up from the US which has been instrumental in carrying out these atrocities can, it seems, also be excluded.
Conclusion
The EIU has, in 2024, ranked: Israel as 31st out of 167 jurisdictions; and the US as 28th out of 167 jurisdictions. Although both are described as “flawed democracies” they have each been assessed as being within the top 20% of democracies worldwide.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong, graded 87th out of 167, has slipped further down within the lowest 50% of ranked jurisdictions in 2024. Incredibly, this latest EIU assessment is thus telling us that Israel, in 2024, proved that it was more than twice as politically saintly as back-sliding Hong Kong. Never mind how, since 2020, Hong Kong has (despite many made-in-America headwinds) combined firmly improving social and economic indicators with the restoration of its extraordinary safe-city reputation.
For many years prior to the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, that country held regular, democratic elections to select its government, where only the white population of less than 20% could normally participate. Using the methodology outlined above, had the EIU index been operating then, it is fair to speculate that apartheid South Africa may have been graded as a “flawed democracy” within the top 25% of ranked jurisdictions.
To get an even better grip on just how exceptionally corrupt this EIU assessment regime has become, imagine, just for a moment, if anyone other than Israel, in response to single, intense terror attack, reduced a major city under their control to rubble using colossal levels of mass-murdering, heavy-duty bombing in order to assert total hate-filled domination of that city and to cleanse it of all current residents. The Economist would surely be unable to control its utter fury, in response, in a report such as this.
In the end, history helps explain how it has all come to this.
During the colonial-era, Christian religious authorities allied with European global expansion used the term “pagan” to indicate their low regard for certain non-Christian religions they encountered in imperial outposts.
Today those advocating the distinguishing, universal superiority of a Western worldview no longer draw-on religion in this way. They make their case based on a secular understanding. But there are resonances, as we can see above, between then and now. Indeed, a senior Chinese government official aptly noted not so long ago that, “Western countries talking about universal values are like colonial-era missionaries telling other countries which god to pray to.”
Finally, note how the EIU’s “five categories” above stress electoral and related process checks. One looks in vain for any explicit performance tests, such as poverty reduction, fundamental infrastructure development, improvements in access to education and medical care and so on – let alone treatment of subjugated enclaves. It is clear, that the EIU categories are measurably well-crafted to foster priority protection for private property accumulation and retention. And they also help thwart consideration of central performance failures.
As well and unfortunately, post-Gaza, we now have conspicuous confirmation that this important Western assessment regime is morally insolvent.
Richard Cullen is an adjunct law professor at the University of Hong Kong and a popular writer on current affairs.
To see a list of articles he has written for this outlet, click this phrase.
Image at the top by fridayeveryday.