London: A new report examining global security threats says the West is suffering from helplessness because of the overwhelming variety and number of international crises that voters feel they can no longer control.
The Munich Security Report 2022, released ahead of the prestigious German conference this week, has previously argued that the democratic world has been suffering from “Westlessness” – whereby liberal democracies were exhibiting “a widespread feeling of uneasiness and restlessness in the face of increasing uncertainty about the enduring purpose of the West”.
The Munich Security Report said slogans like “America First”, “Take back control”, and “strategic autonomy” had become vote winners.Credit:Getty
Despite sounding the alarm in 2020, report author Tobais Bunde said that the situation had worsened and morphed into a sense of “collective helplessness” exacerbated by the pandemic, climate change and the prospect of war in Eastern Europe and the Biden Administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“Helplessness” is a reference to a phenomenon first detected by two psychologists in the 1960s who observed that dogs trained to expect an electric shock after a tone simply laid down and endured the shock even when given the option of escaping the shock by jumping over a small barrier because the animals felt they could not escape their situation.
The report said this sense had crept into Western voters which had begun 2021 by observing the insurrection on the US Capitol. ” 2021 was clearly not a year for geopolitical optimism,” the report said.
It measured sentiment in 12 countries, not including Australia, and found that the perception of feeling helpless against global challenges was the view on the rise in them all. Only in China did fewer people feel that their country had no control over global events.
“Transatlantic leaders need … demonstrate that both democracy as a system and alliances based on liberal values can deliver for their states’ citizens.”
The report said this was why slogans like “America First”, “Take back control”, and “strategic autonomy” had become vote winners and why authoritarian powers were capable of projecting a stronger image of governance.
“Liberal democracies appear particularly overwhelmed and helpless … while autocratic governments often project confidence and decisiveness, liberal-democratic countries sometimes appear paralysed,” the report said. “Turning the tide of crises looks like an ever more difficult task.”
The report argued that the danger was that support in liberal democracies for trying to tackle global challenges would ebb as people simply gave up and that illiberal ideas would dominate the globe.
But it said this did not have to be the case although as history had shown democracy of was capable of enduring whatever was thrown against it.
The report said that this could only be achieved by the Western world uniting and reinforcing, rather than undermining its global institutions so that they could better solve problems.
“Transatlantic leaders need to revive the optimism and momentum palpable in the early days of the Biden administration and demonstrate that both democracy as a system and alliances based on liberal values can deliver for their states’ citizens and the world at large.
“Collectively, they have the chance to turn the tide. Individually they risk being swept away,” the report warned.
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