A view from Freedom House’s window. Over the past half century, it often seemed that the advance of democracy and basic freedoms - the right to speak and write without fear of persecution, to demand political change, and so on - was ineluctable. First the Europeans let their colonies go. Then the Soviet empire fell, and with it the communist monopoly on power in eastern Europe. And apartheid ended in South Africa.
Recently, though, freedom’s progress may have come to a halt, or even gone into reverse. Civil and democratic rights are in retreat, says Freedom House, an august American lobby group with strong, though not uncontested, views on the matter: its report for 2007 speaks of a profoundly disturbing deterioration in the global picture, with reversal seen in 38 countries - nearly four times as many as are showing any signs of improvement.
Using the Freedom House’s long-established division of the world into ‘free’, ‘partly free’ and ‘not free’ countries, the planet is still a better place than it was a quarter-century ago. In other words, there are still net gains from fall of communism, at least in central Europe, and the decline of militarism in Latin America. But the short-term trends seem worrying, not only in the eyes of political analysts but in the business environment as well. Political risk started to flash on the corporate radar. Surveys suggest that businessmen see political risk as a much greater threat than in the recent past. All the main forms of political risk (the danger of political violence, protectionism, geopolitical tensions and government instability) were seen as increasing. So say multinational companies, a hardy breed, traditionally operating in the most inhospitable climates.
WEBSITE EDITOR:
Krešimir J. Adamić
