A quarter of the way through the twenty-first century – when Israel, with the US in tow, is committing genocide in Palestine and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, bombing Syria and carpet-bombing Iran with the complicity of Western powers, barring only Spain and Norway – it’s tempting to go along with the view that we are witnessing a struggle between ‘the West and the Rest’, and the Left should stand with ‘the Rest’. But that would be a grave mistake, according to Kavita Krishnan.
In her book De-democratisation, A Global Story: Script, Actors, Enablers (Context/Westland Books, 2026), she engages in a forensic analysis which demonstrates how Trump’s US, Netanyahu’s Israel, Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Modi’s India and Orban’s Hungary constitute a network connected by ideology, politics and mutual support. The ideology they share is what she calls ‘civilisational nationalism’, underpinned by the politics of ‘multipolarity’, which either explicitly abandons democracy or redefines it as a politics of ethnic or ethno-religious supremacism practised by the powerful nations which form the ‘poles’, allowing them to oppress women and minorities within the country and dominate or colonise less powerful countries abroad. They provide political, economic and ideological support to each other: for example, she shows how Xi’s China plays a critical role in bolstering Israel’s genocide in Gaza, just as Modi’s India is also fully complicit in it.
What led her to write this book is the fact that most of the Left, including many iconic spokespeople, subscribe to multipolarity. She counters their criticisms of liberal democracy by showing that it is a product of struggles by oppressed sections of the population, above all workers and trade unions, and that international law, as represented in the Genocide Convention, Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Rome Statute of the ICC, is also shaped by anti-colonial, feminist and anti-racist struggles.
It is true that supposedly liberal political leaders constantly violate human rights, democracy and international law, but if they profess these principles, they can be held to account. Similarly, socialist leaders may violate socialist principles, but if they profess them, they can be held accountable. For example Lenin, like Marx and Engels, held that democracy was an essential precondition for socialism, and although he fell short of living up to this standard, he criticised himself for doing so, and died fighting for the right of all colonies, including tsarist ones like Ukraine, to self-determination, thus making himself Putin’s worst enemy. For the Left to abandon these principles in favour of multipolarity is a complete betrayal of socialist politics.
What happens when one of these poles clashes with another, as in the case of the US–Israeli war of aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which just a few weeks earlier was slaughtering its own people engaged in peaceful protests and had brutally crushed previous uprisings, including the Woman Life Freedom movement? Here we have to depend on the notion of intersectionality developed by Black feminists. We can support democracy protesters against the Islamic Republic even while we support the people of Iran as a whole against US–Israeli aggression: there is no contradiction between these two positions, they both support the victim of oppression against the oppressor. Krishnan concludes that ‘the most urgent battle of our times is between the defenders and destroyers of democracy. The de-democratisers of the world have joined forces against democracy as a universal principle. Their project can be defeated only if we – people across the world – reclaim democratic principles as our shared inheritance.’