Increasingly, there is something unsavoury about old democracies like the US and UK. Not that their examples were ever terribly inspiring. The US practiced institutionalised slavery and its Afro-American citizens are still subject to discrimination, notwithstanding the fact that Obama is now the country’s president. For instance, a raft of legislation by some states in the US requiring identity papers for voting is patently intended to curb the country’s black population from exercising their electoral rights. In other words, Jim Crow laws in another garb are once again making their appearance to negate the progress made under the country’s civil rights legislation. In the case of the UK, its so-called democracy was very selective and discriminatory, with colonies simply acting as the fodder for its prosperity. And they had to wait till they were considered ready to become self-governing and eventually independent. The question then is: how did the US and UK become the world’s ‘model’ democracies? The simple answer is that their power and prosperity built on the sweat and labour of other people, slaves in the US, and colonies for the UK, gave them the ‘right’ to set universal standards others had no choice but to follow. And it continued even as the old order built on slavery and colonies started to ebb away. With a new order that emerged after WW II, the victorious western bloc managed to create and command new international institutions, set up new models and norms that every other country needed to follow. Those who did not were denied access to capital, technology and political legitimacy, thus facing the prospect of being condemned to backwardness and poverty. In other words, it was a new version of colonialism where the imperial power, comprising the US and its western allies, created an economic and political cartel, with the supposedly newly independent countries continuing to provide the raw materials and other sinews of prosperity. These new nations (the former colonies) came to be categorised as the third world to the first world, comprising the US and its partners. The Soviet Union, a wartime ally of western nations but with its own ideological and power ambitions, refused to submerge into the US-led cartel, thus starting the long Cold War between the US-led camp (called the free world) and Soviet-led bloc, behind an iron curtain. They constituted the second world. The world now had a new hierarchy of the first world (the US and its western allies), the second world (the Soviet-led bloc) and the third world, the lowest order comprising former colonies and countries in the western hemisphere under US control. And when the Soviet Union collapsed due to a variety of reasons, the US and its allies declared victory for the capitalist system and western democracy, holding it up as a model for the rest of the world. Francis Fukuyama, a US academic and political philosopher, declared it the “end of history” in his book. He argued that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government”, and as such constituted the “end of history.” At the time, there was a lot of cheerful jubilation and those even mildly questioning this thesis were more or less consigned to purgatory. Another important global political development was the change of political direction in China in the 1980s from Mao’s creed of perpetual revolution to a new emphasis on economic growth. This change would be effected through the continued monopoly on power of the Communist Party of China (CPC) under the leadership of its powerful leader, Deng Xiaoping. The CPC vehemently rejected the western political model of multi-party democracy, considered too risky for China’s stability. But the party’s monopoly power was challenged in 1989 by a student-led democracy movement that was crushed with the use of military force at the behest of the party’s supreme leader, Deng Xiaoping.After some internal party struggle in which the CPC’s general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, a Deng appointee, was purged and spent the rest of his life under house arrest, China returned to its path of making the state strong through faster economic growth. And that model is continuing to this day, making China the world’s emerging superpower. But the politics of monopoly power wielded by the party are now creating problems arising from entrenched corruption in the system and lack of transparency and accountability. In other words, even though China is emerging as a superpower, its political model of a one-party state lacks drawing power. It will, therefore, remain a distant second in terms of exercising the soft power that the US still commands. Even some of the top CPC leaders send their children for advanced education at universities in the US and UK.However, the US and the UK are increasingly seeking to exercise the attributes of a surveillance state and thus losing their high moral ground. They have often strongly criticised countries like China and Russia for doing exactly the same to control their citizens and to stifle debate and dissent. The attributes of a surveillance state were revealed by the whistle blower Edward Snowden, by leaking the workings of the US National Security Agency (NSA), which spies on millions of its citizens and foreigners through phone taps and a whole range of electronic data mining from internet servers and social media sites. Snowden was granted asylum in Russia for one year, now extended for another three years, as no other country wanted the US’s wrath on its head for doing the same. His asylum in Russia has caused serious friction in US-Russia relations, now worsened by the Ukrainian crisis. The sort of pressure and coercion applied by the US to nab Snowden is just unbelievable, as if one person holds the key to unravelling of the US state. The US must be a very fragile state if it feels so vulnerable because of the activities of a lone whistleblower. It is not that Snowden was a spy working for material gain. From all that has come out so far, here is a young man with a conscience who felt strongly about the workings of his state where every citizen was vulnerable if its intelligence agencies chose to hunt him out. Another lone whistle blower, Bradley Manning, who leaked a swathe of cables to WikiLeaks because of his troubled conscience, is now serving a long prison sentence for this act while Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is cooped up in the Ecuador embassy in London for fear of ending up in the US for publishing the stuff passed on by Manning. All this does not reflect well on a country like the US that is so proud of its democracy. The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia. He can be reached at sushilpseth@yahoo.co.au