The tide of global democratic change, which at the start of the new millennium looked like an unstoppable force of nature, has been turned back over the last decade. How serious and prolonged this reversal turns out to be is open to question. What cannot be doubted is the direction of travel. In its most recent annual survey, the respected think tank Freedom House recorded a net decline in world freedom for the eighth year in a row. While political rights and civil liberties improved in 40 countries, they deteriorated in 54.

Perhaps the most vivid and significant example of this trend is the sight of a young, imperfect democracy – Ukraine – being brutalised by its large, authoritarian neighbour as the democratic world stands frozen on the sidelines. It isn’t a coincidence that Freedom House began to note the drift away from democracy a year after it downgraded Russia’s ranking from ‘partly free’ to ‘not free’. China already provided an attractive model of authoritarian modernisation for the power elites of developing nations, but Vladimir Putin went further by showing the world that democratisation is reversible.

What he also provided is a more vocal and assertive expression of the new authoritarianism. Whereas policy-makers in Beijing have been careful to emphasise China’s peaceful rise and commercial priorities, their counterparts in Moscow are happy to present their approach as an open challenge to western norms and the prevailing world order. They have even given it a name – ‘sovereign democracy’. By associating sovereignty with the right to reject democratic standards, and inviting other countries to join them, Russia’s leaders have emboldened politicians across the world to impose their own forms of autocratic rule with the self-serving pretext that democracy needs to be ‘a(chǎn)dapted’ to local conditions.