The 1AC’s notion of “democratic backsliding” leading to devastating results a tool used by the west to separate form “the rest.”

The notion of democracy is not only a category of analysis (a Weberian ideal type). It works today largely as an identity marker for the West, the signifier of its very quintessence. As such, it establishes and perpetuates the superiority complex of the West vis-à-vis “the Rest”, democracy being held as the universal model of the “end of history”.7 Western democracies have thus unsurprisingly long been annoyed at the fact that China blatantly refuses to “transit” toward democracy in accordance with the prophecy of democracy as the end of history and the West as the destiny of the world. In the face of the emergence of COVID-19 in Wuhan, Western democracies have repeatedly asserted the superiority of their political regime—with, in the background, the belief in a form of superior democratic rationality. However, from March-April onwards, as Western democracies in turn came to be seriously affected by the disease, this stance started to reveal its illusory as well as deadly character. Does Democracy Protect Against Disease? When the epidemic was announced, in France as in many Western countries, the media discourse immediately engaged in a denunciation of the Chinese political system: editorials, op-eds, and broadcast or televised debates condemned the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, considered a “martyr of the coronavirus”,8 analysing how it revealed of the “failure” of the Chinese system,9 particularly of its “totalitarianism”.10 French media have not hesitated to attribute Dr. Li’s death to his treatment by Chinese authorities, writing at length about his “imprisonment”,11 or even, for some, going as far as to suggest his murder by the Chinese authorities.12 In other words, the coronavirus was framed less as an issue of public health than as a matter of foreign policy/politics. By the end of January, the announcement of the lockdown in China reinforced this reading even further: the lockdown was presented as a totalitarian measure dictated by the profound nature of the Chinese regime, rather than by the severity of the problem in epidemiological terms. The decision to put tens of millions of people under house arrest reinforced the feeling of radical alterity between Europe and China: more than ever, it was out of the question to compare the two entities. Meanwhile, the superiority of democracy was energetically reaffirmed.13 Then, from March onwards, while the prospect of confinement no longer appeared so “exotic/archaic” in Europe and as Wuhan started to lift its lockdown, editorials and op-eds began to question the ability of democracy to handle the crisis any better than China had.14 The question was raised as to whether authoritarianism might not ultimately be better able to respond to health crises, although the answer remained invariably negative: no, of course not.15 Finally, from early April onwards, when China reported its “success” in eradicating the virus, Western democracies imposed quarantine measures—although European mortality rates quickly escalated to higher numbers than in China. Since then, editorials and op-eds have returned to the discourse of non-comparability, arguing that Chinese numbers were fake, which was typical of Chinese “propaganda”,16 itself a product of China being a “structurally deceitful country”.17 Thus, it was argued, given the lack of comparable data (statistics in democracies being assumed to be honest and reliable), the comparison between democracy and dictatorship would be impossible—as well as being morally unacceptable. Are Public Policies Comparable Only Among Democracies? Not very many situations lend themselves to international comparison better than the one arising out of the COVID-19 pandemic. John Stuart Mill, one of the founders of qualitative comparison, established in his System of Logic, published in 1843, a typology of the comparative methodologies to isolate and test the variables of a given phenomenon: the method of most similar cases producing differing outcomes and the method of most different cases producing similar outcomes.18 The China-France comparison seems a priori to be in the matrix of the most different cases: for the same outcome, namely the suppression of the virus, two different methods, one democratic, the other authoritarian. Yet, the most similar cases comparison appears to be a better fit: the two countries have used the same methods, namely lockdown (confinement), but with dissimilar results. China aimed to eradicate the virus, France to slow down its pace (the so-called “flattening” of the curve). Of course, the lockdown was stricter in China than in France, but progressively, with the use of drones and methods of surveillance, this gap has reduced.19 In certain respects, the French lockdown was both more stringent and more massive than the one imposed in China: China confined only one province and a handful of cities, a tiny part of its population, without declaring a state of emergency, while Paris imposed a national lockdown on its 67 million inhabitants and declared a state of emergency. In France, the media pushed a narrative of blaming and shaming China, which in turn delayed rather than prompted the reaction of the French government to take public health measures against the coronavirus. The expected positive effects of freedom of the press and transparency in terms of inducing prompt government reaction to the crisis did not materialise. The initial absence of reaction toward the virus contrasts with the “overreaction” deployed against the H1N1 flu in 2009, which had a much lower death rate than COVID-19 but was first declared in the United States, another country considered to be part of the “club of liberal Western democracies”. So, why did Amartya Sen’s theory, once extrapolated to epidemics, not prove to be true in the case of COVID-19? The Democracy-Dictatorship Binary: An Orientalist Reading of Comparative Politics In 1978, Edward Saïd, following Syed Hussein Alatas,20 defined Orientalism as an epistemic process at the heart of the domination of the West, a process built on a series of essentialising stereotypes.21 From an Orientalist perspective, the COVID-19 epidemic was interpreted in the West as the dysfunctional, even well-deserved, offspring of Chinese totalitarianism, rather than as a public health event. Biases and stereotypes against China, reactivated by the start of the epidemic, are not only racist against Chinese people per se but also reveal deeper stereotypes of authoritarian regimes, of which Beijing is currently the paradigmatic case.22 The origins of the massive media reaction of blaming China can be traced back to the Orientalism of our categories of thought and the categories we use in the social sciences. Such Orientalism lies at the heart of the genesis of the discipline of political science. It suffices to quote Montesquieu, who was the first, in his Spirit of the Laws, to establish despotism as the “natural” condition of the East, based on his readings on Japan, China, Siam, and the Ottoman Empire.23 Next, in Montesquieu’s wake, John Stuart Mill and Max Weber associated freedom, legality, and modernity distinctively and exclusively with the West.24 After the Second World War, transitology, which borrows heavily from the theory of modernisation derived from the Weberian thesis, became one of the pillars of the discipline of comparative politics.25 Non-Western countries were intended to “transit” toward democracy. The dictatorship-democracy dichotomy became the new semiotic avatar of the differential degrees of civilization between West and East. The central question, formulated from the West, focused on how to “assist” non-democratic countries to democratise, reactivating the myth of the civilising mission of the West. From the 1980s onwards, the social sciences were diversely affected by the Saïd revolution. If Orientalism had a major impact on the discipline of anthropology, it had a lesser impact on other social sciences. In political science and public law in particular, Eurocentrism was vigorously denounced, but the comparison between dictatorships and democracies remained limited to the emphasis of their profound, ontological alterity. Orientalism diffused with more ease within the interdisciplinary field of “area studies”, a somewhat marginalised field. If most of the “areas” forming the units of area studies were to some degree homogeneous in religious or political terms—real or fantasied26—this was not the case of Oriental Asia, characterised by its extreme religious as well as political diversity.