By Christophe Jaffrelot

The Arab yearning for democracy that burst forth last spring has not only toppled entrenched autocratic rulers, it has also presented democracies with an embarrassing dilemma.
The Arab Spring has held up a discomforting mirror, especially to developing countries that pride themselves on being democracies. Three major democracies – India, Brazil and South Africa, known as IBSA – by abstaining on a censure-Syria motion two weeks ago have yet again shown in practice that they do not side with aspiring democrats in the developing world. The stronger a country becomes the less disposed it may be to support principles it does not require for protection – and that some of its oppressed citizens may invoke.

Exactly one year ago, in his U.N. General Assembly address, President Barack Obama appealed to newly democratic countries “don’t stand idly by, don’t be silent.” He reminded them, “When dissidents elsewhere are imprisoned and protesters are beaten, recall your own history, because part of the price of our own freedom is standing up for the freedom of others.”

India, Brazil and South Africa had almost the opposite reaction. With Moammar Gadhafi’s forces about to launch a massacre in Benghazi, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution authorizing all necessary measures to protect Libyan civilians. India and Brazil joined authoritarian China and Russia in abstaining. South Africa voted for the resolution, only to reverse itself.

While Syrian demonstrators were victims of ferocious crackdowns, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India and China) rejected a U.N. resolution. In August, while India presided over the Security Council, three officials from Brazil, South Africa and India went to Damascus and endorsed the official stand of Bashar Assad, as presented by the Syrian deputy foreign minister in New Delhi a few weeks earlier, urging India not to be misled by “Western propaganda.”

In a recent public lecture the Indian National Security Adviser Shiv Shankar Menon justified his country’s policy: “Do we not have a responsibility to spread democracy and fight for our values abroad? Yes and no.” He offered caveats: “Yes, if we have the means to actually ensure that we are able to spread them. And yes if having democrats as our neighbors contributes to the peaceful periphery that we need.” But he argued that “a people cannot be forced to be free or to practice democracy.” He took an ill-disguised shot at the West: “We have seen how high sounding phrases like the ‘right to protect’ are selectively invoked and brutally applied in the pursuit of self-interest, giving humanitarian and international intervention a bad name.”

While the insensitivity to struggles for human rights is understandable from China and Russia, it is puzzling in the case of democracies like South Africa, which gained freedom from oppression in part due to external interventions. The foreign ministers of India, Brazil and South Africa have met every year since 2003, and claim to represent the largest democracies of the three largest continents. They justify their coming together by the need to “democratize” the international system by giving a voice to those excluded so far.

Much is at stake because if these countries join hands with Russia and China against democracy promotion, the future of value systems, the most widely admitted terms of reference since 1945, may be in jeopardy. Yet the situation may not be so tragic for three reasons:

First, cynicism in international politics is nothing new. The West has supported autocratic regimes when it suited its interests. The list is huge, from Augusto Pinochet’s Chile to Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s Pakistan. The emerging countries are doing the same. They promote democracy when it suits them. India refrains from helping Aung San Suu Kyi to enjoy access to Burmese gas, but helps the Afghan democracy against Pakistan. South Africa does not support Robert Mugabe’s unionist opponents, probably lest victory in Zimbabwe lead South African trade unions to break off their alliance with the African National Congress. Yet Pretoria is prepared to intervene in Ivory Coast to lessen French influence. Brazil does not recognize the government that emerged from free elections in Honduras and abstains from raising issues of democracy and human rights in Nicaragua. But Western countries have behaved similarly before.

Second, the record of India, Brazil and South Africa are not so bad. Brazil, in 2001, played a key role in creating the Inter-American Democratic Charter of the Organization of American States. Brazil not only placed itself under the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Human Rights Court, it helped form the U.N. Human Rights Council.

At the regional level, Brazil was part of the 1998 declaration of the Mercosur, after which undemocratic organization members could be either suspended or expelled. Similarly, Nelson Mandela criticized the Nigeria regime for killing human-rights defenders and intervened militarily to save a democratic regime in Lesotho in 1998. India intervened in the Maldives to prevent a 1988 coup and in Sri Lanka in 1987-1989, with Rajiv Gandhi sending the Indian Peace Keeping Force, in vain, to restore normalcy between Tamils and Sinhalese.

Third, the BRICS may refuse to support U.N.-related foreign intervention in Syria because they resent how the West used Resolution 1973 for regime change in Libya. After a few weeks, it became clear, indeed, that the goal of the war in Libya was to replace Gadhafi. Optimists, therefore, may assume that after the dust settles, the emerging countries may once again view democracy-related foreign interventions in a better light.

However, such optimism should be qualified for three other reasons: First, as a country grows stronger, the more it indulges in realpolitik. When India, Brazil and South Africa were weak, they made a point to invoke moral principles, which were then their only protections against dominant powers. Now they can afford to resort to force and pay less attention to international law.

Second, and more importantly, the three are obsessed with national sovereignty to such an extent that the U.N. principle “the duty to protect” is hardly acceptable to them. This is one of the legacies of the imperial age, colonization and its exploitation. But beyond this post-colonial mentality, there is also the will to be free in dealing with domestic issues such as Kashmir, the Maoist movement in India or the Amazonian forest in Brazil. The policies of the three converge with China, with its Tibetan problem, and Russia, with Chechnya, against the West, which in the post-Cold War 21st century has embraced interventionist policies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

Last but not least, so long as the West claims human rights as a Western creation, the emerging countries will share a reluctance to support the Western states, simply as a means of asserting themselves and making the point to invent a new paradigm, even if their elite are often a product of the West.

Instead of looking down at India, Brazil and South Africa from the moral high ground (a tactic bound to fail give the fact that Western states are lacking in political and moral standing), the West should engage the three on new terrain. It should respond, for instance, to Menon’s statement that “people cannot be forced to be free.” But is helping Syrians remove their oppressors an example of force?

Christophe Jaffrelot is a senior research fellow with the Center for International Studies and Research, Sciences Po-CNRS. This commentary is reprinted with permission from YaleGlobal Online (www.yaleglobal.yale.edu), Copyright © 2011, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, Yale University.