Yalta – more a semi-colon than a full stop

The primaries in the US have already supplied a much-needed boost for dreary New Year television viewing: Hillary Clinton crying, Barack Obama orating and John McCain offering a glimpse of grace, enjoying the fight and his own beliefs. He stands little chance of winning: his politics appeal to everyone and no-one; and anyway, Americans seem systematically to vote for the candidate who is not a war hero with a strong record of subsequent public service.

Besides narrative, the primaries have also supplied a very necessary model of democracy, albeit one in which you need to be able to amass an obscene amount of money in order to be able to compete, and in which you run the risk of having your life shredded into minute facts and endless fiction. Nonetheless, it is a safe and open system; one in which in 2000 Al Gore won the popular vote and lost on the back of a political decision by the Supreme Court - and not a single person died.

Democracy has taken a beating around the world these past weeks: there have been violent elections in Kenya, the murder of Benazir Bhutto, and the subsequent postponement of elections in Pakistan. In the final weeks of 2007 there were far from free and fair elections in Russia, a state of emergency was declared in Georgia - repealed and then redeemed by a snap democratic election - and a decidedly dodgy leadership contest for the ANC in South Africa.

Taken together, it appears that the institution that has done most to ensure wealth and health around the globe in the past decades is in retreat - but it may actually also be in a form of realignment. It is the Western world that saw the end of the Second World War as the end of wars, especially for the creation of new nations, and the start of the democratic era. The rest of the world never viewed the Yalta Agreement in the same light.

For many peoples and states 1945 was never a full stop so much as a semi- colon of sheer exhaustion - which was then extended because of the Cold War. What we are now witnessing is the conflicts of nations establishing themselves - and they are messy. No more, and in many cases far less, violent than the wars that established European nations, but nonetheless painful - and in our era, fully visible. We are watching democracy under attack, not just reading about it in three-week-old despatches from far-flung corners of the world.

The EU is both metaphorically and physically caught between the US and the rest of the world: it firmly established democracy as its own standard, but has not always been able to insist upon it elsewhere. With the fall of the Soviet Union the EU hit upon a winning formula for dealing with emerging nations - cash. It has literally paid for liberal democracy and in the process also established law-based societies more or less everywhere between Germany and Russia. But money has not always worked: since 1990 the EU has also seen its own conflicts of nationhood, most especially in the former Yugoslavia, whilst all around its neighbourhood and further away the turmoil of nations breaking and making is apparent, whether in Africa or the Middle East. In these situations, the Union has shown itself inadequate: faced with naked hatred and high passions, the nice Europeans open a purse and shy away.

The EU also does something else: it preaches. As nations fight and democracy collapses, the Union issues statements of disapproval, dismay, or reproach, often ending with expectations or demands for difference.

Apart from failing as a policy - no nation outside Europe has stopped fighting because of EU speeches or money, though the latter is always taken - such an approach has done nothing to position the EU in the forefront of the fight for democracy. This issue should be guiding the planning for the new EU foreign service. Democracy has ensured peace and prosperity in Europe and many other places: its retreat will therefore endanger Europe’s own stability and in an unstable environment cash may not be able to buy it back.

• Ilana Bet-El is an academic, author and policy adviser based in Brussels.

The primaries in the US have already supplied a much-needed boost for dreary New Year television viewing: Hillary Clinton crying, Barack Obama orating and John McCain offering a glimpse of grace, enjoying the fight and his own beliefs. He stands little chance of winning: his politics appeal to everyone and no-one; and anyway, Americans seem systematically to vote for the candidate who is not a war hero with a strong record of subsequent public service.