An urgent new class of challenges to independent intellectual inquiry has emerged on the global stage. These challenges stem primarily from the vulnerabilities that economic and technological change have introduced into the knowledge sectors of open societies, including both mature and developing democracies. In recent years, intensifying marketization has placed ever-greater financial and competitive pressures on publishers, universities, and other knowledge-sector institutions critical to the functioning of democracies. 

The well-known images of East Germans eagerly pouring into West Berlin on the night of November 9, 1989, have become symbols of the beginning of the end of the Cold War and, more specifically, evidence of the failure of Communist rule in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) and its socialist economic system. Yet that historic moment was only the final dramatic high point in the long history of dissatisfaction with living conditions in the eastern territory of Germany, first occupied by the Red Army during the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 and, four years later, established as the GDR when, in Winston Churchill’s words, the Iron Curtain fell across the continent.

The Digital Revolution and the evolution of the information environment have ushered in an unprecedented era of information conflict, with revisionist states using hostile, disinformation-based influence campaigns to subvert democratic governance and the rule of law. International law has struggled to keep pace. This essay argues for an interpretation of international law that would consider strategic, covert deception as a form of prohibited coercion in violation of the rule of nonintervention.

This paper on India has been included in the Hoover Institution’s important project on Socialism and Free-Market Capitalism, The Human Prosperity Project, because India represents a unique case of socialism and democracy in conflict. Following India’s birth to freedom and independence in 1947, its democracy was dominated by socialist, planned-economy policies that failed for nearly seventy years to achieve the levels of growth its people desperately needed to rise out of poverty.