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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

A Recession We Can All Applaud

Before democracy can spread further, it must take deeper root where it has already sprouted. It is a basic principle of any military or geopolitical campaign that at some point an advancing force must consolidate its gains before it conquers more territory. ~Larry Diamond It is doubtful that the further spread of democracy is necessarily […]

Before democracy can spread further, it must take deeper root where it has already sprouted. It is a basic principle of any military or geopolitical campaign that at some point an advancing force must consolidate its gains before it conquers more territory. ~Larry Diamond

It is doubtful that the further spread of democracy is necessarily the most desirable thing for many of the countries Diamong mentions.  However, supposing that were true, describing the advance of democracy with military metaphors and conceiving of the spread of democracy as if it ought to be part of a “geopolitical campaign” are two almost guaranteed ways to make sure that we see greater resistance and “backsliding” in the future.  The United States ought not to be engaged in such a “geopolitcal campaign” in any case (so I reject the basic assumption of the rest of Diamond’s article), but if supporters of nascent democratic movements around the world are perceived as creating footholds for conquest, even if these are not actual occupations by foreign armies, they will be discredited immediately in the eyes of their countrymen.  Native democrats must be able to make a case in terms intelligible to their countrymen that persuades that democratic government is in the best interests of their country.  In other words, they need to express their democratic views in a patriotic idiom, and anything that lends support to the idea that democratisation is part of a foreign “geopolitcal campaign” will undermine these efforts. 

Then there is a more pragmatic question: why have there been setbacks?  The simplest answer is that democratically constituted governments frequently fail or evolve naturally into authoritarian, ethnic/tribal majoritarian or sectarian regimes in modernising states.  The spread of democracy has suffered setbacks because democracy often gives rise to corrupt or ineffectual government, and this tendency is greatest in those countries that have the weakest traditions of representative government.  Diamond’s prescription is a laundry list of the near-impossible:

Emerging democracies must demonstrate that they can solve their governance problems and meet their citizens’ expectations for freedom, justice, a better life, and a fairer society. If democracies do not more effectively contain crime and corruption, generate economic growth, relieve economic inequality, and secure freedom and the rule of law, people will eventually lose faith and turn to authoritarian alternatives.

In other words, emerging democracies must work miracles and live up to the utterly unrealistic billing democracy has been given by its Western proponents.  Pragmatically, in the present era, two things take precedence over all of the others: securing the rule of law and creating the conditions for economic growth, mainly through secure property and contract rights and a judiciary that is likely to enforce those rights free from political interference.  The other goals are either extremely long-term (containing corruption) or may be pie-in-the-sky objectives in some rapidly modernising states.  One sure way to help emerging democracies meet their citizens’ expectations is to make clear that citizens shouldn’t expect very much.  The less Westerners and democrats around the world deify democracy, the better its chances of enduring failures and mistakes.  The less we lie about its potential to foster social and international peace, the better grasp everyone will have of what democracy can and cannot do.  Democracy is simply a vehicle for the social and political pathologies of a people, and so it is only as good, peaceful or rational as its participants (which, given our fallen state, is to say not much of any of these), and if a people does not have the habits necessary to self-government its democratic experiment will become one form of despotism or another naturally enough.  That is the natural result of democracy.  What should amaze us is that it does not happen more often.  Of course, the reason it doesn’t happen more often is that many of the successful “democratic” states have built-in liberal, constitutional and definitely un-democratic safeguards that prevent democracy from reaching its full bloom in despotism.  Indeed, most of the desirable things we associate with what we all lazily call “democracy” are the products of other institutional features that have little or nothing to do with popular participation in the selection of governors, the myth of popular sovereignty or the fiction of government by consent.  The peoples in successful “democratic” states thrive and remain reasonably more free in spite of the democratic elements of their governments.

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