The Democracy Wave

Aiding Democracy Abroad
The Learning Curve by Thomas Carothers
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 412 pp., $ 39.95

Developing Democracy
Toward Consolidation by Larry Diamond
Johns Hopkins University Press, 392 pp., $ 49.95

For more than fifteen years, between the fall of Portugal's dictatorship in 1974 and the 1989-91 collapse of the Soviet empire, the world experienced a great, multi-continent wave of democratization. Now, though, the wave appears to have crested. International news is dominated by stories of democratic decay: rising anti-Western sentiment and internal war in Russia, the ascent of an ex-military demagogue to the presidency of Venezuela, coups in Pakistan and the Ivory Coast. Prospects for self-government in the world's first and fourth largest countries, China and Indonesia, are uncertain at best. In Serbia, Cuba, Burma, North Korea, most of sub-Saharan Africa, and almost the entire Arab World, the prospects are dimmer still.

This is a problem for the United States. The Cold War is over, but the consolidation and expansion of international democracy remains manifestly in America's foreign policy interest. That interest is partly moral: We desire to see other countries secure the freedoms we cherish. It is partly economic: Free politics and free markets go together, and free-market societies make the best trading partners. But, to an underappreciated degree, the American national interest in global democratization is a matter of old-fashioned, politico-military "realism" as well. Democracies tend not to go to war with one another, much less with us. And faltering democracy tends to incubate anti-Americanism. Venezuela's new president, for example, Lt. Col. Hugo Chavez, has been cozying up to Castro's Cuba and the Marxist FARC guerrillas in Colombia.

In short, the global march of freedom this past quarter century has been a huge national security windfall for the United States, and even its partial reversal would be a significant defeat. The question, then, is not whether the United States should promote democracy abroad, but how.

Anyone inclined to believe that the democracy-promotion programs currently sponsored by the U.S. government represent a sufficient response to this challenge should read Thomas Carothers's new book. Carothers was a Reagan administration State Department official and is now vice president for global policy at the Carnegie Endowment. He is a sympathetic student of American efforts to spread and sustain self-government overseas. But he is also a rigorous one. So while his forecast remains hopeful, his judgment on the present state of those efforts is unsparing: U.S. spending on international democracy -- some $ 700 million per year, by Carothers's reckoning -- is ineffectual at best and counterproductive at worst.

As Aiding Democracy Abroad explains, the democracy-promotion effort -- and its attendant bureaucracy -- emerged from the 1980s battle over U.S. intervention against communism in Latin America. The Reagan administration, responding to liberal criticism that its support for right-wing regimes failed to address the underlying causes of left-wing revolution, agreed with Congress to launch a variety of pro-democracy efforts -- everything from training police and judges to funding election monitors. That work has survived the Cold War and exists today as an even larger panoply of programs designed to help build democratic systems in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. A host of agencies have a piece of this pie: the National Endowment for Democracy, the State and Justice departments, the Agency for International Development -- even the Pentagon, which justifies its training of foreign soldiers as a bid to inculcate respect for independent, civil authorities.

Carothers argues, convincingly, that the chief conceptual flaw of these programs is the strange (and unacknowledged) assumption that fashioning a new political system can be an apolitical exercise. Factional, ideological, economic, and personal factors shape the performance of politicians, journalists, policy advocates, and judges in an emerging democracy -- just as in a fully developed one. But, all too often, the democracy-promotion bureaucracy back in Washington ignores such subtleties in favor of the shallowest form of missionary work: sending Americans, qualified by little more than their own citizenship in a democracy, quickly in and out of some country to "train" the natives.

I've been there. In 1996, Nicaragua was preparing for its second national election since 1990, when the democratic opposition had toppled the Sandinistas. Washington wanted the coming election to be seen as free, fair, and legitimate, with maximum participation by an informed public. So the United States Information Agency (USIA) planned a weeklong series of seminars and lectures for the local media in Nicaragua -- about how to cover a political campaign. And I was selected to deliver them. I hadn't actually spent much time covering campaigns. But I did speak Spanish and I had been to Nicaragua as a foreign correspondent, so USIA was only too happy to fly me down.

I stayed in a gorgeous hotel, ate at the very best steakhouses, and met with a series of Nicaraguan journalists who struck me as earnest and determined to professionalize their country's media. And I was beginning to think my little visit was really having an impact until the conclusion of a meeting with reporters our embassy considered the best and most honest in Managua. After listening politely to my ringing calls for tough, issue-oriented reportage, one mischievous member of the audience raised his hand and asked: "So, how much does it cost to bribe a reporter in the United States?" The room erupted in mordant laughter, and the point was clear: I would soon return home, and under-paid writers in virtually lawless Nicaragua would stay behind -- where they would continue to be routinely bought off.

Carothers's book is full of anecdotes like mine, all of which underscore the perverse consequences -- even the smidgen of corruption -- that plague democracy-promotion programs around the world. New "non-governmental organizations" in emerging democracies, which are supposed to embody some independent, indigenous interest in the target country, generally can't survive without funding from a U.S. or other Western source. Support for political parties Washington regards as pro-democratic is inevitably tainted as foreign favoritism. Exchange missions from developing countries to modern capitals often teach exactly the wrong lessons: Nepalese parliamentarians were so impressed by a trip to the parliament in Copenhagen, Carothers reports, that back in Katmandu they began stealing from the public till to buy the faxes, computers, and fancy furniture they'd seen in the offices of their Danish counterparts. And so on.

Carothers believes democracy aid can be salvaged -- hence the "learning curve" of his book's title. He thinks there will be better results over the next few decades if democracy promoters temper their ambitions, take a greater interest in the local politics of beneficiary countries, and pay more attention to building democratic attitudes and processes (and less to the care and feeding of select client groups). One hopes Carothers is right. But it remains an open question whether American politics can engineer so sophisticated and long-term a commitment as he envisions, especially since Carothers himself concedes that even the best-designed and best-run democracy programs will have incremental effects, not "dramatic" ones.

Why that might be is apparent in Developing Democracy, Hoover Institution sociologist Larry Diamond's systematic account of the political realities that make democracy promotion so challenging. Diamond, too, maintains an optimistic mood about his subject. And he marshals an impressive array of cross-cultural social-science evidence, some of which seems to justify that mood. Particularly important is Diamond's demonstration that neither culture nor economic development necessarily poses an obstacle to democratization. Notwithstanding Singaporean dictator Lee Kwan Yew's self-justifying rhetoric about immutable "Asian values," Taiwan and South Korea have made rapid and dramatic political progress. In Africa, impoverished Mali is also consolidating a democratic regime, as is South Africa.

What's more, one clearly helpful policy implication emerges from Diamond's comparative analysis. Studies show that in both Asia and Europe, education appears to be positively correlated with the entrenchment of democratic ideals -- more so, perhaps, than any other single factor. Which would seem to suggest that, if our goal is to foster long-term democratic development, the United States and other democracies should alter our budgets, reducing support for political parties and opposition newspapers and giving those dollars to schools instead. As a foreign-aid mission, advancing literacy and numeracy is relatively well-understood and politically anodyne -- particularly when compared with the more sensitive task of, say, underwriting parliamentarians.

But, curiously, Developing Democracy doesn't stop to recommend a major Western effort to promote basic education in emerging democracies. Diamond's principal concern, one shared by Thomas Carothers, is to establish the distinction between merely "electoral" and truly "liberal" democratic systems. An electoral democracy's government changes hands by means of periodic popular ballots -- and that's about as recognizably democratic as it gets. A liberal democracy boasts not only regular elections, but also a reasonably transparent legal system, a high degree of interpersonal trust and tolerance, developed political parties, high rates of citizen participation, a free and responsible press, strong grass-roots advocacy organizations, and so on. In short, all the desiderata of democracy-promotion programs.

Here Diamond's evidence becomes more sobering -- and less clear in its implications. The vast majority of the world's recently established democracies, he argues, are still in their "electoral" phase and will remain so until they are "considered legitimate by all major sections of their population." That degree of legitimization, in turn, largely depends on improving a new democracy's "political performance" until it is comparable to that achieved in the highly institutionalized polities of Western Europe and North America. And improved political performance is itself a function of many variables -- economic growth, culture, individual attitudes -- all of which are constantly interacting in unpredictable ways, and none of which is particularly easy for outsiders to influence, let alone engineer.

Now, it is undoubtedly better to live in a liberal democracy than an illiberal one. Both are better than no democracy at all. And modern political science is quite adept at specifying these distinctions. What political science can't quite seem to do, however, is answer the question of how to move up the scale from latter to former. Consider Diamond's cautious discussion of China, which he rightly identifies as the most important piece of contested political terrain remaining in the world. "All that can be said in confidence [sic] now is that China is starting to liberalize politically as it crosses the threshold of $ 2,500 per capita income," he writes. "Sooner or later, economic development will generate growing pressures (and possibilities) for China to make a more definitive regime change, to democracy." But this "crisis" could "just as likely" lead to some new form of authoritarianism, or civil disorder, or even a "ruthless crackdown." Who knows?

Developing Democracy's reluctance (or inability) to predict China's future is understandable, of course. But it does reveal a paradox of the "developmental" approach to political freedom. Larry Diamond and Thomas Carothers both correctly insist that true, liberal democracy requires a highly active, organized citizenry, as well as increasingly responsive public institutions. Yet both also acknowledge that pressure for better political performance can destabilize rather than consolidate a fledgling government. Unrealistic expectations -- especially about economic growth -- can overwhelm and delegitimize a new democratic government, thus inviting nostalgia for some erstwhile strong-man regime.

Again, then: How are we to strike the balance? How, precisely, does American foreign policy best involve itself in the question whether democracy arises in other countries -- and, once established, whether it stands or falls, develops or decays? Perhaps the discussion needs to range more widely than the political science literature ordinarily does. Perhaps, while our policymakers are busy learning more about the intricacies of local politics in this or that foreign capital, they should also pay renewed attention to the global context of democratization.

Over the past hundred years, the world has passed through a great and fateful battle of ideas. Three contenders laid claim to the mantle of political legitimacy: democracy, fascism, and communism. They struggled not only in a figurative, ideological sense, but literally: in wars, hot and cold, that cost humanity an ocean of blood. It was an awful price. But the result -- achieved in large part with American military muscle -- was a dramatic international expansion of democracy. Two of today's most firmly consolidated liberal democracies, Germany and Japan, were directly conquered by the United States -- at a time when neither had a strong liberal democratic tradition. And, protected by the promise or reality of American force and assistance, they and other democracies were able to take root, survive, and consolidate throughout the Cold War.

Vietnam is the obvious exception that proves the rule, an American defeat that probably retarded democratization by emboldening pro-Soviet movements around the world. But it is otherwise difficult to imagine the democratization of Spain, Portugal, and Greece in the absence of NATO's security umbrella over Western Europe. U.S. fighter jets were deployed to help stave off a military coup in the Philippines. The presence of American soldiers along Korea's 38th parallel gave Washington leverage to press for a democratic opening in Seoul. Panama would now be a military dictatorship if not for President Bush's 1989 invasion. Not to mention Ronald Reagan's rescue of little Grenada in 1983 or Bill Clinton's flawed but defensible occupation of Haiti in 1994.

Even the much-maligned Reagan administration policies toward Central America deserve some credit for promoting the recent democratization of that region -- albeit in ironic and sometimes unintended ways. The standard criticism was true enough: The Nicaraguan contras and the rightist governments of El Salvador and Honduras got millions of dollars in U.S. military aid -- and were guilty of indefensible human rights violations. But it is not true that the alternative was some kind of clean passage to democracy, negotiated with a purely democratic opposition. The Marxist Left in Latin America was armed and financed by Fidel Castro, and Cuba-model dictatorships probably would have become entrenched had the United States simply kept its hands off.

Here, and elsewhere, American military aid to anti-Communist forces in the 1980s had a double effect. It gave the United States a measure of moderating influence over the behavior and ideology of its allies. And it helped wear down the Soviet Union and decisively weakened the guerrilla movements that the Soviets and Cubans sponsored. The net effect was a gradual reduction of political polarization, hot spot by hot spot, and greater space for democrats and democracy. The phenomenon is more than theoretical; Larry Diamond and Thomas Carothers both identify El Salvador, for example, as a place where democratic values are relatively well-entrenched, despite continuing high rates of crime and poverty -- and despite its horrific recent experience of civil war. Indeed, democracy may be so firmly established in El Salvador precisely because of the chastening experience of bloody internal strife.

Thanks to American power, then, fascism and communism have been mostly vanquished. The remaining task is to remove them where they linger (China, North Korea, Cuba, Iraq, Serbia), and to cope with or over-come other ideologically based obstacles to democracy -- like Islamic fundamentalism, the "Asian values" canard, and the tribal and ethnic strife that bedevil the Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa, the Caucasus, and the Balkans. It may take more than a century to handle all of this unfinished business. But, if the United States is serious about defending and consolidating democracy, it will have to identify democracy's enemies and oppose them, both with the force of our ideas and, where necessary, with just plain force.

In short, what Joseph Nye has called "soft power" -- foreign aid, trade, and the other persuasive tools which Carothers and Diamond emphasize -- may not be enough. "Hard power," the maintenance of a strong U.S. military and a network of global security commitments and alliances capable of protecting democracies and resisting aggressive dictatorships, will surely continue to play an indispensable role. Doubters need only ask themselves whether democracy in Taiwan, South Korea, or even Japan would be stabilized or destabilized by a U.S. pullout from East Asia -- where China increasingly flexes its military muscles.

Diamond and Carothers both make eloquent arguments that the United States can help consolidate emerging democracies by better fulfilling its exemplary role: by cleaning up its own democratic act at home. The "demonstration effect" of successful, stable self-government in America, they reason, has proved powerful in the past. So it should prove powerful in the future, as well: The more we do to root out domestic ills like police brutality and crooked campaign financing, the more credibility we will confer on democrats abroad who urge their fellow citizens to emulate us.

Let us never stop trying to perfect our own politics, whose example surely has helped inspire would-be democrats across the globe. Just the same, there are reasons to remain skeptical about how much this particular demonstration effect can accomplish. One is historical: The world's most recent wave of democratization began in the mid-1970s, at a time when America was just emerging from Vietnam, Watergate, and segregation -- and just about to enter a period of brutal stagflation. To a great many people at home and abroad, it appeared that American democracy was altogether too rotten to compete with the Soviet Union. A whole Third World generation gravitated to radical and revolutionary doctrines as a result. But still the democrats of Portugal, Spain, and Greece -- and later, of Latin America and much of Asia -- carried the day. How America looked from a distance was, ultimately, a secondary issue. The example of democratizing neighboring states surely weighed heavier.

What's more, any demonstration effect is inherently subjective. Is America's system of campaign finance really a symptom of political rot, as Diamond and Carothers seem to believe so strongly? Or is it simply the result of an irreconcilable conflict between equally valid democratic ideals: a maximal amount of free (and expensive) political speech, on the one hand, and a level political playing field of unimpeachable integrity, on the other? Voters, legislatures, and courts have been wrestling with this question for twenty-five years and haven't managed to settle it.

The bottom line is that no matter how good an example we set, and no matter how genuine the reforms we adopt, anti-democratic forces will always find reasons to condemn us and, by extension, democracy itself. In such a world, the best "demonstration effect" on behalf of democracy may remain a United States prepared to support even flawed democracies with force when they are threatened -- so that they might meet the first test of democratic consolidation: survival. With enough economic growth and political experience, these flawed democracies may further liberalize. But that takes time. And it is hard to be patient unless you are secure in the knowledge that the world's most powerful country will, if necessary, fight for the modest, ennobling proposition that democracy is the worst political system known to man, except for all the others.

Charles Lane is editor-at-large of the New Republic.