Democracy: the down side

DEMOCRACY was supposed to be the great American gift to the post-Cold War world. So it comes as no mean embarrassment that less than a decade later many find that democracy is not what it was cracked up to be. In many places, democracy is less the solution than the problem: the new problem of the illiberal content of democracy -- people choosing bad things like racism and selfish power.

As the Cold War wound down, many Americans felt that democratic values had triumphed, that the United States had a duty and opportunity to usher others into the charmed circle, and that our resources and their readiness made the project feasible. But that was before Sudan, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Pakistan, Turkey, Peru, Singapore, Azerbaijan and the dozens of other cases in which, in the '90s, democratic electoral procedures were used to gather up power that was then applied in what most of us would call an undemocratic way.

In Russia, Boris Yeltsin, waving the democratic banner, literally shot up (a rogue) parliament. In Yugoslavia, democracy became the tool of mass murder. In Rwanda, a Western-backed multiparty election separated out the tribes and contributed to genocide.

Fareed Zakaria in Foreign Affairs ("The Rise of Illiberal Democracy") and Robert D. Kaplan in the Atlantic Monthly ("Was Democracy Just a Moment?") remind us that democracy as electoral choice, even as competitive multiparty choice, exposes a society to its worst judgments as well as its best. Without a system that protects individual rights and puts institutional limitations on central power, democracy can become a ticket to a crude anything-goes majoritarianism, to anarchy and to the tyranny that fills the vacuum created by anarchy.

Since we live in a democratic age, Zakaria notes, there is no getting away from democracy. He thinks the problems of governance in the next century will likely be problems within democracy: "This makes them more difficult to handle, wrapped as they are in the mantle of legitimacy."

The United States must better understand and explain the true nature of its own democracy. It is not simply a doctrine of direct popular expression. The American model comes with many checks and balances on executive power. It comes also with the sort of propertied professional middle class it takes a century or two to shape up. And with a commitment to civil liberties, the rule of law and the separation of powers. These are the building blocks of the requisite constitutional liberalism. They cannot be found in most Third World places, although fortunately they do exist in much of formerly communist-controlled Central Europe, a region sharing the Western class structure and political tradition.

It follows that the United States must exercise a little humility and prudence. Instead of "searching for new lands to democratize and new places to hold elections," Zakaria suggests, it would be better to "consolidate democracy where it has taken root and to encourage the gradual development of constitutional liberalism across the globe. Democracy without constitutional liberalism is not simply inadequate, but dangerous, bringing with it the erosion of liberty, the abuse of power, ethnic divisions, and even war."

Kaplan maintains a shorter-term focus on dealing with things as they are. He would come to political terms with the existing collection of "pragmatic hybrid" regimes poised somewhere between democratic and authoritarian poles: the "[quiet] military paternalism" of Turkey, the "subtle authoritarianism" of Fujimori's Peru, even the "offensive neo-authoritarianism" of Singapore. His favorite regime is that of the unelected army-backed Pakistani prime minister of 1993, World Bank technocrat Moin Qureshi: "Because [he] had no voters to please, he made bold moves that restored political stability and economic growth."

The two writers plainly doubt that the familiar levers available to American policy -- public reprimands, economic penalties and the like -- will do much to make faltering governments more democratic. Kaplan in particular thinks growth requires the sort of social discipline that democracy discourages. This is bound to be a continuing dilemma for the United States, which is accustomed to speaking of democracy and development in the same breath. You can have it all, says Washington. Maybe not, say these students of real choices.

Look at my program, says Carl Gershman, head of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the publicly financed, privately administered American agency for strengthening would-be democracies. He sees the global pro-democracy movement "falling out of fashion" and urges other nations to open up democracy-building foundations like NED. It's a bureaucrat's response that cuts across Robert Kaplan's belief that democracies are nourished not by moral fiat but by "organic outgrowth." But NED's agenda of promoting free markets, political parties and independent labor movements points a way.