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10/18/2007
Prospects For Democracy
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman often refers to
Michael Mandelbaum’s work at the Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies, so I thought we’d take a look at
a recent essay Mr. Mandelbaum did for the September / October
issue of Foreign Affairs. The work was adapted from his latest
book, “Democracy’s Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the
World’s Most Popular Form of Government.”
[Excerpts]
“The administration of George W. Bush has made democracy
promotion a central aim of U.S. foreign policy. The president
devoted his second inaugural address to the subject, the 2006
National Security Strategy focused on spreading democracy
abroad, and the White House has launched a series of initiatives
designed to foster democracy across the globe, not least the
military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the Arab world where the
prospects for democracy once seemed promising – Lebanon, the
Palestinian territories, and Egypt – U.S. efforts have not
succeeded. In none of these places, as the Bush administration
enters its final 18 months in office, is democracy even close to
being securely established. This is a familiar pattern. Virtually
every president since the founding of the republic has embraced
the idea of spreading the American form of government beyond
the borders of the United States. The Clinton administration
conducted several military interventions with the stated aim of
establishing democracy. Where it did so – in Somalia, Haiti,
Bosnia, and Kosovo – democracy also failed to take root.
“Yet the failure of Washington’s democracy promotion has not
meant the failure of democracy itself. To the contrary, in the last
quarter of the twentieth century this form of government enjoyed
a remarkable rise. Once confined to a handful of wealthy
countries, it became, in a short period of time, the most popular
political system in the world. In 1900, only ten countries were
democracies; by mid-century, the number had increased to 30,
and 25 years later the count remained the same. By 2005, fully
119 of the world’s 190 countries had become democracies.”
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Mandelbaum notes that democracy today is “the fusion of two
distinct political traditions. One is liberty – that is, individual
freedom. The other is popular sovereignty: rule by the people.”
Liberty has its roots going back to ancient Greece and Rome, and
then on up to religious liberty, provoked by the Protestant
Reformation. Political liberty then followed and is what is
commonly referred to as “freedom” today.
When it comes to popular sovereignty, for centuries this often
meant suppressing liberty. As Mandelbaum writes, “The rule of
the people, it was believed, would lead to corruption, disorder,
mob violence, and ultimately tyranny. In particular, it was
widely thought that those without property would, out of greed
and envy, move to seize it from its owners if the public took
control of the government.”
It was then at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning
of the twentieth that liberty and popular sovereignty began to
flourish in western Europe and North America, thanks to a
broadened commitment to private property as well as
government commitments to provide a minimum standard of
living. Mandelbaum adds, though, that while popular
sovereignty is relatively easy to establish, liberty “is far more
difficult to secure.”
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The Magic of the Market
“The worldwide demand for democratic government in the
modern era arose due to the success of the countries practicing it.
The United Kingdom in the nineteenth century and the United
States in the twentieth became militarily the most powerful and
economically the most prosperous sovereign states. The two
belonged to the winning coalition in each of the three global
conflicts of the twentieth century: the two world wars and the
Cold War. Their success made an impression on others.
Countries, like individuals, learn from what they observe. For
countries, as for individuals, success inspires imitation. The
course of modern history made democracy seem well worth
emulating.
“The desire for a democratic political system does not by itself
create the capacity for establishing one. The key to establishing
a working democracy, and in particular the institutions of liberty,
has been the free-market economy. The institutions, skills, and
values needed to operate a free-market economy are those that, in
the political sphere, constitute democracy. Democracy spreads
through the workings of the market when people apply the habits
and procedures they are already carrying out in one sector of
social life (the economy) to another one (the political arena).
The market is to democracy what a grain of sand is to an oyster’s
pearl: the core around which it forms .
“The other democratic habit that comes from participating in a
market economy is compromise. Compromise inhibits violence
that could threaten democracy. Different preferences concerning
issues of public policy, often deeply felt, are inevitable in any
political system. What distinguishes democracy from other
forms of government is the peaceful resolution of the conflicts to
which these differences give rise .
“From this analysis it follows that the best way to foster
democracy is to encourage the spread of free markets. Market
promotion is, to be sure, an indirect method of democracy
promotion and one that will not yield immediate results. Still,
the rapid spread of democracy over the past three decades did
exhibit a distinct association with free markets.”
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“The prospects for democracy in the Arab countries are poor. A
number of features of Arab society and political life work against
it. None is exclusive to the Middle East, but nowhere else are all
of them present in such strength. One of them is oil. The largest
reserves of readily accessible oil on the planet are located in the
region. Countries that become wealthy through the extraction
and sale of oil, often called petro-states, rarely conform to the
political standards of modern democracy. These countries do not
need the social institutions and individual skills that, transferred
to the realm of politics, promote democracy. All that is required
for them to become rich is the extraction and sale of oil, and a
small number of people can do this. They do not even have to be
citizens of the country itself.
“Furthermore, because the governments own the oil fields and
collect all the petroleum export revenues, they tend to be large
and powerful. In petrol-states, the incentives for rulers to
maintain control of the government are therefore unusually
strong, as are the disincentives to relinquish power voluntarily.
In these countries, the private economies, which elsewhere
counterbalance state power, tend to be small and weak, and civil
society is underdeveloped. Finally, the nondemocratic
governments of petro-states, particularly the monarchies of the
Middle East, where oil is plentiful and populations are relatively
small, use the wealth at their disposal to resist pressures for more
democratic governance. In effect, they bribe the people they
rule, persuading these citizens to forgo political liberty and the
right to decide who governs them.”
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In light of the 17th Party Congress in China taking place this
week, Mandelbaum has some interesting thoughts on the
country.
“Of all the nondemocratic countries in the world, the one where
democracy’s prospects matter most is China – the world’s most
populous country and one that is on course to have, at some point
in the twenty-first century, the world’s largest economy. The
outlook for democracy in China is uncertain. Beginning in the
last years of the 1970s, a series of reforms that brought many of
the features of the free market to what had been a communist-
style economy set in motion a remarkable quarter-century-long
burst of double-digit annual economic growth. Although the
core institution of a free-market economy, private property, has
not been fully established in China, the galloping pace of
economic growth has created a middle class. As a proportion of
China’s huge population it is small, but its numbers are
increasing rapidly. More and more Chinese live in cities, are
well educated, and earn a living in ways that provide them with
both a degree of independence on the job and sufficient income
and leisure time for pursuits away from work .
“Furthermore, twenty-first-century China emphatically fulfills
one of the historical conditions for democracy: it is open to the
world. Communist China’s founding leader, Mao Zedong,
sought to wall China off from other countries. His successors
have opened the country’s doors and welcomed what Mao tried
to keep out.
“The dizzying change that a quarter century of economic reform
and its consequences have brought to China has therefore
installed, in a relatively short period of time, many of the
building blocks of political democracy. As Chinese economic
growth proceeds, as the ranks of the country’s middle class
expand and civil society spreads, the pressure for democratic
change is sure to increase. As it does, however, democracy
advocates are just as certain to encounter formidable resistance
from the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“Although it has abandoned the Maoist project of exerting
control over every aspect of social and political life, the party
remains determined to retain its monopoly on political power. It
squelches any sign of organized political opposition to its rule
and practices selective censorship.
“Explicit expressions of political dissent and any questioning of
the role of the CCP are prohibited. Its efforts to retain power are
not necessarily doomed to fail. The CCP has greater staying
power than the ruling communist parties of Europe and the
Soviet Union enjoyed before they were swept away in 1989 and
1991. Because it has presided over a far more successful
economy than did its European and Soviet counterparts, the CCP
can count on the tacit support of many Chinese who have no
particular fondness for it and who do not necessarily believe it
has the right to govern China in perpetuity without limits on its
authority.
“Popular indulgence of communist rule in China has another
source: the fear of something worse. Recurrent periods of
violence scar China’s twentieth-century history. The Chinese
people certainly wish to avoid further bouts of large-scale murder
and destruction, and if the price of stability is the continuation of
the dictatorial rule of the CCP, they may reckon that this is a
price worth paying. The millions who have done particularly
well in the quarter century of reform – many of them educated,
cosmopolitan, and living in the cities of the country’s coastal
provinces – have reason to be wary of the resentment of the
many more, mainly rural, residents of inland China whose well-
being the economic boom has failed to enhance. The
beneficiaries may calculate that CCP rule protects them and their
gains. Finally, the regime can tap a widespread and potent
popular sentiment to reinforce its position: nationalism. For
example, it assiduously publicizes its claim to control Taiwan, a
claim that seems to enjoy wide popularity on the mainland.
“Whether, when, and how China will become a democracy are
all questions to which only the history of the twenty-first century
can supply the answers. Nonetheless, two predictions may be
hazarded with some confidence. One is that if and when
democracy does come to China – as well as to the Arab world
and Russia – it will not be because of the deliberate and direct
efforts at democracy promotion by the United States. The other
is that pressure for democratic governance will grow in the
twenty-first century whatever the United States does or does not
do. It will grow wherever nondemocratic governments adopt the
free-market system of economic organization. Such regimes will
adopt the free-market system of economic organization. Such
regimes will adopt this system as part of their own efforts to
promote economic growth, a goal that governments all over the
world will be pursuing for as far into the future as the eye can
see.”
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Hot Spots will return Oct. 25.
Brian Trumbore
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