JUST WHEN DEMOCRACY HAS WHIPPED AND BURIED COMMUNISM, howls about the flaws of spreading democracy across the globe grow as loud as hungry jackals in the heat of the night.
Democracy, it is said, is unrealistic in many places. It culturally fits the West, not everywhere else. It doesn’t feed hungry people. It doesn’t halt chaos in hellish places. It is a facade for bullies worldwide. It is not what the world needs now.
What a bummer to hear such bashing, amid all the end-of-the-century idealism and speeches about democracy’s victories, not to mention the money, human effort and blood shed in recent times on behalf of democracy in such places as Africa, China, Peru, the former Yugoslavia and Mexico.
How did we get into this rut, this gloomy way of thinking?
The origins are spread across the globe–countries that by choice or chance fail to secure their grip on democracy. The United States has played no small part in damaging democracy’s image.
The Clinton administration has moralized over respect for human rights and democratic traditions more than any administration since Jimmy Carter’s, yet it has gone about embracing dictators and glancing sideways at widespread abuses. The State Department’s annual human-rights report is reduced to pious babble if there is no action, such as cutbacks on trade with the offending countries.
The United States’ gaps between promises and performance baffle the world. Consider the way the U.S. has dealt with China. On one hand it firmly criticizes China for its failure to respect its citizens’ human rights, on the other the U.S. engages China as an important financial partner.
Yet there is more behind this grumbling over global democracy’s future than complaints about the administration’s lack of vision or spine. There are serious questions being raised here and abroad about whether democracy truly is the gift package needed in the second and third rung of nations.
One common argument is that the U.S. has been seduced by the spread of illiberal democracies. The former colonies or new republics cut from places such as the former Soviet Union flatter our self-image as the world’s bastion for democracy. They swear their opposition to dictatorships and tell us that the rhythm of democracy beats in their hearts.
These are democracies in name, not deed. They hold elections, as in Kenya last week, but the results are orchestrated by those in charge. They have news media, but the members are neither free nor critical. They talk of establishing more rights once the current crisis wanes, but the red warning light never goes out for the rulers.
At best, these pretenders may become ultralight democracies.
Peru under President Alberto Fujimori is one of these. It can easily cast itself as a democracy because Fujimori has been elected twice, but the regime’s refusal to ease limitations on Peruvians’ civil liberties and its inclination to thwart the electoral process so it can stay in power make Peru less than a real democracy.
Although many are innocent, hundreds of people swept up in Peru’s war on terrorism and tried by military courts in the early 1990s remain behind bars. Government critics still live in fear of the security police.
The solution for these sorts of problems, some say, is not to push countries that have little experience with democracy so rapidly into taking on the functions of a democracy.
Countries such as Albania first need laws and lawyers and courts that do not bend to corruption or favoritism. They need independent parliaments, not doormats for lifetime rulers.
Once most of these elements are in place democracy will take hold, say proponents of this view.
Another argument is that the world is simply not ready for democracy.
Countries too poor to feed, house or educate their populations cannot instill democracy, some say. Basic needs come first. Democracy is too distracting, too wasteful of precious political energies.
This is the argument Chinese officials have made regularly. Indeed, India has far more democracy than China, but it is not on the same full-throttle journey toward economic development.
In parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, areas ruled by the Palestinian Authority, there is a common belief, for example, that when the terribly depressed local economy finally flourishes, the impulse for extremism among despondent Palestinians will wane.
Global companies increasingly are proposing their solutions. Saying prosperity can set countries on the right path, they want the U.S. and others to quit compiling human-rights yardsticks and carrying out punishments, even if the penalties are applied only sporadically.
There is a problem, however, with relying on global businesses to reorganize the world’s politics. It is true that business craves stability, order, open borders. But companies also have shown a long-term ability to function in an amoral world, where rights fall far behind profits or market share.
In capitalist powerhouse Singapore, the ruling party won elections a year ago after a campaign that included threats to punish districts that voted against the government.
Ultimately, a simple fact of life makes some of the questioning about democracy quite cruel. That is the plight of those whose lives hang in the balance, whose days are numbered if the simplest of human rights continue to be ignored.
They are dozens of Saudis and foreigners who age in Saudi prisons, bereft of basic legal protections.
They are Turkish human rights activists whose offices have been shut down and who have been arrested on grounds of fomenting anti-government dissent.
They are people like 21-year-old Jennifer Davis of Danville, Ill., who was arrested in September 1996 in Lima, Peru, as she allegedly attempted to leave for the U.S. with cocaine. She has yet to be formally charged. A trial date remains a fantasy.
Many lives have been lost. Hundreds of Rwandans, Burundian Hutus and Congolese Hutus in Congo were killed and their bodies dumped in mass graves after Laurent Kabila took power last year.
A Palestinian lawyer in Gaza last summer was cynically remarking one day about the naivete of the U.S. and how it spends millions to teach Palestinians how to practice democracy. Palestinians know all about politics, he insisted. Rather than lessons in democracy, he said, they need a better economy and more daring politicians.
He was miserable and furious because a client of his, a middle-aged professor, had been languishing for several months in a Palestinian prison, a blatant violation of his rights. His client’s crime: asking students on an exam to describe corruption within the Palestinian Authority.
Such things usually don’t happen in real democracies, even naive ones.
