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Exporting democracy
Review Essay Exporting Democracy
by Joshua Muravchik To Craft Democraciesz An Essay on Democratic Transitions. By Guiseppe Di Palma. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. 260 pp. $38.00 ($16.00, paper). Se~Dete~on in the New World Order. By Morton H. Halperin and DavidJ. Scheffer with Patricia L. Small. Washington, DC.: Carnegie Endowment for 1nt:ernationaI Peace, 1992. 192 pp. $21.95 ($8.95,paper). china’s crisis: Dilemmas of Reform and Proqxcts for Democracy. By Andrew J. Nathan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 252 pp. $27.50 ($12.95,paper). DemocracyandHuman Rights in Developing Countrb. By Zehra F. Arat. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991. 229 pp. $33.50. Thkd Wave: Democratization In the Late Twentieth Century By Samuel P. Huntington. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. 383 pp. $29.95 W6.95, paper).
The
In 1973, forty-three of the worlds nations were democracies, according to the most authoritative count.’ Twenty years later, the number has risen to seventy-five. This remarkable increase constitutes the dominant motif of global politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century, called by some the “democratic revolution.” What caused it? Is there any precedent for it? Will it continue, level
* Freedom House’s annual “survey of freedom.” Although this survey azzesses “freedom” rather than “democracy,” its definition of freedom is the functionai equivalent of dem-cy. It consists of two categories: political rights and civil liberties. ‘Ihe first of these consists of democratic procedures, and the second is an essential component of democracy.
is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of, among other Joshua Mworks, Escpoting Democruc~: iWJZZ@ Americu’s Destiny oJvashingon, D.C.: AEI Press, l!TVl).
Fall1993 1 643
MURAVCHIK off, or be reversed? What can or should be the response from U.S. policy makers? What new problems will the United States be forced to address? In ne mird Wave: Democratization in the Lute Twentieth Century, Samuel P. Huntington has produced the first broad attempt to assay this development and wrestle with these questions. What we have been witnessing, he says, is democracy’s “third wave.” The first wave, which began with the American and French revolutions, continued through the nineteenth century until the 1920s and 1930s when the rise of fascism spearheaded a widespread “reverse” of democratization. The second wave began with the decolonization that followed hard on World War II and lasted only until the 1960s when most of the newly independent countries lapsed into dictatorship, a second reverse. The third wave began in 1974 when Portugal threw off the Caetano dictatorship and then negotiated a tortuous transition to democracy. It has since spread from southern Europe to parts of East Asia, Africa, and the former Soviet bloc. What caused the third wave? “In considerable measure,” says Huntington, it was “the product of the economic growth of the previous two decades.” The wealthier the country, the more likely it is to be democratic. In the 1950s and 1960s rapid economic growth lifted many nations into the global middle class, furnishing the material basis for democratization. Then the oil shocks of the 1970s interrupted the smooth ride to prosperity, undermining existing authoritarian regimes, “The combination of substantial levels of economic development and short-term economic crisis or failure was the economic formula most favorable to the transition from authoritarian to democratic government,” says Huntington. Still, Huntington is far from the view that economic causes suffice to explain the wave. He attaches importance to cultural influences as well, especially the impact of Christianity. Historically, he notes, most democracies were Protestant countries, but Vatican II shifted the weight of the Catholic church from a buttress of established orders to a force for liberalism. It was partly a result of this that “roughly three quarters of the countries that transited to democracy between 1974 and 1979 were Catholic countries.” Huntington also points to the influence that countries have on each other. The frosttransitions of the third wave--in Portugal, Greece, and Spainreflected the pushes and pulls of a European community that had enshrined democratic norms. Subsequently, the elevation of human rights to a central issue in U.S. foreign relations by the Carter administration challenged the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes, especially those allied with Washington. Next, Mikhail Gorbachev announced glasnost and perestroika, in effect conceding on behalf of the worlds great bastion of antidemocracy the validity of the democratic creed. He also loosened the shackles that had held the nations of the former Soviet empire under dictatorship. All of this generated a certain momentum, or “snowball effect,” as modem communications brought the events and discourse of one country right into the living rooms of most others. Will the third wave now be followed by a third reverse? Huntington conscientiously avoids an outright prediction, but he seems to expect it. “For any particular country,” he writes, “the ‘worldwide democratic revolution’ could
644 I
Orbis
Exporting
Democracy
produce an external environment conducive to democratization but it could not produce the conditions within the country necessary for democratization,” Since some of the newly democratic countries, especially those that democratized late in the third wave, were impelled in large measure by the “demonstration effect” of earlier democratizers rather than by internal conditions, we may infer that any number of these are ill-equipped to sustain democracy, making them natural candidates for a reverse wave. Huntington’s is a wonderful book: comprehensive, full of interesting insights, and daring enough to offer prescriptive “guidelines for democratizers.” (“If that makes me seem like an aspiring democratic Machiavelli, so be it,” says Huntington.) Still, one can admire it without being persuaded of the validity of its central defining metaphor. A “wave” amounts to a lot less than a “revolution,” One unsatisfying thing about Huntington’s “waves” is their unevenness. The fr,st one lasted about 150 years, the second about 20. How long should we expect this third wave to endure? If it is like the second, it will ebb any day now; but, if it is like the frost, it will run until around the year 2125. And by then, who knows? Perhaps mankind will have incinerated itself, moved to another planet, or even devised a better political system. Secondly, Huntington’s metaphor implies a lack of overall progress or direction. Waves come in, waves go out. But each of Huntington’s two reverses was brief, and each new wave raised the number of democracies higher than before. Moreover, as Huntington observes, countries often fail at sustaining democracy in their frost attempt and then succeed in their second. Democratic reverses may be seen as nothing but a form of reculerpour mieux sauter. The question is whether we should be speaking of waves and reverses, rather than minor zigs or setbacks, in a process of democratization that is mostly a unidirectional march toward the “end of history.” The point of that provocative phrase by Francis Fukuyama was that democracy corresponds to something in human nature-a belief shared by America’s founders, If that is so, then the spread of democracy is nothing less than the unfolding of man’s teleology, and not a mere rising and falling of waves. This is a question that Huntington, presumably judging it beyond the bounds of science, abjures. He does, however, present a statistic that seems to weigh heavily against any unidirectional interpretation: the proportion of states that were democratic in 1990 (45 percent) was identical to the proportion in 1922. But hold on. The reason for this is that, by Huntington’s count, there were only sixty-four states in 1922; much of the world still consisted of colonies. There were, however, no fewer peoples than today. By this method of counting, if a nation was subjected by a native tyrant, it was a non-democracy; but if it was subjected by a foreign tyrant, it was a non-entity. When the Soviet Union absorbed the Baltic states, the proportion of democracies in the world rose! The more meaningful statistic is that seventy-three nations today are self-governing in the full meaning of the term-more than ever before, and more than twice as many as in 1922. Another way to make the same point is to look at the states of 1922. Some two-thirds of them (or their successors) are democratic today-substantial progress. The reason that the democratic proFall 1993 I 645
MURAVCHIK portion among all nations has remained static is that the democratic proportion among the hundred-odd nations that have come into existence since 1922 is lower, as we might expect. But so, too, might we expect that as they mature politically, the democratic proportion among them will rise to the level of the states that have been independent longer. Both Fukuyama’s teleology and Huntington’s social science run the risk of understating the importance of human choices and decisions. Aware of this pitfall, Huntington says that “democracies are created not by causes but by causers.” For example, “If he had wanted to , . . a political leader far less skilled than Lee Kwan Yew could have produced democracy in Singapore.” This, however, is too easy. While its prosperity makes Singapore seem especially ripe for democratization, democracy exists in places considered less ripe. The more interesting question is whether strong political leadership or outside influence could succeed in implanting democracy in venues where the objective conditions for it seem unpromising.
An interesting question is whether strong political leadership or outside influence can succeed in implanting democracy in venues where the oqective conditions for it seem unpromising Social science can describe past patterns and identify correlations. But there is no certainty that the future will resemble the past. One way in which the future is prone to be different is that people learn from the past. They learn from their own successes and failures, and from observing those of others. Recent generations have had the opportunity to accumulate a lot of knowledge about the virtues, successes, and workings of democracy, as well as about the costs of some of the best articulated alternatives. Perhaps as a result, one thing that differentiates the third wave from the previous ones, observes Huntington, is “the virtual absence of major antidemocratic movements in the new democracies.” Today’s international consensus in favor of democracy is unprecedented, and we cannot know what consequences it may hold for the length, breadth, and solidity of the third wave. The position outlined above is sometimes called “voluntarism.” An extreme version of voluntarism is argued by Guiseppe Di Palma in To Craft Democracies.The author states that “new democracies are . . . less the result of cumulative, necessary, predictable, and systematic developments than of historical busts and booms, global opinion climates, shifting opportunities, and contingent preferences.” In this version, democracy happens when an existing authoritarian regime, or sections of it, and an opposition force conclude that it would be better to reach a democratic bargain than to fight to the finish. If they can settle on a quick free election, democracy is likely to result regardless of cultural factors or other variables, and regardless even of the presence of democratic convictions. This is the game theory version of democratization. It 646 I Orbis
Exporting
Democracy
may well be a fair representation of some of the dynamics of several democratic transitions that have occurred, but it seems to capture only a small slice of the psychology that sustains democracy. Di Palma is a bit hard to follow, partly owing to his recourse to jargon. (What are “breakdown games”? With whom are “popular sectors” popular?) Insofar as his main point is to direct our attention to political decisions rather than background or cultural factors, it is a useful corrective to determinism. It is ironic, however, that Huntington, who is more ambivalent on this issue than Di Palma, offers more compelling evidence against determinism than Di Palma does. He reminds us that just as some cultures today seem inhospitable to democracy-notably Confucianism and Islam-much the same was observed only a few decades ago about Catholicism, which today is a bulwark of democratization. And Confucianism, a philosophy adhered to in countries that now set the pace in economic growth, was once regarded as a cultural obstacle to prosperity. The most important Confucian country, of course, is China, and many Chinese intellectuals themselves seem to believe, despairingly, that China’s backward culture presents an insuperable obstacle to democracy. But Sinologist Andrew Nathan argues in China’s Crisis that “it is precisely because the Chinese intellectuals are so pessimistic about China that I am relatively optimistic.” He believes that their disenchantment with communism and the yearning for democracy expressed so poignantly in Tiananmen Square can be the keys to a democratic future. Nathan recounts several anecdotes that show how democratic ideas were percolating, albeit often in veiled terms, within the Communist party years before 1989. Communism’s Achilles heel turns out to be the same thing that made it such a wicked adversary of democracy, namely, that it is democracy’s illegitimate offspring. In the end, however, if legitimacy derives from the welfare of “the people,” it is hard to resist the logic of letting the people in on the decisions. In today’s China, says Nathan, “the people who operate the control network no longer have faith in the ideology.” Although democratic ideas have persisted within the party despite the crackdown of 1989, the opposition has been consistently moderate in its demands and non-violent in its tactics. In other words, the distance between some in the party and some in the opposition is not very great. As Di Palma’s model reminds us, this suggests that there is a basis for a peaceful transition, despite the very unpeaceful legacy of Tiananmen Square. In this, China would not be exceptional: Huntington notes that one of the cardinal characteristics of the third w-ave is that transitions have mostly occurred through compromise and with little violence. The prospects for China are enhanced by the salutary example of Taiwan, which, from a starting point of rule by a Leninist-type party, has progressed far on the path of democratization. Mirroring Huntington’s point about Lee Kwan Yew, Nathan argues that Deng could have brought China a long way toward democracy in 1989 had he chosen to respond differently to the student demonstrations. While that opportunity was missed, Nathan is optimistic that others will follow. Chinese Communist politics, he says, revolve Fall 1993 I 647
MUKAVCHIK around factional competition, and “from now on democratic reform will always present itself as a possible tactic to factions seeking to improve their power positions.” The success or failure of democracy in China will help determine the outcome of the third wave. If democracy takes hold there, this will outweigh its reversal in any number of small countries. A democratic China alongside a democratic Japan would go far toward making it the “norm” in Asia, as it is in Europe, exerting a powerful pull on other Asian states. Moreover, it would mean that, whatever the proportion of democratic countries, a majority of the worlds people would be living under democracy, creating something of a global “norm,” as well.
nle prospects for the democratization of China are enhanced by the salutary example of Taiwan, which has progressed far on the path of democratization. Even a world in which democracy reigns triumphant will not be a world where history has ended, that is, one without political problems. A principle problem unleashed or intensified by the democratic wave has been ethnic and national conflict. Throughout the former Soviet bloc, and in other countries as well, groups are claiming the right to self-determination. Democracy means that the people choose the government, but which people and what unit of government? Answers do not come easily. In Self-Determination in the New World Order, Morton Halperin and David J. Scheffer offer some guidance on dealing with conflicts over self-determination. After years of criticizing America’s activities abroad, Halperin and Scheffer conclude that “the U.S. government should take the lead in coordinating a more activist international response to self-determination crises.” While most of this intervention should be limited to political and diplomatic means, the authors say that “defending the new world order . . . will require the political will to use military force for novel purposes: to defend democracy . . to protect the human rights of large groups of people , . . from egregious violations, to end humanitarian nightmares, or to stop a devastating civil war.” Nonetheless, the authors warn that “the United States needs to recognize that some countries view the new U.S. interest in democracy and self-determination as yet another pretext for U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of other states in support of U.S. security and economic interests.” Their solution is for the United States to engage in “coercive intervention only with the support of the international community.” Ordinarily this would consist of explicit sanction by the United Nations or other international body, or, even better, it could be achieved by “commitLngl a designated number of U.S. armed forces to the service of the Security Council on a case-by-case basis.” Thus, Halperin and
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Scheffer would insert American soldiers into what are often the most vicious and intractable quarrels, in far comers of the world, under attenuated American control, all without so much as a moment’s consideration of the U.S. interests involved. It would seem cavalier even had it not come from the likes of Halperin, who so often has opposed America’s efforts to defend itself against palpable and urgent threats. If Halperin and Scheffer have produced an unsatisfactory effort: to wrestle with new problems, Zebra Arat, author of &mocracy ad aunt Rig&s 9-z ioeveloping Countries, seems to deny that the problem exists. “Ethnic, religious, and linguistic rivalries are more likely to be facades for struggles for economic and political justice,” she says, reciting the Marxist catechism. Her theme is that civil and political rights cannot endure unless they are in balance with economic and social rights, “If the imbalance is in favor of civil and political rights , , . the regime reflects the characteristics of a democracy doomed to decline.” This formula-which Arat presents as an equation-implies that a regime dooms itself by increasing its observance of civil and political rights just as much as by decreasing observance of economic and social rights. Arat seems locked in an old conceptual universe. She perceives “an irreconcilable tension bekveen capitalism and democracy.” And she derisively labels the apostles of civil and political rights “liberal&s.‘” She even reasserts in her own words Lenin’s theory of imperialism. “The first developers not only exploited the resources of their colonies,” she says, “[they1 used these opportunities to increase the imperialist country’s national wealth to a level at which the standard of living for lower classes could be increased without a radical redisttibutive effort.” In this view, “Western , . . influence . , . has been unfavorable to the advancement of democracy in developing countries” and “the political weakness of [the bourgeoisie] and its failure to establish itself as the dominant class” have formed “the underlying cause of democratic success in some developing countries.” Contrary to democratic op~sm, “as long as social and economic inequalities persist, developing countries that go through the process of democratization today are doomed to return to some form of authoritarianism.” Indeed, says Arat, the same may be true for the developed countries “in the absence of ample welfare programs and of structural modifications.” Thus, while some see in the current moment the “end of history,” with democracy and capitalism triumphant, others see a momentary detour on the path to a socialist future. And while it grows ever harder to find sincere Mar&t faith within the ranks of the Comrnunist party of China, it apparently can still be found without much dif%ulty in the American academy. Such are the joys of democracy.
Fail 1993 1 649
by Joshua Muravchik To Craft Democraciesz An Essay on Democratic Transitions. By Guiseppe Di Palma. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. 260 pp. $38.00 ($16.00, paper). Se~Dete~on in the New World Order. By Morton H. Halperin and DavidJ. Scheffer with Patricia L. Small. Washington, DC.: Carnegie Endowment for 1nt:ernationaI Peace, 1992. 192 pp. $21.95 ($8.95,paper). china’s crisis: Dilemmas of Reform and Proqxcts for Democracy. By Andrew J. Nathan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 252 pp. $27.50 ($12.95,paper). DemocracyandHuman Rights in Developing Countrb. By Zehra F. Arat. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991. 229 pp. $33.50. Thkd Wave: Democratization In the Late Twentieth Century By Samuel P. Huntington. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. 383 pp. $29.95 W6.95, paper).
The
In 1973, forty-three of the worlds nations were democracies, according to the most authoritative count.’ Twenty years later, the number has risen to seventy-five. This remarkable increase constitutes the dominant motif of global politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century, called by some the “democratic revolution.” What caused it? Is there any precedent for it? Will it continue, level
* Freedom House’s annual “survey of freedom.” Although this survey azzesses “freedom” rather than “democracy,” its definition of freedom is the functionai equivalent of dem-cy. It consists of two categories: political rights and civil liberties. ‘Ihe first of these consists of democratic procedures, and the second is an essential component of democracy.
is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of, among other Joshua Mworks, Escpoting Democruc~: iWJZZ@ Americu’s Destiny oJvashingon, D.C.: AEI Press, l!TVl).
Fall1993 1 643
MURAVCHIK off, or be reversed? What can or should be the response from U.S. policy makers? What new problems will the United States be forced to address? In ne mird Wave: Democratization in the Lute Twentieth Century, Samuel P. Huntington has produced the first broad attempt to assay this development and wrestle with these questions. What we have been witnessing, he says, is democracy’s “third wave.” The first wave, which began with the American and French revolutions, continued through the nineteenth century until the 1920s and 1930s when the rise of fascism spearheaded a widespread “reverse” of democratization. The second wave began with the decolonization that followed hard on World War II and lasted only until the 1960s when most of the newly independent countries lapsed into dictatorship, a second reverse. The third wave began in 1974 when Portugal threw off the Caetano dictatorship and then negotiated a tortuous transition to democracy. It has since spread from southern Europe to parts of East Asia, Africa, and the former Soviet bloc. What caused the third wave? “In considerable measure,” says Huntington, it was “the product of the economic growth of the previous two decades.” The wealthier the country, the more likely it is to be democratic. In the 1950s and 1960s rapid economic growth lifted many nations into the global middle class, furnishing the material basis for democratization. Then the oil shocks of the 1970s interrupted the smooth ride to prosperity, undermining existing authoritarian regimes, “The combination of substantial levels of economic development and short-term economic crisis or failure was the economic formula most favorable to the transition from authoritarian to democratic government,” says Huntington. Still, Huntington is far from the view that economic causes suffice to explain the wave. He attaches importance to cultural influences as well, especially the impact of Christianity. Historically, he notes, most democracies were Protestant countries, but Vatican II shifted the weight of the Catholic church from a buttress of established orders to a force for liberalism. It was partly a result of this that “roughly three quarters of the countries that transited to democracy between 1974 and 1979 were Catholic countries.” Huntington also points to the influence that countries have on each other. The frosttransitions of the third wave--in Portugal, Greece, and Spainreflected the pushes and pulls of a European community that had enshrined democratic norms. Subsequently, the elevation of human rights to a central issue in U.S. foreign relations by the Carter administration challenged the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes, especially those allied with Washington. Next, Mikhail Gorbachev announced glasnost and perestroika, in effect conceding on behalf of the worlds great bastion of antidemocracy the validity of the democratic creed. He also loosened the shackles that had held the nations of the former Soviet empire under dictatorship. All of this generated a certain momentum, or “snowball effect,” as modem communications brought the events and discourse of one country right into the living rooms of most others. Will the third wave now be followed by a third reverse? Huntington conscientiously avoids an outright prediction, but he seems to expect it. “For any particular country,” he writes, “the ‘worldwide democratic revolution’ could
644 I
Orbis
Exporting
Democracy
produce an external environment conducive to democratization but it could not produce the conditions within the country necessary for democratization,” Since some of the newly democratic countries, especially those that democratized late in the third wave, were impelled in large measure by the “demonstration effect” of earlier democratizers rather than by internal conditions, we may infer that any number of these are ill-equipped to sustain democracy, making them natural candidates for a reverse wave. Huntington’s is a wonderful book: comprehensive, full of interesting insights, and daring enough to offer prescriptive “guidelines for democratizers.” (“If that makes me seem like an aspiring democratic Machiavelli, so be it,” says Huntington.) Still, one can admire it without being persuaded of the validity of its central defining metaphor. A “wave” amounts to a lot less than a “revolution,” One unsatisfying thing about Huntington’s “waves” is their unevenness. The fr,st one lasted about 150 years, the second about 20. How long should we expect this third wave to endure? If it is like the second, it will ebb any day now; but, if it is like the frost, it will run until around the year 2125. And by then, who knows? Perhaps mankind will have incinerated itself, moved to another planet, or even devised a better political system. Secondly, Huntington’s metaphor implies a lack of overall progress or direction. Waves come in, waves go out. But each of Huntington’s two reverses was brief, and each new wave raised the number of democracies higher than before. Moreover, as Huntington observes, countries often fail at sustaining democracy in their frost attempt and then succeed in their second. Democratic reverses may be seen as nothing but a form of reculerpour mieux sauter. The question is whether we should be speaking of waves and reverses, rather than minor zigs or setbacks, in a process of democratization that is mostly a unidirectional march toward the “end of history.” The point of that provocative phrase by Francis Fukuyama was that democracy corresponds to something in human nature-a belief shared by America’s founders, If that is so, then the spread of democracy is nothing less than the unfolding of man’s teleology, and not a mere rising and falling of waves. This is a question that Huntington, presumably judging it beyond the bounds of science, abjures. He does, however, present a statistic that seems to weigh heavily against any unidirectional interpretation: the proportion of states that were democratic in 1990 (45 percent) was identical to the proportion in 1922. But hold on. The reason for this is that, by Huntington’s count, there were only sixty-four states in 1922; much of the world still consisted of colonies. There were, however, no fewer peoples than today. By this method of counting, if a nation was subjected by a native tyrant, it was a non-democracy; but if it was subjected by a foreign tyrant, it was a non-entity. When the Soviet Union absorbed the Baltic states, the proportion of democracies in the world rose! The more meaningful statistic is that seventy-three nations today are self-governing in the full meaning of the term-more than ever before, and more than twice as many as in 1922. Another way to make the same point is to look at the states of 1922. Some two-thirds of them (or their successors) are democratic today-substantial progress. The reason that the democratic proFall 1993 I 645
MURAVCHIK portion among all nations has remained static is that the democratic proportion among the hundred-odd nations that have come into existence since 1922 is lower, as we might expect. But so, too, might we expect that as they mature politically, the democratic proportion among them will rise to the level of the states that have been independent longer. Both Fukuyama’s teleology and Huntington’s social science run the risk of understating the importance of human choices and decisions. Aware of this pitfall, Huntington says that “democracies are created not by causes but by causers.” For example, “If he had wanted to , . . a political leader far less skilled than Lee Kwan Yew could have produced democracy in Singapore.” This, however, is too easy. While its prosperity makes Singapore seem especially ripe for democratization, democracy exists in places considered less ripe. The more interesting question is whether strong political leadership or outside influence could succeed in implanting democracy in venues where the objective conditions for it seem unpromising.
An interesting question is whether strong political leadership or outside influence can succeed in implanting democracy in venues where the oqective conditions for it seem unpromising Social science can describe past patterns and identify correlations. But there is no certainty that the future will resemble the past. One way in which the future is prone to be different is that people learn from the past. They learn from their own successes and failures, and from observing those of others. Recent generations have had the opportunity to accumulate a lot of knowledge about the virtues, successes, and workings of democracy, as well as about the costs of some of the best articulated alternatives. Perhaps as a result, one thing that differentiates the third wave from the previous ones, observes Huntington, is “the virtual absence of major antidemocratic movements in the new democracies.” Today’s international consensus in favor of democracy is unprecedented, and we cannot know what consequences it may hold for the length, breadth, and solidity of the third wave. The position outlined above is sometimes called “voluntarism.” An extreme version of voluntarism is argued by Guiseppe Di Palma in To Craft Democracies.The author states that “new democracies are . . . less the result of cumulative, necessary, predictable, and systematic developments than of historical busts and booms, global opinion climates, shifting opportunities, and contingent preferences.” In this version, democracy happens when an existing authoritarian regime, or sections of it, and an opposition force conclude that it would be better to reach a democratic bargain than to fight to the finish. If they can settle on a quick free election, democracy is likely to result regardless of cultural factors or other variables, and regardless even of the presence of democratic convictions. This is the game theory version of democratization. It 646 I Orbis
Exporting
Democracy
may well be a fair representation of some of the dynamics of several democratic transitions that have occurred, but it seems to capture only a small slice of the psychology that sustains democracy. Di Palma is a bit hard to follow, partly owing to his recourse to jargon. (What are “breakdown games”? With whom are “popular sectors” popular?) Insofar as his main point is to direct our attention to political decisions rather than background or cultural factors, it is a useful corrective to determinism. It is ironic, however, that Huntington, who is more ambivalent on this issue than Di Palma, offers more compelling evidence against determinism than Di Palma does. He reminds us that just as some cultures today seem inhospitable to democracy-notably Confucianism and Islam-much the same was observed only a few decades ago about Catholicism, which today is a bulwark of democratization. And Confucianism, a philosophy adhered to in countries that now set the pace in economic growth, was once regarded as a cultural obstacle to prosperity. The most important Confucian country, of course, is China, and many Chinese intellectuals themselves seem to believe, despairingly, that China’s backward culture presents an insuperable obstacle to democracy. But Sinologist Andrew Nathan argues in China’s Crisis that “it is precisely because the Chinese intellectuals are so pessimistic about China that I am relatively optimistic.” He believes that their disenchantment with communism and the yearning for democracy expressed so poignantly in Tiananmen Square can be the keys to a democratic future. Nathan recounts several anecdotes that show how democratic ideas were percolating, albeit often in veiled terms, within the Communist party years before 1989. Communism’s Achilles heel turns out to be the same thing that made it such a wicked adversary of democracy, namely, that it is democracy’s illegitimate offspring. In the end, however, if legitimacy derives from the welfare of “the people,” it is hard to resist the logic of letting the people in on the decisions. In today’s China, says Nathan, “the people who operate the control network no longer have faith in the ideology.” Although democratic ideas have persisted within the party despite the crackdown of 1989, the opposition has been consistently moderate in its demands and non-violent in its tactics. In other words, the distance between some in the party and some in the opposition is not very great. As Di Palma’s model reminds us, this suggests that there is a basis for a peaceful transition, despite the very unpeaceful legacy of Tiananmen Square. In this, China would not be exceptional: Huntington notes that one of the cardinal characteristics of the third w-ave is that transitions have mostly occurred through compromise and with little violence. The prospects for China are enhanced by the salutary example of Taiwan, which, from a starting point of rule by a Leninist-type party, has progressed far on the path of democratization. Mirroring Huntington’s point about Lee Kwan Yew, Nathan argues that Deng could have brought China a long way toward democracy in 1989 had he chosen to respond differently to the student demonstrations. While that opportunity was missed, Nathan is optimistic that others will follow. Chinese Communist politics, he says, revolve Fall 1993 I 647
MUKAVCHIK around factional competition, and “from now on democratic reform will always present itself as a possible tactic to factions seeking to improve their power positions.” The success or failure of democracy in China will help determine the outcome of the third wave. If democracy takes hold there, this will outweigh its reversal in any number of small countries. A democratic China alongside a democratic Japan would go far toward making it the “norm” in Asia, as it is in Europe, exerting a powerful pull on other Asian states. Moreover, it would mean that, whatever the proportion of democratic countries, a majority of the worlds people would be living under democracy, creating something of a global “norm,” as well.
nle prospects for the democratization of China are enhanced by the salutary example of Taiwan, which has progressed far on the path of democratization. Even a world in which democracy reigns triumphant will not be a world where history has ended, that is, one without political problems. A principle problem unleashed or intensified by the democratic wave has been ethnic and national conflict. Throughout the former Soviet bloc, and in other countries as well, groups are claiming the right to self-determination. Democracy means that the people choose the government, but which people and what unit of government? Answers do not come easily. In Self-Determination in the New World Order, Morton Halperin and David J. Scheffer offer some guidance on dealing with conflicts over self-determination. After years of criticizing America’s activities abroad, Halperin and Scheffer conclude that “the U.S. government should take the lead in coordinating a more activist international response to self-determination crises.” While most of this intervention should be limited to political and diplomatic means, the authors say that “defending the new world order . . . will require the political will to use military force for novel purposes: to defend democracy . . to protect the human rights of large groups of people , . . from egregious violations, to end humanitarian nightmares, or to stop a devastating civil war.” Nonetheless, the authors warn that “the United States needs to recognize that some countries view the new U.S. interest in democracy and self-determination as yet another pretext for U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of other states in support of U.S. security and economic interests.” Their solution is for the United States to engage in “coercive intervention only with the support of the international community.” Ordinarily this would consist of explicit sanction by the United Nations or other international body, or, even better, it could be achieved by “commitLngl a designated number of U.S. armed forces to the service of the Security Council on a case-by-case basis.” Thus, Halperin and
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Scheffer would insert American soldiers into what are often the most vicious and intractable quarrels, in far comers of the world, under attenuated American control, all without so much as a moment’s consideration of the U.S. interests involved. It would seem cavalier even had it not come from the likes of Halperin, who so often has opposed America’s efforts to defend itself against palpable and urgent threats. If Halperin and Scheffer have produced an unsatisfactory effort: to wrestle with new problems, Zebra Arat, author of &mocracy ad aunt Rig&s 9-z ioeveloping Countries, seems to deny that the problem exists. “Ethnic, religious, and linguistic rivalries are more likely to be facades for struggles for economic and political justice,” she says, reciting the Marxist catechism. Her theme is that civil and political rights cannot endure unless they are in balance with economic and social rights, “If the imbalance is in favor of civil and political rights , , . the regime reflects the characteristics of a democracy doomed to decline.” This formula-which Arat presents as an equation-implies that a regime dooms itself by increasing its observance of civil and political rights just as much as by decreasing observance of economic and social rights. Arat seems locked in an old conceptual universe. She perceives “an irreconcilable tension bekveen capitalism and democracy.” And she derisively labels the apostles of civil and political rights “liberal&s.‘” She even reasserts in her own words Lenin’s theory of imperialism. “The first developers not only exploited the resources of their colonies,” she says, “[they1 used these opportunities to increase the imperialist country’s national wealth to a level at which the standard of living for lower classes could be increased without a radical redisttibutive effort.” In this view, “Western , . . influence . , . has been unfavorable to the advancement of democracy in developing countries” and “the political weakness of [the bourgeoisie] and its failure to establish itself as the dominant class” have formed “the underlying cause of democratic success in some developing countries.” Contrary to democratic op~sm, “as long as social and economic inequalities persist, developing countries that go through the process of democratization today are doomed to return to some form of authoritarianism.” Indeed, says Arat, the same may be true for the developed countries “in the absence of ample welfare programs and of structural modifications.” Thus, while some see in the current moment the “end of history,” with democracy and capitalism triumphant, others see a momentary detour on the path to a socialist future. And while it grows ever harder to find sincere Mar&t faith within the ranks of the Comrnunist party of China, it apparently can still be found without much dif%ulty in the American academy. Such are the joys of democracy.
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