Algeria was supposed to complete its first multiparty elections last week, and Muslim fundamentalists were certain of a tremendous victory. Their majority might have allowed them to rewrite the democratic Constitution itself. The Army stepped in, forced the president to quit and canceled the vote.
Georgia, the former Soviet republic, may be on the edge of renewed civil war -and the liberals are technically antidemocratic. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the once imprisoned dissident who won a free presidential election last year on a platform of Georgian independence, returned to the country after fleeing a popular revolt against his autocratic regime. He insisted he was still the rightful president and asked the people to rally to his support.
Yugoslavia joined the list of former nations. The European Community recognized the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, though much of Croatia is still occupied by Serbian forces. A cease-fire appeared to be holding, for now.
South Africa, having abolished most nonpolitical forms of apartheid, is engaged in the difficult and acrimonious process of hammering out a system that will give the black majority voting rights while preserving some constitutional reassurance for the white minority.
The world is on a democracy binge. Repressive governments have fallen. Authoritarian regimes have opened up to political opposition. Intimidated people now feel free to speak their minds. It has been a time of celebration, amply justified. But now the moment has come for sober stocktaking and searching questions about the so-called triumph of democracy.
When totalitarian systems come crashing down, democratic ones do not automatically rise up in their place. As a fundamentalist victory in Algeria might have proved, free elections do not necessarily produce open governments or human rights. The principle of self-determination doesn’t tell us much about when political subdivision should stop: everyone agrees Czechoslovakia should be independent, but should Slovaks be independent of Czechs (as some of them wish)? If Slovenia can be a country, should Macedonia? Should the Basques of Spain? Some populations do not look on democracy as enthusiastically as others, but are they therefore oppressed? Certainly the forms of democracy vary quite widely, to suit local and historical conditions.
To raise these points is not to question the essential virtue of democracy. It’s a system that’s proved its worth-in reflecting the dignity and equality of all human beings, in making governments accountable to citizens, in establishing a peaceful method of removing bad rulers. One of the pleasing changes of recent years is that democracy no longer needs cheerleaders; the rhetorical game is already won. What is needed is a clearheaded sense of the fragility and limitations of popular rule. For democracy is still very much under threat-most of all in the very countries that have just adopted it.
The world’s new nation builders should beware, then, of a few common misunderstandings:
- Democracy breeds prosperity. Particularly in the countries that have just shed communist rule, there’s been a tendency to link democracy with free-market economics because they usually go together in the industrial West. Democracy, it’s thought, will lead to capitalism which will lead to overflowing larders. The stark truth is that a democratic system may, at least in the short run, make it harder to introduce market reforms. That’s because-as is so plain today in East Europe and the former Soviet Union-these reforms are painful and unpopular. Angry Russians mobbed Boris Yeltsin with complaints of price gouging when he visited St. Petersburg last week. To let subsidized prices shoot up to market levels, to close inefficient plants, to lay off thousands of unnecessary bureaucrats–these remedies are not easy to explain to citizens who see the new freedoms only making their lives worse. After all, many of them rejected communism not so much because it deprived them of political rights as because it failed to deliver the prosperity they saw in the West.
In other parts of the world, the free-market system has flourished under political systems that are far from open. Chile under the authoritarian Gen. Augusto Pinochet achieved the fastest-growing economy in Latin America. Mexico’s essentially one-party system gave President Carlos Salinas de Gortari the political base he needed to introduce the tough reforms that are boosting Mexico’s economy. Carlos Menem of Argentina and Alberto Fujimori of Peru both ran for president as populists, then turned into rigorous free marketers once they had won. In order to impose their programs, both govern increasingly by decree; in Peru people now joke about “Emperor Fujimori.”
In Asia, too, the pattern seems to be prosperity first, democracy later. South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore all built up booming economies under regimes that tolerated little opposition. Government and business leaders alike believed that authoritarianism made for a disciplined and productive work force. Now these systems are gradually opening up-partly because of pressure from the new middle classes created by affluence. Some, like Singaporean autocrat Lee Kwan Yew, fear this development will eventually undermine the region’s economic health. But if democracy does not breed prosperity, then perhaps prosperity can help breed democracy.
- Democracy produces stability. It usually does–once a democratic system is up and running. Fools or tyrants can be ousted without resorting to violence, and pluralism encourages a spirit of compromise. But what about countries with no experience of democracy, cultures to which it is alien? Then it can be a destabilizing force, alarming even to much of the governed.
Take, for example, China. Western-style democracy has never had much of a following there. Even the massive demonstrations that led to the wanton killings around Tiananmen Square in 1989 were as much against official corruption and communist inefficiencies as they were in favor of personal freedom. The government nevertheless was seized with a fear of chaos. Many Chinese have always believed that some degree of authoritarian rule is required to hold together a country of China’s size and diversity. That notion has obviously been reinforced in the last few months by the brutal nationalist fighting that has torn Yugoslavia apart and even more by the death of the Soviet Union.
In Africa, the fear of tribal factionalism gave postcolonial rulers a good reason-or at least a good excuse-for shying away from democracy. The result was abysmal: a hodgepodge of corrupt autocrats, Marxist dictators and immovable patriarchs has ruled the continent since the days of independence. But just in the past year there has been a notable change. In Zambia, the venerable Kenneth Kaunda was voted out of office by a huge majority. In Zaire and Kenya, Mobutu Sese Seko and Daniel arap Moi have been forced to accept the principle of pluralism. Above all, South Africa seems irrevocably set on a course that will at last establish some form of democracy. But none of this, in the short term, is guaranteed to bring stability or prosperity.
- Democracy means majority rule. Yes, but in the Western tradition it has also meant protection of minorities against majority tyranny. The lack of such traditions had a lot to do with the collapse of Yugoslavia, and minority rights is the crucial issue at stake in the constitutional debate in South Africa. Democracy requires mediating institutions: among them, an impartial system of courts, civilian control of the military, a free press. Without these, the citizens remain pretty much at the mercy of the state. These institutions have to be grown and nurtured over time; they can’t be simply ordained. Young democracies will rarely meet the standards of established ones.
Also, democracy is not some theoretical construct like the decimal system or the game of chess that works the same way in any place or culture. It is necessarily overlaid with cultural differences, some of them profound. In East Asia, for example, Confucian values are a powerful force. The ruler is expected to set a virtuous example to his followers, and as long as he does he is accorded enormous respect. This does not sort well with the rough-and-tumble of adversarial party politics and helps explain the appeal of one-party systems in that part of the world. As Gerald Segal, a London-based Asia scholar, puts it: “East Asian political cultures are traditionally not rule-governed. They’re governed by a sense of basic ethics. If you have a government that produces the goods, then laws don’t matter.” This is often puzzling, sometimes exasperating, to Westerners for whom written laws loom large. Segal concludes that “democracy, as conceived of in Western Europe and North America, is not necessarily applicable to the rest of the world.,,
Westerners sometimes complain that Japan cannot be called a real democracy because it has no credible opposition party; power simply shifts between rival factions in the Liberal Democratic Party. But this does not mean that public opinion has no power. “The opposition party may not be very influential in Japan,” says University of Tokyo political scientist. Takashi Inoguchi, “but opposing sentiment is.” Three years ago the prime minister, Noboru Takeshita, rammed a widely unpopular consumption tax through the Japanese Parliament. Shortly afterward he was implicated in the Recruit bribery scandal. The approval rating of his administration plunged to 3 percent and even though he heads the most powerful faction in the LDP, he was forced to resign.
Cultural relativism can be carried too far. Communists liked to call their system “democratic” (remember the German Democratic Republic?), but it wasn’t. Nor was the Argentinian military junta of the early 1980s. Very possibly, the political system that would have been imposed by the Muslim fundamentalists in Algeria would not have been democratic, but now that’s impossible to be sure of. What is clear is that to call off an election because it’s turning out badly for your side is very undemocratic indeed-and may rouse popular passions that could tear Algeria apart.
During the cold war “democracy” was a rhetorical banner, waved vigorously by its practitioners to distinguish Us from Them. The Manichean mind-set of those days did not allow for much sophisticated thought about the subject. The strengths of democracy were blithely assumed, its frailties mostly ignored, its many variations simply glossed over. Those days are over; large portions of the world have been devastated politically by the collapse of the socialist faith. New nations are springing up, and old ones need rebuilding. Democracy will not have “triumphed” until its lessons can be applied-with imagination and realism-in that crucial process of construction.
Photos: Popular passions: Awaiting the return to Algiers of exiled leader Muhammad Boudiaf; democracy march in Tabasco, Mexico (PASCAL PARROT-SYGMA, SERGIO DORANTES-SYGMA)
