Democracies without Rights

Alively debate about the implications Peru to Pakistan and Sierra Leone, some of "illiberal democracy" is stirring up democratically elected governments "are the nation’s foreign affairs specialists. From routinely ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving their citizens of basic rights and freedoms," observes Fareed Zakaria, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, (Nov.-Dec. 1997). Democracy is flourishing: it now claims, by his count, 118 out of 193 countries. But about half of the newly "democratizing" countries are illiberal— more than twice the proportion in 1990.

In encouraging the spread of democracy around the world, Zakaria suggests, the United States has put too much emphasis on holding free and fair elections, and not enough on promoting liberal constitutionalism. (Exhausted by the Cold War, Americans have wanted to transform the world—but on the cheap, Zakaria writes in a more recent article, in the New York Times Magazine [Nov. 1, 1998]. In the 1990s, "few American statesmen—with the notable exception of Richard Nixon—ever wanted to make the transformation of Russia an American goal." Aid to Russia in the 1990s has been only one-sixth that given Europe under the Marshall Plan.)

The United States also has been too quick to criticize undemocratic but "liberalizing" countries, Zakaria argues. The absence of free and fair elections is "one flaw, not the definition of tyranny," he says. If a government with only limited democracy steadily expands economic, civil, and religious freedoms, it should not be branded a dictatorship. "Liberalizing autocracies" such as Singapore and Malaysia, and "liberal semi-democracies" such as Thailand "provide a better environment for the life, liberty, and happiness of their citizens than do either dictatorships like Iraq and Libya or illiberal democracies like Slovakia and Ghana. And the pressures of global capitalism can push the process of liberalization forward."

Historically, argues Zakaria, democracy grew out of constitutional liberalism, as in Western Europe, a course that East Asia appears to be following today. But beginning instead with democracy does not seem to lead to constitutional liberalism, he says. Democracy has come to Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia during the last two decades, but "the results are not encouraging." In many parts of the Islamic world, such as Morocco, Egypt, and some of the Persian Gulf states, he says, elections held tomorrow would almost certainly usher in regimes more illiberal than the current ones. Democracy "has actually fomented nationalism, ethnic conflict, and even war" in societies with no experience with constitutional liberalism, such as Bosnia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.

Adrian Karatnycky, president of Freedom House, writing in Journal of Democracy (Jan. 1999), has a more optimistic view. The Freedom House survey for 1998, he reports, shows a net gain of six liberal democracies during the year. "There are signs that electoral democracy eventually does have a positive effect on freedom." The rise in the number of illiberal democracies that worries Zakaria, writes Karatnycky, apparently "peaked in the first half of the 1990s—a period of rapid democratic expansion in the wake of the collapse of Marxist-Leninist regimes." Since then, the number has fallen. The record in recent years, says Karatnycky, shows that it is precisely the flawed, illiberal democracies that have "the greatest potential for the expansion of freedom." Even the 30 electoral democracies that Freedom House deems only partly free, he points out, "are not states that brutally suppress basic freedoms. Rather, they are generally countries in which civic institutions are weak, poverty is rampant, and intergroup tensions are acute."

"Despite Zakaria’s talk of constitutionalism and individual rights," contends Marc F. Plattner, coeditor of the Journal of Democracy, writing in Foreign Affairs (Mar.–Apr. 1998), "he seems to wind up taking the much more familiar view that authoritarian capitalist development is the most reliable road to eventual liberal democracy." It is implausible to think that autocracies such as Singapore and Malaysia "more reliably protect individual rights or have more independent and impartial judiciaries than the Latin American democracies that Zakaria describes as ‘illiberal.’"

Zakaria overstates the disjunction between democracy and constitutional liberalism, Plattner maintains. "While many new electoral democracies fall short of liberalism, on the whole, countries that hold free elections are overwhelmingly more liberal than those that do not, and countries that protect civil liberties are overwhelmingly more likely to hold free elections than those that do not. This is not simply an accident."