Democracy Without Illusions

Thomas Carothers

From Foreign Affairs, January/ February 1997

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Summary:  What enthusiasts took for a global rush to democracy may be reversing direction, with backsliding and stalled transitions in the former Soviet Union, Africa, the Middle East. So far, one sees disarray or new strongmen much like the old; no competing ideologies seem to be beckoning. Market reforms have not been the cause in most cases. More affluent countries with Western ties seem to be sticking the course better. However the trend plays out, it should lead the administration to rethink democracy promotion. The truth is that U.S. policy is not significantly responsible for democracy's advance or retreat in the world.

Thomas Carothers is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His most recent book is Assessing Democracy Assistance: The Case of Romania.

FROM REVOLUTION TO RETRENCHMENT

Though often oversold, the trend toward democratic government that began in southern Europe in the mid-1970s, swept through Latin America in the 1980s, and spread to many parts of Asia, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s has been an important phenomenon. Together with the demise of Soviet-sponsored communism and the globalization of the international economic system, it propelled the world from the postwar period into a new era. The spread of democracy has by no means eradicated political repression or conflict, but it has tremendously increased the number of people who enjoy at least some freedom and fostered hope that the next century might be less fraught with political rivalry and destruction than the present one.

In the last several years, however, what enthusiasts at the start of the decade were calling "the worldwide democratic revolution" has cooled considerably. The headlines announcing that country after country was shrugging off dictatorial rule and embarking on a democratic path have given way to an intermittent but rising stream of troubling reports: a coup in Gambia, civil strife in the Central African Republic, flawed elections in Albania, a deposed government in Pakistan, returning authoritarianism in Zambia, the shedding of democratic forms in Kazakstan, sabotaged elections in Armenia, eroding human rights in Cambodia. There is still sometimes good news on the democracy front, such as Boris Yeltsin's defeat of the Russian communists last summer, but a counter-movement of stagnation and retrenchment is evident.

Given the relevance of democracy's fortunes to the state of international relations, the new counter-movement raises significant questions, starting with the basic one of whether it is only a scattering of predictable cases of backsliding or instead presages a major reverse trend. Furthermore, the rise of retrenchment prompts inquiry into where it is taking countries in which it is occurring, whether it signals the emergence of a new contender to the liberal democratic model, and what it says about when and why democracy succeeds.

Retrenchment also poses serious questions for U.S. policy. As democratization advanced around the globe in the 1980s and early 1990s, successive U.S. administrations increasingly emphasized support for democracy as a foreign policy goal. The tendency reached its zenith -- rhetorically, at least -- when the Clinton administration proclaimed the promotion of democracy "the successor to a doctrine of containment." It is thus imperative to ask whether retrenchment signals a failure of U.S. policies on democracy promotion and what it may mean for American foreign policy in the years ahead.

RETRENCHMENT'S REACH

Democratic stagnation and retrenchment have been most pronounced in the former Soviet Union, Africa, and the Middle East. Several former Soviet republics have made genuine democratic progress since the U.S.S.R.'s dissolution in 1991, but in the rest of the 15, pluralism was stillborn or is losing ground. The 1996 Russian presidential elections were a milestone, yet political life in Russia is still only very partially democratic, and not especially stable. The dominant ...

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