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The Economist
Democracy and freedom
The wilder shores of liberty -- Is
too much democracy bad for you?
March 6, 2003
FAREED ZAKARIA has a Big Idea. The world, he says, is suffering from a surfeit of democracy. The claim is topical, certainly, and it has profound policy implications. But is it right?
Mr Zakaria's case rests on three claims: that democracy and liberty are not the same; that policymakers and the public overlook institutions and patterns of behaviour that embody liberty, while exaggerating the virtues of those that build democracy; and--most important--that democracy has spread so far that it is now eroding liberty.
On the first point, he is obviously correct. Since Periclean Athens, a slave-owning society, there have been democracies without liberty. For much of the 19th century, America and Britain had a good deal of liberty but not much democracy. It took centuries to combine the two into the constitutional liberal polities of the West. There, as Mr Zakaria writes, liberty led to democracy, not the other way around.
On the second point, he is also correct. Democracy has spread rapidly in the past ten years. There is rejoicing when a country holds its first election. Less attention is paid to the ethnic rivalries and abuse of judicial authority that so often accompany it. In much of the world, democracy predates liberty, and is not working well. Mr Zakaria's account of the undermining of democracy in India, the land of his birth, by crooks, fanatics and the ruling party is a devastating example of failure.
But it is his third point that is controversial. Mr Zakaria asserts that "elected governments claiming to represent the people have steadily encroached on the powers and rights of other elements of society," such as the courts, local government and the press. In other words, democracy and liberty are not merely different. They are not merely developing at different speeds. Democracy is now spreading at the expense of liberty by feeding ethnic hatreds, precipitating wars or undermining the institutions of liberty. The implication is that if you push, say, China or the Middle East towards democratisation too quickly, you will produce unstable, illiberal regimes. This, he says, is what happened in Russia.
Unexpectedly, the most compelling part of Mr Zakaria's thesis concerns America. By opening up Congress to greater scrutiny, changing campaign finance laws and holding popular referenda, he argues, America has produced a dysfunctional political system dominated by special-interest groups, fund-raisers and lobbyists.
Mr Zakaria goes on to look at the damage democratisation has done below the level of the federal government. Lawyers, accountants, bankers, small-town newspapers and national broadcasters all once combined a degree of public spirit with "we know best" professionalism. That has gone as they seek to chase ambulances and keep pace with mass-markets. Mr Zakaria adds, in an intriguing section, that the democratic impulse is even hollowing out America's churches because of their need to reflect, as well as shape, the beliefs and desires of their congregations. This is a cogent corrective to the usual European notion that fundamentalism is running amok in America.
But America is not Mr Zakaria's main focus: the developing world is. And it is here that his Big Idea begins to get bogged down. He argues that countries need a history of building liberty and an income per head of at least $5,000 if they are to begin sustaining liberal democracy. That gives him just nine candidates, and a strange batch they areÑRomania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Malaysia, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia and Iran. Yet many countries have managed the trick without meeting those preconditions, including Japan, Costa Rica and, despite his strictures, India.
He writes rather as if countries face a simple choice between establishing democracy or maintaining incremental reform. In practice, new democracies have often begun because the previous regime had collapsed and there was no other way of establishing legitimacy. In pursuit of his argument that new democracies undermine civic institutions, he exaggerates some of the bad things they have done. It is not true, for instance, that Boris Yeltsin made the courts weaker. Russia's rule of law today has many problems, but Soviet courts were a sham.
Mr Zakaria tends to blame new democracies for failures inherited from the previous regime ("since it embraced democracy, Indonesia's GDP has contracted by almost 50%"). He gives short shrift to the ways in which democracies encourage liberty, as well as harm it. In practice, for example, they are more likely to guarantee property rights. Yet property rights get barely a mention. And just as he exaggerates the downside of new democracies, so he tends to minimise the drawbacks of the slow process of incremental change. Has China encouraged liberty? Hardly. Will incremental reformers like Kazakhstan or Tunisia prove stable? We do not know.
Illiberal democracies are volatile. That does not necessarily make them worse for themselves or the world in the long run. It is a matter of timing: they get the bad news out early. Reforming autocracies leave tough political problems until later, in the hope they will be more manageable. That is not necessarily an argument against rapid democratisation. Mr Zakaria's book is not an attack on democracy, but on its over-extension. He calls the problem "too much of a good thing." The same might be said of this book.