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The Financial Times
The growing pains of democracy
May 14, 2003
In Washington, the ghost of Woodrow Wilson is everywhere. President George W. Bush and his diplomatic advisers, who entered office pledging to intervene only in defence of America's "vital interests" - identified as canals, oil wells and strategic choke-points - now echo former president Wilson's insistence that America's mission should be nothing less than to make the world safe for democracy. In Mr Bush's telling, that mission begins in Baghdad but extends to the wider Arab world, whose tyrannical regimes the administration blames for the resentments that brought the terror of September 11 2001. To counter anti-Americanism, the Bush team has pinned its hopes on the American creed.
Needless to say, the administration's new-found idealism has generated a fair amount of scepticism across the political spectrum. One of the most articulate sceptics is Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, whose new book, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, is destined to become this season's equivalent to Francis Fukuyama's The End of History. It is also something of rebuttal to that book, which foresaw the eventual global triumph of liberal democracy. Not so fast, Zakaria advises. Democracy may have triumphed. The same cannot be said of liberalism.
Hence the rise of "illiberal democracy", a phenomenon that Zakaria claims to be "visible from Peru to the Palestinian territories, from Ghana to Venezuela". In Iraq, too, the spectre of illiberal democracy haunts US policymakers. An illiberal democracy is exactly what the phrase suggests: a political system characterised by reasonably free elections, yet lacking the essential elements of what Zakaria terms "constitutional liberalism" - an impartial judiciary, civic freedoms and the traditional checks and balances we associate with liberal democracy.
As with The End of History, whose title many readers took too literally, the point of Illiberal Democracy will be oversimplified and misused - particularly by Washington's many devotees of realpolitik, who have little time for the Bush team's democratic enthusiasms. But Illiberal Democracy is no reactionary tome. It is a plea for attention to be paid first to liberal democracy's "inner stuffing" - the governing institutions, market systems, civil societies and, yes, restraints on popular will. Without these, Zakaria fears, the spread of democracy will produce nothing better than what went before.
To be sure, none of this is particularly new. James Madison fully shared Zakaria's fears. The French Revolution realised them. And today, after a series of failed democratisation efforts during the 1990s, the US and even the United Nations have come round to Zakaria's view of institution-building.
At times, however, he draws too sharp a distinction between the liberal and democratic components of liberal democracy. The principle of consent lies at the heart of liberalism, and for good reason. Without competitive elections, it is difficult to imagine how that consent might be convincingly obtained. And it is more difficult still to imagine how governments would be held accountable and their powers truly limited, even under a system with an established rule of law and other liberal prerequisites.
There is also the important question of how one attains these prerequisites in the first place. If democracy must be fashioned from liberalism, what is the material from which liberalism must be constructed? The answer, Zakaria suggests, lies mostly in the realm of economics, not politics. "Karl Marx," he writes, "understood that when a country modernises its economy, embraces capitalism, and creates a bourgeoisie, the political system will change to reflect that transformation."
During the 1990s, this brand of economism was in vogue in Washington's foreign policy establishment, notably with respect to China. Zakaria, too, sees the People's Republic as a test case for relying on the market to accomplish political change. Yet in China, as in Germany and Japan a century ago, economic growth seems to have buttressed rather than undermined authoritarian control. Far from creating an independent entrepreneurial class, uniform property rights, the rule of law or any other liberal requisites, China's model of economic development has flourished in their absence.
Nevertheless, the argument that what really counts is not a country's political choices but its economic orientation continues to have its uses, particularly in US foreign policy debates. One of these is to comfort the sensibilities of policymakers who would just as soon curb America's democratic mission. Alas, the author barely discusses that mission. In fact, he contends that the custodian of democracy itself suffers from an excess of democracy. This may explain why Zakaria's otherwise stimulating book skims over an obvious truth that critics of US power would rather deny. The most powerful agent of liberalism in the world today is not a process. It is a nation.
The reviewer is senior editor at The New Republic and co-author, with William Kristol, of The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission