Summer 2002
HARVARD INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
Illiberal Democracy Five Years Later

Fareed Zakaria is Editor of Newsweek International. He oversees Newsweek's English-language overseas editions distributed throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East with a circulation of over 3.5 million readers. Beyond these duties, Mr. Zakaria frequently writes for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New Republic, among other publications. Prior to joining Newsweek International, Mr. Zakaria served as managing editor of Foreign Affairs from 1993 to 2000. He previously taught in the Department of Government at Harvard University.

Perhaps his most influential work, a 1997 Foreign Affairs article "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy," has focused many discussions about the future of democracy. The article describes the illiberal tendencies of countries with otherwise democratic forms of government and the pernicious danger that such illiberalism represents, not only to those countries themselves but also to liberal democracies in the Western mold. Given this trend, Mr. Zakaria then and now suggests that the international community do all it can to foster liberal constitutionalism across the world.

Senior Editor Richard Re and Associate Editor Sabeel Rahman interviewed Mr. Zakaria five years after the initial publication of his seminal Foreign Affairs piece to hear his views on the current state of illiberal democracy and the role established liberal democracies can play in spreading liberal institutions.

HARVARD INTERNATIONAL REVIEW: In your seminal piece in Foreign Affairs, you described the dichotomy between the spread of liberal constitutionalism and democratization. How has the experience of the last few years changed your interpretation of this trend?

I think that, as with any theory when it encounters reality, mine has grown in interesting ways that I could not have predicted. Some things have happened over the past few years that have powerfully confirmed my views, and some
things, frankly, have happened that have made me ask whether I need to modify some of its elements. For one example, when I wrote in 1997 about illiberal democracies, I mentioned Russia as an example, which met with a lot of criticism. A lot of people thought I was being too tough on [Russian President Boris] Yeltsin, but I think the subsequent two or three years have borne out my analysis very well. Yeltsin moved in an even more authoritarian direction by the end of his presidency, and instituted in effect what Richard Pipes has called a coup d'etat by resigning six months before his term was due to end, installing Vladimir Putin as president. Putin then went on to dismantle several other
features of constitutional government. That sort of consolidation of elected
autocracy has taken place not only in Russia, but also in the majority of the former Soviet states. At one level there are several countries where people may say that a similar pattern has been followed. At another level, there are countries such as Iran, which is an illiberal democracy-- and it is the most democratic country in the Muslim Middle East-and yet I think there is some evidence that the experience of democratic, or quasi-democratic, rule has created pressures for liberalism. I have to confess I find that argument intriguing but ultimately unpersuasive, and I have reformulated some of my views on Iran.

How should illiberal democracies or liberal autocracies be approached by the United States or other international powers?

Let me give you another example that ties into this issue of how things have changed. When General Pervez Musharraf took power in Pakistan, there was widespread denunciation of him in just about every major American publication. They said this was not good, that this was a kind of hijacking of democracy. What is interesting is that the press in Pakistan, which is reasonably free, reacted very differently. It was by and large in favor of the coup because they believed the democracy they had was a sham. When George Bush, as you remember, was running for US president, he was asked who was the new leader of Pakistan, and he did not remember the name, but he said he was a general and would add some stability to the region. The Washington Post took it upon itself to declare that the real scandal was not that Bush did not know Musharraf's name, but that he had the gall to say Musharraf would bring order. Now, two years later, I think it is clear that Musharraff has been extraordinarily brave and courageous, a reformist in almost every dimension-- economic, political, religious, cultural-and that he was able to do so because he was not victim to the same short-term interests that modern politicians have to deal with.

The Middle East presents the dilemma that Pakistan faced because in many of these countries there are large segments of the population that are illiberal and often violent and extreme. To hope that liberalism will come by throwing open the democratic process to these elements seems absurd. Over a long maturation process perhaps this will happen, but another question you have to ask is whether you want every country to go through its own version of the French Revolution and the Terror so that then you can achieve liberal democracy. Or is there some better path? People like Musharraf would say that in troubled societies, there are other paths as well.

What are the policy approaches the United States or International Monetary Fund (IMF) should take?

I think there are two main things US foreign policy should take a look at. First, in the Middle East the United States is caught in a terrible dilemma. The US government is supporting illegitimate autocrats, but they may be better in the short term that what may replace them. What the United States wants in the Middle East is liberalization, not democratization, and the source of this liberalization will be these regimes. Washington should try to press governments like those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia to liberalize, especially economically. Liberalizing the economy is the great Trojan horse of political liberalization because regimes generally are willing to do it. They do not see it as threatening to their power bases but as a chance to modernize their countries. In almost all cases historically, it has resulted in political liberalization. I think one of the things that the United States can do is really push economic liberalization. Washington has done it a little bit in some places like Egypt and Jordan, with some success in Jordan and mixed results in Egypt. Saudi Arabia is the most complicated case because the United States does not have a lot of leverage since it does not give them aid, but even there I believe there is more that can be done. The power of US rhetoric and policy can be very strong if focused. Think about something like the Helsinki accords; they had no teeth but wound up being very powerful.

The second, which is more a caution to the IMF, is that destabilizing and delegitimizing a regime is very easy. If you do not have something to replace it with, you can unravel a country in a way that is very difficult to reconstruct. Take Indonesia; the IMF and the administration of US President Bill Clinton, in my opinion, delegitmized and destabilized Suharto's regime in the midst of the East Asian crisis. They added their words to domestic critics, and that ended up being the crucial addition. They dislodged Suharto with the idea that it was then time for Indonesia to be democratic. They failed to notice that Indonesia had no functioning political institutions or political parties, that Suharto had run the country like a court, and that Indonesia was still at a low level of economic development compared with the places where successful transitions to democracy had taken place. So, what you ended up with was chaos and the fleeing of the Chinese entrepreneurs, who had all the money. As a result, Indonesia's gross domestic product has contracted by 50 percent, and the country has been plagued with all sorts of communal violence. About 100 million people have been moved back into Third World level poverty after being drawn out of it during 30 years of growth. You have to ask yourself, for an average Indonesian, was the LMF and the West's intervention beneficial? I don't think so.

So far the discussion has focused on the roles for US foreign policy. What kind of agency should liberal or reformist elements within these illiberal democracies have?

Rule one: found a political party. You cannot achieve sustained reform without political parties. People do not think about this much, and it seems like a boring political science question, but political parties are one of the great creations of the modern political system. They organize and channel human aspirations, emotions, and commitments around agendas. They create common platforms, and in doing so, they transform mob rule into institutionalized democratic rule. Yeltsin's great failure was the failure to found a political party. He wanted to be above politics and have a sort of monarchical presidency, but because of that, Russian reformers were always split, weak, decentralized, and never had the strength that they needed to win battles. It was always easy for the Communists, who were organized as a party and were effective, to stymie them. if you think about the founding of any nation, whether with Ben Gurion in Israel, Nehru in Pakistan, or Mandela, the successful ones always have political parties. For liberal elements within these countries, it is not enough to be members of university groupings and civil society. You have to come together as a political party.

Some critics might interpret your arguments for the establishment of the new bourgeoisie in nation states that you also qualify as illiberal as being culturally imperialistic. What would you say to refute that?

I would basically say that, usually, when people use the cultural argument, particularly regarding democracy, it is to legitimize highly undemocratic, not to say brutal, practices. I think it is very difficult to believe that any reasonable human being today would argue that there are some countries in which people have a cultural disposition to enjoy being jailed or to be political prisoners and held without trial, that there is some disposition toward
countenancing large-scale human rights abuses. Every country of course is going to have a variation of liberalism and democracy that conforms to that culture, but my argument is not culturally imperialistic as much as it is culturally universalist. Human rights are universal, and certain human values are universal at some basic broad level, with lots of cultural variations. And I believe that the basic dynamics of social and political change are not that dissimilar from country to country.

I believe most cultures that have been in that position have been in certain stages of development where the state has been very powerful and the civil society has been very weak, where people have not had the ability to organize in a way that would check state authority. When you look at South Korea, Taiwan, Chile, or South Africa, you find that when people have the chance, when they are at the stage of development where they have the power, they almost always prefer self-rule to the rule of some autocrat. A past criticism is that my argument supports state autocracies; it does not. It is about how to get to stable democracy. My point is that in some cases, immature democratization can hurt the process.

I think that you would agree that the cultural mores that are in place in many countries are going to be resistant to change and constitutional liberal values, in part because they lack an historical tradition of democracy that in the West is embodied in documents like the Magna Carta. Can an external power make reference to existing historical values to make constitutional liberalism make sense in the context of societies that do not share this kind of liberal tradition?

That is the sophisticated version of the cultural argument, not that these
cultures are different and will never be democratic but that there are cultures that have greater resistance to this kind of large-scale change. I would say that is principally why I make the argument that I make about being sure that this is an internal process and that countries have reached a certain stage of development before they have democratization. Imposing it from the outside does not always work. Sometimes it works-India poses questions about this. In an odd sense you can say democracy was imposed on India from the outside, and it worked. But I think mostly the imposition of democracy from the outside does not work.

You need democracy to have organic roots within the society. How can you encourage those organic roots? I have thought about this a lot. The West's experience with democracies is in a sense unique; the West has a whole series of things that have happened over the course of millennia, from the development of an independent church to a kind of feudalism where the feudal lords were very powerful vis-a-vis the kings. You can go even further back and look at geography and the way that Europe is structured to allow many independent national units. All of these factors help.

The one that is the most powerful though, and is a transportable variable, is capitalism. This is the force that has transformed the world in the past 300 years. It has completely destroyed three millennia of recorded history. It has transformed feudal and agricultural societies, everything. Most importantly it is portable: capitalism can work in South Korea, it can work in Taiwan, it can work in Chile, it can work in Israel, it can work in Ireland. The best thing about capitalism for my purposes is its political and social effects. It creates a body of people independent from the state power. People like to talk about civil society, and that is great, but what you need is something that can stand up to organized state authority. The only things that have been able to do that are the Church and capitalism. In my mind, if you are looking for something to make this change happen, the best thing you can do is encourage entrepreneurship and capitalism.

In some of your previous writings, you mention the concept of a fundamentalist or fanatical government as a post-fascist challenge to liberal democracy. In doing so, you describe democracy as a neutral vessel when it come to these kinds of substantive values. What do you think about the future of democracy as it faces new ideological challenges, perhaps from Asian style totalitarianism or Middle East style fundamentalist leadership? What do you think of the future of democracy as a vessel for the perpetuation of liberal constitutionalism?

At one level, I think the future of democracy is assured. We live in a democratic age. There is no system of government, broadly speaking, that has greater legitimacy. You knew this ideology had won when the Khmer Rouge had to call itself the Democratic Republic of Cambodia, when the enemies of democracy had to start calling themselves democratic. The danger for democracies does not really come from the outside but from within, from the fact that democracy becomes so vague and meaningless a phrase that it can be hijacked for almost any purpose. Within democracy, people countenance and allow thoroughly illiberal, authoritarian elements, as with the Iranian mullahs, the nationalists of the Balkans, or some of the more brutal regimes elected in South Asia.

And to a certain extent, even the Western world faces its own version of this problem. We are going through a period in which every aspect of our lives is being democratized. Democratization is taking place at political, cultural, social, and economic levels. Democracy has always existed as one element among many. In an Aristotelian sense, we have always lived in mixed regimes. We have had democracy, but we have had other undemocratic elements that have always been part of the mix: constitutions, laws, but also Tocquevillian institutions like political parties. We are getting to the point where all these things are being swept aside in a great democratic wave. If they are themselves not thoroughly democratized, they are cast aside. This means that you apply this test of democracy to everything in life.

I do not believe that this is a great future for democracy. Democracy is one very important element of political, social, and economic life, but it is not the only one. You want to have a society where you can celebrate the other elements which are often undemocratic like constitutions or guilds. One of the things we have lost is the kind of independent, intermediate associations that Tocqueville celebrated and that had their own internal standards and reputations. Something like a legal guild comes to mind as having such effects. Now the legal sector is thoroughly democratized and marketized. Lawyers have no real independent role, as we have seen in the Enron scandal in the United States. I strongly believe that it is important for Westerners not merely to associate the problems of democracy with distant countries like Sierre Leone and Kazakhstan. There is a common problem of overvaluing democratic process and the magic of the legitimacy conferred by that process and undervaluing the other elements of society that go into making a liberal democracy.

What are the problems that arise from democracy when it is applied to
ethnically or culturally diverse states? What are the contradictions of the ideology of democracy and self-determination in states that are composed of very different cultures and traditions?

When you introduce democracy at an early stage of development in multi-- ethnic, diverse societies, there is an enormous incentive for politicians to play the race card, or the religion card, because those are easily mobilized votes, thereby exacerbating differences that are often quite mild. In some places, this can lead to the invention of distinctions. This danger was seen most powerfully in the Balkans, where people like Slobodan Milosevic were very popular in large part due to their ability to appeal to a latent nationalism.

There is another more general problem, however. In order to have a liberal democracy, you need to have a group of people committed to liberalism. This group tends to be middle class in some broad sense. If you do not have that group, then people start to mobilize along other lines. The most obvious ones are ethnicity, religion, and race. Where is the liberalism going to come from in a democratic electoral framework if you do not have some bloc of liberal votes?

You have spoken about how liberal non-democracies could be transformed by the invasion of the bourgeoisie. What do you think should be done about nations in more of a disrupted state where there is illiberal democracy and no established political force? Should this be treated in the same way, with Western ambassadors going abroad and urging free markets?

It is an interesting question. When you confront an illiberal democracy, should you ask for more democracy or less? In the case of Pakistan, which had an illiberal democracy, clearly it has benefited by having less democracy and more liberalism. In a country like Iran, perhaps the best thing is more democracy and more liberalism. You have to take that on a case-by-case basis. The interesting example now is Russia, where some claim that Putin is genuinely reforming, but there is no question that he has dramatically consolidated power, particularly vis-avis the Duma and the regional governors, the two other main sources of political power within Russia. He has in effect created an elected autocracy and is now pursuing liberal reform. The argument has become that you want to have democracy so you can create a super-- president, a benign autocrat who can then give you real democracy. This strikes me as a very tenuous argument for illiberal democracy.

Many people say that it is better to have the democracy because an illiberal democracy will lead to liberal democracy. However, what you see in Pakistan and Russia is that liberal democracy can lead to the installation of an autocrat, who may or may not be liberal. I do not know if there is an easy answer for all illiberal democracies. I think we should mainly push for liberalism, for the kinds of things you were talking about like capitalism, but also for human rights. There used to be a big debate about human rights versus democratization in the 1970s and 1980s. I think for now we can certainly say that the more important task for US foreign policy should be to push for human rights, meaning political and economic rights, rather than proceduralism, which is to say elections.

In the post-September 11 environment, US President George Bush has characterized US foreign policy in relation to an "axis of evil," which includes three illiberal states, some of them democracies. How do you think this attitude is going to influence the potential for democratization and the spread of constitutional liberalism?

As a purely rhetorical statement, I think Bush's statement is unexceptional. All three of those countries-Iran, Iraq, and North Korea-are without question evil, in the sense that they are oppressive, doing bad things both internally and externally. As a matter of grand strategy, one runs into more difficulty. It is not clear that this is a real alliance, that the United States should have the same policy in dealing with them. At the same time, I think there is something to be said for being unapologetic and calling a spade a spade. It is important for the world to stop and notice that these regimes are thoroughly illiberal, whether democratic or dictatorial.

Beyond the rhetorical effect of the phrase itself, how will the mindset this characterization betrays affect US foreign policy?

I would say the general effect of September has been to put concerns about democratization on the back burner for a while. For the moment the United States is engaged in a classic national security struggle. It is one in which Washington is asking for cooperation from many governments, many of which are not democratic. In the context of this global fight against terrorism, the United States is not going to ask a lot of questions about whether these regimes are democratizing enough. In the short term then, I would say that the issue of democratization has moved a couple steps back in US foreign policy. In a broader sense, however, it is front and center, because it is precisely the dysfunctional political development of the Middle East that has produced this problem in the first place. If one were to think about it even in the medium term, one has to have a strategy relating to political development in the Middle East, and in Afghanistan most obviously, as well as parts of Africa. This is to ensure that these countries do not become either cesspools of terrorism or breeders of certain kinds of ideological hatred of the West and the United States or simply chaotic lands to which terrorists escape. At that level, the issues of democracy and political development return to the center of US foreign policy.

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