Exporting Equality, Importing Instability

Anastasio Somoza, the notorious Nicaraguan dictator deposed in 1979, was no great believer in democracy. "I would like nothing better than to give Nicaraguans the same kind of freedom as that of the United States," he once remarked. "But, it is like what you do with a baby. First you give it milk by drops, then more and more, then a little piece of pig, and finally it can eat everything [...] You have to teach them to use freedom."

Believers in liberal democracy usually find Somoza abhorrent. Recent experience, however, suggests that he might have been right about the need to teach people to be democrats. While democracy seems in theory admirable, too often its hasty implementation brings bloodshed, poverty, disease and death.

"What’s so good about having the vote?" veteran BBC correspondent external pageHumphrey Hawksleycall_made asks in the subtitle of his new book "Democracy Kills." The answer to that question is supposed to be easy, but it’s not. The children who harvest cocoa in the Ivory Coast have certainly not benefited from the ballot box. The price farmers are paid per kilo of cocoa beans is exactly the same as 30 years ago, when the widely reviled dictator Félix Houphouët-Boigny ruled the country. In the meantime, the price of a chocolate bar in London and Los Angeles has risen four-fold.

After Houphouët-Boigny’s death in 1993, the Ivory Coast, encouraged by 'do-gooders' in the West, fell victim to the fashion of democracy. A succession of weak governments resulted, leaving the country open to free-market exploitation by rapacious chocolate producers. Adults now have the vote, but their children are often slaves.

During the Cold War, the US was criticized for supporting brutal dictators – men like Somoza, former Chilean head of state Augusto Pinochet and once Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos. Since 1989, however, a shift has been evident: Americans, and their allies, have assumed that the best way to stabilize the developing world is to create governments similar to their own. "For 60 years, my country […] pursued stability at the expense of democracy […] and we achieved neither," proclaimed then-US secretary of state Condoleeza Rice in 2005. "Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all the people." She was referring specifically to the Middle East at the time, but was essentially espousing a universal doctrine.

Under this doctrine, success came to be measured by how quickly elections could be arranged in former autocracies, a mindset the foreign correspondent Misha Glenny calls "external pagekumbaya politicscall_made." The ballot became a substitute for more comprehensive development. As events in Africa, Central America, the Caribbean and the Middle East have shown, the people often lack the experience to behave like full-fledged democrats. The result is either chronic political instability or, worse, elected autocracies.

That issue of experience conjures a political 'hot potato', painfully reminiscent of Somoza's condescension to the masses. The argument brings to mind the colonial era when self-determination was perpetually denied on grounds that the natives were not ready. Today, the politically correct attitude is to assume that all people are capable of being good democrats, or at least should be allowed to make their own mistakes. Yet democracy is much more than an ideology worthy of adoption simply because it is noble. It is, in truth, a culture – one that took centuries to take root in Europe. The idea that it can be quickly transplanted in places where the soil is rocky and the climate harsh is simply naïve.

Iraq is a case in point. Unlike in established democracies, political divisions in Iraq are drawn not on ideology but along ethnic lines. The US, by pushing Iraq toward elections, encouraged the transformation of religious and tribal units into political parties – Sunni, Kurdish, Christian and Assyrian, among others. As a result, elections became simply a new forum for acting out ancient animosities. The Americans interpreted the enthusiasm with which Iraqis went to the polls as support for democracy, when in fact it was more likely a fierce determination not to allow bitter enemies to gain advantage through the ballot. Missing from the equation is the sense of compromise and accommodation essential to a well-functioning democracy.

Magnanimity in victory and tolerance in defeat are fundamental to the smooth working of the system. Both US President Barack Obama and his defeated opponent Senator John McCain demonstrated that on election night 2008. As Hawksley points out, however, magnanimity and tolerance are foreign to cultures where politics is a bitter contest of hegemony. "In much of the developing world […] the routine practice was often a winner-takes-all scenario – homes, jobs, freedoms and sometimes lives with the losers being bundled off and shot. This […] could not be shed overnight."

Prosperity seems essential to democratic stability. It goes without saying that money is a method of political expression, but what is seldom realized is that this is true even at modest levels of income. The voter who has a stable job and a secure place to live is a stakeholder in society and, by implication, a signatory to the social contract understood by Rousseau. Stakeholders feel that their lives are intrinsically connected to the survival of the state. The destitute, in contrast, feel no such connection and often believe the government is the cause of their plight. Their poverty also renders them susceptible to political bribery and to the populist promises of demagogues.

The Oxford academic Paul Collier, in "Wars, Guns and Votes," has postulated a formula to explain the connection between prosperity and democratic stability. He believes the crossover point lies at a per capita income of $2,700 per year. Below that level, democracy has a difficult time taking root. Political expression is often punctuated with violence. In contrast, in societies above that level, citizens feel that they have a stake in the system, and violence is likely if democratic demands are not met. In emerging democracies around the world, the connection between poverty and instability is clear. So, too, is the process by which economic despair leads to political alienation and, in extreme cases, terrorism.

While the fact that poor countries are often unstable is widely accepted, it has until recently seemed blasphemous to argue that democracy exacerbates their instability. The issue is clouded further when the fortunes of Cuba, China and Vietnam are considered. All are dictatorships, notorious for denying human rights, yet all have delivered a reasonably high standard of living, advanced social welfare and political stability. Cubans enjoy a life expectancy 20 years higher than exists in neighboring Haiti, a democracy. Their infant mortality rate is lower than that of the US. Cuba’s social welfare system is, by any measure, a major human rights triumph. The same could be said for China’s success in raising millions of its citizens out of poverty. All this suggests that the success of a nation should not be measured by the sole criterion of whether its citizens are occasionally allowed to vote.

The problem of bringing stability to the developing world is, in other words, hardly simple, yet, as a solution to turmoil, there are few remedies more simplistic than the vote. In the 1970s, the developed world was lulled into a false sense of serenity by the way Greece, Portugal and Spain moved smoothly from dictatorship to democracy. The experience of those nations, however, is hardly relevant to the predicaments faced by Iraqis, Afghans or Somalis. A more salutary lesson is provided by Germany and Japan after World War II. The Americans began planning reconstruction in 1942 and started with the assumption that economic rejuvenation was the essential prerequisite to democratic transformation. They also accepted that progress would be painfully slow and would require mentoring, management and money.

Evidence suggests that a healthy skepticism about democracy is gradually developing. Recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Zimbabwe, has perhaps convinced people that the ballot is not a panacea. That realization seems also to have penetrated the White House. As Obama has argued, "If we think we can just plunge in and, say, create a democracy from scratch in five years, then we’re badly mistaken."

Spaniards who once suffered under Franco invariably argue that the struggle for democracy is always virtuous. At the other end of the spectrum is the experience of Usama Rehda, an Iraqi citizen for whom democratic change has meant poverty, corruption and the constant threat of car bombs. "You know what they say," he recently remarked. "Be nice to the Americans or they’ll punish you with democracy." Between those two extremes lies an issue that demands debate.