THE WORLDWIDE STATUS OF DEMOCRACY

"Oh, liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!"

The plaint heard during the French Revolution is still widely applicable today. But perhaps even more pertinent would be a variation: "Oh, democracy, what travesties are perpetrated in thy name!" Everybody all over the world seems to want democracy, at least nominally. It is a coveted political status symbol, a powerful fetish. Yet Jefferson and Burke might very well lose their faith in reason or possibly flip their whigs, if they could survey some of the systems that today take democracy's name in vain.

Stalin called his tyranny "democratic centralism." The most irremediably bleak and oppressive of the European satellites, East Germany, styles itself the German Democratic Republic. For that matter, all the satellites are fond of calling themselves "peoples' democracies." That tag was adopted by Indonesian Dictator Sukarno after he gave up the patently absurd mislabel of "guided democracy"--which has now been picked up by Malawi President H. Kamuzu Banda, who explains blandly, "I am a dictator by the will of the people." Southern Rhodesian Premier Ian Smith, busy developing a political hammer lock to keep some 250,000 whites in power over the nation's 4,000,000 blacks, insists that what he is about is "responsible democracy." Pakistan's Ayub Khan had no sooner seized power in a military coup d'etat seven years ago than he set his nation upon the arbitrary road of "basic democracy."

Woodrow Wilson's World War I pledge to "make the world safe for democracy" is nowadays often considered naive. President Kennedy spoke instead of "making the world safe for diversity." Yet the Wilsonian hope--which does not intend to impose democracy on anyone but only to create conditions in which it can live--remains a noble aim and a valid, long-range objective for American policy. The U.S. no longer insists that "real" democracy must conform to a particular version of the parliamentary or presidential system. But any meaningful definition of democracy must meet certain minimum conditions. The ancient Greeks had some careful notions about democracy, and none better than Jason's eloquent appeal in Euripides' Medea that, A good Greek land hath been Thy lasting home, not barbary. Thou hast seen Our ordered life, and justice, and the long Still grasp of law not changing with the strong Man's pleasure . . .

In practice, democracy at the very least requires periodic free elections in which a representative majority of citizens may elect (or dismiss) a government. Most political scientists would demand more: one or more organized opposition parties to guarantee genuine choices, freedom from arbitrary arrest or intimidation, a free press, an independent judiciary, mechanisms guaranteeing the rights of minorities, and a system to protect or improve the economic well-being of all citizens.

Genuine Democracies

By such stiff tests, there are scarcely more than twoscore genuinely functioning democracies. But they embrace about 40% of the world's 3.2 billion people. Another 40% live under the "barbary" of totalitarian rule, the rest in political halfway houses. The governments that most closely meet the democratic tests are, of course, concentrated in the U.S., the old British Commonwealth and Western Europe. In the nature of things, none is perfect, and some are deeply troubled. None achieved democracy quickly, easily, or as the gift of any master. Nobles had to bend to kings, kings had to die on the block, and a middle class had to rise from turmoil before the stubborn will to freedom finally took concrete shape in constitutions, parliaments and electorates.

Inevitably, less effort and less time have gone into the development of younger democracies. Latin America boasts half a dozen democratic regimes--at the moment. The stablest are Chile, with more than 40 years of fairly literate, honest politics, and Costa Rica. The others are Peru, Venezuela, Colombia and Uruguay, and they are all beset in varying degrees by violence and the threat of periodic coups. But at least at present, their democratic machinery is more or less intact.

In Asia, India can rightfully claim to be the world's largest democracy--although it is in effect a one-party state, so dominant is the ruling Congress Party. But trying to impose a classic two-party system on the welter of Indian politics could only lead to total breakdown. Besides, other parties do freely exist, and within itself the Congress Party contains and balances off so many shades of opinion and interests that it is virtually a coalition government. One of the most serious dangers to Indian democracy is corruption in the civil service, essentially a symptom of economic and political insecurity. This also besets other nations; the Philippines, for instance, are often described as a "tropical Tammany."

Japan had modern democracy thrust upon it by the U.S. conquerors after World War II. The Japanese tradition of obedience made it work rather dutifully and mechanically at first, but today, despite occasional street riots and parliamentary mayhem, Japan shows every sign of developing into one of the world's most intelligent democracies.

Newly formed Malaysia is democratic in all respects but one: it discriminates against its Chinese population in jobs and government posts simply because the Malays are so far behind in wealth and education that they need time--and special privileges--to catch up. Though scarcely stable, Ceylon has twice during the last ten years voted out incumbent governments in more or less orderly transition.

In Africa and the Middle East (with the exception of Israel), democracy has fared less well. Zambia, with a vigorous multiparty system, meets most tests, and Morocco, blessed with 1,100 years of national identity, has made the transition to parliamentary democracy fairly smoothly. Uganda is a democracy by virtue of a more dubious blessing--a dissident Buganda minority still so fiercely loyal to their tribal monarch that Premier Milton Obote is forcibly prevented from creating the one-party state he would like.

Dictatorships

At the other end of the political spectrum, authoritarianism abounds, much of it under the Marxist rifle butts. Not that Communist dictatorships are identical. Russia's European satellites have loosened up of late, and so in a way has Russia itself, although none of the Red nations permits political opposition or significant public dissent.

There are non-Communist regimes that are no better, and in some cases worse. Algerians spent eight bloody years winning their independence from France only to have Ben Bella set up a repressive police state. Ghanaian "Redeemer" Nkrumah has created an autocracy in which his own name is even written into the constitution as President. Democracy in Iraq has been all but drowned in blood, and there is little democratic hope to find among the Arab fiefdoms of the Middle East and the bleak dictatorships of Bolivia, Paraguay and Haiti in Latin America.

Some countries automatically classified as dictatorships have grown relatively mellow, among them Spain and Portugal, which are relaxed in comparison with the darker Red regimes or many African one-party states. In fact, Portugal allows presidential elections of sorts, and has been described, not altogether cynically, as a "police democracy."

Some nations, like Turkey and Ecuador, are perhaps only temporarily non-democracies--under military rule because the army stepped in to prevent chaos when the processes of democracy broke down. South Americans have long been accustomed to that phenomenon, and the Ecuadorians knowingly assess their present government as a dictablanda or soft dictatorship. No one is very surprised that the current dictablanda has adopted the Alianza's platform of social and economic reforms and may push more of it through than a civilian government could.

Like Ethiopia, Libya and Cambodia, there are nondemocracies that are authoritarian by force of habit. Emperor Haile Selassie, in 35 years of rule over his backward country, has done more for the welfare of his nation than some blustering democratic regimes; he has even tried to introduce a few democratic forms, but the Ethiopians are not very interested.

Curiously, many authoritarian nations seem unnecessarily oppressive because, if their governments held free elections, their peoples would almost certainly return them to power. Among them: Franco's Spain, Nasser's Egypt, and the Soviet Union itself. But though the regimes might win the first time around, they might not the next.

Doubtful Democracies

Between the democratic and authoritarian extremes lies a multitude of nations in diverse conditions of polity. At best they are dubious democracies, though they can look astonishingly like the real thing. South Africa, for example, has a meaningful two-party system, a literate electorate, a long and stable parliamentary tradition. But in reality, South Africa suppresses any real dissent and rests, like an ancient Greek city-state, on a slave base. Nigeria is often praised as black Africa's premier democracy. But Nigeria is really two nations: the liberal and enlightened south, and the north (more a medieval Islamic caliphate than a modern democracy), clasped in tenuous and sometimes internecine union.

Technically, Mexico hardly qualifies as a democracy since it is ruled by a single group, the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The P.R.I. is a coalition of nearly every political faction in the nation, and every six years puts on a U.S.-style orgy of elections for the one presidential candidate on the ballot, who has been secretly selected by the P.R.I. party chiefs. Yet somehow it all works out fairly democratically, producing a metronomic swing from left to right in the P.R.I. governments. Argentina, in contrast, has the democratic forms without the music: in self-defense, the regime reserves the right to veto candidates backing exiled Dictator Juan Peron, who, were he permitted back, could make a Napoleonic return to power.

There are some dubious democracies that are evolving toward more freedom; unlike being pregnant, it is possible to be a little bit democratic. Perhaps the textbook example of how a benign dictatorship can encourage democracy is Ayub Khan, who remains a military strongman but in seven years has moved Pakistan to the point where he himself ran scared for President in this year's election--and against a 71-year-old woman at that. Similarly, Thailand, now under semiautocratic rule, is preparing a constitution. The Shah of Iran has mobilized the intellectual resources of his nation for economic, social and ultimately democratic reforms. Even that old tribal chief Jomo Kenyatta has so far proved an adroit democrat; though he maneuvered the opposition out of business, all elements of Kenya are represented in his one-party government.

The majority of black Africa's new nations have adopted one-party systems--by no means all as representative as Kenya's. The late President of Togo, Sylvanus Olympic, insisted that "the test of a democratic regime in Africa might not be the actual presence of a second party, so much as whether the regime tolerated individualists." This is not necessarily doublethink. The one-party system is an effort to come to terms with an African tradition of tribal consensus in which the elders made universally accepted decisions. In such a context the concept of a "loyal opposition" is virtually meaningless.

None of the foregoing categories are fixed. While some countries in the dubious classification work their way toward more genuine democracy, others slide back into full dictatorships. No matter how many objective measurements are applied, they do not necessarily tell the quality of a government.

Democracy is not a formula but a living process, not an ideology but a hope about the nature of man. Hence it cannot be applied from a handbook or manifesto to different peoples. It must work for the free-swinging Latin who instinctively distrusts authority and, at the other end of the emotional scale, for the passive Asian who instinctively obeys authority--or ignores it.

Obstacles & Possibilities

Perhaps the biggest single obstacle to the spread of democracy is that at its core lies a paradox--the tension between freedom and order, between the individual and society. In many parts of the world, Voltaire's ringing "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" is incomprehensible. The sense of individual responsibility that the Western ego has developed over the centuries is missing, and what seems in the West a rather commonplace step--voting and the individual decision that precedes it--can seem in Africa and Asia a lonely and unnatural act.

Another obstacle is the new nations' obsession to get rid of all things associated with colonialism, including democratic customs. One ready substitute is socialism--or the vague authoritarian forms that many backward countries take to be socialism--for it offers a nice, revolutionary, anticolonial posture, and more or less handy blueprints for a centralized economy.

There are more obvious inhibitions to democracy. In the Federalist Paper No. 51, James Madison pointed out that the first requirement of a government is to be able to control the governed. From the Congo to Burma, controlling the governed--often in the face of Communist subversion--is the first order of business that leaves little energy for anything else. Some prerequisites for effective democracy, notably a respect for order and a sense of accommodation without violence, can probably be furnished only by a strong, educated middle class, which is present in few of the emerging nations.

Whatever its long-range hopes for democracy, the immediate aim of U.S. foreign policy must often be simply the containment of Communism. Hence the U.S. has grown pragmatic; it has learned that order and stability, even if relatively undemocratic, can be more important in emerging nations than a premature democracy that invites chaos. Thus the U.S. officially applauded (and some say instigated) the overthrow of a hopelessly inefficient and left-wing civilian regime in Guatemala, and cheered the downfall of a left-sliding, if popularly elected, government in Brazil.

Where, then, lies the hope for democracy? At least in part, it lies in economics. Developing nations often argue that what really matters to them is not democracy but modernization. Yet democracy has a strong economic content; it remains, despite Western moves toward collectivism in recent decades, a competitive society. The Communists claim that only some form of economic regimentation can help backward nations close the gap of centuries. The claim is almost demonstrably false, as is suggested by the Russians' own recent experiments with freer enterprise. Says Sociology Professor Edward Shils of Chicago University and Cambridge: "I have never seen any convincing evidence that one-party government is necessary for economic progress. One thing it can do, of course, is silence its critics more easily. But the Communists could never rule Africa, for instance. Communist systems require far too much organization." In the long run, the true modernizer is the free, competitive society.

Finally, the hope of democracy lies in the contagion of the idea itself. Although democracies like ancient Athens and between-wars Germany have voted themselves into the hands of authoritarians, not a single nation has ever freely voted to turn itself over to Communism. "It is a terrible truth that it costs more strength to maintain freedom than to endure the weight of tyranny," wrote Simon Bolivar. That is probably still true. But times and attitudes have changed immeasurably, and it is possible that in a modernizing, prospering world, there ultimately will be more people with more strength to keep their countries safe for democracy.

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