Politics’ Black Box جعبه سیاه سیاست

Do we really know how to promote democracy?
Remarks by Francis Fukuyama
Professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University's
Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
May 24, 2005
Thank you very much. I am really delighted to be here in New
York. I grew up in New York City, so it’s great to be back, and I’d
like to thank the Foreign Policy Association and Hunter College
for the opportunity to speak on this subject tonight.
I am also quite grateful to the National Endowment for
Democracy. As Marc Plattner indicated, I’ve been involved with
the Journal of Democracy right from the beginning, which is a
really terrific and intellectual source of knowledge about
contemporary democracy. But also being a board member of the
NED, Washington is full of top-heavy, inefficient bureaucracies, if
you haven’t noticed, and the NED is just an amazing organization,
because it is small and lean. It doesn’t spend all its money on
contractors and Beltway bandits, it actually gets funds out to
people who are struggling for democracy all over the world, and
does a remarkable job at it. So I have been very honored to be
associated with both the intellectual side of the operation, the
Journal, and the grant making side in the endowment.
Which brings me to the topic, and I think the title got a little bit
garbled when I was negotiating this a few months ago. I actually
thought that the title was “What do we know about democracy
promotion?” So the answer to your immediate question is yes, we
know some things and no we don’t know everything, so your
journal can continue to publish every couple of months.
But I did want to lay out the question, you know, we’ve been doing
democracy promotion quite seriously in an organized way for a
couple of decades, and it is worth standing back and reviewing
this. It is very important to American foreign policy. President
Bush gave a remarkable second inaugural address in which he put
democracy promotion front and center in American foreign policy
in a way that has not quite been so stark in quite a while, although I
would say that every American president has made democracy
promotion a component of American foreign policy.
This is one of the few issues -- and you can tell as Representative
Gephardt was one of the last speakers in the series -- that has really
received bi-partisan support over the decades and one thing that
Americans can actually agree on in Washington. There are not
many these days, and that is one of them. It’s been long associated
with a tradition that in a certain sense starts with Woodrow Wilson.
We’ve done a lot of democracy promotion in earlier generations.
Japan and Germany emerged from World War II as wellfunctioning
democracies in large measure because of American
intervention. We played a large role in promoting the so-called
“third wave” democracies in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s.
And so President Bush is really not taking any departures in what
he said. What I think is interesting is that it is a conservative
Republican saying that, and a conservative Republican that
actually campaigned in 2000 against nation-building and against
extensive American involvement in this sort of thing, which to me
indicates that the imperative for democracy promotion is actually
fairly deeply rooted in the basic needs of American foreign policy.
Now, I am going to skip to the end of the talk in a way, and I am
going to assert the single most fundamental lesson that we have
learned about democracy promotion, and I want to begin with that.
I will have to just assert it without being able to prove it at first.
That lesson is the following: The United States is never the prime
mover in promoting democracy in any country around the world.
Or, to put it slightly differently, democracy cannot come about in
any society unless there is a strong domestic demand by local
actors -- elites, the masses or civil society -- that want it.
This is almost by definition. You cannot impose democracy on a
country that does not want to be democratic. That’s in the
definition of democracy. We’re sometimes accused of doing that
in Iraq. If the Iraqis don’t want democracy, believe me, there is
nothing we are going to be able to do in the long run that is going
to force them to have that form of government.
The United States, I think, can be very helpful in promoting
democratic transitions, and we can be very unhelpful when we
support non-democracies or we support authoritarian allies that are
trying to hold back that tide. But you cannot understand the
prospects for democracy promotion by an outside country like the
United States unless you understand the underlying mechanism
that brings countries to democracy and the conditions that make
democracy more or less likely.
So the first way to approach this problem is not to talk about the
United States, but to talk about democracy itself and the conditions
that facilitate democratic transition. I think that there are basically
four of them that I will discuss. The first has to do with the level
of development. Rich countries have an easier time sustaining
democracy than poor ones. Second is culture. The third has to do
with the neighborhood you live in. And the fourth has to do with
ideas. So let me go over all of those as conditions or hindrances to
democratic transition.
Let’s begin with the level of development. I am a political
scientist, and we have a lot of envy of natural scientists, because
we don’t have many real scientific laws in politics that we can
point to that receive any consensus. One of the few that is more or
less accepted by many is the fact that there is a correlation between
the level of development as measured by per capita GDP and
democracy. So, if you look around the world, virtually all of the
industrialized countries are functioning democracies, and relatively
few poor countries are democratic.
There are, of course, big exceptions. India and Costa Rica are
developing countries that have had robust democracies, while
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are relatively rich countries that are not
democratic. So there are exceptions, but the correlation actually
stands up pretty well. The reverse causality -- does democracy
promote development -- is a much more complicated one, because
we see that there are successful democracies like Japan after 1945
that did grow very fast, and there are authoritarian countries that
have also managed to do quite well, like Singapore, and again,
poor democracies and poor authoritarian rulers.
But there is clearly a relationship between economic development
and the ability – and in fact I think the social scientists who have
looked at this question say that of course a democratic transition
can happen if you are poor or if you are rich, it doesn’t really
matter, but the ability to sustain a stable democracy does correlate
very strongly with the overall level of income in the whole society.
In fact, once you get past a level of about $6,000 in per capita
GDP, and when you get to that level you are basically no longer an
agricultural society, you are an industrialized society. There is
actually not a single case of a country that becomes a democracy
reverting back to an authoritarian government.
Now the reasons for this are complex and not, I think, completely
understood. It has something to do with the growth of the middle
class -- people that own private property have something to lose
and therefore want to participate in the political system.
Obviously, education has something to do with it. If you live in a
subsistence economy you worry about feeding your family and not
whether you can vote, and all of those things begin changing as
you become richer.
So one thing that you want to do if you want to promote
democracy, this is not either a necessary or sufficient condition,
but it is very helpful, is to promote economic development. In
fact, we’ve seen a number of countries that have industrialized,
like South Korea and Taiwan, and right on schedule, when they hit
around that $6,000 income level they develop democratic
movements. One of the big hopes for China is that when they get
up to that level of development, similar processes will take place
there.
It also means, I think, that when we look at democratic transitions
in very poor and economically troubled parts of the world like sub-
Saharan Africa that there is greater skepticism that even if you
have an election or have a democratic transition, whether that will
be sustainable in a society that is that close to subsistence, that
does not have a state, that does not have any kind of resources,
where you have very low levels of education, very severe ethnic
and other kinds of cleavages.
It doesn’t mean it can’t happen in those kinds of poor countries,
but if you can do anything to promote economic development, it is
going to help your ability to sustain democracy. So you have to
worry both about politics and political development, and you have
to worry about economic development as well. In other words,
you need the National Endowment for Democracy, but you also
need the World Bank and other organizations that promote
development.
The second condition for democracy is culture. This has been in
people’s heads a lot. Because of September 11, there is a common
assertion, and actually an unfortunately politicized debate over
whether Islam is compatible either with modern economic
development or with political democracy and people will make
these broad cultural assertions that Islam does not separate the
mosque and the state, and therefore cannot sustain a true liberal
democracy.
I would say that in general, when you approach these cultural
questions you have to avoid two opposite conclusions. One is that
culture doesn’t matter at all, that it is just a matter of economics or
self-interest, because clearly it does. The other is that culture is
all-determinative, and that a particular country can’t develop
because it has a particular cultural background, or it can’t develop
a democracy because there are these insuperable cultural obstacles.
I don’t think that either of these positions is sustainable.
For example, I think that there is no question that there is a cultural
underpinning to successful democracy. Successful democracy is
not just a constitution and a certain set of formal institutions. In
fact, Samuel Huntington, in his latest book on American national
identity, has a phrase in one of the early chapters that I think is
correct that may make people uncomfortable, but he says the same
institutions – and he talks about the Anglo-Protestant culture that
existed in North America at the time of the American founding,
which he said was important to the success of American
democracy – he says if you take the same formal institutions, the
constitution, the presidency and so-forth, and combine it with a
Hispanic culture you get Mexico, if you combine it with a
Portuguese culture you get Brazil, and you get very different
outcomes in terms of the character of the democracy that emerges.
I think that the question is, who is an Anglo-Protestant in the world
these days? I think it is probably Korean grocery store owners and
Russian cab drivers in terms of work ethic and drive to succeed
and so forth, but there is no question that unless you have those
kinds of unwritten norms and cultural values, the ability to
compromise, the willingness to abide for certain types of rule,
respect for rule of law, that it is hard to make democracy work.
On the other hand, history is full of people that abused the concept
of culture to say that it is too determinative. Actually, the most
famous was a person who in a way should not have made this
mistake, the German sociologist Max Weber, who is famous for
his book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” in
which he argued that Protestant countries developed sooner than
Catholic ones because of the work ethic and savings that were
fostered by a certain set of religious beliefs.
He also wrote a book on Asia and the effect of Confucianism on
economic development that is probably one of the wrongest books
ever written by a major sociologist. He’s got this remarkable
assertion, in which he says there are all kinds of reasons why
China could not develop a modern capitalist economy, and he’s got
one line where he says if there is any country less likely to develop
modern capitalism than China, it is Japan. This is a book that was
written in 1915, so even a great thinker like Weber can get
confused about attributing to culture things that really ought to be
contributed to things like weak institutions, the fact that you are
occupied by a colonial power as China was, or that you’ve got a
communist regime or a lot of other things that explain Asia’s
failure to develop up to the last couple of generations.
I would say that we really have to be careful about this when we
think about the question of Islam and democracy today. There is
no question that the existence of radical Islamist parties that are
really not at their core at all democratic, but can contest democratic
elections makes it much harder to hold elections in Muslim
countries, because the fear is that one of these parties will come to
power, you know, one man, one vote, one time, and will use that as
a route to establishing a theocracy of the sort that exists in Iran
today, and that is a real danger.
On the other hand, does that mean that you could not get a
reconciliation of Islam and democracy? I think it is very doubtful.
In fact, we have an Islamist party ruling Turkey today that is a
moderate Islamist party that wants to get into the European Union
and has been changing Turkish laws left and right in order to
comply with the European accession criteria. There are many
ways in which you can combine, and actually we’ve got two
presidents, we’ve got Karzai of Afghanistan and Yudhoyono of
Indonesia both of whom are presidents of countries that are pretty
credible democracies, Afghanistan not for that long. But they have
both done well, they are both non-Western, both are Muslim and
both are democratic, so it’s not an insuperable obstacle but it
matters.
The third issue is neighbors. Societies are obviously influenced by
what goes on around them, and I think this is particularly true in
today’s globalized world where you get images of the Orange
Revolution that are broadcast not just in Ukraine but on every
screen around the world, and it is inevitable that people begin
copying practices or accepting norms and political movements that
occur in other parts of the world.
The fall of the Berlin Wall had echoes all over the world, in Asia,
in Latin America, and there was a wave of democratic transitions
in sub-Saharan Africa in countries that didn’t meet any of the
political scientists’ criteria for candidates for democratic transition
and I think the reason that happened was really people watching
the behavior of other political actors on the global stage.
Therefore, there is a great deal of competition and pressure from
the international community concerning democratic norms.
Now the nature of the neighborhood matters very much, so that
Ukraine and Georgia and Serbia, in a certain sense, believe that
they all filled a certain ex-communist space and it is not the same
space that most Arab countries live in. I think that a country like
Ukraine, certainly Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, all believe
that they should have been in Western Europe, that that was their
real home and that communism actually kept them from being
themselves, so when the wall came down it was simply a matter of
returning to something that was quite natural to them.
That is not the case in the Arab world right now because
democracy is a Western concept. It is something I think many
people in the Arab world want, but it is not something they feel is a
part of their tradition in the same way that people in the former
communist world did. I actually had a student who was an
Egyptian newscaster and he interviewed me once for an Egyptian
news station and we were talking about this issue and he was
saying, yes, Egyptians really do want democracy, but can we just
come up with another word for it, because it just doesn’t sound
right, you know, we use this word when we talk about it in Arabic
and it sounds like something foreign. We have something like it in
our tradition but that’s simply not it. So neighborhood is really
important.
The final issue is ideas, that is, you cannot have a democracy
unless you have people who believe in democracy. I think -- and
in a way this was the core of my book “The End of History and the
Last Man” – the thing that was interesting about the world that
emerged at the end of the 20th century was that liberal democracy
was virtually the only idea that had widespread legitimacy
throughout the world as the basis for a political society, and
particularly for a modern political society, so that even when you
got these generals that took power in Argentina, or Brazil or Peru
in the 1960s and ‘70s, they were embarrassed and said, well, we
are just doing this temporarily, we understand that we have to be
democratic, but democracy isn’t working very well, it really helped
push them out of the way, because at a certain point when they had
sort of outlived the excuse they had made for intervening, nobody
had any other grounds for justifying rule other than democratic
elections.
Even in a Muslim country like Indonesia, I think there is a hope
that the dictator Suharto had that by promoting rapid economic
growth, people would legitimate his form of soft authoritarianism,
and that worked pretty well up until they hit a bump in the road
called the Asian crisis, a major economic setback, where they lost
30 percent of their national income and at that point Indonesians
turned around and said, why do we need this corrupt dictator to
preside over this kind of a setback? We might as well have a
democracy and have something legitimate. So the idea of
democracy was really key.
Now, there are other ideas out there in the world. I believe it was
Zarqawi who put up on his Web site some phrase to the effect that
democracy itself as we envisioned it in Iraq was actually
sacrilegious, because it is not the people who are sovereign, it is
God who is sovereign. So there is a strand of jihadist thinking that
rejects root and branch Western ideas of democracy. My view is
that they still represent a relatively small minority, even within the
Muslim world, and that contest is still ongoing. But unless you’ve
got the ideas, you are not going to have genuine democracy.
Now, the next question has to do with the actual, empirical
American experience with democracy promotion, and this gets to
the question of what have we actually learned having done this for
all these years. The United States did not get on this democracy
promotion kick anytime recently, and in fact the United States
played a very critical role, you know, we had Germany and Japan
of course, but we oftentimes made compromises with our
democratic principles because we were in a cold war and we
supported a lot of non-democratic allies and in fact acted in ways
that destabilized some democracies because they were sufficiently
in our camp in the Cold War.
But that began to change very substantially, I think, really during
the Reagan administration, and you had a number of important
decisions in which the United States began to play a very critical
role. In the Philippines, after the people power revolution
following Benigno Aquino’s assassination, the United States
pulled the rug out from Ferdinand Marcos. In fact, Paul Wolfowitz,
head of the World Bank and at that time assistant secretary of state
for East Asia, played a key role in pushing Ronald Reagan, quite
gently, to end support for this friendly dictator.
The following year in South Korea the United States sent a letter to
Roh Tae Woo, the general ruling Korea saying that he really had to
go for democratic institutions in the face of all the student and
worker demonstrations, pro-democracy demonstrations, that were
taking place there, and he saw the handwriting on the wall that the
United States was not going to support a crackdown in Korea, and
the rest is history. They had an election and Korea is now a fully
democratic society.
The following year, the United States supported the ‘no’
referendum against Augusto Pinochet in 1988. There is still a
controversy about what we did back in 1973 when Pinochet came
to power, but I think that the realists that were in power in
Washington at the time had a certain fondness for stability that was
brought about by friendly dictators, but by 1988 we made a clear
break with that and said whatever the Chilean people say, if they
want Pinochet to go, we are going to support that. Taiwan in 1988
also had a democratic election.
We also supported democracy in Eastern Europe very strongly, the
solidarity labor movement got a lot of support, right from the
beginning, from the AFL-CIO, through the National Endowment
for Democracy, the German foundations, the Frederick Ebert and
Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung played a key role in promoting
democracy in Latin Europe, in Portugal particularly and other
places as well.
So there was a lot of activity in the entire third wave where the
international community didn’t just broadcast its way of life and
ideas but actually gave key material support, training, party
development, election monitoring to actors in countries undergoing
democratic revolutions.
Now, we’ve also tried a more muscular approach to democracy
promotion through invasion and military occupation, and that also
has a long history. We’ve of course had Japan and Germany, and
we have Afghanistan and Iraq today, and we’ve had a lot nationbuilding
exercises that we’ve engaged in. But really the first
important one was the reconstruction of the South. We don’t think
of this as nation-building, but it was actually a very important
precedent because I think all of the important things we did wrong
in reconstruction we are doing wrong today in Iraq, and we
continue to make those kinds of mistakes.
We get very enthusiastic about these projects and do them for
about five years until we get tired of them and move on, and the
problem hasn’t really been solved. And I think, quite frankly,
although Germany and Japan were big successes in this regard, this
kind of muscular nation-building is something that is fairly
problematic, because it is very costly and very difficult.
Forcible regime change really creates as many problems as it
solves because you are the primary agent that is pushing change,
and it is not any longer driven by the society, so the ownership of
the transformation society gets very clouded, and unless the local
people think they own the democracy that they are creating, it
creates a lot of problems, and it creates resistance unless there is a
clear moral basis for the American role.
Now, just in the last five years we’ve had actually a kind of fourth
wave, or a second phase of the third wave of democracy with the
revolutions in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. I’m not going to count
Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan yet because it is really not clear how
those are going to come out, but certainly Serbia, Georgia and
Ukraine were remarkable instances of societies really wanting
democratic change and getting it, which I think, when the history
of this is written, we will find outside democracy promotion
actually played a key role.
All three of those democratic revolutions followed a similar
pattern. The outside support was critical in several respects. It
was critical first in providing election monitoring. We, meaning
the United States and the international community, did not know
how to help stage a free and fair election when we started doing
this in the early ‘80s but the technology and the mechanism for
doing this now is there, and when Ukraine had its run-off election
in late December, the international community could mobilize
thousands of poll-watchers that could really guarantee that the
election was a fair one, which means that election fraud is pretty
detectable now under that system.
We supported independent media that could get word out about
fraudulent or stolen elections, and we supported civil society
groups that could stand outside the government and could mobilize
outside of the legislature in Kiev, all of those crowds standing out
there night after night demanding a second election. I think that
most of the groups that did this, that broadcast news about the
fraud, and that mobilized in that square really had received support
from the outside, not just the United States but from Europe and
Canada and other places, and it’s very possible that that revolution
may not have been as successful, or could have been quashed more
easily, had it not been for that outside help. Something similar
happened in Serbia and Georgia.
There are lessons from this. This kind of democracy promotion
does not work everywhere. The United States, or the international
community, or the Europeans do not have the ability to say, well,
we want democracy in such and such a country and we are going
to use these levers to get it. The movement really has to wait for a
certain ripening, and furthermore, it really does not happen in any
but a semi-authoritarian society. If a ruler is not willing to hold an
election that can be falsified then this kind of sequence of events
cannot happen.
So, when Robert Mugabe recently held what was probably a
crooked election in Zimbabwe, there are no international observers
there, wide suspicion among his opponents that this thing was
rigged, but really no proof, and therefore no ability to mobilize
people in opposition to it. It wouldn’t have worked under Saddam
Hussein or under Kim Jong Il or any number of totalitarian
dictators. So this kind of democracy promotion has a certain
window that it can operate in, and again it depends on the
neighborhood very much and the willingness of people to receive
support from the West, from the United States in particular, and it
differs from country to country. The Russians today I think are
much less happy about that kind of support than were the
Ukrainians or the Georgians.
Let me just conclude by talking a little bit about democracy in the
Middle East, because this really has become, in a way, the
centerpiece of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. And I
don’t think we should approach this in a partisan way, because I
guarantee you that if a Democratic president is elected in 2008,
that administration is going to continue these types of programs
because I think there is a consensus that many of the types of
problems in the Middle East, including terrorism, stem ultimately
from political systems that are absolutely stuck and not susceptible
to change, so just in itself and for the sake of U.S. long-term
interest, I think there is fairly broad consensus that this is
something that we need to do if possible.
The real question is, realistically, what are the prospects for
democratic transition in this region? There are a number of
reasons for thinking that the region is ripe for change. If you just
look at poll data done by any number of organizations, including
the three UNDP Arab Human Development Reports, there is
plenty of evidence that people, broadly speaking, across the
Middle East would like to see democratic change occur in their
countries. In fact, a large number of respondents in Arab countries
actually want to move to a democratic country, because they have
kind of given up on life in their own society.
And we’ve certainly seen big cracks in the façade of Arab
authoritarianism after the Iraq election, in Lebanon, which is going
to trigger things in Syria. In Egypt, Mubarak has shown he is not
impervious to the demands from his biggest allies for some kind of
democratic opening. I have no doubt whatsoever that the whole
region has a great deal of pent up demand for democratic change.
On the negative side, however, I think we have to be a little bit
realistic about both the region and also about the United States
itself. I believe at this point in our history, the United States is
unfortunately the wrong agent for promoting change in this region.
We had a general idea that by toppling Saddam Hussein we would
set off political reverberations and that might help, but we have to
confront the fact that American credibility in this part of the world
is disastrously low.
By the time you got to the invasion of Iraq, even in nominally
friendly countries like Turkey or Kuwait, which we saved in 1991,
or in Indonesia, you were down to levels of popularity for the
United States in the single digits, in contrast to majorities being
favorably inclined towards the United States 10 years earlier. I
think things like Abu Ghraib and Saddam Hussein in his
underwear and all of the things that were unintended consequences
of the invasion have only been salt in that particular wound.
I think that democracy, although it is not the case that democracy
cannot flower and emerge in most Arab countries, I think there are
reasons why it is going to have a different face in that part of the
world. We’ve seen this already in Iraq and Afghanistan, where
religion is simply written into their constitutions and will play a
bigger part in their political society than it will in Europe or the
United States. So even if there is democracy it is going to be
something that will have a Muslim and an Arab character.
The final issue is that I really, honestly, don’t think that people in
Washington have made up their minds if they truly want
democracy in the Middle East if it means destabilizing important
allies and opening the door to Islamists coming to power. The
president has said quite explicitly -- let the chips fall where they
may, this is the course that we are on. I guess we have to take him
at his word. It is a pretty big leap to make to say that in Egypt or
Saudi Arabia you are willing to take the chances of a really free
and open democratic process.
My personal belief is that we should do this. I believe that we
made a big mistake back in the early 1990s when we and the
French told the Algerian military that they should crack down on
the FIS, the Islamic Salvation Front that had won the election at
that point. We were, I think, legitimately worried that this was a
totalitarian party that would abolish democracy if it came to power,
but I think it was a calculated risk that we should have been willing
to take, and I think we should take it in other parts of the Middle
East. But that is a political decision that is extremely hard for the
United States to make, not because we like being hypocritical, but
because it is a genuinely difficult set of decisions.
So, that’s it. I will repeat the assertion with which I began. The
United States does not actually promote democracy anywhere.
Democracy is promoted by people who want to live in democratic
societies. We can be helpful, and we can be helpful to the point
where it makes a difference between success and failure, but I
think we have to understand that democracy promotion is a kind of
opportunistic activity that will remain an important component of
American foreign policy, but will be a process that we are never
able to really control or master, because the whole process of
democracy itself is pretty messy.
Thank you very much for your attention.
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