Why did Babangida bother? Why, indeed, has there been a run of absurd, aborted, often fraudulent elections across the world recently, from Algeria to Angola to Azerbaijan? The answer can be found in a speech delivered by Secretary of State James Baker in March of 1990, a long-forgotten effort to construct a post-cold-war foreign-policy doctrine: “President Bush has defined our new mission to be the promotion and consolidation of democracy…We are tying our assistance to our values.”
That seemed reasonable enough. The Berlin wall had just come down. There was no longer a need to coddle strategically placed General Babangidas around the world. Recognition by the United States-and, more to the point, aid-would now be conditioned on the appearance of democracy. The European Community, the Organization of American States and many international donors and lenders soon followed suit. Running a dictatorship became less profitable; only democracies needed to apply for membership in, and succor from, the “world community.” It was a euphoric moment, but a fleeting one.
The world community was soon reminded that democracy involves more than just calling an election. In some cases, elections meant exposing the populace to grave peril-in Algeria, for instance, opponents of the Muslim fundamentalists warned that a Muslim victory would mean “one man, one vote, one time.” (The fundamentalists won, but were blocked by the military.) In Angola, an election reinvigorated a civil war. In Haiti, it brought to power an unstable populist, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was tossed by the military after he threatened to “necklace” his opponents. In other countries-or ethnic shards posing as countries-elections ratified tribal xenophobia: Slobodan Milosevic was elected democratically. Clearly, the “promotion…of democracy” left something to be desired as the centerpiece of a coherent American foreign policy.
Indeed, the very idea of democracy is now–suddenly, and rather unexpectedly-facing “a strong intellectual challenge,” says Carl Gershman of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Obviously, no intellectual challenge to democracy can be all that strong: it remains the best guarantee of individual freedom, which is the central organizing principle of Western civilization. But there are other civilizations-as Prof. Samuel Huntington points out in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, and they aren’t necessarily keen on “Western ideas of individualism…the rule of law, democracy…Western efforts to propagate such ideas produce instead a reaction against ‘human rights imperialism’.”
The most intriguing challenge is coming from Asia, from the “New Confucians” who argue that democracy is far too volatile for countries undergoing rapid economic development. This “Asian model” is largely a figment of Singaporean dictator Lee Kuan Yew’s imagination, and a clever rationale for the maintenance of draconian political control, but it is sold with great enthusiasm by his mandarins at international gatherings and has provided a supple enough matrix for Lee, a noted ultraconservative, to embrace China’s Deng as a fellow Confucian. At the same time, the best counterargument to the New Confucianism also comes from Asia, from countries like Taiwan and South Korea, whose emerging middle classes have demanded the rights and security that only democracy can guarantee. (Japan also seems to be edging away from consensual democracy-a polite form of authoritarianism-toward a more blustery, consumer-oriented version of freedom.)
Should Asian-style authoritarianism be accepted by the West as a halfway house on the road to freedom, a tolerable way to build the economic stability necessary for democracy to flourish? “Nobody has yet made the case that you need to torture people to have economic development,” says NED’s Carl Gershman. But he also admits that not enough thought has been given to the Asian challenge-and some surprise as well, that three years after the fall of communism, the democratic concept once more needs to be defended.
