Is democracy good for what ails ‘em?

  • From the British pub­li­ca­tion Econ­o­mist (no par­tic­u­lar cheer­leader for Bush, as evi­denced by the title of their cover story — “Democ­racy: The one thing Bush got right”):

    In his [SOTU] speech, Mr Bush said again that Amer­ica was com­mit­ted to the “his­toric long-term goal” of spread­ing democ­racy. But in the Mid­dle East, ask his crit­ics, hasn’t his democ­racy agenda ush­ered in some­thing worse than the pre­vi­ous pat­tern of rule by strong­men: the rise in Iraq, Egypt and now Pales­tine of a form of polit­i­cal Islam that is hos­tile both to the West and to the under­ly­ing val­ues of democ­racy itself?

    The detailed answer to this ques­tion has to be long, if only because the thing peo­ple call “polit­i­cal Islam” comes in so many dif­fer­ent shapes and sizes (see arti­cle). The short answer, how­ever, is no. Mr Bush has made many big mis­takes in the Mid­dle East. They range from inept plan­ning and follow-through in Iraq to supine neglect of Pales­tine. But his democ­ra­ti­sa­tion pol­icy is not one of them. In fact, it may be the one big thing that this pres­i­dent has got right in the region.

    Democracy’s defin­ing feature—the free­dom to hire and fire your government—does not guar­an­tee that coun­tries will make wise choices, or that democ­ra­cies will be good neigh­bours. The les­son of the 20th cen­tury is that no peo­ple is immune from falling under the spell of some hyp­notic voice or per­ni­cious doc­trine. In 1933 Ger­mans freely elected the Nazi Party, which went on to reduce Europe to rub­ble. But only the most twisted his­tory could blame democ­racy rather than dic­ta­tor­ship for the depre­da­tions of Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong. The mer­its of democ­racy are obvi­ous and the appeal of it seems uni­ver­sal. So why do the famil­iar argu­ments have to be rehashed all over again in the case of the Mid­dle East?

    One rea­son peo­ple on the left object to Mr Bush’s “free­dom agenda” is that they see it as a veil for some­thing else: an Amer­i­can pol­icy of stomp­ing about the world depos­ing unfriendly regimes at will. If such a pol­icy existed, it would be wrong. But Mr Bush’s agenda so far con­sists mainly of using the bully pul­pit of super­pow­er­dom to extol democracy’s virtues. …

    Hold­ing elec­tions is not a panacea. Democ­racy can­not at a stroke heal national con­flicts, cre­ate civic insti­tu­tions or mod­ernise tra­di­tional soci­eties. But what­ever else peo­ple think of Mr Bush, on this one thing—the uni­ver­sal poten­tial and appeal of the demo­c­ra­tic idea—he is on the side of history.

    Read it here. (It’s a sub­scrip­tion site, I believe, but free and well worth a cou­ple min­utes to do.)


    Related posts:

    1. Howard lay­ing it down
    2. Alito and pandering
    3. Why Amer­ica must stay
    4. The canoe-headed one strikes back
    5. Heck­uva speech going on

    February 2nd, 2006 | Grace | No Comments |

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