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The Decline of an American Export

Western Democracy Loses Ground to Autocrats

By Erich Follath

It's the best of all bad forms of government, but for many it's no longer good enough. Today democracy leaves lots of people cold, and in Asia and Africa, many prefer autocratic systems. Damaged by Bush, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, few are interested in the model of democracy exported by the United States.

Once upon a time, there was a king who was called the "Precious Ruler of the Dragon People." The monarch loved his people and his people loved him in return. One day he announced that he was going to descend from the throne and voluntarily give up his position of absolute power. He said the time had come for his people to govern themselves and that this would make the country's people better able to realize their philosophy of "Gross National Happiness."

The people were unsure. They thought everything in their little kingdom had been just fine the way it was. On the other hand, they didn't want to go against the trend of the times or against the wishes of their king. So they went ahead and founded political parties. Despite their continued skepticism with regard to democracy, they obediently went to the polling stations to cast their ballots. Voter turnout was around 80 percent. An overwhelming majority of the electorate voted for the Peace and Prosperity Party. You see, it can be done, the king observed, delighted with the results. He said he was looking forward to his own disempowerment and to taking part in parliamentary debates.

This may sound like a fairy tale or a story based on a figure in ancient history, but it actually happened, and not all that long ago. On March 24, Bhutan -- a small country high in the Himalayas, nestled between India, China, and Tibet -- was transformed by order of its king, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, from an absolute monarchy into a democratically legitimated constitutional monarchy. Nine years ago television was legalized in this remote kingdom with its majestic mountain peaks, Buddhist monasteries and population of 680,000. Now democracy has been introduced through what has been a carefully planned, top-down procedure -- like almost everything here in the "Land of the Thunder Dragon," perched atop the world's tallest mountain range.

Chalk one up for Democracy. At Freedom House, a Washington-based organization that compiles and regularly updates surveys on the status of freedom in the world, staff members pinned a green flag indicating "free" to a map of the world. It was high time there was something positive to report.

After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union the West declared that liberal democracy had triumphed. Given the fall of Slobodan Milosovic in the wake of non-violent student demonstrations in Belgrade in 2000, the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in 2005, the trend seemed to be towards the spread of democracy. Belarus looked like it would be the next domino to fall, followed by Azerbaijan and perhaps Burma. Authoritarian regimes throughout the world seemed to be on their way out, or at least this was what the young "Democracy-makers" were e-mailing back and forth to each other at the time, along with recipes for organizing the next civil disobedience coup and "Revolution Inc."

However, it soon became evident that authoritarian regimes could be removed by means of non-violent demonstrations only if they had already been weakened and some sort of oppositional movement already existed. It did not work against very repressive regimes. Police brutally beat down demonstrators in Minsk, Baku, Rangoon, and Tashkent. The same thing happened in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, on orders from the Chinese communist leadership in Beijing in response to demonstrations held by Buddhist monks this March.

After nearly two decades of hopeful developments the world suffered painful setbacks in 2006 and 2007 -- at least in the eyes of experts at Freedom House, a watchdog organization that is largely financed by the United States government but also gets some private donations. The organization reported a global decline of political rights and civil liberties. Democracy is on the wane, a model in crisis. In Germany democracy continues to be unchallenged as a form of government, but it doesn't elicit a great deal of enthusiasm anymore either. In terms of the levels of public support and interest it requires to be successful it is seen as being under threat here as well.

Voter turnout in German state elections has been in decline for years. At the local government level there are no longer enough candidates to ensure that every mayoral election is an exercise in democracy. The country's traditional major parties -- the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) -- are experiencing an enormous loss of membership. Among young people there has been a dramatic decline in those who regularly follow political happenings. If things continue this way Germany will end up being a democracy without a dêmos. At any rate, a clear majority of the people in the eastern German states are no longer satisfied with the way their form of government works.

Worse yet, business leaders and politicians are expressing enthusiasm about the can-do spirit of the authoritarian camp and are doing so with increasing openness. Seeing stagnation for the most part in their own countries, they look to the economic booms taking place elsewhere and often express uncritical admiration for them. New centers of economic strength such as Moscow, Shanghai, Dubai, and Singapore constantly impress them with new superlatives, the tallest and most beautiful "cathedrals" of globalization. They have a desire to be part of this economic growth and, indeed, they need to if they don't want to lose access to future growth markets.

In today's global competition many companies are all too willing to kowtow to authoritarian regimes for the sake of gaining new orders for business. Paying lip service to values such as human rights is considered bothersome and counterproductive. Success is measured by the fact that a German technology like the Transrapid magnetic levitation train can be built in a city like Shanghai. The circumstances under which that came about are of secondary importance. Heinrich von Pierer, a China fan and former CEO of German engineering and electronics giant Siemens, once said, "We simply can't afford to ignore the Chinese."

And so the obvious is pushed aside. Whatever it is that links the Putinists, the Communist Party capitalists, the authoritarian sheikhs and the repressive clingers-on-to-power, it is anything but the brand of democracy that is still so highly touted and praised by our politicians. Even the Indian Minister of Commerce and Industry, normally so proud to be living in "the world's biggest democracy," recently groaned that he sometimes wished for the kind of fast and uncomplicated decision-making processes the Chinese have.

Are assumptions that have been near and dear to us for decades no longer correct? Things like the famous comment by Winston Churchill that "democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried"? Are separation of powers and human rights in actual fact not universally valid concepts for success? Could it be that repressive systems may actually work better? Short deliberation periods instead of long discussions, issuing orders instead of hammering out compromises? Is it racist or simply true when former Secretary of State Colin Powell says: "There are some places that are not ready for the kind of democracy we find so attractive for ourselves. They are not culturally ready for it, they are not historically ready for it and they don’t have the needed institutions."

When it comes to the overall state of democracy, bad news has dominated lately. When genuinely free elections are actually held in the Third World, as happened in the Gaza Strip and West Bank and most recently in Nepal, it is the radicals who win. This, in turn, confronts the West with the dilemma of whether to recognize a terrorist organization, if it has been legitimized in a democratic election. Important countries such as China, Egypt, Nigeria and Venezuela are examples of the advance of authoritarianism. And there's a danger it could spread like wildfire. What we have here is not the "end of history" as professor Francis Fukuyama believed in 1992 -- i.e. the resolution of all problems in a blissful and democratic environment -- but rather a "return to the past" with fragmented and aggressive failed states.