This is an extension of my previous article:
The Heavy Legacies of Our PastA very simplified version of that is that democracy has spread, largely through war and colonisation, not because democracies actively seek to spread democracy, but because more economically and politically inclusive nations tend to become more wealthy and powerful than less inclusive nations, regardless of how close they are to the modern ideal of a functioning democracy.
The modern consequence of this is the democratic peace theory, which is more of an observation that democracies tend not to go to war against each other, presumably because the people do not want it, and they get to have a say. Following World War 2, this became an almost global peace, as war weary nations made sincere efforts to avoid a third round – helped along no doubt by a unipolar world and Mutually Assured Destruction.
However, the mechanisms that support this peace, such as the United Nations, have a natural consequence that they tend to support and legitimise dictatorships. Dictators who attend UN meetings, must, out of necessity, be treated as some kind of equal, even if they do not in any meaningful way represent their people. Thus, while we have been relatively successful at maintaining peace since World War 2, the spread of democracy has almost come to a halt, and in some place is trending backwards.
It is tempting to think that this is a price worth paying for peace, however the numbers tell a different story. Around 1960, roughly 50 million people starved to death in China. Not because anyone was trying to kill or starve them, but because the Chinese Communist party was trying to feed them all equally. China, Russia, Cambodia and various other communist regimes have killed hundreds of millions of people, in roughly equal measure by trying to help them and trying to cement their grip on power and prevent democracy, capitalism and any other popular alternative movements from existing. At the end of World War Two, the west had a window of opportunity to set up democracy in China the same way they did in South Korea. The human cost of setting up a new form of government in China would surely have been less than the cost of Communism, if it could have been done without triggering a war with Russia. Now those opportunities are largely gone, and dictators are using organisations like the UN to cooperate and cement their legitimacy and their grip on power.
In Muslim countries such as Indonesia that have inherited democracy from colonial days, Muslim leaders are gradually chipping away at democracy, eroding the necessary precept that anyone must be allowed to run for office, on any platform they choose. Even the USA is eroding freedom of the press.
Is democracy reaching its global zenith? It is hard to predict the future, and current trends are a bit of a mixed bag. Communism is now largely a spent force, which is a victory for humanity that should not be understated, but major threats still remain from religion (Islam in particular), narcoterrorism, and opportunistic cooperation among leaders who see democracy as a threat.
So where are the current opportunities? They are also a mixed bag:
China: Despite that anti-democratic propaganda from the little pinks that has started to infest even this forum, the Chinese Communist Party is internally democratic. It is a very long way from dictatorships like North Korea. I would put it halfway in between a tinpot dictatorship and a functioning democracy. Using Acemoglu’s theories (see the link at the start of the article), we can predict interesting time ahead for China. It could go both ways. It is like Europe a few centuries ago, or Rome prior to Caesar. In addition, and consistent with the theory, the political inclusiveness of China’s regime has allowed it to make a dramatic transition to, if not capitalism, at least a far more economically inclusive society. This in turn has generated wealth and power, and allowed the people to make yet more demands for both politically and economically inclusive policies. It will probably take some kind of fracturing within the CCP to change the status quo, at which point they could take a violent path towards dictatorship, or the middle road towards democracy.
India: The world’s other country with over a billion people inherited democracy from the British colonists. It is nominally more democratic than China, however the people do not necessarily “get” democracy in the same way as people who have fought a war for their freedom. For example, vote buying is common and done quite openly, which suggests there is a high tolerance for it among voters. This is reflective of a broader problem with corruption. Both India and China are in a messy transition phase. Inevitably, the people ought to start demanding more rights and better representation, but there are no guarantees.
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Democratic peace undermining democracy? (Read 140 times)
