Democratization And Its Discontents
With the US administration uninterested in paying lip service to the value of democracy abroad, can others stand up in its stead?
Currently chic among the chattering classes is the idea that human government has lost its one-way ticket to liberal democracy — if it ever had one at all. Piecing together the origins of transitions to democracy and the means of consolidating democratic rule have been among the obsessions of political science and theory for quite some time. But now the target of much of this commentary is the supposed democratic stronghold of the “Western world.” Now 25 years after Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man hit bookshelves, the sense of democratic inevitability among the US and European intelligentsia has given way towards ever greater concerns that the liberal experiment may be in peril. Even Fukuyama himself.
The strength of populist, nationalist movements across Europe and the election of one in the US has triggered an outpouring of ever more hyperbolic prose in the English-speaking world about the specter of resurgent authoritarianism, even as not a few political theorists and scientists seek to make their careers by competing to serve as well-heeled canaries in the proverbial (but also literal) coal mine.
Even if President Obama was “just another in a long line of US presidents who support a military dictatorship” (Omar Kamel again), this does not absolve us of the need to understand how the world’s major powers might at least tacitly support democratization or — at the very least — avoid openly championing authoritarianism.
Of course, unfettered democracy has had its strident critics and doubters since rule by the majority first appeared. Plato — no doubt racking up ever more citations these days — predicted that the tumult and turnover of rule by the masses (themselves driven by a relentless pursuit of freedom) would give rise to tyrants branded as strongmen (Book VIII). Likewise, decades before Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington made waves in the discipline of political science by arguing for the primacy of political order over and above any particular form of government. “Men may, of course, have order without liberty, but they cannot have liberty without order.” (1968: 7–8) Not a few months ago, Andrew Sullivan argued in New York Magazine that America’s political problems stemmed in part from too much — not too little — democracy.
Postwar political science in the United States — at least the kind claiming objectivity — has followed Huntington in trying periodically to check its implicit pro-democracy tendencies, such as Lisa Anderson’s 1999 lament of the “giddy optimism” that drove students of the Middle East and North Africa to see democratization lurking around every corner in the 1990s. One of the most cited papers in the discipline — “Democracy with Adjectives,” by Collier and Levitsky (1997) — is a 21-page attempt at bringing order to scholarly use of the term “democracy,” arguing against simply tacking on adjectives (controlled democracy, oligarchical democracy, illiberal democracy, etc.) to salvage some sense of democracy while authoritarian politics hold sway.
Yet as we try to wrestle with the meanings and maintenance of democracy and (small-l) liberal politics here in Europe and North America — and various political commentators practically clamber over each other to clog social media feeds with proposed solutions — how do democratic troubles here impact the pace of democratization worldwide?
This is not to give the United States or Europe too much credit for driving the onward march of democracy. To a certain audience, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s recent testimony that “History has shown that the United States leaves a footprint of freedom wherever it goes” is a laugh riot, given a long history of US support for brutal dictatorships and summary executions worldwide. Egyptian writer Omar Kamel no doubt spoke for many in suggesting that “We do not think Trump is any better [than Clinton], but we think a Trump victory would force the USA to admit to what it has become.”
Likewise, one of the leading studies in post-Cold War democratization (or lack thereof), Levitsky and Way’s Competitive Authoritarianism, at times falls flat in its assumption that the United States and Europe would uniformly use economic and political leverage over the developing world to encourage democratization where possible, ignoring a long history of American prevention of democracy in the Middle East, among other regions. And event the starkest attempt to leave a “footprint of freedom” in the region — efforts at democratization in the wake of disastrous US invasion of Iraq — remains an ongoing fiasco.
Yet we can accept all of this and still be concerned about the fate of democracy worldwide if the leader of world’s democratic city on a hill can not even pay lip service to democratic ideals. Future textbooks will no doubt have something to say about President Trump clutching a glowing orb with kings and strongmen in Riyadh while all but glowering at having to deal with democratically elected leaders in Europe. Even if President Obama was “just another in a long line of US presidents who support a military dictatorship” (Omar Kamel again), this does not absolve us of the need to understand how the world’s major powers might at least tacitly support democratization or — at the very least — avoid openly championing authoritarianism.
As the EU is not yet — and may never be — a sovereign supranational body fully independent of its member states, who will champion democracy and human rights as a global public good in the face of domestic demands for greater security and more jobs for (current) EU nationals?
My friend Adel Abdel Ghaffar — presently at the Brookings Doha Center — certainly has something to say about the EU’s track record when it comes to excusing autocracy across the Mediterranean in North Africa. In a recent policy brief, he runs through a history of cross-Medd relations, recalling deep pre-Arab Spring ties between the French government and Algeria’s byzantine oligarchy, security coordination with the Moroccan monarchy, the now infamous relationship between former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Colonel Muammar Gadhafi — all largely predicated on securing energy supplies and cracking down on the threat of terrorism. His essay is joined by a pair of excellent policy briefs this month from the European Council on Foreign Relations, by Mattia Toaldo (on Libya) as well as Yasser El-Shimy and Anthony Dworkin (on Egypt), in arguing for more far-sighted EU policy across the region.
Yet while the uprisings of the Arab Spring led to at least some bilateral and EU-wide efforts in the aim of promoting democracy in the Middle East and North Africa — most notably in Tunisia — such policy recommendations for a greater EU role in the cause of Middle Eastern democracy face an uphill battle. The European Union as a unitary actor (as well as member states) has repeatedly prioritized stopping the flow of migrants and refugees across the Mediterranean and security concerns above all else, striking a deal with Turkey to curb the onward movement of refugees and seeking the same with Libya (despite the lack of a coherent central government in the country).
Any EU leverage in the form of economic incentives and technical expertise appears matched by leverage from the Mediterranean’s southern shores in the form of pledges to regulate the movements of migrants (and refugees) as well as coordination on potential terrorist threats — both highly salient topics for European politicians seeking reelection.
While US foreign policy will likely continue on its erratic and openly illiberal path for some time, the United States is not the only country in the world that can claim to support the consolidation of democracy elsewhere.
While I certainly bow to the expertise of Adel and others in regional expertise, I would encourage future work to delve into the specifics of how to build a coalition within the EU in service of more long-run goals.
So far, even a modest attempt at EU-wide burden-sharing of refugee inflows has been wracked by individual-country resistance and legal challenges. As the EU is not yet — and may never be — a sovereign supranational body fully independent of its member states, who will champion democracy and human rights as a global public good in the face of domestic demands for greater security and more jobs for (current) EU nationals?
Perhaps Macron’s En Marche could sell the idea of slightly greater formal migration from North Africa in exchange for more effective control of migrant flows — so long as French domestic security doesn’t appear to suffer further setbacks. Or perhaps Angela Merkel could champion the cause of political (as well as merely economic) reform in Egypt as integral to shoring up the country’s long-term stability, rather than merely whitewashing the present situation in a bid to cut down on migrant flows from Egypt’s northern coast. Or perhaps a Labour-led UK government could at least slip in a mention or two of human rights while trying to secure greater investment from the Gulf. Perhaps. Maybe.
While US foreign policy will likely continue on its erratic and openly illiberal path for some time, the United States is not the only country in the world that can claim to support the consolidation of democracy elsewhere. Even if the EU is unlikely to repeat its slow carrot-and-stick coaxing of countries along the path to consolidated democracy beyond Eastern Europe, it might refrain from actively militating against democratization — like an initial offer from France to help Tunisian dictator Ben Ali “maintain order” against mounting demonstrations in 2011.
If Nate Silver’s latest predictions are right and the populist wave among Western democracies has already crested, this leaves an opening for more liberal European politicians better able to position themselves as democratic internationalists against a US administration all but using the threat of Russian power to extort money from longstanding allies.
Liberty may be impossible without order, but voting publics and the politicians that court them can ensure that their governments do not settle for order alone.
Andrew Leber is based in Boston.
