The End of Democracy?

Promoting democracy is most effective, according to Traub, when it is part of a larger state-building effort. “If you have a profoundly impoverished country with no infrastructure, with poor public health, with poor educational prospects, you have to be able to do something about that. And that’s something which outside states can do a little bit more about. It’s easier to do that than it is to, for example, produce an independent and honest judiciary—something which tends to develop very slowly from an already existing democratic culture.”

The United States has lost its appetite for the most extreme method of promoting democracy: invading another country and trying to install one. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have simply been too costly. American Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said as much in a recent essay: “The United States is unlikely to repeat another Iraq or Afghanistan—that is, forced regime change followed by nation building under fire—anytime soon,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs. In other words, in the absence of a security threat the United States judges it cannot ignore, countries like Sudan, Burma, and Iran won’t see American soldiers on their soil in the near future.

That American efforts to promote democracy abroad will likely be restrained doesn’t necessarily mean they will be less effective, only less forceful. “There is a strong line of argument that the best way Americans can spread democracy around the world is to be the best model of a working democracy that we possibly can, and that model is often undermined by our quasi-imperial international efforts that lead to things like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib,” says Peter Beinhart, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, in an interview with Maclean’s. “We will be most effective at spreading democracy by focusing on things that make American democracy work best.” By this argument, improving America’s economy may also embolden democracy’s proponents in the developing world by demonstrating the economic advantages of political freedom.

Such a scaled-back agenda for democracy’s global expansion—targeted aid, diplomatic support, and strengthening democracy at home—will no doubt disappoint those who believe a more muscular effort is needed to counter the apparent rise of autocracies and the attraction they hold for weak and unstable states. It is a far cry from John F. Kennedy’s pledge during his inaugural address to pay any price and bear any burden to ensure the survival of liberty—or even George W. Bush’s 2005 promise to stand with the citizens of oppressed countries who choose to stand for their own freedom. It requires faith that democracy will ultimately succeed, not because of the strength of its proponents, but because it is the only political system capable of offering a nation’s citizens real liberty, and because of this its appeal will not fade.

It also requires patience and perspective to recognize that, over the long term, democracy’s rise has been steady and it has overcome enormous obstacles. It was Lord Byron, the British poet who died while fighting in Greece’s war of independence against the Ottoman Empire, who described a nation’s struggle against tyranny as freedom’s battle:

For Freedom’s battle once begun

Bequeath’d by bleeding Sire to Son

Though baffled oft is ever won.

These lines, written almost 200 years ago, were posted by an anti-Communist activist in the Lenin Shipyards of Gdansk, Poland, in 1980. The militant belonged to Solidarity, a trade union that grew into a social movement that Communist authorities repressed but could never contain. Solidarity did more than perhaps any other group to weaken the Soviet Union’s hold on Eastern Europe. Within a decade the Soviet Union lost its grip entirely, and half a continent was free.