Five years after the collapse of global Communism, two decades since the start of the most sweeping wave of democratic transitions in world history, the new global "order" seems a bundle of contradictions. The Cold War is over, but many argue that a new one--even a "clash of civilizations"--has commenced between militant Islam and the democratic West. The threat of "mutually assured destruction" in nuclear war has ebbed. But rogue states, maniacal tyrants, criminal networks, and apocalyptic cults are all racing to get weapons of mass destruction, and some have already shown their willingness to use them in war or terrorism. In the formal sense of civilian, constitutional, multiparty regimes, there are more democracies in the world than ever before. Yet roughly half of those that have emerged since 1974 are not fully "free," and in a growing number, democracy is eroding and threatening to collapse under the weight of ethnic and religious conflict, secessionist violence, terrorism, drug trafficking, organized crime, economic disarray, and state decay.
Perhaps the sharpest contradiction is that which grips the democratic West, and particularly the United States. Now, when the world is more fluid and volatile politically than at any time since World War II, when an old order has broken down and a new one has yet to be built--when global leadership and vision are most needed--U.S. foreign policy drifts from crisis to crisis, bereft of the clear doctrine and bipartisan consensus that underpinned the nation's global leadership in previous eras. Now, when new threats are rising and chaos looms on many fronts, the U.S. government is mired in debt, its foreign operations are being cut back sharply, and doubt grows both at home and abroad that the United States has "any purpose in the world beyond promoting its own interests."1 Public support for "protecting and defending human rights in other countries" is down 24 percent since 1990. Already-modest support for "helping to bring a democratic form of government to other nations" has fallen to its lowest level in twenty years. In principle, Americans continue to support international engagement as much as ever, but they increasingly fail to see a larger purpose beyond protecting narrow security and economic interests.2
With the value of the dollar diminishing and their economic future in doubt, it is not surprising that Americans are less inclined to support a foreign policy based on generous aims and grand ideals. Too often missing from the public debate, however, is an appreciation for how "hard" security and economic interests are inextricably, if often subtly, linked to the pursuit of liberal internationalist ideals. Throughout this century, and in some respects since its founding, American democracy has seen the promotion of democracy and freedom in other countries as part of its unique identity and purpose, but also as crucial to its national security and ultimately to the protection of its own liberty.3 Now more than ever, as borders become more porous and people, technologies, ideas, and weapons cascade across them, the safety and well-being of Americans--and Europeans, and Japanese, and Australians--is bound up with the nature of political order in less established polities.
In this period of drift and doubt, it is important for Americans, and their allies among the industrialized democracies, to ask hard questions. What are the threats to our national security and economic well-being in the coming years? What must we do--and spend--globally in the coming years to defend our interests? How do those interests relate to our values as a people and society?
On any list of the most important potential threats to world order and national security in the coming decade, these six should figure prominently: a hostile, expansionist Russia; a hostile, expansionist China; the spread of fundamentalist Islamic, anti-Western regimes; the spread of political terrorism from all sources; sharply increased immigration pressures; and ethnic conflict that escalates into large-scale violence, civil war, refugee flows, state collapse, and general anarchy. Some of these potential threats interact in significant ways with one another, but they all share a common underlying connection. In each instance, the development of democracy is an important prophylactic, and in some cases the only long- term protection, against disaster.
Chief among the threats to the security of Europe, the United States, and Japan would be the reversion of Russia--with its still very substantial nuclear, scientific, and military prowess--to a hostile posture toward the West. Today, the Russian state (insofar as it continues to exist) appears perched on the precipice of capture by ultranationalist, anti-Semitic, neo-imperialist forces seeking a new era of pogroms, conquest, and "greatness." These forces feed on the weakness of democratic institutions, the divisions among democratic forces, and the generally dismal economic and political state of the country under civilian, constitutional rule. Numerous observers speak of "Weimar Russia." As in Germany in the 1920s, the only alternative to a triumph of fascism (or some related "ism" deeply hostile to freedom and to the West) is the development of an effective democratic order. Now, as then, this project must struggle against great historical and political odds, and it seems feasible only with international economic aid and support for democratic forces and institutions.
In China, the threat to the West emanates from success rather than failure and is less amenable to explicit international assistance and inducement. Still, a China moving toward democracy--gradually constructing a real constitutional order, with established ground rules for political competition and succession and civilian control over the military--seems a much better prospect to be a responsible player on the regional and international stage. Unfair trade practices, naval power projection, territorial expansion, subversion of neighboring regimes, and bullying of democratic forces in Hong Kong and Taiwan are all more likely the more China resists political liberalization. So is a political succession crisis that could disrupt incremental patterns of reform and induce competing power players to take risks internationally to advance their power positions at home. A China that is building an effective rule of law seems a much better prospect to respect international trading rules that mandate protection for intellectual property and forbid the use of prison labor. And on these matters of legal, electoral, and institutional development, international actors can help.
Increasingly, Europeans and Americans worry about the threat from fundamentalist Islam. But fundamentalist movements do not mobilize righteous anger and absolute commitment in a vacuum. They feed on the utter failure of decadent political systems to meet the most elementary expectations for material progress and social justice. Some say the West must choose between corrupt, repressive regimes that are at least secular and pro-Western and Islamic fundamentalist regimes that will be no less repressive, but anti-Western. That is a false choice in Egypt today, as it was in Iran or Algeria--at least until their societies became so polarized as to virtually obliterate the liberal center. It is precisely the corruption, arrogance, oppression, and gross inefficacy of ruling regimes like the current one in Egypt that stimulate the Islamic fundamentalist alternative. Though force may be needed--and legitimate--to meet an armed challenge, history teaches that decadent regimes cannot hang on forever through force alone. In the long run, the only reliable bulwark against revolution or anarchy is good governance--and that requires far-reaching political reform. In Egypt and some other Arab countries, such reform would entail a gradual program of political liberalization that counters corruption, reduces state interference in the economy, responds to social needs, and gives space for moderate forces in civil society to build public support and understanding for further liberalizing reforms. In Pakistan and Turkey, it would mean making democracy work: stamping out corruption, reforming the economy, mobilizing state resources efficiently to address social needs, devolving power, guaranteeing the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, and--not least-- reasserting civilian control over the military. In either case, the fundamentalist challenge can be met only by moving (at varying speeds) toward, not away from, democracy.
Terrorism and immigration pressures also commonly have their origins in political exclusion, social injustice, and bad, abusive, or tyrannical governance. Overwhelmingly, the sponsors of international terrorism are among the world's most authoritarian regimes: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan. And locally within countries, the agents of terrorism tend to be either the fanatics of antidemocratic, ideological movements or aggrieved ethnic and regional minorities who have felt themselves socially marginalized and politically excluded and insecure: Sri Lanka's Tamils, Turkey's Kurds, India's Sikhs and Kashmiris. To be sure, democracies must vigorously mobilize their legitimate instruments of law enforcement to counter this growing threat to their security. But a more fundamental and enduring assault on international terrorism requires political change to bring down zealous, paranoiac dictatorships and to allow aggrieved groups in all countries to pursue their interests through open, peaceful, and constitutional means.
As for immigration, it is true that people everywhere are drawn to prosperous, open, dynamic societies like those of the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. But the sources of large (and rapid) immigration flows to the West increasingly tend to be countries in the grip of civil war, political turmoil, economic disarray, and poor governance: Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, Central America, Algeria. And in Mexico, authoritarianism, corruption, and social injustice have held back human development in ways that have spawned the largest sustained flow of immigrants to any Western country--a flow that threatens to become a floodtide if the Zedillo government cannot rebuild Mexico's economy and societal consensus around authentic democatic reform. In other cases--Ethiopia, Sudan, Nigeria, Afghanistan--immigration to the West has been modest only because of the greater logistical and political difficulties. However, in impoverished areas of Africa and Asia more remote from the West, disarray is felt in the flows of refugees across borders, hardly a benign development for world order. Of course, population growth also heavily drives these pressures. But a common factor underlying all of these crisis-ridden emigration points is the absence of democracy. And, strikingly, populations grow faster in authoritarian than democratic regimes.4
Apologists for authoritarian rule--as in Kenya and Indonesia--are wont to argue that multiparty electoral competition breeds ethnic rivalry and polarization, while strong central control keeps the lid on conflict. But when multiple ethnic and national identities are forcibly suppressed, the lid may violently pop when the regime falls apart. The fate of Yugoslavia, or of Rwanda, dramatically refutes the canard that authoritarian rule is a better means for containing ethnic conflict. Indeed, so does the recent experience of Kenya, where ethnic hatred, land grabs, and violence have been deliberately fostered by the regime of President Daniel arap Moi in a desperate bid to divide the people and thereby cling to power.
Overwhelmingly, theory and evidence show that the path to peaceful management of ethnic pluralism lies not through suppressing ethnic identities and superimposing the hegemony of one group over others. Eventually, such a formula is bound to crumble or be challenged violently. Rather, sustained interethnic moderation and peace follow from the frank recognition of plural identities, legal protection for group and individual rights, devolution of power to various localities and regions, and political institutions that encourage bargaining and accommodation at the center. Such institutional provisions and protections are not only significantly more likely under democracy, they are only possible with some considerable degree of democracy.5
This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness.
The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built.
So what is to be done? As this essay makes clear, much already is being done. In fact, there is under way an extraordinarily diverse and constantly developing array of endeavors, both by public and private actors, to promote democracy (and interrelated goals, such as human rights, popular participation, accountability, and the rule of law) around the world. Established democracies and their civil societies can take pride in these efforts--though the last thing they should do is gloat. Developing democracies can draw hope from them. But if we are to make the most of this unprecedented "democratic moment" in world history, more must be done, with more resources, shared learning, better coordination, and in some cases sharper focus and a more refined approach. Those promoting democracy can and will learn from past experience. Gradually, they figure to improve their communication with one another as well. As I observe below, that is an important challenge, but it is not the central one. The overriding imperative today is one of global strategy and vision, and returns us to the question: What is our purpose in the world, as Americans, and as democrats worldwide?
At a time when every domestic spending program in the United States is coming under searching scrutiny, it is only right that international spending should as well. But it is indefensible that so few voices in public life are explaining why promoting democracy is vital to our national security--not just to serve our values and ideals, but to defend against serious, possibly devastating, threats to our safety and well- being. That the defense democracy provides is preventive, and therefore subtle and at one remove, makes the case harder to establish but also more compelling. For prevention is far, far cheaper and safer than emergency response--whether in medicine or world politics. It is precisely when our resources are as scarce and precious as they are today that we can least afford to overlook the most intelligent and cost- efficient strategies.
As the review below will indicate, democracy promotion programs tend to be unusually cost-efficient in financial terms, because the grants are typically small and because they focus on transferring techniques, building capacities, and generating the institutions and policies for sustained good governance and development, rather than on providing an indefinite stream of resources for consumption. Diplomatic pressure and initiatives may also pull a country off the path to political and humanitarian disaster, at costs in political and financial capital that are much more bearable than those associated with peacekeeping and disaster relief.
Democracy promotion is cost-efficient, but it is not costless. Over many years, this country has evolved a diverse set of institutions to provide the assistance, organize the exchanges, and generate the knowledge underlying the effective promotion of democracy. As I argue below, that goal is best reached when its instruments are freed from excessive entanglement with the competing, more immediate constraints and pressures of conventional foreign policy. That is sometimes frustrating for a maker of foreign policy (executive or legislative). But the more autonomy democracy promotion (and related development) programs have, the more distance from partisan, interest-group, and bureaucratic politics in the donor country, the better able they will be to focus on their overriding purpose--a purpose vital to our long-term security. This is why so many of the proposals to reorganize and streamline our international spending--to merge the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Information Agency into the State Department, to consolidate all democracy promotion spending in a single agency, to eliminate the National Endowment for Democracy, the Asia Foundation, the U.S. Institute for Peace, the North-South Center, the East-West Center--actually undermine our national security, even though they appeal in the abstract when cuts must be made. Pluralism in outlooks, approaches, capacities, and foci has been a key factor in the success of democracy promotion efforts over the past decade and a half. Knowledge-- gained and shared across cultures and borders--is indispensable to the effective design, practice, and improvement of democracy. It would be tragically short-sighted to terminate in an instant the hard gains we have made through so many years of engagement and innovation. And as with cutbacks in preventive medicine, it could be many years before we realize the full measure of what we have lost.