The World America Made (3 page)

It is worth reflecting on these great geopolitical problems that the United States solved after 1945, for had they not been solved, the world would look entirely different today. The strategic relationships Americans formed in Europe and Asia became the pillars of the liberal world order during the Cold War, the engines of the global economy, the heart of the expanding democratic world, and the primary guarantee against world wars and the great-power conflicts that had plagued the world for a century. Over time the self-contained liberal order built around American leadership during the Cold War proved too strong, economically, militarily, and politically, for its chief competitor, the Soviet Union, and its own efforts to establish a global communist order. The American order became the dominant world order. Moscow’s former satellites eagerly joined “the West,” thereby making possible the full flowering of the liberal world that we enjoy today.

T
HERE WAS NOTHING INEVITABLE
about this turn of events. No divine providence or progressive teleology, no unfolding Hegelian dialectic required that liberalism triumph after World War II. Those who live in this remarkable world tend to assume that both the global explosion of democracy and the liberal economic order of free trade and free markets that have spread prosperity these past sixty years were simply a natural stage in humankind’s upward progress. We like to believe that the triumph of democracy is the triumph of an idea and the victory of market capitalism is the victory of a better system, and that both are irreversible.

It’s a pleasant thought, but history tells a different story. Democratic progress and liberal economics have been and can be reversed and undone. The ancient democracies in Greece and the republics of Rome and Venice all fell to more powerful forces or through their own failings. The evolving liberal economic order of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries collapsed in the 1920s and 1930s. The better idea doesn’t have to win just because it is a better idea. It requires great powers to champion it.

Consider the ups and downs of democracy in just the last two centuries. From the time of the American Revolution until near the end of the nineteenth century, there had never been more than five nations in the world that could be called democracies. A brief flurry of liberal and constitutional revolutions in Europe in 1848 had been suppressed. But in the late nineteenth century there was an upswing. By 1900 there were a dozen democracies in the world, a growth so astonishing that contemporaries believed a democratic revolution was about to sweep the planet. Then came World War I and the victory of Great Britain, France, and the United States. Democratic governments sprouted up all across Europe, in the defeated powers of Germany, Austria, and Ottoman Turkey, in Finland, Poland, and Greece, and then also in Latin America. In 1920, with the number of democracies suddenly doubled, the historian James Bryce wondered, along with many others, whether this “trend toward democracy” was no temporary fluctuation but “a natural trend, due to a general law of social progress.”
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As the British economist J. A. Hobson later recalled, democracy “was making
such advances in most countries of the world as to be considered the natural goal of political evolution. Even those who distrusted it believed it to be inevitable.”
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Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, however, the trend moved in the other direction—a “reverse wave,” as Samuel P. Huntington called it. It began with Mussolini’s fascist takeover in Italy in 1922. Then the newly born democracies in Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, and Estonia fell. Then came the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany in the early 1930s and their forcible takeover in Austria and then Czechoslovakia. Greek democracy fell in 1936, and Spanish democracy fell to Franco and his fascist regime that same year. Military coups overthrew democratic governments in Portugal, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Japan’s democracy became a façade for military rule in the 1930s. Across three continents, fragile democracies gave way to authoritarian forces exploiting the vulnerabilities of the democratic system, while others fell prey to economic depression. There was a ripple effect, too—the success of fascism in one country strengthened similar movements elsewhere. Spanish fascists received military assistance from the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. By 1939, on the eve of World War II, the number of democracies had fallen back to no more than a dozen. All the democratic gains of the previous forty years had been wiped out.

The period after World War I showed not only that democratic gains could be reversed but that democracy did not always have to win the competition of ideas. It wasn’t just that democracy was overthrown. As Hobson observed, the very idea of democracy was “discredited.”
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Its aura of inevitability vanished. Great numbers of people did not believe democracy was a better form of government.

The fascist governments looked stronger, more energetic and efficient, and more capable of providing reassurance in troubled times. They also appealed effectively to nationalist sentiments. The many weaknesses of Germany’s Weimar democracy and of the fragile and short-lived democracies of Italy and Spain made their people susceptible to the appeals of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, just as the weaknesses of Russian democracy in the 1990s made a more authoritarian government under Vladimir Putin attractive to many Russians—at least for a while. It turns out that human beings yearn not only for freedom, autonomy, individuality, and recognition. Especially in times of difficulty, they also yearn for security, order, and a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves, something that submerges autonomy and individuality—which autocracies often provide better than democracies. People also tend to follow winners. In the 1920s and 1930s the democratic capitalist countries looked weak compared with the apparently vigorous fascist regimes and with Stalin’s Soviet Union.

It took another war and another victory by Allied democracies (and the Soviet Union) over the fascist governments to reverse the trend again. The United States imposed democracy through force and prolonged occupations in West Germany, Italy, Japan, Austria, and South Korea. With the victory of the democracies, and the discrediting of fascism, many other countries followed suit. Greece and Turkey both moved in a democratic direction,
as did Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. Some of the new nations born as Europe shed its colonies also experimented with democratic government, the most prominent example being India. By 1950 the number of democracies had grown to between twenty and thirty, representing close to 40 percent of the world’s population.

Was this the victory of an idea or the victory of arms, the product of an inevitable human evolution or, as Huntington later observed, of “historically discrete events”?
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The evidence suggests the latter, for it turned out that even the great wave of democracy following World War II was not irreversible. Another “reverse wave” hit from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Greece all fell back under authoritarian rule. In Africa, Nigeria was the most prominent of the newly decolonized nations where democracy failed. By 1975, over three dozen governments around the world had been installed by military coup.
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This reverse wave occurred, moreover, at a time of significant growth in global GDP. The greatest surge in the global economy occurred between 1950 and 1975, and it slowed appreciably thereafter. So while more countries were moving into the phase of economic development that political scientists consider most favorable to democracy, the number of democracies in the world actually declined. Few spoke of democracy’s inevitability in the 1970s or even in the early 1980s. As late as 1984, Huntington himself believed “the limits of democratic development in the world” had been reached. He noted
the “unreceptivity to democracy of several major cultural traditions” as well as “the substantial power of antidemocratic governments (particularly the Soviet Union)” as contributing to democracy’s dim future.
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But then, unexpectedly, came the “third wave.” From the late 1970s through the early 1990s the number of democracies in the world rose to an astonishing 120, representing well over half the world’s population. And it is possible that in the Arab Spring we are seeing a continuation of this third wave, or perhaps even a fourth. The explosion of democracy is now about to enter a fifth straight decade, the longest and broadest such expansion in history. Although there has been backsliding in some parts of Latin America and the former Soviet Union, we have yet to witness a reverse wave.

What explains the prolonged success of democratization over the last quarter of the twentieth century? It cannot only be the steady rise of the global economy and the general yearning for freedom, autonomy, and recognition. These were critical ingredients, but they were not sufficient. Presumably, human beings always have an innate yearning for autonomy and recognition, when these are not outweighed by other concerns and innate yearnings. And the economic growth between 1950 and 1973 was even greater than in the years that followed. Yet neither human yearnings nor economic growth prevented a reversal of the democratic trend in the 1960s and early 1970s. Until the third wave, many nations around the world careened back and forth between democracy and authoritarianism, in a cyclical and almost predictable manner. What has been most notable about the third
wave is that this cyclical alternation between democracy and autocracy has been interrupted. Nations have moved into a democratic phase and stayed there. But why?

The answer is related to the configuration of power and ideas in the world. The international climate from the mid-1970s onward has simply been more hospitable to democracies and more challenging to autocratic governments than in past eras. In his study, Huntington noted such factors as the change in the Catholic Church’s doctrine regarding order and revolution in the Second Vatican Council, which tended to weaken the legitimacy of authoritarian governments in Catholic countries. The growing success and attractiveness of the European Community, meanwhile, had an impact on the internal policies of nations like Portugal, Greece, and Spain, which sought the economic benefits of membership in the EC and therefore felt pressure to conform to its democratic norms. These norms were increasingly becoming international norms. But they did not appear out of nowhere, or as some natural evolution of the species. As Huntington notes, “The pervasiveness of democratic norms rested in large part on the commitment to those norms of the most powerful country in the world.”
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The United States, in fact, played a critical role in making the explosion of democracy possible. This was not because Americans pursued a consistent policy of promoting democracy around the world. They didn’t. At various times throughout the Cold War, American policy often supported dictatorships as part of the battle against communism or simply out of indifference. It even permitted and at times encouraged the overthrow of democratic
regimes deemed unreliable—Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and Allende in Chile in 1973. At times American foreign policy was almost hostile to democracy. Richard Nixon regarded it as “not necessarily the best form of government for people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”
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Nor, when the United States did support democracy, was it purely out of fealty to principle. Often it was for strategic reasons. Reagan officials came to believe that democratic governments might actually be
better
than autocracies at fending off communist insurgencies, for instance. And often it was a reaction to popular local demands that compelled the United States to make a choice it would otherwise have preferred not to make, between supporting an unpopular and possibly faltering dictatorship and “getting on the side of the people.” Ronald Reagan would likely have preferred to support the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s had he not been confronted by Filipino “people power.” In only a few cases—such as George H. W. Bush’s 1989 invasion of Panama and Bill Clinton’s 1994 intervention in Haiti—did the United States seek a change of regime primarily out of devotion to democratic principles.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, the general inclination of the United States did begin to shift toward a more critical view of dictatorship. The U.S. Congress, led by human rights advocates, began to condition or cut off American aid to authoritarian allies, which had the effect of weakening their hold on power. In the Helsinki Accords of 1975, a reference to human rights issues raised greater attention to the cause of dissidents and other
opponents of dictatorship in the Eastern bloc. President Jimmy Carter focused attention on the human rights practices of the Soviet Union as well as on right-wing governments in Latin America and elsewhere. American international information services such as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty put greater emphasis on democracy and human rights in their programming. The Reagan administration, after first trying to roll back Carter’s human rights agenda, eventually embraced it and made the promotion of democracy part of its stated policy. Even during this period, American policy was far from consistent. Many allied dictatorships, especially in the Middle East, were not only tolerated but actively supported with American economic and military aid. But the net effect of the shift in American policy, joined with the efforts of Europe, was significant.

The third wave began in Portugal in 1974, where the “Carnation Revolution” put an end to a half-century-long dictatorship. As the democracy expert Larry Diamond notes, this revolution did not just happen. The United States and European democracies played a key role, making a “heavy investment … in support of the democratic parties.”
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Over the next decade and a half, the United States used a variety of tools, including direct military intervention, to aid democratic transitions and prevent the undermining of existing fragile democracies all across the globe. Carter threatened military action in the Dominican Republic when a long-serving president refused to give up power. Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in 1983 restored a democratic government after a military coup. In the Philippines in 1986, the United States threatened
military action to prevent Marcos from forcibly annulling an election he had lost. Bush’s 1989 invasion of Panama brought democracy after the military strongman Manuel Noriega had annulled his nation’s elections. Throughout this period, too, the United States used its influence to block military coups in Honduras, Bolivia, El Salvador, Peru, and South Korea. Elsewhere it urged presidents not to prolong their stay in office beyond constitutional limits. Altogether Huntington estimated that over the course of about a decade and a half, U.S. support had been “critical to democratization in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, and the Philippines” and was “a contributing factor to democratization in Portugal, Chile, Poland, Korea, Bolivia, and Taiwan.”
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