7. Democracy is on the March

If there has been a single, recurring theme in western foreign policy-speak since the cold war, it has been the promotion of liberal democracy – not just multi-party politics, but all the things that underpin it, such as the rule of the law, respect for property rights and the absence of police repression. Movement in this direction was assumed not just to be desirable but inevitable; the main challenge for policy makers was to hurry it along.

People may concede that Francis Fukuyama, America's guru of geopolitical optimism, was going a bit too far when – after the collapse of undemocratic regimes in the Soviet Union and South Africa – he proclaimed the end of history. But a milder version of his thesis has passed into conventional wisdom. Wherever brutish regimes persist in torturing, expropriating or otherwise silencing their enemies, the West grits its teeth and says that “progress” towards the Promised Land of liberal democracy has been surprisingly slow.

But what if no such “progress” can be assumed at all? Although the number of governments formally committed to democracy may be increasing, Freedom House, an American think-tank that measures political liberty by a sophisticated range of indicators, reckons that only 39% of the world's population now enjoys real political freedom – hardly a massive leap forward from the 36% enjoying it in 1983. And even that slow rate of increase cannot necessarily be relied on. The think-tank notes “growing evidence that the wave of democratisation that began in the 1970s may have crested and ... be receding.”

Looking round the world, democracy seems well enough entrenched in Latin America, even if some of its concomitants, such as clean government and due process, are not. In Asia, it is too soon to tell whether the economic crisis will embolden or weaken those who argue that “Asian values” are an excuse for authoritarianism. But elsewhere there are good reasons to fear that western political values will retreat in the near term.

Democratic institutions are hard to build, and easy to topple when not yet completed. Take the Middle East, where liberal democracy has never been in fashion. As they struggle to cope with demographic explosions and various forms of revolutionary dissent, many regimes will have to choose between being “liberal” – in other words, being secular and modernist about things like education and gender – and being democratic. The latter would entail yielding power to radicals or fundamentalists; they may, in turn give some or all of it back to the people, but it is hardly a sure thing in the short run.

Algeria is only the most extreme example of a country where unbridled democracy would assuredly bring fundamentalists to power and is therefore regarded, both by its own government and many western ones, as a dispensable luxury. To stay in office, other “moderate” Arab governments – from North Africa to the West Bank will resort to increasingly ruthless methods: using secret services to infiltrate, divide and crush opposition movements that might otherwise be unstoppable.

What about the former Soviet Union, where some of the most euphoric pro-democracy rhetoric was once heard? In the southern republics, rulers who held senior positions under communism have used the flimsiest sort of democratic window-dressing to ensure that they remain in office indefinitely. In Russia, the outward forms of multi-party politics and constitutional procedure have proved more robust; but the culture of democracy runs shallow.

And what about Africa, where a spectacular revival of multi-party democracy seemed to reach its peak around 1994? Across a wide swathe of the continent, from Angola to Eritrea, issues of political procedure are overwhelmed by war.

There are still two huge countries – Nigeria and Indonesia – where the near-term trend is towards more political freedom. But both countries face a profound challenge: is it possible for states with vast, diverse populations and acute economic difficulties to go on existing at all, let alone existing democratically? To have a democratic future – which means learning to disagree amicably about particular issues – people in these countries need to develop a much stronger consensus about fundamental issues: state borders, the constitution, property rights and intangibles like national identity. And in Lagos and Jakarta, as well as Moscow and New Delhi, the rules and would-rules are faced with a fraying of consensus, not a consolidation.