Is democracy for everyone? To Americans, the answer is axiomatic. Our own democracy rests on the propositions that "all men are created equal [and] are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights" and that "governments deriv[e] their just power from the consent of the governed." These, says the American Declaration of Independence, are "truths" which are "self-evident." They are, of course, nothing of the sort. No government before had ever been based on them. Rather they were professions of faith or first principles. They could not be proven, but expressed the fundamental notion of justice held by America's founders. Expounding on this theory, Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America's Destiny, looks at the concept of "universal democracy" and defines its parameters and challenges.

Nothing in the Declaration said that these principles applied only to Americans. On the contrary, the authors aimed to describe principles of just government applicable to "all men." This universality has been vindicated by the success with which the American polity has absorbed millions of immigrants of ethnic origins quite different from those of its founders, as well as America's own emancipated slaves. As the nation has grown polyglot, democracy has not weakened, but rather grown steadily more robust. Americans who believe in our own democracy, and the reasons the founders gave for it, must necessarily believe as well that people in other countries are endowed with the same rights and that governments everywhere ought to rest on the consent of the governed.

Challenges to Democratic Universalism

But this characteristically American, universalistic conviction has not seemed "self-evident" to everyone. For example, the representatives of Asian governments who gathered in Bangkok in 1993 for a regional meeting preparatory to the U.N. World Conference on Human Rights declared that "all countries...have the right to determine their [own] political systems," including, by implication, systems that are undemocratic. And they asserted that human rights "must be considered in the context of...national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds." Although the language was turgid, as it often is in diplomatic pronouncements, the point was clear: Democracy might not be good for everyone. The Bangkok declaration lent implicit support to the idea of an "Asian way" that puts the group ahead of the individual, and that pursues economic development by means of authoritarian governance. Analogous points have sometimes been made about the peoples of other regions, for example, that Middle Easterners prefer political systems based on Islamic precepts or that Latin Americans find some kind of corporative populism more congenial than "mechanical" democracy.

There is also a second line of argument that challenges democratic universalism from a different direction. Various American scholars have questioned whether the people of poor or non-Western countries are capable of governing themselves. The writer Irving Kristol put it: "I am not one who is thrilled by the success of democracy in Argentina or in the Philippines or...Korea.... I will lay odds that democracy will not survive in those countries" because they lack "the preconditions of democracy...certain... traditions [and] cultural attitudes." The point, in this view, is not that there is a better alternative to democracy, but rather that it may not be attainable. As political scientist James Q. Wilson has written: "Democracy and human freedom are good for everyone.... But the good they bring can only be appreciated when people are calm and tolerance is accepted." This is not the case, he suggests, in China, Russia, most of Africa and the Middle East or much of Latin America. Kristol and Wilson are conservatives, but the same view has been adopted by many liberal scholars, too. For example, political scientist Robert Dahl wrote: "It is a disagreeable, perhaps even tragic, fact that in much of the world the conditions most favorable to the development and maintenance of democracy are non-existent, or at best only weakly present."

Let us consider each of these two objections to democratic universalism. The claim that every country has a right to its own system begs the question, who speaks for the country? Amartya Sen, the Indian economist who won the 1998 Nobel prize, put it, the "justification for authoritarian political arrangements in Asia...have typically come not from independent historians but from the authorities themselves." Because such arguments are obviously self- serving, they are usually presented in the name of the people. "The Chinese people" or "the people of Singapore," or wherever it may be, do not want democracy, we are told. Aside from the irony in this (Why, apart from democratic premises, does it matter what the people want?), there is also the question of how we can know what they want unless we ask them?

Rulers often say they know what their subjects want, but why should such claims be accepted? In the American South in the 1950s, white spokesmen often insisted that "our colored" were content with racial segregation. But once the right to vote was secured for blacks, the segregationists were thoroughly repudiated.

Around the world, there have been numerous cases in which people living under dictatorship were finally given a chance to express their will, and the results have never vindicated the dictators. Ordinarily this has occurred when the incumbent regime felt itself under pressure and therefore arranged an election under terms favorable to itself in the hope of hanging onto power. In 1977, when protests mounted against the system of martial law that Indira Gandhi had imposed in India, she agreed to call an election, believing it would give her a vote of confidence. In an impoverished country like India, she reasoned, her economic promises would count for more than political rights. Instead, the election swept her from office, and the opposition was led by the party of the "untouchables," the poorest of the poor. In 1987, Ferdinand Marcos called a "snap election" in the Philippines, giving the opposition little time to organize, but he, too, was defeated. The next year in Chile, President Augusto Pinochet, not willing to risk a competitive election, agreed instead to a plebiscite on continuing his rule. The idea was to give the voters a choice between the status quo or an unknown future, which was bound to seem insecure. Nonetheless, the majority voted "No" to Pinochet's continuance. In 1989, the Polish regime and the opposition agreed to hold a semi-competitive election. Many legislative seats were to be contested, but the full slate of top Communist officials was to run without opposition, so as to preserve their ascendance. The people, however, ruined the scheme. Although there were no alternative candidates, the majority of voters crossed out the names of the ruling bigwigs. They may have been the only candidates in history to run unopposed and still lose. In 1990, as dictatorial regimes were tumbling around the world, the military rulers of Burma were confronted with massive street demonstrations. Soldiers killed a great many protestors, but finally the rulers agreed to hold that country's first election in nearly 30 years. The National League for Democracy won more than 80 percent of the vote, but tragically the military oligarchy has refused to honor the results.

Preference for Democracy

Many more such examples could be cited. In contrast, where are the examples of dictators who have won free elections approving their rule? When has a people ever voted to relinquish its democratic rights? To be sure, there are cases where freely elected leaders have refused to relinquish power, in effect turning themselves into dictators, but in none of these cases had such an intention been acknowledged when the man was running for office. It is true, too, that one-time Communists have been voted back into power in several of the states of the former Soviet bloc. But none of these candidates has proposed to restore one-party rule. Rather, they have based their appeals on social and economic issues, while affirming their acceptance of democratic procedures.

The two most recent cases in which a people living under authoritarian rule has demonstrated its preference for democracy are Indonesia and Iran. Student demonstrations brought down General Suharto's regime in 1998, and subsequent elections dealt a devastating defeat to the former ruling party, Golkar. Iran has yet to hold fully free elections. Only candidates who pledge support for the Islamic system and are approved by clerical authorities are allowed to run. Nonetheless, parliamentary elections this year demonstrated clearly the popular will for greater democracy. These events contain an element of poetic justice, since Iran and Indonesia were two of the states most active at the Bangkok conference in making the case that Asian people did not welcome international standards of democracy and human rights.

Another variant of this argument that some nations do not want democracy is exemplified in the following quote from the American scholar Howard Wiarda, a specialist on Latin America. "I doubt that Latin America wants...democracy U.S.-style." This makes it sound as if the question is not whether democracy is a universally applicable value, but rather whether every country should have a political system cut from the same mold, namely, the American mold. This is a false issue. Why should any other country want democracy "U.S.-style?" The American system, with its peculiar checks and balances, its powerful, oddly apportioned Senate, its division of powers between state and federal governments, its two dominant parties, etc., grew out of the American experience. Other democracies have parliamentary systems, unitary governments, multiparty elections, proportional representation, unicameral legislatures and a multitude of other such variations. When the Allied occupiers were creating democracy in Japan after World War II, they briefly tried to impose a federal system, but it was so alien to Japanese traditions, that it did not stick. Every democracy is unique, and there are many possible institutional forms.

This is not to say, however, that everything that calls itself democratic deserves the name. Over the years, many Communist or other revolutionary regimes and movements, called themselves "democratic" because they claimed to be devoted to the well-being of the people, even though they had not been chosen in an election. But in the last years of the Soviet Union, President Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged that this had not been a proper use of the term democracy. "We know today," he said, "that we would have been able to avoid many...difficulties if the democratic process had developed normally in our country." By this he meant, as he said, "representative, parliamentary democracy."

Determining What Is A Democracy

Because the term has been misused, it is important to identify the basic characteristics that determine whether a country is, or is not, a democracy. These boil down to three things. First, the principal government officials must be chosen in free and fair elections. This means anyone can run for office and everyone can vote. Of course, there may be minor derogations from this, but not major ones. South Africa under apartheid held competitive elections, but blacks could not vote. That was not democracy. Iran has an elected president and legislature, but many candidates were barred by clerical authorities, and all elected officials are subordinate to non- elected religious councils. That is not democracy.

Second, freedom of expression must be allowed, namely, freedom of speech, press, assembly and the like. Again, minor derogations may be of little importance, but a state like Serbia, where the means of mass communication are mostly monopolized by the regime and the few independent newspapers and broadcasters are subjected to legal and physical harassment, is not a democracy even though it has held competitive elections.

Third, rule of law must prevail. When a person has been charged with a crime, he should have reason to be confident that his case will be tried on its merits and not according to orders handed to the judge by political authorities. Likewise, when a citizen suffers mistreatment at the hands of an official, there should be some legal avenue by which he can seek a remedy. Thus Malaysia cannot be considered democratic even though it recently held an election, because the leader of the opposition has been held in prison on charges which were surely instigated by the president.

Let us now turn to the second challenge to democratic universalism, namely the argument of thinkers like Kristol, Wilson and Dahl that democracy, though desirable, is beyond the capabilities of poor or non-Western people.

This argument is not of recent vintage. A similar skepticism was expressed a few decades ago about the democratic capabilities of societies that we are now accustomed to thinking of as firmly democratic. For example, as World War II drew to a close, President Harry Truman commissioned a briefing from the U.S. State Department's leading expert on Japan about what to do with that country once it was defeated. The expert, Joseph Grew, told him that "from the long-range point of view, the best we can hope for is a constitutional monarchy, experience having shown that democracy in Japan would never work." Likewise, when the Western occupation of West Germany ended in 1952, the eminent political scientist Hans Eulau toured that country and wrote despairingly that "The Bonn Republic seems like a second performance of Weimar...giv[ing] rise to the same old, vague forebodings." The problem, Eulau explained, is that "German politics is...grounded not on democratic experience but on a deep emotionalism."

When Italy turned to fascism in the 1920s, the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote that "her repudiation of 'democracy' (in our conventional use of the term) has made it an open question whether this political plant can really strike permanent root anywhere except in its native soil," by which he meant England and America. But even in America doubts used to be raised about the political capacity of some of the citizens. As Senator Strom Thurmond explained to the Harvard Law School in 1957: "Many Negroes simply lack sufficient political consciousness to . . . participate in political and civic affairs...a great number probably also lack certain other qualities prerequisite to casting a truly intelligent ballot."

The argument that democracy requires a democratic tradition is circular. How do you acquire a democratic tradition except by practicing democracy? The answer, the skeptics would say, is that democracy in the West grew out of certain ideas in the Western tradition that can be traced all the way back to classical antiquity. But Amartya Sen has an interesting rejoinder to this. He points out that the Western tradition contains diverse elements. The roots of democracy can be traced to ancient Greece, but Greek philosophers also approved slavery. Modern democracy drew on certain elements from the Western tradition while rejecting others. By the same token, Sen enumerates liberal elements that can be found in Buddhist, Confucian, Kautilyan, Islamic and ancient Indian thought, and he asks why these cannot be drawn upon as a cultural basis for democracy in the non-Western world.

Although we sense that culture is an important determinant of politics, the relationship is hard to specify. Political scientist Samuel Huntington has reminded us that a few decades ago all predominantly Confucian societies were poor, and social scientists argued that something in the behaviors inspired by Confucian beliefs kept them poor. Since then, Confucian societies have experienced faster economic growth than Christian or Muslim societies have ever done. Now, social scientists are trying to understand what it is about Confucian beliefs that generates wealth.

Is Universal Democracy Desirable?

The most telling rebuttal to those who doubt the democratic capacity of poor or non-Western peoples is the experience of recent decades. According to the most authoritative account, which is the annual "survey of freedom" conducted by the private organization, Freedom House, last year 120 out of the world's 192 countries had democratically elected governments. This amounted to 62.5 percent of the countries, comprising 58.2 percent of the world's population. There were 20 electoral democracies in Africa and 14 in Asia, not counting the small Asian-Pacific island states, among which there were another 11 democracies. Needless to say, these non-Western democracies include a great number of poor countries. Of course it is true that poverty, illiteracy and social tensions make the practice of democracy more difficult. It may well be that some of the fledgling democracies that Freedom House counted this year will revert to dictatorship, just as most Western European states achieved democracy through episodes of progress and regress rather than all at once. But the weight of historical experience argues that the social and cultural obstacles are not insuperable. Considering that the first, quite imperfect democracy was created in 1776 and that now, 224 years later, there are 120 democracies, the striking thing is how far democracy has spread, not how limited it is.

If all of this goes to show that universal democracy is indeed possible, is it desirable? I believe it is. First, it will make for a more peaceful world. Democracies do not fight one another. A great deal of research has been devoted to this observation since it was first pointed out 10 or 15 years ago, and today it stands, in the words of one scholar, "as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations." There is dispute about whether democracies are more peaceful, per se, or only more peaceful toward other democracies. But either way, if more of the world becomes democratic, war will become less common.

In addition to this "democratic peace," Sen has advanced another proposition about democracies to which no one has yet offered a confuting instance. He says that no democracy has ever experienced a famine or comparable calamity. The reason, he says, is that famines are preventable. In political systems that include the "feedback" mechanisms that are inherent in democracy, governments are alerted when famine conditions are building and they act to assuage them before they reach disastrous proportions.

These are strong instrumental reasons in favor of democracy. But, to me, perhaps because I am an American, the strongest reason is not instrumental. I believe that every adult ought to have a voice in his government, if he wants it. This is part of my conception of human dignity, whether or not democratic governments make wise decisions. Individuals do not always make wise decisions in their private lives, for example, in choosing a career or a spouse. But I believe it is better for them to be free to make their own choices and errors, than for others to control their lives. The same, in my view, applies to the public arena. I cannot prove I am right. This is not a provable proposition, but a matter of core values. Yet, judging from the spread of democracy around the world, these values are shared by a great many people whose experiences are quite different from my own.

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The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S. government.

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