OVER centuries various forms and systems of governments have been tried. Some rejected some accepted – of course with modifications, best suited to the circumstances. In Roman and ancient Greek times, the idea of Democracy was preached and evolved by philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and later by Hobbs, Locke and Rousseau in the form of Social Contract theory to define government-people relationship. By medieval times, people who had tried Kingship, autocrats, dictators, kleptocrats, plutocrats and oligarchs found Democracy as a better option than all the systems mentioned above, as they had more “negatives” than Democracy though Democracy too has its faults.
In the second half of the 20th century, democracies had taken root in the most difficult circumstances possible—in Germany, which had been traumatized by Nazism, in India, which had the world’s largest population of poor people, and, in the 1990s, in South Africa, which had been disfigured by apartheid. Decolonialization created a host of new democracies in Africa and Asia and autocratic regimes gave way to democracy in Greece (1974), Spain (1975), Argentina (1983), Brazil (1985) and Chile (1989). The collapse of the Soviet Union created many fledgling democracies in Central Europe. By 2000 Freedom House, an American think-tank, classified 120 countries, or 63% of the world total, as democracies. Democracy Representatives of more than 100 countries gathered at the World Forum on in Warsaw that year to proclaim that “the will of the people” was “the basis of the authority of government”.
A US State Department report proclaimed that, after overcoming “failed experiments” with authoritarianism, democracy had triumphed. While this view was understandable given recent successes, the triumph of democracy was never inevitable. After Athens’ fall, the concept of democracy lay dormant until the Enlightenment. In the 18th century, only the American Revolution established a sustainable democracy. In the 19th century, monarchists fiercely resisted democratic progress, and by the early 20th century, emerging democracies in Germany, Spain and Italy collapsed. By 1941, only 11 democracies remained, and Franklin Roosevelt feared that “the great flame of democracy” might be extinguished by the rise of barbarism.
The progress seen in the late 20th century has stalled in the 21st. Even though around 40% of the world’s population, more people than ever before, live in countries that will hold free and fair elections this year, democracy’s global advance has come to a halt and may even have gone into reverse. Many nominal democracies have slid towards autocracy, maintaining the outward appearance of democracy through elections, but without the rights and institutions that are equally important aspects of a functioning democratic system.
Faith in democracy flares up in moments of triumph, such as the overthrow of unpopular regimes in Cairo or Kiev, only to sputter out once again. Outside the West, democracy often advances only to collapse. And within the West, democracy has too often become associated with debt and dysfunction at home and overreach abroad. Democracy has always had its critics, but now old doubts are being treated with renewed respect as the weaknesses of democracy in its Western strongholds and the fragility of its influence elsewhere, have become increasingly apparent. Why has democracy lost its forward momentum? Autocratic leaders in Venezuela, Ukraine, Argentina and elsewhere have followed suit, perpetuating a perverted simulacrum of democracy rather than doing away with it altogether, and thus discrediting it further.
The next big setback was the Iraq war. When Saddam Hussein’s fabled weapons of mass destruction failed to materialise after the American-led invasion of 2003, Mr Bush switched instead to justifying the war as a fight for freedom and democracy. “The concerted effort of free nations to promote democracy is a prelude to our enemies’ defeat,” he argued in his second inaugural address. This was more than mere opportunism. But it did the democratic cause great harm. Left-wingers regarded it as proof that democracy was just a fig leaf for American imperialism. Foreign-policy realists took Iraq’s growing chaos as proof that American-led promotion of democratization was a recipe for instability. And disillusioned neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist, saw it as proof that democracy cannot put down roots in stony ground. A third serious setback was Egypt.
The collapse of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in 2011 sparked hopes of democracy spreading across the Middle East. However, Egypt’s subsequent elections, won by the Muslim Brotherhood under Mohamed Morsi, quickly turned to despair. In 2013, the military intervened, deposing Morsi, imprisoning Brotherhood leaders and killing hundreds of protesters. This, coupled with ongoing conflicts in Syria and Libya, shattered the dream of an Arab Spring leading to democracy. Meanwhile, some newer democracies have faltered. In South Africa, the African National Congress, ruling since 1994, has grown increasingly self-serving. These developments have shown that establishing and sustaining democracy is a slow and complex process, with many hurdles to overcome.
In Bangladesh, Thailand and Cambodia, opposition parties have boycotted recent elections or refused to accept their results. All this has demonstrated that building the institutions needed to sustain democracy is very slow work indeed, and has dispelled the once-popular notion that democracy will blossom rapidly and spontaneously once the seed is planted. Although democracy may be a “universal aspiration”, it is a culturally rooted practice. Western countries almost all extended the right to vote long after the establishment of sophisticated political systems, with powerful civil services and entrenched constitutional rights, in societies that cherished the notions of individual rights and independent judiciaries which is the true essence of real Democracy.
—The writer is Former Civil Servant and Consultant (ILO) & International Organisation for Migration and author of seven books.
