The Democracy Rule

We can abandon Bushism—and still care how states treat their people. A response to Charles Kupchan and Adam Mount.

Charles Kupchan and Adam Mount are right that we cannot construct an effective new international order consisting only of Western allies and non-Western democracies [“The Autonomy Rule,” Issue #12]. If we are serious about establishing regimes for climate change or nuclear non-proliferation, or fostering an international financial system, then we have to deal China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other autocratic states into the system. The imperative of such an effort is reason enough, as they rightly note, to discard the “you’re-with-us-or-agin’-us” Bush-era worldview.

So far, so good. But Kupchan and Mount do not just go so far; they would have us abandon not only the worst errors of Bush but some of the nobler impulses of American foreign policy of the last several generations. That’s a mistake, because their sense of what the world looks like is plain wrong.

The argument of “The Autonomy Rule” goes as follows. The liberal democratic order built by the West after World War II is “steadily losing its sway” as non-Western, non-democratic states come to the fore. Because we need these states to fashion an effective global order, we must “make room for the competing visions of rising powers,” and we should welcome any state that seeks to advance the welfare of its people, whether by democratic governance or not. Doing so would honor our own pluralist traditions and would help us forge consensus, both in confronting predatory states and in attracting otherwise refractory regimes into the world order. Empowering non-democratic but “autonomous” states would fortify the regional bodies that represent many such states and provide a motive to abide by the rules of free trade and free markets.

Let’s start with the central premise: The “Western order” of liberal democracy is losing its sway. Certainly the Western share of global GDP is diminishing–though the United States is still three times the size of its next-largest competitor, and little Canada still generates significantly more economic activity than India. More importantly, “the Western order” would be losing its sway only if the non-democracies of the non-West were eclipsing the democracies, and that scarcely seems to be so: Of the 15 non-Western countries in the top 25 of the GDP rankings, eleven are democracies, and only four–China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia–are autocratic.

But what about the broader “democratic recession” we’ve been hearing so much about recently? Certainly the “Third Wave” of democratic expansion that began with the end of the cold war has ebbed. But Freedom House, which tabulates such things, notes that from 2000 to 2008 the number of countries ranked as “free” increased by three, while the “not free” category shrank by six. Thomas Carothers, a scholar of democracy generally inclined toward pessimism, recently wrote that “the overall balance sheet for democracy in this decade relative to ten years ago is surprisingly close to neutral”–not a ringing endorsement, but scarcely cause to abandon the enterprise of democracy promotion.

Let us suppose, however, that Carothers is wrong, and Kupchan and Mount are right, about the current prospects of democracy. If the Western order is threatened with decline, then we must either fight for our collective way of life or accept the inevitability of a world in which democracy is merely one among many political systems. Kupchan and Mount propose the latter. More than that, they suggest, we should accept that citizens may choose any number of such systems–theocratic, autocratic, perhaps oligarchic–as a means to achieve whatever ends they should set for themselves. Since “the requirements of human autonomy vary for different people,” they write, “societies should have considerable latitude in how they organize their institutions of government.”

On one level this is right: The immense variety of economic and social systems among democracies shows that people do, indeed, frame institutions according to their taste. However, we are not just talking about democracies, but also countries like, say, Egypt or Angola. What can we mean when we say that “societies” in such nations have “organized” their institutions? No one has ever seriously asked their opinion. Their institutions have been ordained from above. What about the theocracies, like Saudi Arabia or Iran? Should we suppose that putative proximity to the Divine satisfies some distinctive national requirement of human autonomy in these states? Given the degree of frustration and embitterment in both places, this would be a hard case to make. Of course the authors are thinking more of China, or Singapore, where citizens seem quite happy to exchange political freedom for astonishing economic growth. Though no one asked these societies how they wanted to organize their institutions either, we can infer their consent from relative states of social tranquility. But there aren’t many Chinas or Singapores.

With its anthropologically correct view–that different peoples choose different forms of social organization–the Autonomy Rule offers balm to the troubled conscience. The cold war realists, whether Hans Morgenthau or Henry Kissinger, entertained no illusions about the tyrannical nature of the Soviet bloc states with whom we nevertheless had to find a modus vivendi. Americans were always uneasy with such hard-headed realpolitik. Kupchan and Mount provide us with a way out: The states with whom we must make common cause offer their citizens the same fundamental good we do–“autonomy”–but through different means than we choose. Only the most predatory states–Zimbabwe, North Korea, Sudan, and presumably a very few others–fall so far short of this standard that they do not merit such deference.

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