THE FUTURE OF FREEDOM
Illiberal Democracy At Home and Abroad
By Fareed Zakaria
Norton. 286 pp. $24.95
America's postwar objective in Iraq, the Bush administration never tires of saying, is to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people. But though the terms are often used interchangeably, "freedom" and "democracy" don't mean the same thing. Indeed, as Fareed Zakaria points out in The Future of Freedom, it was only a little more than 50 years ago that most countries in the "free" West became full-fledged democracies. Just as a baby has to crawl before walking, Zakaria argues, a nation must guarantee freedom (through the rule of law, free speech and assembly, private property and other checks on government power) before it can safely subject itself to democratic accountability.
Nations that establish democracy without first guaranteeing their citizens freedom typically become what Zakaria terms "illiberal democracies." During the 4th century B.C., while Athens enjoyed a golden age of democracy, its popular assembly voted to put Socrates to death for corrupting Athenian youth with philosophy. That was democratic, Zakaria writes, "but not liberal." Post-revolutionary France was ruled by a democratic National Assembly, but the bloodbath it created during its reign of terror was profoundly illiberal. Today, Zakaria notes, Yasser Arafat is the only Arab leader who is chosen through "reasonably free elections." But though democratic, the Palestinian Authority is not remotely liberal, as Western journalists who have been harassed by its functionaries will readily attest.
For those of us accustomed to judging a government's legitimacy according to whether it's democratic, Zakaria's nonchalance about democracy is a little bit shocking. But he supports his "freedom before democracy" thesis with judicious argument and a sure grasp of history and the contemporary world scene. The Future of Freedom makes you see the world differently. It's also fun to read, which is almost unheard of in books propounding grand theories about foreign policy. (Zakaria, who edits Newsweek International and was formerly managing editor of the venerable Foreign Affairs, makes his only concession to Council on Foreign Relations-style dullness in the respectably generic title.)
The problem with democratic governance, Zakaria argues, isn't merely that it won't automatically protect the freedom of its citizens. It's also that it may well undermine freedom unless freedom has already been guaranteed through the prior establishment of an independent judiciary, a free press and other components of what Zakaria calls "constitutional liberalism." (He uses the term "liberal" in its 19th-century sense, "tending to enhance the freedom of individuals and limit the power of government.") Echoing James Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville, Zakaria writes that a majority will incline toward tyranny unless forced to accommodate certain individual and minority rights. It may also degenerate quickly into autocracy and dictatorship, a process that he notes is well under way in Russia and has played out many times in sub-Saharan Africa.
The recipe for liberal democracy, then, would appear to be simple. Create constitutional liberalism, allow it to harden into tradition, then add democracy. But one more ingredient, Zakaria writes, is needed for a liberal democracy to sustain itself: wealth. If freedom is the prerequisite to democracy, wealth is the prerequisite to freedom, because it allows the bourgeoisie to establish power independent of the state, which in turn forces the state to govern according to predictable rules (i.e., laws) rather than caprice. Furthermore, he argues, the wealth can't lie only in natural resources, because then the crucial development of a wealth-creating bourgeoisie won't occur. Such "trust-fund states" fritter away their inheritance on extravagances. That doesn't necessarily describe Iraq, whose oil wealth is complemented by the presence of an educated bourgeoisie. But it does describe Saudi Arabia, which some neoconservatives speak breezily of rendering free and democratic.
Zakaria's road map is not without potholes. His faith in the liberalizing effects of capitalism doesn't seem justified in the case of China, which, three decades after first integrating itself into the Western economy, is fantastically successful economically yet brutally repressive and not even remotely democratic. He dances around the problem in various ways before concluding that China should liberalize "with care and incrementally" lest it succumb to the authoritarian impulses of its population. But even granting that his characterization is correct (they don't conduct polls in China), Tiananmen Square is now a decade and a half past. Surely freedom, if not democracy, is long overdue.
More disappointing is Zakaria's decision to end his book with a condemnation of democratic excesses in the United States and the West. His arguments in these late chapters are pedestrian at best (do we really need to hear again that presidential primaries robbed political parties of their power?) and annoyingly mandarin at worst (he comes close to calling for a revival of the WASP aristocracy). They are also beside the point. Only a few of the problems he describes even exist, and those that do bear little comparison to the problems faced by unfree societies. Zakaria should have kept to his broad international canvas, which he paints with much more confidence and enthusiasm. Minus the final irrelevant analysis, The Future of Freedom is a work of tremendous originality and insight. •
Timothy Noah writes the "Chatterbox" column for Slate.com
