Ten years ago democracy was on the march, and its progress seemed more or less inevitable. Political freedom was assumed to expand with economic prosperity, and international relations were expected to grow smoother as the number of democratic nations swelled.
Today those assumptions seem blithe. Democracy has met with reversals, most famously but not only in Russia. China's Communist leaders continue to preside over economic growth without political liberty. And Americans have seen that democracies can disagree fundamentally about how to behave in the world.
Those of us who reported from Moscow during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union knew that democracy was not ensured -- if only because Russians frequently told us so. "First we will have to wander in the desert for 40 years," was a frequent refrain, by which analogy Russians meant that only a new generation, unspoiled by the "slavery" of communism, could truly govern itself.
But the most frequently cited scenarios of failure were a disintegration of Russia into smaller pieces, a Communist revanche or the triumph of a Hitler-like figure in response to poverty and social collapse. Few would have taken seriously a prediction that a bland, democratically elected KGB apparatchik would reconstitute the security state without serious opposition, without much of an ideology, in the space of only a few years, as the economy was growing -- and with outside countries registering barely a peep of protest.
The news for democracy isn't bad everywhere. Indonesia is holding a contested presidential election today; in nearby Malaysia, a leading politician was recently released from jail; Afghans will go to the polls next month. Colombia has made progress in combating its fiercest internal enemies of democracy. In nations from Estonia to South Korea, democracy, once deemed fragile, is so ensconced as to no longer be newsworthy. The long-term global trends, according to the nonprofit organization Freedom House, remain positive: the number of countries rated free has doubled in the past 30 years, and a higher proportion of the world's population than ever before is living in freedom.
And yet Russia is not the only place where things seem to be going backward. As in Russia, an elected leader in Thailand has been orchestrating a steady erosion of press freedoms and political rights. A general who staged a coup in Pakistan five years ago, announcing that "this is . . . only another path to democracy," no longer promises to fade away. The autocrats of Central Asia have grown more confident on their thrones. In Hong Kong people continue to show that democratic yearnings are as Chinese as they are Mexican or South African, but mainland China continues to nibble away at their freedoms.
It's not just these individual cases that can make the optimism of the 1990s seem naive. The fight against Islamic fundamentalist terrorists inevitably became America's top priority after the Sept. 11 attacks; pushing for democracy strikes many policymakers as an unaffordable luxury. Troubles in places as disparate as Haiti and Iraq show how difficult it can be to foster democracy, even though most people want it. Democrats were stifled in places where the United States was heavily engaged (Egypt) and where it pursued a policy of isolation (Burma), leaving few clear answers about the best way to promote freedom. Disagreements with democratic allies such as France (over Iraq) or South Korea (over North Korea) caused some to question whether democratization would bring the promised harmony, even as many inhabitants of new democracies wondered whether the system could deliver all they had expected.
What's the lesson? Life was more comfortable when we could pretend democracy was inevitable -- that as long as we just kept trading with China, for example, liberty would inevitably follow. Now Vladimir Putin has demonstrated that freedom is distressingly reversible.
If people conclude that democracy is unrealistic, unachievable and maybe not all it's cracked up to be anyway, the world will be worse off and the United States less safe. If, on the other hand, people realize democratization takes constant effort and engagement, the lesson could be a constructive one. And maybe, even now under Putin, the 40-year-clock would not have to be reset to zero.
fredhiatt@washpost.com
