The Promise of Democracy

• Author: Bruce Ledewitz
• Position: Professor of Law, Duquesne University School of Law
• Pages: 407-449

THE FUTURE OF FREEDOM: ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY AT HOME AND ABROAD. Fareed Zakaria. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003. Pp. 256.

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There can be no democratic practice without democratic theory.¹

When a leading figure of the American foreign policy elite writes a serious work criticizing democracy, citizens should take notice. Fareed Zakaria's book, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad,²is a signal of a change in our culture. We may be seeing a turn away from the traditional American commitment to democracy at home and abroad. Combining popular dissatisfaction with government domestically, and an uncertain plan for bringing democracy to Iraq, this moment may represent a crisis in our self-identification as the leading voice for democracy in the world.

Fareed Zakaria is a fast-rising star of the international policy establishment. Zakaria has been described as the most influential foreign policy adviser of his generation by Esquire magazine.³ Zakaria is editor of Newsweek International, with a global audience of 3.5 million, and he writes a column that appears in Newsweek and the Washington Post.⁴ At 28, he was the youngest managing editor of Foreign Affairs Magazine.⁵ He also offers political analysis on ABC.⁶ In other words, people who make American foreign policy and who influence American domestic life are reading, and listening to, Zakaria. This book is not an academic exercise. It is an attempt by Zakaria to convince those who count and thereby to change AmericanPage 408 foreign and domestic policy.

For several years, Zakaria has been warning about the rise of what he calls "illiberal democracy" in the developing world. He is not the first to voice this concern. Nor is he the first to ground democracy in the liberal institutions of a market economy and the rule of law.

In The Future of Freedom, however, Zakaria goes further than before. Here, he expressly links the failure of democracy abroad to tendencies within people themselves and suggests coercive international steps to limit majoritarian policies. Zakaria also uses the same flaws in human nature and in the essence of democracy to justify rule by elite institutions in the domestic American context, and generally in the West, as well.

In this Review Essay I will first outline Zakaria's arguments and proposals concerning American foreign policy and domestic practices. In Part II, I will evaluate these proposals. Zakaria's critique of democracy is more radical and fundamental than he acknowledges, and less convincing. In addition, the link between the problems he does identify and "democracy"- however defined-is not always clear. In Part III, I will suggest why Zakaria's project is likely to fail. Finally, in Part IV, I will suggest that there are alternative ways to understand democracy that offer much richer possibilities for political life and action than do Zakaria's very narrow views of government, community, and self-determination.

I Zakaria's Account of Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

A Zakaria's Framework

It is now generally recognized that governments that have come to power through elections, and sometimes continue to govern through elections, may govern in tyrannical ways. Zakaria pointed this out in a Foreign Affairs essay in 1997.⁷ In The Future of Freedom, Zakaria sets the phenomenon of elected tyrannies abroad into the fuller framework of the relationship between liberal institutions and democracy and then traces the effects of democratic tendencies in mature democracies like the United States. He has done this in a relatively short, non-technical book plainly intended to influence leading circles and informed public opinion, especially in the United States.

Zakaria begins his introduction, The Democratic Age, by noting the dominance of democracy today as the only truly accepted political ideology in the world.⁸ This is why even dictators organize national elections.⁹

Despite the importance of democracy to Zakaria, there is an ambiguity throughout the book about what democracy means. When discussing thePage 409 developing world, Zakaria tends to mean simply the holding of open, free, and fair elections.¹⁰ When discussing the mature democracies, specifically the United States, he means something broader-power moving downward or, even more broadly, a way of life.¹¹ When Zakaria refers to growing democracy in the United States, he is not saying that there are now more elections, although in certain contexts that is the case. Rather, he is saying that mass culture is the dominant force in the United States today, from political life to economic life to social life.

Zakaria's formally-stated attitude toward democracy never waivers. He says that while democracy is good, it is not all good. Elections can be, and have been, won by racists, fascists, and separatists who cause miserable conditions for their people. Elected governments in Peru, the Palestinian Authority, Ghana, and Venezuela ignore constitutional limits on their powers and in other ways deprive citizens of basic human rights. There are more important political matters than whether a government is elected: "Despite the limited political choice they offer, countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Jordan, and Morocco provide a better environment for the life, liberty and happiness of their citizens than do the dictatorships in Iraq and Libya or the illiberal democracies of Venezuela, Russia or Ghana."¹²

The reason that democracy is not all good, or not the most important good, is that democracy does not intrinsically include constitutional liberty. That is, it is possible to have elections without the liberal institutions of the rule of law and a market economy. It is also possible to have liberal institutions without democracy. In the past, liberal government rather than democractic government was the norm. Today, increasingly, it is democracy rather than liberty that exists in the developing world. Often, countries that were better run and more respectful of human rights as autocracies deteriorate when elections are introduced-hence Zakaria's term, illiberal democracy.

In contrast to simply holding elections, the American model of government-our constitutional system-divides government power among competing power centers. The system is liberal in that it protects human and constitutional rights because it puts the rule of law at the center of politics.¹³In addition to governmental structures, the American system also relies upon the existence of intermediate groups, today usually referred to as "civil society."¹⁴ Although Zakaria discusses the important ways in which the American system of constitutional liberalism is changing to become more democratic-changes he decries-that system has always been more than a democracy.

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One of Zakaria's major complaints is that, despite our system's commitment to constitutional liberalism, American foreign policy has been formulated to encourage elections without regard to liberal institutions and to treat countries as legitimate only to the extent that they have elections. Zakaria hopes to change that policy.

Chapter One, entitled A Brief History of Human Liberty, shows the historical link between liberty and the liberal democracy that is enjoyed in the mature democracies of the West.¹⁵ Zakaria concludes that democracy arises out of divided political power and capitalism, specifically legal protections for private property, and not the other way around.¹⁶ Indeed, if democracy is defined as more or less universal adult enfranchisement, democracy was not widespread in the West until after World War II. Yet, by the nineteenth century, before democracy arrived, the West enjoyed liberal society.

Zakaria concludes from history that liberal democracy can arise anywhere-there is no special, pro-democratic Anglo-American culture-that constitutionalism and capitalism are present. He strongly implies that no other basis for stable democracy is possible.

In Chapter Two, The Twisted Path, Zakaria traces a different history-the history of the failure of democracy in Europe in the early twentieth century.¹⁷He reminds his readers that Hitler came to power democratically and that World War I resulted from popular appeals to nationalism.¹⁸ So, democratic trends are not always benign.

At the end of Chapter Two, Zakaria sets forth and explains several factors that favor the growth of stable, liberal democracy.¹⁹ Perhaps the most important factor is capitalism, because it creates a bourgeoisie that is politically and economically independent of state authority. The other advantage of capitalism for democracy is its tendency to produce wealth. Zakaria is very impressed with the research of Seymour Martin Lipset associating certain levels of national per capita income with democracy.²⁰This becomes almost an iron law of history in the book. The other important factor in producing stable democracy is a well-functioning and legitimate state-one that is able to collect taxes from the populace. Tax collection forces government accountability, which is why the high per capita income associated in the Middle East with income from oil has not led to democracy.

Zakaria concludes that genuinely open, capitalist development stronglyPage 411 tends to favor...