Democracy or Dictatorship

Zachary Latif recently wrote against democracy in the Muslim world:

In fact one remains hopefully that there will be no significant upheaval within the Islamic Crescent since autocracy, in a convoluted way, is the one redeeming aspect of the Islamic Crescent. There is no need to consider the popular sentiment thus demagogues do not arise and religious fanaticism is inhibited, in dire contrast to India and Israel where the far right (it is virtually impossible to find the a party like BJP – with such a notorious history, shady associations and parochial views – in charge of an Islamic nation) firmly entrenched in power.

The very nature of the Islamic nations is inherently predisposed to a strongman leadership and that is a cultural tendency imbedded within the Muslim world. This is not a necessarily a bad thing far from in fact since it allows visionary leaders to recast their nations in their own modernistic mould. How else could have Ataturk successfully secularised and modernised Turkey to such an extent that the population now considers itself European rather than Eastern.

It is not within the Muslim tradition to cultivate a Western democracy nevertheless I remain thankful that there remains within the crescent the continual ability to subtly imbibe concepts and values that are conducive to future growth. The Islamic Crescent is certainly not a failure and I find it to have made immense progress within the past century(Pakistan being the foremost example, for how else could a Muslim elite so eloquently and effectively pursue their dreams of a nation state without resorting to violence) in spite of the severe handicaps endured (and perpetrated) by Muslim polities & ethnicities throughout the world.

The main idea here seems to be that democracy would be more illiberal and hence we should support visionary dictators. I find that argument completely and wholly wrong. Dictators very rarely have the ability to change the course of a nation for the better. The best they can do is to keep the status quo and that ain’t enough in the Muslim world now.

Regarding Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf, of whom Zachary is a big fan, I think he is following the same line as General Zia did a couple of decades ago within the constraints of their time. General Zia was about the worst thing that happened to Pakistan and I hope Musharraf doesn’t turn out to be as bad. Zachary is young and probably has no recollection of the Zia years. I was the same age as Zachary is now when Zia was killed in a plane crash in 1988 and almost as naive at the time as he is now.

Daniel Drezner has a good critique of a similar idea from Fareed Zakaria’s new book “The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad”. According to Daniel, Fareed Zakaria says:

1. It took a long time for constitutional liberal democracy to develop properly in the West;
2. When democracy has been installed in places without a prior decentralization of religious, commercial, and political authority, bad things happen to democracy, i.e., Nazi Germany;
3. Encouraging the acceleration of democracy in the developing world will lead to democracies that are fundamentally illiberal, which would be bad. So, rather than cajole China into democratizing faster than it is currently doing, let nature take it’s course, otherwise you wind up with backsliding democracies, such as Russia.

Daniel disagrees (as do I):

1. Stable democracies have emerged without the preconditions Zakaria spells out. Some (big and small) examples: Botswana, Costa Rica, India, Japan, and the Baltic states.
2. The slow processes stressed by Zakaria have equally adverse consequences. States that are in the middle of Zakaria’s process are more dangerous than even illiberal democracies. As Jack Snyder has pointed out, these sort of states often have a sufficient mix of particularistic coalitions that lead to overexpansion, which leads to war. Snyder and Ed Mansfield have statistically demonstrated that states undergoing regime transition are far more likely to initiate wars than either democracies OR autocracies (click here for a precis of this argument).

As for illiberal democracies, it is undoubtedly true that their first few years are volatile ones, with lots of potentially aggressive leaders getting elected and then causing problems. However, as Stephen Walt has shown, these revolutionary states tend to mellow, and act as responsible members of the international system.

This doesn’t mean that illiberal democracies are necessarily better for world politics than slowly reforming authoritarian states are. But they are not necessarily worse, either. It’s more a question of timing — illiberal states that become democratic are more likely to have problems sooner rather than later, while authoritarian states that are slowly democratizing are likely to have problems later rather than sooner.

So, to conclude: a) states do not necessarily have to go through the same long-term evolution that England or America endured to become a liberal democracy, and b) over the long term, illiberal democracies are not necessarily more violent actors than other non-democratic states.

NOTE: Yes, I quoted two people with whom I share a name. None of us are related as far as I know.