Democracy, Not Off-the-Shelf

By William Raspberry
Monday, December 8, 2003; Page A25

…It isn't that I don't favor democracy. I do, and I'd love to see more of it in the world. But because of America's peculiar history (excluding that unpleasant little episode called slavery), we may be thinking of democracy as a lot easier, more natural and more inevitable than it is.

We sometimes behave as though, if we can only get democracy on the supermarket shelf alongside other forms of government, the world will choose it the way it would choose fresh-squeezed orange juice over canned.

… Still, there is reason for caution. After all, it takes a lot more than theoretical availability to get nations to choose democracy, and it takes a lot more than elections, however free or fair, to produce it. I'm reminded of an observation uttered more than 10 years ago by someone who understood the point.

"Elections are not automatically the establishment of democracy. . . . Democracy is a process, painful to establish in a land that has never known democracy, where suspicions are high, where absolutism has been the way of life. In a way it's a cultural thing that needs to be based upon respect for human rights, for other people's opinions, for institutions, including the courts. Elections are only a step -- a necessary step -- toward the goal of democracy."

The words were from Francois Benoit, a representative of Haiti's government during the exile of the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But they are worth noting and remembering.

So is this: Democracies are not necessarily engines of great morality. The Communitarian Network recently invited responses to the Bush proposal that America reconsider its 60-year support of autocracies in the Middle East. Here is what one respondent, a Canadian professor, had to say:

"Democracies can be worse than autocracies. To be poor in democratic Mexico or Brazil is certainly worse than to be unrepresented in Cuba or Saudi Arabia. We should know better than to put much stock in the form of government. That it is necessary even to say this shows how tightly we are in the grip of a clichéd ideology."

That is professor Michael Neumann's caution. Here is mine: When you combine overwhelming military might with the utter certainty that your way is the one true way, the temptation can be very strong to impose truth -- political or religious -- at gunpoint.

We could do with a bit less cocksure certainty on both counts.