Was Democracy Just A Moment

[Reggie Bautista]

Following a link from a link that Dan (I think) posted, I ran across an article from 1997 that seems to apply to a few recent threads. The article is, "Was Democracy Just a Moment" by Robert Kaplan.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97dec/democ.htm

The article is very long, but well worth the read. Here are three longish excerpts that apply to recent threads about democracy and world government and issues involved in nation-building in Iraq.

Excerpt #1:
Because both a middle class and civil institutions
are required for successful democracy, democratic
Russia, which inherited neither from the Soviet
regime, remains violent, unstable, and miserably
poor despite its 99 percent literacy rate. Under
its authoritarian system China has dramatically
improved the quality of life for hundreds of
millions of its people. My point, hard as it may
be for Americans to accept, is that Russia may be
failing in part because it is a democracy and
China may be succeeding in part because it is not.
Having traveled through much of western China,
where Muslim Turkic Uighurs (who despise the
Chinese) often predominate, I find it hard to
imagine a truly democratic China without at least
a partial breakup of the country. Such a breakup
would lead to chaos in western China, because the
Uighurs are poorer and less educated than most
Chinese and have a terrible historical record of
governing themselves. Had the student demonstrations
in 1989 in Tiananmen Square led to democracy, would
the astoundingly high economic growth rates of the
1990s still obtain? I am not certain, because
democracy in China would have ignited turmoil not
just in the Muslim west of the country but elsewhere,
too; order would have decreased but corruption would
not have.

Excerpt #2:
The lesson to draw is not that dictatorship is
good and democracy bad but that democracy emerges
successfully only as a capstone to other social
and economic achievements. In his "Author's
Introduction" to Democracy in America, Tocqueville
showed how democracy evolved in the West not
through the kind of moral fiat we are trying to
impose throughout the world but as an organic
outgrowth of development. European society had
reached a level of complexity and sophistication
at which the aristocracy, so as not to overburden
itself, had to confer a measure of equality upon
other citizens and allocate some responsibility to
them: a structured division of the population into
peacefully competing interest groups was necessary
if both tyranny and anarchy were to be averted.

And excerpt #3:
For years idealists have dreamed of a "world
government." Well, a world government has been
emerging -- quietly and organically, the way
vast developments in history take place. I do
not refer to the United Nations, the power of
which, almost by definition, affects only the
poorest countries. After its peacekeeping failures
in Bosnia and Somalia -- and its $2 billion
failure to make Cambodia democratic -- the UN is
on its way to becoming a supranational relief
agency. Rather, I refer to the increasingly dense
ganglia of international corporations and markets
that are becoming the unseen arbiters of power in
many countries. It is much more important nowadays
for the leader of a developing country to get a
hearing before corporate investors at the World
Economic Forum than to speak before the UN General
Assembly. Amnesty International now briefs
corporations, just as it has always briefed national
governments. Interpol officials have spoken about
sharing certain kinds of intelligence with
corporations. The Prime Minister of Malaysia,
Mahathir Mohamad, is recognizing the real new world
order (at least in this case) by building a low-tax
district he calls a "multimedia super-corridor,"
with two new cities and a new airport designed
specifically for international corporations. The
world's most efficient peacemaking force belongs
not to the UN or even to the great powers but to
a South African corporate mercenary force called
Executive Outcomes, which restored relative
stability to Sierra Leone in late 1995. (This is
reminiscent of the British East India Company,
which raised armies transparently for economic
interests.) Not long after Executive Outcomes left
Sierra Leone, where only 20.7 percent of adults
can read, that country's so-called model democracy
crumbled into military anarchy, as Sudan's model
democracy had done in the late 1980s.

He goes on to talk about the fact that 51 of the 100 largest economies in the world are corporations, and how both politics and corporations are about power, and power is transferring from politicians to corporations.

It's a really fascinating article. I'm not sure I agree with everything in it, but it makes for intriguing reading.

Reggie Bautista


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