CHJ Response #1

In November of 1997 when Fareed Zakaria wrote his article on illiberal democracy he made a number of interesting observations on the divergence of democratic institutions and constitutional liberalism. He observes that the number of illiberal democracies has risen. He measures this phenomenon by counting the regimes that employ more liberal democratic election mechanisms than they do liberal civil protections, and concludes that the percentage of the worlds democracies that are illiberal rose from 22% in 1990 to 50% in 1997. This is not an independent phenomenon or even a byproduct of poorly conceived foreign policy; it is a direct result of a western philosophy of democratization at all costs. Democratization theory in the West for too long has hinged on the assumption that a move to democracy was inevitable once a nation started in that direction. The resulting policies of world economic institutions, U.S. aid initiatives and U.S. State Department projects have been focused almost exclusively on facilitating the basic mechanisms of voting, rather than the social conditions necessary for the sustenance of democracy.

Zakaria’s discussion eleven years ago about the multifaceted relationship between democracy in the abstract and constitutional liberalism is perhaps more pertinent today when taken in the context of U.S. foreign policy, than it was even in the time of his writing. Over the last half decade the Untied States has made the spread of democracy a cornerstone of its stated foreign policy objectives. This aim failed to recognize the validity of Zakaria’s insightful observations, and the ensuing quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan can be seen as derivatives of this lack of understanding the differences between democracy and liberal society. We are just now recognizing that tens of thousands of purple thumbed voters on CNN will not necessarily vote to extend to their fellow citizens the freedoms widely accepted in the West.