Democracy Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Condoleezza Rice

  Cover design by Jarrod Taylor. Cover photograph: Selma to Montgomery March, 1965 (gelatin silver print), Karales, James H. (1930–2002) / Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA / E. Hardy Adriance Fine Arts Acquisition Fund / in memory of Marguerite Hardey Adriance / Bridgeman Images.

  Cover illustration © CSA Images/Archive (Eagle).

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: May 2017

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBNs: 978-1-4555-4018-1 (hardcover); 978-1-4555-7119-2 (large print hardcover); 978-1-5387-2746-1 (intl. pbk.); 978-1-5387-5997-4 (signed edition); 978-1-4555-4019-8 (ebook)

  E3-20170323-JV-NF

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Introduction: Is Democracy in Retreat?

  Chapter 1: The American Experience

  Chapter 2: Russia and the Weight of History

  Chapter 3: Martial Law and the Origins of Polish Democracy

  Chapter 4: Ukraine: “A Made-Up Country”?

  Chapter 5: Kenya: “Save Our Beloved Country”

  Chapter 6: Colombia: The Era of Democratic Security

  Chapter 7: The Middle East: Can Democracy Exist in a Cauldron? Iraq: When Tyrants Fall

  Egypt and Tunisia: When Old Men Fail

  Arab Monarchies: Will They Reform?

  Chapter 8: Are Authoritarians So Bad?

  Chapter 9: What Democracy Must Deliver

  Chapter 10: “Democracy Is the Worst… Except for All the Others”

  Epilogue: They Will Look to America

  2016

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Condoleezza Rice

  Mission Statement

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Newsletters

  To my parents

  To my ancestors, who against long odds continued to believe in the promise of the Constitution

  And to all those who still yearn for the dignity that only liberty can afford

  I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.

  —Nelson Mandela, The Long Walk to Freedom, 1995

  Prologue

  Lisa, Christann, and I had been in Moscow for too long and we were happy to be headed home. Suddenly we were landing in Warsaw, an unscheduled stop. “Leave all your possessions and get off the plane,” we were told over the PA system. We sat for hours in the airport, terrified that we were being detained for some unspecified crime. It was 1979 and we were three American girls in a communist country. After what seemed like a lifetime, we were told to get back on the plane. It took off, and when we landed in Paris—the site of our connecting flight to the United States and a city safely within the West—we cried.

  Ten years later, in July 1989, I visited Poland again, this time with President George H. W. Bush. Mikhail Gorbachev was general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and he was rewriting the rulebook for Eastern Europe, loosening the constraints that had sustained Moscow’s power. Poland was a very different place now. The first night of the visit, we were in Warsaw, guests of a dying communist party. The lights went out during the state dinner—a perfect metaphor for the regime’s coming demise.

  The next day we went to Gdańsk, the home of Solidarity and its founder, Lech Wałęsa. This was the new Poland, experiencing dramatic and sudden change. We entered the town square where one hundred thousand Polish workers had gathered. They were waving American flags and shouting, “Bush, Bush, Bush… Freedom, Freedom, Freedom.”

  I turned to my colleague Robert Blackwill of the National Security Council staff and said, “This is not exactly what Karl Marx meant when he said, ‘Workers of the world unite.’” But, indeed, they had “nothing to lose but their chains.” Two months later, the Polish Communist Party gave way to a Solidarity-led government. It happened with dizzying speed.

  The revolutions that began that summer in Poland and followed in most of Eastern Europe proceeded with minimal bloodshed and maximum support among the people. There were exceptions. In Romania, power had to be wrested by force from Nicolae Ceauşescu; he resisted and tried to flee but was ultimately executed at the hands of revolutionaries. In the Balkans the breakup of Yugoslavia unleashed ethnic tensions and violence, the legacy of which can still be felt today. Russia’s own democratic transition at first appeared promising but ultimately failed entirely, replaced today by Vladimir Putin’s autocratic rule and expansionist foreign policy. Yet, with these important exceptions, the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union spawned several consolidated democracies and the region is largely peaceful.

  The climb toward freedom in the broader Middle East and North Africa has been a far rockier story. Whether in still-unstable Afghanistan and Iraq, where the United States and our allies were midwives to the first freely elected governments; in Syria, which descended into civil war; or in Egypt, where the “awakening” of Tahrir Square turned into the thermidor of a military coup, there is turmoil, violence, and uncertainty. Turkey, perched between Europe and the Muslim world, has recently experienced a military coup attempt and subsequent crackdown. There and across the Middle East, citizens and their governments struggle to find the right marriage of religious conviction and personal freedom. The region is in a maelstrom.

  I have been fortunate enough to be an eyewitness to these two great revolts against oppressive rule: the end of the Soviet Union at the close of the twentieth century and freedom’s awakening in the Middle East at the beginning of the twenty-first. I have watched as people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have insisted on freedom—perhaps with less drama than in the Middle East, but with no less passion. And in fact, as a child, I was a part of another great awakening: the second founding of America, as the civil rights movement unfolded in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, and finally expanded the meaning of “We the people” to encompass people like me.

  These experiences have taught me that there is no more thrilling moment than when people finally seize their rights and their liberty. That moment is necessary, right, and inevitable. It is also terrifying and disruptive and chaotic. And what follows it is hard—really, really hard.
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  Introduction

  IS DEMOCRACY IN RETREAT?

  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, spells out a list of rights deemed to be non-negotiable: Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; to freedom of peaceful assembly and association; and to take part in their government, directly or through freely chosen representatives. The declaration does not use the term “democracy,” but that is exactly what it describes.

  Even leaders who are undeniably authoritarian make some claim to the mantle of democracy, either by holding sham elections or by trying to broaden the definition of “rights” to encompass goods they can deliver, like prosperity. Those who are not subject to popular will still crave legitimacy—or at least the appearance of legitimacy. Saddam Hussein held elections in Iraq in October 2002, just a few months before he was overthrown. (He was the only choice on the ballot and won 100 percent of the vote, with the official turnout also at 100 percent.) Few will say they simply rule by fiat, something that would have been wholly acceptable in times past. France’s Sun King, Louis XIV, who declared, “I am the State,” is one of many monarchs from history who claimed to rule by divine right.

  If democracy is broadly understood to mean the right to speak your mind, to be free from the arbitrary power of the state, and to insist that those who would govern you must ask for your consent, then democracy—the only form of government that guarantees these freedoms—has never been more widely accepted as right.

  Yet, while the voices supporting the idea of democracy have become louder, there is more skepticism today about the actual practice and feasibility of the enterprise. Scholarly and popular discourse is filled with declarations that democracy is in retreat or, at least, as Larry Diamond, my colleague at Stanford, has said, in “recession.”1

  The pessimism is understandable, particularly given events in the Middle East, where the promise of the “Arab Spring” seems to lie in tatters. If there is cause for optimism, it is in recognizing that people still want to govern themselves. Democracy activists in Hong Kong and mainland China risk persecution and arrest if they press their cause. Elections still attract long lines of first-time voters, even among the poorest and least-educated populations in Africa—and sometimes even under threat from terrorists in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. No matter their station in life, people are drawn to the idea that they should determine their own fate. Ironically, while those of us who live in liberty express skepticism about democracy’s promise, people who do not yet enjoy its benefits seem determined to win it.

  Freedom has not lost its appeal. But the task of establishing and sustaining the democratic institutions that will protect it is arduous and long. Progress is rarely a one-way road. Ending authoritarian rule can happen quickly; establishing democratic institutions cannot.

  And there are plenty of malignant forces—some from the old order and some unleashed by an end to repression—ready to attack democratic institutions and destroy them in their infancy. Every new democracy has near-death experiences, crucible moments when the institutional framework is tested and strengthened or weakened by its response. Even the world’s most successful democracies, including our own, can point to these moments, from the Civil War to the civil rights movement. No transition to democracy is immediately successful, or an immediate failure.

  Democracy’s Scaffolding

  Democracy requires balance in many spheres: between executive, legislative, and judicial authority; between centralized government and regional responsibility; between civilian and military leaders; between individual and group rights; and ultimately between state and society. In functioning democracies, institutions are invested with protecting that equilibrium. Citizens must trust them as arbiters in disputes and, when necessary, as vehicles for change.

  The importance of institutions in political and economic development has long been noted by social scientists in the field.2 In 1990, the American political economist Douglass North provided a succinct definition of institutions. He called them the rules of the game in a society—or, in other words, “humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.”3

  At the beginning, formal protections—such as constitutionally determined organizations, laws, procedures, or rules—may reflect bargains between various interests in the society. As such, they may be imperfect and sometimes contradictory. This will breed contention for years to come. Every democracy is flawed at its inception. And, indeed, no democracy ever becomes perfect. The question is not one of perfection but how an imperfect system can survive, move forward, and grow stronger.

  Moreover, these “humanly devised constraints” are, at the beginning, just words on paper. The puzzle is how they come to actually “shape human interaction.” In other words, how do institutions become legitimate in the eyes of the citizen—legitimate enough to become the vehicle through which people seek protection and change?

  We know the goal: Social and political disruption takes place within the institutions. While some fringe elements may operate outside of them, the great majority of people trust them to live up to their stated purpose. The paradox of democracy is that its stability is born of its openness to upheaval through elections, legislation, and social action. Disruption is built into the fabric of democracy.

  The Myth of “Democratic Culture”

  No nationality or ethnic group lacks the DNA to come to terms with this paradox. Over the years, many people have tried to invoke “cultural explanations” to assert that some societies lack what it takes to establish or sustain democracy. But this is a myth that has fallen to the reality of democracy’s universal appeal.

  It was once thought that Latin Americans were more suited for caudillos than presidents; that Africans were just too tribal; that Confucian values conflicted with the tenets of self-rule. Years before that, Germans were thought too martial or subservient, and—of course—the descendants of slaves were too “childlike” to care about the right to vote.

  Those racist views are refuted by stable democracies in places as diverse as Chile, Ghana, South Korea, and across Europe. And, of course, America has now had a black president, as well as two secretaries of state and two attorneys general. Even if these “cultural” prejudices have simply not held up over time, the question hangs in the air: Why have some peoples been able to find the equilibrium between disruption and stability that is characteristic of a democracy? Is it a matter of historical circumstances? Or is it simply a matter of time?

  Scholars have offered a number of answers to these questions. Perhaps the most prevalent is that the poorer the country and the lower the levels of education, the less likely the chances for the establishment of a stable democracy.

  Others have emphasized the type of interaction between non-democratic regimes and their oppositions. If the end of the old order does not come through violence but rather through negotiation, the chances for success increase.

  Finally, the state of the society itself is clearly a factor. A more ethnically homogeneous population is likely to find it easier to achieve stability. And if civil society—all the private, non-governmental groups, associations, and institutions in the country—is already well developed, the scaffolding for the new democracy is stronger.

  Unfortunately, these idyllic conditions rarely exist in the real world. When people want to change their circumstances they are unlikely to wait until they have achieved an appropriate level of GDP. Sometimes the old regime has to be overthrown violently. Ethnically homogeneous populations are rare. More often, the history of revolution begins with oppression of one group by another. It is difficult for civil society to develop under repressive regimes. Checks and balances are most robust when they come from multiple sources—from outside governing bodies as well as within them. Authoritarians fully understand and depend on the absenc
e of a well-developed institutional layer between the population as a whole and themselves. They trust that the mob will likely have incoherent views of its interests. The masses might even be easy to manipulate, producing fertile ground for the kind of populism associated with the Peronists in Argentina or the National Socialists in Germany.

  But if the mob organizes independently and pursues its collective interest through new groups and associations, it can become an effective counterweight and a force for change. That is why from Moscow to Caracas, civil society is always in the crosshairs of repressive regimes.

  In short, democracy, particularly in its first moments, will be messy, imperfect, mistake-prone, and fragile. The question isn’t one of how to create perfect circumstances but how to move forward under difficult conditions.

  It Depends on Where You Start

  Democratic institutions are not born in a historical vacuum. A landscape is already in place when the opportunity for change—the democratic opening—comes. As important as larger factors like GDP and literacy may be, transitions to democracy are really stories about institutions and how quickly they can come to condition human behavior.

  Below we identify four institutional landscapes. These categories are analytically discrete, but in reality there is likely some overlap. Yet grouping them in this way illuminates the institutional possibilities at the time of a democratic opening: The lay of the land matters. Leaders’ choices matter too, but they are constrained by the institutional landscape within which they are expressed.

  Type 1: Totalitarian Collapse: Institutional Vacuum

  Totalitarians leave no aspect of life untouched—the space from science to sports to the arts is occupied by the regime. Benito Mussolini coined the term totalitario, describing it to mean “All within the state, none outside the state, none against the state.” Existing institutions (the Ba’ath Party of Saddam, the National Socialists of Germany, Stalin’s Communist Party) are little more than tools of the regime. In Nazi Germany, science was placed at the service of the “Aryan ideal,” promoting eugenics and theories of racial superiority. The Soviet Union persecuted some of its finest artists, composers like Shostakovich and Prokofiev, for writing music that was not socialist enough. Saddam Hussein’s henchmen brutalized members of the national soccer team for performances that did not glorify the regime.