by Robert Kagan
The answer is related to the configuration of power and ideas in the world. The international climate from the mid-1970s onward has simply been more hospitable to democracies and more challenging to autocratic governments than in past eras. In his study, Huntington noted such factors as the change in the Catholic Church’s doctrine regarding order and revolution in the Second Vatican Council, which tended to weaken the legitimacy of authoritarian governments in Catholic countries. The growing success and attractiveness of the European Community, meanwhile, had an impact on the internal policies of nations like Portugal, Greece, and Spain, which sought the economic benefits of membership in the EC and therefore felt pressure to conform to its democratic norms. These norms were increasingly becoming international norms. But they did not appear out of nowhere, or as some natural evolution of the species. As Huntington notes, “The pervasiveness of democratic norms rested in large part on the commitment to those norms of the most powerful country in the world.”20
The United States, in fact, played a critical role in making the explosion of democracy possible. This was not because Americans pursued a consistent policy of promoting democracy around the world. They didn’t. At various times throughout the Cold War, American policy often supported dictatorships as part of the battle against communism or simply out of indifference. It even permitted and at times encouraged the overthrow of democratic regimes deemed unreliable—Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and Allende in Chile in 1973. At times American foreign policy was almost hostile to democracy. Richard Nixon regarded it as “not necessarily the best form of government for people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”21
Nor, when the United States did support democracy, was it purely out of fealty to principle. Often it was for strategic reasons. Reagan officials came to believe that democratic governments might actually be better than autocracies at fending off communist insurgencies, for instance. And often it was a reaction to popular local demands that compelled the United States to make a choice it would otherwise have preferred not to make, between supporting an unpopular and possibly faltering dictatorship and “getting on the side of the people.” Ronald Reagan would likely have preferred to support the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s had he not been confronted by Filipino “people power.” In only a few cases—such as George H. W. Bush’s 1989 invasion of Panama and Bill Clinton’s 1994 intervention in Haiti—did the United States seek a change of regime primarily out of devotion to democratic principles.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, the general inclination of the United States did begin to shift toward a more critical view of dictatorship. The U.S. Congress, led by human rights advocates, began to condition or cut off American aid to authoritarian allies, which had the effect of weakening their hold on power. In the Helsinki Accords of 1975, a reference to human rights issues raised greater attention to the cause of dissidents and other opponents of dictatorship in the Eastern bloc. President Jimmy Carter focused attention on the human rights practices of the Soviet Union as well as on right-wing governments in Latin America and elsewhere. American international information services such as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty put greater emphasis on democracy and human rights in their programming. The Reagan administration, after first trying to roll back Carter’s human rights agenda, eventually embraced it and made the promotion of democracy part of its stated policy. Even during this period, American policy was far from consistent. Many allied dictatorships, especially in the Middle East, were not only tolerated but actively supported with American economic and military aid. But the net effect of the shift in American policy, joined with the efforts of Europe, was significant.
The third wave began in Portugal in 1974, where the “Carnation Revolution” put an end to a half-century-long dictatorship. As the democracy expert Larry Diamond notes, this revolution did not just happen. The United States and European democracies played a key role, making a “heavy investment … in support of the democratic parties.”22 Over the next decade and a half, the United States used a variety of tools, including direct military intervention, to aid democratic transitions and prevent the undermining of existing fragile democracies all across the globe. Carter threatened military action in the Dominican Republic when a long-serving president refused to give up power. Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in 1983 restored a democratic government after a military coup. In the Philippines in 1986, the United States threatened military action to prevent Marcos from forcibly annulling an election he had lost. Bush’s 1989 invasion of Panama brought democracy after the military strongman Manuel Noriega had annulled his nation’s elections. Throughout this period, too, the United States used its influence to block military coups in Honduras, Bolivia, El Salvador, Peru, and South Korea. Elsewhere it urged presidents not to prolong their stay in office beyond constitutional limits. Altogether Huntington estimated that over the course of about a decade and a half, U.S. support had been “critical to democratization in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, and the Philippines” and was “a contributing factor to democratization in Portugal, Chile, Poland, Korea, Bolivia, and Taiwan.”23
Many developments both global and local helped produce the democratizing trend of the late 1970s and the 1980s, and there might have been a democratic wave even if the United States had not been so influential. The question is whether the wave would have been as large and as lasting. The stable zones of democracy in Europe and Japan proved to be powerful magnets. The liberal free-market and free-trade system increasingly outperformed the stagnating economies of the communist bloc, especially at the dawn of the information revolution. The greater activism of the United States, together with other successful democracies, helped build a broad, if not universal, consensus sympathetic to democratic forms of government and less sympathetic to authoritarian governments.
Diamond and others have noted how important it is that these “global democratic norms” came to be “reflected in regional and international institutions and agreements as never before.”24 Those norms had an impact on the internal political processes of countries, making it harder for authoritarians to weather political and economic storms and easier for democratic movements to gain legitimacy. But “norms” are transient, too. In the 1930s the trendsetting nations were fascist dictatorships. In the 1950s and 1960s variants of socialism were in vogue. But from the 1970s until recently, the United States and a handful of other democratic powers set the fashion trend. They pushed democratic principles—some might say imposed them—and embedded them in international institutions and agreements.
Equally important was the role the United States played in preventing backsliding away from democracy where it had barely taken root. Perhaps the most significant U.S. contribution was simply to prevent military coups against fledgling democratic governments. In a sense, the United States was interfering in what might have been a natural cycle, preventing nations that might ordinarily have been “due” for an authoritarian phase from following the usual pattern. It was not that the United States was exporting democracy everywhere. More often, it played the role of catcher in the rye, preventing young democracies from falling off the cliff—in places like the Philippines, Colombia, and Panama. This helped give the third wave an exceptional breadth and durability.
Finally, there was the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it the collapse of communist governments across eastern Europe and the installation of democratic regimes. What role the United States played in hastening the collapse of the Soviet system will always be a subject of contention. Undoubtedly, it played some role, both in containing the Soviet empire militarily and in outperforming it economically and technologically. Nor was the turn to democracy throughout eastern Europe primarily America’s doing. The peoples of the former Warsaw Pact nations had long yearned for liberation from the Soviet Union, which also meant liberation from communism. They wanted to join the rest of
Europe, which offered an economic and social model that was even more attractive than that of the United States. That they uniformly chose democratic forms of government, however, was not simply the aspiration for freedom or comfort. It also reflected the desires of eastern and central European peoples to place themselves under the American security umbrella. The strategic, the economic, the political, and the ideological were thus inseparable. Those nations that wanted to be part of NATO, and later the European Union, knew they stood no chance if they did not present democratic credentials. These democratic transitions, which turned the third wave into a democratic tsunami, need not have occurred had the world been configured differently. The fact that a democratic, united, and prosperous western Europe was even there as a powerful magnet to its eastern neighbors was due to American actions after World War II.
The configuration of power and ideas in any international system invariably affects the form of government of nations within that system. Contrast the fate of democratic movements in the late twentieth century with that of the liberal revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848. Beginning in France, the Springtime of the Peoples, as it was known, included liberal reformers and constitutionalists, nationalists, and representatives of a rising middle class, as well as radical workers and socialists. In a matter of weeks they toppled kings and princes and shook thrones across Germany and Italy, in France and Poland, in Austria, Hungary, and Romania. In the end, however, the liberal movements failed, partly for lack of cohesion, but partly because they were forcibly crushed by the autocratic powers. The Prussian military helped defeat liberal movements in the German principalities. The Russian tsar ordered his forces into Romania and Hungary. Tens of thousands of protesters were killed in the streets of Europe. The sword was mightier than the pen.
It mattered that the more liberal powers, Britain and France, adopted a neutral posture throughout the liberal ferment, even though France’s own revolution had sparked and inspired the pan-European movement. The British monarchy and aristocracy were afraid of radicalism at home. Both France and Britain were more concerned to preserve peace among the great powers than to provide assistance to fellow liberals. The preservation of the European balance among the five great powers benefited the forces of counterrevolution everywhere, and the Springtime of the Peoples was suppressed.25 For several decades, therefore, the forces of reaction in Europe were strengthened against the forces of liberalism.
Scholars have speculated how differently Europe and the world might have evolved had the liberal revolutions of 1848 succeeded—in particular, how differently German history might have unfolded if national unification had been achieved under the auspices of a liberal, parliamentary system rather than by Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor,” who unified the nation by war using the great power of the conservative Prussian military led by the Hohenzollern dynasty. As the historian A. J. P. Taylor observed, history reached a turning point in 1848, but Germany “failed to turn.”26 Might Germans have learned a different lesson from the one Bismarck taught, that “the great questions of the age are not decided by speeches and majority decisions … but by blood and iron”?27 Yet the international system of the day was not configured in such a way as to encourage liberal and democratic change. The European balance of power in the nineteenth century did not favor democracy, and so, not surprisingly, democracy did not triumph, anywhere.28
We can also speculate how differently today’s world might have evolved but for the role of the United States in shaping an international environment favorable to democracy, and how it might evolve were the United States no longer strong enough to play that role. Democratic transitions are not inevitable, even where the conditions may be ripe. Nations may enter a transition zone—economically, socially, and politically—where the probability of moving in a democratic direction increases or decreases. But foreign influences, usually by the reigning great powers, are often catalysts that determine which direction change takes. Strong authoritarian powers willing to support conservative forces against liberal movements can undo what might otherwise have been a natural evolution to democracy, just as powerful democratic nations can help liberal forces that, left to their own devices, might have failed. In the 1980s as in the 1840s, liberal movements arose for their own reasons in different countries, but their success or failure was influenced by the balance of power at the international level. In the American era, the balance was generally favorable to democracy, which helps explain why the liberal revolutions of that later era succeeded. Had the United States not been so powerful, there would have been fewer transitions, and those that occurred might have been short-lived. It might have meant a shallower and more easily reversed third wave.29
The response of the United States to the recent ferment in the Arab world is a good example of how Americans may influence the trend toward democracy even without quite planning or meaning to do so. From 2004 to 2010, the United States had modestly increased pressure on Arab states to undertake mild political reforms, although the effort was halfhearted and uneven. When a Tunisian shopkeeper set himself on fire and sparked a region-wide movement, however, within weeks the United States found itself withdrawing support from longtime allies like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and then, in an impulsive act of humanitarianism, using force to prevent Qaddafi from massacring Libyans in Benghazi. The United States had not set out to unseat these dictators but in both cases felt compelled to place itself on the side of people clamoring for their removal. Once these unexpected decisions were made, American power became a decisive factor shaping the regional and international environment in which the Arab political turmoil unfolded. In Libya, France and Britain took the lead, but neither could have pulled together international support or used force effectively without the United States. The United States did far less than it could have, but what it did do made all the difference. Had the United States been weaker, wielding no greater influence in the international system than Russia and China, it is unlikely the dictators in the region would have faced so much pressure and been compelled to give way or be overthrown.
It is ironic, but not unusual, that Americans, having helped topple dictators in the Middle East, are not sure how they feel about what may follow. The inevitable victory of Islamist parties in some Arab states will probably bring governments to power that are less accommodating to some American interests than the previous dictatorships had been. It would not be the first time. The United States helped throw out Marcos in the Philippines only to have the post-Marcos democratic government throw the United States out of its Filipino air and naval bases. In Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere, new democracies have often proved less reliable allies in some respects than the dictatorships they replaced. Nor are the dictatorships America topples always replaced by democracies. The United States withdrew support from the Shah of Iran in 1979 only to see a virulently anti-American and undemocratic Islamic theocracy take his place—an occurrence that many worry may be repeated in the current Middle Eastern turmoil.
The great spread of democratic governments has nevertheless been an essential attribute of the American world order. Whatever specific interests have been sacrificed, achieving Americans’ broader interests in a more peaceful world and a more open economic system has compensated. It is demonstrably true that democracies rarely go to war with other democracies and that politically liberal regimes are more likely to favor liberal economic systems. Americans’ enduring interest in a liberal world order generally transcends other, more narrow and temporary interests. The United States can lose an Egyptian ally but still gain a healthier world order. That is probably why Americans have sometimes chosen to support democratic movements, and sometimes only purportedly democratic movements, even when their immediate interests might argue against it. And it is that American predilection, the often uncalculating impulse to support those raising the banner of democracy, that has played such an important part in creating and sustaining the extraordinary levels of democratization in the present world o
rder. Whether or not it is true, as Americans believe, that democracy is the best form of government and the only legitimate form of government for everyone everywhere, the great spread of democracy in recent decades would not have been possible without Americans believing it and sometimes acting on that belief.
A SIMILAR STORY CAN be told about the establishment of the present liberal economic order. It is a common perception today that the international free-market system is simply a natural stage in the evolution of the global economy. The forces of globalization, revolutions in communication and technology, the growing interdependence of nations and peoples, have created a system that is both inevitable and self-sustaining.
Yet history tells us that there is nothing inevitable about a liberal international economy, either. A free-market, free-trade global economy does not just come into being. It is a choice, and it is also an imposition. As the political scientist Robert Gilpin has observed, “A liberal international economy cannot come into existence and be maintained unless it has behind it the most powerful state(s) in the system.”30 Technological innovations and social trends may support and strengthen such an order, if people want it to be strengthened. But people and nations have to want it, and most particularly the nations with the greatest power—the dominant states—have to want it. Since nations rarely do anything that is fundamentally at odds with their most vital interests, the dominant powers must believe that an international liberal economic order is the best means of increasing their wealth and power.
