Hard won is easily lost

From Beirut to Baghdad , the streets are overflowing with calls for freedom and liberty, and entrenched democracies such as America and Australia need to be prepared to help support the shift.

In the past century, democracy has morphed from a tyranny-of-the-majority bogeyman into the world’s standard form of government.

In 1900, no country could claim a true democracy – a government created by elections in which every adult citizen could vote. According to the most recent Freedom House survey, 143 countries worldwide (75 per cent) are now free or partly free.

The only significant region where democracy consistently fails to take hold is the Middle East and North Africa . Until now.

The excitement now spreading in that region has not been fostered by UN conferences or multilateral diplomacy or handouts from the Europeans or movies by Michael Moore. These possibilities have emerged as a result of George W. Bush’s unwavering belief in the power of freedom to combat terrorism. This, combined with the powerful forces of globalisation, may lead to an Arab spring, but only with the right kind of support.

Good governance, what we in the West tend to call “democracy”, is more than universal suffrage and multi-party elections; it includes constitutional liberalism.

For democracy to result in sustainable freedom, bankable development and individual liberty, elections must be undergirded by liberal institutions and free markets.

Democracy alone can produce elected leaders but, as Samuel Huntington has written, such governments “may be inefficient, corrupt, short-sighted, irresponsible, dominated by special interests, and incapable of adopting policies demanded by the public good. These qualities make such governments undesirable but not undemocratic.”

Political scientists Jack Snyder and Edward Mansfield found that democratisation can be a destabilising process. Unless media, civic and bureaucratic institutions are fostered in conjunction with elections, war may result. While the risk of a state’s being at war in any particular decade has averaged 1:6 over the past two centuries, the risk is 1:4 during the decade after a country’s democratisation.

So, while encouraging free and fair elections, we also should help to strengthen other areas that stabilise the march towards democracy.

Three important areas in the Middle East are capitalism, education and information technology.

Economic power is a strong factor in democratisation. Whereas companies once sought to reach the rich, the educated or the powerful, they now want to reach the vast middle-class of consumerism. These days hundreds of millions of consumers are riding the tide of prosperity.

Interest and exchange rates are no longer controlled exclusively by central banks. Capital flows move with increased speed and intensity, regulated largely by investors’ desires for maximum returns.

Knowledge is another important input. Around the world, as democracies have flourished, education has spread to the people.

At the turn of the 20th century, fewer than 250,000 Americans, or about 2 per cent of the population between 18 and 24, attended college. By the end of World War II, that figure had risen to more than two million.

Today, the US leads the world in the percentage of citizens (27 per cent, or 79 million) who are college graduates.

But in the Arab world, spending on education has declined over the past two decades, and enrolment rates are falling.

Likewise, information and technology can help people engage in a more democratic relationship with society.

Not so long ago, a small group of people controlled what people heard on the radio, watched on television or saw in the cinema. Now there are thousands of means to promote free speech, from cable television to independent films to the Internet.

This is not the case in the Arab world, however. There the number of telephone lines is barely one-fifth of that in developed countries; access to digital media also is among the world’s lowest.

Attention to these needs be to promoted along with elections to undergird democracy in the Middle East . Without them, freedom may be short-lived and a country may see its fledgling democracy reduced to a “one man, one vote, one time” system.

April W. Palmerlee is a Visiting Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and a former senior official at the US State Department.