Keith Suter: Change cannot be force-fed

Keith Suter

The world has more democracies than ever. But they are homegrown - they have not been imposed from the outside. This suggests that the American dream of exporting democracy to Iraq is doomed to failure.

As recently as three decades ago, few would have predicted the explosion of democracy. It is sweeping around the world - Eastern Europe, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea and Indonesia have become part of it. But in each case, the push for democracy has come from within, not from the outside.

So what is happening? The key factors are domestic economic growth and globalisation.

A brutal dictatorship can run a poor-peasant society based on agriculture. Poor-peasant tradition-based societies, living on isolated farms in desolate valleys, do not make good revolutionaries because they are too worried about the perils of daily survival.

But a dictatorship cannot run a modern industrial state, which requires the free flow of people, information and ideas.

The problem comes - if you are a dictator - from the rising middle class. They get a little money and then they want more. They can see that change is possible. The richer they become, the more politically restive they become. They want a say in how they are being governed.

When the belly is full, the brain starts to think.

But dictators such as Indonesia's Suharto create their own problems by encouraging economic growth and plugging their country into the global economy. In the 1990s, Indonesians were not satisfied with just economic growth - they wanted a say in how the country was being governed.

They assumed that if there were more democracy there would be more freedom of opinion, more accountability, less corruption and police brutality, and more economic growth. They could see how other people lived overseas and they, too, wanted the good things of life.

There are three implications here. First, it is doubtful that the United States can inject democracy into Iraq, even through the election. Iraqis need to work things out for themselves. This may take years, if not decades. After all, democracy did not suddenly occur in Britain or the US, it evolved over centuries. And in the meantime, Iraq needs economic growth and the re-creation of the middle class, which was wrecked by sanctions in the 1990s.

Second, how will China manage the transition from dictatorship to democracy? The old men running the country have forgotten their Marxism. Marx argued that economic change brings political change. Hence Gorbachev's attempt to encourage both economic change and political reform in the hope of controlling the political reform while the economic change took place. Instead, of course, the political change got out of hand and Gorbachev was swept away by the political reforms.

China's elderly politicians think they can ignore the trend of history by encouraging economic growth while retaining tight political control. The problem for the rest of the world is that China's economic growth is now so important for so many people overseas.

In 2003, global economic growth was 3 per cent. The largest single country was China at 1 per cent (the US was only 0.7 per cent). An upheaval in China threatens the global economy.

Third, given that the explosion of democracy eventually sweeps away even the most brutal of dictators, such as Suharto, could such a process have worked in Iraq under Saddam Hussein in the 1990s? This is an intriguing question that will never be answered.

With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps an alternative grand strategy for the US to have followed in the 1990s would have been to have eased up on the sanctions, allowed economic growth to take place, enabled the middle class to revive and then let political events take their own course domestically, leading to the eventual toppling of Saddam.

That possible chain of events seems hard to imagine. But it worked elsewhere.

The middle classes in eastern Europe, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia have all showed that brutal dictatorships can eventually be removed.

Democracy can triumph. But it must come from within the country in its own time. It cannot be force-fed from outside.

* Keith Suter is a professional fellow at the Futures Foundation Australia.