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10/08/2005:

"Big idea: democratisation"

Democratisation is an ugly word, bearing about as much relationship to real democracy as does a forced marriage to romantic love. The idea was the brainchild of political scientists and lawyers, who used it to describe the successive waves of countries that emerged from authoritarianism to liberal democracy during the postwar period and the constitutional alternatives available to help them on their way.
In the last couple of years, however, it has been press-ganged into service by the American government. The argument of the neo-conservatives who surround the Republican administration - and one that occasionally puts in an appearance in the speeches of George Bush - is that planting the seeds of democracy in the Middle East might make the place more resistant to virulent strains of Islamist extremism.

That theory is now under attack. Writing in the latest issue of the prestigious American journal Foreign Affairs, F Gregory Gause III, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont, argues that there is no empirical evidence to suggest that democracy snuffs out terrorism.

Far from it, he argues. Gause produces statistics to show that between 1976 and 2004 there were 400 terrorist incidents in democratic India and only 18 in non-democratic China. There is, Gause concludes in his survey, "no solid empirical evidence for a strong link between democracy, or any other regime type, and terrorism, in either a positive or a negative direction". The problem is that democracy is inherently destabilising - if it were a technology, it might be called disruptive - which is why ruling elites have traditionally tried to keep it under control. The most democratic decade in Britain of the previous half-century was probably the 1970s, but few of us want to return there anytime soon.

The situation is doubly fraught in Iraq, where there are fledgling democratic institutions but little evidence of any real enthusiasm for popular sovereignty. The transitions to democracy that we are used to - from Spain in the mid-70s to South Africa in the early 90s - were, at least in part, responses to the will of the people. Unlike previous "waves of democratisation", however, this new one has been conceived from without and in strictly instrumental terms - not as a good in itself, but because it might open up a more benign kind of politics in the Middle East and help marginalise Islamist extremism.

The Bush administration is now in a bind. If it backtracks on its democratising mission in Iraq and throws in its lot with a local Iraqi strongman - and there are plenty to choose from - it will be accused of toppling Saddam in favour of a kind of Saddam-lite. But if it presses ahead with its attempts at democratisation, it seems likely to end up with a bastard democracy whose very shapelessness becomes an invitation to sectarian rivalries and a red rag to the terrorists who want to provoke it into revealing its authoritarian colours. Whichever direction its takes, America's wave of democratisation has already slowed into a trickle, and may yet go into reverse.
guardian.co.uk