Essayist Ian Buruma tells a
story about Japan just after the war. The Prime Minister, Yoshida Shigeru,
divided the American conquerors into two categories.
The
"realists" didn't mind an authoritarian, pro-business Japan, he said, but
the "idealists" - Roosevelt New Dealers - encouraged Japanese socialists
and trade unionists to create an American-style democracy.
The
idealists prevailed in building democracy until the Cold War started, and
Japan became, as Buruma puts it, "a conservative, bureaucratic, de facto
one-party state".
For the next 45 years the Cold War impeded the
growth of democracies.
The Soviet Union promoted an overtly
anti-democratic system, and the Americans and allies found themselves
acquiescing to tinpot dictators in oil monarchies and coconut republics
all over the map.
They were awful - they even included the Taleban
in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq - but they were lesser, or at
least more localised, evils compared with the communist
empire.
With the Cold War over, the future of dictatorships is
everywhere in doubt.
Democracy - which means free, fair elections
between competitive candidates and parties, held at regular intervals - is
on the rise. This is heartening news, not only for the ability of people
to enjoy liberty and civic participation, but also for prospects of world
peace.
A pacifying and civilising sense of mutual respect
characterises relations between democracies. Countries ruled
democratically almost never declare war on each other.
The
statistics are impressive. Most of the world's nations are now democratic.
The virus spread through Latin America from the 1970s, into Asia, and
finally into Eastern Europe after the fall of communism.
In 1974,
there were 41 democracies among 150 existing states. Today that ratio is
121 of 193 states. Nothing rivals democracy as a model for
government.
Not all the news is good. Russia has had severe
problems instituting democracy, or even grasping the idea.
Too
much control and money fell into the hands of local mafias on the collapse
of the Soviet Union, strong political parties are having trouble forming,
the judiciary is weak, and Vladimir Putin seems too fond of the Kremlin's
Tsarist accoutrements.
China presents awesome difficulties. The
leadership wants dictatorial control while allowing the country to reap
the wealth of free enterprise.
Their attempt to run a free-market
dictatorship is incoherent and, therefore, doomed. Convulsions lie
ahead.
Then there is that black hole of democratic tradition, the
Arab dictatorships which take in billions in oil revenues and return so
little to their own people.
Even Saudi Arabia's female literacy
rate is still only 69 per cent.
Some military tyrannies, such as
Myanmar's especially nasty version, are the West's Cold War orphans. But
the Soviet Union also left totalitarian client states, notably the
egregious North Korea and that vile Stalinist encampment, Castro's
Cuba.
Some bone-headed Hollywood stars and pompous lecturers are
still singing Castro's praises, but they are a dwindling
band.
Fidel's recent secret trials and sentencing of 75 dissidents
for up to 28 years in prison, and the summary execution of three
ineffectual chaps who tried to hijack a ferry to Florida (it ran out of
petrol almost immediately), have soured former friends.
Castro is
76, and his brutality reminds me of the last years of another charming but
deadly monster.
Francisco Franco had a few brave students executed
not long before he died. Once Franco was in his grave, Spain took the
democratic road, and the Spaniards have never looked back.
The same
will happen to Cuba. I expect some of my romantic, leftist friends will
feel a sense of profound loss the day oxen are replaced in Cuban tobacco
fields, Starbucks opens in Havana, and they start having traffic
congestion on the streets.
The Cubans won't share their nostalgia.
They want freedom.
And what about our neighbourhood? We, too,
support a semi-feudal state in Tonga. With 100,000 people to rule over,
the King of Tonga is little more than a village tyrant. Lately, his
Government has tried to ban the Taimi'o Tonga, a threatening source of
independent criticism.
Now that the newspaper is being distributed
by court order, the Government talks of amending laws to exempt it from
court orders, and to further curtail press freedom.
New Zealand
gives $5.6 million a year to Tonga in aid. It's inexcusable that this kind
of money should support such an authoritarian regime, and we all ought to
support MP Matt Robson's call to pressure Tonga into democratic
reform.
A defender of Tonga said last week, he was not convinced
that democracy was good for Pacific peoples. For Tonga, it was "culturally
not the proper thing to bandy dirty washing in public".
He should
be told that, for New Zealanders, it is culturally not the proper thing to
send millions of our hard-earned dollars to prop up little kava-bowl
monarchies that stifle freedom of speech.
Pushing around Tonga?
That's colonialism. Yes, I can hear the howls of execration. But maybe a
little revived colonialism on behalf of knocking over dictators and
installing democracies is exactly what the world needs.
It could
do immense good in places like Burma or Zimbabwe. If the West holds the
power to incite democracy - as we hold power over Tonga - it ought to go
ahead.
Among the true reactionaries of our age are the
anti-democratic academics who try to excuse the likes of Tonga.
They bleat mantras of "cultural identity" and the need to respect
"indigenous values" (meaning local fascisms) in the face of globalisation.
They treat democracy as though it were an optional cultural preference,
like rugby or a taste for Vegemite.
Democracy is not an arbitrary
choice among governmental systems. Wherever it arises, it tends to become
permanently entrenched.
Even countries that have lost democracy
(Argentina in 1975) have thought better of it and worked to regain their
democratic right.
Karl Marx had a few good ideas and a lot of bad
ones. Among his best was the notion that human political history was
heading toward a state of equilibrium.
He wrongly imagined it
would be a workers' paradise where the state had withered away. What a
disappointment it would be for him to find out that the end of history
looks pretty much like universal bourgeois democracy.
In the final
analysis, democratic idealists have turned out to be the true
realists.
Worldwide, tastes in food, music, clothing and television
quiz shows may vary, dropping in and out of fashion.
But
underneath it all is emerging a bedrock political certainty: for the human
race, democracy is destiny.
