Democracy For Arabs, Too
George F. Will dismisses the idea that it is America's "duty" to repair the world's broken nations [op-ed, Aug. 17]. But this strike against a fringe position seems merely a diversionary tactic, his real targets being Tony Blair, George W. Bush and neoconservatives who hope to bring democracy to the Middle East as an antidote to terrorism.</br></br>Such an approach is folly, says Will, because the social experience of Middle Easterners is so different from that of Anglo- Americans whose "attachment to freedom is . . . the product of complex and protracted acculturation by institutions and social mores that have evolved over centuries that prepared the social ground for seeds of democracy." To believe that democracy can be made to grow in the soil of the Middle East is to believe that "either national cultures do not significantly differ, or they do not matter or they are infinitely malleable under the touch of enlightened reformers."</br></br>Although Will strikes a pose of historicity, he ignores most relevant experience. To be sure, it was 561 years from the Magna Carta to the birth of the American republic, the first modern democracy. But over the next 200 years, democracy spread to more than one-third of the world's nations. Then, in the past 30 years, the trend accelerated sharply. Today, according to the authoritative count of Freedom House, 121 of 192 recognized states have freely elected governments.</br></br>Granted, only 89 of these 121 meet all the criteria for what Freedom House calls a "free" country. The other 32 are rated as only "partly free." These fledgling democracies may lack a reliable judicial system or a fully free press or may be plagued by corruption or civil strife. Nonetheless, the rulers are chosen in competitive elections, and there is reason to anticipate that democracy will deepen just as it did in the United States after highly imperfect beginnings.</br></br>Whether one counts electoral democracies or the shorter list of "free" countries, one finds that democracy has spread far from its cultural origins. There are 30 electoral democracies in Latin America and the Caribbean (of which 21 are rated "free"); 24 in Asia and the Pacific (of which 18 are "free"); and 20 in Africa (11 "free").