Showing papers in "Journal of Democracy in 1999"

Democracy as a Universal Value

Abstract: In the summer of 1997, I was asked by a leading Japanese newspaper what I thought was the most important thing that had happened in the twentieth century. I found this to be an unusually thought-provoking question, since so many things of gravity have happened over the last hundred years. The European empires, especially the British and French ones that had so dominated the nineteenth century, came to an end. We witnessed two world wars. We saw the rise and fall of fascism and Nazism. The century witnessed the rise of communism, and its fall (as in the former Soviet bloc) or radical transformation (as in China). We also saw a shift from the economic dominance of the West to a new economic balance much more dominated by Japan and East and Southeast Asia. Even though that region is going through some financial and economic problems right now, this is not going to nullify the shift in the balance of the world economy that has occurred over many decades (in the case of Japan, through nearly the entire century). The past hundred years are not lacking in important events.

Federalism and Democracy: Beyond the U.S. Model

Abstract: For those of us interested in the spread and consolidation of democracy, whether as policy makers, human rights activists, political analysts, or democratic theorists, there is a greater need than ever to reconsider the potential risks and benefits of federalism. The greatest risk is that federal arrangements can offer opportunities for ethnic nationalists to mobilize their resources. This risk is especially grave when elections are introduced in the subunits of a formerly nondemocratic federal polity prior to democratic countrywide elections and in the absence of democratic countrywide parties. Of the nine states that once made up communist Europe, six were unitary and three were federal. The six unitary states are now five states (East Germany has reunited with the Federal Republic), while the three federal states—Yugoslavia, the USSR, and Czechoslovakia—are now 22 independent states. Most of postcommunist Europe’s ethnocracies and ethnic bloodshed have occurred within these postfederal states.

Fujimori and Post-Party Politics in Peru

Abstract: As it has in the past, Peruvian politics defied regional trends in the 1990s. Whereas democracy either took hold (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay) or at least survived (Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua) throughout most of Latin America, it collapsed in Peru. That collapse took place on 5 April 1992, when President Alberto Fujimori, in a military-backed autogolpe (self-coup), closed the Congress, suspended the constitution, and purged the judiciary.1 After ruling by decree for seven months, the Fujimori government held elections for a constituent assembly in November 1992; in 1993, it secured the approval, via referendum, of a new constitution. Two years later, Fujimori, who had originally been elected president in 1990, was reelected by an over-whelming margin. These developments led many observers to place Peru back in the camp of democratic (or at least "delegative democratic") regimes.2 Such a characterization is misleading, however. Although the restoration of formal constitutional rule and elections represented an important step away from full-fledged authoritarianism, it was accompanied by a systematic assault on a range of democratic institutions that has left contemporary Peru with a regime that is best described as "semidemocratic."

The Perils of a Protracted Transition

Abstract: Copyright © 1999 National Endowment for Democracy and the Johns HopkinsUniversity Press. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this headerincluded, for noncommercial purposes within a subscribed institution. No copies ofthis work may be distributed electronically outside of the subscribed institution, in whole or in part,without express written permission from the JHU Press.

From Liberalism to Liberal Democracy

Abstract: Today the most liberal regimes in the world, those of the advanced Western countries, are typically referred to either as liberal democracies or, more often, simply as democracies. This reflects one of the most striking ways in which twentieth-century liberalism differs from the older liberalism that emerged in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Today, wherever one finds liberalism (understood as constitutional and limited government, the rule of law, and the protection of individual rights), it is almost invariably coupled with democracy (understood as the selection of government officials by universal suffrage). The converse proposition, however, has in recent decades been becoming less and less true. With the downfall since 1975 of scores of authoritarian regimes and their replacement by more or less freely elected governments, there are now many regimes that can plausibly be called democratic but not liberal. As a result, the relationship between liberalism and democracy has once again become a subject of intense intellectual and policy debate. Perhaps the most prominent example of this is Fareed Zakaria's 1997 article in Foreign Affairs on "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy." 1 Zakaria emphasizes a point that had already been made by other observers more sympathetic than he to the struggles of new would-be liberal democracies in the postcommunist and developing worlds: Even among those regimes that have succeeded in holding genuinely free elections, many have compiled a poor record in terms of such criteria [End Page 121] of liberalism as the rule of law and the protection of individual rights. The more sympathetic observers tend to stress the importance of "consolidatin g" these new democracies, preserving their electoral achievements while strengthening their liberal features. Zakaria, however, concludes that the liberal deficit of these regimes has emerged not in spite of, but in some measure because of, their adoption of the democratic mechanism of popular elections. He thus questions the wisdom of encouraging countries to elect their rulers before the foundations of liberalism are firmly in place. Zakaria puts heavy emphasis on the distinction between liberalism and democracy. Making it clear that he views the former as more important than the latter, he argues for the superiority of liberal autocracy over illiberal democracy. This in turn has prompted discussion of the viability of liberal autocracy (or, more generically, nondemocratic liberalism) in the contemporary world, for the only explicit twentieth-century example of liberal autocracy that Zakaria provides is Hong Kong under British colonial rule. His primary example is the constitutional monarchies of nineteenth-century Europe, which certainly did have many of the elements of liberalism in place before they adopted universal manhood suffrage. But it is also noteworthy that all of these pre-twentieth-century liberal nondemocracies have now become democratic. This raises the question of why liberal regimes have all tended to evolve in a democratic direction. Is it due merely to adventitious circumstances or extraneous factors, or is it somehow related to the intrinsic principles of liberalism? That is the issue I wish to explore.

Korea After the Crash

Abstract: Mo, Jongryn; Moon, Chung-in1999Korea after the crash,Article,[Baltimore]Johns Hopkins University Press