The tide flows back out

According to the late Samuel Huntington’s influential book The Third Wave, there have been three “waves” of democratization in history.

The first encompassed roughly the entire 19th Century and was propelled by the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of a commercial middle class (“bourgeoisie”) in Europe and North America.

The second began after World War II as the result of successful nation-building in the defeated Axis powers and initial establishment of democratic governments in what became known as the Third World following de-colonization.

The third wave, the largest and most consequential, began on the Iberian Peninsula in Spain and Portugal in the mid-1970s after the collapse of the sclerotic Franco and Salazar dictatorships.

At the beginning of the 1970s, and despite the first two waves, the majority of the world’s countries were still dictatorships of one kind or another, and the majority of the world’s people lived under such regimes.

But according to various organizations that chart such things, more than 60 percent of the world’s countries are now, remarkably, democracies, and the majority of the world’s people now govern themselves.

This shift to self-government over only three to four decades constitutes the most remarkable episode of political progress in human experience, and the culmination of the erratic spread of the ideals of 1776 to all points of the globe. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to believe that a critical mass in favor of democracy has now been created, such that the days are numbered for dictatorships that remain in places like Iran, Syria, North Korea and Cuba.

Alas, the urgent question for political scientists at present is whether Huntington’s third wave has crested and begun to flow back out (as occurred after the first two waves). Freedom House’s last annual report notes, for instance, that there have now been eight consecutive years in which the both the number of democracies and the number of countries enjoying the kinds of freedoms we associate with democracy have declined. According to that report, “Particularly notable were developments in Egypt, which endured across-the-board reversals in its democratic institutions following a military coup.”

“Serious setbacks” to democracy, it said, were also visible “in other large, politically influential countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Venezuela, and Indonesia.”

At the least, we can conclude that the impressive momentum toward democracy demonstrated between the mid-1970s and the middle point of the last decade has been halted, with three special problem areas.

First is, of course, Russia, the most significant state to experience what Huntington called “authoritarian relapse.” Whatever erratic progress Russia made toward democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union has clearly been snuffed out bit by bit since Vladimir Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin. Russia still has a thin veneer of democratic processes, but Putin has essentially become president for life under his oxymoronic doctrine of “sovereign democracy,” which apparently means that Russia is a democracy with a sovereign (him).

Perhaps more important than Russian backsliding is the failure of the world’s most populous country, China, to move forward much at all. Indeed, we’re now more than a quarter-century past the Tiananmen Square movement (and massacre), and there seems little in the way of any kind of renewed democratic stirring there.

What is particularly disturbing is that this apparent acceptance of authoritarianism has gone hand in hand with perhaps history’s most impressive case of economic growth—China now has the world’s largest middle class but that middle class doesn’t seem—in contradiction of traditional developmental theory, which explains democracy as a consequence of bourgeois demands for rights and influence—much interested in challenging the rule of the Chinese Communist Party.

At issue in China, then, is both the validity of Western developmental theory and the prospects for a future “fourth wave” of democratization, which China would, given its size, constitute all by itself.

Finally, and perhaps most intractable among the obstacles to a revival of the global democratic revolution, are conditions in the Islamic world. Because there are no genuinely stable democracies among the 50 or so Muslim-majority nations, in a mathematical sense, what remains of authoritarianism is now overwhelmingly Islamic in content.

Not that long ago, this appeared to be changing, but more than four years have passed since the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi touched off the Arab Spring and the young liberals who crowded into Egypt’s Tahrir Square to topple Hosni Mubarark have now been crowded out throughout the region by radical Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS. The Arab Spring has, accordingly, become a brutal Arab Winter.

While it is conceivable that a post-Putin Russia can return to the democratic path, or that continued Chinese economic development will eventually propel it to Walt Rostow’s “take-off” point for political liberalization, democracy can never be made compatible with jihadism: if manmade law is blasphemy, and there can be only “God’s law,” there can be no self-government.

Which is another way of saying that beheading infidels is no path to human rights and democracy.