WORLD DEMOCRACY IN JANUARY 2011
Democracy is not doing well! As a political system, it has with honourable exceptions stalled. It no longer seems to be inevitable that democracy will become the manifest destiny of a future world, as many including ourselves, had believed. True, there was a burst of realignment activity over the years after the cold war, the principal events in which related to the break-up of the immense Soviet empire, and are outlined below. But there have been other events inevitably less dramatic than that, but negatively affecting the fortunes of the democratic cause.
There have been two substantial ‘foreign’ wars since the end of the USSR, both of which were at the behest of the USA in which the introduction of democracy was claimed to be a primary reason for invasion. As a result, Iraq * (123) and Afghanistan (141) are quite simply wrecked. They currently rank as they always had, amongst the lowest by all criteria of democracy. The picture is further complicated by the fact that the breakdown within these countries has led to the evil genie of militant religion escaping from the bottle. Neither state had the slightest possibility of achieving democracy, certainly not as a war-zone, they don’t even pretend very hard despite the inflowing billions. This was always the reality even though the US neocon co-authors of these wars, seemed to believe that democracy could be delivered out of the barrel of a gun.
There have been two substantial ‘foreign’ wars since the end of the USSR, both of which were at the behest of the USA in which the introduction of democracy was claimed to be a primary reason for invasion. As a result, Iraq * (123) and Afghanistan (141) are quite simply wrecked. They currently rank as they always had, amongst the lowest by all criteria of democracy. The picture is further complicated by the fact that the breakdown within these countries has led to the evil genie of militant religion escaping from the bottle. Neither state had the slightest possibility of achieving democracy, certainly not as a war-zone, they don’t even pretend very hard despite the inflowing billions. This was always the reality even though the US neocon co-authors of these wars, seemed to believe that democracy could be delivered out of the barrel of a gun.
Over the 13 years that we have conducted this survey, we have seen a swathe of nations achieving democracy, almost entirely those European states of the Warsaw pact, which then were effectively colonies recently liberated from the embrace of Moscow. They had retained the vestiges of their europeanism as it had been post-WWI. With help and encouragement from their European neighbours and a friendly USA after the collapse of the Soviet empire, they were encouraged to measure up to European Union standards (which specifically require the Rule of Law as necessary for any EU government). Thus, one by one they were admitted to full membership. It can be seen in retrospect that setting such a standard was necessary as some of them could have slid back in time to military dictatorship, or similar authoritarian corrupt government, which is after all where some of them were, before WWII and the Red Army takeover. As recently as ten years ago, our World Audit ‘First Division’ which equates with ‘fully democratic’, was only fourteen strong with none of these former Warsaw pact nations then included. For 2011 it has doubled to twenty eight.
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