What Samuel Huntington Knew
The
dictators are back. The political scientist saw it coming.
'What would happen," Samuel
Huntington once wondered, "if the American model no longer embodied strength and
success, no longer seemed to be the winning model?"
The question,
when the great Harvard political scientist asked it in 1991, seemed far-fetched.
The Cold War was won, the Soviet Union was about to vanish. History was at an
end. All over the world, people seemed to want the same things in the same way:
democracy, capitalism, free trade, free speech, freedom of conscience, freedom
for women.
"The day of
the dictator is over," George H.W. Bush had said in his 1989 inaugural address.
"We know what works: Freedom works. We know what's right: Freedom is right."
Not quite. A
quarter-century later, the dictators are back in places where we thought they
had been banished. And they're back by popular demand. Egyptian strongman Abdel
Fatah al-Sisi will not have to stuff any ballots to get himself elected
president next month; he's going to win in a walk. Hungarian Prime Minister
Viktor Orbán presides over the most illiberal government in modern Europe, but
he had no trouble winning a third term in elections two weeks ago.
In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has spent recent months
brutalizing protesters in Istanbul, shutting down judicial inquiries into
corruption allegations against his government, and seeking to block the ultimate
emblems of digital freedom. But his AKP party still won resounding victories in
key municipal elections last month.
And then
there is Russia. In a Journal op-ed Monday, foreign-policy analyst Ilan Berman
pointed out that Russia had $51 billion in capital flight in the first quarter
of 2014, largely thanks to Vladimir Putin's Crimean caper. That's a lot of money
for a country with a GDP roughly equal to that of Italy. The World Bank predicts
the Russian economy could shrink by 2% this year. Relations with the West
haven't been worse since the days of Yuri Andropov.
But never
mind about that. Mr. Putin has a public approval rating of 80%, according to the
independent Levada Center. That's up from 65% in early February.
Maybe it's
something in the water. Or the culture. Or the religion. Or the educational
system. Or the level of economic development. Or the underhanded ways in which
authoritarian leaders manipulate media and suppress dissent. The West rarely
runs out of explanations for why institutions of freedom—presumably fit for all
people for all time—seem to fit only some people, sometimes.
But maybe
there's something else at work. Maybe the West mistook the collapse of
communism—just one variant of dictatorship—as a vindication of liberal
democracy. Maybe the West forgot that it needed to justify its legitimacy not
only in the language of higher democratic morality. It needed to show that the
morality yields benefits: higher growth, lower unemployment, better living.
Has the West
been performing well lately? If the average Turk looks to Greece as the nearest
example of a Western democracy, does he see much to admire? Did Egyptians have a
happy experience of the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood? Should a
government in Budapest take economic advice from the finance ministry of France?
Did ethnic Russians prosper under a succession of Kiev kleptocrats?
"Sustained
inability to provide welfare, prosperity, equity, justice, domestic order, or
external security could over time undermine the legitimacy of even democratic
governments," Huntington warned. "As the memories of authoritarian failures
fade, irritation with democratic failures is likely to increase."
The passage
quoted here comes from "The Third Wave," the book Huntington wrote just before
his famous essay on the clash of civilizations. The "wave" was a reference to
the 30 or so authoritarian states that, between 1974 and 1990, adopted
democratic institutions. The two previous waves referred to the rise of
mass-suffrage democracy in the 1830s and the post-Wilsonian wave of the 1920s.
In each previous case, revolution succumbed to reaction; Weimar gave way to
Hitler.
Huntington
knew that the third wave, too, would crest, crash and recede. It's happening
now. The real question is how hard it will crash, on whom, for how long.
A West that
prefers debt-subsidized welfarism over economic growth will not offer much in
the way of an attractive model for countries in a hurry to modernize. A West
that consistently sacrifices efficiency on the altars of regulation, litigation
and political consensus will lose the dynamism that makes the risks inherent in
free societies seem worthwhile. A West that shrinks from maintaining global
order because doing so is difficult or discomfiting will invite challenges from
nimble adversaries willing to take geopolitical gambles.
At some point
the momentum will shift back. That, too, is inevitable. The dictators will err;
their corruption will become excessive; their cynicism will become transparent
to their own rank-and-file. A new democratic wave will begin to build.
Whether that
takes five years or 50 depends on what the West does now. Five years is a blip.
Fifty is the tragedy of a lifetime.
Write to
bstephens@wsj.com
Thanks to Nurit G.
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