The Triumph of Democracy and the Eclipse of the West

Ewan Harrison, S. Mitchell, Sara McLaughlin Mitchell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137353863
• eBook ISBN: 9781137346865
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the paradox of the worldwide spread of democracy and capitalism in an era of Western decline. The rest is overtaking the West as Samuel Huntington predicted, but because it is adopting Western institutions. The emerging global order offers unprecedented opportunities for the expansion of peace, prosperity, and freedom. Yet this is not the 'end of history', but the beginning of a post-Western future for the democratic project. The major conflicts of the future will occur between the established democracies of the West and emerging democracies in the developing world as they seek the benefits and recognition associated with membership of the democratic community. This 'clash of democratizations' will define world politics.

1. Introduction: The Arab Spring in Global Perspective

In one of the first public speeches I made in 1988, I suggested that we were launching out on our second struggle for independence. The first . . . had brought us freedom from colonial rule. The second . . . would bring us freedom from . . . dictatorship.

—Aung San Suu Kyi, BBC Reith Lectures, July 5, 2011¹

The Arab Spring has reopened fundamental questions about global political change that have been salient since the end of the Cold War. The events of 2011 in the Middle East were strikingly reminiscent of the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe. Like the 1989 revolutions, they were almost entirely unanticipated and occurred in a region assumed to be a bastion of unshakable authoritarianism. Like the 1989 revolutions, commentators had been so focused on questions of military security that they failed to notice how deeper changes in technology and the global economy were undermining authoritarian states. Like the 1989 revolutions, the Arab Spring spread rapidly through regional contagion and toppled a series of brutal regimes. Moreover, as with the revolutions of 1989, the Arab Spring triggered a swathe of democratic transitions which will have major ramifications for the future of the region and of the world. Just as Francis Fukuyama criticized commentators in 1989 for failing to relate unfolding developments in Eastern Europe to a larger historical pattern, the same argument can be leveled at discussions of the revolutions of 2011.²

This book revisits Francis Fukuyama’s controversial “End of History” thesis in light of the momentous events in the Middle East. It is argued that the Arab Spring vindicates the essence of Fukuyama’s claim that an evolutionary dynamic is occurring in world politics that favors liberal democratic regimes over authoritarian models. The revolutions of 2011 reflect a powerful process of socialization through which democracy is spreading in the international system. With the end of the Cold War, a critical mass of democratic states emerged at a global level, creating a potent mix of moral and material pressures encouraging the spread of democracy. This establishes a virtuous cycle or positive feedback loop in which the spread of democracy further strengthens the democratic community, thereby increasing pressures for democratization. The international system has thus achieved reflexivity, a condition in which knowledge about the spread of democracy itself becomes a major factor further encouraging the spread of democracy. These historical forces related to the presence of a cluster of stable democratic and capitalist states in global politics explain what Huntington called the “third wave” of democratization that peaked with the end of the Cold War.³

The same dynamics that lay behind the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe caused the revolutions in the Middle East in 2011. Through a convergence of global forces, authoritarian states across the Arab world have come under pressure to liberalize. These global forces are transnational (arising from globalization) and international (arising from the states system). Economic modernization initially strengthened authoritarian rulers by providing growth, but also created demands for political reform from the emerging middle class. Changes in communications technology delegitimized Arab regimes, and enabled revolutions to spread quickly both within and between states. Pressure from the Western powers weakened autocracies facing protests in the Middle East, particularly in the form of UN Security Council resolution 1973 authorizing international action against Libya’s former leader, Muammar Qaddafi. Finally, regional contagion and neighborhood effects facilitated the international diffusion of demonstrations, corroded the position of the authoritarian regimes close to Europe, and increased the prospects for the export of democracy to North Africa. Overall, the events of 2011 made it increasingly clear that through outside forces from the democratic and capitalist world, dictators in the Middle East have found it hard to stay afloat given the rising democratic tide. The pressure that Bashar Al-Assad is facing in the ongoing Syrian civil war is the latest manifestation of this broader trend in the region. The lack of systematic alternatives to democracy, combined with the “pull” generated by a strong global democratic community, has irreversibly changed the politics of the Middle East.

However, the Arab Spring itself is the reflection of a larger historical process associated with “the rise of the rest.”⁴ By 2030, up to two billion people are anticipated to enter the global middle class.⁵ While individual democratic transitions will fail, in the aggregate, this will lead to a massive consolidation of democracy on a worldwide basis. Like 1989, 2011 represents an intense moment of global reflexivity or growing global consciousness about the international spread of democracy. This zeitgeist intensifies the pressures on authoritarian states, which are increasingly seen as being “on the wrong side of history.” Given this, there are two routes forward for developing countries. The first is “high-grade” authoritarianism, such as that existing in Russia or China.⁶ These states utilize a sophisticated blend of concessions and repression, and they understand it is critical to provide for economic growth. However, the longer-term problem these regimes face is handling their emerging middle class. Once growth slows, as is inevitable under capitalism, they will face the same legitimacy deficit that has plagued the countries affected by the Arab Spring. High-grade authoritarianism merely stores up today’s legitimacy problems for tomorrow.

A second and more viable route forward for developing countries is to become emerging democracies. For this alternative, a spectrum of models exists: Brazil, India, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa, Nigeria, and Turkey.⁷ What is unfolding in world politics today is what Aung San Suu Kyi aptly referred to in her 2011 BBC Reith Lectures as the developing world’s “second struggle for independence.”⁸ After a long and miserable experience with authoritarianism and underdevelopment, developing countries are adopting, by their own initiative, the democracy and capitalism that propelled the Western powers to ascendancy. Emerging democracies differ from the established democracies of the West in that they have a higher probability of backsliding. However, they hold broadly free and fair elections, they provide for a regular transfer of power, they adopt capitalism in some form, they are nonaggressive in their international relations, and their people enjoy a reasonable degree of domestic freedom and pluralism. They are therefore capable of becoming established democracies in the future.

Emerging democracies are increasingly important in world politics. Developing and postcolonial countries will move in this direction given the structural legitimacy problems faced by authoritarian regimes. Paradoxically, however, the global spread of democracy is occurring at the juncture the West has gone into decline, as manifested by the 2008 financial crisis. Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis was therefore correct in predicting that the West had not triumphed, and that future dynamism in world politics would come from the rest.⁹ Yet he was wrong that this dynamism would be associated with the rejection of capitalism and democracy by the developing world. On the contrary, the rise of the rest is being driven by the developing world’s embrace of these historically Western institutions. The non-Western world is succeeding because it is downloading the “killer apps” of Western civilization¹⁰ What these changes herald is therefore not the “End of History” or the triumph of the West, but the beginning of a post-Western future for the global democratic project.

As the democratic community expands and strengthens, divisions within it will emerge.¹¹ One possibility is disputes between the established democracies of the West. We have seen prominent examples of this in the form of the crisis in trans-Atlantic relations over the Iraq War, and more recently in the Euro crisis. While such conflicts will be increasingly prominent, they are likely to remain nonmilitarized and to be contained within manageable levels, as was the case over the Iraq War. The global democratic “critical mass” will be sustained, and pressures for democratic socialization will continue even as divisions within the democratic community emerge. A more important axis of conflict in the international system will therefore be conflicts between the established democracies of the West and the emerging democracies in the developing world. These will occur as emerging democracies seek the material benefits and moral recognition associated with membership of the exclusive “gentleman’s club” represented by the democratic community.

The most important political conflicts of the future will not be between autocracies such as Iran, Russia, and China, and democracies, as Robert Kagan has forecasted.¹² Instead they will be between the established democracies of the West and the emerging democracies in the developing world. Such conflicts represent what we term “the clash of democratizations,” and will define the trajectory of the emerging international system. Sharing the spoils and status associated with membership of the democratic community will be extremely difficult for the established democracies of the West, which are used to having a near-monopoly over these benefits, and which are facing steep relative decline. The global spread of democracy actually poses greater challenges for the West than surviving the Cold War or the nineteenth century when the democratic community was weak and the autocratic community was strong.

This book addresses questions about the fundamental dynamics in world politics since the end of the Cold War in light of the momentous events of 2011 and the “rise of the rest” more generally. It answers these questions with an original synthesis of Fukuyama’s “End of History” and Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” theses, both hugely influential, but regarded as antithetical. It engages with these theoretical debates in simple, nontechnical language to make the argument easily comprehensible to policy makers and, more importantly, to the global public. This is important because the book seeks not just to document but also to contribute to the global reflexivity it identifies in the form of growing global consciousness about the worldwide spread of democracy. Moreover, the book seeks to serve as a wake-up call to Western leaders and peoples, and to educate them about the enormous new challenges a post-Western democratic order will, paradoxically, bring for them.

This is not a risk-averse contribution to scholarship. We do not provide a “safe bet,” or an incremental contribution to the literature. Instead, this book directly tackles the very biggest themes in world politics—namely the fundamental nature of the global order and its central long-term dynamics. These issues relate directly to the momentous events of 2011 in the Middle East and the “rise of the rest” writ large. Yet this is resolutely not a book about current affairs. Indeed, debates in political science have been far too driven by recent events, with the result that 9/11 and its aftermath distracted commentators from analyzing the persistent trend toward the spread of democracy. The Arab Spring did not come “out of the blue,” but manifested a larger global systemic pattern. Debates about the End of History, the Clash of Civilizations, the socialization of states, and the spread of democracy and human rights have been a prominent and ongoing feature of international relations since at least the end of the Cold War, and have attracted enormous attention even among policy makers and within the general public. This book engages with these classic contributions and major debates and seeks to further extend these discussions through a bold new synthesis.

This book consciously “ruffles feathers,” says the unsayable and violates disciplinary taboos such as the presumption that the postcolonial world has rejected democracy and/or capitalism, or that the End of History and the Clash of Civilizations theses are irreconcilable and inherently contradictory. It will also encourage crosscutting debate between subfields within political science, and—more importantly—between the scholarly community, policy elites, and the global public, especially in the non-Western world. The book sets out a provocative but original vision of an emerging post-Western democratic order. It provides the first account of both the historic opportunities this presents for the West to realize its most cherished ideals on a global scale, and the major new inter-democratic conflicts that this order will bring in its wake.

We also provide a forthright riposte to the pessimism that has afflicted the study of international relations in the post-9/11 and Iraq War era, particularly with respect to the prospects for democratization around the world. Debates about American dominance, the Bush Doctrine, global terrorism, Islamic extremism, and problems promoting democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan have missed the much deeper trends brought about by modernization and the “rise of the rest.” These are changes that have occurred quietly and behind the scenes while commentators were distracted by 9/11 and its aftermath, but that have had much more far-reaching consequences that have surfaced dramaticall...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1. Introduction: The Arab Spring in Global Perspective
• Part I   The Arab Spring and Global Democratization
• Part II   The Triumph of Democracy
• Part III   The Eclipse of the West
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index