Nijat Garayev,

Models of Democracy
American English
28 February, 2009
2210 words (excluding the abstract)

What are, according to you, the conditions that allow the establishment of a
democratic regime? Can democracy be exported?

Abstract

Almost all countries in the world consider themselves democratic, applying one of the
models of democracy as their government system. In early 20th century, less than half of the
world countries were democratic (due to colonialism and imperialism, not many countries were
independent). Many countries that are currently de jure democratic, de facto, they’re not.
Various questions were raised by politicians, theorists and thinkers, regarding the
democratization of non-democratic countries. Some associated emerge of democracy with
culture and history; others considered regime and political tension to be most important factors
in the process of democratization. Recent attempts by US and NATO regarding the regime
change and democracy establishment in Iraq and Afghanistan do not seem to be successful yet.
On the contrary, examples of successful establishment of democracy in countries like Japan,
Korea, and Germany (after the WWII) put forth counter facts for the enforcement of democracy
by outside powers. Observing democracy in various cultures throughout history we come to
conclusion that there are certain values and principles which grow out of particular political,
social and economic circumstances. Without conditions for those principles to emerge,
enforcement of democracy cannot succeed.

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear
any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and
success of liberty.” Those are the lines from Kennedy’s inaugural speech, on Friday, January the
15th, 1961. 49 years have passed since then. World does not fear of Communism anymore.
Political and economic agendas of states have changed and challenges of democracy are different
now, than it was in mid. 20th century. World is an interesting place where concepts of self
determination and international responsibility continuously clashes with concepts as sovereignty
and territorial integrity. Despite the fact that many autocracies of the past century are replaced
with democracies, a lot of countries do not still answer democratic standards, some even not
accepting democracy to be the right system. Though one thing is certain; today, majority of
world states do accept the fact that democracy is the most suitable system of governance, just by
declaring their government to be democratic, no matter if democracy being executed
successfully, or not. Even the countries that do not practice democracy as the political system,
have already agreed upon the basic principles of human rights, simply by being a member of
United Nations. This fact gives a common ground for the West to justify spread of democracy
and its values. International organizations, mostly centered in Europe and America, have been
intensively propagating and spreading the ideals of democracy and human rights after the WWII.
The question, whether democracy can be exported, or imposed by outside powers has been the
subject for debates for a long time. Empirical history of governance shows that without certain
democratic values exiting, it is not possible to implement democracy. If society does not practice
the concepts as equality, freedom, and responsibility, application of any democratic model will
not function properly, as we see in many countries around the world. Without the conditions for
the development of the concepts named, democracy cannot be implemented from above.
Installation of any democratic model should be realized out of need and necessity, as it was in
ancient Greece, in USA, and in many countries afterwards.

As a political model and as an ideal, democracy has been though many experiences and
challenges, and became quite complicated. Its fundamental elements are universally recognized
by the world community, irrespective to their culture, ethnicity, social, economic and political
background. Rights of an individual should be exercised under the conditions of equality,
freedom, and responsibility. All the other principles that further on shape and develop democracy
most likely emerge out of those three. Transparency, political participation, freedom of market,
freedom of speech, freedom of press and media, freedom of movement and organization;
freedom to represent and being represented, security and public accountability and many other
elements of democracy should occur in all states that consider themselves democratic, except
under the situation of emergency. Different societies might apply different modeling of
democracy depending on many factors (of social, political and economic type), but they should
all respect universally accepted principles and norms of democracy. The countries that are not
democratic might not be so due to various reasons. For instance, Germany, getting democratized
relatively easily after the 12 years of totalitarianism, was due to the reason that German people
practiced democracy before the Nazi regime. Democracy was not established in Germany, it was
re-established. Besides, it was Germans themselves who converted their political system into
democracy again. Though the intervention was essential in order to end totalitarianism, the new
constitution was written by Germans, and not by Allied forces. The other examples of successful
installment of democracy by the outside power are the case of Japan and Korea. Despite the fact
that Japanese constitution was written by Americans, the main reason of successful transition to
democracy was conditions that American authorities in Japan created; freeing former opposition,
ensuring freedom of speech and organization of free press, pushing for land reform, and
abolishing Japanese military forces (therefore, avoiding military intervention to public affairs).
These resulted with equality and freedom (civil and political, economic, and social) among the
citizens that led to the prosperity of the democratic values. In spite of the efforts, Japan has still
been facing several human rights problems (ex. gender equality). It took a long time for the
Japanese society to overcome the obstacles as nationalism. Republic of Korea is often named as
well, to be one of the countries that democracy was brought from abroad. In Korea, US were
involved only in military section and was supervising Korean military sector. There were no
particular intensive programs focused on democratization of South Korea at that time. It has
gone through dictatorships during 70’s and 80’s and still executing the National Security Law,
which has continuously been causing problems to free media and free speech. In all the three
cases, it is obvious that it was the people themselves executing democracy, rather than outside
powers imposing it. Of course, both in Germany and Japan foreign democratic powers helped to
create the conditions for development of democratic values and principles. In many other cases
also, where the regime was changed to democracy, it was the creation of conditions (either by the
regime itself, or by outside powers) for equality, freedom and responsibility that gave start to the
establishment of democracy. Sometimes the problem is not the regime, but rather the traditional
society and cultural obstacles. Many scholars deny this fact and claim that it is rather the
ideology of a society, or the government that prevents democratic conditions to appear (Di
Palma, 1990). China might be suitable to this claim, but Afghanistan is not. Instability in
Afghanistan is not because of Islam. It is mostly, because of the tribal society and warlords that
undermine sovereignty of the Afghani government. Traditional beliefs prevent basic aspects of
freedom to be exercised that leads to inequality and irresponsibility. Rule of law does not
function and under these circumstances, therefore, democracy cannot function. It is a hard task
for US, NATO and EU to promote and encourage democracy and it will take a long time and big
effort for the Afghani people to reach certain goals towards democratization.
 Democracy can only be implemented from bottom to up. It has to emerge out of necessity
and need. In order people to develop their needs, they need space. In order freedom to be
established in a certain country, people need to be free within that space; both politically and
economically. In authoritarian type states this freedom is usually controlled by the government,
most of the case with the purpose of creating an obstacle for opposition to reach people.
Therefore controlling the information sector and peoples civic and political rights like freedom
of gathering and freedom of speech helps dictatorial states to restrain society and keep their
authority. Control of market results with inequality of income among the population and this is
for the benefit of an authoritarian regime as well. However, corruption and malfunction of rule of
law, which is in favor of authoritarian governments, further deepens inequality, and makes the
society hard to control. Such governments face two options; either to hold market reforms to
increase people’s income, or further represses any opposition, and strengthen propaganda to keep
people quiet and distracted from politics. It is hard to stay in the middle for a long time. No
wonder, authoritarian countries that liberalize their economic sector soon become obliged to hold
political reforms as well. As Huntington pointed out, “the wealthier the country is, the more
likely it is to be democratic.” If an authoritarian government pushes even harder on opposition, it
will most likely be overthrown. There are examples of successful and unsuccessful authoritarian
regimes in Africa, Central Asia, Latin-America, and in South-East Asia. Examples of “the
bottom billion”(Collier, 2007) countries show that creating of conditions for democracy and
protecting the values emerging out of those conditions is the responsibility of a government
itself, or a transitional outside power that has the objective to promote, and encourage
democracy. However, there are many other factors that influence non-democratic countries to
survive for a long time, despite the pressure by international community, international
organizations and democratic countries. Paul Collier, the professor of the Oxford University,
explains four conditions that make it hard to impose democracy upon the failed states. They are
armed conflicts (e.g. coup d’états, civil wars, wars with neighbors), rich natural resources
(diamond, oil & gas, foreign aid, etc.), “bad” neighbors with low growth, low infrastructure,
unstable government, and bad government, that fails to control economy and society efficiently.
These factors show that external positive influence for the establishment of democracy in non-
democratic countries (whether they are failed states or not) requires high responsibility to
eliminate all the negative factors that prevent the democratic conditions appear. To make it clear,
it is in the hands of power holder in a certain country to ensure the conditions and promote the
values of democracy there. It is the responsibility of the society – the people of that certain
country – to develop values of democracy; to form a constitution, to form a certain model of
democracy that is suitable (or not, depends on their choice) to the culture, ethnic diversity,
religion, and other relevant characteristics of that particular country. Therefore, without the
fundamental principles of democracy existing in a society, installation of any democratic model
as a political system from above will not function properly and efficiently in relation to the
standards of democracy itself. On the other hand, in many cases (e.g. former USSR countries in
Europe) people adopted a certain democratic model as their government system, and only after
that worked on strengthening the implementation and efficiency of that model in their country.
Similarly, many others that did the same have not been succeeding for the last 20 years. Former
USSR countries (CIS) as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan,
Belarus, and Tajikistan are still suffering from lack of free press & media, lack of free and fair
elections, and violation of basic human rights that are identical for democracy as well.

Each country’s democratic experience is unique. History of application of democracy for

more than 2.500 by various societies under different circumstances resulted with diverse
modeling of democracy as a political system. Different political theorists came up with different
models of democracy and number of debates occurred upon considering certain models offered
to be democratic or not. Even if many elements of those models not matching each other, they all
ought to follow basic ideology and fundamental values of democracy. Prof. David Held from
LSE, in his book Models of Democracy names models as Athenian democracy, republican
democracy, direct democracy, deliberative democracy, liberal democracy, social democracy,
theocratic democracy, and variety of other models that emerge in 20th century, as well, after the
collapse of the USSR. Many other models of democracies have been offered by various political
theorists, as non-partisan democracy, totalitarian democracy and so on. Accepting fact that
installation of any democratic model (by the society) should be realized out of need and
necessity, then either a definite democratic model should fit economic, social, and political
characteristics of a society, or a new model should be formed if necessary. Societies where
individual freedom is highly admired and economic system is strongly capitalistic will probably
end up with the liberal-democratic model or at least share most of its elements. Likewise, a
society where religious traditions are followed by the majority, is best suitable to theocratic
democracy, where sovereignty of people are recognized along with rules of religion. Of course,
not always the model of the political system makes majority happy and recognizes rights of
minority. In this case, unpleasant consequences of the model’s implementation might happen.
Problems with the recognition of rights of minorities in Islamic Republic of Iran, Peoples
Republic of China, and the Republic of Turkey can be a good example to this.

Once there is a civil society with free, equal, and responsible citizens, practice of
democratic values will most probably succeed if the model is suitable. Countries like USA,
France, Britain, and respectively others from the Western world do share valuable democratic
experiences and have been successful exercising them. In all these cases democracy was agreed
upon by the majority of the people and was applied from the society, rather than from the
government. In many other cases where democracy was promoted and propagated by West, it did
not go farther than the assistance for creation of the conditions for the rise of democratic
principles and values. In democracy, sovereignty comes from the people, not from any other
authority. Therefore, it is the majority that is responsible to organize its government in a form of
particular political model. However, it does not deny the fact that it is the task of the authority to
ensure the very existence of the conditions for emerge of values and principles of democracy,
and guarantee safety of them. Democracy is not a product that can be exported in the west and
imported to the rest. At the same time, adoption and execution of it can be assisted, helped
through, encouraged and supported by the international community, varying in each and specific
case.

Works Cited
Held, David. Models of Democracy. Third Edition. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.

Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Lomborg, Bjorn. Solutions for the worlds biggest problems. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

“How to Complete Democracy in Korea.” New York Times. April 18, 1992.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7DA143AF93BA25757C0A964958260&n=Top/Ref
erence/Times%20Topics/People/R/Roh%20Tae%20Woo

Palma, Guiseppe. “To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions.” Berkeley. University of
California Press. 1990.
Halperin. Scheffer. Small. “Self-Determination in the New World Order.” Washington, D.C. Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. 1992.

Nathan, Andrew. “China's Crisis: Dilemmas of Reform and Prospects for Democracy.” New York.
Columbia University Press. 1990.

Arat. Colo. “Democracy and Human Rights In Developing Countries.” Lynne Rienner Publishers. 1991.

Huntington, Samuel. “The Third Wave: Democratization In the Late Twentieth Century.” University of
Oklahoma Press, 1991.