Promoting Democracy: Refining Our Objectives

Promote democracy, tribal culture and democracy  

Democracy advances on all fronts. Peoples rise up against their oppressors to demand self-determination.

 Their rights no longer will be denied. What so recently seemed impossible is suddenly possible, a world of free democratic states living in peace with one another.

 This is not the first time we have seen this vision in the twentieth century. At its beginning, and immediately after both world wars, many in the West felt the democratic millennium was just around the corner. 1   Yet each time the vision quickly faded. To extend the democratic vision of 1990 and make it eventually become reality, we need to think more deeply this time about what we mean by “democracy”, and the varied meanings that are represented by democratizing movements. This appraisal should allow us to place America’s support for democracy on a sounder footing, one more able to carry the burden of what, at best, will be a long and often interrupted movement toward the realization of our ideals.

Exactly how and why the democratizing revolution came about in the late 1980s in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union will occupy generations of historians, and no investigation will be of greater importance. But we do know that it is the latest phase in the democratic expansion that has unfolded over the past two and one-half centuries. At first moving very slowly, this growth has gradually and sporadically accelerated, as it has again since the mid-1970s.

We need only summarize the record. At the end of the eighteenth century, the United States was the only country with a system comparable to democracy as we use the term today, and by modern standards the American system was still quite incomplete. By 1900 there were ten operating democracies, by 1920, perhaps twenty. 2   This number rose and then declined in the interwar period. After the defeat of the Axis Powers in World War II, and the decolonization that followed, the number of democracies increased from the 1940s to the 1970s. During the early part of this post-war period, the chief gains were the successful establishment of democratic regimes in the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, and Japan, and the stabilization of democracy in the prewar democracies of Western Europe. But, with the notable exception of India, the decolonization that followed the war produced few substantial democracies.

 Western Europe gradually expanded the border of its democratic region to include Spain, Portugal, Malta, Greece, Cyprus, and, intermittently, Turkey. Elsewhere many small island states came to independence as democracies and maintained democratic systems. In Latin America, democracy in the early 1970s retreated, as countries with proud democratic traditions, such as Chile, and Uruguay, succumbed to new tyrannies. Yet by the late 1970s these new dictatorships began once again to be replaced by democratic regimes, a process supported by the simultaneous democratization of their Iberian homelands. Culminating in the recent elections in Chile and Brazil, this process has gradually swept away the military coup makers of the recent past – although most Latin American democracies remain embattled and insecure. In Asia, the 1980s saw democratic progress in South Korea, Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand. For twenty months, Pakistan was a democracy, perhaps more authentically a democracy than at any time in its short history; at the time of writing its parliament was at least temporarily suspended by yet another intervention. Nineteen eighty-nine elections in India revitalized the democratic traditions of this keystone of third-world democracy. Only in the Middle East and Africa has there been little movement toward democracy beyond a few lonely outposts. In 1989, according to the relaxed standards of the Comparative Survey of Freedom, there were about fifty-eight operating democracies in the world. 3. In reviewing this history, and these numbers, it is important to realize that the internal development of democracy since the eighteenth century has been as impressive as its external development. Since 1780 religious and economic qualifications for democratic participation have declined remarkably both in law and practice, most notably with the opening up of democratic systems to the participation of women. During this period slavery was renounced in all democracies, as were those discriminations that restricted the life and vote of African-Americans, Amerindians, and others not acceptable to majority communities. Although there were setbacks, particularly in wartime, civil freedoms generally advanced along a broad front in the democracies. So when we look at the growth of democracy, we must remember that this has been a growth in both numbers and quality. 4. The growth in quality was part of a larger movement, the development of an international consensus on the relationship of people, whether as groups or individuals, with their governments. In recent years, the growth of this consensus in support of human rights has been promoted by many private and national agencies, most notably by Amnesty International and the U.S. Congress – directly and through the State Department’s annual reports to Congress on the condition of human rights in every country. Promoting human rights and democracy became the explicit program of the U.S. government under President Carter. The program was then extended and reformulated as the struggle for democracy by President Reagan and his National Endowment for Democracy.

 It was in this context that Eastern Europe’s dissidents began in the late 1970s to mount struggles for their peoples’ rights. Against tiring and aging tyrannies, the social and economic defenses of the Soviet world were progressively breached. Then, when the infection of new political and economic ideas began to rage in the heart of the Kremlin, weakened authoritarian structures succumbed to the rise of oppressed and unhappy peoples throughout the Soviet Empire.

 The democratic revolution has achieved one obvious objective. Human beings everywhere have always believed in their hearts that it is right for people to have the ability to determine their own affairs, to be free of the oppressions of the few. Suddenly, throughout the Soviet Union and its satellites they discovered it was possible for this dream to come true. This new freedom is palpably valuable in itself to Soviet and East European peoples, and through them to all of us.

The democratic revolution is likely to have other, less direct, values. Some political scientists have demonstrated that in addition to its obvious justice, democracy also promises to help in ending the greatest scourge of humanity, the scourge of war. 5

 Their studies appear to show that modern democracies are less warlike, and spend on the average less on arms than nondemocracies. While there is some doubt that democracies have historically been involved in fewer wars than nondemocracies, it is clear that few, if any, wars have occurred between democratic regimes. (At the beginning of the democratic era, the War of 1812 is sometimes mentioned as a counterexample.) In a world becoming increasingly democratic, this should give a substantial boost to the move away from the use of force to resolve international problems that is already well underway in every region except the Middle East.

Conflicting Definitions of Democracy

Before going further, however, we should stop and consider what we meant above by “increasingly democratic”. Democracy has long been used in many senses, and the confusion of its many meanings in the rhetoric of the well-meaning continues to plague us as we move into a more democratic era.

 Americans have commonly failed to distinguish freedom achieved through independence and self-determination from freedom achieved through the effective institutionalization of modern democracy. In pressing for the self-determination of peoples at the end of World War I, Wilson understood self-determination to be identical with the achievement of modern, liberal democracy. He did not imagine self-determination could have a strictly political meaning that gave little protection to the individual or minority, or that denied the forms of political democracy in favor of Rousseauian evocations of the “general will”. 6. After World War II, the United States added to this confusion by contrasting the “free world” with the unfree world, where “free” meant simply that the countries outside the Soviet orbit were independent of Moscow. In this use of the word we echoed, of course, the Soviet-communist insistence that “national liberation” resulted from the freeing of a people from colonial (or capitalist) control. The confusion of “free” with democratic has led our leaders to purposefully or negligently fail to discriminate between “facade democracies” 7   in which those elected are prevented from ruling – usually because of more powerful military leaders – and those real democracies in which the elected have preponderant power.

In still another and related way we tend to confuse what we mean by democracy when we speak as though modern liberal democracy is inseparably linked to capitalism or a market economy. The Marxists sold the world the idea that Western democracy was “bourgeois democracy” and Americans have apparently decided to take them up on the identification. It is true that in modern times democracy has been roughly correlated with capitalism.

 Yet there are two reasons not to overemphasize the relationship. First, some successful third-world market economies have been arrested in their political and civil evolution at a stage of authoritarian pseudo-democracy, such as that of Singapore or Malaysia. To identify democratic progress with such states, as is sometimes implied by Western economists and ideologues, robs civil and political democracy of its distinctive meaning. Second, and more important, to identify political and civil democracy with any nonpolitical ideology, particularly with an economic ideology, reduces the scope of democratic institutions. For if we identify liberal democracy with capitalism or market economics, the discussion of, or voting on, economic solutions that are not in accordance with the principles of market economics threatens to be delegitimized. This delegitimizes, in turn, democratic institutions in the minds of those who disagree with market economics, free trade, and the rest of the liberal economist’s litany. From the political viewpoint, the only “free economy” is the economy that the people of the country affected have freely discussed and accepted through democratic processes.

However, perhaps most significant is the confusion between tribal or village democracy and liberal democracy, a confusion that goes back to the two great “democratic revolutions”, the French and American. In beginning political science courses, the two democracies might be described as those of Rousseau and Locke.

The historical and anthropological record suggests that tribal or village democracy existed in the earliest human societies; it was that primitive community structure in which all adults, or at least all adult men, were given a part in reaching consensus on the affairs of the group. 8   With the increasing size of communities, tribal democracy became increasingly difficult to sustain. Conquest followed conquest, and the social strata that were left behind by each conquest led to a differentiation of victors and vanquished that progressively submerged the democratic impulse. Nevertheless, by exception, tribal democracies attained considerable size and influence in later ages. One glory of Athens was that it managed to sustain for many years a relatively effective, face-to-face, tribal democracy.

 Tribal democracy is group based. Although formal voting procedures may be developed, the essential method of reaching decisions is consensus. Since consensus-based political systems frequently lead to the coercion of the minority by the majority, they easily become mobocracies such as undermined and then destroyed the French Revolution. Discussion may be allowed in the tribe, but once a decision is made, or the group moves psychologically in one or another direction, it is generally safer for those who disagree to lapse into silence, or even to join the chanting throng with which they secretly disagree. Socrates taking the hemlock is part of the creation-myth of this democracy, for his action symbolizes the ultimate renunciation of individual rights in favor of group rights. It symbolizes a democracy in which the rights of the group over its members are essentially unlimited.

 Psychologically, tribal or political democracy is not humbling. It characteristically exalts the tribe or nation and its values. In doing so the members of a political democracy strive to place not only their fellows, but also as much of the rest of the world as possible under their control. This is the American democracy that thought little of repeated expulsions of Indians from their property in the advance westward, that was anxious to have a war with Mexico that would offer an opportunity for further group enhancement, or that welcomed the Spanish-American War out of similar motives. It was British democracy that supported the extension and protection of the Empire until the late 1940s. It was French political democracy that struggled desperately against the loss of its empire in the 1950s, and that denied the rights of the Bretons and Basques even to their own languages until recent years. 9

 Generally tribal democracy is majoritarian, but it may also be majoritarian by fiat, with leaders laying down the absolute unquestioned principles by which the group is to be ruled without concern as to whether a majority would actually vote for such rules. Muslim fundamentalists do not want the rules of Islamic societies voted on any more than Hitler wanted to put his actions against the mentally deficient or Jews to a vote. Such rulers govern in the name of the group, preferring often to use an emotionally laden special referendum or plebiscite rather than a routine electoral process to legitimize rule. They rule in the name of their group against other groups, and when political democracy threatens their rule they bypass it by reference to principles outside politics such as religious law or the “general will”.

 Before the American Revolution, tribal democracy was what was meant by democracy in most discussions of political forms, and it was generally disparaged. Most political thinkers rejected democracy for two reasons. First, its scale was wrong for the evolving nation state. Second, tribal democracy too easily declined into mob rule, as Aristotle had already reported in ancient times. When representative government was successfully combined with democracy in the eighteenth century, the first objection was overcome for all time. The second difficulty was only overcome through the development of constitutionalism that had the capability of transforming tribal democracy into liberal democracy.

 Liberal or modern democracy is based on respect for individual rights. It might be referred to as “civil democracy”, as opposed to “political democracy”, for it replaces emphasis on majority rights guaranteed by political forms with emphasis on a rule of law that balances majority and minority rights. The eighteenth-century creators of this democracy were hesitant to call it democracy at all, for the doctrine stood squarely against the rights of the mob, emphasizing instead the sovereign rights of individuals to disagree publicly with the decisions of the community or government to which they bear allegiance. It is, however, a matter of degree. Civil democracy incorporates the egalitarianism and communitarianism of tribal democracy in that it accepts the right of the majority to have the principal say in determining public policy. Liberal or civil democracy is quite distinct from the extreme antistatism discussed in some libertarian circles: it does not seek to do away with the ability of majorities to use state or community power to serve common interests. Liberal democracy is best understood as a measured attempt to give people both civil and political liberties and to establish rules for regulating their clash.

 The story of democratic growth within democracies since the eighteenth century has been two stories: the story of the extension of political democratic rights to an increasing percentage of the population, and the story of the proliferation and perfection of civil democratic rights. In advanced democracies growth has shifted from the expansion of electorates to development of a legal order that protects the weak at the expense of the strong, especially in the less material aspects of life. The perfection of the franchise is the primary example of the extension of political democracy, while the growing legal protection of the right to live according to the dictates of different religious or personal belief systems is an example of the extension of civil democracy. By 1990, political extensions are nearly complete in most countries calling themselves democracies – everyone can in theory, and generally in practice, take part in the political process; but by this date the extension of civil democracy has been essentially completed in only a few of the most advanced and least complex democracies, such as Denmark or Iceland. Civil democracy is simply more difficult to institutionalize, and its definition is more likely to be revised over time.

 Today, from the comfortable vantage point of relatively wealthy and well-educated societies, we have come to think of democracy as being identical with civil or liberal democracy, with the freedom of the individual in a society of laws. It is this well-behaved democracy that some political scientists have in mind when they insist that democracies are markedly less warlike than other societies, and that the democratization of the world is a necessary preface to its pacification. In doing so they have forgotten the long and difficult struggle between tribalism and liberalism that preceded our current relative enlightenment.

The Implications of the “Two Democracies” for Democratization

What then can we expect in the next few years of an “increasingly democratic” world? If we remember our own history, we should not be surprised that political rights are more completely and successfully guaranteed in new, emerging, and unstable democracies than are civil liberties. Nor should we be surprised that the people of the principal third-world democracy, India, demonstrate a remarkable commitment to political democracy and an equally remarkable inability to grant people of different religions, castes, genders, or communities the right to pursue their own lives in the way they see fit.

 Iran today is an extreme example of the discontinuity between the two types of democracy. When Ayatollah Khomeini established a new system of government, he was not loathe to take over essentially in toto the institutions of representative democracy that had worked after a fashion under the Shah, and had become the “international standard” even in the eyes of conservatives. For generations, Islamic scholars had referred to the ideal Islamic community as a “democracy under God”; they had found a legal and ideological basis for such a democracy in both early Islam and the tribal traditions of Arabia. However, in spite of this theory, Iran became perhaps the first historical state to combine Islam with political democracy. In the nineteen-eighties this “Islamic democracy” held many competent elections; substantive issues were argued in political campaigns and in parliament. But for Khomeini and his followers, it was inconceivable that this meant that God’s representatives (as they defined themselves) could not determine the limits of the debate, that they could not use their spiritual mandate to interfere in the details of individual lives, and that they could not deny the rights of individuals to oppose the new system.

 10. Not only putative majorities, such as Khomeini’s in Iran, understand democracy in terms of tribal interests, and reject the extension of democratic rights when those interests are threatened. The saddening collapse of Fijian democracy in the 1980s offers another example of the difficulty of making the transition from the ways of thinking common to tribal democracy to those characterizing civil democracy. Like so many small British colonies, Fiji inherited functioning democratic institutions from the colonial power. Against this background, it developed a constitution guaranteeing the rights of both native Fijians and the slightly more numerous Indian Fijians. The former were guaranteed special rights to the land and reserved seats in the legislature. As long as a skilled native Fijian elite controlled the system, it seemed to guarantee the civil and political liberties of all. Unfortunately, when this control threatened to break down, and an opposition party in which Indian Fijians played a major role came to power, the native Fijian military stepped in and subverted the political process. In spite of appearances, Fijian democracy had not in fact progressed beyond tribalism. The military easily destroyed the democratic system in which all Fijians had taken such pride just a few years before. 11

As we think of the future of the “new democracies” of Eastern Europe and those that may emerge from the possible disintegration of the USSR, as well as the democracies that have recently emerged, or may soon emerge, in countries such as Namibia, Nicaragua, or South Africa, we must be prepared for a long and difficult struggle between the two democracies. The struggle is likely to result in many cases in the collapse first of civil democracy, and then of meaningful political democracy as well – a process already well advanced in Zimbabwe. We must remember that Fascist Italy, Germany, and Japan all evolved out of developing political democracies in the interwar period. Their rejection of democracy was echoed in many small democracies on their peripheries, with or without the encouragement of the major Fascist states. Democracy faltered in most Eastern European countries, including the Baltic Republics, well before World War II submerged their independence. 12   Today, although democratic development in Central and Eastern Europe remains at risk, democratic collapse is most probable in those societies that lie geographically or psychologically even further from the democratic heartland.

The Role of the United States in Promoting Democracy

In part, the recent democratization of the world has been the natural result of modernization and communication between the heartlands of democracy and less democratic states. This communication has gone along with commerce, missionary activity, education, colonialism, and conquest. But the change has also been the result of a deliberate and long-standing promotion of democracy by the United States. From the beginning of the Republic, American leaders have seen the representative system of government under the Constitution as a model for the rest of the world. 13   At the end of World War I, President Wilson sponsored what he hoped to be the democratization of half of Europe. We fought World War II in the name of democracy – referring to the United States, for example, as “the arsenal of democracy”. At the end of the war we imposed democratic systems on the losers and brought pressure against our colonialist allies (other than the USSR) to grant their colonies independence. We then turned to helping with the economic development of the world and with the growth of democracies everywhere. Both goals were pursued alongside an overriding foreign policy goal of containing the spread of communism.

 Today, the United States rides the crest of what appears to be a great democratic victory. We do not know exactly why or how this “victory” came about. Containment, our military steadfastness, played a part. The economic rot at the heart of communism, in the Soviet Union itself, played a major part in delegitimizing the system, even in the eyes of its leaders. The growing together of the world through communication made it ever more difficult to prevent comparisons between systems, to make more and more people at every social level realize that communism in practice failed even to deliver on its basic promise – equality. This process of delegitimization was abetted directly by the cumulative effect of American programs to promote democracy, such as those of United States Information Agency, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America, or some of the efforts of the Peace Corps, the Agency for International Development, or activities generated by the development of human rights policy in the 1970s, and the National Endowment for Democracy in the 1980s. In the euphoria that has accompanied achievements in the Philippines, Chile, Eastern Europe, and now Nicaragua, there has developed a heady sense that democracy is on a roll, and that as we reduce military efforts we should transfer our energy into a renewed effort to democratize the world in its interest and our own.

 The point is not to settle the question of the extent to which our direct attempts to support democratic trends led to the results we found in the 1990s, but to note that many feel that we have as a country played a major part in achieving favorable outcomes. As a result, there is more pressure than ever for the United States to play a direct role in the democratic transformation of societies. If we are to continue and even augment this role, then we must be clear about the nature of the transformations we would promote and the difficulties we are likely to face.

In pressing for the democratization of the world, we need to be clear about what democracy we have in mind. We must remember the rocky path all nations must travel from the initial acceptance of formal political democratic institutions to the realization of effective modern and liberal democracy. We should not assume that in much of the world this path will be any smoother in the future than it has been in the past. Upon their independence from Spain, nearly every Latin American society adopted a democratic constitution, but achieving the reality of civil democracy has been a long road in this hemisphere, and has only recently been firmly achieved in one or two countries south of the border. After forcibly detaching it from Spain and defeating its indigenous independence movement, the United States invested a great deal of effort in the democratization of the Philippines, only to see its efforts undermined by Ferdinand Marcos. Even after his replacement, it remains doubtful that a firm basis for liberal democracy has yet been laid in the country – but the basis for liberal democracy in the Philippines is stronger than that in any neighboring society.

Our experience in bringing pressure on the Shah and Somoza in defense of human rights should lead us to reflect that it is much easier to use our ideals to help to bring down unpopular regimes than it is to use them as a basis for developing replacements. If we have played a part in the breakdown of Soviet control over the last of the world empires, and even if acceptance of aspects of the democratic vision has played a major part in this breakdown – desire for

self-determination and independence among the many and for Western human rights and self-expression among the few – we should not be surprised if the outcome of this revolution is widespread repression of minorities by new majorities, endemic violence, and ultimately the replacement of emergent democracies by authoritarian successor states.

 The United States should be particularly circumspect in its support for democratic development in Middle Eastern Muslim countries. There has long been a democratically inclined, Westernized elite in most Muslim countries. At the time of the Persian Revolution of 1905-1909, this elite established Persia on paper as a constitutional monarchy with the civil and political guarantees of the advanced democracies of the West. 14   This Persian democracy had a short and unhappy lifetime. Afghanistan twice made serious efforts to establish from the top down a constitutional monarchy on the European model (in the 1920s and again in the 1960s). 15   But the basis for modern democracy just was not there. Today, countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Sudan, even a united Yemen, might move toward liberal democracy, except for the fact that, once organized, the political force of the many in these states would probably use the political forms of democracy to crush liberalizing minorities. The result would be the creation of totalitarian tribal democracies not very different from Iran’s Islamic democracy. Within the Middle East, only Turkey approximates a modern democracy. Two major flaws in Turkey’s democracy are instructive: an unwillingness of the government to acknowledge even the most basic cultural rights of the Kurdish minority, and a legal prohibition imposed on the country’s Muslim majority that makes it a crime to refer to Quranic law in political discourse or campaigning. These denials of civil rights are justified by a secular elite ruling in the name of the “Turkish nation”. In their eyes, both Kurdish culture and Islamic law are threats to basic Turkish values and the interests of the Turkish people. 16

Perhaps we should think of American support for democracy in recent years as evolving through stages. The first, or human rights stage, was that of righteous indignation. Indignation has a useful place, it can help mobilize world opinion, and can in favorable circumstances lead to the overthrow of oppressive regimes; this mobilization played a part in changing the balance of forces in Iran and Nicaragua in the 1970s, and in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The second stage is one of support for rapid democratic transitions through direct aid to dissident groups and the opening up of new communication channels to promote democratic change. Support for change of this nature through the National Endowment for Democracy and governmental agencies is useful and necessary. The approach is certainly more positive and long-range than an approach based simply on the politics of indignation. Yet in emphasizing the forms and institutions of democracy, the importance of human rights as our ultimate goal may be forgotten. More seriously, this approach may lead us into bringing about the creation of democracies that fail to meet either our aspirations or those of their citizens. The subsequent failures of such democracies could cause a swing away from democracy in many parts of the world, setting back more substantial movement toward a world of modern democracies.

It may be utopian, but one could imagine a third stage in our support for democracy, a stage that based American strategies in support of democracy on careful estimates of the likelihood of creating a stable democracy in particular countries through the promotion of different rates of change toward that goal. If it was judged that the development of national consciousness, education, a functioning economy, a modern social and political culture, or a modern class structure did not suggest a beneficial result from immediate adoption of democratic forms and procedures, then our support for democracy should be channeled into improving these substructural bases for democratic evolution rather than support for change in the more formal democratic superstructure.

This might be too much to expect or coordinate, and, unfortunately, the adoption of such an approach might be used to justify the “value-free” toleration of tyranny that characterized much of our foreign policy in the past. But the general principle, at least, should be remembered: in so far as we wish to promote democracy defined as liberal democracy, the United States should not press hard for the adoption of democratic political forms except where liberal civic values have begun to take root. We will need to recognize that in the long run, support for the rights of the severely impoverished, women, and suppressed minorities, or support for the rights of individuals denied their basic rights through governmental or terrorist violence, may be at least as important as support for democratic forms, particularly when these forms serve as facades for military rule, the suppression of minorities, or the imposition of an unquestionable definition of group interest and values on a society.

To promote liberal democracies, we will need to develop ways to help transform the texture of life in nondemocratic societies, to instill understanding of racial and ethnic equality, tolerance for others, and the rights of the individual. This requires much time and effort; it is not the work of one generation. It requires exchange of all types. It requires international radio and television broadcasts that build on the experience of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe to bring to all peoples the message of liberal democracy, a message that can now be stripped of its cold-war baggage. It requires economic support for those nascent democratic experiments that will come into being, with or without our help, so that liberal democracy will continue to be associated with success rather than failure.

 Defined with this emphasis, support for democracy can be provided in many forms, governmental and private non-governmental. Often it will be most effective if it is not dependent on the United States. In recent years the concept of worldwide governmental and nongovernmental democratic support organizations has been proposed by the Committee for a Community of Democracies, and developed at a number of international meetings. In 1990, Benazir Bhutto proposed in an address at Harvard University an Association of Democracies; a project she apparently intended to begin with a few “new democracies” such as Pakistan and Philippines. 17   Although her proposal may be set aside by events, such an association or council could serve a useful role in connecting people throughout the world that have a common interest in democratic institutions and ways of life. It could help to mobilize the international community to come to the aid of democracies in trouble. Its existence could be important to individuals or countries that continue to feel isolated and swamped by antidemocratic forces in their country or region. An Association of Democracies might also provide an instrumentality for the promotion of democracy that would be more acceptable to many peoples than the United States or another major power.

 One should not conclude from this discussion that the United States should abandon its support for democratic change, even very limited and tribal democratic change, whenever peoples desire it. Historically, we must continue our support; we symbolize democracy and human rights for many oppressed peoples (no matter the occasional spottiness of our record). The discussion suggests only that we should be as interested in promoting general and civic education, and the establishment of constitutional orders able to defend human rights, in both new and aspiring democracies, as we are in promoting the revolutionary victories of “democratic forces” that are primarily interested in group freedom or group self-determination.

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NOTES

1. For 1900 see Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure, 1989, pages 2-4. For 1920 see James Bryce (Viscount Lord), Modern Democracies, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1921), pages I, 4, 22, II, 602. The League of