Spectator's Journal: As Good As It Gets

...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL by Adrian Karatnycky As Good As It Gets As this millennium heads for an end, and with it our blood-drenched century, it is hard not to reflect on the world's seemingly intractable problems...

...In most developing countries, there are real signs of, well, development...

...In our politically correct age, the poorest underdeveloped societies of the Third World44 By every indicator, the world is increasingly freer in its politics and more open in its economics...

...54 of the troubles afflicting the developing world...

...The revolution against the political stranglehold of dictators has been accompanied by a revolution against the economic stranglehold of the state...

...This, in turn, will require resources in the form of initiatives like the National Endowment for Democracy and Radio Free Asia (which targets China, Vietnam, and Burma), Radio Liberty (which reaches Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia), and Radio Marti (which broadcasts into Cuba...

...Ofi The American Spectator May 1998 57...

...Our role as the preeminent world power goes unchallenged...

...Today, 117 of the world's 191 countries (or 61 percent) are electoral democracies...

...Certainly the looming economic crisis in Asia suggests that not all "market reform" yields never-ending successes...

...May 1998 The American Spectator the dramatic positive changes that have occurred around the world in recent decades...

...This is why the new pessimism about democracy is not only wrong, but dangerous...

...In the twelvenon-Baltic countries of the former USSR, the picture is decidedly more mixed with only five countries enjoying democratically elected leadership...

...There is the war against the fundamentalist Taliban in Afghanistan...

...Can the progress we see at home and around the world be reversed...

...In Fukuyama's view, markets and open societies based on democratic rule are not yet the world's norm, but with the collapse of Marxism-Leninism, they have no coherent ideological rival...

...We ought, he argues, to be more tolerant of authoritarian leaders, so long as they promote limited government and the rule of law...

...In the poor developing world, per capita gross domestic product has grown from $915 to $2,923 in inflation-adjusted terms—an increase of 300 percent in thirty-five years...

...leaders—from the president on down—makeclear their support for the voices for democracy and reform in those parts of the world still in the thrall of dictatorship...

...The writer Robert Kaplan, who has made a career out of doom-saying, recently took to the pages of the liberal Atlantic Monthly and the conservative Wall Street Journal to argue that democracy is under siege in the West and is the source of many ADRIAN KARATNYCKY is the president of Freedom House and editor of Freedom in the World: The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties, 19971998...

...And if you believe ideas have consequences, the collapse of statist ideologies is the harbinger of economic progress and human liberty...

...The average life span at birth of someone in the poor developing countries now is nearly 62 years, compared with 46.2 in 1960...

...Economic reforms introduced in a democratically competitive electoral setting have been nowhere more evident than in India, where one in six of the world's population resides...

...Progress in education also has been registered in recent decades...

...Even in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, in which poverty remains a great problem, the average per capita gross domestic product has risen by over 8o percent since 196o to nearly $1,000...

...These ideas and policies —which have helped generate the rapid rise of middle classes—have also coincided with the growing momentum of democratic political ferment...

...While this is still about twelve years below the average life span in industrial countries, the gap between poor and rich nations is closing, not widening: In thirty-five years, the developing world has extended its life span by sixteen years on average, while the advanced industrial countries have added a little over five years...

...In other words, democratic and free market momentum needs to be nurtured and encouraged if the gains of recent years are to be sustained...

...Revolutions in medicine and health care are reducing infant mortality, which in the developing world has dropped to nearly half of what it was in less than thirThe American Spectator • May 1998 ty-five years...

...There are others—Turkey is a good example—where the military enjoys inordinate influence in the political process...

...It is hard to see how the progress that the world has registered in recent years can be improved upon...

...Yet one of the lessons being drawn by many in Asia is that the sources of the region's economic difficulties are an excess of secrecy and cronyism and that the remedy for these is more economic liberalization and more democracy, not less...

...Indeed, in most of Latin America, the former Communist bloc, and Africa, free- market economic reform has been launched by democratically elected leaders and not—as some theories would have it—by enlightened authoritarian reformers unconstrained by the pressures of public opinion...

...It was the workers of Poland's Solidarity trade union who in 56 May 1998 • The American Spectator 1980 first shook the foundations of the Soviet empire and unleashed the forces of democratic change in Central Europe...

...It also will require that U.S...

...Today, such phenomena are increasingly rare: the exceptional products of unusual climatic factors or warfare...

...In 1978, there were 69 democracies among 162 countries (a little over 40 percent...

...Yet today serious analysts across the political spectrum are suggesting there is a new threat: the active promotion of democratic reform...

...77 handling the downturn better than Indonesia and Malaysia, two of the region's more politically closed societies...

...Now Kaplan claims the barbarians are not only at the gates, but—in the shape of faceless global corporation—may be inside the gates...

...Nor has this increase in consumption been the result of the avarice of the rich countries...

...Indeed, the record shows that the region's more politically open market systems—the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea—are44 In sub-Saharan Africa, the average per capita GDP has risen by over 80 percent since 1960...

...Dramatic gains also have occurred in the developing world's life expectancy...

...Such pessimism may be a byproduct of the fin de siecle imperative—the need to make sweeping generalizations that encapsulate the broad trends and spirit of the age...

...As significantly, democratic systems have made deep inroads in a broad array of countries and cultures across the globe...

...As significant, much of this progress in health, education, and income has occurred even as advanced industrial countries have scaled back their foreign-aid spending and redirected some of it from the developing countries to promote reform in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR...

...If these commentators are to be believed, things seem to be miserable...

...And, in the words of the movie of the same name, that ain't bad...

...If China's rapid growth continues, there is some hope that its rapidly emerging middle and working classes will clamor for greater political freedom...

...Many of the world's closed societies will have to be engaged and challenged if we expect them to become open members of the world community...

...And while there is no iron law of history that says increased prosperity inevitably leads to increased democracy, workers and the middle classes have been the leading factors in the democratic ferment of recent decades...

...In general, however, most democracies guarantee a broad array of basic rights for their citizens...

...At home we are prosperous...

...At the beginning of the 197o's, the population of the developing world consumed on average 8o percent of the minimum dietary requirement...

...They present a set of unsubstantiated speculations that are often at odds with the clear evidence of several decades of political and economic progress that have made the world a better and a safer place...

...T he evidence of economic and social progress in most parts of the world is unassailable...

...As agricultural productivity and food supplies have increased dramatically, food prices have plummeted by forty percent from what they were just a generation ago...

...The collapse of dictatorships in Latin America, in much of the former Soviet bloc, and in large portions of Asia, is a phenomenon that gained momentum in the 1970's and took off with rapid speed in the 1980's...

...Our era of remarkable global progress is in no small measure the fruit of years of consistent bipartisan commitment to promoting democratic change and market reform around the world...

...And there is the ever-present threat of nuclear, biological and chemical terrorism against the U.S...

...Today in the poorest countries average caloric intake stands at 2,600 calories per capita, or ten percent greater than the minimum...

...It is, says Templeton, "the most glorious period in all of history...

...Since the early 1980's, when President Reagan called for a global crusade on behalf of democracy, successive presidents and Congresses have supported initiatives aimed at pressuring closed societies to open their economic and political systems...

...And there is always corruption...

...In the 1960's and 1970's famines and mass starvation seemed endemic to large swaths of the globe...

...Such an effort requires greater coordination by the world's expanding community of democracies...

...Amid such phenomena and threats, there are growing signs that a new pessimism is gathering momentum...

...Tom Bethell has argued in these pages that democracy is not such a good idea and ought to be circumscribed to productive (i.e., taxpaying) members of society...

...In short, statist systems are under pressure to reform both their politics and their economics...

...There are the simmering bloody ethnic conflicts among Hutus and Tutsis in the Great Lakes region of Africa, the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka, and ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia...

...In rapid succession a series of essays in influential publications has posited that global chaos and ethnic conflict are on the rise, that there is a looming clash of unremittingly hostile civilizations, and that the global expansion of democratically elected governments is a dangerous source of increasing inter-ethnic and inter-religious tension...

...And South Africa's black and multi-racial trade unions contributed to a wave of strikes that helped speed the end of apartheid...

...T he late twentieth-century revolution in human prosperity has been ideological, driven by the spread of free-market approaches...

...In Africa, open societies and democracies represent a distinct, though significant, minority of states...

...The amount of spending on education has increased in the developed and developing world, in part with the help of state spending, but also as a result of the significant input of the private sector, which understands that profits require an investment in human capital...

...Only in the Arab world are there no democracies or free countries...

...and other advanced industrial democracies...

...In China, where one in five of the earth's inhabitants lives, limited economic reform has not been accompanied by significant political liberalization...

...Still, despite an array of very serious problems, there is ample reason to agree with the conclusions of international investor John Marks Templeton, who writes in his excellent book-length survey Is Progress Speeding Up?: "Fewer and fewer people live under the weight of tyranny...

...Democratic systems—and free markets—will continue to be challenged by the enemies of freedom...

...Indeed, the world's per capita food consumption has increased by zo percent compared with a half century ago...

...Some, like India, face significant pockets of ethnic and inter-religious strife...

...This is what Francis Fukuyama referred to when he wrote in 1989 of "the end of history...

...This in turn has led to economic growth accompanied by significant human rights improvements...

...Among the countries of the developing world economic indicators also have improved measurably...

...They suggest we are either in the middle of or on the brink of a major global breakdown...

...Not all democratic societies have achieved stability and a lasting rule of law...

...In 1989, we saw the first signs of this demand in the mass protests in Peking and Shanghai, which involved millions of participants...

...Otherwise, Zakaria suggests, we may be in for a democratic age filled with human rights violations and ethnic and religious persecutions...

...The last decade has seen economic liberalization accompanied by the rapid expansion of the country's middle class, which today numbers over 100 million and is expected to double in the next five years...

...As significantly, in less than a quarter of a century, the proportion of adolescents enrolled in secondary education has grown from 31 percent to 65 percent worldwide...

...But in the final analysis, this may well be as good as it gets...

...I t is important that we not draw the wrong conclusions about this remarkable era of economic and political liberty...

...The last twenty years have seen a remarkable expansion in the spread of democratic values and institutions around the world...

...Still others have made great strides in opening up to competitive multiparty elections and a free press, but have not achieved the same degree of institutional legal reform enjoyed by most free societies...

...These remarkable gains will necessarily be tempered by setbacks and by the dangers posed by those who reject or fear the democratic consensus...

...The reason for this trend is simple: it's the market, stupid...

...But their pessimism is entirely unjustified by the evidence of The world is not going to hell in a handbasket...

...As of 1995, only 3o percent of the adult population of the developing world is illiterate, compared with nearly 6o percent just a quarter century ago...

...In 1989, a nationwide general strike gave teeth to the calls for political liberalization in then-Czechoslovakia...

...To be sure, there are significant pockets of obscurantism, misrule, strife, and poverty...

...Today, the term is accurate...

...leadership and military capability will be essential in preserving a world in which terrorism and ethnic hatred are kept in check...

...Writing in Foreign Affairs, that influential journal's managing editor Fareed Zakaria suggests that the U.S's promotion of electoral democracy may be the wrong recipe for many societies and warns of the rise of "illiberal democracies," by which he means states in which democratically elected leaders engage in demagogy and the scapegoating of minorities...

...His 1996 book, The Ends ofthe Earth, paints a picture of a world beset by poverty, famine, pestilence, and simmering ethnic and racial hatreds...

...Russian coal miners played a key role in backing reformers and democrats who led to the disintegration of the USSR...

...As a result, despite widespread poverty, India has nearly tripled its per capita real gross domestic product to nearly $1,400 since 1960...

...There are the dangers emanating from the rogue states of Libya, North Korea, and Iraq...

...Even TAS has been home to some of the voices of this pessimistic chorus...

...And America certainly is at peace with its neighbors who resemble us more and more...

...This democratic expansion has gone hand in hand with the expansion of economic freedom and concomitant economic progress...

...In short, we may be in the middle of a period of remarkable human progress that is as good as it gets...

...Thus, while the world may still face dangerous tyrants, biological and chemical terrorism, and a "clash of cultures," the reality is that by every indicator, the globe is becoming increasingly freer in its politics and increasingly more open in its economics...

...In 1998, democracy and freedom have become the dominant systems among the countries of the Americas, Western Europe, East-Central Europe, and even in the Asia/Pacific region...

...17 were euphemistically renamed the "developing world" by foreign-aid bureaucrats intent on not offending the leaders of impoverished countries...

...What is clear is that the ideas of the free market and of open societies based on individual rights have assumed ideological ascendancy...

...But increasingly these are exceptions to the general trend...

...For as the twentieth century approaches its end, mankind is in the midst of unprecedented progress fueled by the growing acceptance of free-market principles, the gradual triumph of the idea of individual rights, and the widening acceptance of democratic procedures...

...Still, the country's limited economic reform has led to more than a four-fold increase in per capita gross domestic product to $2,604 in 1994...

...And by most indicators, the state of human rights in the world has improved when compared to a decade ago...

...In broad brushstrokes, they are portraying the world in dark hues...

...The result is a more prosperous and more healthy world with greater space for personal — and, with increasing frequency, political —freedom...

...In all, 55 percent of the world's population lives under democratically elected leaders...

...In that regard, today's doomsayers are no different from many of their predecessors...

...David Pryce-Jones has warned of a growing wave of corruption that is threatening both democratic rule and the free market...

...In most parts of the world, people are enjoying longer, healthier and more fulfilling lives...