The Human Conspiracy Blog-space

A print version of this piece is posted at http://jaygaskill.com/Guns.htm .

“Guns, Thugs and Steal”
About The Fragility of Elections
No, We Have Not Reached “The End of History”

 

AP Photo 

Ms. Benazir Bhutto is dead, victim of anti-democratic thugs in Pakistan, as yet unidentified.  This is not the first Bhutto political killing. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, founder of Pakistan’s People’s Party, served as Pakistan’s Prime Minister from 1973 until he was removed in a coup in1977, then hanged in 1979 following his conviction for murdering a dissident. The late Ms. Bhutto was his daughter, born in 1953.

Pakistan belongs to a significant list of proto-democracies in which the entire democratization project remains unresolved.  Think of Venezuela, post-Soviet Russia and Iraq, for example.

 

The establishment of a functioning democracy in a place where one has never before flourished presents a multi-focal problem in infrastructure development; this is another way of saying that the worthy project if spreading democratic forms of governance in the world, however desirable, can’t be accomplished by fiat, or without the willing engagement of a critical mass of informed and very, very savvy local supporters. And it doesn’t happen without the investment of time, education and – at least in many cases – without external support.

 

Ultimately democracy depends for its existence on the “rule of law”, essentially a robust, well enforced legal system with check and balances and security conditions sufficient to police the police and their political string pullers.  It is the work of decades, not years.

 

Francis Fukuyama wrote in “The End of History” that democracy was the world’s new triumphant paradigm.  Propelled by the acclaim for his book and the attractive force of this notion, he was among the early cheerleaders for the Iraq war of liberation.  As the going got tough, Fukuyama wilted under the pressure from his fellow academics and recanted.

 

I’ve written about the problem (and democracy’s long term prospects) in an article “Fukuyama’s Wave Meets the Rocky Beach”, still posted at http://www.jaygaskill.com/democracychallenged.htm , with a follow up article at http://www.jaygaskill.com/FukuyamaWaveRevisited.htm  .

 

We Americans need to understand that the establishment of durable democracies in the world’s most sensitive regions (i.e., consensual governments that are geared to peaceful regime changes via free elections) may actually prove necessary for our democracy’s survival in the long term.  And we need to realize that the development processes that lead to that outcome are tricky and expensive.  I still think that Fukuyama’s vision of the future was accurate.  But we are far from reaching “The End of History.”

 

JBG