Earlier this year, Freedom House painted a bleak picture of global democracy. Their 2010 report noted that worldwide freedom was in retreat for the fourth year in a row, especially in Latin America, the post Soviet States and the Middle East.
Now, the Bertelsmann Foundation is out with their Transformation Index, which tracks countries undergoing the transition toward democratic and free market rule. And, like Freedom House, they see democratic back-sliding:
At first glance, the results of the Transformation Index 2010 on the state of political transformation in the world point to considerable stability. Sixty percent of the countries under review continue to be ruled by democratic governments, and democracy does not appear to have lost its normative appeal.Nevertheless, with the exception of a very stable group of top performers, the overall quality of democracy has deteriorated and â?? in some cases â?? considerably. Indeed, some of the key components of a functioning democracy, such as political participation rights and civil liberties, have suffered qualitative erosion. Of particular concern are increasing problems with free and fair elections and with freedoms of assembly and the press. In addition, in several democracies, an anemic rule of law, weak party systems and insufficient trust or limited social capital in civil society all prevent further steps toward consolidation. Over time, these developments threaten to hollow out the quality and substance of governance, which in turn undermines respect for democratic institutions.
The report's authors go on to note that they do not detect a "global shift toward autocracy" but that instead, states in transition are facing a rocky road.
I haven't dug too deeply into the Bertelsmann numbers yet (although they have a cool, down-loadable application which lets you engage with their data interactively) but I do wonder how much the post Soviet states are skewing these various indexes. Their liberation caused a huge surge in the number of nascent democracies around the world and occasioned a lot of democratic triumphalism that, in retrospect, seems premature. While central Europe solidified their democratic gains, there's been some backsliding in parts of Eastern Europe and other nations on Russia's periphery, not to mention in Russia herself.
The idea that the U.S. cannot be secure in a world that does not reflect its ideological preferences is nothing new, but the collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of new democracies in its wake actually brought such a vision much closer to view. For a fleeting moment, it seemed possible that the U.S. would be able to sit atop a liberalizing globe. That moment appears to be waning. Whether temporarily or longer-term remains to be seen. The question is what role, if any, the U.S. should play in trying to reverse this trend.
