We Don't Know How to Build Democracy

The president articulated clearly where we would like to end up: in a world composed of functioning, sovereign, democratic states. The advantages of such a world are obvious. In mature democracies, domestic institutions are stable and leaders accountable. The rule of law prevails and corruption is limited. Economic policy is constructive and incomes and opportunities increase. The appeal of terrorism lessens.

But with all our determination to promote democracy, the truth is, we don't have a very good idea of how to do it. Neither the United States nor anyone else has much experience in creating democracy where there was none.

The accepted international practices to promote democracy -- such things as United Nations peacekeeping operations, foreign assistance to support better governance, and transitional administrations like those set up in Kosovo and East Timor -- haven't proved to be all that satisfactory. Even our governmental institutions reflect our unpreparedness for the task: We have a Department of Defense, but we don't have a Department of Regime Building.

What we do know -- or should know -- is that getting from here to there will be hard. The states we're most interested in helping to transform today generally have low per-capita incomes, limited experience with democracy and long histories of autocratic and sometimes brutal rule. These are not conditions that tend to foster democracy.

Among the surprisingly few things we know about creating democracies is this: While it doesn't necessarily take higher per-capita income to establish a democracy, it certainly helps in sustaining it. No democratic country with per-capita income above $6,000 has ever reverted to autocracy.

We also know that democratic transitions are dangerous. Autocratic leaders feeling threatened by democratic reforms can respond by cracking down. A destructive sort of nationalism can surface (think Kaiser Wilhelm II before World War I, Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s or Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe today). And states in transition are more likely than either stable democracies or autocracies to become involved in wars.