Five Rising Democracies

And the Fate of the International Liberal Order

Ted Piccone

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780815725787
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Shifting power balances in the world are shaking the foundations of the liberal international order and revealing new fault lines at the intersection of human rights and international security. Will these new global trends help or hinder the world's long struggle for human rights and democracy? The answer depends on the role of five rising democracies—India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, and Indonesia—as both examples and supporters of liberal ideas and practices.

Ted Piccone analyzes the transitions of these five democracies as their stars rise on the international stage. While they offer important and mainly positive examples of the compatibility of political liberties, economic growth, and human development, their foreign policies swing between interest-based strategic autonomy and a principled concern for democratic progress and human rights. In a multipolar world, the fate of the liberal international order depends on how they reconcile these tendencies.

CHAPTER ONE

The Road to the Rise

How Democracy and Development Powered the Five

TURN THE CLOCK BACK to 1984. The world was gripped by the nasty Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, and their allies and proxies. Wars in Central America raged. Dictators reigned in large swathes of the developing world. Nelson Mandela sat in jail for the twentieth year. Thousands were killed in India in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the toxic gas leaks in Bhopal. General Suharto ruled Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, with an iron fist. Brazil’s military junta was entering its twentieth year in power. And the threat of nuclear apocalypse cast its long shadow around the globe.

By 2014, just thirty years later, the world looks very different. The Soviet Union is gone; China and India have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of despair; Europe is unified, whole, and free; Africa boasts the world’s fastest growing economies; the threat of nuclear war has receded; and all but one country in the Americas have emerged as viable democracies. Deaths caused by conflict have declined dramatically, from 53,286 in 1989 to 21,259 in 2013, and the number of interstate and internal conflicts have declined, as well.¹ Economic growth and trade have exploded in every region, and the Internet has become a ubiquitous and essential feature of commerce, culture, and politics. New problems have emerged or intensified—transnational terrorism, climate change, failing states, forced migration, cyber warfare, and humanitarian crises. By most measures, however, the world today is a much better place for the average human being, who is now living longer, with more years of education, some shelter and electricity, and in better health. Since 1990 extreme poverty rates have been cut in half, more boys and girls are in school, child mortality has declined significantly, and more people have access to safe drinking water.²

Figure 1-1. High Majorities Believe Democracy Is a Good System for Governing Their Country

Note: 86,274 individuals from 57 countries were queried. Respondents heard descriptions of various types of political systems and asked whether each was a very good, fairly good, fairly bad, or very bad way of governing this country. Respondents were asked what they thought about “having a democratic political system.”

Source: World Values Survey, Wave 6 (2010–14), question V130.

Among the most notable changes in the intervening three decades is the expansion of democracy and human rights in every corner of the globe. In 1989, 69 countries (41 percent of the world’s countries) were electoral democracies, but as of 2014, there were 125 (63 percent of all countries). In 1989, 2.28 billion people lived in electoral democracies. Today the number is 4.18 billion, almost twice the number of just twenty-five years ago.³ Public opinion polling conducted in every region of the world shows that most people strongly prefer to live in democratic systems that allow free elections and protect civil rights, and most people believe in the effectiveness of democracy as a system of governance (see figure 1-1).⁴ States large and small, east and west, north and south have adopted more open, pluralistic, and competitive systems of governance, giving more people a stake in how they are governed (see figure 1-2). Tendentious rhetoric aside, there is also growing convergence around the core elements of liberal democracy—periodic, free, and fair elections, with secret ballots and universal suffrage, run by independent electoral bodies; the rule of law guaranteed by independent judiciaries; respect for universal human rights, including political and civil rights; multiparty political systems and a robust and independent civil society; civilian control of the military; and freedom of the press.⁵

Figure 1-2. High Majorities Consider Living in a Democracy to Be Important

Note: 86,274 individuals in 57 countries were queried. Respondents were asked, “How important is it for you to live in a country that is governed democratically? On this scale where 1 means it is ‘not at all important’ and 10 means ‘absolutely important,’ what position would you choose?”

Source: World Values Survey, Wave 6 (2010–14), question V140.

Dramatic episodes of democratic change over the past three decades have captured the world’s imagination as “people power” rose up and defeated long-standing autocrats in the Philippines, Chile, Poland, and Korea. Spain successfully transitioned from Franco’s iron fist to a strong parliamentary system with a weakened monarch. Mexico moved from one-party control under a democratic facade to peaceful transfers of power to opposition parties. The European Union expanded from twelve members in 1989 to twenty-eight today, all of which meet shared criteria for democratic governance, rule of law, and human rights. As the tide turned, and the democratic wave reached yet more shores, some even hoped that the end of history was near and that liberal representative government would rule the land.⁶ Recent history, however, is replete with examples of the profound difficulties of converting popular aspirations for voice, transparency, and accountability into viable forms of democratic governance. Aside from the positive example of Tunisia, the Arab Spring has turned into the Arab nightmare with civil wars raging from Yemen and Iraq to Syria and Libya. They remind us that the story of democratization is the tale of the proverbial “two steps forward, one step back.” Scores of stagnating illiberal democracies are stuck in neutral or sliding backward on their path toward more liberal systems, while more developed democracies contend with apathy, elite capture of politics, rising nationalism and populism, and growing polarization.

In this sea of change, five major countries—India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, and Indonesia (to which I refer throughout this book in short form as IBSATI)—stand out for three reasons:

1. They leaped from closed, authoritarian, illiberal governance to more open, representative, and accountable political and economic systems.

2. They made impressive progress in delivering better standards of living for their citizens, and their success as aspiring democratic powers could potentially impact other societies striving for change.

3. Their remarkably diverse populations, evident in multiple languages, ethnicities, and religions, distinguish them from more homogeneous and relatively cohesive societies such as Poland, South Korea, and Chile.

Their standing in the global community is changing as well: together, their citizens represent 25 percent of the world’s population, whereas their economies account for only 8 percent of global GDP, suggesting high potential for more growth to come. IBSATI countries’ average GDP growth rates over the past thirty years have been consistently above the global average, sometimes (from 2003 to 2008, and again in 2010 and 2011) as much as 50 percent higher. They also weathered the 2008 financial crisis effectively—their growth rates did not drop as low as the global average, and they bounced back quickly. IBSATI countries as a group perform better than authoritarian China in certain economic measurements, as well. For example, in recent years their average GDP per capita has consistently exceeded China’s until 2014, when GDP per capita in China surpassed the IBSATI average owing to contractions in Turkey and South Africa (GDP per capita in Brazil, India, and Indonesia all continued to grow).⁷ IBSATI countries have performed admirably in attaining Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); four of the five countries outstripped the global average in the percentage of the population with access to improved drinking water, and in lowering rates of child mortality.⁸ There are other powerful examples of rising democracies, namely, Mexico and South Korea, both important stories of political, economic, and social progress in the past three decades. For a variety of reasons, including their particular geographic, security, and economic relationships with their immediate neighbors (the United States and North Korea, respectively), they were not included in the study.

This chapter documents how these five rising democracies emerged from legacies of military rule, colonial control, apartheid, authoritarianism, and statism to more dynamic, decentralized, and democratic societies. It examines the historical turning points when national identities and policies shifted toward a new path of greater openness, both domestically and internationally. From those key moments of transition, the chapter demonstrates the progress each country has made across a whole range of indicators, from political rights and civil liberties to GDP per capita, literacy, maternal mortality, public expenditures for health and education, and other indicia of human development. It also tells the story of how each country has entered the globalized marketplace through an increasing reliance on international trade, migration, remittances, energy, and foreign investment flows.

The data, drawn from a broad spectrum of sources, reveal two critical findings about these five countries: first, that their chosen paths toward more democratic models of development helped fuel their own successes in providing better livelihoods for their citizens, and, second, that these achievements translated into more ambitious and activist claims for leadership at the regional and global levels. As their credibility and soft power as democratically governed states delivering economic and social development for millions of their citizens have grown, their demands for a greater say in global governance have expanded, posing new challenges to the international order, particularly regarding the promotion of liberal norms of democracy and human rights. Their potential to provide positive examples to other countries, particularly vis-à-vis competing systems of hybrid authoritarianism, will also depend on how quickly and how well they can close major gaps in political, economic, and social goods. The job, in other words, is unfinished, and these five countries’ weight in global affairs will rise and fall on their ability to meet international standards and their own publics’ rising demands.

TURNING POINTS TOWARD LIBERALIZATION

Every national story of democratic transition is composed of a multitude of unique twists and turns. Each case also features a fork in the road between two paths—one of liberalization and representative governance, and the other of autocracy and isolation. This inflection point is identified in this study as T1. As the analysis below contends, the leaders, and more important the citizens, of these five rising democracies chose the more difficult but ultimately more durable and rewarding road of democratic development at critical moments of their national histories.

Brazil (T1 = 1985)

After its declaration of independence from Portugal in 1822, Brazil experimented with a range of governmental systems from monarchy and federal republicanism to parliamentary democracy and dictatorship. In 1964, conservative forces aligned with the military, with the support of the United States, overthrew the elected leftist president, João Goulart, ushering in a twenty-one-year period of military rule known for both repression of political opponents and fast economic growth based on state ownership of key sectors of the economy. For much of this time, political parties were banned, direct elections of mayors and governors were canceled, activists were tortured, and the military controlled all aspects of national security. As the military loosened its grip on power in the late 1970s and early 1980s, opposition parties began to consolidate their bases of support. In January 1985, they won enough votes in the electoral college to elect a civilian president, Tancredo Neves, and vice president, José Sarney. Neves tragically died before assuming office, leaving it to Sarney to cope with spiraling foreign debt, rampant inflation, and a fragile transition to democracy. During his term, a constituent assembly drafted a new constitution that secured individual rights and civil liberties, criminalized coups d’état, and established various forms of direct popular participation in governance.

Brazil’s economic woes, however, continued. Fernando Collor de Mello, Brazil’s first directly elected president in twenty-nine years, battled hyperinflation, which reached 30,000 percent in 1990, through a series of wage and price freezes, privatizations, free trade, and fiscal reforms. Just two years into his term, however, Collor faced an impeachment trial for an influence-peddling scheme and resigned, handing power to Vice President Itamar Franco. Despite an economy still reeling from hyperinflation and rising unemployment, Franco rejected calls for a military-led coup aimed at purging a corrupt congress and judiciary, and opted instead for an ambitious and ultimately successful scheme to control inflation, known as the Plano Real, managed by his finance minister, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. During this period and under Cardoso’s subsequent two-term presidency, the Brazilian economy stabilized and began to grow, laying the path for takeoff under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2002. A former shoeshine boy and labor activis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: The Road to the Rise: How Democracy and Development Powered the Five
• Chapter 2: The International Human Rights and Democracy Order: Convergence and Divergence
• Chapter 3: India: A Reluctant Leader
• Chapter 4: Brazil: In Pursuit of Strategic Autonomy
• Chapter 5: South Africa: A Conflicted Mediator
• Chapter 6: Turkey: A Questionable Model
• Chapter 7: Indonesia: A Quiet Player
• Chapter 8: Paths to Convergence
• Notes
• Index