Democracy No Longer Able to Uphold Sustainability Standards
Democracy Uniqueness
Demo Weak Now
Democracy no longer able to uphold sustainability standards
The Economist 14, “What’s Gone Wrong With Democracy?”, 01/03/14, http://www.economist.com/printedition/2014-03-01, 7/9/15
Yet these days the exhilaration generated by events like those in Kiev is mixed with anxiety, for a troubling pattern has repeated itself in capital after capital. The people mass in the main square. Regime-sanctioned thugs try to fight back but lose their nerve in the face of popular intransigence and global news coverage. The world applauds the collapse of the regime and offers to help build a democracy. But turfing out an autocrat turns out to be much easier than setting up a viable democratic government. The new regime stumbles, the economy flounders and the country finds itself in a state at least as bad as it was before. This is what happened in much of the Arab spring, and also in Ukraine’s Orange revolution a decade ago. In 2004 Mr Yanukovych was ousted from office by vast street protests, only to be re-elected to the presidency (with the help of huge amounts of Russian money) in 2010, after the opposition politicians who replaced him turned out to be just as hopeless. Between 1980 and 2000 democracy experienced a few setbacks, but since 2000 there have been many Democracy is going through a difficult time. Where autocrats have been driven out of office, their opponents have mostly failed to create viable democratic regimes. Even in established democracies, flaws in the system have become worryingly visible and disillusion with politics is rife. Yet just a few years ago democracy looked as though it would dominate the world. In the second half of the 20th century, democracies had taken root in the most difficult circumstances possible—in Germany, which had been traumatised by Nazism, in India, which had the world’s largest population of poor people, and, in the 1990s, in South Africa, which had been disfigured by apartheid. Decolonialisation created a host of new democracies in Africa and Asia, and autocratic regimes gave way to democracy in Greece (1974), Spain (1975), Argentina (1983), Brazil (1985) and Chile (1989). The collapse of the Soviet Union created many fledgling democracies in central Europe. By 2000 Freedom House, an American think-tank, classified 120 countries, or 63% of the world total, as democracies. Representatives of more than 100 countries gathered at the World Forum on Democracy in Warsaw that year to proclaim that “the will of the people” was “the basis of the authority of government”. A report issued by America’s State Department declared that having seen off “failed experiments” with authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government, “it seems that now, at long last, democracy is triumphant.” Such hubris was surely understandable after such a run of successes. But stand farther back and the triumph of democracy looks rather less inevitable. After the fall of Athens, where it was first developed, the political model had lain dormant until the Enlightenment more than 2,000 years later. In the 18th century only the American revolution produced a sustainable democracy. During the 19th century monarchists fought a prolonged rearguard action against democratic forces. In the first half of the 20th century nascent democracies collapsed in Germany, Spain and Italy. By 1941 there were only 11 democracies left, and Franklin Roosevelt worried that it might not be possible to shield “the great flame of democracy from the blackout of barbarism”. A high-water mark? Freedom score, by country Africa Asia north Asia south Europe Middle East North America South America % of total 1972 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2013 0 25 50 75 100 Not freePartly freeFree1972 Sources: Freedom House; The Economist
De facto democracy not holding up to de jure standards, faith in democracy is regressing.
The Economist 14, “What’s Gone Wrong With Democracy?”, 01/03/14, http://www.economist.com/printedition/2014-03-01, 7/9/15
The progress seen in the late 20th century has stalled in the 21st. Even though around 40% of the world’s population, more people than ever before, live in countries that will hold free and fair elections this year, democracy’s global advance has come to a halt, and may even have gone into reverse. Freedom House reckons that 2013 was the eighth consecutive year in which global freedom declined, and that its forward march peaked around the beginning of the century. Between 1980 and 2000 the cause of democracy experienced only a few setbacks, but since 2000 there have been many. And democracy’s problems run deeper than mere numbers suggest. Many nominal democracies have slid towards autocracy, maintaining the outward appearance of democracy through elections, but without the rights and institutions that are equally important aspects of a functioning democratic system.
Faith in democracy flares up in moments of triumph, such as the overthrow of unpopular regimes in Cairo or Kiev, only to sputter out once again. Outside the West, democracy often advances only to collapse. And within the West, democracy has too often become associated with debt and dysfunction at home and overreach abroad. Democracy has always had its critics, but now old doubts are being treated with renewed respect as the weaknesses of democracy in its Western strongholds, and the fragility of its influence elsewhere, have become increasingly apparent. Why has democracy lost its forward momentum?
A statue of Stalin is carted away after the fall of the Soviet Union The return of history
Both US and EU fall from their status as the paragon of democracy
The Economist 14, “What’s Gone Wrong With Democracy?”, 01/03/14, http://www.economist.com/printedition/2014-03-01, 7/9/15
Yet in recent years the very institutions that are meant to provide models for new democracies have come to seem outdated and dysfunctional in established ones. The United States has become a byword for gridlock, so obsessed with partisan point-scoring that it has come to the verge of defaulting on its debts twice in the past two years. Its democracy is also corrupted by gerrymandering, the practice of drawing constituency boundaries to entrench the power of incumbents. This encourages extremism, because politicians have to appeal only to the party faithful, and in effect disenfranchises large numbers of voters. And money talks louder than ever in American politics. Thousands of lobbyists (more than 20 for every member of Congress) add to the length and complexity of legislation, the better to smuggle in special privileges. All this creates the impression that American democracy is for sale and that the rich have more power than the poor, even as lobbyists and donors insist that political expenditure is an exercise in free speech. The result is that America’s image—and by extension that of democracy itself—has taken a terrible battering.
Nor is the EU a paragon of democracy. The decision to introduce the euro in 1999 was taken largely by technocrats; only two countries, Denmark and Sweden, held referendums on the matter (both said no). Efforts to win popular approval for the Lisbon Treaty, which consolidated power in Brussels, were abandoned when people started voting the wrong way. During the darkest days of the euro crisis the euro-elite forced Italy and Greece to replace democratically elected leaders with technocrats. The European Parliament, an unsuccessful attempt to fix Europe’s democratic deficit, is both ignored and despised. The EU has become a breeding ground for populist parties, such as Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, which claim to defend ordinary people against an arrogant and incompetent elite. Greece’s Golden Dawn is testing how far democracies can tolerate Nazi-style parties. A project designed to tame the beast of European populism is instead poking it back into life.
The spread of democracy does not stop terror
Gause III 05 Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont and Director of its Middle East Studies Program. Can Democracy Stop Terrorism? 1/9/05, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2005-09-01/can-democracy-stop-terrorism, 7/9/15
The United States is engaged in what President George W. Bush has called a "generational challenge" to instill democracy in the Arab world. The Bush administration and its defenders contend that this push for Arab democracy will not only spread American values but also improve U.S. security. As democracy grows in the Arab world, the thinking goes, the region will stop generating anti-American terrorism. Promoting democracy in the Middle East is therefore not merely consistent with U.S. security goals; it is necessary to achieve them. But this begs a fundamental question: Is it true that the more democratic a country becomes, the less likely it is to produce terrorists and terrorist groups? In other words, is the security rationale for promoting democracy in the Arab world based on a sound premise? Unfortunately, the answer appears to be no. Although what is known about terrorism is admittedly incomplete, the data available do not show a strong relationship between democracy and an absence of or a reduction in terrorism. Terrorism appears to stem from factors much more specific than regime type. Nor is it likely that democratization would end the current campaign against the United States. Al Qaeda and like-minded groups are not fighting for democracy in the Muslim world; they are fighting to impose their vision of an Islamic state. Nor is there any evidence that democracy in the Arab world would "drain the swamp," eliminating soft support for terrorist organizations among the Arab public and reducing the number of potential recruits for them. Even if democracy were achieved in the Middle East, what kind of governments would it produce? Would they cooperate with the United States on important policy objectives besides curbing terrorism, such as advancing the Arab-Israeli peace process, maintaining security in the Persian Gulf, and ensuring steady supplies of oil? No one can predict the course a new democracy will take, but based on public opinion surveys and recent elections in the Arab world, the advent of democracy there seems likely to produce new Islamist governments that would be much less willing to cooperate with the United States than are the current authoritarian rulers. The answers to these questions should give Washington pause. The Bush administration's democracy initiative can be defended as an effort to spread American democratic values at any cost, or as a long-term gamble that even if Islamists do come to power, the realities of governance will moderate them or the public will grow disillusioned with them. The emphasis on electoral democracy will not, however, serve immediate U.S. interests either in the war on terrorism or in other important Middle East policies. It is thus time to rethink the U.S. emphasis on democracy promotion in the Arab world. Rather than push for quick elections, the United States should instead focus its energy on encouraging the development of secular, nationalist, and liberal political organizations that could compete on an equal footing with Islamist parties. Only by doing so can Washington help ensure that when elections finally do occur, the results are more in line with U.S. interests.
Demo Strong Now
Democratic promotion growing, democracy modeling successful
Green 01 (article date internally cited: not official) Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Delaware, USA, DEMOCRATIZATION: THE WORLD-WIDE SPREAD OF DEMOCRACY IN THE MODERN AGE, (Full date not available), http://www.eolss.net/sample-chapters/c04/E6-94-19.pdf, 7/9/15
Second, there is the more conscious, intentional advancement and promotion of democratic values by governments in their foreign policy, with the intention of affecting global politics. For example, at times liberal states act as full-fledged “liberal powers.” In these instances states let their liberal values guide their foreign policy rather than realist calculations; they assertively promote and even impose liberal values, human rights, constitutions and elections, and democracy upon others in their foreign policy. Liberal powers have reached a new level of ambition in the last twenty years or so, in that they have come to be aware of and believe in the democratic peace and act intentionally to promote democracy for the purpose of achieving it. Today we have reached the level of general consciousness of the liberal advantage and the democratic peace, such that world leaders publicly discuss it and adopt democracy promotion and democratic expansion as a foreign policy.
**Democracy Good/Bad**
Critical
Democracy Good
Demo Good: Topshelf
Assumptions about liberal democracy promotion are ill-informed-different countries promote democracy in different way while in different places-prefer empirical evidence over assumptions.
Hobson, and Kurk 9/20/11 (Professor in International Relations Theory. BA University of Hull MscEcon University of Wales, Aberystwyth PhD University of Wales/ Scholar of international political theory Assistant Professor in the School of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University.) “The Conceptual Politics of Democracy Promotion” accessed online 7/8/15 https://books.google.com/books?id=-seoAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA100&dq=Misunderstanding+the+maladies+of+liberal+democracy+promotion%E2%80%9D,&hl=en&sa=X&ei=UzOdVdbSB8WmgwTIsIP4CQ&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
Two commonly made assumptions rest on empirical ground that is not firm. The first of these is the assumption that Western powers are in essence over- promoting liberal democracy. The facts suggest instead that tl1ey are not doing much to promote democracy of any type, whether liberal or othenvise. This is the most notable policy trend of recent years. under-stressed if not entirely ignored by arguments that derive from critical theory. Second is the supposition that where they are active in democracy support, Western powers follow a rigidly liberal template that is inappropriate and inat- tentive to local demands and specificities. Of course, in places some such concerns are well founded and injustices are undoubtedly committed in the pursuit of political change. But this argument is far too sweeping when forwarded as a general n1ela-critique of democracy promotion. Real-life policy fonnulation is much more ad hoc and varied in its conceptual bases. This is evident if one takes the trouble to look at the nitty-gritty substance of what democracy promoters are doing on the ground. In some cases Western powers assertively promote liberal democracy. But other combinations are also adopted. Sometimes policy favours illiberal demo- cracy; sometimes it seeks advances in liberal rights without democracy; and sometimes it is active in supporting neither the 'liberal' nor the 'democracy' strands of liberal democracy. The precise nature and balance of such policy options varies across different democracy promoters, different 'target states and over different moments in time. Critical theory inspired approaches risks seeing a uniformity that simply does not exist in concrete democracy_\;' support strategies. It is if anything more straight jacketed than the policy-makers it mocks as rigidly simplistic in their conceptual understanding of deinocrac_\;'. This is not to suggest that all is well in the democracy promoters' house; but the renovations needed are more subtle in nature.