Dictators and their future
I went on the BBC Radio 3 Nightwaves programme last night, to discuss with the former UK diplomat Carne Ross whether dictators are a declining force in world affairs. In the stylised way of such debates, I was presenting the hopeful view and he was arguing against it. You can hear the programme here till next week.
This briefly is my case for the decline of the dictators.
1. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has become more conspicuous than ever that the most successful states on any conventional criteria - power, wealth, military might, diplomatic and cultural influence - are not dictatorships.
2. The principal ideological challengers to democracy in the last century, fascism and communism, are discredited forces (though admittedly another variant of totalitarianism, militant Islamism, is a potent threat).
3. The peculiar social conditions of the late 20th and early 21st century are not conducive to the maintenance of dictatorship. The fax machine, satellite dish and the Internet make it more difficult for despotic regimes to control the flow of information. Information has a galvanising effect in political reform. The ousting of Milosevic in Serbia in 2000, the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003, and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 were all sparked by the rigging of elections, news of which rapidly spread.
4. Despite the controversies of the Iraq intervention, the doctrine of state sovereignty is gradually being eroded as a barrier to the notion that dictators may be held to account for the way they treat captive peoples. The development of intermediate institutions - news channels, transnational human rights groups and common legal standards - is an important factor in this highly desirable shift. All of these may be politicised to some degree (Amnesty International, for example, is no longer the politically disinterested and morally weighty organisation it once was), but the trend is there even if the outcome is often flawed. The fact that Milosevic, an orchestrator of genocide, and Pinochet, the destroyer of Chilean due process and democracy, cheated justice is less important in the end than that the mechanisms for trying them were established. These will be used against the deposed despot of Liberia, Charles Taylor, and I hope others in due course.
There are qualifications to a simple narrrative of the spread of democracy. For a start, the factors I've identified as tending to the demise of dictators don't apply where a tyrant is sufficiently ruthless. Saddam Hussein and Kim Il-Sung & Kim Jong-Il are examples of despots without political limit. In these cases, political reform is impossible without direct external intervention. But autocracies where there is a significant and growing civil society, such as Iran, are different and more vulnerable.
Overall, the state of international politics is one where there are strong and successful constitutional democracies, and a large intermediate area of what the foreign affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria referred to some years ago as the rise of illiberal democracy - broadly, but not limited to, majoritarian rule without checks and balances. (The authoritarian-populist regime of President Chavez in Venezuela is of this type.) The numbers and virulence of outright dictatorships are, in my view, likely to decline, and the pursuit of that outcome should be a central part of Western foreign policy.
