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In December of 1997 The Atlantic posted (or published back then) Was Democracy Just a Moment. It is a loooong piece but very enlightening on the failure of democracy around the globe.
In April of 1985 I found myself in the middle of a Sudanese crowd that had just helped to overthrow a military regime and replace it with a new government, which the following year held free and fair elections. Sudan's newly elected democracy led immediately to anarchy, which in turn led to the most brutal tyranny in Sudan's postcolonial history: a military regime that broadened the scope of executions, persecuted women, starved non-Muslims to death, sold kidnapped non-Muslim children back to their parents for $200, and made Khartoum the terrorism capital of the Arab world, replacing Beirut. In Sudan only 27 percent of the population (and only 12 percent of the women) could read. If a society is not in reasonable health, democracy can be not only risky but disastrous: during the last phases of the post-First World War German and Italian democracies, for example, the unemployment and inflation figures for Germany and the amount of civil unrest in Italy were just as abysmal as Sudan's literacy rates.
The article doesn't paint a great picture of democracy around the world. It also shows the failure of America's attempts to push democracies onto societies that aren't ready. And remember this was written four years ago and not much seems to have changed since then.
posted on Monday, October 15, 2001 3:42 PM Print
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