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How democracies emerge
Thomas Carothers
Extracted from Journal of Democracy: Vol 18, Number 01
January 2007

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Thomas Carothers is vice-president for international politics and governance and director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His most recent book is Confronting the Weakest Link: Aiding Political Parties in New Democracies (2006)

In the second half of the 1990s, a counterreaction emerged to the heady enthusiasm about democracy and democracy promotion that flourished during the peak years of democracy's "third wave" in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Believing that the global democratic wave had been oversold, several policy experts and scholars produced a series of influential articles articulating a pessimistic, cautionary view. Fareed Zakaria, alarmed by what he saw as a dangerous rash of newly elected leaders restricting rights and abusing power from Peru and Argentina to the Philippines and Kazakhstan, warned that rapid democratization was producing a plague of "illiberal democracy."¹ Troubled by violent conflicts breaking out in former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, and elsewhere, Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder argued that democratizing states are in fact more conflict-prone than stable autocracies.² Disturbed by the specter of ethnic conflict in different parts of Asia, Amy Chua asserted that the simultaneous pursuit of democracy and market reform in countries with "market-dominant minorities" leads to ethnic conflict and antimarket backlashes.³

Although their specific areas of focus and analytic frameworks varied, these different accounts coalesced around a central argument that appealed to what might be called the need for democratic sequencing. In this view, it is a mistake to assume that democratization-especially open national elections-is always a good idea. When tried in countries poorly prepared for it, democratization can and often does result in bad outcomes-illiberal leaders or extremists in power, virulent nationalism, ethnic and other types of civil conflict, and interstate wars. To prevent such results, certain preconditions, above all, the rule of law and a well-functioning state, should be in place before a society democratizes. Therefore, the United States, and the West generally, should rethink their approach and commitment to democracy promotion. In some countries, staying with an existing autocratic regime is a better alternative. Where outside actors do want to promote positive political change in a nondemocratic society, they should concentrate first on helping it to achieve the rule of law and a well-functioning state. Only much farther down the road, when those preconditions are established, should outsiders push for elections and the other associated elements of what sequentialists refer to, warily, as "mass political participation"⁴ or "mass plebiscites."⁵

Democratic sequentialism is one part of a wider body of skeptical thinking about democracy's global prospects that gained popularity in the 1990s in reaction to third-wave enthusiasm. This wider body, which might be called "democratic pessimism," is represented most vividly in the much-discussed writings of journalist Robert Kaplan.⁶ Sequentialism has found a vital place in this more generalized pessimism thanks to its concrete policy implications and intuitive appeal: Pursuing a sequential path promises to rationalize and defang democratic change by putting the potentially volatile, unpredictable actions of newly empowered masses and emergent elected leaders into a sturdy cage built of laws and institutions.

Sequentialism met a warm welcome from various parts of the international policy community. Traditional realists, who had been uneasily eyeing the ascendancy of a prodemocratic policy outlook in the 1980s and 1990s, were happy to have an additional set of arguments for downplaying democracy promotion and maintaining cordial relations with friendly autocracies. Traditional developmentalists, still loyal to old-school modernization theory's notion that development must precede democracy and feeling upset by democracy promotion's sudden rise to prominence, were delighted to have a new set of contrarian allies. Finally, powerholders in some nondemocratic countries eagerly embraced sequentialism in order to argue that their reticence about opening up political competition actually reflected a deeper commitment to democracy in the long term.

Sequentialism has continued to gain attention and adherents in this decade. The initial articles by Zakaria, Mansfield and Snyder, and Chua have all returned in expanded form as successful books.7 Democracy's continued trials and tribulations, from the backsliding in the former Soviet Union to the swelling populist currents in Latin America, have provided plentiful grist for pessimism regarding this form of government. The troubling results of the Bush administration's loudly proclaimed drive for democracy in the Middle East have been especially rich fodder. Sequentialists interpret the searing, dispiriting experience of attempted democracy-building in post-Saddam Iraq as telling evidence of the consequences of an extreme application of a "no-preconditions" outlook on democratization. Similarly, the gains of Islamists in recent elections in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine appear to some observers to be further indications of the dangers of moving quickly toward elections in countries with little democratic history.

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1. Fareed Zakaria, "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy," Foreign Affairs 76 (November- December 1997): 22-43.
2. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, "Democratization and the Danger of War," International Security 20 (Summer 1995): 5-38.
3. Amy Chua, "Markets, Democracy, and Ethnicity: Toward a New Paradigm for Law and Development," Yale Law Journal 108 (October 1998): 1-108.
4. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 273.
5. Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2003), 15.

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