Those signs of progress are important and give historical validity to liberal theses. By no means, however, do they justify complacency, since one of the most refined (and rare) certainties of liberalism is that historical determinism does not exist. History has not been written so as to negate any further appeal. History is the work of men, and just as men can act rightly with measures that push history in the direction of progress and civilization, they can also err, and by conviction, apathy, or cowardice, allow history to slide into anarchy, impoverishment, obscurantism, and barbarism. The culture of democracy can gain new ground and consolidate the advances it has achieved. Or, it can watch its dominions shrink into nothingness, like Balzac's peau de chagrin. The future depends on us -- on our ideas, our votes, and the decisions of those we put into power.
For liberals, the war for the progress of liberty in history is, above all else, an intellectual struggle, a battle of ideas. The Allies won the war against the Axis, but that military victory did little more than confirm the superiority of a vision of man and society that is broad, horizontal, pluralist, tolerant, and democratic, over a vision that was narrow-minded, truncated, racist, discriminatory, and vertical. The disintegration of the Soviet empire before the democratic West validated the arguments of Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Popper, and Isaiah Berlin concerning the open society and the free economy, and invalidated the fatal arrogance of ideologues like Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, and Mao Zedong, who were convinced that they had unraveled the inflexible laws of history and interpreted them correctly with their proletarian dictatorships and economic centralism. We should also remember that the West achieved its victory over communism at a time when its societies were full of inferiority complexes: Ordinary democracy offered scant "sex appeal" next to the fireworks of the supposedly classless societies of the communist world.
The present battle is perhaps less arduous for liberals than the one that our teachers fought. In that battle, central planners, police states, single-party regimes, and state-controlled economies had on their side an empire that was armed to the teeth, as well as a formidable public relations campaign, conducted in the heart of democracy by a fifth column of intellectuals seduced by socialist ideas.
Today, the battle that we must join is not against great totalitarian thinkers, like Marx, or intelligent social democrats, like John Maynard Keynes, but, rather, against stereotypes and caricatures that attempt to introduce doubt and confusion in the democratic camp; hence the multiple offensive launched from various trenches against the monster nicknamed neoliberalism. The battle is also against the apocalyptics, a new species of skeptical thinker. Instead of opposing the culture of democracy, as did Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, or Jean-Paul Sartre, the apocalyptics are content to deny it, assuring us that democracy does not really exist and that we are dealing with a fiction, behind which lurks the ominous shadow of despotism.
Dictators or democrats?
Of that species, I would like to single out an emblematic case: that of Robert D. Kaplan. In "Was Democracy Just a Moment?," a provocative essay originally published in the December 1997 issue of The Atlantic and later incorporated into the 2000 book The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War, Kaplan maintains that, contrary to the optimistic expectations about the future of democracy heralded by the death of Marxism in Eastern Europe, humanity is actually headed toward a world dominated by authoritarianism. In some cases, this authoritarianism is undisguised, in others, it is masked by institutions of civil and liberal appearance. For Kaplan those institutions are mere decorations. The real power is -- or will soon be -- in the hands of giant international corporations, the owners of technology and capital that, thanks to their ubiquity and extraterritoriality, enjoy almost total impunity in their actions.
"I submit," he writes, "that the democracy we are encouraging in many poor parts of the world is an integral part of a transformation toward new forms of authoritarianism; that democracy in the United States is at greater risk than ever before, and from obscure sources; and that many future regimes, ours especially, could resemble the oligarchies of ancient Athens and Greece more than they do the current government in Washington."
His analysis is particularly negative with regard to the possibility that democracy may be able to find root in the developing world. According to Kaplan, all Western efforts to impose democracy in countries that lack a democratic tradition have resulted in terrible failures. Some of those failures have been very costly, as in Cambodia, where $2 billion invested by the international community have not advanced legality or liberty even a single millimeter in the ancient kingdom of Angkor. Efforts in places like Sudan, Algeria, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Congo, Mali, Russia, Albania, or Haiti, have created chaos, civil wars, terrorism, and the resurgence of ferocious tyrannies.
Kaplan looks with similar disdain upon the Latin American process of democratization. The exceptions are Chile and Peru. In his view, the fact that the first experienced the explicit dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and the second experienced the oblique dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori guarantees stability to those countries. By comparison, the so-called rule of law cannot preserve that stability in Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, or Brazil. In his judgment, the weakness of civil institutions, the excesses of corruption, and the astronomical inequalities are pushing "a backlash from millions of badly educated and newly urbanized dwellers in teeming slums, who see few palpable benefits to Western parliamentary systems."
Kaplan says what he thinks with clarity, and what he thinks is that democracy and the developing world are incompatible: "Social stability results from the establishment of a middle class. Not democracies but authoritarian systems, including monarchies, create middle classes." He cites the examples of the Asian Pacific Basin (his prime example is the Singapore of Lee Kuan Yew) and Pinochet's Chile. Although he does not mention it, he could have also cited Francisco Franco's Spain. The present-day authoritarian regimes he sees creating middle classes and making democracy possible are the China of "market socialism" and Fujimori's Peru (a military dictatorship with a civilian puppet as figurehead). Those are the models of development that he sees as forging "prosperity from abject poverty." For Kaplan the choice in the developing world is not "between dictators and democrats" but between "bad dictatorships and slightly better ones." In his opinion, "Russia may be failing in part because it is a democracy and China may be succeeding in part because it is not."
True social progress
I have taken the space to review these arguments because Kaplan says out loud what others -- many others -- think but do not dare say. Kaplan's pessimism with respect to the developing world is great; but it is not less than that inspired in him by the developed world. Once the efficient dictatorships have developed the poor countries and the new middle classes seek to gain access to Western-style democracy, they will only be chasing a mirage, he says. Western democracy will have been supplanted by a system (similar to those of Athens and Sparta) in which oligarchies -- the multinational corporations, operating on the five continents -- will have snatched from governments the power to make significant decisions for society and the individual. The oligarchies will exercise that power without accountability, because power comes to the giant corporations not by electoral mandate but through their technological and economic strength. Kaplan reminds us that out of the top 100 economies in the world, 51 are not countries but businesses, and that the 500 most powerful companies alone represent 70 percent of world commerce.
Those arguments are a good point of departure for comparison with the liberal vision in the new millennium. In that vision, the human creation of liberty is the source of the most extraordinary advances in the fields of science, human rights, technical progress, and the fight against despotism and exploitation.
The most outlandish of Kaplan's arguments is that only dictatorships create middle classes and bring stability to countries. If that were so, the paradise of the middle classes would not be the United States, Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It would be Mexico, Bolivia, or Paraguay. Latin American history is a veritable zoo of petty tyrants, strongmen, and maximum leaders. Juan Domingo Perón -- to give but one example -- nearly destroyed the middle class of Argentina, a middle class that until his rise to power was vast and prosperous and had developed its country at a faster pace than most of the European countries. Forty years of dictatorship have not brought Cuba the least prosperity, but have reduced it to the status of an international beggar; to keep from starving, Cubans have been condemned to eat grass and flowers, while their women prostitute themselves to capitalist tourists.
Of course, Kaplan can say that he is not talking about all dictatorships, but only the efficient ones like those of Pacific Asia and those of Pinochet and Fujimori. I read his essay, coincidentally enough, just when the supposedly efficient autocracy of Indonesia was crumbling, General Suharto was renouncing his office under pressure, and the Indonesian economy was collapsing. Shortly before that, the ex-autocracies of Korea and Thailand had collapsed and the famous Asian Tigers had begun to vanish into smoke, like something out of a Hollywood super-thriller. Apparently, those market dictatorships were not as successful as Kaplan thought. They are now gathered on their knees before the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, asking to be saved from total ruin.
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