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July 26, 2003 Unfortunately, nobody seems to care. In the United States, we have fallen into this mentality that if it doesn't affect me right now, it's probably not that important. Yet, it is important, and unfortunately, no one is even cognizant of how important it is, or even what it is. What am I talking about? I'm talking about our inability to support the one thing that may be the difference between our survivability and our demise: the little democracies around the world. Immediately, I know people are already starting to turn off. They don't care. You don't care. To be honest, mostly I didn't care either. At least until you start thinking about it. Recently, the Berlin Wall fell and tons of former communist countries became democracies. We fell over ourselves to welcome them, but then soon after, we stuck our heads back in the ground and forgot that if you follow Samuel Huntington's maxim that waves of democracy are followed by backlashes against democracy, that means we have a whole ton of countries that are quite possibly on the edge of becoming authoritative governments in the next decade. In other words, we're going to be fighting a bunch of wars we could have prevented just by paying attention to the democracies that have started to spring up. In Eastern Europe, a large number of countries are newly acquired democracies. They have been fighting amongst themselves through internal battles to finally find a common voice which has been that of democracy. Having lived under communist rule for so long, we should have been shocked at how easy they were able to establish and maintain parliamentary government with moralistic presidential leaders. This was a tough time for Eastern Europe, and a few attempts were actually almost complete failures, and we should consider ourselves lucky that they were able to be turned around. When Slovakia broke away from Czechoslovakia, it went the direction of a populist president who was not interested in defining the advanced institutions that bring about stronger democracy. He was interested in maintaining a power base, and he started to mimick the efforts by those of his neighbors, those in Yugoslavia. This could have gone really badly, and many people could have died, but at the crucial moment in 1998, the Slovaks decided that they didn’t want to go that direction. Sure, they hated the Hungarians, the natural enemy of the Slovaks for that evil nasty thing they did when they were called the Magyars (of which the Slovaks still indicate that genocide should never be forgotten; which makes one very frightened for the fact that something that happened in the lifetime of ancestors is still something that causes one to seek revenge), but when it came down to it the people of Slovakia worked together a coalition that threw out Mecier’s racist party. But this is important. He’s not gone. His party picked up twenty percent of the seats during the last election, which indicates that hatred is not always on the other side of the door; quite often, it sits in the same parlour as you, just waiting to take charge again. What has the United States done about this? For the most part, we’ve kept our nose out of it other than to point at the successes and say „good country“ when they do a good job, and then ignore them when they do badly. Well, recently, because a bunch of these struggling democracies didn’t like our desire to remain guilt free in courts for our actions we conduct around the world, we cut them off from aid. So, a struggling democracy, that might make it based on whether or not its people believe it is succeeding, might just fall back into a dictatorship because we felt that it was unfair that they didn’t sign on and make us exempt from any of their international laws. If they end up as really bad countries and cause many, many people to die, you really have to wonder how our PR machine is going to paint them for their evil methods and never bother to mention how we had a chance to make a difference. We have this same problem in South Africa. This new democracy needs help badly, but we're ignoring the country for the most part and just figuring that because they're a democracy, they'll make it okay. But they won't. History as a dependent variable is not so kind. The sad thing is: most people in the United States don’t even know what is going on in South Africa. As the South African writer Allister Sparks pointed out in 2002, most people in the west think that things that happen in South Africa are lumped in with everything else that happens in Africa, so if they’re killing themselves in Liberia, it is heavily linked to South Africa. Even worse, most Americans probably don’t even know South Africa is a newly emerging democracy. Oh sure, they know that Nelson Mandela was involved somehow, but that’s about the extent of the knowledge. A former communist entity, the ANC, is now in charge of the government, actually working to make a multicultural system work, and it is one of those organizations that can go either way if things get bad enough. Look at the neighbor of South Africa, Zimbabwe. It was becoming a consolidated democracy, but in one of the most psychotic examples of how things can change overnight, it became the flip side of South Africa, and now there is nothing but death and misery in that country. That’s a democracy gone bad. That’s what we have to look forward to if we decide to just ignore the potentiality of fate. So, what can we do? We can make sure that our leaders know that we care about the democracies in this world, and that we as democrats (the institution, not the party) intend to make sure that they maintain as democracies. In the end, the beneficiary will be us. Or we will be fighting that war that could have so easily been avoided with care and attention. That's always cheaper than tanks and lives. ------------ About the author: Duane Gundrum is a political scientist who studies transitional governments and the concept of anarchy within stable governments. He is a former counterintelligence agent, and he currently lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. You can read his blogger at Am I really a scientist? or email Duane Gundrum: flippery@sarbonn.com Comment on this column in the forum. Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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