The Spirit of Democracy, page 6
When the dictatorship fell to the Carnation Revolution, it was far from clear that Portugal would become a democracy. It had never been one before. It had just been through half a century of quasi-fascist rule. The ailing Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, clung to power over the border. Both countries were steeped in a Latin, Catholic culture that was dismissed by many political scientists and commentators as being unsuited to democracy, a logic that was used to explain the virtual absence of democracy in Latin America at the time. Quickly, the Portuguese armed forces fractured into ideological factions, and the country fell into a period of intense political mobilization, intrigue, and peril. As Samuel Huntington summarized it:
For eighteen months after the April coup, Portugal was in turmoil. The MFA officers split into competing conservative, moderate, and Marxist factions. The political parties covered an equally wide spectrum, from the hard-line Communist party on the left to fascist groups on the right. Six provisional governments succeeded each other, each exercising less authority than its predecessor. Coups and countercoups were attempted. Workers and peasants struck, demonstrated, and seized factories, farms, and media. Moderate parties won the national elections on the anniversary of the coup in 1975, but by the fall of that year civil war appeared possible between the conservative north and the radical south.1
For a time, it looked as though the Communists would take over in Portugal. In September 1974, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned Mário Soares, leader of the moderate Socialist Party (PS), that he would wind up like Alexander Kerensky in Russia—swallowed by the Bolsheviks.2 But the West bet heavily on a democratic outcome and channeled aid to democratic parties and movements, including the PS. The April 1975 constituent assembly elections indicated a clear preference for the democratic center. When radical military units tried to seize power in 1975, they were crushed by “a taciturn prodemocracy colonel,” António Ramalho Eanes.3 A constitutional compromise was reached in April 1976 and a democratic government elected shortly thereafter.
THE THIRD WAVE OF DEMOCRATIZATION
The triumph of democracy in Portugal was the beginning of a political boom for democracy in the world. In his highly influential book, Huntington termed this the third wave of democratic expansion in the world.4 He dates the first long wave of democratization to 1828, with the expansion of democratic suffrage in the United States, through the early 1920s, with the ascendance of Mussolini in Italy and the first reverse wave. A second, shorter, democratic wave began with the Allied victory in World War II, incorporating a number of Latin American and newly independent (primarily former British) colonies. But by 1962, a second reverse wave had begun, bringing widespread military and one-party rule and leaving only two states in South America democratic.
With the overthrow of the dictatorship in Portugal in 1974, the third wave of democratization began. At that time, there were only about forty democracies in the world, mainly in the advanced industrial countries (and including a dozen microstates with populations of less than one million). Among countries with more than one million people, Huntington counts only thirty democracies in the world at the end of 1973, slightly less than a quarter of all states.5 Scattered through Africa, Asia, and Latin America were a few other democracies: India, Sri Lanka, Botswana, Costa Rica, Venezuela. But military, one-party, or one-man dictatorships dominated most of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. All of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were under Communist rule.
Since then, democracy has expanded dramatically. For some time following the Portuguese revolution, however, there was only a modest and gradual trend, giving no sign of the global transformation to come. Three months after the Portuguese revolution, the seven-year-old Greek military dictatorship fractured following its military defeat by Turkey in Cyprus. Humiliated and in disarray, the Greek military was forced to call on civilians to form a caretaker government, which led to parliamentary elections in November 1974 and a restoration of civilian constitutional rule.
The following year, the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, in power nearly four decades since his alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany during the Spanish Civil War, became terminally ill, and Prince Juan Carlos, who had previously been designated as heir to the Spanish throne, assumed provisional powers in October. When Franco died the next month, Juan Carlos became king, and pressure for democratic transition escalated dramatically with the young king’s tacit support. In July 1976, Franco’s last prime minister was replaced by a shrewd and able young reformist conservative, Adolfo Suárez. He deftly shepherded a transition by negotiating compromise “pacts” with opposition forces and keeping the military and the conservative elements involved. Suárez held control of government for the conservatives in the June 1977 parliamentary elections and forged an agreement with the Socialist and Communist parties on social and economic reforms in October (the famous Pact of Moncloa). A year later, the parliament overwhelmingly approved a new constitution, completing the transition to democracy in late 1978. The Spanish model of a “pacted” transition, in which the old authoritarian establishment and the rising democratic opposition negotiate a series of mutual guarantees and restraints, would become a model for many future democratic transitions in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa—in particular, South Africa.
This democratization in Portugal and Spain influenced the scene in Latin America, which was under pressure from increasingly assertive popular movements and from the United States, where a new foreign policy emphasis on human rights had been introduced by President Jimmy Carter. In 1978, the authoritarian strongman of the Dominican Republic, Joaquin Balaguer, was defeated and left office, marking the first real electoral alternation of government in Dominican history. That same year, a constituent assembly was elected in Peru to draft a new constitution, and in May 1980, a democratically elected government assumed power. In 1979, a transition back to elected civilian rule occurred in Ecuador.
In a seminal event for the region, the brutal Argentine military dictatorship imploded in 1982 following its ill-considered invasion of the Falkland Islands and its humiliating defeat at the hands of the British military. Led by Raúl Alfonsín, democratic forces independent of both the military and the long-dominant party of the populist demagogue Juan Perón scored a decisive victory in the October 1983 elections and began to revive respect for human rights and the rule of law. At the same time, Brazil experienced an extended process of abertura (opening) from two decades of military rule to civilian leadership. Brazil’s political decompression was completed in January 1985, when the opposition leader Tancredo Neves won the presidency in the electoral college, despite procedures favoring the military party. Although Neves died tragically soon thereafter, the liberalization process continued with the adoption of a new constitution in October 1988.
Despite these important changes in Europe and the Americas, the global democratic trend remained quite limited. By 1980, the proportion of democracies in the world had only increased to a third of all states, from a little over a quarter in 1973. Moreover, significant reversals were occurring. Democracy had given way to the military in Turkey and to civil war in Lebanon, and three prominent new democracies—Bangladesh, Ghana, and Nigeria—broke down within a few years. Between 1973 and 1980, the number of democracies increased from forty to fifty-four, but more than a third (nineteen) were in microstates with fewer than one million people. Seven of the new democracies of the 1970s were in tiny Caribbean and Pacific island states that had recently become independent. By 1984, the proportion of democracies among states with over one million population (29 percent) was less than half that among the microstates (62 percent).
A decade into the third wave, the world remained predominantly authoritarian, unaware that an unprecedented global transformation was under way. Western Europe was now entirely democratic, as was about half of Latin America. But Communist regimes appeared firmly entrenched, and Japan remained the only East Asian democracy. Africa was still untouched by the changes in Europe and Latin America. In fact, the military had just seized power in the continent’s largest and most dynamic country, Nigeria, after grotesque electoral fraud returned the venal ruling party to power by a huge margin.
Then, in 1986, a “miracle” happened. In the first of what would be a number of “people power revolutions” during the third wave, the Philippine opposition mobilized society with tactics of nonviolent resistance to split the regime and bring down the dictator.6 In November 1985, President Ferdinand Marcos, under growing domestic and international pressure for looting the country and suppressing dissent for two decades, sought to shore up his sagging legitimacy by calling an early presidential election. The opposition had been inflamed since August 1983, when the charismatic democratic leader Benigno Aquino was assassinated on the tarmac of the Manila airport upon his return from exile in the United States. A government commission of inquiry placed responsibility for the murder with the armed forces chief of staff, General Fabian Ver (a onetime chauffeur and bodyguard to Marcos), but he was acquitted by a biased court and reinstated to his job, intensifying the unrest. Thinking he could win a quick test of his popularity, Marcos announced a “snap election” in order to “restore confidence” in his rule. But, under moral pressure from the esteemed Catholic archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin, the normally fractious opposition united around Aquino’s widow, Corazón. And when Marcos brazenly rigged the election, the fraud was documented by an unprecedented citizen vote-monitoring effort, the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL), as well as by foreign observers. Heading President Reagan’s official U.S. delegation of election observers, Senator Richard Lugar endorsed the NAMFREL vote count, as did the Catholic Church. With Marcos and Aquino both claiming victory, Aquino called for civil disobedience, boycotts, and other forms of peaceful protest to “bring down the usurper,” and reform-minded military leaders defected from Marcos and recognized Aquino as the legitimately elected president. At the urging of Cardinal Sin, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos then poured into the highway in Manila (EDSA) that connected the two military rebel bases and prayed on their knees. In what came to be known as the “miracle at EDSA,” crowds linking arms and nuns holding rosaries stopped tanks and troops loyal to Marcos in their tracks. Support for Marcos evaporated, and he fled into exile.
The spirit of democracy was spreading to East Asia. The next year it was the turn of South Korea. When the military dictator, President Chun Doo Hwan, suspended all consideration of constitutional reforms necessary for meaningful democratization, mass protests erupted in April 1987, drawing the middle classes that had swelled in size over two decades of economic growth. With the mobilization of a more moderate opposition and the Olympics due to be held in Seoul the following summer, the United States warned Chun not to use force to suppress the demonstrations. In the face of intense domestic and international pressure, Chun’s designated successor, Roh Tae Woo, felt compelled to yield to the opposition’s demands for constitutional reform and the release of political prisoners. Although the opposition ultimately divided between Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam, enabling Roh to win the December 1987 presidential election with a plurality, nearly three decades of authoritarian military rule came to an end.
By then, a transition to democracy had begun in another East Asian “tiger,” Taiwan. In October 1986, President Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and decided to allow opposition parties to organize (as one had already boldly done the previous month). Chiang, the son of the nationalist Chinese dictator Chiang Kai-shek, was heir to a reign of one-party domination stretching back more than half a century to the Chinese mainland. But Communist China was beginning to boom and his own health was poor, and he could see the need for change. Even in the absence of formal party opposition, increasingly competitive elections had been occurring for decades, and (as in Korea, but with less radicalism) economic development was giving rise to a growing array of vocal civil society organizations. When Chiang died in January 1988, power passed for the first time to a member of the native, Taiwan-born majority, Lee Tenghui. Over the next eight years, Lee led a series of sweeping constitutional, legal, and electoral reforms that dismantled the authoritarian structures, separated the ruling party from the state, and culminated with his own landslide win in the country’s first direct presidential election in 1996.
By the late 1980s, the winds of democratic change were blowing vigorously in Asia, though not always with successful outcomes. In August 1988, Thailand crossed the murky line from a military-dominated semi-democracy to an electoral democracy when Chatichai Choonhavan became the first elected member of parliament to become prime minister since the breakdown of the country’s previous democratic experiment, in 1976. Chatichai’s effort to assert greater civilian control over the military motivated two generals to seize power in 1991. However, when they tried to restore “democracy” through the old superficial guise of military-backed parties and an unelected prime minister, it set off massive demonstrations and a return to genuine democracy.
Affected by the democratic change sweeping the region, thousands of students and intellectuals came to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in April 1989 to mourn the sudden death of the reformist general secretary of the Communist Party, Hu Yaobang. As their numbers swelled, their concerns broadened to include demands for press freedom and for a dialogue on democratic reforms between elected student representatives and regime officials. The students staged a mass hunger strike, supported by hundreds of thousands of other students, intellectuals, and workers in Beijing. Millions joined the protests as they spread to cities around China. It looked as though the Chinese regime might agree to significant reforms or even unravel, but hard-liners crushed the demonstrations in a deadly military assault on June 4.
Around this time, most of the remaining Latin American dictatorships were giving way as well. In Chile, the once polarized democratic parties united with other civic forces in a vigorous campaign in 1988 to defeat a plebiscite that would have given the military dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, another eight years in power. The next year, the democratic coalition decisively defeated the regime’s favored candidate. In February 1989, Alfredo Stroessner’s thirty-five-year dictatorship in nearby Paraguay was overthrown, and the country began a rocky transition through free (if not fair) elections. In December 1989, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was ousted by American troops, enabling the legitimate victor in the presidential elections to be inaugurated. Two months later, the violent conflict in Nicaragua ended with democratic elections that dealt a stunning defeat to the authoritarian Sandinista regime. In January 1992, a negotiated settlement peacefully ended El Salvador’s civil war, permitting a more inclusive and meaningful democracy to emerge.
Meanwhile, in South Asia, democracy was also being restored. The Pakistani military’s effort to manipulate elections and thwart popular pressure for a return to genuine democracy lost steam when the dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, died in a plane crash in August 1988. Three months later, national parliamentary elections led to the appointment as prime minister of Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of a former civilian prime minister and an eloquent campaigner for democracy. In Bangladesh, the military strongman General Hossain Ershad maneuvered for years to find a formula to extend his hold on power, converting his status into that of an “elected” president, but he never succeeded in taming the unruly political parties or civil society. When opposition demonstrations snowballed into nationwide (and increasingly violent) strikes, Ershad’s support collapsed, and in October 1990, he resigned; an elected civilian government was restored in early 1991. Around the same time, Nepal was moving from a more or less absolute monarchy (with a feckless array of parties and elected bodies) to a constitutional monarchy with a freely elected government. Widespread popular protests forced the autocrat to yield.
THE SECOND BURST OF THE THIRD WAVE
When Nepal’s bitterly divided parties came together into the new Movement for the Restoration of Democracy in February 1990, they drew inspiration from the dramatic images of democratic change in other countries. But the source of their encouragement was not Pakistan, or Bangladesh, or any other Asian country, so much as it was the stunning events of the preceding six months in Eastern Europe.
The dividing line between the two phases of the third wave is marked by the events of 1989. Indeed, the changes wrought by the downfall of East European communism were so profound that some scholars have dubbed the subsequent period of democratization a fourth wave.7 At the end of 1988, only two of every five governments in the world were democratic; the global democratic trend had spread from Western Europe to Latin America and then to Asia, but not beyond. With sudden and startling force, that shifted. By 1994, another 20 percent of the world’s states had become democratic, even as new states were being created with the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Soviet empire. In barely half a decade, forty countries made transitions to democracy at a dizzying speed.
The cascade began unexpectedly in August 1989, when Communist Hungary opened its border with Austria, and over thirteen thousand East German tourists escaped to freedom. Crucial also were the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s “perestroika” reforms, which appeared to remove the specter of military intervention from the east, as had happened with the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968. Anti-Communist demonstrations, inspired by the moral leadership and vision of courageous democratic dissidents like Czech playwright Václav Havel, swept through Eastern Europe, and Communist regimes toppled. On October 18, 1989, the aging but still ruthless East German party boss, Erich Honecker, who had predicted that the Berlin Wall would stand for a “hundred more years,” resigned in the face of massive demonstrations and flights from the country, and soon thereafter his desperate successors began dismantling the wall. A year later, the two Germanys were united as one democracy.
