From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
The Future of Freedom
Democracy isn't always as important as the rule of law.
As a rule, I'm a sucker for books with "freedom" in the title. I like them even more when the word is deployed in an effort to distinguish between, on the one hand, nations where liberty is enshrined in law and, on the other, nations where elections decide only which snouts get to feed from the public trough. So not even a favorable dust-jacket plug from Peter Jennings could put me off Fareed Zakaria's splendid "The Future of Freedom."
Mr. Zakaria flies his colors bright and bold. That is to say, the editor of Newsweek's international edition sails comfortably within a classical liberal tradition recognizing that the limitations on government are more important to the freedom and prosperity of any given people than how or whether its government is elected. At the moment that's a timely message, with Donald Rumsfeld's blitzkrieg having just cleared the path for Iraqis to build something the Arab peoples do not yet have: a free society.
Mr. Zakaria's healthy skepticism about the transforming effects of elections alone can easily get a man tagged as hostile to democracy. That is especially true for a man who writes such things as "the 'Western model of government' is best symbolized not by the mass plebiscite but the impartial judge." But for the most part the principles that Mr. Zakaria espouses would be eminently congenial to John Adams or James Madison. I say "for the most part" because his recent Newsweek cover story ("The Arrogant Empire") at times appears to confuse constitutional checks and balances with, say, the Kyoto Protocol.
But that's another story. With our having reached Francis Fukuyama's "end of history"--i.e., a world where democratic capitalism has won the argument--the real question has become specific: How do you get there from here? In most cases, "here" can be an ugly political beast, whether it be post-Soviet Russia, still-Communist China or Wahhabist Saudi Arabia. And though we have no shortage of road maps in theory, in practice, Mr. Zakaria rightly notes, the tough first steps toward more openness have mostly been taken by "liberalizing autocrats." (Whether freedom was their aim is another question altogether.)
Want your country to develop? Assuming you're not fighting a war, civil or otherwise, pretty much all it takes is the rule of law plus a sound currency. Plainly societies have managed to achieve economic success (think Suharto's Indonesia) without genuine democracy. But the record from Taiwan to Chile increasingly suggests that the inevitable byproduct of a society that creates sustained affluence will be a middle class less willing to be patronized by an unaccountable government.
That's why Mr. Zakaria spends so much time relating per capita GDP to a nation's prospects for democracy, suggesting that the sweet zone lies somewhere between $3,000 and $6,000 a year. And he rightly distinguishes between merely having money (e.g., the oil-rich "trust-fund states" of the Persian Gulf) and having the "earned wealth" created by free people applying their talents in open (or opening) economies grounded in law. Still, that message can be a hard sell in an impatient global village. "In an age of images and symbols," Mr. Zakaria notes, "elections are easy to capture on film. But how do you capture the rule of law?"
Good question. The Hong Kong where I lived for nearly a decade was exactly what it was called: a Crown Colony, with an appointed British governor presiding over an executive-led administration. What it did have, however, was a rule of law that was palpable. I remember feeling this myself in a Hong Kong courtroom, where I was the defendant in a civil action brought by a Chinese furniture merchant whose goods were built by desperate Filipino illegals he exploited in his factory. Though the judge and plaintiffs were both Chinese, though most people in the room were also Chinese, and though nearly everyone chattered away in a Cantonese I could not understand, I never doubted that I would get a fair shake. And I did.
This public confidence cannot be legislated; it must be built up, like the rule of law itself, over decades. In Hong Kong it impressed even Chinese revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen. Another was Tsang Ki-fan, an old newspaperman who, like many Chinese nationalists, had originally felt humiliated at having been forced to find his refuge from communism in a British colony. Yet just before he died in 1989 he put it this way: Hong Kong was "the only Chinese society that, for a brief span of 100 years, lived through an ideal never realized at any time in the history of Chinese societies--a time when no man had to live in fear of the midnight knock on the door."
In the Philippines, by contrast, at least since the People Power revolution of Cory Aquino, Filipinos have "enjoyed" elections. But how many Filipinos would tell you with a straight face that they have either the rule of law or government "of the people, by the people and for the people"? The sorry upshot is that a land rich in natural resources, located smack dab in arguably the most dynamic part of the world and boasting one of the world's most talented, hardworking people, still sends thousands of college-educated women abroad to work as other people's maids because there is no opportunity at home.
None of this is an argument against representative government. It isan argument for sequencing. "First," Mr. Zakaria writes, "a government must be able to control the governed, then it must be able to control itself. Order plus liberty. These two forces will, in the long run, produce legitimate government, prosperity and liberal democracy." Easier said than done, for sure. But as true for postwar Baghdad as it was for Berlin.
Mr. McGurn is the Journal's chief editorial writer.
