DEMOCRACY: If You Can Keep It

National Review, Jan 24, 2000 by Jean-Francois Revel

THE current president of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, was until quite recently a pro-Soviet apparatchik and collaborator of General Jaruzelski. But now, when he is addressing assembled fellow citizens in the capital, he makes his speech in Ronald Reagan Square. He faces a towering, massive edifice in the Stalinist style, which served as headquarters of the Polish Communist Party. Today it is the Warsaw Stock Exchange.

Politics consists not only of the law of unintended consequences, but of the law of improbability. Things that fifteen years ago no futuristic- minded filmmaker would have dared offer the public have become true, not to say commonplace. In front of our eyes, history has taken a shortcut so full of ironies that there is good reason to be optimistic about the future of democracy. The 20th century, it is tempting to believe, has concluded in the widespread victory of democracy, or, at the very least, in a general reorientation of mankind in the direction of democracy.

Let us be optimistic, by all means, but on one condition: that we steadily bear in mind that the law of improbability can also work itself out in some contrary sense, and at extreme speed too. At the close of the 19th century, nobody could conceivably have predicted that the 20th would belong to totalitarianism. The term itself, not yet devised, pointed to a reality that humanity had never experienced in the course of its history.

The arithmetic that divides the passing of time into segments of a hundred years is artificial, and best left to one side. In the perspective of history as it has actually occurred, the 19th century, as has often been noted, lasted from 1815 to 1914, and the 20th from 1919 to 1989.

In the wake of revolutionary and Napoleonic upheavals, Europe after 1815 was effectively stable for the rest of the century. Wars, revolutions, and coups there might have been, but democracy was set on a course that steadily gathered pace throughout the nations of Europe: the incremental adoption of the universal franchise, trade-union rights for the workforce, the origins of the welfare state, freedom of expression and recourse to the law, cultural independence, guarantees for the individual against an arbitrary state, literacy for the masses and the spread of education. Already in operation, and relayed via Tocqueville, American democracy was held up as the model for Europe. The former colonies of Latin America won their liberty, however chaotic the next stages of their history were to prove. Even Czarist Russia was slowly liberalizing. Asked in 1900 for an opinion about the future, an impartial observer would have had every reason to predict that the century ahead would see the peaceful extension of the whole process of democratization.

It did not. The years after the First War gave rise to regimes of a type not previously known, under the general description of "totalitarian": Bolshevism in 1917, Fascism in 1922, Nazism in 1933. When we say "of a type not previously known," we mean that a regime may very well be undemocratic without being totalitarian. European monarchies in the age of absolutism, Greek city-states under the rule of a tyrant, the governments of Italian cities in the Renaissance--all were authoritarian, but not totalitarian. In every one of these political structures, economic life was largely autonomous, and supreme authority was subject to a variety of checks and balances, whether feudal, regional, religious, legal, or university-related. Scientific research, the pursuit of philosophy, and artistic and literary creativity were matters of free choice, almost without qualification. Each society went its own way.

In contrast, a totalitarian regime by definition is a cast-iron monopoly of politics, the economy, and the culture, for the benefit of a self- appointed oligarchy. The operation of such a monopoly requires ideologically driven machinery for suppressing individual liberty and obliterating culture. All totalitarianisms mean the rule of an Idea. This ideological and utopian substructure explains one of the strangest characteristics of all totalitarianisms: the liquidation of their own people. The moment that their Idea proves to be impossibly unrealistic in practice, the oligarchs put the failure down to "unhealthy" elements, at fault on account of either race or class, and they then set about "purging" millions of innocent people who are not even political opponents.

IDEOLOGY, DEAD AND ALIVE

Because no futurologist at the start of the century could ever have imagined that "totalitarian" regimes would appear in Europe--and in most of Asia and in some Latin American countries as well--it seems unwise to take for granted that the breakup of Communism after 1989 will lead inexorably to the spread of the market economy everywhere, and to democracy as the globe's sole political system. Such a deduction might seem a certainty in the logic of things, but the progress of the 20th century is evidence that logic may not be the principal motor of history.