At one level, I think the future of democracy is assured. We live in a democratic age. There is no system of government, broadly speaking, that has greater legitimacy. You knew this ideology had won when the Khmer Rouge had to call itself the Democratic Republic of Cambodia, when the enemies of democracy had to start calling themselves democratic. The danger for democracies does not really come from the outside but from within, from the fact that democracy becomes so vague and meaningless a phrase that it can be hijacked for almost any purpose. Within democracy, people countenance and allow thoroughly illiberal, authoritarian elements, as with the Iranian mullahs, the nationalists of the Balkans, or some of the more brutal regimes elected in South Asia.

And to a certain extent, even the Western world faces its own version of this problem. We are going through a period in which every aspect of our lives is being democratized. Democratization is taking place at political, cultural, social, and economic levels. Democracy has always existed as one element among many. In an Aristotelian sense, we have always lived in mixed regimes. We have had democracy, but we have had other undemocratic elements that have always been part of the mix: constitutions, laws, but also Tocquevillian institutions like political parties. We are getting to the point where all these things are being swept aside in a great democratic wave. If they are themselves not thoroughly democratized, they are cast aside. This means that you apply this test of democracy to everything in life.

I do not believe that this is a great future for democracy. Democracy is one very important element of political, social, and economic life, but it is not the only one. You want to have a society where you can celebrate the other elements which are often undemocratic like constitutions or guilds. One of the things we have lost is the kind of independent, intermediate associations that Tocqueville celebrated and that had their own internal standards and reputations. Something like a legal guild comes to mind as having such effects. Now the legal sector is thoroughly democratized and marketized. Lawyers have no real independent role, as we have seen in the Enron scandal in the United States. I strongly believe that it is important for Westerners not merely to associate the problems of democracy with distant countries like Sierre Leone and Kazakhstan. There is a common problem of overvaluing democratic process and the magic of the legitimacy conferred by that process and undervaluing the other elements of society that go into making a liberal democracy.

What are the problems that arise from democracy when it is applied to ethnically or culturally diverse states? What are the contradictions of the ideology of democracy and self-determination in states that are composed of very different cultures and traditions?

When you introduce democracy at an early stage of development in multi-ethnic, diverse societies, there is an enormous incentive for politicians to play the race card, or the religion card, because those are easily mobilized votes, thereby exacerbating differences that are often quite mild. In some places, this can lead to the invention of distinctions. This danger was seen most powerfully in the Balkans, where people like Slobodan Milosevic were very popular in large part due to their ability to appeal to a latent nationalism.

There is another more general problem, however. In order to have a liberal democracy, you need to have a group of people committed to liberalism. This group tends to be middle class in some broad sense. If you do not have that group, then people start to mobilize along other lines. The most obvious ones are ethnicity, religion, and race. Where is the liberalism going to come from in a democratic electoral framework if you do not have some bloc of liberal votes?

You have spoken about how liberal non-democracies could be transformed by the invasion of the bourgeoisie. What do you think should be done about nations in more of a disrupted state where there is illiberal democracy and no established political force? Should this be treated in the same way, with Western ambassadors going abroad and urging free markets?

It is an interesting question. When you confront an illiberal democracy, should you ask for more democracy or less? In the case of Pakistan, which had an illiberal democracy, clearly it has benefited by having less democracy and more liberalism. In a country like Iran, perhaps the best thing is more democracy and more liberalism. You have to take that on a case-by-case basis. The interesting example now is Russia, where some claim that Putin is genuinely reforming, but there is no question that he has dramatically consolidated power, particularly vis-ŕ-vis the Duma and the regional governors, the two other main sources of political power within Russia. He has in effect created an elected autocracy and is now pursuing liberal reform. The argument has become that you want to have democracy so you can create a super-president, a benign autocrat who can then give you real democracy. This strikes me as a very tenuous argument for illiberal democracy.

Many people say that it is better to have the democracy because an illiberal democracy will lead to liberal democracy. However, what you see in Pakistan and Russia is that liberal democracy can lead to the installation of an autocrat, who may or may not be liberal. I do not know if there is an easy answer for all illiberal democracies. I think we should mainly push for liberalism, for the kinds of things you were talking about like capitalism, but also for human rights. There used to be a big debate about human rights versus democratization in the 1970s and 1980s. I think for now we can certainly say that the more important task for US foreign policy should be to push for human rights, meaning political and economic rights, rather than proceduralism, which is to say elections.

In the post-September 11 environment, US President George Bush has characterized US foreign policy in relation to an “axis of evil,” which includes three illiberal states, some of them democracies. How do you think this attitude is going to influence the potential for democratization and the spread of constitutional liberalism?