Coral Gables, Florida -- Democracy is not a western import but an indigenous adaptation of general principles by each and every country worldwide, says Lorne W. Craner, U.S. assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.

In an interview with the Washington File while attending the June 5-6 "Dialogue on Democracy" conference, Craner said democracy is expanding more and more worldwide every day and cited the Florida conference to illustrate his point.

This event, he said, came about as a direct follow-up to a 2002 Community of Democracies conference in Seoul attended by representatives of more than 100 democratic countries.

"If we had held the Seoul conference 30 years ago, there would have been maybe 30 democracies," he said, "so you can see the acceleration in the number of countries that have adopted democracy over these past 30 years.Some used to say it is a western import. It is not a western import anymore, it is something that is indigenous to each country."

Democracy is also not something that can be viewed as an American transplant, Craner emphatically stressed. "You can't transplant democracy from America. We have a very different democratic system than Great Britain...and they have a very different democratic system than France.

"What we are finding when we look at Mongolia, Mali or Mexico is that they have taken the principles of democracy and are figuring out" how to fine tune their own forms of democratic government to meet their own particular needs.

Democratic governments worldwide, he said, "want people to be involved in the electoral process and the process between elections -- which is in some ways at least as important as elections."

These countries, he said, "are figuring out how to do that themselves, adapting democracy to their local culture, traditions, history and mores It therefore becomes their own" particular form of democracy or their "own way of doing it," and unique to countries like Mali, Taiwan and Botswana.

Craner stressed that social, economic and democratic development work together to complement each other. "If you add up the gross national product (GNP) of the world's democratic countries," he noted, "it by far dwarfs the GNPs of the countries that are not democratic."

There are certain fundamental factors that are important to a country's development process -- like property rights and the rule of law – he said, and it is those qualities that a country's citizens as well as outside investors look for when considering whether to invest in a particular country.

"Do you want to invest in your own country or would you rather ship your money abroad where you know it is safer," he rhetorically asked. "If you don't have those kind of rule-of-law guarantees -- all of which are part of a democratic government -- you are going to ship your money overseas" to a democratic country where those principles are observed, he said.

"Even if you have some countries that have adopted some parts of rule of law but are undemocratic," he warned, "it is still an unstable situation. People know that dictatorships can't last and so they are very leery of investing in dictatorships.".

When asked about the importance of the two-day "Dialogue on Democracy" conference in Florida -- which included both governmental and non-governmental representatives from Africa, Latin America and Caribbean nations -- Craner called the event outstanding... What is clear to me is that Africans and Latin Americans have adopted and adapted democracy to their own form, and they view it very much as something that is their own. "

Commenting on the open and frank dialogue exchanged between participants at the conference plenary sessions, Craner said, "You are getting straight from the participants the advantages, the problems and challenges that democracy brings about. It turns out that many of them are facing very similar challenges."

One such challenge, he said, is determining how a country continues democratic development at the same time it is striving to achieve a high rate of economic growth and development.

Some problems, he added, have a greater impact on one region than on another. "I think for the Africans, HIV/AIDS is a big problem, and it is a threat to democracy. That is also the case for Brazil and the Caribbean here in the western hemisphere, but it is less of a challenge here in the western hemisphere."

Another benefit of the conference, Craner explained, is that "Africans are talking to Latins on how they faced down some of their problems and Latins are doing the same thing. So... (the Florida conference) is not...Americans talking about democracy. All of these countries have had enough experience. . . to know what they are talking about."

Craner, like the conference participants, also discussed the similarities between the Organization of American States (OAS) and the African Union (AU). "The OAS many years ago, said there ought to be democratic standards in this hemisphere. Here we are, 20 years later, and virtually every country but Cuba and one or two others, have been able to live up to those standards, starting really from very, very little. Of the 50-some
countries in Africa, I think anyone would rate 14 of them as democracies.

"I think what the AU is trying to do," he said, "is do the same thing by saying 'we need to have democratic standards on this (the African) continent'" and that democracy is not a western import. There are more than a dozen countries on the African continent that have
embraced democracy and Craner said many Africans at the conference expressed their hope that Africa can "live up to the same standards" that can be found in Asia, Eastern Europe or Latin America.

The conference was hosted by U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Paula J. Dobriansky as a direct follow-up to the 2002 Community of Democracies meeting in Seoul.

Government and non-governmental representatives from Cape Verde, Mali, Botswana, Senegal, Kenya, Ghana, Mozambique, Jamaica, Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Peru and the Dominican Republic participated in the event to share their experiences in strengthening democracy at home and abroad.