Fareed Zakaria: Has Bush Soured the World on Democracy?
Newsweek
January 23, 2007

In a Newsweek article Fareed Zakaria places blame on the Bush administration for the Freedom House assessment that democracy is stagnant in the world in their 2007 Freedom in the World.  Zakaria claims that “some of the explanation lies in the global antipathy to the U.S. president,” citing Egyptian civil activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim’s statement that “we (democracy activists) have all been hurt by the association with the Bush administration.”  He accuses the “freedom agenda” of the Bush administration as seeing “the entire complex process of political and economic development through one simple lens,” leading to “bad analysis and bad outcomes.” 

Zakaria quotes CCD Board member Larry Diamond as saying “Bush’s arrogance has turned people off the idea of democracy.”  Diamond says that “in many developing countries democracy is not working very well,” and has resulted in “government paralysis, corruption and ethnic warfare.” 

The article uses the situation in Iraq as an example of the “simple lens” of Bush’s “freedom agenda.”  Zakaria says that despite the touting of political progress in Iraq, the reality is that the country “has seen its politics and institutions fall apart….it’s state dismantled, its economy disrupted, (and) its social order overturned…”  He calls the administration’s definition of political development in this context “strange.” 

The fundamental problem in the developing world is the lack of governance, not the lack of democracy according to Zakaria.  He believes that we need to “reward countries when they protect human rights, reduce corruption and increase the quality of governance,” not solely aiding countries that are democracies, as is the current policy of the Bush administration.  Zakaria quotes Larry Diamond again, saying that “our aid should be conditional on absolute standards.”  Diamond uses the European Union as an example, claiming that it has “forced change on countries that want to join it by demanding real progress in tough issues.”