Has Democracy won its War?

The Cold war ended with the defeat of the USSR and Communism. Democracy came out as the winner and solution for all the problems in the world such as war, tyranny, poverty, etc. Almost 30 years have passed but still, democracy has been seen struggling. It was seen as the solution to wars and tyranny but it created wars. Its goal was to spread freedom but it was seen that it was suppressing the right of freedom of different states and it was challenging their sovereignty. Thus democracy failed to achieve its objectives and was not able to continue on its true path.

Democracy is derived from the Greek word demokratia, which was coined from demos meaning people and Kratos meaning people. Thus it means rule by people. Generally, democracy is seen as a process of elections in which different parties compete to form the government. But democracy is more than elections. Democracy basically is a set of ideas about political power and institutions. It revolves around three basic features:

1. Opposing political parties rotate peacefully in power through free and fair elections.
2. All institutions in the government, including the military, are subject to the control of the elected officials.
3. Individuals have fundamental protections of their civil rights such as the right to practice their religion freely, freedom of expression, right to vote, right to form political parties, etc.

Supporters of democracy explain that democracy through institutions helps to improve global security by stabilizing trade and diplomacy. While the absence of democracy results in failure of diplomacy resulting in violence and wars such as in the Middle East. Therefore spreading democracy may enable the world to transcend anarchy and war. President Bill Clinton said in 1994 in his State of the Union message,

“The advance of democracy elsewhere…the best strategy to ensure…to security and to build a durable peace. Democracies do not attack each other, they make better trading partners and partners in diplomacy.”

Democracy was supposed to end all forms of struggle, tyranny, and violence because there is no need for competition in democratic states as democracy is based on universalism and equal recognition of individuals as well as states. As it is the struggle of status which derives states into the struggle of power and hence into the competition, conflicts, and then into wars. Once states are democratic, they will recognize each other equal and democratic peace will be maintained as explained in End of history by Francis Fukuyama. He said that the spread of democracy had brought an end to the violent struggle among the states. He explained that with the defeat and disintegration of the Soviet Union, Communism also died its death. Hence, democracy came out as a winner, unchallenged, and the only successful system in the world. Democracy was able to pull out a victory over Communism because it provided equality among the individuals and states which ended the quest for power and competition between them. Hegel also explained this by saying, “People desire to be recognized by other people, and that spiritedness ignites a struggle for social status to gain recognition by others creating conflicts between them.” States also function in the same way thus the result is conflicts and war. This is why democracy is very important to end these competitions and conflicts between states. In this argument, it can be seen how democracy is better than communism and it is must be needed in this anarchic world. Fukuyama at the end of the Cold War said that,

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of the particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of the government. This is not to say that there will be no longer be events to fill the pages….for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long turn.”

Critically analyzing all these points we got to know that we have been manipulated by democracy. Democracy is directly proportional to liberal democracy which was the aim of America to spread it in the whole world hence making all the states democratic in which it failed. So by this, The End of History proposed by Fukuyama is still not achieved. It demands the whole system to be democratic. Therefore the whole world is not democratic thus democratic peace can not be achieved. Democracy can only work when the whole system consists of democratic states and if not then the objectives of it can never be fulfilled. Because when there will be two opposite sides there will be always conflicts among them.

We can’t agree with Fukuyama on his End of History because, after almost 30 years of his book, there are still many non-democratic countries in the world such as Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Islamic countries, etc. Democracy is full of idealism that sees democratic states as the most democratic states but if we compare a non-democratic Chinese state with a democratic Indian state we can see that China is more peaceful than India. Similarly, Israel is said to be democratic but we can see their atrocities on Palestinians. So we should not make judgments on peace seeing the democratic nature of the state.

Democracy is said to be the system that will establish peace but peace never established after the end of the Cold War. It is said that democratic states don’t go into war but we have the biggest examples of the United States and Great Britain. We can also see the atrocities done by those democratic Western states in their colonies when they were sellers of democracy but at the same time, they were the biggest tyrants of their time such as Britain and France. The United States who is the champion of liberal democracy was involved in big wars such as the gulf wars and the Afghan war which continued for almost 2 decades. America has also been involved in the proxies in the Middle East. Also, we can see from the history of the West that liberals have never opposed war such as in the case of the United States and Great Britain. Professor John Mearsheimer says that,

“ US is addicted to war.”

By democracy, the West wanted to spread actually liberal democracy. Liberalism is all about the freedom of speech that individuals can’t agree on the first principles but they should respect other’s opinions and should give space to other people to express them freely. Therefore we need a state to maintain peace because human being is a social animal and conflicts among human beings are inevitable. Liberalism says that humans can be controlled through institutions and it can bring them to an agreement. But here democracy is not valid because it sees the world from an idealistic perspective that in a democratic world there are no disagreements which are clearly wrong because one can not predict the humans who are subjective so peace can never be as an end among them. Also, democratic state such as the US is trying to suppress the freedom and sovereignty of other states by forcing them to leave the authoritarian system and to join democracy resulting in unstoppable violence such as in the form of Arab Spring in which the US was involved very much for changing the regimes. If democracy is all about freedom of speech then why can’t the champions of democracy can digest the authoritarian or any other opposite system of government other than democracy?

Concluding all this we can say that democracy is not the only way to peace because we can see that democratic state such as America itself has been involved in many wars and the biggest of them in recent times such as Iraq War and the Afghan War which the US started unilaterally just due to its interests. Democracy is not the only successful system in the present world neither it is the end of history because there can be only an end when all the states will be democratic which they are not at present. They can’t be democratic even in the coming 2 to 3 decades. After 30 years, democracy is still at war and America is still trying to make the world democratic in order to safeguard its dominance and hegemony. It is the struggle for power that influences states and leaders to shape ideas of their own such as the US and the West want to spread democracy by which they want to interfere in the domestic politics for their interests by manipulating people by democracy as we have seen in Arab Spring. As John F. Kennedy said,

“Before you call for independence from one tyrant, be sure you can avoid oppression by another tyrant that maybe even worse.”