>The real question is why in the years from 1945 to 1989 the non- or
>semi-democratic regimes in the West Bloc--Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain,
>Portugal, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Thailand, and
>Malaysia--have evolved, slowly and haltingly, toward political democracy,
>human liberty, and economic prosperity, while their counterpart
>non-democratic regimes in the East Bloc--Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, China,
>North Korea, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
>Poland, E. Grermany, and the USSR itself--did not until the revolutions of
>1989. It's not because of any general greater openness to reform on the
>part of "authoritarian" than "totalitarian" regimes: none of the East Bloc
>regimes were "totalitarian" in any sense after Stalin's death...
This question ignores the fact that to a large degree the Soviet Union and the US did not ALLOW development of political democracies and general economic prosperity during the Cold War. Its tough to get a democracy going when every time you start to reform society someone comes in with a gun and shoots you. Fine, this is too simplistic an explanation, but to first order its not too misleading. While the Soviet Union no longer exists, we are STILL a force which blocks the kind of progress you are talking about.
And it is especially cynical of you to include countries like Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the list of East Bloc regimes, as if we the west had no role to play in their immiseration and suffering, or the brutal regimes which came to power as a result and intensified tragedy.
>The difficulty of this historical problem is amplified once one notes that
>for almost the entire post-WWII period this democratizing trend did not
>hold for South Asia, Africa, or Latin America (although we hope it holds
>now). Moreover this democratizing trend did not hold before WWII in
>Europe--then it was democratic regimes that evolved into non-democratic
>ones, not the reverse. Fascism in the sense of Mussolini, or Hitler, or
>their many interwar imitators in Europe and post-war imitators outside
>Europe, is a powerful enemy of political democracy.
The US is primarily responsible for the lack of any democratizing trend in Latin America, since every time it showed itself we brutally repressed it. This is no mystery. I'm sure the Vietnam War and the terror we inflicted upon Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and supported in Indonesia played a significant role in delaying South Asia's democratization. I can't speak for Africa, since I know virtually nothing about what went on there.
>This is, I think, the reason to be in favor of policies of economic
>engagement, which these days automatically carries with it enormous
>cultural integration as well. There is a chance that we can get people in
>Shanghai and Canton thinking that their next government should run much
>more along the lines of government in Tokyo or Taipei or Washington, just
>as post-WWII economic and cultural European integration provided strong
>support for democratization in Madrid and Athens.
I can't argue too much with your interpretation of why Spain and Greece moved towards western capitalist democracy, at least after the anti-fascist resistance was crushed in Greece. But your implicit extension of these examples to other parts of the world shows either a shocking ignorance of history or a cynical willingness to overlook or minimize the role of western violence.
Brett