Alexis de Tocqueville
and the Future of Democracy

Larry Diamond: I think for almost everyone who has worked on the staff of the Journal of Democracy over the last ten years, it has been a labor of love. For no one is this more true than for Marc and myself; I hope you don’t mind my speaking for you as well, Marc. It has been deeply satisfying to watch the Journal grow in readership and impact to the point where recently it was identified by one measure as one of the five most widely cited journals in political science. But part of the satisfaction for us is that it is not just a political science or social science journal; we have aimed to reach more than the academic community. Without, we hope, losing our analytical objectivity, we have sought from time to time to convey some of the passion and drama, and to address some of the normative and philosophical questions surrounding the global struggle for democracy. While we try to be dispassionate in our analysis, we are not dispassionate about the overall subject of our analysis—democracy.

It is partly this ability to speak to multiple audiences and to be useful to a variety of purposes—to civil society activists, policy makers, journalists, and concerned citizens, as well as to professors and to students—that makes the Journal of Democracy distinctive, especially within comparative politics. We are often told that college students and non-academic readers and even many scholars, but I suspect most of all students, appreciate as well the fact that our articles are kept to a reasonable length, and are largely free of the technical jargon and esoteric verbiage that increasingly afflict much of the academic literature in political science. In the spirit of democracy, we believe that our articles should be accessible to the widest possible readership.

One of the great advantages of the Journal of Democracy is the freedom we have to choose issues and topics that are timely and important to the future of democracy, either empirically or intellectually. We have a considerably greater capacity than the typical political science journal to respond rapidly to developments in the world, and to shape the broader analytical and philosophical discourse on democracy. Today we think that this capacity to engage deeper questions about the nature and future of democracy is on display both in our special issue, “Democracy in the World,” and in the panel that I am now proud to introduce.

The chair for our panel today is the coeditor—really I should say executive editor—of the Journal, Marc Plattner. As many of you know, Marc is a political theorist by academic training, the author of Rousseau’s State of Nature: An Interpretation of the Discourse on Inequality, the editor of Human Rights in Our Time, and the coeditor with me of a number of books that have resulted from the work of the Journal of Democracy and of our International Forum for Democratic Studies. His latest edited book with João Carlos Espada, who is also with us, The Democratic Invention, will be published this spring. Those of you who know Marc probably are aware that he is a great admirer of Alexis de Tocqueville. Actually, as I think will become apparent, so are all our panelists. So am I. But Marc had the depth of understanding of Tocqueville and the creativity to see how we could organize an entire special issue of the Journal around a set of contemporary and global reflections on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. So, in addition to everything else, Marc, thank you for having what I think is a wonderful idea.

Let me now introduce our other panelists in the order of seniority, as I am sure our expert on Confucianism, Hahm Chaibong, would wish us to do. I think virtually everyone in this room knows Seymour Martin Lipset and Francis Fukuyama. Marty Lipset is the Hazel Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is one of the most prolific and admired social scientists of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, the only person ever elected president of both the American Sociological and American Political Science Associations. His many books include Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, Party Systems and Voter Alignments, American Exceptionalism, and a forthcoming new book with Gary Marx on why there is no socialism in the United States and never has been. He is also a coeditor with Juan Linz and myself of Democracy in Developing Countries.

Like Marty Lipset, Francis Fukuyama has been one of the most active, generous, creative, and helpful members of the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy. Coincidentally, he also teaches at George Mason University, where he is Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy. Francis Fukuyama has written three of the most influential books about international affairs and comparative societies in the 1990s. They are—I think everyone here could recite these titles—The End of History and the Last Man, Trust: Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, and published just last year, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order. He has also written widely on political culture, economic development, democracy in East Asia and globally, and on U.S. foreign policy.

Hahm Chaibong is associate professor of political science at Yonsei University, where he directs the comparative cultural studies center at the Institute for East and West Studies. He is editor-in-chief of a Korean quarterly journal, whose English title is Tradition and Modernity, and has written widely on issues relating to Confucianism and democracy. In fact, he is the lead organizer of a three-year collaborative project on “Liberal, Social, and Confucian Democracy.” As a visiting fellow at our International Forum for Democratic Studies over the past year, he has been working on a new book, The Confucian Gentleman and the Citizen: Towards a New Theory of Korean Politics. Despite his relative youth, I can tell you that Chaibong is a very influential public intellectual in Korea, a frequent and widely respected commentator on politics and public affairs.

Finally, H. Kwasi Prempeh, a Ghanaian national, studied law at Yale University and now practices law in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Toward Judicial Independence and Accountability: The Courts and the Consolidation of Democracy in Ghana, and most recently “A New Jurisprudence for Africa,” which appeared in the July 1999 issue of the Journal of Democracy. He is also active in advancing democracy and the rule of law in Ghana, where he is a founding member of the governing board of the Center for Democracy and Development in Accra, which I think is one of the most exciting and impressive pro-democracy NGOs I have encountered in Africa.

Finally, I would like to introduce four other contributors to this issue of the Journal, who are with us today in the audience, in the front row. They are Hillel Fradkin of the American Enterprise Institute; João Carlos Espada of the Portuguese Catholic University, who is teaching this semester at Georgetown University; Gautam Adhikari, the former editor of the Times of India; and William Galston of the University of Maryland. That should be enough by way of introduction; Marc, the rest is yours.

Marc F. Plattner: Thank you, Larry. As Larry has mentioned and as most of you know, today’s panel is based on our tenth anniversary issue of the Journal of Democracy, which brings together more than twenty short essays by distinguished scholars from around the world on the key themes addressed in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. We asked our contributors to reflect upon and, where appropriate, to “update” Tocqueville’s analysis in light of the worldwide experience with democracy as we enter the twenty-first century. Our initial decision to base the Journal’s tenth anniversary issue on Democracy in America stemmed largely from the desire to find a convenient and distinctive framework for assessing the global state of democracy in our first issue of the new millennium. But in the course of reviewing and editing the essays we commissioned for this issue, and of rereading Tocqueville himself, as it was necessary to do, it became clear to us, at least to me, that this decision was even more apropos than we had originally realized. For it turns out that Tocqueville may well be the thinker who speaks most directly to the issues that are most salient to students and friends of democracy in the twenty-first century. In any event, that is the case that we have tried to argue in the introduction to this special issue.

Now this is somewhat surprising because, while Tocqueville enjoyed great celebrity in the decades following the publication of Democracy in America (the first volume in 1835 and the second in 1840), his reputation, at least outside the United States, went into eclipse in the late nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth. As Martin Malia points out in the concluding essay of our special issue, the eclipse of Tocqueville largely coincided with the rise of Karl Marx, who surely was the world’s most influential thinker from the late nineteenth century until the revolutions of 1989-91.

Although Marxism, of course, envisions the ultimate withering away of the state, in practice it fostered the aggrandizement of the central state and the unchecked rule of a single party that allegedly embodied the proletarian majority. It stood for official atheism, and everywhere it sought to repress not only the church and religion but every other organization of independent civil society. Marxism was not only the official ideology of regimes that ruled a substantial part of mankind but had an enormous intellectual influence in the rest of the world. Even in the non-communist West there was a seemingly irreversible trend toward centralization and an expansion in the role and size of the state. During this period, many of Tocqueville’s concerns about the separation and dispersal of political power, or about the political importance of civil society, religion, and the family, came to be regarded as old-fashioned, even retrograde—mere prejudices that many traced to Tocqueville’s own aristocratic heritage.

Today, however, this situation has been utterly and dramatically reversed. Now it is Marx who seems to be old-fashioned and retrograde, while Tocqueville speaks to the chief concerns of democrats around the world. It’s remarkable how many of the key themes of contemporary efforts to promote and consolidate democracy—decentralization, the independence of the judiciary, civil society, freedom of the press, the rule of law—receive their classic statements in Democracy in America. While Volume One of Democracy in America focuses primarily on these kinds of matters relating to political laws and institutions, Volume Two focuses on what social scientists today would call political culture—the realm of habits and opinions, manners and morals, family and religion, which are again understood to be so crucial to the health and to the endurance of democratic government. Nor does Tocqueville ignore the economic sphere. Though an admirer of the achievements of commercial or capitalist societies, he also writes penetratingly about the dangers of unbridled materialism and excessive economic inequality.

Democracy in America, I would argue, is the most insightful, wide-ranging, and comprehensive book on democracy ever written, and it thus provides a superb starting point for assessing the state of democracy in the world at the turn of the millennium. This afternoon, of course, we can only cover a few of the many subjects that are addressed by Tocqueville and that we try to cover in our special issue. But my hope is that we can at least touch upon some of the most important ones. I want to begin where Tocqueville himself did, with his introduction to Volume One, where he discusses what he calls the “great democratic revolution” that in his view had been moving the world toward ever greater equality of conditions for more than 700 years at the time he wrote. So let me first turn to Francis Fukuyama, whose essay for our special issue on this theme suggests that Tocqueville was actually the father of all subsequent theories of modernization. Frank, can you explain what you meant by that conclusion?

Francis Fukuyama: I am not sure that I can deal with this Oprah-like format without a podium to stand behind. Let’s hope it’s not a Jerry Springer type of discussion. Well, I think that the “Introduction” to Democracy in America is really a remarkable document. It’s only about twelve pages long, and it begins with this assertion about the inevitability of democracy. Now, Tocqueville is not understood primarily as a philosopher of history in the way that Hegel or Marx was, but he espouses what amounts to a philosophy of history, one that in a way is more rigid and deterministic than that of either Hegel or Marx. He says that democracy has been making steady gains, that equality has been increasing for at least the seven hundred years prior to his writing, that no one should expect that the actions of a single generation could possibly reverse this trend, that it is universal, and that ultimately it will lead the greater part of the world to democracy. Now, his explicit reason for saying that the march of history moves in this single direction is ostensibly “the hand of God.” And I don’t think that we should immediately discount the idea that he believes this, but there is reason to think that his reasoning is in fact much more complex than that. He was arguing to a French audience that believed in God, and rhetorically it was effective to make this kind of argument, but he also presents five or six other reasons, each one of which has been the seed of a theory of modernization that has been put forward by some lesser political scientist in the past couple of generations.

So, for example, there is a certain amount of economic determinism. He says that the spread of commerce and the division of labor empowered commoners because the kings and nobles found that they needed the resources that the middle class or the financiers owned. Economic imperatives also made necessary a society open to talents because, Tocqueville argues, the graces of the mind are rather randomly distributed and therefore not the possession of a single elite. He talks about technology and what people have labeled “defensive modernization”: The advance of technology gives the people that can master it a military advantage and thus forces all the competitors in the global system to catch up. A good example (though Tocqueville of course does not cite this) would be Japan modernizing and adopting modern institutions once Commodore Perry shows up in his black ships. Tocqueville also talks about the kind of hypothesis about feudalism associated with Barrington Moore: that the distribution of power in Europe led to democracy because it did not permit the growth of a single hierarchical, authoritarian empire.

I think the most critical issue that Tocqueville brings out, however, is really the role of religion. It is the one that is most relevant to the current debate over human rights and over the future spread of democracy, because Tocqueville makes very clear that, in terms of economic development and in terms of simple enlightenment, it is not obvious that the democratic principle ought to win. In terms of economic development, by his lights, you could have a modern society that was much more hierarchical; all you need is openness to talents. Or you could have a liberal society that was not democratic, that didn’t believe in the sanctity of the essential moral equality of every individual. And yet this belief is somehow at the core of modern democracy. Technology certainly does not dictate the principle of universal equality. Most importantly, he is very far from thinking that it is simply a rational position to take, that somehow this principle of universal equality is the natural condition of man, and we’re simply in a more scientific age where we understand that in fact Jefferson was right that all men are created equal. Because as any reader of Tocqueville knows, he was also a great admirer of aristocracies and believed in a certain way that they had an important natural component, that certain people were more gifted than others. Aristocracies actually allowed a kind of completion of human nature that the leveling effects of democracy tended to crush and obliterate, and in that sense there wasn’t simple intellectual and moral and spiritual progress with the rush towards equality.

So if that is not sufficient to explain the inevitability of equality, then what is? I think the single answer that he provides quite consistently throughout the book is Christianity. He says the principle of equality is really dictated by the teaching of Jesus Christ. In a way he really anticipates Hegel, because what Hegel said was that the idea of equality was first revealed through religion, through the Christian religion specifically, and that democracy is simply a secularized form of Christianity. That is how the principle is let loose in the world. You could not get to that principle of equality through any of these technological or economic determinants; you really had to have that moral principle be introduced into the world.

Now, from the standpoint of the future of democracy, it seems to me that this question about where that principle of equality comes from is really critical. Samuel Huntington in The Third Wave and in The Clash of Civilizations has basically argued that this aspect of democracy is culturally unique to Western civilization. And he agrees with all of these other thinkers, including Hegel and Nietzsche and quite a few others, that in fact democracy is a secularized form of Christianity, and he argues that the third wave is largely the final arrival at democracy of the remaining Christian nations that were most resistant to it. So, it first emerged among the Protestant Northern Europeans, and then it spread into the Mediterranean world, and now all the Catholic countries are democratic. But then you have to interpret the march of democracy as essentially a cultural phenomenon, and this obviously, as Chaibong will talk about, has great implications for what happens when you get to Asia. Of course, Korea is partly Christian, but this argument would suggest that when you get to completely different cultural systems that do not participate in the Western Christian heritage, the assumption that the march of democracy—and particularly its egalitarian aspect—is inevitable is not so obvious.

Plattner: Let me turn then on this point to Chaibong as someone who edits a journal on tradition and modernity. It certainly does seem, from a superficial glance at least, that the principle of equality, along with democracy, is making its way in Korea. What would your reaction to that be?

Hahm Chaibong: Certainly, in terms of the political, social, economic, educational institutions that Korea adopts, and other East Asian nations adopt, they are based upon those very principles. So the institutions are meant to foster those values and those perceptions in the individuals who live under those institutions. At the same time, given the economic development and democratic development in countries like Korea, individualism, which I think is the other side of the principle of equality, is rapidly spreading. There is no doubt that, as Tocqueville was quite alarmed at, it spreads along with democracy.This was something Tocqueville was quite alarmed about; he said individualism was as much a result of deficiency of mind as of perversity of heart.

Plattner: I want to return later to a discussion of individualism. But in terms of the acceptance of the principle of equality in a society that traditionally has been hierarchical, is that something that is now recognized and admitted by the majority?

Hahm: Of course. It is hard to resist the principles, but when it comes to practicing them, what does it really mean to practice equality in terms of the relationship between parents and children or between students and teachers? When it comes to those actual, concrete practices, that is where people come into conflict; they find that it is not as easy to practice the principles as to accept them.

Plattner: I want to raise with Frank another question about Tocqueville’s presentation here. When he talks about the “great democratic revolution,” he means primarily the advance of equality. In fact, he actually says somewhere that equality is inevitable, but it can take very different political forms—either the sovereignty of all or the despotic rule of one man. So that portion of the evolution he doesn’t see as inevitable. Your own presentation in The End of History and the Last Man appears to suggest that not just equality but democratic political institutions are generated by the historical process.

Fukuyama: Well, I think that I am probably a little more of an economic determinist than Tocqueville was, because I think that there is a certain economic logic that underlies the development of those institutions. This is familiar to any reader of the Journal of Democracy; it is the usual sort of thing, that what goes along with modernization is also economically efficient. So individualism is in a way driven by the market because it is what the capitalist market demands. It demands at least equality of opportunity because that makes the most efficient use of the talents of society. It probably demands participation because, in fact, economic growth requires education and therefore all the things that come with education. There aren’t so many institutional forms in which you can optimize all these different good things that modernity brings with it, so I think there is a reason why we should see their development. You’re absolutely right. I think one of the central themes in Tocqueville is that there is a tradeoff between freedom and equality, and that in many cases greater equality is bought at the expense of freedom. So the kind of distribution of political power that he sees as the essence of freedom in a liberal society with limited government is very often threatened by the demand for equality that wants to create a state able to enforce that. I cannot see, and I think that he certainly would argue against, any kind of narrow determinism in regarding exactly where that balance between freedom and equality will end up.

Plattner: Would either of our other panelists like to comment on this question before we move on to another?

Seymour Martin Lipset: Well, Tocqueville on equality is very interesting. He said that once the idea of equality came into the world, it was unbeatable. And he had a theory of class struggle that said politics was a conflict between, as he put it, the aristocracy and the mass. In that context he thought that the mass would win because they would want to get more for themselves and, in effect, take away property from the rich. Tocqueville was more optimistic—or more pessimistic—about the victory of the lower classes than Marx was, because he saw them acting out of almost pure self-interest. But at the same time, Tocqueville’s concept of equality was a complex one. By equality he didn’t mean equal property or equal power, but rather equality of opportunity and also equality in social relations, so that people would deal with respect with one another, regardless of whether they were wealthy or poor. The important thing about a person was not how much money he had or what his title was, but the fact that he was a person. In America, compared with France and with Europe, there is this emphasis on the individual, not on higher status and background. Recognizing equality in terms of social relations was a very important insight into the character of the United States compared to that of other countries.

Plattner: Much of Volume One of Democracy in America is devoted to a discussion of American political institutions—local government, federalism, the judicial power, the executive power, and so on. But Tocqueville emphasizes that “above these institutions there is a sovereign power: that of the people.” It is in this context that he discusses three non-governmental institutions that nonetheless play a key role in democratic governance: political parties, the press, and public associations. Here I want to turn to Marty Lipset, who has written our essay on political parties, and ask him to speak briefly about the extent to which he believes that Tocqueville has properly understood the role of parties in modern democracy.

Lipset: Well, he understood the role of parties and associations. For him, parties were one of the large numbers of associations that characterized American society. Political associations are at the heart of democracy. I think this is an important insight, which of course has been extended, as I mention in my article, by E.E. Schattsneider, a very important political scientist before World War II, who wrote about democracy being created by parties and said that there could be no democracy without stable, institutionalized parties. Now Tocqueville didn’t go that far but said, in effect, that without associations in competition with one another, of which the political were the most important, there couldn’t be stable democracy. And one can see this now if you look at today’s new democracies. They’re still unstable and could collapse. Take Russia, which is the biggest one. In the last election, with twenty-eight political parties or groups on the ballot, only one was a real party, the Communist party. Two of the parties, which were supporting Putin, came from nowhere. They suddenly emerged and gained a large proportion of the vote. Other parties that got large votes last time disappeared. If a party can be wiped out because something goes wrong, then you cannot have a stable democracy. One of the most important characteristics of parties in a democracy is that they are able to remain regardless of what happens. During the Great Depression, the Republican party wasn’t wiped out; it declined, but it is still here. The understanding that democracy requires parties, implicit in Tocqueville, is I think one of the key phenomena that we have to look for in studying democracy today.

One of the striking things about Tocqueville—and we all agree that he is a great man who wrote a great book—is pessimistic for scholars today. Tocqueville was all of twenty-eight when he wrote the book, and he wrote it based on nine months’ field work. He went to America, spent nine months here, and never came back. Based on that he wrote what everybody considers is still the greatest book on American society. Well, none of us has come close, or ever will come close, to doing this kind of work. I’d like to mention, then I’ll stop, one other thing that we have not discussed. Marx and Tocqueville were the two great protagonists of nineteenth-century society, but there was another one who ranks with them, Max Weber. Max Weber wrote extensively on democracy, but for reasons I don’t understand, much less attention is paid to his analysis in our work on democracy. There are many Weber scholars who deal with democracy, but it is conducted in a totally different context from that of people interested in Tocqueville. And the Weberians, if you read them, have been publishing books and articles on democracy, yet they never refer to Tocqueville or pay attention to him; they have a very different orientation. So perhaps, as I have suggested to Marc and Larry, the Journal of Democracy ought to have an issue on Weber.

Plattner: We will definitely look into this. Since you just extolled the achievements of youth, maybe I should turn to our younger panelists on this question, both of whom come from countries that I think might fairly be described as new democracies. Kwasi, what would you say about the success of Ghana in building a party system thus far?

Kwasi Prempeh: Well, as with most emerging democracies, at least a good number of them, Ghana’s present regime is the product of a transition from a dictatorship. There existed a military junta and when it became necessary or inevitable that there would have to be a transition to democratic politics, the junta basically regrouped as a political party and, given the advantage of incumbency, had itself elected into power. That means, of course, that we now have a political party that was in power for about a decade and a half before the transfer and that has become almost impossible to compete with in terms of resources and the like.

The aspect of Tocqueville’s work on this issue, in terms of political associations, that I find quite instructive for emerging democracies is not so much the issue of political parties as that of other public associations. Tocqueville took the view that an electorate that so trusted their rulers that they were willing to disengage from civic participation and from politics, in the hope and expectation that their rulers would do good by them, would certainly be a democracy on its way back to a dictatorship. To that extent, there is a lot of optimism to be gained from the fact that there has been a big upsurge in civic involvement in Ghana, with a number of public associations, not just the big NGOs doing democracy work, but mutual-benefit organizations, the very low-key neighborhood organizations that Tocqueville found quite fascinating in America. I think as people become engaged in these kinds of organizations, even though we might have a hegemonic or dominant party in power, people are able to engage the state and the ruling party in many different ways, from many different angles. And looking at Ghana, I think that there has been this big upsurge of activity in the civil society area—I wouldn’t say a mushrooming but certainly a vibrant and widespread evolution of these public associations—which gets the ordinary person involved in politics. It could be micropolitics on the local level, but it is politics nonetheless.

Plattner: This leads me to a follow-up question that I wanted to ask Marty Lipset. As one looks around the world today, almost everywhere civil society seems to be flourishing—perhaps almost everywhere is too strong, but certainly in many countries, especially many new democracies. Whereas, in general, I would say that political parties tend to be weak, and I would say right now one of the weakest elements in new democracies. And I know that some of our colleagues at the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, who work on the issue of strengthening political parties, feel that a kind imbalance has arisen in the way that people view political development: Everyone now thinks that civil society is wonderful but has grave doubts about political parties. Marty, the title of your article is “The Indispensability of Political Parties.” In a way, Tocqueville says that too, but he also says that political parties are a “necessary evil” in free government. And there always seems to be some sense about political parties—I mean, the very name implies partisanship—that somehow they’re not for the good of the whole, whereas someone who is working for an NGO that’s promoting civic participation and good government can have the feeling that he is above partisanship, that he’s contributing to the good of the country as a whole. If, though, it is true that parties are necessary, how does one get around this problem of their being in bad odor that way?

Lipset: You know, the term politician has always been, in this country at least, a negative term. There are countries, however, where it is not; in France, particularly, politicians or at least people working for the state are in good repute. Not here. Here polls show them and political parties way down in terms of respect. Trade unions also are low in opinion polls. Americans say that they are necessary, that they accomplish good, but still they are very negative about them, and even more so on the leadership of unions. Business also is not in very good repute. There seems to be a sense among the public that organizations that foster the self-interest of themselves or their members are characterized by corruption, that organizations with power, whether they be political parties or business or labor, use their power to gain something for themselves at the expense of the rest of the society. Parties have the problem of being in bad repute as compared to nonprofits. The very term nonprofit implies that you are doing this for the good of society, not for yourself. The converse leads to a negative feeling, disdain, for politics. Look around the world; in Germany Kohl’s activities may lead to the collapse of the Christian Democrats as occurred in Italy, and as also happened to the Socialist Party of Italy, which has disappeared. Parties, to maintain themselves, have the problem everywhere of getting money. We have the campaign financing issue, which is a concern everywhere and produces the negative repute of politics.

Plattner: Are you optimistic that, in new democracies in particular, strong parties can be built again? Or is the era of strong political parties behind us?

Lipset: It depends how one understands strong, but I think the era of highly disciplined parties is probably gone, though variations will remain, related to the differences in political systems. Parliamentary systems produce more disciplined parties. Separation of institutions yields weak parties; the American parties have never been strong, except perhaps on local levels. I do not see strong discipline returning. The strongest parties have been authoritarian, the Communists, the Nazis, and the like, and hopefully they are gone. The phenomenon of “parties of integration,” as some political scientists have called them, like the old Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats in Europe, has also disappeared. They organized a whole life-space for individuals. They had many affiliated or allied organizations. People spent their whole lives within the arena of the Social Democrats or the Christian Democrats. Fortunately, that’s gone; no parties are that strong. When we say that parties are on the decline, that they are not as strong as they used to be, we are making a true assertion. There are many reasons for this. Television, both here and elsewhere, has obviated the need for parties to go around door-to-door turning out votes. But we still need organized diversity, composed of people with conflicting values, points of view, or interests. The Democrats and Republicans are weak as organizations, but members of Congress today tend to follow a party line even more than in the past. Democrats are overwhelmingly liberal; Republicans are predominantly conservative. That was not true before World War II.

Plattner: Chaibong, I know that Korea is reputed to have a particular problem with the weakness of its political parties. Do you want to add something?

Hahm: Well, actually yesterday there was a new political party that was launched in Korea, and by no less a person than our president. The incumbent party has decided to disband itself and form a new party, of course with our president as the chairman of the party. We have seen this repeatedly in our past administrations. For some reason, the people who came to power through their party organizations decided to disband them in the middle of their term and form a new party. That’s as good an indication of the stability of our parties as anything, I guess.

I was struck when I was reading Marty’s piece on what you need for a stable party: he says that there needs to be major “cleavages,” divisions in society, which the political parties have to use. And so I started thinking: What are the major divisions and cleavages in places like Korea, for instance, that political parties can grab onto? And then I started going through the typical cleavages that stable Western political democracies and political party systems use. There are things like religion; it could be class differences, it could be ethnic and racial differences, and sometimes regional differences. And then I tried to think, okay, are these things present in Korea? Well, there was a budding sense of class consciousness, but since the fall of the Soviet Union and Marxism, that effort, it seems, has disappeared to a large extent. Are there any religious cleavages? As you mentioned, yes. I would say that in Korea a quarter of the population is Christian, another quarter is Buddhist, and we basically have all the major religions of the world present, including Muslims; I think Muslims are about 1.2 percent of the population. Nonetheless, do they really affect politics? They don’t. I don’t think religious cleavages are at the stage where they actually affect politics, and they don’t align with particular politics, and I don’t think that anybody in Korea actually views that as a source of political parties. Plus, there is this whole tradition of discourse, like Confucianism, which emphasizes harmony and wholeness, on top of which there is the authoritarian tradition emphasizing the state and the people. So in Korea we have this whole discourse that also goes against major cleavages. Now, the only thing that is really left for politicians to utilize, it seems to me, is region. And so you get regionalism. But is regionalism a stable source for the kind of party politics that we need in democracy? And I think that is the fundamental reason for the instability. My question to everybody is: What would you recommend? What cleavage can we find and develop and utilize?

Lipset: Of course you’re right when you say that parties with a regional base don’t compete across the whole country. But class exists everywhere, even if parties don’t appeal directly to class. In the United States there is less emphasis on class, but historically the Democrats have always been the party of the outsiders, including the ethnically and economically less privileged, while the Republicans or the Whigs and the Federalists before them have always been the party of the insiders, even though they do not make overt appeals in this direction. I think you will find this everywhere. One problem, as I note in my article, is that in Russia and in a number of the ex-communist countries, the Communist party is the party of the nomenklatura, the party of the upper class, protecting their interests. But it also appeals to the working class and the lower class. One of the big problems of Russia and other countries is that the Communists distort this whole question of a class cleavage in the political system. I don’t think you have that in Korea.

Fukuyama: It seems to me that there is a tension in Tocqueville that is reflected in the articles in the Journal about the relative emphasis on civil versus political associations; Marty says that the political are the more important, and Bill Galston emphasizes more the civil ones. If the world is in fact moving toward a greater emphasis on civil rather than political associations—whether because of technology, or maybe the greater and more complex kinds of cleavages that exist today— it does seem that we have a certain problem. Government by NGO, although a lot of people think that this is a viable model of governance, really has some serious problems regarding accountability and transparency. If the Christian Democrats screw up in Germany, you can always vote them out of office; if Greenpeace screws up, how are you going to vote them out of office? How do you disable an NGO if you think that it is illegitimate? So I think that is one of the issues or tensions that is clearly unresolved, if that is the trend in modern politics.

Lipset: One interesting thing in the American context that Tocqueville saw is the unique role of religion in America, that is as a voluntary association, not state-supported or linked. It also stimulated a lot of other voluntary associations. Well, insofar as religion gets weaker, it should affect the importance of the voluntary associations. But that is not what’s happening. Robert Putnam was wrong about that, as Everett Ladd and Paul Rich have documented.

Prempeh: I want to make a comment about the issue of cleavages and political parties because I think when you throw that into the context of a place like Africa, at least in Ghana, you get very troubling results. In fact, I think it’s for that reason that democracy has long been held at bay by the political elite. For the longest time they were able to argue that this idea of partisanship is divisive in the most adverse way, with tribalism degenerating into internecine conflict. They were able to evoke that fear to hold democracy at bay. Now, with the reintroduction of democratic politics, some of us wondered, since we were living in a “post-ideological” age, where are these politicians going to find those class cleavages on the basis of which they could formulate policy and party planks that were really different and offered options to the electorate? In Ghana, a small opposition party just came out with a statement that the main opposition party and the government party are just the same. They basically believe in the same thing, they’ll do the same thing when they are in power; and there is a great deal of truth to that. Really the options for states like Ghana in this globalized world aren’t really that much. And therefore I think there has been a tendency, if you look around, for the political elite to basically just go opportunistically to the preexisting cleavages, which for the most part are ethnic. That is really a very troubling issue for the political elite to work out in many African countries. It is for that reason that you have something like the no-party system idea in Uganda, for example, where Museveni seems to be getting a lot of support from Africans and democracy skeptics as well as from the West, because he has revived this idea that if you introduce parties in our kind of system, then we will degenerate into civil strife. In Ghana in 1978, the military government, which was trying to usher itself out of power, somehow came up with this idea of a no-party government. The idea was rejected in a referendum, but there are now people who are thinking that perhaps we threw the baby out with the bath water, maybe because most Ghanaians simply hated the incumbent dictator [Acheampong] so badly they didn’t want to entertain any idea that he had to offer. So, for us in Africa, the search continues for a form of democracy that will help us mitigate the socially explosive consequences of introducing political parties into ethnically divided societies.

Plattner: That was a fascinating discussion, but I think that we should move on to some of the other topics we want to look at. In emphasizing the sovereignty of the people as operating above democratic institutions, Tocqueville winds up focusing on the overwhelming power of public opinion in a democracy, which he famously labeled “the tyranny of the majority.” He saw this as the great danger of democratic government, and therefore he devoted an entire chapter to analyzing the “causes which mitigate the tyranny of the majority in the United States.” Prominent among these in his view is the role not only of the judiciary but that of the entire legal profession as a whole. Kwasi, this is the subject that you wrote about, so let me ask you to say a bit about Tocqueville’s analysis of the role of the legal profession in democracy.

Prempeh: As you’re probably aware, as you’re definitely aware, Alexis de Tocqueville definitely was a liberal democrat. He wasn’t a firm believer in majoritarianism as such, and I think that probably comes out of his own experience in France, where he had seen the revolution essentially go into excess. But partly, I also think that Tocqueville certainly was an aristocrat, and he had studied law by training. I am surprised that, reading Tocqueville, he looks like one of the very few people who has anything really nice to say about lawyers. It’s actually quite refreshing to read him, as a lawyer, because he really does have a lot of nice things to say about lawyers and about the role that they play in making democracy work. They make it work in a counter-majoritarian sort of way. He saw majoritarianism as certainly veering too close to the tyranny of the majority. In a democracy, the majority must get a head count of everybody, and there are more likely to be many poor people so the minority would be the wealthy people. By that head count, I think he just concluded that if we had a tyranny of the majority, the poor would basically be exploiting the wealthy. We would have class legislation, expropriation of property maybe. But he really didn’t fear this too much because he thought that the poor too would aspire to be wealthy and they would want their property protected when they get there.

But he did have this nervousness about the tyranny of the majority, and looking around in America, he thought the one real barrier that prevented that from happening was certainly the laws. The laws, the Constitution, the judiciary with the power of judicial review, and also the bar, an active bar that was of the people by birth, as he put it, but certainly aristocratic in its orientations. He felt that lawyers were a bunch of people who ordinarily belonged with the commoners by birth, but who by training had acquired some aristocratic tastes and inclinations. If you interposed this class of people between the poor majority and the rich, somehow they would manage to take the passions of the majority and channel them within the limits of the law. And for that reason I think he saw lawyers as playing a very important role in protecting the minority in a democracy.

As I read that and really thought about that in the context of American politics, I was wondering what explains the majoritarian grievance—grievance would be a very mild word—the real dislike of lawyers in America today. Part of the reason, I think, can be found in precisely the role that Tocqueville expected them to play, which is really a counter-majoritarian role. And today we see a majoritarian resurgence in American politics. I think when you look at, say from the 1950s, American lawyers, or at least a certain activist segment of the lawyers, became very active in articulating interests that were not traditionally part of the agenda. In Tocqueville’s day, as I said, the majority was a matter of the numbers game, the poor and the rich, but certainly over time it became more complicated than that. Money intruded into politics in a big way, so that it was no longer a matter of a head count, and access to politics was more a matter of how much you could pay. So the idea that the rich were really in dire need of legal intervention, I think, became a bit difficult to defend over time. Thus we see a new generation of activist lawyers going to the defense of other minorities—racial minorities, religious minorities, working women, immigrants, and the like. And I think that part of the backlash against lawyers we are seeing today is a majoritarian backlash against a group of people whose real mission is counter-majoritarian, and it is really difficult for lawyers to do otherwise. If they have to really stay true to their credo, then I guess they will still have to represent vulnerable minorities in a democracy, yet when they do that they are bound to incur the wrath of the majority.

Plattner: It seems to me you are saying the particular minority that lawyers are defending today might be different than the one Tocqueville was most concerned about, but still they are basically serving the same counter-majoritarian function, which you yourself seem to think is a good thing, given that the victims of majorities are people who deserve to be defended.

Prempeh: Absolutely. I am definitely a democrat, but I am not a majoritarian in that sense. I am not trying to suggest that lawyers today, in fact, defend minorities; they still basically defend corporate America. Which is why I am the only lawyer here this afternoon; all the rest of them are busy working in the defense of corporate interests, by and large. Even in the corporate law firms, however, a substantial amount of time is actually donated to the defense of the non-monied minorities. And I think that is definitely good for democracy, and I think it has not only made America more democratic, I think it has also made it more liberal, which definitely would have pleased Tocqueville, since he definitely was a liberal democrat, in the classical sense of the term.

Fukuyama: Isn’t there a certain point where there can be a judicial usurpation of the legislative function that even Tocqueville would have been aghast at. Just look at the effort now to use the courts to sue gun manufacturers on behalf of the residents of housing projects. There are cases where you couldn’t possibly get a legislative majority in this country to do something, so you come up with this clever strategy to use the courts to overturn what the strong majority of the citizens prefers. There is a long history to this that gets people upset, going back to abortion and a lot of other things. Somehow I can’t believe that Tocqueville, if he were to come back, at this point would approve of a lot of that.

Plattner: The interesting thing to me in looking at the discussion of these kinds of issues around the world is how little strength pure majoritarianism has today. It used to be that the people who were more radical would want annual election of representatives; anything that would make the voice of the people more directly impact on the political process was viewed as good. But today there is hardly anyone who argues that way, and in fact courts, independent courts, turn out to be the most popular political institutions in the new democracies of Eastern Europe, for example. Many of the new democracies want to have the kinds of agencies that are insulated from popular control. Even the British Labor Party comes into office and the first thing it does is to make the central bank more independent. There seems to be a curious way in which democrats themselves today have turned against majoritarianism, which I would see as a certain triumph of Tocqueville. But I think it is from hard experience that people have learned over a century or more that allowing the majority to immediately determine public policy is a danger to minorities of all kinds.

Lipset: In a funny way you’re quite right. In both the United States and Britain we use the term “establishment,” but Britain has an establishment and we don’t. The elites in Britain, regardless of their politics, all know each other, all went to the same schools together, interact socially in London and other places. They have a consensus about certain things; civil liberties in Britain are protected by the establishment. In this country we don’t have anything like this, but we have, to use a Unitarian concept, the emerging conscience of mankind; certain values become morally right. Because they involve values, they sometimes cannot be enacted by legislation, for their opponents are also moralistic. The Supreme Court has actually taken on the function—I don’t know to what degree one can say they do this consciously—of doing things, “enacting” new values, that we cannot get by legislation. For example, the changes in representation. State electorates were frustrated by the absence of democratic representation because the rural, small-town minorities controlled the upper house. Well, the Supreme Court finally came along and said you’ve got to have equal representation. This would have never passed the legislatures because it took away power from some people. With respect to the abortion issue, the court tried to do the same thing, but it made a mistake. The Supreme Court thought that the vast majority of the American people accepted abortion, but it couldn’t pass because of the veto power of the anti-abortion people, because they were so committed to their side of the issue. The court went about making abortion legal. If you look at the Roe v. Wade decision, it’s pure legislation. It talks about what can be done in the first three months, the next three months, and the last three months; this is the sort of thing that would ordinarily be passed by legislation. Why did this happen? I would suggest it reflects the fact that the Court has taken on the role of the establishment. It feels that it’s responsible for carrying out new dominant norms that minorities are able to veto in legislatures. On one hand, you can say that the justices think that they are exercising a democratic function, but in fact this is hardly democratic; it’s not by elections. I don’t know to what degree Tocqueville would have recognized this, or understood it. He didn’t, because the courts weren’t doing it in his day.

Prempeh: I think he definitely recognized the limits of law. I think Tocqueville was very clear that ultimately law can only do so much. If you take, for example, the history of American democracy from the civil rights movement on, many of the victories were in courtrooms. But as we get into an era of “majoritarian resurgence,” as I call it, we see a new court emerging, which has rolled back a number of those earlier victories, as well as majorities prevailing on legislatures to enact laws, some of them rolling back these things. I think Tocqueville anticipated that a bit because he makes the point that at the end of the day it’s the primacy of political culture that stands out here. Yes, you can score some victories in the courtroom, but that is not a substitute for politics. The victories scored in the courtroom, if they are not reinforced or solidified through active political participation, coalition building, and those kinds of political efforts that went into the Civil Rights Act, may not survive. If you look at the gains of the civil rights movement that have endured, you realize that the most enduring ones have been the legislative ones and not the judicial ones. Tocqueville definitely recognized this, that there would come a time when, if you had too many victories in the courtroom through lawyers, there would be a majoritarian backlash. I think part of what we see today might be really reinforcing that sense that the law in fact has limits.

Lipset: But with Brown v. Board of Education, the integration struggle was in a sense won first in the courts. As with school integration, doing away with Jim Crow was a consequence of a judicial action, which had already been accepted or desired by the population. It was one of those cases where we couldn’t get a political body to do this, so the courts did it.

Prempeh: In earlier times, however, Jim Crow itself was not just the product of American political culture playing itself out. It was also the product of law. It was the product of judicial decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson, which said that you could have apartheid in a democracy. So to the extent that law and judicial intervention have had something to do with the status quo, it only reasonable that at some point the courts would have something to do with removing the injustices of the past.

Plattner: I think now we should move on to the political culture issue that you raise, which in a sense is what the whole second volume of Democracy in America is about. As Chaibong mentioned earlier, the subject he wrote about is Tocqueville’s chapters about the principle of individualism. Individualism is often presented in a positive light as a basic foundation for modern liberal democracy, yet Tocqueville actually uses the word in a negative sense to describe a tendency that isolates men and turns them away from concern with their fellows. The words he uses are that “it threatens to confine them within the solitude of their own hearts.” Let me ask Chaibong then to discuss Tocqueville’s concerns on this score.

Hahm: He was clearly speaking as an aristocrat there. I don’t think there is any doubt. I am not quite sure how he ultimately resolved that. His argument is against individualism in the negative sense and the inevitability of its rise with the notion of equality and democracy. This, for me, brings up an interesting question connected with the “end of history,” in the sense of liberal democracy triumphing. Kwasi mentioned that Tocqueville would have been a liberal democrat, if anything. But I am sort of wondering, given his concern about the individualistic aspect of democracy, whether he would have actually approved of being labeled a liberal democrat in the modern sense. That’s the issue that I was trying to explore, and given my interest in Confucianism and the sort of oxymoron of Confucian democracy, Tocqueville was very, very helpful because he was guarded about individualism. Nevertheless, he seemed to think that you could have a viable, functioning democracy without it. Of course, as I said, I don’t think that he actually articulates it to its logical conclusion.

In the cultural context of Korea and East Asia, again, principles of democracy and equality are fully accepted. There is absolutely no—at least, no overt—opposition to these principles. But again, it is when it comes to the practice of these things that you start to run into problems and conflicts with our traditional culture, which I think has many similarities to Tocqueville’s description of aristocratic culture, which I guess is really not that surprising. I think there is still room in Tocqueville’s account for the possibility of a nonliberal or nonindividualistic democracy. Also, for me there is that cultural challenge, in the sense that when you bring democracy, it inevitably seems to come in the form of a liberal democracy. It’s almost as if, as Frank has said, it’s the end of history, but the end of history in the Western political and theoretical debate. Then, the winner of that contest is being spread all over, so when it’s coming to places like Korea, you are facing a definite type of liberal democracy on the American model that is clashing with traditional culture, which is very uneasy about the idea of individualism.

This also ties in with what we were just talking about with regard to lawyers and legalism, because I think one interesting aspect of the coming of democracy and liberalism and the rule of law is this massive explosion of lawsuits in Korea. Just an unheard explosion of them. You have people who say that in Japan there are few lawyers and few lawsuits; in Korea, we have an incredible number of lawsuits going on. Everybody seems to be suing everybody else, and there is a serious public debate because this is paralyzing our legal system. Anybody who gets offended at something or by somebody reverts to the legal process, because it seems now everyone has begun to think that this is the means by which to further one’s rights and to express one’s individuality. So we have the government trying to expand vastly the number of lawyers that we pass through the government bar examination. There used to be 300 each year, now they are expanding it to 2,000. Of course, you’re saying that isn’t so many, but still 2,000 new lawyers every year. Anyway, even those people who are suing one another and using this process do it thinking that this is not the right way to behave. I really don’t believe that they think this is the way disputes should be resolved, but there is almost a sense of inevitability that in a liberal, individualistic society, this legal culture and the legal system are the only means by which to adjudicate the kind of things that you used to be able to resolve in a different way. I think it’s very interesting to look at all of these issues, including the Asian values debate, in a very positive sense; as I mentioned in my article, it really means that now democracy is spreading, and for the first time it is an intercultural, intercivilizational project. Of course, for Tocqueville, there was so great a cultural and civilizational gap between America and France that he probably thought it was a clash of civilizations. But I think now we are truly getting to the point where there is enough liberal democracy getting into non-Western places, and it’s beginning to affect the daily lives of the people, so much so that people are beginning to be troubled by it, they’re being able to use it. We have theorists and philosophers who are beginning to try to articulate what exactly democracy is, and what exactly liberalism means in our own cultural context.

Prempeh: To measure the significance of this litigation explosion, which is really very much characteristic of the American legal system, you have to look at what would happen if they did not go to court. What other institutions are there to mediate these grievances and differences? In some places where the legal system is not accessible to address grievances, you get self-help resolution in terms of vigilantism and violence. There is certainly a cost that is associated with having rights in a democratic society like the United States, and I think part of the cost is the fact that the legal system may be abused. But sometimes when I hear of the litigation explosion, I think, well, would you rather be in Liberia or Sierra Leone, where you would resolve the conflict in some other way? I am not saying that the litigation explosion is good, but I am saying that sometimes we need to be able to assess the cost of rights and build it into what it takes to maintain a democracy. I think there is definitely going to be some explosion of lawsuits when you open the courthouse to those for whom it has been long inaccessible.

Fukuyama: I think Chaibong made a very good point. There is a really serious side to the Asian values debate, and there is a stupid side. The stupid side I regard as Lee Kwan Yew or Mahathir arguing that they should be able to suppress political parties and the press. They’re going to lose that argument; I think there is no question about that. But there is also this communitarian critique of individualism in America, in which they quote people like Robert Bork and Father Neuhaus and others who live in Western societies and look around them and see broken families and crime and everything else. So some Asians say that this is not such a great society in a lot of ways, and maybe we can still be a liberal democracy but have a more orderly kind of culture that involves a certain amount of social hierarchy and authority. It seems to me that that is perfectly legitimate. I think liberal democracy in its large outlines is pretty inevitable, but I don’t think there is any inevitability to the kinds of cultural implementations of it—stronger families or weaker families, neighborhoods or people moving around all the time. There are a lot of ways in which you can have a more livable kind of democracy. I think the Asian values argument has actually uncovered that. Maybe people in Asia will actually come up with a form of democracy that in a certain way is more spiritually appealing than what we have in the United States.

Plattner: I want to give Marty the last word, and then I want to give some of the other people here a chance to speak.

Lipset: Tocqueville was a communitarian, he was a Frenchman, and he was a Catholic. France and Catholicism have had very different values from those that have been dominant in the Protestant, individualistic United States. Tocqueville once wrote, not in Democracy in America but in his notes, that he never wrote a word about the United States without thinking about France. That is part of what makes it such a great book; his method of comparison always raises the question: Why is it different here from the way it is in France? In France he emphasized the role of a strong aristocracy with local power that could resist the king and central state power. In the United States there was no aristocracy; he saw its functional equivalent in resisting the central state in voluntary associations and federalism. To turn to another subject, the political role of religion, which affects political conflicts in the United States, the two parties reflect struggles between two cultures. The Democratic Party has been the communitarian party. And the people who are Democrats—Catholics, Jews, blacks—have a communitarian background. The Republicans, the Federalists, and the Whigs before them have largely been WASP. Their emphasis has been on individualism; they favor a weak state. That kind of conflict also exists in Europe. In Europe, the communitarian emphasis is much stronger, since it is fostered by the churches—Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Orthodox—and dominates among Tories (Disraeli, Chamberlain, Churchill, Bismarck, Adenauer, Kohl) and the Social Democrats. The business-oriented Liberals favored a weak state, laissez faire. And as H.G. Wells and Louis Hartz argued, there were no Tories or Social Democrats in the United States, only different varieties of liberals (libertarians). The Great Depression pressed the trade unions and the Democrats to the statist and communitarian side, which their ethno-religious supporters favored. The WASP, Protestant sectarian-based Republican Party is the only libertarian party which remains a mass party, although the Democrats, in recent decades, have moved back from statism.

Tocqueville admired the American system, but he also disliked various aspects of it. I think he did not admire traits and institutions that were not communitarian. He was, after all, a Catholic and an aristocrat. He believed in noblesse oblige by the upper class and by the state.

Plattner: Thank you. Let’s now give people in the audience a chance to have a word. But first, let me see if any of our additional contributors, who are sitting in the front row, would like to make any comments . . . Bill Galston?

William Galston: I have three brief comments, two of which represent poaching on territories not my own. First of all, with regard to the relationship between civil association and political association, which Frank and Marty Lipset brought up, I was surprised when I returned to Tocqueville after a great many years that he is much subtler on that point than people who speak in his name today in this country are wont to be. Indeed, I am tempted to say that Tocqueville was not a Tocquevillean on this most important question, because he doesn’t have a one-way theory that strong civil association creates strong political association and strong politics. For him it is equally true that the reverse is the case, and that if identification with political associations and institutions is weak, that will have a trickle-down effect on the structure, strength, and vigor of civil society. There is a lot of contemporary social science research that tends to bear him out on that point—that a withdrawal of confidence from national or centralized institutions will tend, all other things being equal, to weaken civil society, not strengthen it. So it’s not a hydraulic effect where politics goes down and civil society goes up. That’s the first point, the nonpoaching point . . .

Plattner: I should explain. It’s nonpoaching because Bill wrote the article on civil society for our issue.

Galston: Secondly, and this is addressed to Marc as much as to anybody else, I thought you made an interesting point about the tendency, even on the left, to create institutions that are insulated from direct majority pressure, such as what the Labor government in Britain did with the central bank. But I think it is a populist misinterpretation to see that as the defense of the minority against the majority. I think in the hands of the Labor Party and others it’s an effort to defend the majority against itself. That is to say that the goals that the majority wants to pursue would be undermined by direct majority control of the money supply, or whatever it is. The Bill Greiders and the James Carvilles of this world think of the Federal Reserve as a capitalist plot against the common man. Maybe it was in the beginning, but it isn’t anymore. Right now, it’s a way that the majority stops itself from doing things that would damage itself.

Now, the third and final point, very quickly, and it really hasn’t come up at all but it occurred to me. I was asking myself as I was listening to this discussion: At the beginning of the twenty-first century, what is the most serious obstacle to the spread and strengthening of democracy in places where it is not established or is weak? The answer that I came up with is tribalism. What I want to suggest is that democracy is a form of political organization that presupposes a demos, that is to say, people who identify with one another as members of the same political community more than they identify with subassociations. I would predict empirically that the places that are going to have the hardest time establishing democracy are the places where ethnos trumps demos.

Plattner: Gautam Adhikari, who was the author of our chapter on freedom of the press.

Gautam Adhikari: This was a very rich discussion, and therefore it has thrown up a wealth of points. I will not try to cover anything except one interesting point that has been raised, both by Frank Fukuyama and Hahm Chaibong: Is democracy culturally biased? I think that is the central question, as I tend to believe coming from India, which has a billion people and houses one-sixth of the world’s population, and which claims to be democratic and has remained so for fifty years now. I believe that democracy is more of a universal value. I suspect some of the problems with Tocqueville’s tackling of this question come from the fact that he does, as Frank Fukuyama said, equate equality with democracy, and therefore he makes another leap toward saying that Christianity or Christ’s teachings are the primary basis for equality in the world. With each of these premises, there are questions that can be raised. If you look at equality per se, there is no such thing. Actually, what I am talking about is equality of opportunity, which in fact is what Tocqueville talks about, not equality of outcome and income. Because if it is equality of all three, then socialism, or communism for that matter, is more democratic than the kind of democracy that you have in the United States, where there is a great disparity of incomes. Because of that, there is a problem that people tend to think that democracy began in the West and is exclusively a Western and therefore, as Sam Huntington says, a Judeo-Christian value. There are other egalitarian ideologies. Islam is as egalitarian as Christianity, but it didn’t lead to democracy around the world when Islam was triumphant for a substantial number of centuries. For that matter, the Greeks also weren’t democratic. They were somewhat aristocratic. Maybe that is what Tocqueville appreciated about American democracy as it was at that time, but this is an issue that I think needs to be looked at. I do not believe that the countries of Asia, including East Asia, that are now struggling to become more liberal in their democracies necessarily have a cultural bias, because I tend to agree with Frank Fukuyama’s other observation that it is really much more a matter of economics. It’s really the market and the spread of market forces that are forcing a kind of equality of opportunity, because there is a need for equality in information gathering, there is a need for equality in market accessibility that forces this. Thank you.

Plattner: Thank you. Larry Diamond?

Diamond: Just briefly, I wanted to put a different spin on Gautam’s intervention. The problem of the degree of universality of democracy and freedom and of the origins of that universality is prominent in your contribution, Frank. Actually, we raise it in a way in our introduction by suggesting that we are virtually all Tocquevilleans now, and we confront it in other pieces as well. The question I would pose and would really like to have you all address—but particularly the two panelists from non-Western cultures—is: Where does this universality come from now? One could argue that its origins are in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, but I think it’s very hard to argue that that is what sustains it. I think Huntington is absolutely wrong about the limits of “cultural travel” in the Clash of Civilizations. So what is there that is driving the universality now beyond Christianity? You, Chaibong, have been arguing about the adaptability and the complex features of Confucianism, and Frank has written about that as well. Is it modernization? Is there something about human nature that, when human beings get a certain degree of dignity and autonomy that comes with economic development, makes these principles simply intrinsically more appealing?

Plattner: Let me just see if we can take a few questions from the audience and then give our panelists a chance to respond.

Audience member #1: Coming from outside Washington, I first want to say thanks that the NED and the Journal are still alive and still doing good work. Thanks to all of you. I want to take off from Bill Galston’s last point. It seems to me that the greatest obstacle is the loss of common ground in the United States. It’s more important than any of the other ten, including tribalism. But that is based on an assumption, and I wanted to get each of the panelists’ response to a question in the interest of focusing the answers. First, I’ll give you three one-word possible answers to the question, and then I’ll give you the question. One word is “determining”; one word is “important”; and one word is “peripheral.” And the question is: How important to the future of the democratic political community in the world is America’s political culture?

Audience member #2: I’d like to follow up on the question about political parties and civil society that several people touched on. It revolves around the decline of parties in the Western countries, and perhaps in others as well. From what Hahm Chaibong said, we can’t have much hope that parties will become strong in Korea, and they are certainly declining in the Western countries. Marty Lipset talked about the revival of party cohesion in the U.S. Congress, which we can see some signs of, but if we look at party identification among the public, it is going down, with more independents than Republicans or Democrats. I think you can find some of the same things, which he pointed to, in the European countries. So what do we do? What kind of institution is going to provide the articulation and cohesion that we need to run a democratic political system? The obvious candidate would seem to be civil society. Frank Fukuyama got to this point—but the discussion necessarily had to move on to other things—when he asked, Well, where are we? Is it going to be government by NGOs? That’s an unsettling prospect in many ways. I would be very interested in what the panelists think about the future implications here. Are we looking at government by NGOs, or coalitions of NGOs, which would necessarily be less cohesive or stable than parties? So I hope that you can comment on that.

Plattner: Thank you. The final question I will take from Mike McFaul.

Michael McFaul: Thank you. I just want to follow up on something that Larry raised. It’s really a question addressed to Frank, but I hope that everyone will chime in. If you read the Journal’s pages over the last decade, which I have done and I am sure many other people here have, there are actually lots of articles, especially from the part of the world that I look at, the postcommunist world, where we seemed to be creeping toward democratic collapse. Everybody kept predicting that there would be collapse, lots of failures along the way. And what is remarkable is the small number of democratic failures that we have actually had since the Journal of Democracy was launched. Now, is this just because Frank Fukuyama was so smart when he wrote his book on the end of history? Perhaps the others could comment on that. Or are there other factors that you would point to that would account for this? When we meet for the twentieth anniversary of the Journal, will we be saying the same thing, talking about democracy as a universal value, or are there some storm clouds out there that you see for some of the new democracies?

Plattner: Well, we have enough questions for an additional two hours, but since we only have about seven or eight minutes left, let me ask each of the panelists to perhaps pick one or two of these broad and interesting questions that were raised, and respond. Why don’t we begin with Chaibong and go around in order.

Hahm: On the question of whether democracy is culturally based or whether it has universal appeal, I am almost tempted to answer that at this point I don’t think it really matters all that much. I am trying to articulate an indigenous, domestic justification for democracy and capitalism because there is really no longer a choice. Of course, that might not be the case for other places in the world, but for me, that is where I find myself. When I am trying to do this, it involves defining democracy and what liberal democracy means. But I am tempted to say that, at least as far as Confucianism is concerned, one can find there the whole notion of equality and the integrity of the human being. These can be found literally anywhere, everywhere, in all the classic works of any religion. And in looking at Confucianism and the term that we use to translate democracy, menjoo, joo is “the master” and men- is “the people.” It’s a term that has a long history and a long and illustrious genealogy. So it’s easy to translate democracy, and people in Korea who have never read Tocqueville, who have never read a single book on democracy, find it very appealing. In fact, it’s not just appealing as something novel. They can find traditional stories to back it up; they can find traditional passages in classics that they have read that they can use to back it up. They can immediately find resonances in their own traditions, so much so that they don’t have to go outside the tradition to find justifications for it. For instance, when I try to analyze as a political scientist the kind of democratization movements that have backed democracy against authoritarian regimes, do I find these students and intellectuals who have fought so hard for democracy to be masters of Western political theory? How many of them have actually read Tocqueville and other theorists of democracy? Actually, they have not. They organize and they struggle; their sense of mission in all of this is based on something that is very native and indigenous. So I guess in that sense I am saying that it is both. As a political theorist who is trying to justify the theoretical basis of democracy in Korea, I am almost forced by the international discourse to do that. But at the same time I find it very easy to do, and find it in an indigenous tradition, which does not seem that forced to myself or my audience.

Lipset: There are a couple of things that we haven’t mentioned, so I’ll just bring them in here. One is the extent to which the supernational communities have made democracy a condition for membership. The new agreement with Turkey provides that they cannot get into the European Union unless they are democratic. The World Bank and the IMF both insist on democracy, as well as on the market. We have an emerging international culture with international law. Countries and rulers who don’t like the idea of democracy at least have to pretend or to make some gestures in this direction. So we’re getting, not world government, but at least real international governance. The European community is a nation. In some ways world institutions are taking over governmental functions, and one of the things they insist on in their “constitution” is democracy. Another thing we have talked about is class. If we go back to Aristotle’s discussion of the conditions for democracy, the optimum condition for democracy is a large middle class, a class structure that bulges towards the center. If we ask, as Tocqueville did, why democracy in the United States succeeded, one reason was that it was bourgeois; it’s people were mostly self-employed. The majority of postrevolutionary Americans were farmers. Middle classes defend democracy, and seek to expand their powers. Still, we must recognize that the largest contemporary democracy, India, a country with a billion people, doesn’t meet any of the traditional conditions of democracy that sociologists and political scientists suggest. India is a very poor country, with a high illiteracy rate. It has, however, multiple sources of cleavage. Many people in India refuse to be in the same party as other castes or ethno-religious groups. Indian democracy is kept going by multiple cross-cutting cleavages—caste, religion, and language, as well as class. But today, as noted earlier, another element is important: external values and institutions. I think the Chinese show this. They have Communist-party domination, but they are aware of the fact that they are sort of out of step. And they make various gestures to get back into step, minimally, but this is something that doesn’t stem from their domestic situation.

Prempeh: I think I would like to take up the issue of America’s example, or how important American leadership is in the worldwide spread of democracy. To look at this question, I think I will go back to Tocqueville, because he thought of American democracy as a case study. It was a case study that would have lessons for other places, but he was insistent that it not be misconstrued as a model to be transplanted or exported to other lands. He certainly was attracted to the substance of democracy, but argued that the form could take any number of shapes. I think the unfortunate thing with the current trend in democratization is that America is being seen not as a case study but as a model. And to the extent that America is seen as a model, I think that how American democracy fares is of immense significance and could affect the progress or pace of democratization elsewhere. Each year when the State Department issues its annual human rights reports on various countries, for example, the Chinese government releases its own on the United States, talking about racial discrimination, homelessness, people sleeping in front of the White House. To the extent that America has become a model, issues such as those highlighted, obviously opportunistically, by the Chinese become relevant, especially to emerging democracies. In more recent times, as the rest of the world followed the Monica Lewinsky story, those of us who have been trying to defend the freedom of the press in places like Ghana against criminal libel laws and the like get questions like, “This is the stuff you want to bring here?” To the extent that we are looking to the United States as an example and not, as Tocqueville would have wished, as a case study, I think that there is great, great importance to the quality of American democracy and the quality of that example. I think it’s really unfortunate. I would have preferred that we look at it just as a case study and not as a model. Not only in terms of the forms that democracy takes in other places, but just because American democracy itself is a work in progress. I think for those of us who are out there looking to the United States, we have governments in power who constantly refer you to incidents in the United States. “You think the United States is heaven? Well, look at this, or look at that.” Those kinds of things really undermine the ability of democracy activists in a lot of places.

Fukuyama: To answer Larry’s question, I believe the universality of democracy really has to rest on some universality of human nature. I just don’t see what other basis it could have, and I believe that is probably the case. But then to answer Mike McFaul’s question, that’s completely irrelevant for anything that is going to happen in the near term, because to the extent that has an influence on the spread of democracy you are talking about hundred-year increments that are much longer than anyone’s lifetime and therefore not really relevant. Of course, there are lots of things that could happen in the short run to delegitimize democracy. Just look at what happened in Venezuela that led to the rise of Hugo Chávez—corruption and the failure of institutions. Government by NGOs is another development that people could decide doesn’t look so attractive, or excessive judicial activism, which has already caused a lot of American conservatives to question the legitimacy of their institutions. So, yes, there are plenty of these things in the short run that will give the Journal of Democracy plenty of grist for the mill in the next decade.

Plattner: Thank you. Well, I think that is a very good note on which to end. We can stay in business. Let me thank all of the panelists and all of you for coming.