All They Need to Do Is Catch the Bug : Democracy: No place is really immune, and it doesn’t take years of gradual exposure to transform the body politic.

In 1975, the usually ebullient Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then America’s envoy to the United Nations, was downright pessimistic about the prospects for democracy in the world. It “has simply no relevance to the future,” he proclaimed. He called it “a holdover form of government,” one that manages to persist only in “isolated or peculiar places here and there.”

As if in conspiracy to embarrass Moynihan--or to cheer him up--the countries of the world have been on something of a democratic binge ever since. There have been setbacks in a few places. But for the most part, democracy has become all the rage as its two chief rivals--inflexible right-wing authoritarianism and ideology-bound Communist dictatorship--descend into disrepute.

Particularly remarkable has been the ease with which many countries have adopted a form of government that has often been considered to be complicated, delicate and difficult. For centuries, political thinkers have been philosophizing about the “prerequisites” or “preconditions” that are necessary for democracy to flower. They often conclude that economic development and the gradual emergence of a democratic tradition are required, and that people must become comparatively responsible, selfless and informed.

Recent history suggests, however, that about all a country needs to become democratic is the more or less general desire to do so. A democratic revolution, it now appears, is often quite easy to manage--it requires neither special preparation nor notable improvement in human nature or capacities.

This might have been evident in the immediate aftermath of World War II when totalitarian Germany, Japan, Italy and Austria became democracies. Democracy was forced upon them, of course, but they took to it very well despite little democratic tradition, particularly in Japan.

The current rage for democracy, however, seems to have been born in 1975 (even as Moynihan spoke) when Portugal and Spain, both economically backward countries with virtually no democratic preparation or tradition, became democracies almost overnight and almost entirely without bloodshed.

Since that time almost all new states (mainly in the Caribbean, but also in such unlikely places as Papua New Guinea) have adopted democracy with remarkably little apparent effort. In Latin America, it is the military dictatorship that has proven to be the form of government in decline. In country after country, military leaders have relinquished control in large part because they felt embarrassed that their countries were so out of fashion. If present trends continue, Paraguay--once one of the most entrenched and unyielding dictatorships in the world--will soon become a democracy under the guidance of a general who used to be a chief pillar of the authoritarian regime.

The remarkably rapid recent progress toward democracy in the Soviet Bloc--particularly in Poland and Hungary--has often been attributed to the Western orientation of those countries. The democracy movement in China was undoubtedly similarly affected by increased knowledge of Western ways. But calls for democracy have also burgeoned in Myanmar (formerly Burma)--one of the poorest and most isolated countries in the world.

All this suggests that there is no reason to anticipate that the next democracies must necessarily emerge in countries that have been preparing for it for decades, like Turkey. Rather, any place--Albania, Iraq, Zaire, Iraq, Romania, the Soviet Union--can quite easily become a democracy. All they need is to catch the bug.

Fans of democracy can take cheer from all this, but they are also entitled to wonder whether these developments present a firm trend or merely a fad. Some of those demanding democracy--as in China, Burma, and South Korea--may see it merely as an expedient gimmick to remove current leaders from office.

And others find appeal in democracy because they simplistically associate it with prosperity. But while prosperity and democracy seem to have gone hand-in-hand in the developed Western world, prosperity has certainly not accompanied democracy in India or the Philippines, and some may eventually be led to notice that the present prosperity of South Korea and Taiwan was largely achieved under authoritarian regimes.

There may well be setbacks for democracy, then, but the long-range prospects look rather good. After all, in 1789 there were only two democracies in the world--Switzerland and the United States. By 1975, as Moynihan might have noticed, democracy had firmly taken root not merely “in isolated or peculiar places here and there,” but in most of the major countries of the world. In that sense, democracy has been on a tear not merely for 15 years, but for 200. It’s hard to dismiss that as a fad.