New, Fragile Democracies Present Problems for U.S.

While an approving world focuses on the historic surge toward freedom in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, fledgling democracies in other parts of the world face problems that are beginning to threaten their very survival.

Pakistan, the Philippines, Argentina, Nicaragua and several other new or budding democratic governments suffer from economic and political frailties that could reverse their turn toward more open societies, U.S. officials and regional analysts assert.

If these new democracies falter, U.S. intelligence and State Department sources say, the consequences would extend beyond the borders of the individual countries, casting shadows over the prospects for a kinder, gentler world as a whole.

As a result, many analysts say, the general trend toward democracy, although welcome, could bring with it a host of problems for the United States, including pressure to use U.S. forces to prop up fragile governments such as that in the Philippines or to find massive economic relief for nations such as economically strapped Argentina.

“Generally, the U.S. government has been much more sensitive to the need to promote democratization in authoritarian systems than to preserve democracies which are fragile,” said David Shipler, who is researching the democratization process at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“The United States has problems with follow-through. We need to pay attention to the problem of new democracies and even some established democracies that are losing some of their democratic characteristics. The erosion of democracy is often a slow process that is less dramatic than what we see in Nicaragua or Eastern Europe, so it doesn’t get the attention that it should.”

Many of the elected leaders of the new democracies face common problems: poverty and economic turmoil at home, crushing foreign debt, troubled relations with their own armies, and continuing struggles with the vestiges of the authoritarian regimes they replaced.

And in each country, most of the basic social and economic problems that led to public demand for democratic rule have failed to improve or, indeed, have worsened since the old regimes were toppled. The continuing deterioration is causing concern among U.S. officials about the political survival of leaders in these countries--and the potential alternatives if they should fall.

Consider the following:

Only 15 months after the restoration of democracy in Pakistan, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s government is being undermined by internal paralysis, stiff opposition and growing corruption, reportedly now including Bhutto’s relatives.

* Four years after taking control in the Philippines, President Corazon Aquino’s hold on power is slipping rapidly. She has faced six coup attempts. The most recent effort to overthrow her last December slowed economic growth, increased popular disillusionment with Aquino’s capacity to govern and encouraged further efforts by Philippine military leaders to seize power.

* Only eight months after taking office, Argentine President Carlos Menem’s government is already riddled with dissension. His erratic domestic policies have led to a series of Cabinet resignations and growing disillusionment within his own party.

* Even before the new government of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro takes power in Nicaragua, doubts are growing about the ability of her 14-party coalition--which ranges from far left to far right--to reach agreement on a formula to address a chronic list of economic ills.

“Chamorro is going to face many of the same problems we faced--an economy that is in ruins and so forth,” said Emmanuel Pelaez, the Philippine ambassador to the United States, a few days after the Nicaraguan election in which Chamorro defeated the leader of the current Sandinista regime, Daniel Ortega.

The dangers faced by these new democracies are nowhere more evident than in Pakistan. Despite the lofty pledges Bhutto made during the election campaign, U.S. analysts are concerned that her government has yet to introduce a significant piece of legislation except for a budget.

“People did not support her out of loyalty for the Pakistan People’s Party but because they really wanted to see improvements and accomplishments in health, education and unemployment,” said a senior Bush Administration analyst.

“But the honeymoon is long over and the domestic situation is in increasingly critical condition. She spends time politicking, not governing, and there is real disillusionment among her supporters.”

Illiteracy is 77%, which is high even by Third World standards, while per capita income is $390. Crime and corruption, already chronic, deteriorated further after she took office. “The level of violence is unprecedented,” said a U.S. official analyst who recently served in Islamabad.

The kidnaping of businessmen or their relatives, particularly in Bhutto’s home province of Sind, is now so common that groups regularly take ads in local papers to announce the latest total of abductees and to plead for government action.

And, although Bhutto is personally considered to be clean, allegations about widespread corruption now touch her husband and her father-in-law, Hakim Ali Zardari, who serves as chairman of the parliamentary public accounts committee. Zardari has been nicknamed “the 10-million-rupee man” because of his reported charges for advice and influence.

“She is so parsimonious in her expenditures that she worries about light bills and often serves the same meal at lunch and dinner,” said a U.S. official who has traced her career through imprisonment and exile. “But it doesn’t help her national image when she is seen as unable to control her own family.”

When asked who represents Bhutto’s greatest political threat, the senior analyst replied: “Herself. She created the problems she is in right now.”

“She is very book smart,” the analyst said of the Harvard-educated prime minister. “But she is not a good manager, and she has poor advisers largely inherited from her father,” former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was ousted in a 1977 military takeover and executed in 1979.

Many U.S. and regional analysts suggest that the fate of Pakistan’s democratic experiment may depend on Bhutto’s ability to survive through her five-year term. If she were to be ousted by a parliamentary no-confidence vote, current U.S. assessments predict that the opposition would not be able to hold the government together more than a year, forcing the president to call for new elections.

“That sequence would suggest the instability of democracy and probably open the way for mass fraud in a new election,” particularly in Punjab, which has 60% of Pakistan’s population and is led by an opposition party, one U.S. expert on Pakistan said. “She has to survive until 1993 to prove that democracy can work in Pakistan.”

One factor in her favor is the military’s support, so far, of the democratic process, if not necessarily of Bhutto. And she did survive a no-confidence vote last November.

When Aquino came to power in Manila after the 1986 “people power” revolution against the government of Ferdinand E. Marcos, U.S. officials were full of optimism about the prospects for change. Throughout the last three years of the Ronald Reagan Administration, Secretary of State George P. Shultz told all listeners, “I’m bullish on the Philippines.”

Now, U.S. officials have become increasingly bearish.

Some of the complaints they voice about Aquino sound strikingly similar to the ones made about Bhutto: what they see as a failure to seize the initiative, to take action against corruption or to control members of her own family, such as her brother, Jose Cojuangco, who has extensive business interests in the Philippines.

Aquino has also failed to carry out major social reforms. During her 1985-86 election campaign against Marcos, for example, Aquino promised to institute a land-reform program to help defuse agrarian unrest. She promised to make her own family’s huge estate, the Hacienda Luisita, a model for land reform throughout the nation.

But over the last four years, Aquino’s land-reform efforts have been slow and ill-fated. Last year, she was forced to fire her first land-reform secretary after his program was beset by financial scandals. She decided that it would not be economically efficient to break up her family’s hacienda, and instead offered one-third of the land free to the peasants.

“Many years ago (in the 1950s), the United States helped foster an effective land-reform program in Taiwan. But Taiwan was a dictatorship then,” observed one Philippine official, who asked not to be quoted by name. “Would that be possible under the present circumstances, under our democratic system? It would be very difficult.”

Argentina is a third source of American concern. Inaugurated only last July, President Menem already is not expected to last out his five-year term, according to Bush Administration assessments.

The austral, the national currency, sank in value from 1,600 to the U.S. dollar in January to 5,400 last week. The flight of capital abroad has reached unprecedented proportions, according to Argentine economists, some of whom predict such dire measures as abandonment of the austral in favor of the dollar.

With the West’s focus on aid to the East Bloc, Argentines fear that there is little, if any, hope for rescheduling its enormous debt, which eats away at national reserves needed for development to reinvigorate the economy.

Politically, Menem promoted the populist Peronist party line during his campaign, but in office he has instead favored conservative fiscal measures, including privatization. Dissent within his young government has been reflected in the resignations of three central bank governors and a defense minister.

Ironically, the military is not, as yet, considered an alternative, in large part because it does not want to be saddled with the country’s crisis.

More dangerous for Menem may be the dissipation of his base of support. Polls indicated that his popularity has plummeted from 80% after his election to about 40% today.

Despite the still overwhelming public support of democracy, the result of Menem’s declining personal popularity, according to a leading political scientist in Buenos Aires, is that democracy in Argentina is associated with failure.

The barometer for most fragile democracies is economic change. “In recessions, it becomes very difficult to hold on to democracy unless you have a long cultural history of democracy,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a former national security staff director in the Reagan Administration. “The United States and Britain have gotten through recessions, but almost everywhere (else) they (democracies) have collapsed. The most obvious example was the Weimar Republic (in Germany before the rise of Adolf Hitler).”

Two countries that have moved toward democracy in recent years and are considered to have the best chances of survival are Taiwan and South Korea, which have extraordinarily high rates of economic growth.

In Taiwan, the ruling Nationalist Party has, over the last three years, lifted martial law and allowed an opposition party to run against it. In South Korea, the authoritarian regime of Chun Doo Hwan gave way in 1988 to an elected government run by Chun’s associate, Roh Tae Woo.

Even in those two countries, the transition to democracy is still fragile and incomplete. And other elected governments such as Nicaragua and the Philippines cannot hope to achieve the relative prosperity of those two Pacific Rim nations.

“People are still living in the springtime of nations,” Kemp said. “They forget that springtime is followed by the hot summer.”