COLUMN ONE : Democracy Takes Hold --Sort of : The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe is the latest boost. But while more open political systems are on the rise, it is easy to exaggerate their health.

Is democracy rising like a phoenix out of the ashes and disgrace of communism? Is democracy on a relentless roll? Some optimists often paint the world that way.

But it is a simplistic look at a complex notion. In his speech to the United Nations in mid-September, for example, President Bush extolled the Western Hemisphere as a vast sea of democracy. Fidel Castro, the President insisted, was “the lone holdout in an otherwise democratic hemisphere.”

In less than a week, however, Cuba was no longer standing alone. Mutinous soldiers overthrew popularly elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti in a bloody and outrageous coup. Shocked by this usurpation of power, Bush pledged that the United States is “committed to the restoration of democracy” in that hapless, impoverished republic.

Yet many Latin America specialists have a far more complex view of democracy in the hemisphere than Bush. To them, Aristide’s Haiti was never a democracy--although it had taken a significant democratic step with the U.N.-supervised elections that he won in December, 1990. Moreover, many academics believe that Cuba has lots more undemocratic company. Few specialists would accept Bush’s contention that every state in the Western Hemisphere save Cuba and Haiti is democratic.

“No, I don’t agree with him,” said Robert A. Dahl, professor-emeritus of political science at Yale University, one of America’s foremost analysts of democratic theory. He described Bush’s U.N. speech as “a very generous appraisal” of democracy in Latin America.

“There are a lot of people in the White House and the State Department,” Dahl went on, “who say if you have elections without too much interference, well, that’s it, that’s democracy. That’s not it, in my opinion. That’s a pretty narrow view of democracy.”

Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, however, insisted that Bush’s singling out of Cuba has validity “in the sense that you have had democratic movement all over the hemisphere, while Cuba remains a totalitarian state with no movement to democracy.”

But Gershman acknowledged: “Clearly, there are many countries in the Western Hemisphere that you would not consider real democracies. . . . Just an election doesn’t a democracy make.”

It is often easy to confuse the form of democracy for its substance. In 1962, for example, this correspondent attended a session of the Western House of Assembly in Ibadan, Nigeria.

An African sergeant-at-arms in blue knee breeches and red stockings, carrying the ceremonial mace upon a pillow, strode into the chamber, bellowing out, “The Speak-uhhhh!” The Speaker, an enormous Nigerian in white wig and black robes, followed his sergeant-at-arms majestically.

A visitor could not help marveling how the pomp and tradition of Westminster had taken hold in the young, independent, former British colony of Nigeria, so far away from London and the mother of parliaments.

But, moments after the Speaker called the chamber to order, an assemblyman leaped up on his chair and cried out, as a signal: “Snake! Fire! Snake!”

Chairs cascaded across the floor as the members of the assembly chased each other in and out. One snatched the mace and tried to smash it down upon the Speaker. The fearful Speaker fled for his life while troops stormed into the building firing tear gas into every crevice.

It was a feverish turn in Nigerian history. The federal government used the riot as a pretext to declare a state of emergency. This infuriated a generation of young Nigerians and provoked coup and countercoup and finally the Nigerian Civil War, the greatest scourge in Africa since the slave trade.

More coups followed and a procession of short-lived attempts at civilian rule. The army still runs Nigeria these days, with the reigning general promising, like other dictators before him, democracy when the time is ripe.

The Nigerian experience reflects the elusive nature of democracy. Democracy is definitely on the rise throughout the world, but it is easy to exaggerate its health in the euphoria over the collapse of communism in Europe. A hard look at the worldwide status of democracy makes clear:

* Most people do not live in democratic countries. Democracy is entrenched in Western Europe and most of North America, strengthened in Latin America and incipient in Eastern Europe. But Africa and the Middle East are as inhospitable to democracy as ever. And Asia is still dominated by communism and authoritarianism.

* Many people who yearn for democracy do not understand much about it. Its difficulties and fragility are often glossed over.

* The current wave of democracy began long before the end of the Cold War and the collapse of East European communism.

* For the first time in history, democracy has no significant ideological competitors. But some rivals loom on the horizon--the most obvious, Islamic fundamentalism.

* The United States, the most powerful democracy on earth, has often failed to foster democracy even while trying to. In theory, the end of the Cold War should make it easier for the United States to shun dictators and embrace democracies, but there is a lot of evidence that this may not happen. Bush, after all, did not use the repercussions of the Persian Gulf War to try to encourage democratic government in Kuwait and Iraq.

Freedom House, a private organization in New York that monitors democracy throughout the world, ranked 65 of 165 countries, with 39% of the world’s population, as “free” this year. In 1977, Freedom House classified only 41 countries, with 20% of the world’s population, as free.

Samuel P. Huntington, professor of government at Harvard, believes that the world is now engaged in its third wave of democratization. Modern history’s first wave lasted from the 1820s to the 1920s and carried democracy to almost 30 nations. After the defeat of Nazism and fascism in World War II, a second wave increased the number to 36. The third wave, which began with the Portuguese Revolution in 1974, has ballooned the number of democracies to more than 60.

But Huntington also points out that each wave of democracy in the past has been followed by a reverse whiplash that reduced the number of democracies before another wave increased them again.

Yet it is also true that the idea of democracy has a dynamic force in some areas of the world these days, infused with a power difficult to resist.

In 1981, a foolish colonel of the Spanish Civil Guard, backed by army generals with nostalgia for the fascist past, stormed into Parliament and attempted a coup. Spain had been nurturing its young democracy for six years since the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, and many Spaniards feared the worst.

But the coup collapsed, and now, a decade later, most Spaniards look on the attempt as a comic-opera interlude. Spaniards cannot now imagine what the colonel and the generals would have done even if they had taken over the country.

The ludicrous yet fearful coup attempt, in fact, served as a kind of inoculation for democracy in Spain. Its arrogance and madness convinced many Spaniards once and for all that no backpedaling from democracy was possible.

It is not yet clear whether the collapse of the foolish coup in the Soviet Union in August provided the same inoculation there. Democracy is still a weak reed in Eastern Europe. But there is little doubt that the popular resistance to the coup made almost everyone realize that, whether or not the Soviet people were heading to democracy, there was no going back to Communist dictatorship.

In assessing democracy, most experts look for a host of political and civil rights in addition to fair elections. Prof. Dahl, for example, says that a democracy must have fair and free elections of its top leaders; freedom of expression and the right to form all kinds of political associations; sources of news that are not monopolized by the government or powerful interests, and a national electorate that includes almost everyone (and doesn’t exclude blacks, as in South Africa, or women, as in the United States almost 75 years ago).

The snags of democracy and prospects for it differ from region to region throughout the world, and democracy can probably be understood best by looking at some of these differences in some detail.

Latin America

Civilian governments predominate in Latin America today mainly because military governments have failed. The Argentine military, for example, withdrew in disgrace after the debacle of the Falklands War. The Chilean dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet submitted to a plebiscite and lost.

This predominance of civilian rule, however, does not mean a predominance of democratic rule. Governments run roughshod over rights. Death squads strike with impunity. Presidents dare not offend generals. Coups are still a threat. As Abraham F. Lowenthal, professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, and Peter Hakim, staff director of the Inter-American Dialogue, put it in a recent article, “Latin American democracy today needs reinforcement, not premature celebration.”

Elaborating on this later, Lowenthal said that those celebrating the supposed rush toward democracy ought to pause and take note that “the countries that have the strongest democracies now in South America had them 30 years ago.” He cited Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela. Democracy, in short, was working best where it has roots, but it does not have roots in many countries of Latin America.

Nevertheless, there are healthy omens for democracy. “Fifteen years ago in Latin America,” Lowenthal said, “both military guardians on the right and Leninist vanguards on the left argued the superiority of authoritarian formulas. That has really been undermined by the experience of the last 15 years.”

Africa

In the last two years, 17 African despots, including President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, have felt the need to legalize their opposition, but this has proven no more than a feeble step toward democracy.

The essence of the African political system was probably best described by President Daniel Arap Moi, who succeeded the late Jomo Kenyatta as the authoritarian ruler of Kenya 13 years ago. “I call on all Kenyans to sing like parrots,” Moi told his countrymen in a political speech a few years ago, “During the Kenyatta time, I persistently sang the Kenyatta tune. I said I did not have any ideas of my own. Therefore, you should now sing the song I sing. This is how the country will move forward.”

Almost all African countries came to independence with colonial-bequeathed democratic systems, but these did not last very long. They were probably not suitable to countries that were artificial creations with borders that paid no attention to tribal boundaries.

Before independence, African nationalists used to cry for “one man, one vote”--a slogan that demanded fair elections in which the African majorities could easily outvote the colonial settlers and bureaucrats. But, once these elections were held, producing an African government that led the country to independence, they were usually not repeated. The slogan should have been, according to one bitter joke, “one man, one vote, once.”

Middle East

Either the State Department or Amnesty International or both cited almost every country in the Middle East last year for violations of human rights. In its survey of the Middle East, Freedom House ranks only Israel as free--although the Israeli-occupied territories are classified as “not free.”

Some experts fear that the Islamic religion is simply incompatible with democracy. Gambia and the Turkish republic of northern Cyprus are the only Muslim entities in the world that are rated free by Freedom House.

In much of North Africa and the Middle East, the opposition to authoritarian governments comes not from democratic groups but from Islamic fundamentalists who believe that Koranic law should be the basic law of a state and that Islamic religious leaders should have the right to oversee the decisions of the government. Citing this dependence of the state upon religion, Prof. Huntington said, “Islamic concepts of politics differ from and contradict the premises of democratic politics.”

But Michael Hudson, a leading Arab specialist at Georgetown University, insisted that this is an oversimplification. Pointing out that most of the Middle East emerged from colonialism only after World War II, Hudson said: “These post-independence governments tended to be wobbly affairs. But I wouldn’t attribute that kind of instability to Islamic culture.”

East Europe, Soviets

Democracy and multi-party politics are the new watchwords of the old Communist world of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. A recent poll by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, for example, revealed that 60% of the Russians supported a multi-party system rather than a strong leader and that 55% believed that a democratic government was the best way to solve the country’s problems. Majorities were even larger in the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe.

Yet the poll also revealed that support for some of the rudiments of democracy were fragile throughout the region and that there was deep suspicion of some of the new institutions. Most East Europeans looked on their elected parliaments as chambers of sound and fury and their political leaders as ineffectual windbags.

Asia

The collapse of communism in Europe may have evoked subversive ideas in the heads of Asian college students, but communism did not come crashing down in Asia. Although feeling isolated and defensive, North Korea, Vietnam and the world’s most populous country, China, are all Communist. Asia, in fact, is now the heartland of communism.

Although Asia boasts the world’s largest democracy in India, many of the non-Communist countries such as Burma and Indonesia are not democratic at all. In fact, despite the American belief that free markets and democracy go hand in hand, some Asian countries such as Singapore and Taiwan accomplished economic miracles with authoritarian regimes.

In a recent lecture, Robert A. Scalapino of the University of California, one of the leading Asian scholars in the country, argued that the enormous economic growth in several authoritarian Asian states is leading to a demand for more political freedom, a demand that has already forced more liberalization than ever before.

“An open economy and a closed polity cannot coexist for long,” he said.

The nature of democracy is elusive and fragile and nettlesome. “Democracy is hard to do, period,” said Lowenthal.

The collapse of democracy in Western Europe is now inconceivable to most of the world. Yet Greece, Portugal and Spain were dictatorships not so very long ago. And nazism and fascism ruled most of Europe only a half century ago. “We now think of Western Europe as unquestionably democratic,” said Lowenthal. “But our parents, many of whom came from Europe, didn’t have that experience of seeing firmly established democracies in Europe.”

The caldron of recent events stirs both hope and caution in Prof. Dahl. “Democracy always competed with alternative and pretty credible belief systems: monarchy, aristocracy, Leninism, nazism, fascism, Maoism,” he said. “The astounding historical events that we are living in has changed this. All those competitors don’t have much strength. . . .

“I don’t know how long this is going to last. New competitors will begin to appear. My guess is that they will have a pseudo-democratic, populist component without the democratic institutions. But they can’t any longer be elitist in character. It’s impossible now for elites to say they can rule without regard to the wishes of the people.”

THE DEMOCRACIES

These are the countries classified “free” by Freedom House:

North America, English-speaking Caribbean

United States

Canada

Barbados

St. Kitts-Nevis

Trinidad & Tobago

Belize

Dominica

St. Lucia

St. Vincent & Grenadines

Grenada

Jamaica

Antigua & Barbuda

Bahamas

Latin America

Costa Rica

Uruguay

Argentina

Chile

Ecuador

Venezuela

Bolivia

Brazil

Dominican Republic

Honduras

Western Europe

Austria

Belgium

Denmark

Finland

Iceland

Ireland

Italy

Luxembourg

Netherlands

Norway

Spain

Sweden

Switzerland

France

Germany

Greece

Portugal

United Kingdom

Eastern Europe

Czechoslovakia

Hungary

Poland

Australia, South Pacific

Australia

New Zealand

Solomon Islands

Tuvalu

Kiribati

Nauru

Western Samoa

Papua New Guinea

Vanuatu

Mediterranean, Middle East

Greek-speaking Cyprus

Turkish-speaking Cyprus

Malta

Israel

Asia

Japan

India

South Korea

Thailand *

Africa

Botswana

Gambia

Mauritius

Namibia

* Classified before recent coup.

Source: “Freedom in the World, 1990-91,” Freedom House