69% of Mankind Called Free; Ethnic Strife Clouds Gains

President-elect Bill Clinton will inherit the freest world in history because 69% of the world’s 5.4 billion people now live in free or partly free societies, according to a Freedom House survey released Thursday.

Yet the trend toward a more open, integrated and freer world since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has faced its most serious challenge this year in the rise of nationalist, religious and ethnic strife and in brutal civil wars, the annual survey of democracy and human rights warned.

The survey, “Freedom in the World 1993,” reported that at least 34 countries have adopted democracy as their political system over the last three years, and another seven may make the transition by early 1993.

But “the unprecedented rate of democratic change over the last three years has also unleashed many forces known to undermine free societies,’ said R. Bruce McColm, executive director of Freedom House.

Old democracies in Venezuela and the struggling new democracies in Algeria and Congo have been threatened by violence and human rights abuses, while neo-Communists have returned to power or influence in countries such as Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Slovakia, as well as several former Soviet republics.

Setbacks to the “democratic renaissance,” including both failures in the transition to democracy and the onset of decay in established democracies, are now undermining the progress of the past decade. They also “may augur a new cycle of authoritarianism, if the community of democracies does not respond adequately to the challenge,” the survey predicted.

Elsewhere, economic shock-therapy programs also are endangering new democracies on three continents because of the chronic deterioration in the standard of living.

Of the 186 countries monitored, 99 are now considered formal democracies--a dramatic increase from the 44 democracies in 1972 or the 57 in 1983. Yet only 75 earn the Freedom House ranking of “free,” while 23 are rated “partly free” and one “not free” because of human rights abuses or election violations.

Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization established in 1941 to combat the rise of Nazism and right-wing extremism, called on the incoming Clinton Administration to more actively encourage the implementation of democracy and to expand aid to democratic parties and other non-government institutions to consolidate democratic gains achieved over the past three years.

“Without an aggressive foreign policy that places democracy and human rights at its center, the United States stands to lose prestige and influence around the world and will face a rash of severe challenges to its national interests,” McColm wrote.

The survey also criticized the West’s failure to respond to Serbian aggression, which it warned will “cast a long shadow over the continued expansion of freedom around the world.”

More than 3 million people have become refugees since last spring in Bosnia-Herzegovina, while several hundred thousand have been detained--a situation the survey said is one of the gravest crises in Europe since World War II.

“The Balkans may be a new generation’s Spain, the gruesome laboratory of the future,” it said.

It also criticized the West for allowing so much time to pass--and for so many to die--before acting in Somalia, where, it said, one-third of children under 5 have died.