Democracy around the World

Abstract

Winston Churchill famously said that is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.1 This appears to be a popular conclusion as people in a growing number of countries seek to establish democratic systems of self-go vemment. In each society democracy takes on a different expression, but the core elements of regular elections, civic and human rights protections, and alternation of power among factions or parties are common goals.From activists in societies with little or no democratic experience, there has come an outreach to older democracies such as Canada, Britain, France, and the United States for technical assistance and support to bund the domestic institutions necessary to sustain new democratic governments. Similar, more poignant requests have come from dissidents under authoritarian and totalitarian regimes seeking solidarity and support from free people abroad. In the 19th century, colonial empires brought democratic principles and institutions from Europe to new continents, from North America to Africa and Asia, where they had limited success. In the 20th century, the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War pitted democratic governments against different forms of totalitarianism (fascism and communism, principally), adding geostrategic urgency to the support for democratic governments in West Germany, Japan, Greece, Turkey, and elsewhere.Then, in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, President George W Bush made the promotion of democracy a central element of the US response to global terrorism. His efforts built on those of previous US presidents, from William Howard Taft to Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, and echoed the rhetoric of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Bush was mostly increasing the scale and scope of US democracy assistance efforts and not adding something new. Nevertheless, support for developing democracies around the world became associated with Bush and his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in such a way that many people began to pay attention to democracy assistance for the first time, and many took away a poor first impression of its practice.Canada was in the vanguard of the 19th-century British empire when it came to promoting the principles of responsible government at home and abroad. Canada's great experiment in designing a federal variation of the Westminster model to accommodate English- and French-Canadian aspirations in a continent- spanning became the model for the establishment of governments with dominion status in Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the pre-Canadian Newfoundland. During the First and Second World Wars as well as the Cold War, Canada was a stalwart on the side of the democracies.Yet after 2001, many Canadians harboured doubts about the provision of democracy assistance abroad. This was certainly in part a reaction to the Bush administration's embrace of the field, but it also reflected an uncertainty about what this assistance involves, as well as the damaging misperception that democracy assistance was a new and risky idea cooked up by neoconservatives in Washington, DC. Despite a long tradition of support for democracy at home and abroad, Canada stood out among western, democratic countries because it had no formal democracy assistance agency or institution, and many talented Canadians found work in democracy assistance organizations outside the country.In 2006 and 2007, the Canadian house of commons standing committee on foreign affairs and international development held hearings on contemporary best practices for the assistance of democratic development by aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations around the world. Committee members heard testimony from some ofthe Canadian specialists working abroad, and from international democracy assistance practitioners in Denmark, Finland, Britain, Sweden, Norway, and the United States, as well as at the United Nations. …