“In ‘89 to ‘91 we thought we saw democracy spreading across an entire region,” Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves told me in a conversation in his office in Tallinn.
But of the East Bloc population served by Radio Free Europe – where Ilves was a research analyst 20 years ago – and Radio Liberty before 1989, just 25 percent now live in countries rated as free, Ilves says.
The rest have fallen back under some form of authoritarianism.
Will the Middle East make it to 25 percent in 20 years? That could depend, says Ilves, on whether this generation of revolutionaries makes good decisions about how to build democratic institutions and a free economy – and whether the West is supportive or discouraging.
What did this tiny Baltic country do right? First, says Ilves, it created a parliamentary rather than a presidential system; every former communist country with a strong president has become an autocracy.
It was aggressive in privatizing its economy, but in a way that prevented oligarchs from gaining control over swaths of industry, as in neighboring Russia.
Baltic nation curbs powers of president, rich in establishing true democracy.
Estonia has a low flat tax and a robust free press, which have headed off the endemic corruption of other new democracies.
Finally, Ilves says, it has benefited from an electoral system based on proportional representation – which has preserved minority parties and deterred the winner-takes-all mentality that has polarized places such as Hungary.
“What we’ve learned,” says Ilves, “is that democracy is not just about building institutions but building the right institutions.”
So far, the lessons from the last wave of anti-authoritarian revolution do not seem to be resonating with this one.
Egypt is well on its way to making every mistake on Ilves’ list – from perpetuating a strong presidential system, to a majoritarian voting regime for parliament, to an economic policy that may veer away from a free market.
Western governments, meanwhile, seem to be repeating stumbles they committed during the 1989-91 revolutions.
Then, leaders doubted that countries such as Estonia could really win freedom; worried that disruption of the status quo could lead to war or chaos; and clung to diplomatic and personal relationships with a discredited elite.
That history is repeating in the Middle East, where, says Ilves, “you have an elite that speaks English, that wears suits and ties, who are familiar in Western capitals, but who are completely discredited in their own countries.”
Once again U.S. and European leaders are slow to accept that the old status quo is unsustainable, that a new generation of leaders is emerging – that unknown academics and radio station researchers could become presidents and foreign ministers.
Jackson Diehl is deputy editorial page editor of the Washington Post. This article is reprinted with permission.
