16
idealists think about revolution today, they have Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in mind.
Few assumptions can lead you into as much trouble this quickly. Even in 1989-90, those countries were the exception and not the rule. Think Ukraine, Belarus, Yugoslavia, Romania, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and of course Russia itself. More people live in countries where the 1989-90 revolutionary wave failed to establish secure constitutional democracy than live in those where it succeeded.
More, the countries that had ‘velvet’ revolutions shared a number of important characteristics. They had or longed to have close political and cultural ties to the West. They wanted to join NATO and the EU, and had a reasonable confidence of doing so sooner rather than later. They could expect enormous amounts of aid and foreign direct investment if they continued along the path of democratic reform. They lay on the ‘western’ side of the ancient division of Europe between the Orthodox east and the Catholic/Protestant homeland of the modern liberal tradition.
No Arab country looks anything like this. Indeed, most seem closer to Yugoslavia and Belarus or, at best, Ukraine. We, and they, may get lucky, and the revolutions in the Arab world may lead to something that looks more like Central Europe than like Central Asia. That would be a nice surprise, but we should not be placing large bets that this will actually happen.
China, by the way, does not look very much like the Czech Republic. Revolution there is very unlikely to produce a US or European style democracy anytime soon.
If realists ignore the inevitability of revolution, idealists close their eyes to the problems of revolutionary upheavals in societies that have difficult histories, deep social divisions, and poor short term economic prospects. Unfortunately the countries most likely to
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031891