Hong Kong and Singapore, as examples that others should follow.
it as the ideal situation in which to promote liberalism.
Particularly since the advent of the Arab Spring, this has raised questions around what kind of regime change the international community should support. Would it have been more prudent to encourage Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt to enact liberal policies rather than welcoming the popular uprisings that overthrew them? The changes may have been more incremental, but the end result may well have been better than the largely illiberal regimes that have resulted from revolution. The West is often keen to encourage elections in post conflict states, as a means of ensuring peace and stability. But in Angola in 1992 8 and in Kenya in 2007 9 , elections have resulted in disputes that have in turn caused huge escalations in violence. Perhaps the WestÊs fixation on the spread of democracy is misplaced, and the absence of free and fair elections should be seen as one of many possible flaws rather than the definition of an illegitimate regime. But others would argue that this is an unrealistic view to take of the world. Plattner writes that Âwise and benevolent despots are the exception, not the ruleÊ, and points out that liberal autocracies are few and far between, with very few existing outside of South East Asia. There have been scarcely any examples in history of dictators actually accepting demands for constitutional liberalism. After all, they are mainly concerned with the proliferation of power and it would seem counterintuitive for them to accept its limitation. Furthermore, although not all democracies are liberal, a democracy is much more likely to be liberal than an autocracy. Therefore we should not give up on illiberal democracy, but rather see 8 Jonas SavimbiÊs refusal to accept defeat in a UN monitored election plunged the country back into civil war. 9 Both sides alleged electoral fraud, and the resulting violence killed between 800 and 1500 people.
Once a people have come to respect democracy, they have also come to recognize some of the key principles underlying liberalism. The belief that everyone should have an equal say in who rules is not far from the belief that everyone should have equal rights and status under the law. When the people can choose who is in power, they are also likely to want to choose how they can exercise that power and make sure that they donÊt abuse it. We should not see illiberal democracy as a failure, but rather an imperfect form of government that over time can be transformed into the liberal democracies that have flourished in the West. Many feared that the illiberal democracies that arose after the breakup of Yugoslavia would soon revert to authoritarianism, but they have since come to gradually embrace a more liberal form of governance. 10 Democracy does not always foster liberalism, and of course placing blind faith behind it as the ideal system of government is foolish. But that does not mean we should abandon it. It remains the ideal state within which liberalism can flourish and the one in which it has done so the most throughout history. Complacency has arisen in the international community that once a country has held elections it is necessarily on the road to freedom, and this idea is indeed misplaced. When countries are emerging from decades of dictatorship they should be helped not just to uphold democracy, but also to form a constitution that enshrines rights and makes sure that that democracy can last. On its own, democracy often cannot make peopleÊs lives significantly better. But it is the system that is most likely to promote constitutional liberalism and a free society.
10 Slovenia and Croatia have been encouraged to liberalize by the incentive of EU membership .
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