The Future of Freedom

Fareed Zakaria, journalist and editor of Newsweek International, argues that democracy and liberty are distinct concepts, and that the global spread of democracy, while overwhelmingly positive, carries serious risks when not accompanied by constitutional liberalism: the tradition of protecting individual rights through the rule of law, separation of powers, and institutional checks on government authority. Writing in 2003, with an afterword added in 2007, Zakaria contends that the West achieved liberty long before it achieved democracy, and that reversing this sequence produces dangerous outcomes he calls "illiberal democracy," in which elected leaders use their popular mandates to concentrate power and erode individual freedoms.

Zakaria opens by establishing that democracy has become the dominant political system worldwide, with 119 countries qualifying as democracies by the early 2000s compared to none in 1900. He argues that democratization extends far beyond politics into economics, culture, and technology, as hierarchies break down and mass pressures drive social change. The benefits have been extraordinary, but the dark side is real: The democratization of technology has enabled small groups to acquire destructive capabilities, and the democratization of politics, when unaccompanied by liberal institutions, has produced elected autocrats who trample the rights of their citizens.

To establish why sequence matters, Zakaria traces the history of liberty in the West. He begins with Emperor Constantine's fourth-century decision to move the Roman capital to Constantinople, which separated the Catholic Church from imperial power and created space for individual freedom. Europe's fractured geography prevented any single ruler from conquering the continent, enabling political competition among hundreds of small states. Feudal aristocrats demanded guaranteed rights and produced representative bodies such as parliaments. The English aristocracy forced King John to sign Magna Carta in 1215, the first written limitation on royal authority in Europe. The Protestant Reformation, launched by Martin Luther in 1517, further fragmented authority. Capitalism completed the transformation by creating an independent business class, the bourgeoisie, whose wealth depended on free markets and the rule of law. The Harvard scholar Barrington Moore, Jr., captured this insight: "No bourgeoisie, no democracy" (47).

America represented a special case: England without feudalism. Its middle-class society needed neither a powerful central government nor a violent revolution to establish liberty. Both Britain and the United States were liberal long before they were fully democratic, with universal adult suffrage arriving only in the 20th century. Zakaria acknowledges that culture matters but argues it is not destiny, using examples such as Germany, China, India, and Singapore to show that economic policies and political leadership can rapidly alter cultural trajectories.

Turning to continental Europe, Zakaria examines how premature democratization produced illiberal outcomes. In 1890s Vienna, the expansion of the franchise brought the anti-Semitic ultranationalist Karl Lueger to power as mayor, causing liberals to side with the authoritarian emperor against the democratic will of the people. Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, rose to power through a similar pattern, winning increasing shares of the vote through legitimate elections and exploiting democratic freedoms to organize and spread. Germany's failure to follow England's liberal path stemmed from its weak, state-dependent bourgeoisie. France also struggled, embracing democracy without constitutional liberalism and oscillating between republics, monarchies, and empires for over 150 years.

Zakaria presents a striking statistical relationship between wealth and democratic survival. A study by political scientists Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi found that democratic regimes in countries with per capita incomes under $1,500 lasted an average of eight years, while those above $6,000 became nearly indestructible. Wealth promotes liberty because economic development creates business classes independent of the state. Wealth derived from natural resources, however, acts as a curse: Oil-rich states such as Saudi Arabia and Nigeria grew rich without building accountable institutions, because easy revenue eliminated the government's need to tax citizens and provide something in return. Zakaria also devotes extensive attention to China's experiment with economic liberalization under continued political control, arguing that dramatic growth had already produced significant social and legal changes even though political dissent remained suppressed.

Zakaria then surveys illiberal democracy globally. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first post-Soviet president, embodied the pattern: Even at his 1991 stand against Soviet coup plotters, Yeltsin governed by decree, systematically weakening the legislature, courts, and regional governments before installing his chosen successor, Vladimir Putin. Putin further consolidated power over media, regional governors, and oligarchs, all with broad popular support. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez won power through elections and rewrote the constitution to concentrate authority. Africa's wave of elections in the 1990s produced corruption and instability in many countries. India serves as a detailed case study. As the Congress Party declined and new parties based on caste, religion, and regional identity mobilized previously marginalized voters, Indian democracy became more participatory but less liberal, bringing Hindu nationalism, anti-Muslim violence, massive political corruption, and the erosion of judicial independence. Zakaria also challenges the "democratic peace" thesis, arguing that constitutional liberalism, not democracy itself, produces peaceful relations between states, and that democratizing countries actually go to war more often than either stable autocracies or established liberal democracies.

Zakaria argues that the political dysfunction of the Arab world stems not from Islam as a religion but from specific failures of Arab states. The world's largest Muslim populations, in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, have significant democratic experience. The real problem lies in the 22 countries of the Arab League, the regional organization of Arab states, none of which was an electoral democracy. Arab politics stagnated because secular ideologies failed, oil wealth allowed governments to avoid accountability, and the mosque, the one institution regimes could not ban, became the only space for political opposition. Zakaria proposes that the West should seek constitutional liberalism rather than immediate democracy in the Middle East, advocating economic reforms first and a period of institutional development before national elections.

The book then turns inward. Despite extraordinary prosperity, Americans lost faith in their political system, with trust in the federal government falling from over 70 percent in the early 1960s to around 30 percent. Zakaria traces this decline to the democratization of American politics itself. Post-Watergate reforms opened Congress to greater public scrutiny and recorded every vote, changes intended to produce majority rule but that instead empowered organized lobbies and special interests. Political parties effectively died when the primary system took candidate selection out of party hands, and primary voters, more extreme than average members, produced a polarized Washington. Zakaria extends his analysis to religion, culture, and the professions, arguing that the erosion of mediating institutions and expert authority left American society without the buffering elites that once tempered democratic excesses. The old white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment, for all its exclusivity, embodied values of public service, and its dissolution left a meritocratic elite that feels no comparable obligation.

Zakaria concludes by proposing reforms, advocating delegation of complex policy decisions to expert bodies insulated from daily political pressures, citing the Federal Reserve and the European Union as models. He warns that if democracy becomes perceived as a system ruled by organized minorities sacrificing the future for the present, it will face a crisis of legitimacy.

In a 2007 afterword, Zakaria critiques the Bush administration's "freedom agenda," its policy of promoting democracy abroad. He argues that the conviction that freedom meant simply removing a tyrant led to virtually no postwar planning in Iraq, the disbanding of the Iraqi army, and the dismantling of state institutions, producing civil war. The prevailing problem in the developing world, Zakaria contends, is not the absence of democracy but the absence of governance. Order is the prerequisite for civilized life, and building sustainable democracy remains a complex, long-term undertaking.