Democracy makes a poor export

THE effort of the Group of Seven countries to swing the Russian referendum of 25 April in favour of Boris Yeltsin is crude and may be counter-productive. The huge aid package conditionally promised sets the seal on Mr Yeltsin's image as the West's favourite Russian, in succession to Mikhail Gorbachev. That image did not do Mr Gorbachev any good. Why should it be assumed that it is going to do Mr Yeltsin good?

Many Russians, including some who are not particularly fervent nationalists, find Russia's present relation to the West intensely humiliating. Their resentment has begun to have a significant effect on Russia's position in international affairs. The UN Security Council has been obliged to defer sanctions against Serbia because Russian support for sanctions would arouse sentiments of Slav solidarity, which would be generally unhelpful to Mr Yeltsin, and specifically unhelpful in the context of the coming referendum.

The Americans, with their habitual unawareness of the existence of dealings among non-Americans, have been passing the word around that good old Boris will back sanctions against Serbia once he is safely over the hump of that referendum. This is not a message that is likely to help him over the hump in question. In general, Western opinion seems disposed to exaggerate both the importance of that referendum and the likelihood of establishing stable democratic institutions in and around the Russian Federation.

The referendum could indeed be of decisive importance, if there were to be a massive electoral turnout and this then provided a handsome majority for Mr Yeltsin. But not even Mr Yeltsin himself thinks that at all likely. He has indicated that he will claim victory if he scores more than 50 per cent of the turnout, however low the latter may be. The parliament has demanded 50 per cent of the electorate, as the test of validity, and will therefore contest the legitimacy of a victory based on a low turnout.

Mr Yeltsin has also indicated that he may well hold on - or try to hold on - as President, even if the referendum registers a no-confidence vote in him. He will resign only if the presidential vote goes against him and there is also a simultaneous vote against early elections to parliament. If he is voted out as President, but the people ask for early parliamentary elections, he will try to hold on in the interim. The fact that he is (under certain conditions) determined to hold on after he has actually been voted out seems to cast some doubt on the depth of his personal commitment to democratic process.

If Mr Yeltsin is re-elected, but on a very low turnout, the result will actually be damaging to the prospects of democracy, since there will not only be a continued crisis of perceived legitimacy, but there will also have been an experimental demonstration of the Russian people's lack of stable mass-commitment to democratic processes and institutions. It is true, but not particularly relevant, that the Russian turnout, even if low, may be no lower than that which has been usual in American elections for many years.

But Americans, unlike Russians, have that precious thing, the habit of democracy: people may not vote themselves, but they are not inclined to call in question the legitimacy of the electoral result. Many people dislike Bill Clinton, but only a lunatic would deny that he is the President of the United States. On the other hand, the fact that a people does not have the habit of democracy, and of respecting its results, makes a low poll extremely dangerous. It means that the habit in question may never be given the chance of establishing itself.

It is reasonable that democratic countries should do whatever it is in their quite limited power to do, in order to encourage democratic tendencies in Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. But they should be a lot more discreet about it than they have often been.

Rash pro-Yeltsin gestures, like the effort to swing votes his way by promises of money, should be avoided. The more democracy is seen as a foreign thing, being foisted on Russians by wealthy foreigners, the less chance there is that democracy will establish itself among Russians as a habit. If you arouse against democracy the force of nationalism, the outcome is unlikely to be the victory of democracy.

Democracy was felt by many Germans in the Thirties to be a system imposed on them by foreigners in order to keep them in subjection. It would be calamitous to establish a 'Weimar syndrome' around the fragile burgeonings of democracy in Russia. Yet that is what the West is currently doing with its flamboyant and oafish promises of support. Only Russians can make Russia a democracy, and only if they have the will to do so. Foreigners, if they really want to help, should keep a low profile, which they are certainly not doing this week.

Westerners have difficulty in assimilating the concept that their zeal for exporting democracy may be creating difficulties for those who are being urged to import it. That difficulty has increased in the late 20th century, with the prevalence of an impression that the universal triumph of democracy cannot be long delayed. True, that expectation has dimmed a little over the past few years. Those years have not been kind to Francis Fukuyama's 'End of History' theory: the entity whose demise he once pronounced has been busy refuting his diagnosis every day of every week in the opening years of the last decade of the 20th century.

Yet the conviction that the West can somehow make all the rest of the world democratic and peaceful still lingers. It helps to fuel the demand for military intervention in former Yugoslavia. In Russia, it is by monetary intervention that it seeks to foster democracy. Weirdest of all the 'export democracy' gimmicks is the theory, propounded in the correspondence columns of this newspaper this week, that the introduction of democratic institutions by Britain into Hong Kong, on the eve of that colony's reversion to China in four years' time, is likely to lead to the democratisation of all China.

Not all cultures, not all forms of society are so constituted historically that they assimilate democracy, the free market, freedom of expression and the rule of law all at once. Much may depend on the order in which these desirable things are introduced. It is now clear that Mr Gorbachev made a mistake by beginning with freedom of expression - glasnost - as the West encouraged him to do. By doing so, he simultaneously undermined the bases both of his own authority and of the cohesion of the Soviet Union itself. The Chinese, by going for economic liberalisation as top priority, while clamping down on freedom of expression, earned the condemnation of all the West, but somehow still managed to look in better shape than the Russians currently do. Perhaps the condemnation of the West is more helpful to non-Western systems than its loud encouragement.