Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has responded to last week’s coup attempt with a hammer. Over the span of just a few days, more than 50,000 people have been fired from their jobs or detained on suspicions that they’re connected to the coup or to the Gülenist movement (which President Erdoğan blames for the coup attempt). Now emergency rule has been imposed, suggesting that more detentions may follow.

Turkish leaders are assuring everyone that the state of emergency is meant to control the situation and to preserve Turkish democracy. But many observers, including in the West, aren’t buying it: There are legitimate fears that these measures will actually further consolidate Erdoğan’s authoritarian rule. And the consequences of Turkey’s continued drift away from democracy isn’t only a human rights or governance problem—it could become a real geopolitical challenge for the West. 

The swinging pendulum

Turkey—literally the bridge between Europe and Asia—sometimes seems of two minds on governance issues. On the one hand, its leaders express a commitment to a Western form of governance based on the rule of law, liberal democracy, transparency, and accountability. On the other—and more in the vein of governance styles in Russia, Iran, and China—they sometimes reject what they see as outside interference, restrict civil liberties and government transparency, and promote a heavy state role in the economy. 

Although Turkey was welcomed into NATO and other transatlantic institutions after World War II—at a time when Soviet expansionism was a real fear—its commitment to democratic values has always been shaky. The military’s shadow loomed large over Turkish politics (last week’s coup attempt was far from the first) and the country’s human rights record was poor, particularly on minority rights. 

Many thought that all this would change when Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002. They introduced political reforms that propelled Turkey toward EU membership. The Turkish economy excelled: Many people in Turkey once depended on remittances sent by Gastarbeiters (guest workers) in Germany and other West European countries, for instance, but the country quickly became host itself to immigrants from neighboring countries. Tourists, business people, students, athletes, and artists poured into the country in the millions. And Turkey enjoyed considerable soft power in the region and the world, often touted as a model in the wake of the Arab Spring of a country that properly paired mainstream Islamism and democratic governance. None of this would have been possible were it not for Turkey’s growing adherence to Western governance norms and its membership in the transatlantic community. 

But the picture has since become rather grim. The events of the past week have renewed concerns about the state of Turkish democracy, yes—but those concerns have in fact been growing for years. Turkey’s commitment to supporting freedom of expression, freedom of the media, anti-corruption efforts, and liberal markets has been in serious doubt for a while. Meanwhile, the economy has stalled, related in part to political developments and to a recent spate of terror attacks that have seriously damaged the overall security situation. It is no wonder that Turkish per capita income—which peaked at $10,800 in 2013—has now fallen to 2009 levels, at $9,950. (That’s an almost 10 percent drop in the span of just two years.) Turkey’s further slide away from Western governance norms would likely only make matters worse, making Erdoğan’s promise of putting Turkey among the largest 10 economies in the world a fantasy.

If you ask Erdoğan and his AKP colleagues why reforms sputtered out, they’re likely to answer with conspiracy theories: They’ll blame the West, the EU, the interest rate lobby, and others. But the AKP has failed to be self-critical, which could have helped it succeed. 

Turkey’s choice of orbit

So if Turkey seems to be moving away from Western norms, is it also moving away from the West? Possibly. In November 2013—after years of stop-and-go accession talks with the EU—Erdoğan sought Russian President Vladimir Putin’s support for accepting Turkey into Eurasian organizations like the Shanghai Five. That could be a big geostrategic gain for Russia, something not lost on the Russian press.

Western Europe and the United States would be the biggest losers if Turkey moved closer to Russia’s camp. Losing their partnership with Turkey would deliver a serious blow to the fight against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, for one thing. But it would also further dim prospects that Turkey might really embrace Western-style democracy any time soon. As Ted Piccone has written, Turkey has the potential to be a linchpin of the liberal international order—and a long-term downturn in the country could have wide detrimental effects in regional and global governance. 

The path ahead

Finally, is there a role for the United States in all this? In the short term, as Ömer Taşpınar has argued, the United States should offer real help to Ankara in investigating the role of Pennsylvania resident Fethullah Gülen and his movement in last week’s coup attempt. Extradition is a highly sensitive issue, and the United States must defend its legal standards. At the same time, that kind of cooperation could build trust in U.S.-Turkey relations, calm Ankara’s paranoia about a potential U.S. role in the coup attempt (and therefore possibly help minimize the damage to Turkish democracy that Ankara itself might cause in its heavy-handed response), and help the United States build credibility on the rule of law. A thorough investigation—including into the Gülenists—is important for determining who was behind the coup attempt. And it’s in U.S. interests to know: As Turkey is a NATO member, a threat against it should be considered a threat against all members. It is in no NATO member’s interest to allow a political earthquake like this to push Turkey from its fold or towards a rival mode of governance. 

This isn’t to downplay the burden now on Ankara; the Turkish government shouldn’t forget that its respect for civil liberties and the rule of law once helped earn it a lot of international respect and a place in the Western community. It’s disappointing that the AKP and Erdoğan supporters have failed to capitalize on their country’s potential. Among its peers in the Muslim world, Turkey had once made the most progress in terms of democratic values and economic growth. Many would still like to believe that that Turkey still exists, in spite of recent setbacks. But for Turkey to win back those gains, its leadership will have to proceed very cautiously and with reason. 

The recent fall in world oil prices undoubtedly has an impact on the politics of the Middle East, where many states rely heavily on oil to fund their governments and to float their economies more generally. One can cite serious domestic and regional disruptions that have followed severe oil price declines in the recent past. Will the current period of dropping prices result in domestic upheaval and regional war? Is the price drop part of a Saudi power play against its regional rivals?

Read Sultans of Swing? The Geopolitics of Falling Oil Prices

In this Policy Briefing, F. Gregory Gause, III answers the above questions by analyzing the regional impact of previous declines in the price of oil. He argues that Saudi Arabia is merely continuing its policy of only considering production cuts to arrest falling prices if other producers join them. Gause also finds that, despite memorable exceptions, oil-dependent regimes are actually more stable than their non-oil counterparts, including during periods of lower prices.

In considering the Middle East, Gause identifies a pattern of the region’s oil producers negotiating agreements on production cuts, rather than coming to blows, when faced with low prices. He stresses that if Iran, and perhaps Russia, approach Saudi Arabia about negotiating an oil deal, the United States should encourage such talks, and be ready to expand them to include the largest strategic picture of the Middle East.

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Like many Brits, I’m reeling. Everyone knew that the "Brexit" referendum was going to be close. But deep down I think many of us assumed that the vote would be to remain in the European Union. David Cameron had no realistic choice but to announce that he will step down.

Mr. Cameron’s fall can be traced back to a promise he made in the 2010 election to cap the annual flow of migrants into the U.K. at less than 100,000, "no ifs, no buts."Membership in the EU means free movement of labor, so this was an impossible goal to reach through direct policy. I served in the coalition government that emerged from the 2010 election, and this uncomfortable fact was clear from the outset. I don’t share the contents of briefings and meetings from my time in government (I think it makes good government harder if everyone is taking notes for memoirs), but my counterpart in the government, Mr. Cameron’s head of strategy, Steve Hilton, went public in the Daily Mail just before this week’s vote.

Steve recalled senior civil servants telling us bluntly that the pledged target could not be reached. He rightly fulminated about the fact that this meant we were turning away much more skilled and desirable potential immigrants from non-EU countries in a bid to bring down the overall number. What he didn’t say is that the target, based on an arbitrary figure, was a foolish pledge in the first place.

Mr. Cameron was unable to deliver on his campaign pledge, and immigration to the U.K. has been running at about three times that level. This fueled anger at the establishment for again breaking a promise, as well as anger at the EU. In an attempt to contain his anti-European right wing, Mr. Cameron made another rash promise: to hold a referendum.

The rest, as they say, is history. And now, so is he.

Immigration played a role in the Brexit campaign, though it seems that voters may not have made a clear distinction between EU and non-EU inward movement. Still, Thursday’s vote was, at heart, a plebiscite on what it means to British. Our national identity has always been of a quieter kind than, say the American one. Attempts by politicians to institute the equivalent of a Flag Day or July Fourth, to teach citizenship in schools, or to animate a “British Dream” have generally been laughed out of court. Being British is an understated national identity. Indeed, understatement is a key part of that identity.

Many Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish feel a much stronger affinity to their home nation within the U.K. than they do to Great Britain. Many Londoners look at the rest of England and wonder how they are in the same political community. These splits were obvious Thursday.

Identity politics has tended in recent years to be of the progressive kind, advancing the cause of ethnic minorities, lesbians and gays, and so on. In both the U.K. and the U.S. a strongly reactionary form of identity politics is gaining strength, in part as a reaction to the cosmopolitan, liberal, and multicultural forms that have been dominant. This is identity politics of a negative kind, defined not by what you are for but what you are against. A narrow majority of my fellow Brits just decided that at the very least, being British means not being European. It was a defensive, narrow, backward-looking attempt to reclaim something that many felt had been lost. But the real losses are yet to come.

Editor's Note: This piece originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire.

Event Information

Japan may face political uncertainty in the weeks ahead with an election slated for the Diet’s Upper House this summer. Only a few months ago, it was widely thought that Prime Minister Abe would dissolve the Lower House in order to have a double election this summer. However, lackluster economic performance, the pending decision on a consumption tax increase, and the task of reconstruction after the Kumamoto earthquakes may encourage the Prime Minister to reevaluate his options. How will the ruling coalition redefine its electoral strategy as voters expect further progress on the economic agenda? Can the newly-formed Democratic Party use this first electoral test to demonstrate greater potential?

On May 3, the Center for East Asia Policy Studies hosted a panel of distinguished Japanese politicians for a discussion on the future of Japanese politics. Yoshimasa Hayashi, Yasutoshi Nishimura, and Itsunori Onodera of the Liberal Democratic Party and Goshi Hosono of the Democratic Party shared their thoughts on their respective parties’ preparations for the upcoming election and the impact the election may have on the balance of power in the Diet, as well as issues such as the ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the implementation of signature reform policies, and the potential resurgence of the opposition Democratic Party.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #JapanPolitics

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• The future of Japanese politics (Japanese)

Politics follows geopolitics, or so it has often seemed throughout history. When the Athenian democracy’s empire rose in the fifth century B.C.E., the number of Greek city-states ruled by democrats proliferated; Sparta’s power was reflected in the spread of Spartan-style oligarchies. When the Soviet Union’s power rose in the early Cold War years, communism spread. In the later Cold War years, when the United States and Western Europe gained the advantage and ultimately triumphed, democracies proliferated and communism collapsed. Was this all just the outcome of the battle of ideas, as Francis Fukuyama and others argue, with the better idea of liberal capitalism triumphing over the worse ideas of communism and fascism? Or did liberal ideas triumph in part because of real battles and shifts that occurred less in the realm of thought than in the realm of power?

These are relevant questions again. We live in a time when democratic nations are in retreat in the realm of geopolitics, and when democracy itself is also in retreat. The latter phenomenon has been well documented by Freedom House, which has recorded declines in freedom in the world for nine straight years. At the level of geopolitics, the shifting tectonic plates have yet to produce a seismic rearrangement of power, but rumblings are audible. The United States has been in a state of retrenchment since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. The democratic nations of Europe, which some might have expected to pick up the slack, have instead turned inward and all but abandoned earlier dreams of reshaping the international system in their image. As for such rising democracies as Brazil, India, Turkey, and South Africa, they are neither rising as fast as once anticipated nor yet behaving as democracies in world affairs. Their focus remains narrow and regional. Their national identities remain shaped by postcolonial and nonaligned sensibilities—by old but carefully nursed resentments—which lead them, for instance, to shield rather than condemn autocratic Russia’s invasion of democratic Ukraine, or, in the case of Brazil, to prefer the company of Venezuelan dictators to that of North American democratic presidents.

Meanwhile, insofar as there is energy in the international system, it comes from the great-power autocracies, China and Russia, and from would-be theocrats pursuing their dream of a new caliphate in the Middle East. For all their many problems and weaknesses, it is still these autocracies and these aspiring religious totalitarians that push forward while the democracies draw back, that act while the democracies react, and that seem increasingly unleashed while the democracies feel increasingly constrained.

It should not be surprising that one of the side effects of these circumstances has been the weakening and in some cases collapse of democracy in those places where it was newest and weakest. Geopolitical shifts among the reigning great powers, often but not always the result of wars, can have significant effects on the domestic politics of the smaller and weaker nations of the world. Global democratizing trends have been stopped and reversed before.

Consider the interwar years. In 1920, when the number of democracies in the world had doubled in the aftermath of the First World War, contemporaries such as the British historian James Bryce believed that they were witnessing “a natural trend, due to a general law of social progress.”[1] Yet almost immediately the new democracies in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland began to fall. Europe’s democratic great powers, France and Britain, were suffering the effects of the recent devastating war, while the one rich and healthy democratic power, the United States, had retreated to the safety of its distant shores. In the vacuum came Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy in 1922, the crumbling of Germany’s Weimar Republic, and the broader triumph of European fascism. Greek democracy fell in 1936. Spanish democracy fell to Franco that same year. Military coups overthrew democratic governments in Portugal, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Japan’s shaky democracy succumbed to military rule and then to a form of fascism.

Across three continents, fragile democracies gave way to authoritarian forces exploiting the vulnerabilities of the democratic system, while other democracies fell prey to the worldwide economic depression. There was a ripple effect, too—the success of fascism in one country strengthened similar movements elsewhere, sometimes directly. Spanish fascists received military assistance from the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. The result was that by 1939 the democratic gains of the previous forty years had been wiped out.

The period after the First World War showed not only that democratic gains could be reversed, but that democracy need not always triumph even in the competition of ideas. For it was not just that democracies had been overthrown. The very idea of democracy had been “discredited,” as John A. Hobson observed.[2] Democracy’s aura of inevitability vanished as great numbers of people rejected the idea that it was a better form of government. Human beings, after all, do not yearn only for freedom, autonomy, individuality, and recognition. Especially in times of difficulty, they yearn also for comfort, security, order, and, importantly, a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves, something that submerges autonomy and individuality—all of which autocracies can sometimes provide, or at least appear to provide, better than democracies. 

In the 1920s and 1930s, the fascist governments looked stronger, more energetic and efficient, and more capable of providing reassurance in troubled times. They appealed effectively to nationalist, ethnic, and tribal sentiments. The many weaknesses of Germany’s Weimar democracy, inadequately supported by the democratic great powers, and of the fragile and short-lived democracies of Italy and Spain made their people susceptible to the appeals of the Nazis, Mussolini, and Franco, just as the weaknesses of Russian democracy in the 1990s made a more authoritarian government under Vladimir Putin attractive to many Russians. People tend to follow winners, and between the wars the democratic-capitalist countries looked weak and in retreat compared with the apparently vigorous fascist regimes and with Stalin’s Soviet Union.

It took a second world war and another military victory by the Allied democracies (plus the Soviet Union) to reverse the trend again. The United States imposed democracy by force and through prolonged occupations in West Germany, Italy, Japan, Austria, and South Korea. With the victory of the democracies and the discrediting of fascism—chiefly on the battlefield—many other countries followed suit. Greece and Turkey both moved in a democratic direction, as did Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. Some of the new nations born as Europe shed its colonies also experimented with democratic government, the most prominent example being India. By 1950, the number of democracies had grown to between twenty and thirty, and they governed close to 40 percent of the world’s population.

Was this the victory of an idea or the victory of arms? Was it the product of an inevitable human evolution or, as Samuel P. Huntington later observed, of “historically discrete events”?[3] We would prefer to believe the former, but evidence suggests the latter, for it turned out that even the great wave of democracy following World War II was not irreversible. Another “reverse wave” hit from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador, South Korea, the Philippines, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Greece all fell back under authoritarian rule. In Africa, Nigeria was the most prominent of the newly decolonized nations where democracy failed. By 1975, more than three-dozen governments around the world had been installed by military coups.[4] Few spoke of democracy’s inevitability in the 1970s or even in the early 1980s. As late as 1984, Huntington himself believed that “the limits of democratic development in the world” had been reached, noting the “unreceptivity to democracy of several major cultural traditions,” as well as “the substantial power of antidemocratic governments (particularly the Soviet Union).”[5]

But then, unexpectedly, came the “third wave.” From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, the number of democracies in the world rose to an astonishing 120, representing well over half the world’s population. What explained the prolonged success of democratization over the last quarter of the twentieth century? It could not have been merely the steady rise of the global economy and the general yearning for freedom, autonomy, and recognition. Neither economic growth nor human yearnings had prevented the democratic reversals of the 1960s and early 1970s. Until the third wave, many nations around the world careened back and forth between democracy and authoritarianism in a cyclical, almost predictable manner. What was most notable about the third wave was that this cyclical alternation between democracy and autocracy was interrupted. Nations moved into a democratic phase and stayed there. But why?

The International Climate Improves

The answer is related to the configuration of power and ideas in the world. The international climate from the mid-1970s onward was simply more hospitable to democracies and more challenging to autocratic governments than had been the case in past eras. In his study, Huntington emphasized the change, following the Second Vatican Council, in the Catholic Church’s doctrine regarding order and revolution, which tended to weaken the legitimacy of authoritarian governments in Catholic countries. The growing success and attractiveness of the European Community (EC), meanwhile, had an impact on the internal policies of nations such as Portugal, Greece, and Spain, which sought the economic benefits of membership in the EC and therefore felt pressure to conform to its democratic norms. These norms increasingly became international norms. But they did not appear out of nowhere or as the result of some natural evolution of the human species. As Huntington noted, “The pervasiveness of democratic norms rested in large part on the commitment to those norms of the most powerful country in the world.[6]

The United States, in fact, played a critical role in making the explosion of democracy possible. This was not because U.S. policy makers consistently promoted democracy around the world. They did not. At various times throughout the Cold War, U.S. policy often supported dictatorships as part of the battle against communism or simply out of indifference. It even permitted or was complicit in the overthrow of democratic regimes deemed unreliable—those of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. At times, U.S. foreign policy was almost hostile to democracy. President Richard Nixon regarded it as “not necessarily the best form of government for people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”[7] 

Nor, when the United States did support democracy, was it purely out of fealty to principle. Often it was for strategic reasons. Officials in President Ronald Reagan’s administration came to believe that democratic governments might actually be better than autocracies at fending off communist insurgencies, for instance. And often it was popular local demands that compelled the United States to make a choice that it would otherwise have preferred to avoid, between supporting an unpopular and possibly faltering dictatorship and “getting on the side of the people.” Reagan would have preferred to support the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s had he not been confronted by the moral challenge of Filipino “people power.” Rarely if ever did the United States seek a change of regime primarily out of devotion to democratic principles.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, the general inclination of the United States did begin to shift toward a more critical view of dictatorship. The U.S. Congress, led by human-rights advocates, began to condition or cut off U.S. aid to authoritarian allies, which weakened their hold on power. In the Helsinki Accords of 1975, a reference to human-rights issues drew greater attention to the cause of dissidents and other opponents of dictatorship in the Eastern bloc. President Jimmy Carter focused attention on the human-rights abuses of the Soviet Union as well as of right-wing governments in Latin America and elsewhere. The U.S. government’s international information services, including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, put greater emphasis on democracy and human rights in their programming. The Reagan administration, after first trying to roll back Carter’s human-rights agenda, eventually embraced it and made the promotion of democracy part of its stated (if not always its actual) policy. Even during this period, U.S. policy was far from consistent. Many allied dictatorships, especially in the Middle East, were not only tolerated but actively supported with U.S. economic and military aid. But the net effect of the shift in U.S. policy, joined with the efforts of Europe, was significant.

The third wave began in 1974 in Portugal, where the Carnation Revolution put an end to a half-century of dictatorship. As Larry Diamond notes, this revolution did not just happen. The United States and the European democracies played a key role, making a “heavy investment . . . in support of the democratic parties.”[8] Over the next decade and a half, the United States used a variety of tools, including direct military intervention, to aid democratic transitions and prevent the undermining of existing fragile democracies all across the globe. In 1978, Carter threatened military action in the Dominican Republic when long-serving president Joaquín Balaguer refused to give up power after losing an election. In 1983, Reagan’s invasion of Grenada restored a democratic government after a military coup. In 1986, the United States threatened military action to prevent Marcos from forcibly annulling an election that he had lost. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush invaded Panama to help install democracy after military strongman Manuel Noriega had annulled his nation’s elections. 

Throughout this period, too, the United States used its influence to block military coups in Honduras, Bolivia, El Salvador, Peru, and South Korea. Elsewhere it urged presidents not to try staying in office beyond constitutional limits. Huntington estimated that over the course of about a decade and a half, U.S. support had been “critical to democratization in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, and the Philippines” and was “a contributing factor to democratization in Portugal, Chile, Poland, Korea, Bolivia, and Taiwan.”[9]

Many developments both global and local helped to produce the democratizing trend of the late 1970s and the 1980s, and there might have been a democratic wave even if the United States had not been so influential. The question is whether the wave would have been as large and as lasting. The stable zones of democracy in Europe and Japan proved to be powerful magnets. The liberal free-market and free-trade system increasingly outperformed the stagnating economies of the socialist bloc, especially at the dawn of the information revolution. The greater activism of the United States, together with that of other successful democracies, helped to build a broad, if not universal, consensus that was more sympathetic to democratic forms of government and less sympathetic to authoritarian forms.

Diamond and others have noted how important it was that these “global democratic norms” came to be “reflected in regional and international institutions and agreements as never before.”[10] Those norms had an impact on the internal political processes of countries, making it harder for authoritarians to weather political and economic storms and easier for democratic movements to gain legitimacy. But “norms” are transient as well. In the 1930s, the trendsetting nations were fascist dictatorships. In the 1950s and 1960s, variants of socialism were in vogue. But from the 1970s until recently, the United States and a handful of other democratic powers set the fashion trend. They pushed—some might even say imposed—democratic principles and embedded them in international institutions and agreements.

Equally important was the role that the United States played in preventing backsliding away from democracy where it had barely taken root. Perhaps the most significant U.S. contribution was simply to prevent military coups against fledgling democratic governments. In a sense, the United States was interfering in what might have been a natural cycle, preventing nations that ordinarily would have been “due” for an authoritarian phase from following the usual pattern. It was not that the United States was exporting democracy everywhere. More often, it played the role of “catcher in the rye”—preventing young democracies from falling off the cliff—in places such as the Philippines, Colombia, and Panama. This helped to give the third wave unprecedented breadth and durability.

Finally, there was the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it the fall of Central and Eastern Europe’s communist regimes and their replacement by democracies. What role the United States played in hastening the Soviet downfall may be in dispute, but surely it played some part, both by containing the Soviet empire militarily and by outperforming it economically and technologically. And at the heart of the struggle were the peoples of the former Warsaw Pact countries themselves. They had long yearned to achieve the liberation of their respective nations from the Soviet Union, which also meant liberation from communism. These peoples wanted to join the rest of Europe, which offered an economic and social model that was even more attractive than that of the United States. 

That Central and East Europeans uniformly chose democratic forms of government, however, was not simply the fruit of aspirations for freedom or comfort. It also reflected the desires of these peoples to place themselves under the U.S. security umbrella. The strategic, the economic, the political, and the ideological were thus inseparable. Those nations that wanted to be part of NATO, and later of the European Union, knew that they would stand no chance of admission without democratic credentials. These democratic transitions, which turned the third wave into a democratic tsunami, need not have occurred had the world been configured differently. That a democratic, united, and prosperous Western Europe was even there to exert a powerful magnetic pull on its eastern neighbors was due to U.S. actions after World War II.

The Lost Future of 1848

Contrast the fate of democratic movements in the late twentieth century with that of the liberal revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. Beginning in France, the “Springtime of the Peoples,” as it was known, included liberal reformers and constitutionalists, nationalists, and representatives of the rising middle class as well as radical workers and socialists. In a matter of weeks, they toppled kings and princes and shook thrones in France, Poland, Austria, and Romania, as well as the Italian peninsula and the German principalities. In the end, however, the liberal movements failed, partly because they lacked cohesion, but also because the autocratic powers forcibly crushed them. The Prussian army helped to defeat liberal movements in the German lands, while the Russian czar sent his troops into Romania and Hungary. Tens of thousands of protesters were killed in the streets of Europe. The sword proved mightier than the pen.

It mattered that the more liberal powers, Britain and France, adopted a neutral posture throughout the liberal ferment, even though France’s own revolution had sparked and inspired the pan-European movement. The British monarchy and aristocracy were afraid of radicalism at home. Both France and Britain were more concerned with preserving peace among the great powers than with providing assistance to fellow liberals. The preservation of the European balance among the five great powers benefited the forces of counterrevolution everywhere, and the Springtime of the Peoples was suppressed.[11] As a result, for several decades the forces of reaction in Europe were strengthened against the forces of liberalism.

Scholars have speculated about how differently Europe and the world might have evolved had the liberal revolutions of 1848 succeeded: How might German history have unfolded had national unification been achieved under a liberal parliamentary system rather than under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck? The “Iron Chancellor” unified the nation not through elections and debates, but through military victories won by the great power of the conservative Prussian army under the Hohenzollern dynasty. As the historian A.J.P. Taylor observed, history reached a turning point in 1848, but Germany “failed to turn.”[12] Might Germans have learned a different lesson from the one that Bismarck taught—namely, that “the great questions of the age are not decided by speeches and majority decisions . . . but by blood and iron”?[13] Yet the international system of the day was not configured in such a way as to encourage liberal and democratic change. The European balance of power in the mid-nineteenth century did not favor democracy, and so it is not surprising that democracy failed to triumph anywhere.[14] 

We can also speculate about how differently today’s world might have evolved without the U.S. role in shaping an international environment favorable to democracy, and how it might evolve should the United States find itself no longer strong enough to play that role. Democratic transitions are not inevitable, even where the conditions may be ripe. Nations may enter a transition zone—economically, socially, and politically—where the probability of moving in a democratic direction increases or decreases. But foreign influences, usually exerted by the reigning great powers, often determine which direction change takes. Strong authoritarian powers willing to support conservative forces against liberal movements can undo what might otherwise have been a “natural” evolution to democracy, just as powerful democratic nations can help liberal forces that, left to their own devices, might otherwise fail. 

In the 1980s as in the 1840s, liberal movements arose for their own reasons in different countries, but their success or failure was influenced by the balance of power at the international level. In the era of U.S. predominance, the balance was generally favorable to democracy, which helps to explain why the liberal revolutions of that later era succeeded. Had the United States not been so powerful, there would have been fewer transitions to democracy, and those that occurred might have been short-lived. It might have meant a shallower and more easily reversed third wave.[15] 

Democracy, Autocracy, and Power

What about today? With the democratic superpower curtailing its global influence, regional powers are setting the tone in their respective regions. Not surprisingly, dictatorships are more common in the environs of Russia, along the borders of China (North Korea, Burma, and Thailand), and in the Middle East, where long dictatorial traditions have so far mostly withstood the challenge of popular uprisings.

But even in regions where democracies remain strong, authoritarians have been able to make a determined stand while their democratic neighbors passively stand by. Thus Hungary’s leaders, in the heart of an indifferent Europe, proclaim their love of illiberalism and crack down on press and political freedoms while the rest of the European Union, supposedly a club for democracies only, looks away. In South America, democracy is engaged in a contest with dictatorship, but an indifferent Brazil looks on, thinking only of trade and of North American imperialism. Meanwhile in Central America, next door to an indifferent Mexico, democracy collapses under the weight of drugs and crime and the resurgence of the caudillos. Yet it may be unfair to blame regional powers for not doing what they have never done. Insofar as the shift in the geopolitical equation has affected the fate of democracies worldwide, it is probably the change in the democratic superpower’s behavior that bears most of the responsibility.

If that superpower does not change its course, we are likely to see democracy around the world rolled back further. There is nothing inevitable about democracy. The liberal world order we have been living in these past decades was not bequeathed by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It is not the endpoint of human progress.

There are those who would prefer a world order different from the liberal one. Until now, however, they have not been able to have their way, but not because their ideas of governance are impossible to enact. Who is to say that Putinism in Russia or China’s particular brand of authoritarianism will not survive as far into the future as European democracy, which, after all, is less than a century old on most of the continent? Autocracy in Russia and China has certainly been around longer than any Western democracy. Indeed, it is autocracy, not democracy, that has been the norm in human history—only in recent decades have the democracies, led by the United States, had the power to shape the world.

Skeptics of U.S. “democracy promotion” have long argued that many of the places where the democratic experiment has been tried over the past few decades are not a natural fit for that form of government, and that the United States has tried to plant democracy in some very infertile soils. Given that democratic governments have taken deep root in widely varying circumstances, from impoverished India to “Confucian” East Asia to Islamic Indonesia, we ought to have some modesty about asserting where the soil is right or not right for democracy. Yet it should be clear that the prospects for democracy have been much better under the protection of a liberal world order, supported and defended by a democratic superpower or by a collection of democratic great powers. Today, as always, democracy is a fragile flower. It requires constant support, constant tending, and the plucking of weeds and fencing-off of the jungle that threaten it both from within and without. In the absence of such efforts, the jungle and the weeds may sooner or later come back to reclaim the land.

[1] Quoted in Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 17.

[2] Quoted in John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 573.

[3] Huntington, Third Wave, 40.

[4] Huntington, Third Wave, 21.

[5] Samuel P. Huntington, “Will More Countries Become Democratic?” Political Science Quarterly 99 (Summer 1984): 193–218; quoted in Larry Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (New York: Times Books, 2008), 10.

[6] Huntington, Third Wave, 47.

[7] Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 196.

[8] Diamond, Spirit of Democracy, 5.

[9] Huntington, Third Wave, 98.

[10] Diamond, Spirit of Democracy, 13.

[11] Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 409.

[12] A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of German History Since 1815 (London: Routledge, 2001; orig. publ. 1945), 71.

[13] Rapport, 1848, 401–402.

[14] As Huntington paraphrased the findings of Jonathan Sunshine: “External influences in Europe before 1830 were fundamentally antidemocratic and hence held up democratization. Between 1830 and 1930 . . . the external environment was neutral . . . hence democratization proceeded in different countries more or less at the pace set by economic and social development.” Huntington, Third Wave, 86.

[15] As Huntington observed, “The absence of the United States from the process would have meant fewer and later transitions to democracy.” Huntington, Third Wave, 98.

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• Is Democracy in Decline? The Weight of Geopolitics

Real political change in Turkey has been hard to come by in recent years. Establishment parties in Turkey have, time and again, proven unable to change the political system. Now a new hope for reform has emerged in Turkey from an unlikely source: the Kurds.

During most of the Cold War—and particularly during the 1980s and 1990s—Turkey had, for lack of a better word, a Kemalist consensus: The military played a major role behind the scenes, and those outside the consensus, especially the Islamists and the Kurds, were essentially excluded from politics. 

The first wave of democratization in the post-Cold War era in Turkey came from the Islamists—specifically, from the Justice and Development Party (AKP). In 2002, when the AKP came to power, it decided that accession to the European Union should be its main goal and that effort could serve as tool to undermine the political power of the Turkish military that still lurked behind the scenes. So, incredibly, an Islamist party, the AKP, decided to bring about a post-Kemalist system by pushing for membership in the EU’s essentially liberal, democratic project. This strategy explains why Turkish liberals supported the AKP and could hope that the Islamists would push the system in a liberal direction.

But then something tragic happened. The AKP became the establishment. After the military was essentially defeated as a political force, the AKP ceased to be an anti-establishment party. Rather, it became a party that started to use the privileges of power, and itself began its own networks of patronage clientelism, and became a victim of this entity called the state. The AKP became the state. 

Now we're in a situation where the second wave of democratization may also come from an anti-establishment party, this one mostly representing the Kurds. The most democratic, the most liberal, the most progressive narrative that you hear in Turkish politics today is coming from Selahattin Demirtaş of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP)—not the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), not the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and not the AKP.

There is reason to think that, in Turkey, only anti-establishment parties can actually improve the system. The old AKP was an anti-establishment party. What gives me hope about the HDP is that, even when it enters the parliament—and even if a miracle happens and it enters a coalition government—it will never become the state. 

By definition, the HDP is a Kurdish political party. The Islamists could become the state, because Turkey is 99 percent Muslim, and people could establish basically a sense of supremacy based on Muslim identity. The Kurds will never be able to represent the majority. They will never be able to become the state. They have vested and permanent interest in the rule of law—indeed their very survival depends on it. Their survival depends on minority rights and on checks and balances. This stark fact gives me hope about the HDP and its agenda.

What’s wrong with the rest of the Turkish opposition?

The real puzzle is the failure of establishment political parties to challenge the system. It would have been wonderful for a center-right party or a center-left party to have taken Turkey to the post-Kemalist phase, to a post-military, pro-E.U., pro-progressive phase. But the mainstream political parties have failed. The establishment of Turkey has failed. The Kemalist order in Turkey has failed.

The agent of change was first the Islamists, and now the agent of change has become the Kurds. 

What is it that creates this mental block of establishment political parties? Why did it take so many years for the CHP to understand that it can become an agent of change, too? In the absence of a left-wing movement in Turkey, there will never be balance. We need a progressive left. We need something that can challenge the strong coalition on the right. The HDP alone cannot be there.

One thing that is not being discussed in Turkey is the possibility of a CHP-HDP coalition, yet this is the most natural coalition. The CHP, if it's a progressive political party, it should be able to get rid of its Kemalist, neo-nationalist baggage and embrace the progress of liberal, democratic agenda of the HDP. 

One reason that the CHP voters and the CHP itself are unable to really embrace the HDP is because the CHP, deep down, is still the party of Atatürk, still the party of Kemalism, still the party of nationalism. And what the Kurds want in Turkey—make no mistake—what the Kurds want in Turkey is autonomy. They want nothing short of autonomy.

The days when you could basically solve the Kurdish question with some cosmetic cultural reforms are over. They want democratic decentralization. And to me, that translates into autonomy. And this is a very difficult step to digest for the CHP. Add to this the fact that the disgruntled CHP voters are voting for the HDP, the fact that people who usually could vote for a central-left progressive party are so disillusioned with the CHP that they're gravitating to the HDP. Therefore, there is also a tactical obstacle, in terms of cooperation between the HDP and the CHP right now. 

But down the line, I think the best reconciliation between Turkish nationalism and Kurdish nationalism would come from a CHP-HDP coalition. Turkish nationalism needs to reconcile itself to the fact that the Kurdish genie is out of the bottle. The good old days of assimilating the Kurds are over. The Kurds want autonomy. They will probably get it, hopefully in a bloodless way.

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Despite the attention on the mid-term races, few elections are competitive. Electoral competition, already low at the national level, is in decline in state and primary elections as well. Reformers, who point to gerrymandering and a host of other targets for change, argue that improving competition will produce voters who are more interested in elections, better-informed on issues, and more likely to turn out to the polls.

On October 27, the Brookings Institution—in conjunction with the Cato Institute and The Pew Research Center—presented a discussion and a groundbreaking survey exploring the attitudes and opinions of voters in competitive and noncompetitive congressional districts. The survey, part of Pew's regular polling on voter attitudes, was conducted through the weekend of October 21. A series of questions explored the public's perceptions, knowledge, and opinions about electoral competitiveness.

The discussion also explored a publication that addresses the startling lack of competition in our democratic system. The Marketplace of Democracy: Electoral Competition and American Politics (Brookings, 2006), considers the historical development, legal background, and political aspects of a system that is supposed to be responsive and accountable, yet for many is becoming stagnant, self-perpetuating, and tone-deaf. Michael McDonald, editor and Brookings visiting fellow, moderated a discussion among co-editor John Samples, director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute, and Andrew Kohut and Scott Keeter from The Pew Research Center, who also discussed the survey.

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Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s write-in candidacy for reelection makes her the latest to join a growing number of prominent politicians who have shed political affiliations in the hopes of winning public office.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is running as an independent for the Senate, former Sen. Lincoln Chafee is running as an independent for Rhode Island governor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg became an independent to run New York City, and, of course, Sen. Joe Lieberman lost the 2006 Democratic Senate primary — but won in the general as an independent.

The trend of moderate independent candidates who have forsworn party affiliations is not new to U.S. politics. Since the Civil War, when the modern Republican Party was established to compete against the Democratic Party, minor party or unaffiliated candidates have won election to the House or Senate a total of 697 times. Of these, 89 percent of elected minor party candidates had voting records ideologically between the two major parties.

Despite the recent polarization of U.S. politics, history tells us that moderates make winners. Consider the Wisconsin Progressive Party. Its development has a familiar ring to today’s politics. Extremist elements flourished in the Republican Party during the Great Depression, growing out of our nation’s economic anxieties. GOP moderates responded by creating this Wisconsin group, focused on issues of reform and pragmatic governance.

It started when Wisconsin Gov. Philip La Follette ran for reelection in 1932 as the GOP nominee. He was heckled throughout his speeches by Republican ‘Stalwarts’ on his political right. They “had their Phil” and were angered by his policies of perceived higher taxes to support government spending. La Follette lost the Republican primary to Stalwart-backed Walter Kohler amid then-record turnout. Kohler lost to the Democrat in the general election.

La Follette is a famous political name. Gov. Philip La Follette and Sen. Robert La Follette Jr. were sons of the leading GOP politician, Sen. Robert La Follette Sr. Republican progressives had supported him for the party’s presidential nomination in 1912 and 1916. He eventually ran for president in 1924 — on his own Independent Progressive Party ticket. But while the father’s exploits are well-known, his sons’ reactions to Wisconsin’s political climate are more relevant to today’s politics.

Frustrated by the GOP extremists, the La Follette brothers created the Wisconsin Progressive Party, and they ran as party candidates when successfully elected governor and senator in 1934. Today’s independent candidates share a similar frustration with the ideological purists on their right and left. The extremists in the Democratic and Republican primary electorates are rejecting centrist candidates who might be better positioned to win general elections.

Consider the words of Crist when he declared his Independent candidacy. “If you want somebody on the right or you want somebody on the left,” Crist said, “you have the former speaker, Rubio, or the congressman, Meek. If you want somebody who has common sense, who puts the will of the people first, who wants to fight for the people first, now you've got Charlie Crist. You have a choice.”

With all the attention paid to the successes of Tea Party activists during the GOP primaries, it is easy to forget that these are not like general elections. Primary voters tend to be more ideologically extreme. So these Republican primary voters may end up denying the party several general election victories.

For example, many political observers agree that Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.), a moderate, would have been a stronger candidate for Senate than the GOP primary victor, Christine O’Donnell, his tea party-backed opponent. General elections have traditionally been won in the center -- where most voters still reside.

Minor party successes usually arise when the two major political parties become ideologically polarized. Moderates can usually find a seat under a big tent, but when party activists are unable to tolerate dissent, moderates are shut out and left to their own devices. So it isn’t surprising that strong candidates holding moderate positions realize they are electorally viable by abandoning their party and appealing to the center in general elections.

History tells us that conditions now are favorable for moderates like Chafee, Crist, Lieberman, and Murkowski. They step into a political vacuum at the center that the major parties created by moving to the political extremes. With room left for further polarization, this may be just the beginning of the rise of moderate independent candidates.

History also tells us the political party that first figures out how to recapture the middle -- and bring these candidates and their supporters into the fold -- is the one most likely to emerge as dominant.

Now that the 2010 Census is concluded, states will begin the process of reapportionment—re-drawing voting district lines to account for population shifts. Nonresident Senior Fellow Michael McDonald says redistricting has been fraught with controversy and corruption since the nation’s early days, when the first “gerrymandered” district was drawn. Two states—Arizona and California—have instituted redistricting commissions intended to insulate the process from political shenanigans, but politicians everywhere will continue to work the system to gain electoral advantage and the best chance of re-election for themselves and their parties.

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The fiscal budget has become a casualty of political polarization and even functions that had enjoyed bipartisan support, like research and development (R&D), are becoming divisive issues on Capitol Hill. As a result, federal R&D is likely to grow pegged to inflation or worse, decline.

With the size of the pie fixed or shrinking, requests for R&D funding increases will trigger an inter-agency zero-sum game that will play out as pointless comparisons of agencies’ merit, or worse, as a contest to attract the favor of Congress or the White House. This insidious politics will be made even more so by the growing tendency of equating public accountability with the measurement of performance. Political polarization, tight budgets, and pressure for quantifiable results threaten to undermine the sustainability of public R&D. The situation begs the question: What can federal agencies do to deal with the changing politics of federal R&D?

In a new paper, Walter D. Valdivia and Benjamin Y. Clark apply punctuated equilibrium theory to examine the last four decades of federal R&D, both at the aggregate and the agency level. Valdivia and Clark observe a general upward trend driven by gradual increases. In turn, budget leaps or punctuations are few and far in between and do no appear to have lasting effects. As the politics of R&D are stirred up, federal departments and agencies are sure to find that proposing punctuations is becoming more costly and risky. Consequently, agencies will be well advised in securing stable growth in their R&D budgets in the long run rather than pushing for short term budget leaps.

While appropriations history would suggest the stability of R&D spending resulted from the character of the budget politics, in the future, stability will need the stewardship of R&D champions who work to institutionalize gradualism, this time, in spite of the politics.

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A 2010 publication of the U.S. Geological Survey caused major excitement in Cyprus, an island that at the time was suffering from the economic collapse of its neighbor and major trading partner, Greece. According to the publication, the seabed of the Eastern Mediterranean could contain up to 120 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas.3 Three years later, the Cypriot administration has high hopes that natural gas exports may get Cyprus—the third smallest European Union member state—back on its feet, after its own financial collapse in 2012. Unfortunately for the Cypriots, the reality on the ground is sobering, and it is currently unclear whether Cyprus will become a producer, or an exporter, of natural gas. Around Cyprus, other countries hope to benefit from the energy potential as well, including Israel, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority. In the Israeli Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), in particular, substantial reserves of natural gas have been found, though the verdict is out whether these will in fact all be produced.

Exploration of Cyprus’s offshore concessions is at an early stage. Energy majors such as ENI and Total are among the first to explore possible gas (and oil) reserves and they expect results not before 2015. To date, only two test wells have been drilled by Houston-based Noble Energy. Proven reserves have been downgraded since and are currently estimated to be between 3 and 5 tcf. At this level of reserves, investing in a natural gas liquefaction terminal, which the Cypriot administration has supported, is not economically viable. A better alternative would be to construct a pipeline to Turkey, which has a large and rapidly growing market for natural gas.

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• Politics Trump Economics in the Complex Game of Eastern Mediterranean Hydrocarbons