Unfortunately, Bush s strategy of democracy promotion has mainly contributed to unease around the world and alienation from Western goals. Especially in view of the Iraq experience, Putin has won substantial public sympathy by arguing that opposition to Western democracy promotion is resistance not to democracy itself, but to Western intervention against Russian sovereign democracy.

Western capitalism s model of a society based on near universal affluence and liberal democracy looks increasingly ineffective compared to the competition. Authoritarian countries middle classes may push their leaders toward greater democracy, as in Russia, but Western democracies will also likely become more authoritarian.

During the Cold War, social democracy was Western Europe s egalitarian alternative to communism. Attlee, for one, was ferociously anti communist.

What Romania wishes to see in the Western Balkans is sustainable security and stability, based on democracy, freedom and tolerance.

Second, we need to appreciate the special and innovative nature of the democracy created by Western European elites after 1945. In light of the totalitarian experience, they stopped identifying democracy with parliamentary sovereignty the classic interpretation of modern representative democracy everywhere but in the United States.

Australia believes that the sceptics who that say that democracy is a Western concept that will never take root in the Middle East are wrong.

Faced with this uncertainty about the future of liberal democracy in Russia, how should western countries respond? This question is particularly difficult for the Bush administration, which is torn between the president s early endorsement of Putin and his pro democracy agenda.

Democracy is increasingly seen as a mere ritual. In general, Western societies, it seems, are experiencing a certain crisis of the democratic ethos and active citizenship.

Western allies have a strong strategic interest in supporting Ukrainian democracy and Ukraine's Euro Atlantic integration. But this course must be pursued prudently and with great care.

The army has a special place in its society. The people do want democracy, but they will be disdainful of Western critics whom they will see as utterly naive in the face of the threat to democracy that the Muslim Brotherhood posed.

Years of Western backed repressive authoritarianism nipped in the bud any potential growth of a liberal alternative to the incumbent Arab regimes, and turned any abrupt move to free elections into a dangerous exercise in Islamic democracy. A democracy that produces governments led by Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood is inevitably bound to be anti Western and opposed to an American inspired peace process with Israel.

Democracy is not a Western product nor is it for Western citizens alone. Asia has enough historical experience to suggest that even its six remaining dictatorships could, in time, embrace a fairer system of government and the peace and prosperity that come with it.

In fact, support for democracy corresponds with a number of other liberal attitudes that we found in Saudi Arabia. Supporters of democracy tend to be less religious, more secular, more tolerant of others, more critical of public sector performance, and more concerned with Western cultural invasion.

The US eventually had to abandon its fantasies about Western style Arab democracy, but it ironically left the Iranians carrying the torch of democracy in the region. After all, Iran was quick to recognize that free elections are the safest way to undermine the Middle East s pro American regimes.

In fact, the sick man undeniably European, if not Western could reveal himself to be more resilient, owing to the strength of his own natural defenses democracy and the rule of law.

That has also been the result of Bush s ill conceived democracy crusade in the Arab world. Bush discovered to his dismay that any exercise in Arab democracy is bound to usher in anti Western Islamists, be it the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Shia parties in Iraq, or Hamas in Palestine.

Clearly, national interests, and sometimes pure power, play a part in how the US and other Western countries apply values like human rights, the rule of law, democracy, and pluralism. But these values are not mere ideological window dressing for Western interests in fact, they are not that to any significant extent.

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama claimed in a famous essay that the Cold War s end marked the end of ideological evolution, the end of history, with the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. Yet, two decades on, the global spread of democracy has been encountering increasingly strong headwinds.

But the message of Tunisia s Jasmine Revolution rings loud and clear democracy and the liberal political order in which it is rooted is not merely a Western concept (or a Western conspiracy), but holds universal attraction, powered by the craving for recognition. Moreover, it can be accessed at an early stage of a country s modernization.

Furthermore, the growth of trafficking in drugs and human beings in all the European countries had repercussions, and very few European politicians had escaped accusations of corruption, proof that so called Western democracy was not infallible.

Attracting neighbors has long been a noble aspiration and something of a European specialty. The European Union s embrace of post communist republics in Central Europe represented a most powerful symbol of the reach of Western liberal democracy.

We in Turkey have been tackling the question of whether Islam can coexist with Western democracy for more than 150 years. After150 years of Westernization and modernization, the answer we have come up with is a definite yes.

Western Asia

Western Asia

Western Brigade

Western Brigade

After 42 years of dictatorship, Libya, like Iraq in 2003 after the fall of Saddam Hussein, needs more than wishful thinking to become a vibrant democracy. It needs organized state building in Tripoli and realistic policymaking in Western capitals.

Democracy

Democracy

Yet, despite consistently demonstrating a commitment to democracy, the international community has been deaf to our appeals. The United States, Europe, and other Western governments refuse to negotiate with us, even though neighboring Iraq and Turkey have done so willingly.

In fact, while the Saakashvili government s clampdown showed the structural weaknesses of Georgia s democracy, the aftermath has also shown that Georgia s Western ambition remains intact, because the government understands that it cannot afford any long term deviation from democratic norms.

Rethinking Democracy

Damaged Democracy

Gunboat Democracy?

C. Democracy

Morocco claimed a right to Western Sahara yet Western Sahara was not Moroccan, it was Saharan.

Talk of human rights and democracy is nothing but a smoke screen for demonizing China. Arms sales to Taiwan, Tibetan activism, and color revolutions of various kinds are all sponsored by the US and other Western powers, and are aimed at weakening China.

In the last years of the increasingly unstable Weimar Republic, as democracy was fraying, German governments started to use their opponents radicalism in an effort to extract security concessions from the Western powers. Domestic political pressure became a source of heightened international tension.

Such concrete proposals for political reform inspired by Confucian values can rarely be published in mainland China. In fact, there are fewer constraints imposed on public discussion of liberal democratic institutions precisely because few Chinese are inspired by Western style liberal democracy.

Western Politics Locust Years

Reviving Georgia s Western Dream

Western Europe and other

OF WESTERN THRACE, GREECE

For example, the Western emphasis on reform and democracy in recent years has been used more often than not as a threat, a typical message being Help us in Iraq or we will press for democracy and human rights in your own country. And the Arab reply is equally threatening Stop pressing us on the reform issue or we won t cooperate in the war on terror !

However, the democracy fund should be used to support countries' home grown institutions of democracy and not to import foreign brands of democracy and to use them as a conditionality for accessing the democracy fund.