Don’t Have High Hopes for Libyan Democracy – Democracy in the News
“Our western standards must be tempered by the cultural and social experiences […] We ought to lower our expectations”
– Lt. Gen. Bouchard, Commander of Canadian Operations in Libya
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/02/13/libya-canada-nato-commander.html
It seems that we, as the West, have learned from out democratization efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead of toppling an autocratic regime and expecting a fully free and liberal democracy to arise magically out of the ashes, we are now taking other social considerations into effect. In realizing that a country has a long history of authoritarianism, expectations of democracy are now being tempered by reality. Perhaps this is because we have less political motivation to see Libya as a fully free democracy as we do with Afghanistan or Iraq because we didn’t directly have boots on the ground to topple that regime. We sacrificed far less for this coup, so we can view it objectively.
Instead of expecting a Liberal Democracy military experts are saying we will see a Libyan Democracy. This is clever wordplay but highlights the fact that despite our definition of democracy, this is not the ideal or even possible version for other nations. This is undoubtedly what collier and levitsky would call a diminished subtype. Nevertheless, it is nice to see that commentators are being objective instead of political.