348 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

DEMOCRACY'S THIRD WAVE

Samuel P. Huntington: The Third Wave. Democratization in the Late Twentieth
Century. (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. Pp. xvii, 366.
$24.95.)

When a clique of young army officers overthrew the authoritarian rule of

Marcello Caetano in Portugal on 25 April 1974, they could hardly have
imagined that, in retrospect, their action would be credited with unleashing
a wave of democratization that during the next 27 years would affect over 30
countries and every continent of the world. Indeed, at the time, 98 percent of
the Portuguese population was caught by surprise, as were 100 percent of the
(few) academic observers of the country—myself included!
Comparativists, especially those working on Third World Polities, had
just settled into the routine of explaining why some form of autocracy was
virtually unavoidable, given underdevelopment, illiteracy, international de-
pendency, imperatives for capital accumulation, weakness of national bour-
geoisies, distortions in class structure, bloated state bureaucracies, propensity
for military intervention, peripheral location in the world system, internal
colonialism, policies of imperial powers, ethnic tensions, "uncivic" political
cultures, alliance commitments, "the requirements of political order," and a
whole host of other unpleasant factors. None of these changed appreciably;
yet, suddenly, these generalists and area specialists had to cope with explain-
ing a literal sea change in regime type—first, in Southern Europe, then, in
Latin America, some parts of Asia, Eastern Europe and, most recently, Africa.
Only Middle Eastern specialists could seem to go about their business as usual
and, even there, curious rumblings could be heard in Tunisia, Algeria and
Jordan.
The contribution of Samuel B. Huntington to this now burgeoning
literature on democratization is bound to be especially interesting and influ-
ential. As he himself admits, his previous work in this field was singularly
concerned with the problem of political order. One of his most (in)famous
maxims—cited self-approvingly in this volume (p. 28) —was: "the most
important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of
government, but their degree of government" {Political Order in Changing
Societies [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968], p. 1). Contrary to most of
those working on political development, Huntington was indifferent to what
kind of regime was in power, provided that it was capable of producing and
reproducing the status quo, whether in terms of authority relations, property
rights, distribution of wealth, national boundaries and, especially, alliance
commitments and bilateral relations with the United States. Consistent with
this position, he did not hesitate in his writing and extensive consulting to
proffer advice to authoritarian rulers about how they could best sustain
"their" respective versions of political order.
In this book, we discover that Huntington is no longer so indifferent to
how people govern themselves. He (now) believes that "democracy is good
in itself and . . . (conveniently) has positive consequences for individual
freedom, domestic stability, international peace, and the United States of
 REVIEWS 349

America" (p. xv). In reading his Chapter One which both defines what he
means by democracy and why he believes it produces such beneficent results,
one has to ask what could have happened since the 1960s to account for this
change in attitude. Why, all of a sudden, is this particular form of governance
so conducive to political stability when it presumably wasn't before? All of the
reasons offered by Huntington seem convincing (to me); none, however, are
especially novel or unorthodox.
Huntington does not attempt to break new ground in defining democ-
racy. He focuses narrowly on "the extent that (the) most powerful collective
decision makers are selected through fair, honest, and periodic elections in
which candidates freely compete for votes and in which virtually all the adult
population is eligible to vote" (p. 7). For practical purposes, this quality is
dichotomized and all existing independent polities (with more than one
million population) are scored as "democratic" or "nondemocratic" for
specific periods of time. According to the box score for 1990, the latter are still
ahead by 71 to 58 (p. 26)!
Huntington is aware that such a "minimal-procedural" definition has
some problems—for example, that freely elected decision makers can be
circumscribed in their actions by unelected military or civilian oligarchs—but
argues that alternative definitions either contain potentially arbitrary, subjec-
tive judgments or are simply too difficult to operationalize. While there is
some confusion in several of the tables about how many units are included in
the analysis, my impression is that the individual scorings would not only be
accepted by most specialists as accurate, but reveal an impressive command
of information over such a large number of polities. For example, the mere fact
that Mexico has been holding regularly scheduled elections for a long time
does not merit its qualification as a democracy, just as persistent intervention
by military or civil officials seems to have deprived Guatemala, El Salvador,
Honduras, Romania, Bulgaria and Mexico of this label as of 1990.
Many scholars have observed that democracies tend to come in waves;
Huntington develops this notion into a major theme, one might even say,
theory. Moreover, he emphasizes both the positive waves that move countries
toward accountable institutions and the negative ones that bring them back to
autocracy. In his zeal to find or make waves, however, Huntington does
sometimes seem to stretch the point. For example, his "first wave" begins in
1828 [conveniently, with Jacksonian Democracy which allows him to call the
U.S., "the premier democratic country of the world" (p. 30)] and doesn't end
until 1926! I submit that there is no way that either the initial impulse or the
interactive properties that constitute a wave could have lasted that long.
Huntington would have been better served had he concentrated on the four
(not three) periods during which efforts to democratize were compressed
within a relatively compact location in time and space: (1) the "Springtime of
Freedom" in 1848-49; (2) around the First World War and its aftermath (1910-
1920); (3) the Second World War and its aftermath (1943-1948); and (4) the
present (1974 to ??), and then admitted that certain countries, for example, the
United Kingdom, the United States, Switzerland, Canada, New Zealand and
Australia, have democratized according to another rhythm and been much
less affected by what was going on in neighboring countries.
350 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

His point that movement in one direction is often followed by reversions,

either to the statu quo ante or some other form of autocracy, is a sobering one
in the light of all the triumphalism about the "end of history." Most polities
have not made it to democracy on their first or even their second try—
although one has to admit that one of the most surprising characteristics of this
present wave is that so few attempts at democratization have reverted:
Burma, China, Haiti, Algeria?. That remains unexplained, by Huntington or
anyone else.
Why this sea change in regimes since 1974? In addition to the intriguing
notion that diffusion alone (or what he calls "demonstration effects") could be
responsible—namely, that each successive democratization creates incen-
tives for a similar transformation of its neighbors and that the longer the wave
persists, the more it tends to create transnational and even global institutions
that can carry the impulse to other regions—Huntington rounds up the usual
suspects in Chapter 2: legitimacy problems exacerbated by military defeats,
economic failures and successive oil shocks; economic growth during the
earlier period and the emergence of a new middle class; changes in religious
beliefs and the role of the Catholic church; and new policies by external actors,
especially the criteria for membership imposed by the European Community
and the impact of the Helsinki Process, the human rights policies of the United
States and the "Sinatra Doctrine" of the USSR with regard to Eastern Europe.
The general approach is calculatedly eclectic: no single factor explains regime
change; all democratizations involve a combination of causes; these combina-
tions vary from case to case and from wave to wave. How can one argue with
such a laundry list—especially when it comes selectively illustrated with a
cosmopolitan variety of cases? What does it prove that 27 of the 31 cases of
regime transition between 1973 and 1989 had a per-capita income (in 1976)
between $250 and $3,00? To his credit, Huntington notes that rapid economic
growth in the fifteen years prior to the "Third Wave" may have destabilized
some authoritarian regimes, but it did not necessarily lead to democracy, for
example, in Iran and China. What about the fact that many of the post-1974
democratizers were Catholic? Was this due to changes in Church doctrine
(which Huntington, following Weigel, attributes to the influence of U.S.
bishops, pp. 76-85)? Or the simple fact that most Protestant countries were
already safely ensconced in the democratic column? How can the benevolence
of U.S. policy be so confidently assumed when the Reagan administration
reversed Carter's human rights policy and adopted a much more "realistic,"
not to say "militaristic," approach to what it saw as subversion and instability?
Switching from why to how, Huntington offers a rather loose and
unsystematic typology of modes of transition. Categorizing 35 cases of
liberalization/democratization (there were 25 at the beginning of Chapter 4,
28 in Table 1.1 and 31 in Table 2.1), sixteen were termed "transformations" in
which previous elites took the lead; six were "replacements" where opposi-
tion groups brought about democracy; eleven were "transplacements" in-
volving joint action by regime and opposition; and, finally, two (Grenada and
Panama) were the result of armed intervention by a benevolent outside
power. The assignments of individual cases seem more arbitrary here than in
the earlier dichotomous judgments of whether a regime transition had oc-
 REVIEWS 351

curred, no doubt, because of the fuzziness of the distinctions. For each type,
Huntington offers some, rather obvious, "guidelines" —all of which can be
condensed into a single maxim: eschew violence, move toward the center and
be prepared to compromise!
Like many of the recent students of regime change, Huntington recog-
nizes that the transition from authoritarian rule does not ensure the consoli-
dation of democracy. His historical analysis demonstrates that relapse is not
only possible, but even likely, unless specific actions are taken—often by those
who were not responsible for the transition itself. In many cases, the core
difficulty hinges on relations with the military. By far the most original
analysis and insightful guidelines of the entire volume emerge from his
discussion of "the torturer problem" and "the praetorian problem." Here, he
is drawing on his vast experience in studying civil-military relations and
advising military regimes. His conclusions are perhaps predictable: (1) do not
prosecute or punish the torturers, but publicize their nefarious deeds so they
will not be forgotten; (2) purge or retire all potentially disloyal officers (and
punish severely those who may rebel against the nascent democracy), but
improve the salaries and living conditions of those who remain, provide them
with a plausible defense mission and new weaponry (if possible at the cost of
the American taxpayer)—but the discussion leading up to them is systematic
and well-informed. His discussion of the other, manifold, problems likely to
impede the consolidation of democracy is less focused, and does not produce
such pithy guidelines for action. Virtually nothing is said about the economic
reforms and, in some cases, system transformations that these countries must
simultaneously undergo.
On the big question: "Will these nascent democracies survive or be
engulfed in a 'third reverse wave'"?, Huntington equivocates. Certain new
impulses favor a positive outcome, he thinks: the changed role of Catholicism,
the persistent benevolence of the United States, the withdrawal (and subse-
quent collapse) of the Soviet Union—but the forward momentum has been
spent, non-Western cultural traditions are bound to assert themselves, break-
downs of law and order are looming, social and political polarization could re-
emerge; economic crisis or collapse may revive the demand for imposed
solutions. One of his most provocative speculations is that in the future we
may experience "historically new forms of authoritarian rule" (p. 292),
although the ones he suggests are tiresomely familiar (pp. 293-94).
Even a reader such as this one who finds Huntington's definition of
democracy too "electoralist," his faith in U.S. benevolence too excessive, his
attention to economic issues too summary, and his guidelines for action too
blurred and cautious will learn a great deal from this book. In its sheer scope
and erudition, not to mention its consistent orientation toward actors and
their difficult choices, The Third Wave makes a distinctive contribution to our
knowledge about present efforts at democratization and their uncertain
futures.
—Philippe C. Schmitter