Stories from the Long Road to Freedom

By Condoleezza Rice

---

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, spells out a list of rights deemed to be non-negotiable: Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; to freedom of peaceful assembly and association; and to take part in their government, directly to through freely chosen representatives. The declaration does not use the term “democracy,” but that is exactly what it describes. 

Even leaders who are undeniably authoritarian make some claim to the mantle of democracy, either by holding sham elections or by trying to broaden the definition of “rights” to encompass goods they can deliver, like prosperity. Those who are not subject to popular will still crave legitimacy – or at least the appearance of legitimacy. Saddam Hussein held elections in Iraq in October 2002, just a few months before he was overthrown. (He was the only choice on the ballot and won 100 percent of the vote, with the official turnout also at 100 percent.) Few will say they simply rule by fiat, something that would have been wholly acceptable in times past. France’s Sun King, Louis XIV, who declared, “I am the State,” is one of many monarchs from history who claimed to rule by divine right. 

If democracy is bradley understood to mean the right to speak your mind, to be free from the arbitrary power of the state, and to insist that those who would govern you must ask for your consent, then democracy – the only form of government that guarantees these freedoms – has never been more widely accepted as right. 

(Rice 2017, pp.5-6)

At the beginning, formal protections – such as constitutionally determined organizations, laws, procedures, or rules – may reflect bargains between various interests in the society. As such, they may be imperfect and sometimes contradictory. This will breed contention for years to come. Every democracy is flawed at its inception. And, indeed, no democracy ever becomes perfect. The question is not one of perfection but how an imperfect system can survive, move forward, and grow stronger. 

(Rice 2017, pp.8)

No nationality or ethnic group lacks the DNA to come to terms with this paradox. Over the years, many people have tried to invoke “cultural explanations” to assert that some societies lack what it takes to establish or sustain democracy. But this is a myth that has fallen to the reality of democracy’s universal appeal. 

It was once thought that Latin Americans were more suited for caudillos that presidents; that Africans were just too tribal; that Confucian values conflicted with the tenets of self-rule. Years before that, Germans were. Thought too martial or subservient, and – of course – the descendants of slaves were too “childlike” to care about the right to vote. 

Those racist views are refuted by stable democracies in places as diverse as Chile, Ghana, South Korea, and across Europe. And, of course, America has now had a black president, as well as two secretaries of state and two attorneys general. Even if these “cultural” prejudices have simply not held up over time, the question hangs in the air: Why have some peoples been able to find the equilibrium between disruption and stability that is characteristic of a democracy? Is it a matter of historical circumstances? Or is it simply a matter of time?

(Rice 2017, pp.10)

While tyrants were capricious with nothing to restrain them, democratic governments relied upon and were limited by the will of the people. But the people’s wishes wouldn’t be revealed every day, in every circumstance. Indeed, the Founders were concerned that the will of the people could easily become the preferences of the mob. Thus democratic institutions became a way not only to limit the government but to channel popular passions and interests. Citizens had to come to respect the institutions that would represent and protect their rights. They would be free to associate with others as they wished and there would be a watchful press that could not be abridged, censored, or otherwise checked by the government. The “Fourth Estate,” a free press, would be the eyes and ears of the people, holding their leaders accountable.

The debates were intense about every aspect of institutional design. The question of how to deal with executive power exposed splits among the Founders. Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson of Pennsylvania were advocates of strength. As Hamilton would say, “A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.”

Others worried that a strong presidency could evolve too easily into the very system they had fought to replace. As Patrick Henry warned supporters of the Constitution, “Your President may easily become King.”

(Rice 2017, pp.32-33)

The America about which we learned as schoolchildren was thus one in which freedom of religion and separation of church and state were foregone conclusions at the start. But as with everything in our history, practice has not always matched stated values. In the period before independence, some colonies had official churches, like the Anglican Church in Virginia, while other colonies, such as Rhode Island, imposed a stricter separation. 

(Rice 2017, pp.40)

Many have made the point that Christians founded America. These men and women lived in a time when at least some expression of Christian belief was an absolute necessity for moral propriety. Like many religious people, I find great comfort in the stories of their personal struggles to find meaning and, in some cases, to find God. But in the final analysis it doesn’t matter whether they were Christian believers, Deists, or atheists: Their intention was to create a system of governance that prohibited the privileging of one set of beliefs over another and allowed citizens the freedom to choose and practice religion without the interference of the state. 

And through the constitutional process, Americans have been defining precisely what that means in practical terms. This flexibility has become more crucial as our own diversity has stretched to incorporate every known religious belief and the possibility of no religious faith at all. The questions that have arisen are wide-ranging. Some strike us as fundamental: Can the government compel obedience to a law that a citizen deems to be in contradiction to her religious beliefs? Others may seem more trivial: Do holiday decorations with a religious theme displayed on government property violate the separation of church and state? What is remarkable is that we have a Constitution that gives us a pathway to confront these questions. We do not, therefore, take up arms against one another to defend the claim that God is on our side. 

(Rice 2017, pp.43)

That has meant that happiness is pursued through individual initiative and free association with others. 

The claim of America’s founding documents that the government should undertake to protect the right of citizens to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is so broad as to be almost absurd. It makes perfectly good sense that citizens should enjoy freedom of speech and of religion, protection from the arbitrary power of the state, and the right to select those who would govern them. But a right to pursue happiness? How in the world can government guarantee that?

The answer lies in the fact that the government’s role was actually limited. There was no guarantee to happiness – only a promise to provide conditions of freedom and liberty that allowed citizens to pursue their goals. That has meant that happiness is pursued through individual initiative and free association with others. 

The United States evolved in a way that made unprecedented room for private space and private activity. This is of course true for the economy, where in terms of “value added,” private industries account for more than 87 percent of GDP.

(Rice 2017, pp.44)

The time is coming when we, as a country, may make a different choice. In her opinion on the Michigan case, Sandra Day O’Connor thought that the need for preferences would expire in twenty-five years. That would be 2028.

Affirmative action is also being challenged on a state-by-state basis. In 1996, for example, the people of California voted in a referendum to end affirmative action by state agencies in employment, education, and contracting. 

But the underrepresentation of minorities in academia, the corporate environment, and the government persists. Affirmative action has caused people to stop and think and make good-faith efforts to diversify outside of traditional channels. I doubt that Stanford would have taken a second look at a young Soviet specialist from the University of Denver on a one-year fellowship without an eye toward diversification. But the university took a chance on me and I joined the faculty. It worked out well for both of us. 

(Rice 2017, pp.65)

The Russian language has a word, vopros, which means “question,” “issue,” or “problem.” Those who study Russia know that the country’s history has been characterized by a series of questions: Lenin’s famous challenge to his Bolshevik comrades, “What is to be Done?” A constant obsession among the people with “Who is to Blame?” And terrible geography and a troubled history that cause Russians to ask, “Who are we?” and “What is Russia?” These questions have defied answers throughout the centuries and provoke another: Can democracy ever take hold in this rough and vast land?

Every country has some aspect of its history that could be used to explain why democracy can’t succeed. Russia’s modern story has a familiar theme in failed democratic transitions around the world: weak institutions that never took hold against a backdrop of economic decline and social instability. Russia is not Mars and the Russians are not endowed with some unique, antidemocratic DNA.

Yet there is a facet of this story that is unique to Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union occurred contemporaneously with the birth of the new Russian state, which added a dimension of complexity and turmoil that was indeed different. The borders of the state, the identity of its people, and the system of economic and political governance were all in play at the same time. That is where the long, tortured history does matter and helps to explain why the transition to democracy was not a transition at all: It was the collapse of the Russian state within the collapse of the Soviet Empire. And in the end, it was too much to overcome. 

(Rice 2017, pp.73-74)

Though the reforms were cautious, they were in fact pretty radical when one remembers the tenets of central planning on which the Soviet economy had rested for sixty-five years. Inputs and outputs were determined not by supply and demand but by a series of plans, adopted every five years by the government. Remarkably, the plan was intended to lay out every transaction within an economy serving nearly three hundred million people over eleven different time zones. 

One year the plans for forks and towel racks got mixed up. Workers produced, nonetheless, according to the plans. No one stopped to notice that the towel racks were incredibly light and the forks unbelievably heavy. They were shipped to the stores, where Soviet consumers presumably made do with what they got. This was the nature of central planning, and it governed everything from the production of shoes, refrigerators, and automobiles to the provision of machine tools for heavy industry and armaments for the military. 

(Rice 2017, pp.75-76)

The reforms of perstroika were accompanied by glasnost, a series of political changes that were intended to reduce resistance to the economic overhaul. Gorbachev seemed to believe that he could safely remove the key constraints of the political system – propaganda and fear. He wanted, he told many people, including me, to make the Soviet Union a “normal country.” 

Like the economic reforms, glasnost (roughly meaning “transparency”) started modestly. The Communist Party took the lead, publishing revisions of the whitewashed history of the country. For example, there had long been a debate about how many people perished in the gurges of the 1930s under Josef Stalin. The British-American historian Robert Conquest was excoriated by academics for claiming in 1968 that twenty million had been killed. As late as the mid-1980s, some scholars described the number of victims as only “many thousands.” Yet when the official story was told, we learned that Conquest’s numbers were gruesomely accurate. Approximately one in three party members (and many ordinary citizens) were branded as traitors and purged during Stalin’s reign. Many were branded as traitors and purged during Stalin’s reign. Many were executed outright, while others were sent to Siberia and similar detention camps, where they died under the harsh labor conditions and a few, very few, lived to tell the story when glasnost made it safe to do so. Under glasnost, great dissident writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn who had chronicled the brutality of the Stalinist years (and beyond) were welcomed back into the good graces of their country.

(Rice 2017, pp.77-78)

The pace of change accelerated throughout 1988 with the Gorbachev reforms targeting the role of the party itself in governance. There had always been parallel structures in the Soviet Union – the party and the government. For instance, Pravda (Truth) was the party’s newspaper and Izvestiya (the News) belonged to the government. Still, any high-ranking member of the government was also a member of the party, and there was little doubt that real authority rested in the Politburo of the CPSU and its general secretary.

Gorbachev proposed a presidential system for the USSR, changing the institutional basis for leading the country. Power would now rest in the president, not in the general secretary. The 1977 constitution was amended as well, creating a bicameral legislature with the Congress of People’s Deputies as the lower house and the Supreme Soviet as the upper house. This was an early attempt to create a legislature, theoretically independent of the party. (“Soviet” is the Russian word for “council,” so the name of this organization did not mean that it was a part of the Communist Party.)

(Rice 2017, pp.80-81)

These changes were not intended to destroy the CPSU’s hold on power. Gorbachev intended to democratize and modernize the Communist Party, giving it greater legitimacy among the Soviet people. He seemed to believe that it could gain the trust of the people, no longer needing coercion and repression to command their loyalty. Yet by creating and allowing new institutional arrangements, he provided space for other forces that he could not control. And in short order these seemingly breath-taking changes were revealed to be too little too late. Pressures from the left (conservatives in Russian political parlance) and from the right (liberals) left little room for Gorbachev’s middle ground. 

On the left, powerful figures like Politburo member Yegor Ligachev feared (correctly, it turns out) that the CPSU was committing suicide. Ligachev was stripped of responsibility for ideological matters as a result of his views and put in charge of agriculture. Everyone understood the significance of that, since the portfolio had often been a sign of political exile. Still, open criticism in the Soviet press and the appearance of reactionary factions within the Party itself grew more urgent and more common. But Gorbachev pushed ahead, declaring at the 28th Party Congress in July 1990 that the Politburo of the Party would have no role in governing the country. Earlier that year, Gorbachev engineered an amendment to Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution that eliminated the CPSU’s monopoly on power and allowed the creation of multiple parties. 

(Rice 2017, pp.82-83)

Political choices do not take place on a blank canvas: What has gone before matters. Gorbachev’s effort to make the Soviet Union a “normal” nation introduced important democratizing reforms, essentially for the first time in the country’s history. The only other episode had been tragically brief. Alexander Kerensky established an independent parliament, a freer press, and rule of law when he took power after the abdication of the tsar in March 1917. The victory of the Bolsheviks eight months later put an end to that experiment. And thanks to the telling of history in Soviet times, few Russians knew that story. 

(Rice 2017, pp.88-89)

We have seen that America’ Founding Fathers worried about creating a state that would be too strong and thus a threat to democratic values. But they understood that the state had to be strong enough to carry out certain functions: protecting the country from foreign enemies; the establishment of a national currency; the maintenance of civil order; the ability to tax its citizens fairly; and the confidence that the states would carry out federal laws. Somewhere between chaos and authoritarianism lay democracy.

Russia did not find that sweet spot. Rather, the period was characterized by wild schemes to privatize the economy rapidly, creating massively rich new elites while real income plummeted and poverty levels soared for the general population. Organized crime emerged as a potent force, offering protection to companies and individuals (for a fee) that the state could not provide. Regional and local authorities simply ignored the policies of the central government. The Russian citizen experienced daily life as one of humiliation, deprivation, and chaos. 

(Rice 2017, pp.91)

It had been a difficult NATO summit in Bucharest. In President Bush’s last year in office, we hoped to solidify the commitment of the alliance to Eastern Europe. The expansion of NATO to Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and then all the way to the Baltic states had been relatively seamless – a joint project of the Clinton and Bush administrations. The new members were energetic, devoted to the principles on which the alliance had been founded – the defense of democracy and liberty in Europe and beyond. For most of Europe and even the United States, the other purpose of NATO – keeping the Soviet Union or now Russia at bay – had long since lost salience. We had really come to believe that the Cold War was over, Europe was whole, free, and at peace, and even if they didn’t like the outcome, the men in the Kremlin were resigned to it. It turns out they were not. 

(Rice 2017, pp.114)

Putin walked into the room, greeted everyone, and sat down. At the beginning, his speech sounded almost perfunctory and a bit valedictory. I was listening in Russian because I always found that interpreters didn’t quite get Putin’s harsh and combative tone. All of a sudden, I thought that my Russian was failing, and so I started going back and forth between the English translation and the Russian. Did he really just say that Ukraine was a made-up country? Yes, he did. There it was, a declaration that was so Soviet, or actually tsarist, that I couldn’t believe my ears. 

(Rice 2017, pp.117)

This historical messianism is dangerous. Already in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia, one of the justifications was protection of the Russian populations in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Of course the real cause was Putin’s disdain for the pro-Western democratically elected government of Mikheil Saakashvili. This was followed by the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the creeping occupation of eastern Ukraine, setting Putin’s Russia against Europe and the United States. But these acts of aggression have solidified his popularity at home. In 2013, Putin’s standing was at a low point- still well above 60 percent, but headed downward. His expensive Sochi Olympic adventure had turned out to be not very popular.

The annexation of Crimea propelled Putin to new highs. What most of the world saw as an outright violation of international law – countries don’t annex the territory of their neighbors in the twenty-first century – Russians saw as returning the territory to its rightful home. In their version of events, Catherine the Great conquered Crimea in 1783; the idiot Nikita Khurshchev gave it to Ukraine as a gift for three hundred years of Russian-Ukrainian friendship in 1954; when Ukraine became independent in 1991, Kiev didn’t give it back. Vladimir Putin set all of that right. Crimea was once Russian, and it was Russian again. 

(Rice 2017, pp.118)

In one peculiar incident, Soviet cosmonauts had to orbit in space while Russia and Kazakhstan negotiated the right for them to touch down. They had taken off from the Soviet Union. The landing strip now belonged to Kazakhstan. 

But Ukraine began to stubble almost immediately as it tried to carve out an identity divorced from its neighbor. Think back to the comment that losing Ukraine was like an amputation. Essentially all of the Soviet Union was hacked into parts. The infrastructure of a single country was divided at the borders of several – whether the division made sense or not. Gas pipelines, the electrical grid, industrial sites, even military bases were affected. In one peculiar incident, Soviet cosmonauts had to orbit in space while Russia and Kazakhstan negotiated the right for them to touch down. They had taken off from the Soviet Union. The landing strip now belonged to Kazakhstan. 

(Rice 2017, pp.174)

The Middle East is cursed with a complex political geography. Egypt has existed for centuries. Modern-day Iran was once the core of the Persian Empire, and Turkey was the center of the Ottoman Empire. These states have strong and established national identities. Others in the region, however, emerged by diplomatic design in the early twentieth century. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of World War I, its four-hundred-year-old system of governing the Middle East collapsed with it. Britain and France, victors in the war, poured into the vacuum and redrew the boarders, often without regard for the complexities on the ground. From this process emerged the modern boundaries of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and what was then called Palestine. Monarchs and dictators held these constructed states together. Arbitrary lines crossed sectarian and ethnic divides, leaving a hodgepodge of Kurds, Shia and Sunni Muslims, and a smattering of Christian groups and other minorities within and across borders. 

And often the leadership did not match the ethnic and religious mix. Iraq was ruled first by a Sunni king and later by a Sunni dictator, Saddam Hussein, though the Shia were 60 percent of the population. Bahrain’s ruling family is Sunni, while the population is roughly 70 percent Shia. Eastern Saudi Arabia – 10 percent of the country and an oil-rich region – is largely Shia. The Sunni monarchs have historically neglected the needs of their populations, leading to widespread distrust. Bashar al-Assad is Alawite – a minority Shia sect. The broader Syrian population is roughly 75 percent Sunni, about 13 percent of whom are Kurds. Lebanon’s population is about 27 percent Sunni, 27 percent Shia, and 40 percent Christian. The country is governed by a fixed formula. The president must be Christian, the prime minister Sunni, and the speaker of the parliament Shia. Lebanese Hezbollah, meaning “Party of God,” is also Shia and dominates the country’s southern region and a big chunk of Beirut. It is almost purely an extension of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps – taking orders, money, and inspiration from Tehran. 

(Rice 2017, pp.269-270)

The decision to give the Iraqis a chance at a democratic future was a separate one – and driven by a different logic. Some within the administration, including Don Rmsfeld, argued that we might be better off to install another strongman once Saddam was gone. Just find a general who wasn’t implicated in his war crimes and let the Iraqis sort it out. It was a reasonable idea, but the president believed that America had done enough of that in the Middle East, with unacceptable outcomes. The freedom gap was in part to blame for terrorism and instability in the region. We knew the complexity of Iraq’s ethnic and religious mix. It was precisely the complexity that demanded democratic institutions so that people could coexist while contending with their differences peacefully. The other option – someone oppresses someone else – was no longer a formula for stability. 

The closest historical parallel to his view is American policy toward Germany and Japan after World War II. The United States did not enter those wars to bring democracy – it overthrew Imperial Japan and Adolf Hitler because they were security threats. But when the regimes were defeated, the Americans avowedly focused on building democratic successor states. There is a story – perhaps apocryphal – that as the war neared conclusion, Churchill was asked what he wanted to do about the vanquished Germany. “I like Germany so much that I want as many of them as possible,” he is said to have remarked. In other words, break it up and keep it weak. It was classic balance-of-power thinking. 

(Rice 2017, pp.276-277)

The standard-bearers for those who voted to shake up the system need to find the humility to know and accept democracy’s paradox: Its genius is in its openness to change, but its stability comes through institutions that embody constraint and reject absolute power. They will find that it is easier to tear down democratic institutions than to build them and work through them. And they must now deliver real prosperity for those who trusted them – not just assign blame to foreigners and immigrants who “take their jobs.”

On the other hand, those who would defend the status quo – the postwar global order – need to admit that there are those who have not shared in its prosperity and are troubled by its rejection of more traditional values. In this regard, the trend toward dividing people into ever-smaller groups, each with its own particular grievance and narrative, comes at the expense of the unifying identity that all democracies need. This is especially true in the United States, where “we the people” has no ethnic, national, or religious basis. We reinforce those divisions at our peril.

Global leaders also need to accept that there is a growing gap between those who are comfortable breaking down borders and barriers between peoples – and those who find it dizzying and even threatening. 

(Rice 2017, pp.442-443)

---

References

Rice, Condoleezza. 2017. Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom. N.p.: Grand Central Publishing.

ISBN 978-1-4555-4018-1