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Brown Journal of World Affairs: Looking back, how would you assess the democratic wave that transformed Lebanon, Ukraine, and various central Asian countries over the summer? What lessons are being drawn from those revolutions by illiberal governments and advocates of democratization?
Larry Diamond: The regimes in the Arab world are starting to use the example of instability in Iraq to dampen aspirations for democracy. In the most recent issue of the Journal of Democracy, my colleague Michael McFaul at Stanford wrote about the conjunction of factors that led to the democratic breakthroughs in Serbia in 2000, then more recently in Georgia and Ukraine, and, partially, in Kyrgyzstan. One of the important factors was that these regimes were not purely authoritarian. They had elections; they wanted them to look democratic enough to be minimally acceptable to the rest of the world. The fact that they allowed space for opposition to organize and for civil society to mobilize, that there was at least partial freedom of the press, and that there was a means for the opposition to coordinate and...
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