In the 21st century, however, one cannot have stability without democracy. Outside the Democratic People s Republic of Korea, where the walls of isolation are beginning to crumble under the twin assault of grinding poverty and knowledge of prosperity elsewhere, in the age of ubiquitous access to information about other citizens or other peoples living and working conditions, authoritarian or dictatorial regimes cannot durably respond to the legitimate aspirations of those who have been left behind. And democracies can both educate and motivate the poor to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. It is not surprising, therefore, that the first of the ILO s major objectives in recent years has been to support the development of democracy. Combating poverty has been another major objective.
Recent history holds many lessons.
The failure of the communist command economies in the 1980s points to the stifling effects of undemocratic procedures. A communist regime can force or motivate some of the people some of the time but not all the people all the time. The growth spurts experienced in the 1950s and 1960s in Western Europe, and in the last several decades in East and South-East Asia, show striking parallels and instructive differences, which warrant to be compared briefly. So did exports. Much of the FDI was export orientated, even in Western Europe.