Again, for the most hard-headed of reasons, we should grant to other countries both the entitlement to, and the capacity for, political freedom if they are to have any chance of attaining it. By the same token, it would be perverse in the extreme if we were to consign whole nations to despotism on the theory that it is the fate they deserve, or that it is somehow encoded in their genes. Another theme of pessimism holds that it is the morning after for democracy, that a hangover has set in, that the wave of good news from the '80s is giving way to a counter-wave of bad news in the '90s. Certainly there have been plenty of reminders in the last few years that the transition is long and hard, especially for countries where political progress is hostage to economic disadvantage. Poverty, underdevelopment, and stagnation are by no means alibis for tyranny, but they are, without doubt, obstacles to freedom and openness.
Some regions have the added burden of unsustainable population growth.
Another problem is that newly enfranchised citizens tend to have unrealistically high expectations of what their elected leaders can accomplish, how long it will take, and with what degree of attendant hardship and pain. When those expectations are unmet, voters become vulnerable to demagogues, to purveyors of foolish, even sinister, nostrums based on the deadly combination of nostalgia for the past and fear of the future. To believe in democracy and the rightness of what our leaders have asked us to do is not to deny any of these difficulties. Nor is it to assert that there is anything foreordained about the triumph of democracy on a global scale. In fact, it is precisely because the future of democracy is not assured in much of the world that the countries represented here must work hard to help nascent democracies through their phase of greatest fragility.