Don't Rush Fragile States Toward Democracy

Former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron now heads a commission on "state fragility, growth and development" formed by the London School of Economics and Oxford University. There's a certain irony to that -- after all, didn't Cameron's disastrous gamble with the Brexit referendum make the U.K. more fragile, putting its further growth and development into question? The commission's first recommendations, however, are sober and sensible: Take care that people feel economically secure and at peace before building a governance system that looks like those of old democracies.

The report argues that developed nations trying to help fragile ones have been doing it wrong. They have pushed the "best practices" of wealthy nations, demanding quick multi-party elections and often unpopular, harsh economic policies backed by global financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund. This has resulted in deeply flawed and easily subverted or overturned democracies in countries such as post-Saddam Iraq, post-Mubarak Egypt and post-Gaddafi Libya. In Yemen, according to the report, the program proposed by the international financial institutions demanded a radical transformation of the country within two years."The reform program was aborted because the state collapsed through rebellion triggered by one of the reforms," the report says.