IS DEMOCRACY BLOCKING DEVELOPMENT?

We are often told that our Western system for making political choices, what we call democracy, is the best in the world, with the implication that if every nation adopted it many of the world's problems would be solved, or at least made less bad.

Every country, we assume, aspires to copy that system because they want the level of individual rights and freedom we have. After all, in the UK, Churchill told us: 'democracy is the least bad form of government, after you have tried the others'.

It might sound like sacrilege now to challenge that dictum. Yet, we often misunderstand what the government is and does and what people want in other places. That misunderstanding can often lead to consequences that we cannot even imagine.

Certainly, the countries that have lifted fastest out of poverty and reached some advanced form of economic development were not democracies, but dictatorships. The examples that jump out of the page are certainly Japan and Germany after the Second World War. Japan was under the dictatorship of General MacArthur from 1945 to 1951.

Germany – except for the Eastern part which was under the control of the USSR – was run by Britain, France and the US from 1945 to 1955. The occupying power did not allow the local governments the freedom they might have wanted; they mandated them to do what they wanted.

In more recent years we have seen South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong become the Eastern Tigers. Not one of them was a democracy. If we insist on democracy (European version), the result in many parts of the world will be, and have been very far from beneficial.

The most evident result of such a policy of imposed democracy is the huge imbalance in economic and social terms between the rich and the poor everywhere. In some of the poorest 'democracies' in the world, our imposed values have had disastrous consequences, particularly for the poorest among their own people who continue to die of starvation at an alarming rate.

The way we in Western Europe interpret democracy simply cannot be applied easily in other parts of the world. And I wouldn't even say it is universally aspired to or desirable. The only country in Africa that has progressed for all its people is Rwanda.

President Kagame can be accused of many things, but certainly not of being a democrat. But none of the people starving today care about my thoughts above. They are small-scale farmers who had hoped to feed their families with vegetables grown on a small plot of land.

Things haven't worked out for them and they are dying. If I were in their shoes and had to choose between democracy and state communism, I'd pick the latter, because it treats farmers better.

I don't advocate the political system of China, but it does beat democracy for its pace in transforming a poor agrarian country into a modern economy. It gave hungry people what they wanted – food for their families. In many places the democratic approach to development falls at the first hurdle, feeding the hungry.