I don't know that there has been an acceleration, but the trend is steady and very worrisome. I think we should start by at least recalling....
I referred earlier in my testimony to the third wave of democratization. That was the period that began with the fall of the Portuguese military in 1974 and then grew and expanded. It really covered the whole world except for the Arab Middle East, which then had the revolutions of 2011. This really came to a head at the end of the 1990s. The number of democracies in the world reached a peak in 2005 of about 125. We've seen this reversal since then.
I should point out that in the theory put forward by Samuel Huntington about the third wave, he said that the third wave assumes the possibility of a reverse wave, just as the first two waves of democratization had reverse waves with the rise of communism and fascism in the 1930s. Then there was the backsliding in the newly decolonized countries in the 1960s and 1970s, with the rise of military dictatorships in Latin America.
I might note that in 1976, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that democracy is “where the world was, not where the world is going”. It was a very pessimistic moment. He had been ambassador in India, and India had an emergency at that time, yet that was at the very point where the third wave of democratization was beginning. We shouldn't get too upset by these reversals. They are sort of built into the process of development. In terms of reversal, obviously there are things like the economic crisis of 2008, globalization and the fact that many people have been left out of globalization, and the so-called dictator's learning curve, where dictators learn how to use forms of democratization while increasing repression, making it more difficult to attack them. All of these things are factors.
I did point out in my testimony that we should not forget that gains have been made. What's happening now in Ethiopia, Armenia, Malaysia and even Tunisia, the first Arab democracy, is very, very important. We need to be able to encourage those trends. The political scientists, in talking about the current period, do not use the term “reverse wave”. They do not feel we're in a reverse wave. It has been called a recession. It may get worse, and this is what we have to fight against, but I would not exaggerate the backlash and the backsliding.