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5) Russia and China move towards democracy. This would be a great development in security for the world, democracies tend not to declare war on other democracies, and it would also help to protect the human rights of the citizens of those aforementioned countries. That is something their present governments have conspicuously failed to do."
As far as I can see, Russia is a democracy, albeit one where the President has been accused of rigging the ballots. China has a complex internal set of party democratic structures but isn't a democracy.
The assumptions that 1) democracy is always the best of all possible worlds; 2) that democracy functions as a panacea, curing all the possible ills of the country which adopts it and 3) that democracy must be absolute replications of American or British systems, are wrong.
But maybe I am misdefining democracy. For example, one of the first google results for "Russia democracy" was
this piece in the Washington Post, which appears to disqualify Russia from being a democracy because it sold some military equipment to Iraq during the second Gulf War. Being a democracy is entirely about being aligned with US interests here.
If democracies tend not to declare war on other democracies, it doesn't mean that democracy is the reason. Given that most of the democracies in the 20th century were in the US bloc in a world predominately composed of non-democracies, it's a rather brash statement to make. Given, also, that many of the world's developing democracies were overthrown by American or British coups during this time, it's possible that only sympathetic democracies were allowed to survive. In their complexities and their self-divisions at the top, democracies have always been easy targets for powerful outside influences.
(Consider also the Golden Arches theory that no McDonalds theory of diplomacy, which states that no two states with McDonalds' in their capitals have ever gone to war with one another, alternatively phrased as "there is no incentive for McDonalds to build in potential warzones". Or my own rejoinder to the "democracies tend not to declare war on other democracies" point, which is that no communist states ever went to war, depending on your definition of war.)
Secondly, democracy is assumed to be a good vehicle for human rights. This may be a little circular in that
democracy is usually a factor in human rights indices (I'll consider the notion of human rights in a later post). The injustices which human rights are meant to prevent - injustice before the law and state violence against its people - can just as well be committed under a democratic government, as the Kurdish situation in Turkey demonstrates.
Here is a page which is maintained by a rabid neo-liberal but which has a scatter-graph demonstrates my point - even among the most "unfree" countries in the world, there are those with good human rights records and vice versa.
Finally I want to draw your attention to this fantastic
atlas of electoral systems of the world, which is very colourful and makes my inner electoral calculator very happy.
