In the Arab world, every state has at least one risk factor for failed, violent democratization: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, Syria and Yemen have annual per capita national incomes under $2,000. Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen have rates of illiteracy above 20 percent among adults over the age of 15. The best bet for democratization by these indicators is Lebanon, a state that does not produce petroleum and where illiteracy stands at 13.5 percent and the average income is $4,040. However, Lebanon is deeply divided among distrustful, armed ethnic and religious groups. Its electoral power-sharing institutions provide a rigid system for managing these divisions that locks in ethnic identity as the political trump card and prevents the formation of groups based on non-ethnic platforms.

Iran's experience over the past 25 years should serve as a cautionary tale. The theocratic, illiberal semi-democracy established by the popular Iranian Revolution relentlessly pressed the offensive in a bloody war of attrition with Iraq after 1981 and supported violent movements abroad. A quarter of a century later, Iranian electoral politics still bears the imprint of incomplete democratization. With liberal democratic reformers barred from running for office, in 2005 Iranian voters looking for a more responsive government elected as president the religiously fundamentalist and populist mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a staunch proponent of the Iranian nuclear program. When elites manipulate the weak mechanisms of electoral accountability to rule out liberal alternatives, nationalism is often the only game in town.

Islamic democratization is hardly the only such danger on the horizon. A future democratic opening in China, though much hoped for by advocates of human rights and democratization, could produce a sobering outcome. China's communist rulers have presided over a commercial expansion that has generated wealth and a potentially powerful constituency for broader political participation. However, given the huge socio-economic divide between the prosperous coastal areas and the vast, impoverished hinterlands, it seems unlikely that economic development will lead as smoothly to democratic consolidation in China as it has in Taiwan. China's leadership cracked down on student pressures for democratic liberalization at Tiananmen Square in 1989, but party elites know that they need a stronger basis of popular legitimacy to survive the social and ideological changes that economic change has unleashed.

Nationalism is a key element in their strategy. China's demand to incorporate Taiwan in the People's Republic of China, its animosity toward Japan, and its public displays of resentment at U.S. slights are themes that resonate with the Chinese public and can be used to rally national solidarity behind the regime. At the same time, newly rising social forces see that China's leaders permit more latitude to expressions of nationalism than liberalism. Thus, some of the same intellectuals who played a role in the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests turned up a few years later as authors of a nationalist text, The China That Can Say No.

Like many other established elites who have made use of popular nationalist rhetoric, China's party leadership has walked a fine line, allowing only limited expressions of popular nationalist outrage after such perceived provocations as the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, anti-Chinese pogroms in Jakarta, the U.S. spy plane incident of 2001 and the Japanese bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council in 2005. They realize that criticism of external enemies can quickly become transformed into popular criticism of the government for not being sufficiently diligent in defense of Chinese national interests. It is doubtful that they could maintain fine-tuned control over an aroused nationalist public if an incompletely democratizing China becomes embroiled in a future crisis with Taiwan.

The Oxymoron of Imposed Democracy

IF A COUNTRY lacks the preconditions for democracy, can this infrastructure be forcefully supplied by an external source? Few would argue in favor of conquering countries simply to make them democratic, but democratic great powers--particularly Great Britain and the United States--have sometimes conquered countries for other reasons and then have struggled to remake them as friendly democracies before withdrawing. Those who are nostalgic for empire view this as a policy with a future. They point to the establishment of courts, a free press and rational public administration in British colonies, without which democracy would probably be scarcer in the developing world today, since most of the postcolonial states that have remained almost continuously democratic--such as India and some West Indian island states--are former British possessions. Still, other former British colonies have failed to achieve democratic stability: Pakistan and Nigeria oscillate between chaotic elected regimes and military dictatorships; Sri Lanka has held elections that stoked the fires of ethnic conflict; and Malaysia has averted ethnic conflict only by limiting democracy. The list contains even more parlous cases, from Burma to Zimbabwe.

In part, this reflects the difficulty of establishing democracy anywhere the preconditions are initially lacking. However, it also reflects the counterproductive expedients of imperial rule while the institutions of democracy are being built. Until that task is completed, the empire must often govern through local elites whose legitimacy or political support is based on traditional authority or ethnic sectarianism. To retain power without devoting massive resources to the military occupation of the country, the empire plays the game of divide and rule, favoring groups who help them keep control at a manageable cost. Such short-run expedients hinder the long-run transition to stable democracy by increasing ethnic polarization. Even if the empire does not take active steps to politicize ethnicity, the act of unleashing demands for mass political participation that nascent democratic institutions often are not strong enough to manage is likely to increase the risk of a polarized, violent, unsuccessful transition. British imperialists repeatedly fell prey to these dilemmas between the 1920s and 1960s, even when their intentions were benign.

The United States risks falling into the same trap as it tries to promote democracy in the wake of military interventions. In Iraq, the United States must rule through Shi'a clerics and Kurdish ethnic nationalists. In Afghanistan, as a second cousin of President Hamid Karzai stated on the eve of the September election, the newly elected Parliament "will have tribal leaders, warlords, drug lords" alongside the new democrats. And this is the view of an optimist.

The Virtue of Patience

MILITARY OCCUPATION is a costly and risky method for promoting democratization. Other kinds of inducements and pressures can be helpful. The lure of potential membership in the European Union, conditioned on democratic reform and respect for minority rights, helped realign incentives for several multi-ethnic states--such as Slovakia, Croatia, Romania and the Baltic countries--that might otherwise have turned down the path toward nationalism and violence. The same incentives helped consolidate Turkey's democracy and improve the position of its ethnic Kurds, notwithstanding the rise to power of an Islamic party--although these achievements may or may not endure if the likelihood of EU membership fades. Likewise, the U.S. military umbrella and its leadership in constructing an open, stable trading system permitted states like West Germany, Taiwan and South Korea to create the preconditions for stable democracy despite their nations being divided by the Cold War.

A successful long-term project for promoting democracy globally by inducement would require the United States and Europe to work together. Separately, each has liabilities. The European Union, hobbled by its internal constitutional imperfections, has expansion fatigue and is balking at the inclusion of Turkey. The United States has acquired a reputation for recklessness that a more multilateral approach could rectify. Acting together, the United States and the EU would have adequate resources and political legitimacy to mount a program of encouraging preparations for democracy worldwide.

Such a program should combine inducements and measured pressures to establish the preconditions of democracy in the right sequence. Generally, the starting point should be to encourage authoritarian states to move away from patronage and repression as the basis of their rule, and toward economic reform and the development of impartial state administration. Taking these steps strengthens the rule of law and provides the state with effective administrative arms, which is in the interest of any ruler. Once in place, these reforms create a state apparatus that in the longer term will be capable of carrying out the edicts of a democratically elected government and independent courts, when these institutions come to fruition. For the most part, this was the path followed by the former British colonies that democratized successfully, by Taiwan and South Korea, and by Chile, the Latin American country that had the most successful experience with democratization.

But even if an authoritarian regime undertakes these reforms to improve its own economic and administrative performance, why would it take the next step and allow broad political competition? Normally, this requires more than international cajoling: There needs to be a strong domestic constituency pushing for democratization. The labor movement, civil society groups or progressive business groups typically need to organize to reinforce the pressure to liberalize. Professionalized, objective journalists need the freedom to evaluate the regime's policies and rhetoric. Many international democracy-assistance programs do in fact try to develop these kinds of forces in civil society. However, in countries where the preconditions for democracy are not yet ripe, such programs should try to build the long-term capacity to organize for eventual democratic participation, not to demand immediate elections.