When I read this article about despots, I thought the author was talking about John Howard, then I read further and was convinced he was talking about him untill lesser despots like mugabee came into the frame. So why is it so important for you europeans to export democracy and your way of life to other nations. Are you that arrogant that you think your culture is so superiour because you have an armed force that will back up your demands on smaller weak nations?.

The problems in most of these countries came about as a result of colonisation by the european powers over the last five hundred years. Most of these nations like Australia historically were made up of competing and often hostile tribes who with colonisation became united with one tribe supported by whites being in charge of another.

This has created the problem we see today and helped the extremists in these countries spread their form of nationalsim based on religious and racial intollerance leading to in some cases to genocide.

If America and Australia were to mind our own business and leave these people do there own thing then maybe we might be a lesser target for violence in the future.

why worry about kazahkstan?

oz is not a democracy, by aristotle's definition. he'd call oz an 'oligarchy'. but, for the same reason that they have elections in kazahkstan, they have them in oz.

the people don't rule, here. usually they don't even know what's going on. if they did, they can't do anything about it.

if you apply the schools and the media to training the people to call themselves 'citizens', to call oz a 'democracy, the result is that the people are trained. they line up to be shorn, they line up to be counted, they imagine politican rule is natural, inevitable, inescapable, and as good as it gets.

it doesn't really matter, i suppose. but calling oz a democracy suggests ignorance, or complicity. i urge the use of 'westminster society', it's close enough, and makes no claims that are not true.

Demos, did you read my coments? of course its not a democracy you don't have to tell an Indigenous person that because, we know from bitter experience that its not. So why the hell would you want to import such a flawed concept anyway, when these other groups have their own flawed concept, and as for the westminster system thats crap too.

Non elected inbreeds in the house of lord deciding on the fate of the country, which is overseen by a person not elected by the people. How flawed was this system imported to Australia at the time of invasion.

As usual, this is an excellent contribution by Mr Roth. I think there is a crucial and important distinction between the legitimacy of the sort of proto-formalist nod to democracy, which might have ballots but not much else, and the full throated type which is impossible to separate from complex social enablers like robust public institutions, an independent judiciary and the rule of law. As regards the latter, I think Mr Roth is correct that human rights treaty regimes, though imperfect, and often misunderstood by the public, have a sufficient specificity which makes them a credible indicia of legitimacy. Unfortunately, the Bush administration is guilty of indulging the former view, engaging in what many commentators have called the ballots and bombs theory of democracy.

“Democracy is a metric by which the United States still measures up fairly well,” … and so I would have thought did Israel with fair elections, independent judiciary, and a mainly free press. But according to Amnesty International there are “More than 8000 Palestinians, most of whom are nonviolent prisoners of conscience and few if any of whom have received trials that meet international standards, are being held as political prisoners.”

The article states of Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov that “His government holds some 7,000 political and religious prisoners, routinely tortures detainees, and, in 2005, massacred hundreds of protesters.”

It would seem the countries are on a par until you consider that Uzbekistan has nearly four times the population of Israel.

Israel could be argued to have a fully functioning democracy of the kind touted by the article as desirable, but a human rights record deserving of condemnation. Ultimately the only reason they appear not to have been fingered in Mr Roth’s article is they are not under a dictatorship.

BBoy
No matter if it is a human rights treaty democracy, or a bombs and ballots democracy, the man or men who control the country have the loyalty of the army.

Mr Rudd (and Mr Howard) only rule this country because they have the loyalty of the legalized warlords, the army. The same is true for president Bush and it is also true for every other system of government in the world.

In other words men with guns and military muscle rule according to their belief systems and luckily in the West we are ruled by men who grew up believing in the right to vote and to a certain level human rights. If other armed men every take control such as terrorists or so called freedom fighter groups then the country will be subject to their way of ruling.
Human rights treaties although noble and right in their aim will mean didly squat if the warlords in control choose to set up their own laws and systems of justice.
A treaty is only a piece of paper after all. The rulers and the armies in the West could change their stance on certain laws protecting human rights and freedoms in a heartbeat if they felt threatened enough by terrorists attacks or the like.