What is happening in Egypt, after what happened in Tunisia, is sending us back to a very old question that we have been living at least since the 1956 Hungarian Revolution: should democracies intervene to help a people who is fighting dictatorship?
The answer then was negative. Ever since, democracies did not intervene anywhere: neither in Iran when a revolution has been hijacked by the mullahs, nor in China, when another was crushed under the tanks. Nor in any other country in Africa or Latin America. And it was because Gorbachev decided not to fire on the crowds that the Soviet system collapsed.
Instead, democracies continued to fund these regimes, train their police, receive their dictators without requiring them to reduce poverty, struggle against corruption or respect human rights. Similarly, no international institution has made a real democratic conditionality in its support.
The situation repeats itself today in Tunisia and Egypt, where beautiful people express themselves. It will repeat itself more and more often, more and more quickly, in half of the world still under the control of dictatorships, with varied contours: some are camouflaged in a democracy, while others are openly totalitarian regimes. Conversely, some democracies are moving toward totalitarian regimes; and some totalitarian regimes are evolving at their own pace toward democracy.
And yet, democracies are never there to support those who seek to accelerate what history promises. Always with good reasons: stability, rejection of fundamentalism, non-interference. And the fact that no democracy has any real lesson to give because none is fully respecting the extraordinary Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in 1948 by Eleanor Roosevelt and Rene Cassin.
So how can we then be surprised when peoples turn against democracies that have neglected them?
To help with these transitions, a simple solution would be to create a new international institution, grouping all nations enjoying democracy, claiming a right to interfere, and providing the means to help political freedom, by giving subdued peoples specific ways to support freedom of the press, political parties, NGOs, fight against poverty and against corruption. The embryos of such an institution exist: In economics, democracies are gathered in the OECD. In military matters, in NATO. Even if it was not, initially, the rationale of these two institutions. Their coordination would give the means to think differently the way forward on this matter. Other institutions, private, give themselves as mission to promote democracy: NGOs such as Transparency International. Foundations, like those of former U.S. presidents Carter and Clinton or that of George Soros. And countless NGOs especially in countries suffering from dictatorships.
A minimal solution more realistic would be to create a forum bringing together all of these institutions, to study the situation of each dictatorship and consider ways to offer a coherent and coordinated support to these peoples in their transitions toward democracy.
If democracies do not go in this direction, it is because they lack confidence in their own model. They cannot then be surprised if others move away from it.