Democracy

WASHINGTON -- Questioned about his alliance with Soviet Russia against Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill is reported to have said, "If Hitler invaded Hell, I'd find something nice to say about the Devil." At the start of our war on terror, for solid tactical reasons, we had to accept as an ally Pakistan -- an undemocratic nation that had previously distinguished itself as a promoter of terror. It was uncomfortable, but arguably necessary, because our larger objective of toppling the Taliban took precedence.

When Andres Rodriguez hands the sash of office to Juan Carlos Wasmosy on Aug. 15, it will be the first time in Paraguay's 182 years of independence that an elected president succeeded an elected president.The winner of a more-or-less fair, three-way election with nearly 40 percent of the vote, Mr. Wasmosy was indistinguishable from his opponents as a free-market conservative. The real distinction is that he and not they carried the banner of the Colorado Party. This was the vehicle through which the dictator Alfredo Stroessner ruled from 1954 to 1989.

London. -- No one, certainly not the leaders of the West, appears to be shedding tears over the overthrow of the #i democratically elected president of Georgia. Indeed, they seemto share the perception of the opposition, that Zviad Gamsakhurdia, for all his overwhelming plurality in the polls, had become in practice a tyrant beholden, not to constitutions and laws, but solely to his own interests. So much for the magic wand of democracy.At the same time, the first fully open election in the Arab world in modern times looks as if it will bring to power in Algeria, Islamic fundamentalists who do not believe in the rights of the popular mass to change its leaders by the ballot.

Has the world's dramatic explosion of democracy that began in 1989 run out of steam? We cannot yet write off the trend that started with the freeing of Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Berlin wall, and the breakup of the Soviet Union. But there are troubling signs.Each year Freedom House, the respected New York-based human rights organization, monitors the course of freedom around the world. It recently reported bleakly on 1993. Ethnic violence and political repression made it the worst single-year setback for freedom since 1972.

IT'S NOT HARD to believe that people would rather go back to a known tyrant than spend one more day in an unfamiliar place behind barbed wire. What other choice do Haitians have, really?Now that hundreds are voluntarily returning home from the refugee camp set up at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, human rights activists are pointing at the Bush administration for having a policy regarding Haiti that makes us look racist.The issue is whether the 12,000-plus Haitians who have been captured at sea on their way to the United States have a legal claim to political asylum.

If the re-emergent democracies of Africa are to survive and bloom they desperately need Western capital and technology. But the West, having burnt its fingers once, will not return to Africa until it can find security there.That is the dilemma of Africa as it stumbles through the post-Cold War 1990s: It cannot have stability without investment and it cannot have investment without stability.Yet, for all the conflict and misery in far-flung countries such as Somalia, Angola and Liberia, this may well be the time of greatest opportunity in Africa since the departing British and French colonists let loose a wave of independence in the 1950s and '60s.

Stockholm. -- The presidential coup d'etat in Peru pushed too many observers into questioning whether, in the midst of economic agony and domestic insurgency, democracy can function without a ''temporary'' helping hand from a strong man, the military or some combination of both.But surely all that remains to be questioned in 1992, in the words of the ''Human Development Report,'' published yesterday in Stockholm by the United Nations Development Programme, ''is the causality -- the direction of the arrow, whether more freedom leads to more development or more development leads to more freedom?

College Park -- Two more African dictators have fallen. On January 26, Mohamed Siad Barre, 73, who had run Somalia at gunpoint since October 1969, was chased out of his presidential palace, Villa Somalia, by rebels led by Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidiid. On March 26, Moussa Traore, 54, who had ruled Mali with an iron first since December 1968, was ousted in a coup led by Lt. Col. Amadou Toumani Toure.In the tradition of African-style ''revolution,'' both General Aidiid and Colonel Toure promised to allow the formation of democratically elected civilian governments as soon as possible.

NATO MEETS in Prague this week in expectation that it will ratify expansion of the 19-member alliance to include seven formerly communist nations in Eastern Europe in a bid to preserve its relevance in an age of international terrorism. But the relevance of NATO and its expansion is about much more than short-term military plans. It's about the long-term integration of security and democracy. To maintain international support for the war on terrorism, the Bush administration needs to convince other countries that the United States doesn't see its security in conflict with their democratic aspirations.