Among the questions raised by Wilson's slogan are these: if making the world safe for democracy is a good thing, what are the anticipated benefits of this democracy? will democracy alone generate these benefits, or are other factors necessary? if so, what are those factors? if not, should we anticipate these benefits in any and every instance of democracy?
Historian and economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that democracy can be, and has been, overrated. Expectations that democracy, by itself, will produce a wide variety of benefits are expectations likely to be disappointed. Concrete evidence is as recent as the Middle East in the early twenty-first century, but Hoppe points to the First World War:
World War I marks one of the great watersheds of modern history. With its end the transformation of the entire Western world from monarchical rule and sovereign kings to democratic-republican rule and sovereign people that began with the French Revolution was completed. Until 1914, only three republics had existed in Europe - France, Switzerland and after 1911, Portugal; and of all major European monarchies only the United Kingdom could be classified as a parliamentary system, i. e., one in which supreme power was vested in an elected parliament. Only four years later, after the United States had entered the European war and decisively determined its outcome, monarchies all but disappeared, and Europe along with the entire world entered the age of democratic republicanism.
So it would seem that Woodrow Wilson's plan to make the world safe for democracy yielded fruit. But which type of fruit was it? Readers educated in the western world are trained to answer that this was progress, that democracy was spread, and that dignity was granted to millions. Many readers will take it as axiomatic that democracy is good, and if a nation embraces, or is embraced by, a democratic system, then this is an improvement.
There are some facts which might cause us to pause and consider more carefully these assumptions about democracy.
In the specific case of WWI, America's entry into the war may have prolonged it and increased the death count. Naturally, dealing with counterfactual hypotheses, e.g. what would have happened if the United States hadn't entered the war, is imprecise speculation and not rigorous history. But there is plausible and persuasive evidence to suggest that the stalemate situation of mid-1917 would have led to ceasefires and negotiations, if the USA had convincingly declared itself neutral and had refused to engage in the war effort, and that such ceasefires could have occurred well before November 1918.
Democracy, then, might be responsible for millions of battlefield deaths.
Some might argue that the regrettable loss of life was, however, in the service of attaining more democracy in the world. The net increase in democracy, as a blessing to the human race, might ensure that those deaths were not in vain.
Yet that assertion is far from self-evident, viewing the course of events after 1918.
If we look at the United States, which Wilson alleged to be the font of such blessings, we see that the century after WWI has yielded persistent economic problems: periods of stagnant or falling wages, massive public-sector debt, problematic private-sector debt, unpaid and unpayable future obligations in the forms of entitlements, and others. Also present are non-economic problems: high or rising rates of divorce, illegitimacy, and a strangling bureaucratic regulatory culture. Tensions exist along racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious lines.
Those nations which followed the path of American democracy have experienced similar outcomes - in some cases milder, in other cases worse. Ethnic disintegration struck Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Economic decay hobbled Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.
Western democracy cannot be defended by comparing it to the USSR, as Hoppe notes:
Further, the collapse of the Soviet Empire represented not so much a triumph of democracy as the bankruptcy of the idea of socialism, and it also contained an indictment against the American (Western) system of democratic - rather than dictatorial - socialism.
None of this, let us be clear, is meant to say that democracy is evil. There are real benefits which are made possible by democracy. Let us entertain this thesis: democracy by itself is insufficient.
The mere fact that one has instituted, within the territorial borders of some given nation-state, a republic with freely elected representatives, does not guarantee civil bliss and political justice and economic prosperity. On the contrary, democracy unaccompanied by other factors may merely place into the hands of people the ability to dismantle the beneficial aspects of their civilization.
The question which remains, then, is this: if democracy by itself is not sufficient to guarantee those anticipated benefits, what is necessary in addition to democracy?