Nabetz at New Mongols has a look at some international rankings, showing that not all of Russia’s non-European neighbours have problems with democratising, or resisting pressure from Russia and China to maintain pliable authoritarian regimes:
With numbers like this, it’s easy to understand why Mongolia has been able to have nine national parliamentary and presidential national elections in about 15 years–all of them free, fair, and, perhaps most tellingly, friendly (compare elsewhere in the region). That political power has changed been passed back and forth between several parties is an indication that the Republic is advancing more strongly, more peacefully, and more openly than ever.
It is also instructive to notice that the four countries that surpassed Mongolia in the ranking were all western (Latvia, Estonia, Croatia, Slovakia), and had, until Soviet expansion, had been philosophically and politically liberal, whereas Mongolia—it should go without saying—had not been. Rather, it had been under Chinese Nationalist and then, from 1921, Communist Russian domination. To say that Mongolia had enjoyed little to no open contact with liberal political ideas until the Iron Curtain unraveled would be too obvious by half. Nevertheless, Mongolia took hold of the idea of a liberal democracy and has been running ever since and ever faster.
Hopefully, the example of Mongolia will also bring an end to the sometimes fashionable belief that countries without a Christian tradition and/or occupation by American troops can’t democratise.
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My guess is that Mongolia’s easy entry into democracy is based on its extreme homogenity. Are there any ethnic or religious minorities in Mongolia of any size? Have “diversity” and multiculturalism arrived in Mongolia? If not,democracy in Mongolia may be essentially of a tribal nature.
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