Twilight of the Dictators?

Events in Uzbekistan are beginning to grow out of control. I won't report on the thing blow-by-blow, since there are plenty of other places where you can get that. I suggest Google News or the BBC.

But it's set my mind to pondering. Could this be the twilight of the dictators? I've heard as much from plenty of sources--the Christian Science Monitor, the NY Times Review of Books, even Foreign Affairs have all had articles in the last year asking this question.

I wondered whether this has ever happened before--has there ever been another twilight of the dictators?
Well, aside from another NYTRoB article with the exact same phrase that I found from 1999, I couldn't find another direct reference.

But I do remember the late 1980's and early 1990's. You know? That whole collapse-of-communism thing? Moscow Spring? Yeah, all that stuff. Not but about two years after the wall fell, democracy swept Central America, too. If you recall, that was somewhat prompted by the first Bush administration's removal of Manual Noriega from Panama.
And around the same time-frame and a little earlier, many long-serving dictators fell in South America as well--Pinochet, Stroessner, Alvarado, etc.

Whether or not anyone actually used the phrase "twilight of the dictators" I don't know, but it has a certain ring to it and so probably was.

The current rash of dictator-removal seems quite positive, as all such things are. I wouldn't wish to claim otherwise. But it seems to me like this sort of thing is cyclical. Every so many years, a host of dictators are overthrown and replaced with... well, with something else. Often with another dictator (Saddam Hussein, after all, came to power by overthrowing a ruthless monarchical dictatorship), but one never knows.

Unfortunately, the past history of these things is a mixed bag. Certainly the overthrow of Ceaucescu in Romania was positive; Romania is now negotiating to enter the EU, the economy is creaking toward modernity, and the country has managed 16 years of relatively democratic governance. That's certainly progress.

But El Salvador threw off the yoke of dictatorship and civil war around the same time Romania did, and since then they've fought a border war with Honduras over a soccer game, seen their real per capita income decline almost each year, and watched their country slowly be taken over by violent youth gangs populated largely by convicts deported from the U.S. Romania isn't exactly paradise, but El Salvador is just bad.

The current round of democratization has taken some fairly nice places by storm: Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia... so obviously we all root for them and want them to succeed. And we feel the same way about the less nice places, like Iraq and Ukraine. Uzbekistan quite definitely falls into the latter category, but we don't know yet whether Karimov will actually be forced from power or not.

But this is still a pretty small trend. There are a lot of dictators left in the world unlikely to give up power without a fight. A handful being overthrown here and there, while surely positive, is not quite "the twilight of the dictators."

Let's see. We have... Cuba, Venezuela, 9/10s of Africa, the entire Arabian peninsula save Yemen, Iran, Syria, Turkmenistan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, China, North Korea, Burma, Laos, Vietnam, and... that's all I can think of off hand. You could argue that Russia might belong in that group, probably several others. Anyway, let's see some more of those countries hold revolutions before we start talking trend and Pax Bushia.