This yearbook, prepared by Freedom House—a private nonprofit foundation from New York—is the tenth in the series of annual comparative surveys of political and civil liberties in the world. Started in 1972, the Freedom House project to assess the status of freedom around the globe has become an indispensable gauge for anyone interested in the progress of liberty.
The heart of the survey is a table rating each country on a seven-point scale for political and civil freedom, then providing an overall judgment of each as “free,” “partly free,” or “not free.” A rating of one indicates the freest, of seven the least free.
Such tables, however, are not flawless. Putting Argentina, for example, in the same category as the United States (“free”) will undoubtedly offend many, as should the placement of dynamic Taiwan alongside still-Communist Poland and increasingly pro-Soviet Nicaragua (all “partly free”). To consider Iran and Zimbabwe, as the survey does, “partly free,” alongside South Korea and Singapore, is also peculiar—suggesting a need for finer distinctions.
In addition to the table itself there are brief summaries of the human rights situation in every country. While less detailed than the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights, the survey summaries offer an evaluation of every nation’s attitude toward the individual.
And this is where the problems start. The statement, for instance, that in Romania “Soviet influence is relatively slight” is simpleminded at best, given the interrelation of the two countries’ intelligence services. The section on Afghanistan says nothing about Soviet use of chemical warfare against the local population, of toy bombs that have maimed children, or other terrorist tactics—making it less accurate even than the relatively restrained Special Rapporteur’s Report on Afghanistan prepared for the UN Human Rights Commission. Similarly, the section on Israel makes no mention of Palestinian attacks against Jews—as would be required to put the picture in proper context. Moreover, nowhere in the survey is there any discussion of state-sponsored terrorism and its uses. Since terrorist attacks obviously violate human rights, some sort of discussion of the subject would have been helpful.
The essays in Freedom in the World are also disappointing at best, beginning with the introductory piece by Raymond Gastil. Gastil warns us, for example, not to take literally the claim of countries calling themselves “Democratic” (as in “German Democratic Republic”), but then issues the same warning about German fascists, claiming that their “National Socialist” label was fraudulent. Yet socialists they certainly were, albeit somewhat less totalitarian than their internationalist brethren.
Still more disappointing is the analysis of freedom by Thomas D. Anderson, geography professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He places countries in six categories, the most favorable of which is “countries where all elements of individual rights are specified by law and presently are extended to all inhabitants without restriction.” The result, however, is that countries with more liberal immigration policies or a varied citizenry will fare worse than their more restrictive or homogeneous counterparts because of “minorities” problems—not necessarily caused by legal impediments. In Anderson’s ratings, culturally homogeneous Austria is placed in group I while the US, UK, and most Western democracies are in group II. Yet surely it would appear that part of what is meant by “individual rights” should include the right to private ownership. In Austria, however, this right is severely curtailed: banks and heavy industry are largely nationalized, and, no less important, radio and television are state-owned—both serious marks against the country’s record on individual freedom.
The article on “The Interrelationship of Freedom, Equality, and Development” by Harmon Zeigler, a professor of politics and government at the University of Puget Sound, contains even more peculiar claims. While conceding the existence of privileges in Communist countries—contrary to strict Marxist ideology—Zeigler warns against being too critical of that system. For example, he points to the “fact” that income distribution in the USSR is similar to that of industrial democracies—never mind the unreliability of statistics in a nonmarket context, the deliberate distortions of data for political purposes, or nonmonetary privileges that differentiate the party elites from the masses qualitatively as well as quantitatively. Zeigler, it seems, gives the edge to the Soviets, since though life there is admittedly “grim,” still, “nobody starves, nobody is denied medical attention, nobody is unemployed, and there are no ‘street people.'”
The most critical flaw in the survey, however, is a systematic misunderstanding of the economic dimension of individual liberty. The economic aspect of rights, in this volume, seems to imply either economic indexes such as infant mortality, GNP, and adult literacy (for which a statistical table is provided) or, in Gastil’s words, an assessment that “a system [is] free primarily to the extent that the people [are] actually given a choice in determining the nature of their economic system.” The former approach, through economic indexes, tells nothing about legal protection for individual initiative or private property. The second definition begs the question of how “the people”—taken somehow as a whole—might make such a “choice.”
Philosophical issues aside, I feel vaguely disappointed by a volume devoted to individual liberty that fails to include some sense of the subjective: how it feels to live without freedom. what tyranny is all about, and, for that matter, what heroism is. A selection, say, from Natan Sharansky’s Fear No Evil, or from Armando Valladares’ accounts of his suffering, or from any number of other personal stories might have made the message more real and tangible. But that would have demanded a very different book.
[Freedom in the World: Political Rights and Civil Liberties 1987-1988, by Raymond D. Gastil (New York: Freedom House) 450 pp., $29.50 (hardcover), $12.95 (paper)]
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