For reasons which I am not qualified to adduce, but surely not coincidentally, there has never been a sustained, open democracy - as Western Europe or the United States would understand it - in any self proclaimed Islamic state and in much of Africa and Asia all government is kleptocratic to such a degree that even the minimalist, 'night watchman' state is not worth the trouble or the money.

The degree of governance, as well as its form, cannot be stipulated across borders and oceans just as the degree of public expenditure in differing economies must be different.

The fact that Pericles, Jefferson and even Gladstone presided over democracies with massive exclusions based on sex, colour and income did not stop the preaching and who is to say that we have made progress or that what we are satisfied with for ourselves is any use to others?

There may well come a time when large communities can behave as crypto-Athenian assemblies through the use of interactive telecommunications but for now most of us simply want competent technocrats and an insurance policy against outright dictatorship; and, after all, in the year that the Berlin Wall fell down the USA and the United Kingdom had clinically mad leaders which was hardly an advertisement for the democracy we were then poised to export.

Turkey, perhaps the best model for Pakistan, has managed, with great difficulty and with the help, it must be noted, of the army, to hang on to its democratic credentials; both have squandered unequalled technocratic traditions from Byzantium and Britain respectively but there is still adequate residual corporate memory to restore them to a degree of competent management.

Below the surface, however, and here we come into contact yet again with Tanzania, the underlying drag on any form of even technocratically engineered social progress is the distribution of income and wealth in countries crying out above all else for land reform, for where land is the near sole producer of both its reform is essential. There is hardly a country in the modern era - the Netherlands and Singapore come to mind but their mercantilism was a special factor - where prosperity and progress were not preceded by land reform. This is not a cry I often hear raised on the floor of the Senate or the House of Commons whose grandeur and self importance were both founded on and sustained by the ownership of land which in turn led to the ownership of industries and, even later, services.

It is not often in this era of miasmic, low level, high irritant contentment that it feels right to quote Karl Marx in two successive weeks but his views on feudalism and land reform on the one hand and monopoly capitalism on the other bear careful re-examination; his geography and timing might have been faulty but the - as they say nowadays - modelling was superb. Not that modelling is enough, as Nyerere and his people found out to their great cost, but we have Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrathto explain away.

KEVIN CAREY is a writer, broadcaster and social entrepreneur. His interests range from the relationship between information technology and social exclusion and the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. He is the director of a UK charity, HumanITy, which combines rigorous social analysis with experimental field projects on learning IT skills through content creation. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard before a spell at the BBC, followed by 15 years in Third World Development, Carey offers a unique perspective on world affairs. He is a politcal theorist, moral philosopher, classical music critic and published poet.

Kevin Carey can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

| THE PREVIOUS DAY ONE | THE NEXT DAY ONE |