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For the world's anti-democratic countries, this is a big moment. Cuba and Iran have both made major moves recently to become engaged with the democratic world, in ways that have forced them to sacrifice things they once held dear. Yet they've done so without becoming even remotely democratic.

There are two ways of looking at this: As a victory for autocrats who now have a stamp of international authenticity and a source of global financing, or as a sign of a shift toward a more homogeneous, more liberal world. To understand the distinction, look not at what we have given these countries, but what they have done to achieve it.

Cuba has sought to have normal relations with the democratic world for a quarter century, after its closed trading and political relations came to an end with the fall of Soviet Communism. To win this opening – as it did last week by being granted diplomatic and trade relations with the United States – it has given up many of the things that made it different: It now allows the free movement and travel of its citizens, private property ownership, international business and trade, political dissent without automatic imprisonment, and increasingly a set of laws and norms that make it much more similar to the world's liberal states.

Iran's theocratic regime had no reason, under the founding logic of its 1979 seizure of power, to sign a nuclear deal with four Western democracies, the European Union, China and Russia that forces it to give up most of its nuclear resources, submit to regular outside inspections and expose itself to foreign scrutiny for 15 years. It could have stayed outside the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (like India, Pakistan and Israel do) and become a closed and insular state (like North Korea or Taliban-era Afghanistan). But that was economically and politically unthinkable: The Tehran regime relies on tight trade and financial relations, and a public sense that it shares institutions and conventions with the liberal-democratic world, to maintain its tenuous hold on legitimacy. If it tried to be a different sort of country, it would collapse.

A quarter century ago, Francis Fukuyama's name became a shorthand for democratic triumphalism when he declared that "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution" would be "the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." In later versions of that essay, The End of History?, he dropped the word "Western" (and the question mark), but the damage had been done: He, along with scores of other thinkers, political leaders and journalists, had branded liberal democracy a Western export.

That claim has been used by dozens of governments to hold on tightly to autocratic rule: From Beijing to Saudi Arabia to Moscow to Tehran, autocratic leaders can (and very much do) claim that democracy would be an alien Western export and imposition on their cultural traditions (even though democratic institutions are core to all those cultural traditions). This anti-democratic bloc contains more than 70 of the world's 195 countries, and it's not getting smaller.

But, aside from elections, it is getting a lot more like the democratic world. The baseline institutions of democracy – rule of law, a focus of the state on the individual, a middle class, private property, a sense of redress and justice, free movement of people and goods – have become far more ubiquitous, though often imperfect.

In this, Dr. Fukuyama had a point beyond his most famous sentence: There is no longer any viable alternative to the liberal state and the market economy. There is no totalizing ideology – such as communism and fascism before – that can command an entire population and keep it in functioning order. The efforts of insurgent groups such as Islamic State and Boko Haram to form an alternative, or by North Korea or Belarus to maintain an old one, only highlight this: To do so is violent, difficult and impoverishing.

It was this disappearance of wholesale alternatives to the liberal state focused on the individual citizen, and on the market economy driven by international trade, that Dr. Fukuyama devoted most of his text to describing as the post-Cold War norm. His subsequent works have stepped away from the notion that democracy will follow quickly from those two (and these books have become very popular in China).

Calling democracy "Western" and using demands or military force to bring it about has not brought open elections to these holdout autocracies. That will happen when their people come to see democracy as a product of their own culture – a goal that comes closer when they feel compelled to link themselves into our world.

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