A stare-down in a remote and not very consequential corner of the world has become a test of that noble but vague entity known as the international community. The confrontation pits Laurent Gbagbo, the strongman leader of the Ivory Coast, who has refused to step down despite losing an election last November, against the United States, France, and an array of international organizations: the United Nations, the World Bank, the African Union, and the West African regional body known as ECOWAS. It sounds like an extremely unequal confrontation. But six weeks after the election, Gbagbo still occupies the presidential palace and shows no intention of leaving. He may end by inflicting serious damage not only on his own people, but on the standing of some very important institutions.

Africa is the regional example par excellence of what Fareed Zakaria has called "illiberal democracies": states in which tyrants and autocrats cynically exploit the formal trappings of democracy in order to marshal popular support and then rule with little concern for democratic accountability. African leaders routinely amend their countries' constitutions to allow themselves to stay in office (Kenya), murder and terrorize the opposition (Zimbabwe), or even threaten to kill the voters themselves if they pull the wrong lever (Liberia). But Africa also has an increasing number of countries that take justifiable pride in their democratic institutions, however wobbly they may be -- South Africa, Nigeria, even Mali -- as well as regional bodies whose charters place democratic values at their core. Gbagbo has, in effect, provoked a clash between the traditional Africa of the autocrat and the fledgling Africa of institutions that prize democracy, even if they do not always practice it.

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Gbagbo, a longtime political activist who was briefly jailed in the 1990s -- by then-Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara, the same politician who defeated him in the presidential election late last year -- has been at this game for a long time and is exceptionally skilled at it. He was elected president in 2000; after an insurgency broke out in northern Ivory Coast in 2002, Gbagbo agreed to a cease-fire, and then violated its terms by expelling representatives of the rebels from his government and by failing to disarm his own forces. In 2004, I attended a meeting of a dozen or so African heads of state that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had convened on the sidelines of an African Union session in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with the goal of persuading Gbagbo to abide by the terms of the deal. Gbagbo must have been greatly amused to be lectured about "reintegration" by none other than Omar Bongo, Gabon's president for life. He certainly seemed amused, jovially joining in the discussion as if it were aimed at someone else altogether. He promised to reconcile with the rebels, and then proceeded to ignore the pledge.

The Ivory Coast has been teetering on the brink of a catastrophe ever since, in part because Gbagbo and his allies fanned the flames of nationalism by treating northerners as non-Ivoirian. Gbagbo refused to call an election for years, thus inflaming sentiment throughout the north. Presumably he thought he would win the race last November; populist leaders have a way of deluding themselves on that score. When the United Nations certified that Ouattara had won, Gbagbo not only refused to acknowledge the outcome, but also unleashed his security forces, as well as youth militias, on Ouattara's supporters. Between Dec. 16 and 23, U.N. human rights monitors reported 173 killings, 90 cases of torture or abuse, 24 forced disappearances, and hundreds of arrests. Bullet-riddled bodies turned up on the streets of Abidjan, the country's chief city. Gbagbo has since demanded the departure of the 10,000-man U.N. peacekeeping mission, which arrived in 2004 and now protects Ouattara at a seaside hotel; the United Nations, no longer recognizing the incumbent's authority, has refused.

Gbagbo has managed to wear out everyone's patience. When Russia blocked a U.N. Security Council resolution endorsing Ouattara's victory, it found itself besieged not only by the United States, Britain, and France, but also by Uganda. ECOWAS endorsed Ouattara and in the aftermath of the violence threatened the use of force to remove Gbagbo from office. And U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has surprised his critics by showing some spine on the subject, unambiguously supporting Ouattara's victory and threatening Gbagbo and his allies with culpability for alleged atrocities. "He really does think that this is the test case of international credibility," I was told by a U.N. official usually very critical of Ban.

It is dangerous to declare something a test case. "This is the hour of Europe," Luxembourg's foreign minister said as violence flared in the Balkans in 1991. Europe failed. A decade later, the atrocities in Darfur, Sudan, challenged the commitment to never again stand by in the face of genocide, as countries had in Rwanda. This time the whole world failed. And the failure came to be understood paradigmatically: The international community is not prepared to use force to stop atrocities carried out as a conscious instrument of state policy. That was the lesson, and leaders like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe paid close attention: Who would stop him as he trashed his own country in order to preserve his power?

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