From owner-imap@chumbly.math.missouri.edu Sun Jan 23 10:07:19 2005
Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 11:09:58 -0600 (CST)
From: nytr@olm.blythe-systems.com
Subject: [NYTr] Bush's Illusory Democracy Crusade Bound to Fail
Article: 202617
To: undisclosed-recipients: ;
Although President Bush's uncompromising second inaugural address
does not so much as mention the words Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on
terror, he and his supporters continue to engage in a planned
reordering of the world. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are but one
part of a supposedly universal effort to create world order by
spreading democracy
. This idea is not merely quixotic—it
is dangerous. The rhetoric implies that democracy is applicable in a
standardised (western) form, that it can succeed everywhere, that it
can remedy today's transnational dilemmas, and that it can bring
peace, rather than sow disorder. It cannot. Democracy is rightly
popular. In 1647, the English Levellers broadcast the powerful idea
that all government is in the free consent of the people
. They
meant votes for all. Of course, universal suffrage does not guarantee
any particular political result, and elections cannot even ensure
their own perpetuation—witness the Weimar Republic. Electoral
democracy is also unlikely to produce outcomes convenient to hegemonic
or imperial powers. (If the Iraq war had depended on the freely
expressed consent of the world community
, it would not have
happened). But these uncertainties do not diminish its justified
appeal.
Other factors besides democracy's popularity explain the dangerous belief that its propagation by armies might actually be feasible. Globalisation suggests that human affairs are evolving toward a universal pattern. If gas stations, iPods, and computer geeks are the same worldwide, why not political institutions? This view underrates the world's complexity. The relapse into bloodshed and anarchy that has occurred so visibly in much of the world has also made the idea of spreading a new order more attractive. The Balkans seemed to show that areas of turmoil required the intervention, military if need be, of strong and stable states. In the absence of effective international governance, some humanitarians are still ready to support a world order imposed by US power. But one should always be suspicious when military powers claim to be doing weaker states favours by occupying them.
Another factor may be the most important: the US has been ready with
the necessary combination of megalomania and messianism, derived from
its revolutionary origins. Today's US is unchallengeable in its
techno-military supremacy, convinced of the superiority of its social
system, and, since 1989, no longer reminded—as even the greatest
conquering empires always had been—that its material power has
limits. Like President Wilson, today's ideologues see a model
society already at work in the US: a combination of law, liberal
freedoms, competitive private enterprise and regular, contested
elections with universal suffrage. All that remains is to remake the
world in the image of this free society
.
This idea is dangerous whistling in the dark. Although great power
action may have morally or politically desirable consequences,
identifying with it is perilous because the logic and methods of state
action are not those of universal rights. All established states put
their own interests first. If they have the power, and the end is
considered sufficiently vital, states justify the means of achieving
it—particularly when they think God is on their side. Both good and
evil empires have produced the barbarisation of our era, to which the
war against terror
has now contributed.
While threatening the integrity of universal values, the campaign to
spread democracy will not succeed. The 20th century demonstrated that
states could not simply remake the world or abbreviate historical
transformations. Nor can they easily effect social change by
transferring institutions across borders. The conditions for effective
democratic government are rare: an existing state enjoying legitimacy,
consent and the ability to mediate conflicts between domestic
groups. Without such consensus, there is no single sovereign people
and therefore no legitimacy for arithmetical majorities. When this
consensus is absent, democracy has been suspended (as is the case in
Northern Ireland), the state has split (as in Czechoslovakia), or
society has descended into permanent civil war (as in Sri
Lanka). Spreading democracy
aggravated ethnic conflict and
produced the disintegration of states in multinational and
multicommunal regions after both 1918 and 1989.
The effort to spread standardised western democracy also suffers a fundamental paradox. A growing part of human life now occurs beyond the influence of voters—in transnational public and private entities that have no electorates. And electoral democracy cannot function effectively outside political units such as nation-states. The powerful states are therefore trying to spread a system that even they find inadequate to meet today's challenges.
Europe proves the point. A body such as the European Union could
develop into a powerful and effective structure precisely because it
has no electorate other than a small number of member governments. The
EU would be nowhere without its democratic deficit
, and there
can be no legitimacy for its parliament, for there is no European
people
. Unsurprisingly, problems arose as soon as the EU moved
beyond negotiations between governments and became the subject of
democratic campaigning in the member states.
The effort to spread democracy is also dangerous in a more indirect way: it conveys to those who do not enjoy this form of government the illusion that it actually governs those who do. But does it? We now know something about how the actual decisions to go to war in Iraq were taken in at least two states of unquestionable democratic bona fides: the US and the UK. Other than creating complex problems of deceit and concealment, electoral democracy and representative assemblies had little to do with that process. Decisions were taken among small groups of people in private, not very different from the way they would have been taken in non-democratic countries.
Fortunately, media independence could not be so easily circumvented in the UK. But it is not electoral democracy that necessarily ensures effective freedom of the press, citizen rights and an independent judiciary.