Democracy, Realistically
Is America's national interest served by the spread of democracy? Realist critics have repeatedly chastised the Bush Administration for its "utopianism", arguing that, in using American power to spread political liberty around the world, the president is at best wasting America's resources and at worst wooing disaster. These sentiments were clearly on display in the essay by Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson in the Fall 2005 issue of The National Interest and in the symposium that followed in the Winter issue. Many of the critics subscribe to the proposition that the promotion of democracy and the preservation of American power are contradictory goals; that the choice is either to embrace principle by promoting democracy (and paying a huge cost as a result) or to follow a self-interested policy and let other countries work out their domestic affairs with no guidance or interference from the United States.
In contrast, those who define themselves as "principled realists" (or "pragmatic idealists") believe that there is a close connection between the growth of American power and the spread of democracy. The United States reaps what economists term "efficiency gains" from the extension of democratic capitalism around the globe. Democracies conduct their affairs with a greater degree of transparency and reliability, making them more predictable partners for the United States. Because settled democracies do not fight wars against one another, America ends up with fewer enemies. As countries open up their economies, the United States gains more trading and investment partners. New democracies--particularly those in unstable regions of the world or those who find themselves located near powerful authoritarian neighbors--tend to forge much closer links with the United States.
The expansion of the zone of democracies since the 1980s is due in part to America's victory in the Cold War. The same expansion has in turn helped sustain American hegemony in the post-Cold War world. The consequences of the link between democracy and American power are profound. Realists must realize that preserving American power requires some democracy promotion. A democratic crusade--using force to bring liberty and justice to all without regard to cost--is never prudent, and indeed democracy promotion alone is insufficient grounds for a war. But the spread of free institutions has a rightful place among U.S. foreign policy goals, not least because it can serve the pre-eminent goals of national security and prosperity. This is why the United States has declared democracy promotion to be official policy since June 1982, when President Ronald Reagan announced to the British House of Commons, "The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means."
Critics of democracy promotion are correct that, as Hamas's recent victory in Palestinian elections shows, abrupt free elections in authoritarian societies may produce anti-American governments. But stable democracy consists of institutions and culture, not simply an election certified by Jimmy Carter. And it is true that some advocates of vigorous American democracy promotion fail to appreciate that some countries lack so many prerequisites for liberal democracy that even the world's sole superpower cannot democratize them at acceptable cost. Indeed, although sometimes democracy can be promoted by force of arms, in most cases such methods appear imperialistic and lead potential democrats in the target country to resist the promoter. But critics of democracy promotion go too far when they imply an inescapable trade-off between doing good--promoting liberty--and doing well--safeguarding U.S. interests. Sometimes good things do go together.
Yet the link between democracy and American interest implies another dynamic that all sides of the debate must come to grips with. States anxious to limit or roll back American power and influence in the world understand this link. Not surprisingly, these countries are not helping the United States promote democracy in Iraq. Indeed, their number includes some of America's fellow democracies, who have been put in the awkward position of opposing the overthrow of dictatorial regimes they abhor. Stable, secure democracies do not need U.S. help and are less pro-American than new democracies whose regimes are more threatened internally or externally. Precisely because more democracies mean more American power and influence, democracy promotion will often be a unilateral U.S. action.
Overall, the expansion of democracy over the past three decades has been a net gain not only for the United States but also for the world as a whole.
The near absence of wars among mature liberal democracies--perhaps the most robust finding in international relations research today--means that democratic states need not prepare for war against one another. This allows them to invest resources elsewhere that might have been used on such preparations.
Democracies reap other efficiency gains as well. They are evidently more likely to trade with and invest in one another, which tends to raise their rates of productivity growth. More generally, their institutions make them relatively transparent and constrained, which in turn allows them to reach more efficient bargains with one another, with less hedging than afflicts relations among non-democracies. Thus they are more likely voluntarily to join and abide by international agreements than other types of states, and to form and maintain effective regional organizations that pool power. The most successful international organizations tend to be the ones that comprise liberal democracies: the EU, NATO, the OSCE and the OECD.
Taken together, these advantages mean that, broadly speaking, the more democracies there are in the world, the better off is each democracy. Of course, as Adrian Karatnycky argued in these pages in 2004, the fact that democracies form a sort of club, and a powerful and successful one at that, threatens authoritarian states to some degree. The non-democracies may respond by increasing their own military spending, forming alliances or otherwise threatening the democracies, and hence driving back up the costs of being democratic. But the expansion of the zone of democracy lessens the overall potential of non-democracies to harm democracies. Moreover, even an authoritarian state like China benefits, because the Chinese economy today depends so heavily on the prosperity of democracies (including the United States). Thus a "peace dividend" followed the collapse of the Soviet empire, allowing U.S. military spending to decline by more than 20 percent from 1986 to 1994.
So the United States gains each time a country becomes democratic. But there are tangible benefits beyond increases in economic well-being and decreases in security expenditures. The expansion of democracy over the past several decades has increased the number of American allies throughout the world. Most strikingly, the states of Central Europe, once freed from communism, quickly sought membership in NATO. Even democracies that do not seek a military alliance with the United States and that worry about unipolarity are unwilling to mount much of a challenge to it. Since most Latin American countries have embraced liberal democracy in recent decades, the United States has had few security concerns in that region (and, tellingly, it is only with left-authoritarian Cuba and Venezuela that U.S. relations are truly hostile). In Africa and Asia, U.S. relations with the democracies--including regional powers South Africa and India--remain cordial.
Ever since the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, traditional balance-of-power realism has anticipated the formation of an anti-American alliance that would end unipolarity. So far, the only state that is even arguably trying to counter-balance U.S. power is authoritarian China, whose ruling elites know that more democracy in China means less influence for them and more for the United States. American hegemony--the unipolar era--is extended in time by the extension in space of democracy. Democracy is not just a consequence of American primacy, it is also a cause of it. And leaders in China and around the world know it.
So we should expect ambivalence from other countries about democracy promotion: It may sustain a global order that promotes peace and prosperity, but it also helps to keep America number one. Nonetheless, President Bush has encountered hostility, not ambivalence, for his rhetorical and actual support for democracy. Is this because no one believes Washington really wants the Middle East to be democratic--that Bush is purely and simply extending the American imperium? Or that U.S. meddling can only render the Middle East even more perilous than it already is? Or that American hegemony will jeopardize European business interests?
Perhaps. But realists should recognize another reason: America tends to reap extra advantages from the emergence of democratic regimes in unstable regions of the world. Democratic governments that fear domestic or foreign overthrow see strong common interests with the United States precisely because it is the democratic exemplar, the state that by virtue of its power and wealth demonstrates the success that democracy brings. The perception among besieged democrats in an ideologically torn region of a strong common interest with the United States helps explain why America promotes democracy actively in such areas, and why so many other countries are at best reluctant to help it do so. The new democracies of central Europe tended to back the U.S.-led war in Iraq; indeed, they exploited the transatlantic rift to assert themselves against France, Germany and Russia, European powers that adamantly opposed the war. Newly democratic Georgia (after its Rose Revolution) and Ukraine (following its Orange Revolution) are following in the path of their central European counterparts: moving away from historically hegemonic Russia, notwithstanding its natural resources, and toward the West, in particular the United States.
It is not the case that all democracies, even new or embattled ones, always do America's bidding. Countervailing interests are always present and sometimes quite strong. Latin America's democracies generally lean less sharply than their central European counterparts toward the United States, in part because the United States is so close geographically. India's relations with America are vastly better than during the Cold War, but that country's own development of nuclear weapons in the 1990s meant that Washington recently had to press New Delhi hard to secure its opposition to Iran's nuclear program.
Promoting one's ideology as a way to extend one's geopolitical influence is not a new idea. It has worked among countries and governments of every ideological stripe for the past several centuries. In 1559 Elizabeth I sent troops to Scotland to help Protestant insurgents--the "English party"--thereby helping transform her northern neighbor from an ally of Catholic France to an ally of her own Protestant England. In 1831 Metternich sent troops to three Italian states to overturn liberal revolutions, hence restoring not only absolute monarchy but pro-Austrian rulers over the peninsula. This thinking, of course, was also behind the Soviets' imposition of their system on Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and their use of force to maintain those regimes and keep their bloc together in 1956 and 1968.
Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson complain that the Bush Doctrine is a radical departure from an American tradition of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other states. But there were influential Americans from the start who wanted to spread republicanism by force: Henry Clay advocated U.S. intervention on behalf of republican independence movements in Latin America in the 1810s; prominent northern Democrats pushed for U.S. intervention in the European revolutions of 1848. These proto-Wilsonians were routinely thwarted by leaders who held to the competing principle that democracy could be promoted only by example. But that tradition of non-intervention itself emerged and persisted in part because America was, until the late 19th century, a puny power. As American power began to expand, so did the willingness to intervene in the domestic affairs of other states. From 1898 in the Western Hemisphere, and from the 1940s in Europe and East Asia, the United States began to alter other states' internal regimes so as to shape its environment in its favor.
Since that time, the United States has used force many times to promote regime change--and, it is true, not always democratic ones. After all, the overriding goal of regime change was for the target country's new government to enact policies friendlier to U.S. interests than the alternative government would have done.
Yet there is not always a viable democratic alternative able to take power, and, as Gerard Alexander has argued in these pages, sometimes the choice has to be to support a non-democratic but viable option. In the Central Asian republics north of Afghanistan, for example, the Bush Administration perceives no viable democratic faction willing and able to aid its war on Islamist terrorism in the region. It is not the case that America supports authoritarianism out of interest and democracy only out of principle. Washington has promoted democracy whenever possible not only because it is right, but also because it serves U.S. interests.
Consider the case of West Germany. Initially, Franklin D. Roosevelt had no desire to rebuild Germany after the war and certainly never envisaged it as a democracy or a security partner. The onset of the Cold War, however, changed American priorities, so that in September 1946 Secretary of State James Byrnes delivered a speech at Stuttgart declaring that America would indeed help build a democratic Germany. Byrnes was responding to pleas from General Lucius Clay, who was running the U.S. zone in Germany and was alarmed about increasing Soviet influence. As Clay's biographer, Jean Edward Smith, put it: "He was convinced that a united Germany could be attained and that liberal, democratic values would ultimately prevail. The result would be to extend Western influence to the Soviet zone and bring Poland and Czechoslovakia into direct contact with democratic ideas."
The Truman Administration made sure that German democracy would be pro-American by cultivating and favoring particular people and parties. As the Soviets were rehabilitating the old German Communist Party and merging it with the Social Democratic Party in their zone, the Americans countered by working with Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democrats, who were staunchly anti-communist and favored strong ties to the West. The U.S.-led democratization of Germany, then, was a tactic in the developing Cold War--and an unusually successful one, as the Federal Republic of Germany became both a mature democracy and a close ally, a pillar of both NATO and the liberal economic order upon which U.S. power and security rested. Similar stories can be told about postwar Japan and Italy. These countries helped the United States in the Cold War and enjoyed the benefits of liberal democracy.
In articulating a democratic vision for the Middle East and taking steps to realize that vision, George W. Bush has done nothing radical. Seeing that the region is an ideological battleground between an advancing radical Islamism and various retreating alternatives, he has responded as Truman did in the 1940s against metastasizing communism in Europe. Believing that democracy is genuinely better than its competitors--more just, more conducive to prosperity, and a more sustainable carrier of American influence--he has followed Ronald Reagan in extending democracy promotion to countries where America had previously supported authoritarianism. At the time, some high Reagan officials opposed shifting U.S. strategy in the Third World from anti-communism to pro-democracy; in the case of the Philippines, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Director of Central Intelligence William Casey and Donald Regan, Reagan's chief of staff, argued that abandoning Ferdinand Marcos for Corazon Aquino meant losing the Philippines to Soviet influence. Events proved them wrong.
That new democracies are pro-American might explain why non-democracies such as China and Russia oppose Bush's democracy promotion. But why do many democracies likewise oppose it? Why do so many even now refuse to help the United States build democracy in Iraq, even though they, too, would be better off if that country did not plummet into civil war or theocracy? Why do countries that have for years berated America for its hypocrisy, for crowning itself the paladin of liberty with one hand while propping up assorted psychopaths and criminals with the other, not at least applaud the Bush Administration for withdrawing that other hand now? Do we not edge toward a contradiction in the argument here? U.S. power and influence do not appear to be coterminous with the zone of democracies. Even during the Clinton years, France was complaining about American "hyperpower" and calling for a multipolar world.
Across countries, some democrats are indeed more pro-American than others. The degree to which democrats favor policies that are in U.S. interests depends on the degree to which liberal democracy is endangered in their own country. In the late 1940s West European democrats lived in fear of communist takeovers via trade unions, the general demoralized state of their societies, and for all they knew a Soviet invasion. It was these Europeans who pushed for a permanent U.S. security guarantee on the Continent, amounting to an unprecedented expansion of American power. Today by contrast, democracy in Europe is secure, and European democrats neither need U.S. support nor see so many common interests with the United States. They do not fear that America will attack them, and, enjoying all of the efficiencies of life in the democratic club, they are not actively counter-balancing U.S. power. But with significant exceptions, including Great Britain, they are finding passive ways to limit U.S. power, such as remaining aloof from the struggle in Iraq.
In the Middle East, on the other hand, democrats are in a death struggle with Islamists of various stripes (as well as with secular authoritarians and monarchists). One of the most pro-American cohorts in the world, rivaling the devotees of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, may be the young educated urbanites of Iran. If Muslim democrats can come to trust the United States as European Christian Democrats did in the late 1940s, they will likewise see many common interests with America. If they come to govern their countries, their national policies will be friendlier to U.S. interests. Over the ensuing years, should Islamic democracies become more secure internally and externally, they will need U.S. support less, and, like European democracies before them, they will find that countervailing interests start to loom larger. They will tend to distance themselves from America and align with other countries according to power, culture, ethnicity, economics or geography. America's challenges in the Middle East at that point will begin to resemble its challenges in Europe and Latin America today. Islamic democracies will worry about gains in U.S. power, yet, living under the benefits of American liberal hegemony, will not be sufficiently motivated to counter-balance the United States actively. America's relations with these democracies will have their tensions, annoyances and humiliations; but who would not choose such relations over those that the United States has historically had with the region?
But are current conditions in Iraq--which has become for many the definitive test of Bush's democracy promotion strategy--conducive to stable, pro-American democracy? Is Iraq like Germany in the late 1940s and the Philippines in the late 1980s? Or is it more like Tajikistan or Saudi Arabia today, where the Bush Administration evidently fears that no viable democratic faction is willing and able to rule out cooperation with the Islamist enemy? Is there an Iraqi Konrad Adenauer or Corazon Aquino? Or was the remarkable Ahmad Chalabi, now fallen from grace, the only hope?
Even for those who accept a link between democracy and U.S. influence, it is open to debate whether using force to democratize Iraq was the right policy. The administration ought to have seen that although the first half of regime change--toppling Saddam--was going to be easy, the second half--implanting democracy--was not. Scholars disagree on the prerequisites for constitutional democracy, but Iraq lacked any state institutions free of authoritarian taint; any national unity free of naked coercion; or any history of the rule of law. If Iraq disintegrates, becomes a Shi'a-dominated theocracy or settles into semi-democratic status, then American power will not be enhanced. Still, despair is not called for. It is good to recall that liberal democrats in the past have prematurely consigned certain cultures or regions--Catholic, Asian, Germanic--to permanent despotism. And for all its costs, the Iraqi intervention has had some benefits. For example, the various Iraqi elections in 2005 have encouraged dissenters in other Arab countries to believe that democracy is possible for them as well. As Farid Ghadriy reported recently in Middle East Quarterly: "The U.S.-led occupation of Iraq has been a watershed [for democratic reformers] within the Middle East. Reformists inside Syria are encouraged by the events that transpired in Iraq, even if some are loath to admit it."
If it is true that democracy extends U.S. influence, then still another objection arises: Is not the United States, by promoting democracy, liable to trigger hostility and counter-balancing? Are we not already seeing this in Iraq itself, where the U.S. occupation seems to amount to a subsidy for Al-Qaeda's recruitment program? And what about other states concerned at the intrusion of U.S. power in Central and Southwest Asia and North Africa? What will be the long-term reactions of Russia, China and India? America's moves into Southwest Asia have aided the formation and deepening of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a sort of authoritarian club comprising China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. If America is promoting democracy to augment its national security, is not its behavior eventually going to prove self-defeating?
This objection, which appeals to familiar realist insights about the balance of power, is valid in the abstract. Historically, great powers that have spread their institutions abroad have often thereby triggered reactions, including counter-interventions in other countries by rival great powers. England's rise in power in the 1560s and continuing promotions of Protestantism in Europe provoked the hostility of France and then of Spain, which eventually attacked England in 1588 and again in 1599. Austria's preservation of its power in the 1830s reassured its allies Prussia and Russia but exacerbated tensions between those three and the liberal entente cordiale of France and Great Britain, weakening the Concert of Europe. The Warsaw Pact's invasion of Hungary in 1956 alienated even many of those in the West who had sympathized with the Soviet socio-economic experiment. And even America's promotion of democracy in Germany after 1945 was not without a price, although it was one well worth paying. Provoked by a Soviet bid for hegemony over a united Germany, America's move further deepened Soviet suspicion and hostility and thus the Cold War itself.
The question is whether the gains of democracy promotion to the United States are outweighed by the losses. Would making Iraq into a democratic ally trigger such a reaction as to make it more trouble than it was worth? Or to take the question further, if Paul Wolfowitz's dream of a liberal-democratic band of nations stretching from Morocco to Pakistan were realized, America might have many new friends, but precisely for that reason it would be more frightening than ever to many other countries. Is there a tipping point beyond which enough countries find it worth their while to cooperate to end American hegemony?
U.S. officials must keep in mind that a tipping point doubtless does exist. Its location, however, is not always clear. Democratizing western Germany in the late 1940s was well short of it, even though it further degraded relations with the Soviet Union. Although we can never know the counter-factual, trying to make the Mekong Delta into the Tennessee Valley Authority--that is, extending America's reach into Indochina in the 1960s--was dangerously close to the tipping point, as America's international position in 1974 was inferior to its position in 1964. Today, Islamism, a transnational ideology whose force is by no means spent, is a serious enough threat to outweigh some alienation of other countries. But just how alienated others become is in part a function of the means and velocity with which America promotes democracy. At this point, with Iraq unstable, the region inflamed and much of the world persuaded that America is bent on a global empire, it is doubtless wiser for Washington to use economic and diplomatic means to press for democratic reform than to use force on unfriendly states such as Iran or Syria. The world can comfort itself with the knowledge that in the long term, as explained above, secure Muslim democracies should follow their European predecessors and distance themselves from the United States.
Since the Bush Administration decided to make Iraq the vein through which the Muslim world would receive its injection of liberty, democracy promoters have themselves gotten a healthful injection of realism. Freedom may indeed be for everyone, but at present not everyone wants what they take to be American- or Western-style freedom, and those who do want it do not necessarily trust the Americans to help them achieve it. But realists who persist in regarding any democracy promotion as a waste of resources at best and latter-day Jacobinism at worst need to recognize that competing ideas about political order polarize people and states and create opportunities for American (or anti-American) influence. Idealists must come to grips with the fact that, if they want a freer world, they must put up with American hegemony; realists, with the fact that if they want America to stay powerful and secure, they must put up with some democracy promotion. With that settled, let us have a real debate.
John M. Owen IV is associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia and author of Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security (1997).
Essay Types: Essay