The Struggle for Democracy
Mini Teaser: The promotion of democracy is the centerpiece of Bush's foreign policy, but the president has yet to define democracy.
President George Bush's promotion of democracy has become the unifying and driving principle of his administration's global foreign policy and the stated objective of the costly and controversial military effort in Iraq. The administration has talked about enfranchising individuals in all corners of the world, admittedly with a growing sense of unease, from Venezuela to Zimbabwe to Palestine.
Enthusiasm for democracy is not limited to the corridors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Many Americans have come to see the spread of democracy around the world as part of their national identity, even though that pursuit has never been the driving force of foreign policy in the past. A zeal for spreading democracy is the emerging zeitgeist of the 21st century, replacing the egalitarian imperative that prevailed in (and convulsed) the later 20th century.
Policy analysts today are less inclined to wander into tactical-strategic muddles in which "good" dictators are supported against bad ones and alliances with enemies of our enemies are promoted. The realpolitik approach has lost currency and is no longer the benchmark against which to measure foreign policy strategies. It is also being aggressively fought as an applied theory and as a cultural force.
And yet there is still no consensus, either within the administration or American society, about what constitutes a democracy. The world's only superpower is rhetorically and militarily promoting a political system that remains undefined--and it is staking its credibility and treasure on that pursuit. Little wonder that the administration's democratic strategy for establishing stability and equity in the Middle East invites confusion, if not outright derision.
Leading political theorists offer competing definitions of democracy--and there is much at risk in the competition. There is an implicit sense that policymakers will be guided and influenced by the most galvanizing definition of democracy. A widely accepted definition could be central to how the administration identifies its policy goals beyond Iraq in coming years. But the administration must be wary of limiting itself to a policy blueprint. It should draw from existing theories and definitions of democracy to guide, but not prescribe, policy.
Without question, the global struggle for leadership in defining democracy is as ideological as it is political or economic. Leading thinkers on democratic theory offer definitions that identify political, cultural and distributive paradigms.
Democracy as a "political thesis" is best and brilliantly distilled by the works of Robert A. Dahl of Yale University. Dahl's intellectual talents match his modesty. In a statement that appears in the Summer 2005 issue of Political Science Quarterly, he richly describes why political institutions are necessary for democracy. Dahl focuses on "effective participation", which puts him in the camp of the Enlightenment vision, in which legislation and education are fused as the source of democratic wisdom. In the classic tradition of the French Enlightenment, Dahl holds that legislation and education are the building blocks for democracy.
Dahl further insists that individual ability and the freedom to change the direction of events through political involvement--without incurring a retaliatory backlash from the state--is critical to democracy. He argues, though, that a democracy goes beyond the freedoms of street mobilization or electoral participation and requires also the building of democratic institutions. What is compelling in Dahl's formulation is its maintenance of democracy as a universal concept, rather than a nationalist belief in special conditions for democracy predicated on racial, religious or local criteria. In contrast, Middle East leaders do not deny or reject the idea of democracy; they simply qualify it with phrases like "Egyptian Democracy" or the "Muslim grounds for equality." Dahl's work goes to the heart of such parochial claims with his counter-claim that culture is a universal frame of reference when it comes to politics.
Depriving democracy of its singularity and insisting upon its conception as one part of a paired hyphen, such as Egyptian, Russian or American democracy, mocks the notion of effective participation and enlightened understanding. It reduces democracy to a special and particular footnote to nationalism.
James Gibson of Washington University in St. Louis follows on the heels of the earlier work of the late Aaron Wildavsky in presenting democracy primarily as a series of cultural factors that filter into the political system. Democracy may appear to be a set of institutions, courts, congresses, laws and a constitution; but those are cultural factors that emerge from actions and attitudes lodged in the hearts and minds of average people. In a nutshell, democracy is an acquired taste, and such inclinations take a long time to develop, especially in places where such traditions have been either submerged or never existed--such as the Third World.
Gibson offers a list of elements that comprise a democratic culture: tolerance, or putting up with ideas of others; the legitimacy of democratic institutions, or accepting responsibility undertaken by legal processes; and belief in the equality of all people (which Gibson believes is Islam's big stumbling block). At the heart of Gibson's position is the notion of compromise, or the ability to accept defeat as part of the democratic process.
Gibson believes in the gradual development of democracy, comparing that incremental approach to postponing gratification at the personal level. Democratic rule, he argues, requires that the people grant authority to their ruler. He views the questioning of authority as a means to counter excessive conformity. He sees education as a universal right. It is clear that such a view of democracy is close to the heart of American values--even if our commitment to these goals may unravel in times of tension and conflict.
The notion of culture as central to democracy returns the debate to its 19th-century roots in Kant and Hegel, where one must choose between the free conscience and the well-ordered state. The balancing of rights and obligations becomes the grounds for democracy in a well-ordered state.
In turn, that leads to considerations that go further back than even Kant and Hegel into the less abstract world of Hobbes, Smith and Locke--a world in which democratic values fare less well and specific forms of justice fare better. Older notions were predicated on toleration and laissez faire concepts of law that allowed for a common starting point to all citizens. The more recent visions of the new culturalists are based on some governmental or federal authority that limits excesses of wealth and poverty and at the same time assures common outcomes.
The problem with the cultural vision is that the clarity of the theory becomes badly muddled in its choice of examples. Gibson points to South Africa as an example of a country that evolved democratically as a result of cultural factors. In South Africa, Gibson maintains that demands for social and racial justice led to profound changes in land ownership and job distribution. He fails to explain, though, just how those changes came about as a result of cultural factors. It is also unclear how that kind of redistribution advances the cause of democracy.
Another problem with Gibson's choice of example is that the jury is still out on South Africa. It remains to be seen how enduring the country's democratic progress will be. Will the pluralistic democratic culture prevail, or will it become like Zimbabwe, hostage to demagogic appeals and land expropriations from white settlers? Indeed, will a multicultural, better yet, a multiracial society be feasible or even be tolerated in the new South Africa, or will the minority white population seek asylum elsewhere? Will the economy remain exclusively open to market forces, or will it shut down in favor of controlled economies? And which language and culture is to prevail: those of the native inhabitants or English? Is there room for the first colonialists, the Dutch, in such an open system? In short, will the culture itself remain democratic, or will it yield to authoritarian options in the face of natural and human disasters? It may be asking too much of a single author to answer all of these queries. But if the theory of culture as the wellspring of democracy is to be taken seriously, then there should be enduring examples to point towards.
The third view is that of people like the late John Rawls of Harvard University and the late C. B. Macpherson of the University of Toronto. Both were intelligent advocates of democracy as a form of distributive justice. They argued that the "possessive individualism" of the bourgeoisie is not serviceable in an era of mass society. For them, the moral economy of Locke and Smith requires the augmentation of the political economy of Hobbes (according to Macpherson) and of Rousseau and the general will (according to Rawls). They propose that the social welfare model, or just plain socialist approach, is the bedrock of the democratic vision. It is hard to imagine Rawls accepting a laissez faire, 19th-century version of democracy as anything other than a liberal quagmire that drives the free market back to its competitive roots. That perspective implies a belief in the natural inequality of human beings.
In Rawls's terms, democracy requires a redistribution of public goods: "Arranging for and financing public goods must be taken over by the state, and some binding rule requiring payment must be enforced." Rawls makes this claim repeatedly throughout A Theory of Justice (1971). For Rawls, the state must curb individual avarice or selfish desires by enforcing rules. The state provides the legal machinery that ensures collective agreements, and "firm assurances must be given to all that they will be honored." Collective agreements in the Rawlsian world are much like the social contracts of Rousseau's world: commitments and obligations to provide a platform through which individuals cannot and should not be allowed to fall and a ceiling that makes the wealthy beholden to their moral obligations to society. In this way, democracy secures a just set of relations--an equilibrium assured by the state.
If there is a difference between Rawls and Macpherson, it is that the former sees the state as a liberal enterprise engaging in benign activities, whereas the latter sees the state essentially as a collectivist enterprise. As Rawls puts it, collective agreements should be guaranteed by the social system chosen, not by implementing mechanisms that are geared towards delivering justice. However, Macpherson draws a line from Hobbes to Marx that is unsentimental and unsparing in its insistence that democracy is a not a bargaining exchange between classes, but an imposition on those who hold power and those who lack power. He argues that the authority must impose social justice in order for democracy to prevail.
The views of Rawls and Macpherson about democracy in the political sense are rather sparse. Indeed, with the exception of the idea of "democratic equality" as "the principle of equal participation", they say little about the machinery of governance. It is not so much that no child is left behind, but rather that no adult can finish too far out front of any other. The problem with their formulation of a moral economy of democracy is that behind the theory of justice there must be a practice of force. If not, the potential for economic differentiation based on talent, skill and even desire would quickly resurface. While Rawls tiptoes around this, Macpherson does not. Since his democracy is basically a vision of distribution of economic goods and services, government is forever more the guardian and force behind democracy as such.
Democracy thus becomes a vehicle for guaranteeing equitable results, rather than an implicitly virtuous system. Those liberal or socialist assumptions and modalities too often result in authoritarian consequences. Following Rawls's more liberal idea of "social union" (the social contract redrawn for a late-20th-century America) still too readily translates into the ideas that animated the formation of the Soviet Union--to say nothing of Macpherson's authoritarian model. Rawls's is a benign post-Stalinist world to be sure, but still it is a socialist system built on state power aimed at egalitarianism as democracy--or as it was conveniently termed under Soviet power, a people's democracy. Normative theorists are usually too clever to be forced into such crude formulations. They leave those outcomes for less astute or concerned acolytes.
President Bush's vision of democracy unfortunately creates ambiguity rather than clarity. It contains aspects of all three perspectives discussed here without resolving the dilemmas in any of them. It reflects first and foremost a Dahlian, matter-of-fact view, in which a set of criteria are met, such as free elections, free parties and free discourse. This is subject to an admixture of the cultural viewpoint of Gibson and Wildavsky, with an appreciation of democracy as a culture that evolves over time and is more than simply an episodic event in a singular place. The Bush Administration now subtly but increasingly subscribes to the cultural theory. It does so by acknowledging, with some reluctance to be sure, that there are different pathways to democracy and that democracy in the Middle East will not look the same as it does in Europe or the United States. But that acknowledgement only serves to muddle an already cloudy frame of reference.
The Macpherson-Rawls vision of democracy as distribution comes in a distant third. While the president does hint at the need for such economic overhauling, he does so not in the context of class struggle, but rather with respect to imagined social contracts and compacts between classes, regions and religious sects. In regards to Iraq, for example, the administration has been involved in brokering a compact between different regions and ethnic groups on sharing oil wealth. But in that perfectly legitimate activity of statecraft, the administration resorts to a classical model of diplomacy: one that pragmatically recognizes differences in state power. In doing so, the Bush Administration demonstrates its ad hoc approach to policymaking in Iraq.
At the end of the day, we are left with a political vision of democracy as a process, as exemplified by Dahl and practiced by Western democracies; an economic vision of democracy based on statist premises as outlined by Rawls and Macpherson; and a cultural vision that would like to ensure a world of friendship based on abstract premises of the good society but in practice undulates between different ideologies and provides no real blueprint for action.
None of these three academic visions is a compelling option in practice, nor are they especially appealing for those who guide American foreign policy. The temptation to offer one's own theory or thoughts on defining democracy is real, but that really is part of the problem. American administrations should not elevate the promotion of theories of pure democracy as a guiding principle for foreign policy or the objective of military action.
All the same, the leading figures of the Bush Administration should demonstrate an understanding of what the principal schools of thought on democracy are in formulating their strategy for advancing global democratic progress. The current U.S. policy appears to be so ad hoc that it lacks a degree of coherence and guiding principles. The administration should not follow normative blueprints, but it should exhibit a greater understanding of normative theories and a sense of what the foundation of a democracy is. At the very least, the administrative should acknowledge that elections do not comprise democracy.
It is much better that U.S. policy be guided by a Hans Kelsen and even a Hans Morgenthau approach to politics among nations, one that takes seriously the nature and import of national interest. In this sense, the Bush Administration must face the problem of having come full circle. Bush advances democracy as a central plank of its foreign policy, only to come face to face with a higher (or probably lower) truth: the need to protect the citizenry of the United States and confront the fallout of military engagement in Iraq. In plain language, the immediate requirements of military activity in the pacification of a recalcitrant host population pre-empts the long-term faith in democratic outcomes.
The administration lacks both a coherent definition of democracy and a sense of history when promoting democracy. Such an approach has consequences. It is fair to say that the president is not always clear as to his intentions with respect to democracy. This is especially true regarding whether democracy is to be imposed by foreign elites or to be freely decided by the masses.
It has not been lost on the current administration that democratic rule came to nations like post-fascist Italy and post-Nazi Germany by force of arms--in no small part, American arms. The process may have been hastened by previous traditions of cultural freedom, but these same societies were also capable of cultural barbarism as long as they remained viable states. What this suggests is that the concept of democracy may be an important aspect of policymaking in regards to backward states but should not drive all aspects of policymaking. It is difficult to assess whether the administration will calibrate its emphasis on democracy-building after having so routinely emphasized that pursuit with Afghanistan and Iraq. Although there may be some growing sophistication, the administration seems disinclined to move away from its pedagogic promotion of democracy.
Democracy born at the end of a gun barrel was not only a slogan of the Maoist routing of the Chiang Kai-shek nationalists, but very much the unspoken operational code book of American power in determining the outcome of the Second World War. The triumph of democracy was not occasioned by moral lectures or fine distinctions among the political, economic and cultural, but rather by the belief that establishing democracy was the surest and safest guide to postwar reconstruction and would maximize American interests.
The Bush Administration has failed to recognize, though, that a democracy propelled by the point of a gun is at inherent risk for future revolutionary overthrow, in the same way post-coup or guerrilla governments have been. Whether the unique circumstances surrounding the postwar democratization of Japan and Germany can be replicated in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere is difficult to say. I suspect not. The preconditions of a culture of enlightenment, a politics of class struggles and trade unions, and an economy of the free market may exist in isolated portions of the Middle East--but as a healthy and viable triumvirate, they have not emerged there to any extensive degree. It is therefore risky to declare that victory in Iraq and Afghanistan entails establishing democracy.
Although the president has added some darker shades to his previous optimizing scenarios on how the Middle East is adopting principles of modernity, there is not much candor within the administration about the potential for the pursuit and promotion of democracy to undermine, rather than maximize, American interests. Some of Dahl's criteria, such as elections and party participation, have brought some less-than-desirable outcomes, such as victories in Palestine by Hamas candidates, or Sunni and Shi'a factions in Iraq vanquishing secular politicians favored by Washington. To some degree, fuzziness may be dictated by the needs of quotidian realities, but it also reflects indecision as to what brand of democratic theorizing works best in specific environments.
One of the hidden assumptions of the Bush Administration is that democracies develop in a linear and uninterrupted progression. The problem is that the actual course of history contravenes this model. For example, some relatively democratic regimes have in the recent past capitulated to authoritarian outcomes precisely because the force of arms either would not or could not be used to defend democracy. The shift in Venezuela from Romulo Betancourt to Ch vez is a dramatic illustration of how this process can take place within a single generation. Iran is another example: While the Persia of the shah was hardly an exemplar of democracy, Iran's social practices--its liberation of women for example--served as a useful model to the rest of the Middle East. Unfortunately, there are just as many examples of democracies devolving into totalitarian states as there are of democratic progress of the kind cited in Freedom House Reports. The classical 18th-century theories of progress therefore require some scrutiny, although rejecting the assumption of progress goes against the American grain. It must come as a shock to those with a sense of real history to see the women of Iran--decked out once more in traditional Muslim garb and holding hands in solidarity--demonstrating in support of Iran's nuclear weapons program, directly adjacent to a uranium-conversion plant in Isfahan.
Likewise, those who presume that speaking English is a sure guide to cultural pluralism might have another look at places like Zimbabwe, in which culture was overwhelmed by doctrines of distributive justice or, more accurately, retribution. Certainly those in Zimbabwe who grew up in English grammar schools and are now leading the charge toward racialism and separatism are not enamored of the British traditions of fairness or equity. The question is not as Timothy Garton Ash, who should know better, would have it: "How can such a regime be transformed?" Rather it is how such regnant totalitarian or theocratic regimes have been able to seize, secure and retain power, and turn the democratic clock into hard reverse.
Critics of the Bush vision, meanwhile, fail to point the way forward and seem frustrated in their efforts to devise a useful alternative to current administrative foreign policy initiatives. Bush's democracy agenda has flustered the Right and Left alike, prompting extremists at both ends of the political spectrum to meet. A common strain of hatred of Bush's agenda is apparent in conventional conservative and radical calls against American arrogance, imperialism and monopoly--the pejorative names of the hour. One can scarcely distinguish between critics of the administration on the Right or Left without knowing an individual's historical political position.
Self-declared libertarians, revolutionaries, anti-globalizers, faith healers, assorted academic placard carriers and journalistic malcontents have never been more united in their opposition to the presidency--even though this opposition lacks cohesion in terms of what it actually supports. They try to counter the presidential emphasis on democracy but are stymied by an inability to articulate their own democratic goals. Once again, though, the critics may be correct, in that the nations we try to assist into the modern world have little capacity or interest to articulate a democratic vision.
In short, the conduct of foreign policy is not subject to an ideological blueprint. It requires a highly leveraged series of maneuvers, requiring a balance of pragmatic and normative components, in which even winners acting out of noble intent get their feet muddy and their hands bloodied. These normative elements must be decided upon before acting and should subscribe to guiding principles that give policy greater consistency and coherence. Ordinary people, especially foot soldiers, know this well. It is the elites, especially academic pundits, who have yet to appreciate that ideological crusades lead to combat fatalities.
Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University, where he also serves as chairman of the board of Transaction Publishers. His recent works include Behemoth: Main Currents in the History and Theory of Political Sociology (1999) and Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power (1976), now in its fifth edition.
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