[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: Spreading Democracy

Fri Dec 17 19:48:33 PST 2004

>
>
>Spreading Democracy
>
>By Eric J. Hobsbawm
>
>Foreign Policy.com
>September/October 2004
>The World's Most Dangerous Ideas
>
>We are at present engaged in what purports to be a
>planned reordering of the world by the powerful states.
>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 surrounding
>this crusade implies that the system is applicable in a
>standardized (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 the appeal of electoral
>democracy.
>
>Several other factors besides democracy's popularity
>explain the dangerous and illusory belief that its
>propagation by foreign armies might actually be
>feasible. Globalization 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 and humanitarian catastrophe 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 U.S. power. But one
>should always be suspicious when military powers claim
>to be doing favors for their victims and the world by
>defeating and occupying weaker states.
>
>Yet another factor may be the most important: The
>United States has been ready with the necessary
>combination of megalomania and messianism, derived from
>its revolutionary origins. Today's United States 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 Woodrow Wilson (a
>spectacular international failure in his day), today's
>ideologues see a model society already at work in the
>United States: 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 (though rarely in
>public)--particularly when they think God is on their
>side. Both good and evil empires have produced the
>barbarization 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.
>Even within the ranks of territorial nation-states, 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--be it
>religious, ethnic, or both--is absent, democracy has
>been suspended (as is the case with democratic
>institutions 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, a bleak
>prospect.
>
>Beyond its scant chance of success, the effort to
>spread standardized Western democracy also suffers from
>a fundamental paradox. In no small part, it is
>conceived of as a solution to the dangerous
>transnational problems of our day. A growing part of
>human life now occurs beyond the influence of voters--
>in transnational public and private entities that have
>no electorates, or at least no democratic ones. 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 like the European Union
>(EU) could develop into a powerful and effective
>structure precisely because it has no electorate other
>than a small number (albeit growing) of member
>governments. The EU would be nowhere without its
>"democratic deficit," and there can be no future for
>its parliament, for there is no "European people," only
>a collection of "member peoples," less than half of
>whom bothered to vote in the 2004 EU parliamentary
>elections. "Europe" is now a functioning entity, but
>unlike the member states it enjoys no popular
>legitimacy or electoral authority. 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 United States
>and the United Kingdom. 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 nondemocratic countries.
>Fortunately, media independence could not be so easily
>circumvented in the United Kingdom. But it is not
>electoral democracy that necessarily ensures effective
>freedom of the press, citizen rights, and an
>independent judiciary.
>
>----------------------------------------------------
>Eric J. Hobsbawm is emeritus professor of economic and
>social history at Birkbeck, University of London, and
>author of The Age of Extremes: A History of the World,
>1914--1991 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994). (c)E.J.
>Hobsbawm 2004.
>
>http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/files/story2666.php?email=portside@portside.org
>
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand