Promoting Democracy

INTRODUCTION:

Over at the Daily Demarche a challenge was issued for right and left leaning bloggers to engage each other in a great debate on the merits of the U.S. promoting Democracy around the world. With the encouragement of Marc Schulman of American Future I decided to throw my voice into the fray. I have asked David Leftwich of the blog Eclectic Refrigerator to handle things coming from the left-of-center perspective, while I handle duties from the right-of-center. It is probably safe to assume David and I are both more centrist than anything else, but I believe there will be enough variation in our starting points to make this a worthwhile endeavor. As a bonus I thought it would also be a good thing to get David's voice back in circulation after a few months away from the world of blogging.

THE QUESTION:

Should the U.S. support foreign pro-democracy groups around the globe?

It might seem, in a post 9-11 world, that this question is a bit superfluous, but I think it is worthwhile to take a moment to consider the arguments one could make against U.S. involvement with any foreign pro-democracy groups.

One strand of thought often used, in certain circles, stresses a culturally relativistic view of the world. In such a view the U.S. promoting democracy around the world is just another example of a kind of Imperialism. Whether it stems from a sense of cultural superiority or the desire to dominate others economically, it all comes as one in the end. "Promoting democracy" is, for such folks, just another way the hegemonic nations exercise their power over weaker nations.

As an explanation of the world, such a view is seriously lacking. It requires a rather stolid caricature of the "democracy promoter" straight out of Marxism's Central Casting that bears little relation to anything actually existing. As such this view can be safely disregarded.

However, a milder form of the same argument is a little more interesting. It can be argued that the U.S. should allow pro-democratic groups to spring up on their own accord. Such "homegrown" groups, it can be argued, would be more attuned to cultural differences within a given society that could aid it in taking root deep within that society. What happens when we try to export democracy abroad is that we wind up trying to make folks American democrats instead of simply democrats.

At one level this makes some sense. It is obvious any political group that wishes to influence how their country is governed will need to seem as if they are representing an integral part of that country's society. However, it seems more unclear how promoting the prerequisites of democratic societies could be viewed as necessarily relativistic. A free press is a free press. Its definition will not change depending on if one is in the United States or in Austria or in Indonesia. A "free press" that does not include opposition views is not a free press even if the Iranian government says it is. Likewise, the definition of a "free election" does not change from country to country either. It would seem these concerns could be dealt with by making sure the our efforts do not suffer from having a tin ear when being translated into different societies. It does not strike me as a fundamental difficulty.

These concerns have been largely at a theoretical level to this point. There is however a more practical objection one might posit to U.S. pro-democracy efforts:

The risk of the U.S. seeming too involved in the internal affairs of other nations.

It could be argued that when the U.S. actively supports a specific pro-democratic group within a country they help to in effect de-legitimize that group, particularly in places that are at least nominally democratic to begin with. One can think of the example of Venezuela. It is clear that the Bush administration supports the various middle-class opposition parties against President Hugo Chavez. It is also clear that, strictly from the standpoint of promoting a democratic society, there are legitimate reasons for criticizing Chavez. The heavy handed tactics of the Venezuelan government obviously inhibit the workings of a free and independent press, and present unjust conditions for opposition political groups. However, it also seems clear that the U.S. involvement with these opposition groups has done either side little good. Indeed, it has made these groups susceptible to charges they are nothing more than lackeys for the Americans, and it has made the U.S., at the very least, look responsible for the missteps and illegalities perpetrated by the Venezuelan opposition. What our actual involvement was, is, for this discussion, irrelevant. It is enough to show that U.S. efforts are deemed to be intrusive and are as a result counter-productive.

As presented this argument is convincing. If the U.S. efforts are seen to be intrusive of the internal workings of a foreign country, they will ultimately be of no value. However, it is not evident that all U.S. pro-democracy efforts are doomed to such intrusiveness. Defining them as such does not make them so. What is clear is that however the U.S. goes about promoting democracy abroad it must be seen as neutral vis-a-vis the individual political groups within a country. At this point we are no longer debating whether the U.S. should be promoting democracy abroad but we are debating how they should go about it.

THE QUESTION:

How should the U.S. support foreign pro-democracy groups around the globe?

Roughly speaking there are two general approaches the U.S. can take on this question, one more practical and realistic and the other more principled and theoretical.

The realistic approach basically says the U.S. should pick and choose carefully the spots where it will decide to promote democracy. For example, the U.S. might decide to "promote democracy" in a generally non-democratic regime that assumes an anti-U.S. stance, while democracy might not be promoted in a regime already more favorable to U.S. interests. Such thinking is in many ways a product of the Cold War world. In a bipolar geopolitical situation "promoting democracy" wasn't a policy, it was a tool; a tool not wielded against those in the "friendly" column.

Even in a one super-power system there are still arguments to allow the same sort of distinctions. For example, there is the "devil you know" argument. We might not like a given regime's modus operandi, but, if they are friendly to us at this moment in time, the status quo might just be preferable to what might result after democratic reforms. (One can hear such arguments being made routinely about Saudi Arabia.)

An added benefit of such an approach is that the U.S. could minimize the risk of failure. There would be little chance for a loss of prestige in the world if you don't have to back democracy in tough situations. One cannot help but think of the situation in Hungary in 1956. In that case the inability of the U.S. to support the fledgling democratic movement in Budapest against Soviet aggression, despite the U.S.' democratic rhetoric of the day, resulted in a serious blow to American prestige.

Whatever can be said in favor of such an approach, it is obvious that it is prone to failing the criterion set out earlier of not seeming too intrusive. The capricious nature of choosing only some non-democratic regimes to pressure is enough to cast aspersions on American efforts. Additionally, such policies fail to take into account the democratic nature of American society. Think back to the 1980's. Whether someone in the U.S. wanted to promote democracy in El Salvador or Nicaragua had very little to do with actual conditions in those countries and everything to do with what party the someone belonged to, Democrat or Republican. When U.S. "pro-democracy" efforts can be seen as merely the extension of some American ideological debate or inter-party squabble, it becomes nearly impossible to argue that it isn't intrusive. Whatever our pro-democracy efforts are they have to seem more than mere pawns in a Washington D.C. power struggle.

Another fundamental difficulty with the realist approach is that it becomes nigh impossible for U.S. efforts to look anything other than hypocritical. At any given time the U.S. will be both supporting some pro-democratic forces and some anti-democratic regimes. This fact alone invalidates any principled claim we might wish to make in favor of democracy as being the most morally legitimate form of governance. In the end the realist approach would seem to be self defeating.

This leaves us with the principled or theoretical approach to promoting democracy. Such an approach would focus necessarily on democracy as a process. In such a view the goal is not to ensure that regimes we like will emerge from any given country. Indeed, the U.S. has to view the results of elections as irrelevant to the purpose of spreading democracy. The reason for this is clear. Any attempt to pre-determine who wins an election in another country would be an example of the U.S. being too intrusive in the internal affairs of other nations, and would in fact constitute a large incentive for such governments to become less democratic in the future. On one level the U.S. cannot care if the citizens of Iraq vote for a Shia inspired theocratic party, as long as future elections are still free and open. Indeed it is the continuing character of the election processes, including the workings of a free press and the rights of opposition being respected, that would be the only legitimate concern for the United States.

It becomes clear that the only legitimate help the U.S. can give to pro-democratic groups around the world is in helping to set up a democratic electoral process. Organizations set up to monitor elections would be key. Unfortunately, the United Nations is not an ideal partner for such activities. The U.N., as an organization, has not seem too concerned about the democratic process throughout its history. They will condemn instances of political violence, it is true, but the U.N. has no trouble recognizing governments that are maintained through the most brutal of methods in flagrant violation of the basic tenets of democracy. The U.N. simply does not see its role as that of fostering democratic reform around the world, and there seems to be little reason to think it can reinvent itself in that way in the future.

In many ways a U.S. foreign policy centered around democratic reforms would be akin to the Jimmy Carter initiative to center U.S. foreign policy around Human Rights. Carter's policies were never going to make a lot of headway against the Cold War era realists in Congress or in the State Department, but that doesn't mean they were completely wrong-headed. A foreign policy centered on democratic reforms is in many ways a better bet. For starters, it is less ambitious. Electoral reform is largely a technical exercise. It really doesn’t require a total re-ordering of society in order to implement it. A campaign for human rights is almost always an open-ended process that doesn't allow for the easy delineation of boundaries. Once questions of Human Rights are raised everything is on the table. (It will be argued that a democratic society will, eventually amount to the same thing. I agree, but by limiting the external pressure for reform to the more technical aspects of a democratic polity, you allow the internal political machinations of each country to bring up the larger questions of Human Rights, which, in the long run, is the best way to ensure that progress takes place. Attempting to impose Human Rights from without seems to me a recipe for disaster.)

In addition to supporting election monitoring, the U.S. must also support opposition parties that are being denied the right to operate freely. However, it is important that we support every single party facing such difficulties. We cannot choose a handful of U.S. friendly parties to give support to. In a similar vein we must also support the press rights for every persecuted news outlet, even those highly critical of the United States. Basically the U.S. should function something like the ACLU of thirty years ago: We support the principles upon which every democratic society is founded, even if we disagree with the content of your speech, and every person has the right to participate in the political life of his or her country without governmental interference.

A NOTE ON POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY:

In most respects, I'd argue that the United States is the only country on earth in a good position to advocate democratic reform, with the possible exception of the United Kingdom. I feel this way because the U.S. is really the only democratic country where the principles of a liberal democratic society are still widely embraced across the political spectrum. People on the left and the right in this country will go on and on about, for example, the Bill of Rights, or on the importance of our system of Checks & Balances. We have a rich and continuing history of intellectuals thinking about what it means to live in a liberal democratic state. That is something you just do not see in continental Europe. I'm not saying it isn't visible at all, but it is certainly less of a vital force there. (You can see something of the European attitude in American academics who have little patience with the thinkers of the American founding, but have no trouble spending their time in a quixotic effort to make of Nietzsche a closet democrat or Democrat.)

Considering the troubles we are having presently throughout the Middle East, it is somewhat ironic that I will also argue that the Middle Easterner who is interested in liberal democratic thought will probably get more out of the classic Western statements of liberal thought than would your average American. Someone in Iran who turns to Hobbes or Locke or Algernon Sidney will find lengthy discussions disputing theocratic principles of governance that will speak much more clearly to an Iranian than it ever would for a modern American. Most college educated Americans may have read Locke's Second Treatise on Government but very few have read Locke's First Treatise. We don't read Hooker's or Filmer's defenses of divine right so we just assume questions of theocracy were settled, but of course they weren't in 17th century England, just as they are not settled in 21st century Iran. In a very real sense this is an opportunity for every thinking American to learn something new about the ideas that underlie our society.

I know these thoughts will probably not sway your average American sophisticate, who assumes a certain incommensurability in the world (supported by what examples in history I will never know.) But really it is not the American sophisticate who is important in this process. It is amazing how easy it is to forget that fact.