The Dangers of Exporting
Democracy :
Bush's Crusade
is Based on a Dangerous Illusion and Will Fail
By Eric
Hobsbawm
Guardian/UK
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 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 its justified appeal.
Other factors besides
democracy's popularity explain the dangerous belief that its propagation
by 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 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 favors 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 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. 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
standardized 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.
Eric Hobsbawm is
professor emeritus of economic and social history of the University of
London
at Birkbeck and author of The Age of Extremes: The Short 20th Century
1914-1991; this is an edited version of an article that first appeared in
the journal Foreign Policy.
January 22, 2005
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