Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online
Authors: Philip Bobbitt
The New Realist is preoccupied with stability.
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His forebears are those European intellectuals who attempted to tutor an unsophisticated and idealistic American policy elite in order to prevent a repetition of the catastrophe of Nazism that seemed to them as much a product of internationalist idealism and faith in the League of Nations as of the isolationism that characterized prewar U.S. policy. This group had little interest in the Third World; its successors do not either. There is nothing “vital” in American interests there, and the potential for costly diversion is limitless. Nor do the problems of transnationalism, the environment, refugee migration, epidemics, famine, and terrorism seem to concern the New Realist. He accepts the primacy of the nation-state, and at the same time realizes its existence cannot be successfully separated from that of the society of nation-states of which it is part, a member, so to speak, of an ensemble. Transnational problems, however, and the nongovernmental organizations that are increasingly the effective agents dealing with these problems, are difficult for the balance-of-power theorist to include within his frame of reference.
In September 1993 the Clinton administration announced its policy of “democratic enlargement,” a commitment to bring as many nations as possible into the fold of practicing free-market economies and limited-government democracies. This represented something of a change from the previous policy of “democratic engagement,” by which the United States sought a dialogue with other states at varying stages of democratization to encourage them along that path. That subtle change turns on a key notion of democratic enlargement: the link between a nation's internal political order and its external orientation.
Whether by force following aborted elections (as in Haiti or Panama), or with economic aid after democratic revolutions (as in the former Soviet empire) or economic sanctions against existing parliamentary states (as against South Africa), Americans have acted alone and in concert with NATO allies or pursuant to U.N. resolutions to encourage democratic regimes. Establishing democratic regimes, however, is a far more ambitious agenda than simply encouraging them. For one thing, the former goal requires rewriting existing international legal norms because the nature of a state's political structure has usually been held to be an “internal” matter, for that state's determination alone. Observing that the state system was “built around the idea of sovereign equality and noninterference by foreign powers into a nation's internal affairs,” the then director of policy planning for the State Department, James Steinberg, concluded, however, that “it seems clear that a rigid application of the concept of ‘noninterference in internal affairs' is not enough. Neither balance of power nor collective security arrangements will be adequate…”
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Steinberg, later a highly influential deputy national security advisor, further wrote that “the international community has begun to exercise the right, recognized in the U.N. Charter, to intervene in internal disputes when they pose a threat to international peace and security. And in practice, the international community is stretching the concept of a threat to internal peace and security to a broad range of cases where the internal conflict is serious, the humanitarian costs are large, but the external dimension is limited as in Somalia.”
Now suppose that, in addition to this appreciation of the changing transparency of sovereignty, we add the convictions that (1) democracies do not go to war against one another, and (2) a democracy crucially, if in part, consists in the security of basic human rights for its citizens, and (3) that free markets and democracy are mutually supportive and may even be indispensable to the longevity of either. We then have the “New Evangelist”
position, which sees the U.S. role as one that, using international institutions wherever possible but acting alone if necessary, the United States should intervene to buttress, restore, or even establish democratic regimes where these are threatened or nonexistent, leading gradually to a world of like-minded communities sharing the universal values of liberty and freedom.
But are such values truly universal? George Kennan once wrote,
I know of no evidence that “democracy” or what we picture to ourselves under that word is the natural state of most of mankind. It seems rather to be a form of government (and a difficult one, with many drawbacks at that) which evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries in northwestern Europe… and which was then carried into other parts of the world, including North America, where peoples from that northwestern European area appeared as settlers… Democracy has, in other words, a relatively narrow base both in time and in space, and the evidence has yet to be produced that it is the natural form of rule for peoples outside those narrow perimeters.
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Or, as Tony Smith put it in the
Washington Quarterly
:
[Some realists ask]: Given the desperate condition of many African countries, how can the U.S. propose with confidence that if they follow its example they will find salvation? Can Americans realistically suppose that good relations with the Muslim world necessarily presuppose the conversion of these countries to liberal democratic government?
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The realist is content to offer limited help to struggling democracies, stressing that it is difficult to know what the right political system is for non-Western cultures and a mistake to identify too closely with every friendly regime. He doubts the premise that the security of human rights abroad is truly vital to American security. The nationalist, by contrast, is actually hostile to making the promotion of democracy a key American goal. He doubts the very underpinnings of the democratic evangelism, the belief that American security would be enhanced by a world of democracies because such states do not attack each other. France occupied the Ruhr in 1923 against the Weimar democracy; India attacked what was then East Pakistan when both states were thought to have generally democratic institutions; and Ecuador and Peru, Turkey and Greece have threatened recent hostilities. These and other examples may cast doubt on the theory, most eloquently argued in our day by the Princeton political scientist Michael Doyle, that democracies do not make war on one another. Moreover, the nationalist sees the New Evangelist as an impractical meddler,
risking his own state's resources in a vain effort to reform everyone else. As Alexander Hamilton wrote:
There are still to be found visionary, or designing, men who stand ready to advocate the paradox of perpetual peace between states. The genius of [democracy], they say is pacific; the spirit of commerce has a tendency to soften the manners of men and to extinguish those inflammable humors which has so often kindled wars. [Democracies] will never be disposed to waste themselves in ruinous contentions with each other. They will be governed by mutual interest, and will cultivate a spirit of mutual amity and concord.
We may ask these projectors in politics, whether it is not the true interest of all nations to cultivate the same benevolent and philosophic spirit? If this be their true interest, have they in fact pursued it? Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions and immediate interests have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility and justice? Have democracies in fact been less addicted to war than monarchies? Are not the former administered by men as much as the latter? Are there not aversions, predilections, rivalships, and desires of unjust acquisition that affect nations as well as kings? Are not popular assemblies frequently subject to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice and other irregular and violent propensities?
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By contrast, the objection of the New Internationalist to the New Evangelist's proposed paradigm aims at a fundamentally different target: he questions the evangelist's emphasis on the importance of the internal. The internationalist strives for agreements to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, ecological devastation, and world recession from a macroeconomic perspective; he is less concerned with the internal drama of party politics and microeconomic practices. Both approaches stress the importance of international institutions, but on closer inspection, the preferred organizations of the new evangelist are choirs composed of the converted—the G-7, for example, or NATO, not the United Nations or the Organization of African Unity.
The New Evangelist rejects the classic formulation that states have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. For the evangelist, the community of the faithful
is
permanent. Because they are chosen by the people, democratic governments regard each other's regimes as legitimate and deserving of respect. Because, domestically, they use civilized nonviolent means to resolve disputes, democracies tend to prefer the same methods internationally. The evangelist also downplays the fear of a
hegemonic power or group of powers. Indeed, the Clinton administration was more enthusiastic about European integration than many of the members of the E.U. So long as the power is exercised by a democratic state, even nuclear proliferation, for example, to Israel, is acceptable.
Like each of the other competing paradigms, this view is linked to a perception of a particular threat that it regards as uniquely salient. For the New Evangelist, this threat arises from the resurgence of nationalism and violence in the hands of authoritarian states. To combat this threat to the United States, the New Evangelist proposes a kind of inoculation far more imaginative than anything envisaged by his competitors. Realists, nationalists, and internationalists all treat the world as relatively static. The Cold War has ended, but their prescriptions generally forecast more of the same. The New Evangelist has more dynamic developments in mind, and these lend support to his position: history seems to be moving in his direction (the number of democracies is increasing), at least in the short term, and he can mobilize democratic popular support on behalf of American democratic values in a way that more cynical or more abstract theorists cannot. A global democratic revolution has been going on since Prague Spring in 1968, and with considerably more success each decade. In 1975 the Portuguese overthrew their communist government with the help of the European democracies. In the 1980s Latin American states began to replace military regimes to an unprecedented degree on that continent such that by 2001, there were elected civilian governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, Panama, and Uruguay. In the 1990s, the transition from a racist, oligarchic state to a multiracial democracy in South Africa inspired the world community. In 2001, some 120 of the world's 192 states had democratic governments.
Unlike the other competing paradigms, the New Evangelism can call on these developments for inspiration and political support. Democratic ideology, it is said,
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not weaponry, won the Cold War. “Ideas matter.” We cannot ignore the role of values in shaping our security and our fate, nor should we. Being true to human rights, pluralism, freedom of conscience, and democratic governance is the only way we will be able to mobilize support at home for our policies and, if the New Evangelist is right, actually achieve a safer, more secure world. The end of the Cold War has freed us from having to support regimes that were hostile to our values. Now, as the sole remaining superpower, we can support those regimes with whom we have a true affinity.
It must be said that much of the enthusiasm behind this position does arise from our role as the sole superpower. The world is beset by enemies, many of them states that are the enemies of their own peoples. None really threaten us. If there was ever a time for the United States to assert its values,
it must be now, for if not the United States, then who would do it, and if not now, when would we be in a better position to do so? And if no one asserts these values, isn't it just a matter of time before the fragile movement toward democracies is overtaken by the retrograde forces of jaded realists, reactionary nationalists, and relativist internationalists everywhere? In a period of
relative
American decline, doesn't our best insurance against the future lie in persuading other states to adopt a political system that is benign toward our state and congenial to our culture—a system, in other words, that is compatible with our strategic approach
and
our constitutional values?
Like all unipolar, or imperial, universal visions, however, the paradigm of the New Evangelist seems remarkably insensitive to the will of others. When a Clinton administration official proposed in an interview that “the U.S. must rebuild the Haitian economy and restructure its court system, its legislative system and its military system,” a columnist replied, “What colonialist, racist nonsense. Haiti belongs to the Haitians to run as they see fit.”
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But isn't that the beauty of the democratic vision: that it alone of all the ideologies of modern government can lay a claim to truly recognizing the people's will in having a state of their own choosing? Only evangelism promises that, after conversion, one is empowered to do as one pleases.
The only major states in which democratic transplantation has been tried are Japan and Germany. These examples can be cited either way. Skeptics point out that the principal reason behind the alliance system was not to simply contain the USSR but to do so in a way that kept these new democracies from reverting to their old ways. This must reflect at least some nervousness about how entrenched the habits of democracy have become in those societies, even under the most propitious circumstances. Advocates point to the unblemished success of those two societies in peacefully transferring power (finally, in Japan) and in their nonthreatening international behavior. Perhaps the most salient point, however, is that it is no less important now to strengthen those democracies than it was before, and this, as before, is unlikely to happen in the absence of American commitment.
But what if a state is attacked that is not a fully functioning democracy, such as Kuwait? Or if a state threatens its neighbors even though it is a democracy, such as India? Or if the slow process of building democracies is too complicated and ponderous to treat emergencies such as occurred in Bosnia and Rwanda? In all these instances, democratic enlargement seems to have little of immediate relevance to say.