Monday, December 08, 2003
Democracy, Not Off-the-Shelf
By William Raspberry
Monday, December 8, 2003; Page A25
The Bush administration seems determined to get into the business of exporting democracy to the Middle East. And a lot of Americans are wondering what took so long. After all, America is the political, military, economic and, yes, cultural envy of the world, and the one thing we are certain has produced that enviable status is the way we govern ourselves: U.S. democracy.
Viewed that way, it seems downright uncharitable not to offer the world a draft of the elixir that has made us what we are.
Thus it was that a month ago, in one of the more stirring speeches of his presidency, George W. Bush was urging a "crusade for freedom," beginning, conveniently, in Iraq but spreading with such force as to engulf the whole region, including our friends the royally ruled Saudis.
And I'm thinking: Maybe we ought to back off just a bit.
It isn't that I don't favor democracy. I do, and I'd love to see more of it in the world. But because of America's peculiar history (excluding that unpleasant little episode called slavery), we may be thinking of democracy as a lot easier, more natural and more inevitable than it is.
We sometimes behave as though, if we can only get democracy on the supermarket shelf alongside other forms of government, the world will choose it the way it would choose fresh-squeezed orange juice over canned.
So what's wrong with getting democracy on the shelf? Nothing at all. I'd love it to be available; I'd love to see our foreign policy promote it; I'd love us to tilt toward democracy at every opportunity.
But when the talk is in the context of Iraq (with overtones of transforming the Middle East), it seems to suggest not just support of local democratic stirrings but a policy of injecting democracy every chance we get. And even that will strike some people as no more inappropriate than the idea of Christian proselytizing has struck others. I mean, those people need Jesus, and it's our God-ordained role to spread that word.
Sometimes, in religion and in politics, it works. There are more Christians and more democracies today than there were a generation ago.
Still, there is reason for caution. After all, it takes a lot more than theoretical availability to get nations to choose democracy, and it takes a lot more than elections, however free or fair, to produce it. I'm reminded of an observation uttered more than 10 years ago by someone who understood the point.
"Elections are not automatically the establishment of democracy. . . . Democracy is a process, painful to establish in a land that has never known democracy, where suspicions are high, where absolutism has been the way of life. In a way it's a cultural thing that needs to be based upon respect for human rights, for other people's opinions, for institutions, including the courts. Elections are only a step -- a necessary step -- toward the goal of democracy."
The words were from Francois Benoit, a representative of Haiti's government during the exile of the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But they are worth noting and remembering.
So is this: Democracies are not necessarily engines of great morality. The Communitarian Network recently invited responses to the Bush proposal that America reconsider its 60-year support of autocracies in the Middle East. Here is what one respondent, a Canadian professor, had to say:
"Democracies can be worse than autocracies. To be poor in democratic Mexico or Brazil is certainly worse than to be unrepresented in Cuba or Saudi Arabia. We should know better than to put much stock in the form of government. That it is necessary even to say this shows how tightly we are in the grip of a clichéd ideology."
That is professor Michael Neumann's caution. Here is mine: When you combine overwhelming military might with the utter certainty that your way is the one true way, the temptation can be very strong to impose truth -- political or religious -- at gunpoint.
We could do with a bit less cocksure certainty on both counts.
By William Raspberry
Monday, December 8, 2003; Page A25
The Bush administration seems determined to get into the business of exporting democracy to the Middle East. And a lot of Americans are wondering what took so long. After all, America is the political, military, economic and, yes, cultural envy of the world, and the one thing we are certain has produced that enviable status is the way we govern ourselves: U.S. democracy.
Viewed that way, it seems downright uncharitable not to offer the world a draft of the elixir that has made us what we are.
Thus it was that a month ago, in one of the more stirring speeches of his presidency, George W. Bush was urging a "crusade for freedom," beginning, conveniently, in Iraq but spreading with such force as to engulf the whole region, including our friends the royally ruled Saudis.
And I'm thinking: Maybe we ought to back off just a bit.
It isn't that I don't favor democracy. I do, and I'd love to see more of it in the world. But because of America's peculiar history (excluding that unpleasant little episode called slavery), we may be thinking of democracy as a lot easier, more natural and more inevitable than it is.
We sometimes behave as though, if we can only get democracy on the supermarket shelf alongside other forms of government, the world will choose it the way it would choose fresh-squeezed orange juice over canned.
So what's wrong with getting democracy on the shelf? Nothing at all. I'd love it to be available; I'd love to see our foreign policy promote it; I'd love us to tilt toward democracy at every opportunity.
But when the talk is in the context of Iraq (with overtones of transforming the Middle East), it seems to suggest not just support of local democratic stirrings but a policy of injecting democracy every chance we get. And even that will strike some people as no more inappropriate than the idea of Christian proselytizing has struck others. I mean, those people need Jesus, and it's our God-ordained role to spread that word.
Sometimes, in religion and in politics, it works. There are more Christians and more democracies today than there were a generation ago.
Still, there is reason for caution. After all, it takes a lot more than theoretical availability to get nations to choose democracy, and it takes a lot more than elections, however free or fair, to produce it. I'm reminded of an observation uttered more than 10 years ago by someone who understood the point.
"Elections are not automatically the establishment of democracy. . . . Democracy is a process, painful to establish in a land that has never known democracy, where suspicions are high, where absolutism has been the way of life. In a way it's a cultural thing that needs to be based upon respect for human rights, for other people's opinions, for institutions, including the courts. Elections are only a step -- a necessary step -- toward the goal of democracy."
The words were from Francois Benoit, a representative of Haiti's government during the exile of the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But they are worth noting and remembering.
So is this: Democracies are not necessarily engines of great morality. The Communitarian Network recently invited responses to the Bush proposal that America reconsider its 60-year support of autocracies in the Middle East. Here is what one respondent, a Canadian professor, had to say:
"Democracies can be worse than autocracies. To be poor in democratic Mexico or Brazil is certainly worse than to be unrepresented in Cuba or Saudi Arabia. We should know better than to put much stock in the form of government. That it is necessary even to say this shows how tightly we are in the grip of a clichéd ideology."
That is professor Michael Neumann's caution. Here is mine: When you combine overwhelming military might with the utter certainty that your way is the one true way, the temptation can be very strong to impose truth -- political or religious -- at gunpoint.
We could do with a bit less cocksure certainty on both counts.
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