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The Dangers of Exporting Democracy (as opposed to say, fascism)
No, let's not have democracy spread. Let's have Islamofascism and communism.
 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.
| You get too many democracies in this world, there's the danger the natives'll start doing as they damned well please. |
| It's much better to have a world ordered by better people who know about these things. |
The rhetoric implies that democracy is applicable in a standardised (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.
As I've pointed out before, "democracy" is shorthand for "freedom" and "liberty." If you listen to Bush's speeches, he uses all three words just about interchangeably. Democracy is, of course, a political system, whereas the other two are actually concepts. Freedom and liberty are used interchangeably by nearly everyone, though, as Jonah Goldberg pointed out a couple years ago, there are differences between the two. "Freedom", in Baathist and other Fascist usage, accrues to the state, and in Western usage it accrues to the individual.
Liberty is generally understood to accrue to the individual exclusively. Liberty is not necessarily limited to democracies. We have a republic, and more individual liberties than "democracies" like Pakistan or Bangladesh. An oligarchy, a constitutional monarchy, even a democratic centralist system, could theoretically guarantee its citizens' liberties. Fascism and its Baathist descendants by definition cannot; they're built on the very basis of near-static social class. Neither can most non-Baathist authoritarian states look at Zimbabwe and Sudan, Ivory Coast and Turkmenistan. Liberty says that one man's opinion is as good as another's, that one man (or woman) is as good as another. This makes each life precious, not something to be wasted on national aggrandizement or adventurism. The Guardian seems to have something against this concept. I suppose it's because of that English social class heritage. |
| It's because of the cross between the French Revolution and its fraternité and 20th century progressivism with its under-the-cover socialism. Some people are just plain smarter, so they should rule the world. They won't behave like Plato's disinterested philosophers, however; their goal is an ordered society with themselves in charge. For all their brave words about equality, it's strikingly fascist in its execution. |
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.
| Had the Weimar Republic been based on the idea of individual liberty, that all men are guaranteed their liberty and that no government has the power to take it away without the citizen abrogating it, that in fact the government is the guarantor of liberty, then Hitler never would have happened. |
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).
| Luckily, we don't have a world government. If the human race is very lucky we won't have a world government. Ever. |
| If the "world community" had the sense of liberty that Fred laid out above, there would have been no need for an intervention in Iraq, since Saddam would have been smothered in his crib. |
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.
| The Guardian, like the left in general, values "peace" more than they do liberty. Sheep are very peaceful while they're grazing... |
| A peace in perfect order, with wise men schooled in the finest schools patiently explaining to the masses what's good for them. In a sad way it's not like the desire in the Arab world for a caliphate, only the progressive caliph doesn't need a bejeweled turban, an open account at the state bank will do nicely. |
Globalisation 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 favours by occupying them.
| And one should always be suspicious of high hatters who make the condescending assumption that the Natives can't handle their own affairs. |
Posted by: Captain America 2005-01-23 |
