NOBLE WAGER

Spreading Democracy in the Modern World (Victor Davis Hanson, July 7th, 2005)

Just as globalization, I think, brought the matter to the fore, it also offered some solution, that unlike the 19th or 17th or 15th centuries, people could not only learn of the relative impoverishment of the Middle East that they suffered under, but they could see people voting in Ethiopia, they could see people voting in the former republics of the Soviet Union, and they can see Western institutions, Western think tanks, Western governments who can lend expertise to sort of jump-start this long 2,500-year process, even though it’s foreign, even though it’s implanted by strangers The belief was that in a globalized society there were new tools or methodologies or protocols that might give us a pass from this hard ancient truth that democracy is an epiphenomenon of a larger cultural tradition and not so easily grafted.

Of course there was some evidence that in the case of Turkey there had been consensual government. Most of the world’s Muslims today perhaps vote under consensual societies in India and Turkey and to a degree in Indonesia and Malaysia. So there was the idea that there was nothing antithetical necessarily between Islam and voting or constitutional government. As I said earlier, in the 50’s the problem wasn’t Islam as much as pan-Arabism that was antithetical to democracy. So there was at least the alternative view that Islam could be compatible with democracy.

And finally there was this age-old truth that if you think about it, democracies really don’t attack other democracies. We can quibble about the war of 1812 or the Boer War or the American Civil War and say there were senates or houses or parliaments, but on examination there was really one society that was open and free, the United States, in a way that Great Britain by 1812 still wasn’t. And the Boers were a very different society than Victorian England. I think the North was a very different society than the South. In that context, not since either republican city-states like Florence and Venice fought each other or Athens invaded democratic Sicily in 413 have you seen a democratic society attacking, another democratic society. They can attack non-democratic societies, but the thinking was there was historical precedent that if you created a nucleus of democratic societies, then there would be less likely problems not only with terrorism and WMD but wars against one another.

And all of that together I think after 9/11 explains our present policy, not as the first resort — because remember that we have tried realpolitik, we’ve tried bribery, we’ve tried arms sales to particular governments, we’ve tried just cash infusion. So this idea that democracy was thought up well before 9/11 and then implanted in some conspiratorial fashions I think wrong. It was not the first choice. It was the last choice. And I think it was the last choice of desperation after 9/11, and it was done with some reluctance, because I think that most of the people in the administration came in as realists and realized from a whole body of academic work that democracy is not easily transferred from the West to the non-West, but felt for the reasons I outlined that it was (A), their last choice, and (B) there was some optimism in this 21st century that it might just work.

And there we have it, a policy that tries to graft, implant and transfer the imagination of the Greeks, fast-forwarding 2,500 years to a vastly different geographical location, a religious tradition, and a political heritage that’s not only alien but in some cases antithetical to the original aspirations of the Greeks.

I’ll just finish by, will it work? I don’t know, but I think the better question is, does anybody have a better alternative? Because as we saw in the Balkans, as we saw in the case of the Middle East, I think realpolitik or simple neglect or giving subsidies or cash grants to dictatorships give a short-term stability but a long-term instability. And that this messy solution, however difficult it seems in the here and now, offers the only possible way out of this paradox in the Middle East, of a society that is traditional and highly religious and yet autocratic and has the ability to witness what’s going on in the world instantaneously.

Let me just finish by saying that I think for all of the horror of the last three years, I’m optimistic If we look at elections in parts of the former Soviet Union, or we look at Ethiopia or we look at Iraq or Afghanistan, and we look at the elections in the Netherlands and France, there does seem to be a commonality. Communism is dead. The great communist power of China seems to be more like America in 1870. It’s hyper-capitalist, laissez-faire. It’s on some type of metamorphosis, but it’s drifting away from a communist mode of production. Fascism is gone from its birth in Europe. I think we won’t see a Mubarak II or an Assad III, instead we will see what we saw in Lebanon and the pressure on the Gulf states. So I think fascism is dead. Islamicism is nihilistic. It offers nothing. Can’t house anybody, it can’t educate anybody. It’s just devolved into a hypercritical reaction to Western affluence and success. It leads nowhere. There is no 8th century caliphate that’s going to reappear.

And the other strain which I mentioned at the very beginning, this other strain of Western culture that seeks an equality of result, I think we’re seeing in Europe that whether it’s demographic crisis or low growth or high unemployment, or most importantly fear of an 80,000-man unaccountable bureaucracy in Brussels dictating things from the size of a banana in Greece to an EU-approved beach in Spain, that that’s not going to work either. In other words, when we get down to it all, what’s left is Western liberal government coming from the Greeks and the Romans, and then evolving to an Anglo-Saxon model of open markets and individual liberty. For all its excesses, it’s really the only paradigm that works. I think that the world is slowly coming to that acknowledgment.

One hopes the world is acknowledging faster than the left is undermining at home.