December 20, 2007
RWR AND SONS (via Mike Daley):
The “March of Freedom” From Reagan to Bush: Two presidents, one idea (Paul Kengor, December 2007/January 2008, Policy Review)
Ronald Reagan left the presidency the third week of January 1989. By the end of that year, Solidarity candidates had swept 99 of 100 seats in a free and fair election in communist Poland, the Berlin Wall had crashed in a soon-to-be-reunified Germany, Vaclav Havel had left prison for the presidency of Czechoslovakia, and the continent ’s worst living dictator, Romania’s Nicolai Ceausescu, had been lined up against a wall by the masses and shot on Christmas Day — a day he had sought to ban. Two years later, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist, and the Cold War was over.Now, as a retired Reagan began what he called “the sunset of my life” in California, a sunrise of freedom set the world aglow.
During the 1970s, Reagan had often bemoaned the lack of freedom in the world, turning in his speeches to data from Freedom House marking the number of free and unfree nations. As president, he dedicated himself to improving those numbers.
By the early 1990s, we could look to the same source to demonstrate the degree of success of the “march of freedom”: In 1980 there were 56 democracies in the world; by 1990, there were 76. The numbers continued upward, hitting 91 in 1991, 99 in 1992, 108 in 1993, and 114 in 1994. Thirteen years after he’d entered the Oval Office, the number of free nations had doubled; by 1994, 60 percent of the world’s nations were democracies.
By the end of the violent twentieth century, which had seen over 50 million perish in two world wars and over 100 million murdered by communist governments, 120 of the world’s 192 nations were free. Outside of Western Europe, 90 percent of Latin American and Caribbean nations were considered democracies, along with 91 percent of Pacific Island states and 93 percent of the nations of East Central Europe and the Baltic area — i.e., the former Soviet region.
Yet there was one part of the world immune to this wave of freedom: the Middle East — the least democratic region on the planet and, perhaps not coincidentally, the most violent. A 1999-2000 survey by Freedom House (done, importantly, before September 11, 2001) found that an astonishing zero of the 16 Arab countries in the Middle East were democratic, the worst rate on the globe.
Freedom’s dungeon
Now, against great odds, another Republican president is attempting to extend Ronald Reagan’s march of freedom to that one area on earth where it has been most resisted.
Agree or not, September 11, 2001 taught George W. Bush something significant: Regardless of whether Iraq was in any way linked to that event, or to al Qaeda, or to terrorism generally — for the record, throughout the 1990s the Clinton State Department rightly listed Iraq as one of the world’s two chief sponsors of terrorism and devoted more attention to Iraq than to any other country in its final annual report — the forty-third president concluded that the pathology of Middle East dictatorship and violence had to be addressed, especially in a world in which wmd technology was coming increasingly within reach of any tyrant.
How to turn the Middle East around? The president concluded that there was only one hope: freedom — political and economic freedom. Indeed, in the academic field of international relations, one of the few practical debates of the 1990s was the “democratic peace” thesis. The argument postulates that democracies, generally speaking — and depending on their level of maturity and stability — do not fight one another and are a safer bet to be peaceful. Thus, to the extent that the hostile Middle East becomes more democratic, it is likely to become more peaceful.
George W. Bush began to sow the seeds for such a transformation, beginning in the Middle East ’s two most repressive states: Afghanistan and Iraq. After removing the Taliban in the fall of 2001, Bush removed Saddam’s regime in the spring of 2003. It is in those countries that Bush hoped to recommence the march.
While everyone would like to imahgine he lives in unique times and partisans and ideologues imagine enormous differences from one presidency to the next, the reality is that historians will look back at the past thirty years, at least, as a fairly undifferentiated period of finishing up the Long War and first slowing the growth of the New Deal and then replacing it with the Third Way.