Down Histologion way, Talos has a great quotation from Eric Hobsbawm about the difficulties associated with "exporting democracy," as so many people like to call it. The core of Professor Hobsbawm's critique seems to be that powerful states do not take major decisions in a democratic manner themselves, plus that what is sent abroad as democracy is often just attractive packaging for states advancing their self-interest in the context of power politics.
The war in Iraq could be used as an example, although it would be easy to challenge the notion that that the US or UK derives any benefit from that fiasco. Outside of a few small groups which have derived financial benefit -- but that is not just conspiracy theory, it is the problem with contemporary democracy generally. Look at surveys in any democratic state, or the Eurobarometer, and you will find high levels of discomfort in established democratic states. Most of it is derived from alienation from institutions, which are seen as dominated by powerful interests and nonrepresentative.
In the EU candidate countries or the countries that would like to be candidates, the problem is magnified by weak credibility of the new elites, and also by the feeling that "democracy" is being imposed as a set of demands from above. Europeans and Americans might be surprised that not everyone is so sure that their empire is necessarily more attractive than the Soviet one. What keeps the "transition" process going is that there is also very little nostalgia for the old authoritarianism or aspiration toward a new one in most places. This is a precarious foundation, and marginality, poverty and unemployment whack their hammers at it every day.
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13 comments:
Yes, you are right, we do feel the democracy is being imposed by someone, and alas that someone is at the same time present in Iraque, as liberator, or "liberator".
I feel sorry, during the old authoritarianism I was dreaming about good old England democracy, now Blair is Blair is Blair... Ergo, there is nothing to dream about!
Sorry, Anonimous is Quod!
I thought that was you! And understand your disappointment.
Nego -- posalji mi svoju e-mail adresu ako te zanima idea o "Balkan blog carnival" (dole u postu o nagradnoj igri).
E-Mail is there, among comments of that post -nagradna igra!
Quod
Hi Eric, a few comments:
- I think a crucial part of Hobsbawm's point, and one that is quite relevant in the Balkans is that:
"The conditions for effective democratic government are rare: an existing state enjoying legitimacy, consent and the ability to mediate conflicts between domestic groups. Without such consensus, there is no single sovereign people and therefore no legitimacy for arithmetical majorities."
This seems to apply perfectly to many places at many times in the Balkans.
- Yet the issue in Eastern Europe seems to be that what was introduced as "democracy", is not only a corrupt system in which most of the new elite is more or less the old elite under a "capitalist" guise, but most of the economic decisions and a large part of the social decisions,seem (and IMHO are) predetermined by an outside center that has no popular legitimacy - as arbritary and non-democratic as the old system with an even larger income inequality. Similar developments plague the West and are at the root of much of the discomfort Eric describes
- "Europeans and Americans might be surprised that not everyone is so sure that their empire is necessarily more attractive than the Soviet one."
(Because this is not pointed out often enough:) Well no one is surprised over here in Greece, which was on the receiving end of the "good empire's" attentions, including an unnecessary and extremely bloody civil war and various degrees of police-state, up until 1974, complete with murders, executions, exiles, imprisonment and torture - and the marginalization or mistrust of almost two thirds of the population. Yet democracy is strong here (as an idea with all its practical faults) because it was hard fought for, not imposed. (You'll be surprised though how many *conservatives* here lament the fall of the Soviet Union, because it served as a "couterbalance" to the US hegemony.)
- Ukrainians and Russians I meet here in Greece seem to overwhelmingly be of the opinion that the "old system" needed "fixing" not demolishing. These of course are people (often with university degrees) that found themselves working as home nurses (or much worse) in a foreign country and for whom the change has obviously been to the worse...
Plus - here is a related essay on the urgency of a real reinvention of democracy, by Portugese novelist and Nobel Laureate in literature Jose Saramago.
I hope that some other people will be responding as well! Actually the bit about conservatives does not surprise me much, because US conservatives (I include cold-war Democrats here as well) often make a similar point: competition gave them a reason to exist, and they have been looking for a replacement since the Soviet Union gave up.
Now, I am not so sure about the bit from Hobsbawn about consensus being a condition for democracy. The difficulty I have is not that it may not be true (though I suspect that it may not be--it might be a question of whether the "domestic groups" he is talking about have access to the political system or are excluded from it) but what it implies. It seems to imply that democracy cannot be a means for solving political problems but instead a luxury that becomes available once problems have been solved. There is an empirical issue here (have all democratic states successfully mediated their domestic conflicts?), and there may also be a question of cause and effect (is the legitimacy of the state a given, or a consequence of acceptance of the processes by which the state establishes and reestablishes its authority?). It is kind of surprising, but it may also be possible that Hobsbawm is ignoring economic issues. For me, as much as I may dislike Mr Bush, I have a level of comfort and autonomy that only depends on him in the extreme instance that he could completely destroy the prestige and prosperity of the country, and bad as he is I think that he is not likely to go quite that far. Were the country smaller and poorer, that level of autonomy would not exist.
I do agree that the time is past for blanket condemnation, and also blanket praise, of Communism. Whatever else those regimes were, they were governments, and there is enough information available to evaluate them on the basis of what they did or did not do, and not whether they claimed to have intellectual roots in Marx or not.
But enough from me! Plenty of room for discussion here!
Hobsbawm is one of those historians who gets better and better as he gets further from the here and now, and worse and worse as he gets closer. Hobsbawn on Napoleon's France is brilliant; Hobsbawm on Thatcher's Britain is unreadable.
"what is sent abroad as democracy is often just attractive packaging for states advancing their self-interest in the context of power politics" -- often, sure. Always, certainly not. I'll skip over the too much discussed examples of the Marshall Plan and post-WWII Europe and Japan to note that there are some quiet corners of the globe, from Belize and Botswana to the Virgin Islands, Costa Rica, and Samoa, where democracy has been transplanted quite successfully and is quietly flourishing.
Many of these are former colonies or semicolonies that have done well because they were small and strategically insignificant: the former colonial power had no reason to screw them over, so more disinterestedly benevolent impulses could prevail. (N.B. that this is a useful precondition, but not by itself sufficient; many small and obscure colonies, from Guyana to the Marshall islands have dropped into a more typical postcolonial pattern of political and economic dysfunction.)
A second category is East Asian tiger economies. Taiwan and South Korea deserve our careful attention here. Just a generation ago, both of these countries were authoritarian, highly militarized, intensely nationalist states led by long-term dictators or their immediate successors. As recently as the late 1970s, it would not have been ridiculous to call these states "fascist". (Wrong, IMO, but not ridiculous.) Yet both evolved smoothly and quickly into rambunctious but fully functional democracies.
Indonesia and Thailand present interesting intermediate cases. Indonesia has, goodness knows, massive problems; yet it has visibly been evolving in a democratic direction since 1999. Thailand was at least a semidemocracy, and seemed to be heading towards more pluralism and liberalism, but in the last few years progress has stopped or perhaps gone into reverse under a rather-too-strong President. (Imagine a Berlusconi, but in a state where checks on executive power were a lot less fully evolved.)
Finally, there's the Philippines, which really is a democracy... just a desperately poor, corrupt and dysfunctional one.
I'm going to be a bit provocative here, and note that democracy in East Asia is currently most advanced in those countries where western, and particularly American, influence has been strongest. I'll freely concede that the US played a very negative role in supporting brutal and authoritarian regimes in South Korea and Taiwan (among others). That said, I think the US role in the successful democratic transitions in those countries must be acknowledged as well.
Note carefully that when I say "US role", I'm not limiting that to the policies or actions of the US government. More on this if time permits.
And then there's Turkey. I think that arguments about Turkey fit better over on Histologion, but there's no question that Turkey has become much more democratic and free in the last couple of decades. Of course, Turks perceive democracy as something they imported, not something that was exported to them... but certainly the growth of liberal democracy in Turkey has been at least encouraged by outside actors, from the EU to Amnesty International. (No, seriously. Beginning in the 1980s, AI helped make torture in Turkey publicly unacceptable. It's still very very common, of course, but it used to be not just tolerated but openly embraced.)
Two final thoughts: one, democracy sensu strictu ain't much. You need things like a tradition of tolerance, an at least halfway functional economy (of whatever sort), the whole complex of organizations and attitudes that we call "civil society", and a bunch of other stuff to have a society worth living in and fighting for.
Two, Hobsbawm quite deliberately skips over the possibility that spreading democracy might /be/ in a state's self-interest. The old Commie. The fact that the neocons have recently given this doctrine a very bad name recently does not mean that it isn't sometimes valid anyhow.
Doug M.
I'll let other people decide whether all of Doug's fit as "democracy exports" or not. But I like very much the point that "democracy sensu strictu ain't much." When people use the term "democracy" as a value, most of the time they have something else in mind (responsive institutions, equal treatment, maybe also prosperity). This is confusing a procedure with an outcome, and leads to what the wacky semanticist S.I. Hayakawa (there! quoted a Republican!) called the "IFD" syndrome ("infatuation, frustration, disillusion").
Doug M.
Reluctant as I am to start our never ending debates on somebody else's weblog, I simply *can't* help but point out that:
None of the examples you mention, (Costa Rica, Botswana etc.) have had democracy *imposed* on them, it was (as your Turkish metaphor correctly points out) home grown and accepted. I'd argue that in a majority of countries around the world, democracy (or anyway something more democratic than the regimes they ended with) was impeded rather than aided by western involvement, sometimes quite violently (Mossedaq's Iran, Chile, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa etc. - I would add Qasim's Iraq up to a point). Indeed during the cold war the US and most of the West in general, was pretty much opposed to pretty much *every* democratic movement that mattered world-wide (Greece BTW is an excellent example, where the very shy liberal reforms of the original George Papandreou in the 60s were vehemently opposed by the State Dpt. leading to a "palace coup" and then, of course, the junta). Countries like Costa Rica were the exception.
As for South Korea, a not insignificant part of the praise for its democratic transformation has to go to the huge worker and student movement there - movements built on (among other things) a virulent anti-americanism and a demand for the democracy the pro-american government was denying them. Ditto for the Philippines. The US (government of course) in all cases played a *limiting* role - almost always *against* the pro-democracy movements in the area.
This stance was tempered and to a point reversed, only after the resulting third world democracies were guaranteed to be stripped of most real power on matters of economy and trade. Note though, that in Venezuela, where compliance still matters, the US was recently supportive of a coup to topple the (many times) democratically elected president of the country, while in Colombia it trains and arms possibly the most deadly paramilitary forces in the world.
Finally all the above applies in spades to Turkey. If you think that the US has played a constructive role in the development of Turkish democracy, I suggest you speak with the thousands of activists that were imprisoned or tortured during the past few decades. There was a large home-grown pro-democracy movement in Turkey. The EU has intervened so as to empower this movement. This is hardly exporting democracy...
Actually in most of the "undemocratic" countries there existed significant pro-democratic movements. and traditions. In these countries it is kind of disrespectful to those that suffered and died for the cause, to portray developments towards greater democracy as some sort of imposed order.
Reluctant as I am to start our never ending debates on somebody else's weblog...Yeah, it does feel a little strange. I'll try to keep this short. (And maybe we should switch it over there anyhow if it goes past a certain number of response cycles.)
None of the examples you mention, (Costa Rica, Botswana etc.) have had democracy *imposed* on them,Er, actually, yes several of them did. Democracy was not a part of indigenous WaTswana, Samoan, or Coastal Mayan culture. (Traditional Samoan culture was probably the least democratic on the planet. The highest and lowest social castes were viewed as, basically, different species. This continued to be so until late in the 19th century.)
As for South Korea, a not insignificant part of the praise for its democratic transformation has to go to the huge worker and student movement there The student movement was noisy but not particularly effective or relevant. The unions, on the other hand, were indeed important.
Think that one through, though: where did Koreans get the idea of labor unions _from_? When the Japanese took over in 1910, there weren't a dozen people in the country who had even heard of such a thing.
That's not a rhetorical question, BTW. The answer is known, and fairly obvious if you think about it.
movements built on (among other things) a virulent anti-americanism and a demand for the democracy the pro-american government was denying them.Anti-Americanism does play a significant part in South Korean politics. But it's very easy to overstate it. Note that South Korea's first democratically elected President was a Vietnam veteran, pro-American, anti-Communist businessman. (He was also a crook who ended up doing some years in jail, but that came later.)
Ditto for the Philippines. No, that one is just plain wrong. Sorry.
This stance was tempered and to a point reversed, only after the resulting third world democracies were guaranteed to be stripped of most real power on matters of economy and trade.Taiwan and Korea have been "stripped of most real power on matters of economy and trade"?
Boggle.
I love you, man, but I cry bullshit here. This has no connection to reality.
If you think that the US has played a constructive role in the development of Turkish democracy, Go back and look again at what I wrote, please.
EU has intervened so as to empower this movement. This is hardly exporting democracy...Isn't it, though?
Hobsbawm didn't specify "by invading" or "at the point of a gun". That's why I mentioned things like Amnesty International's letter-writing campaigns. Those count IMO.
You can set up a dichotomy between force and persuasion, but I think that's misleading. They're ends of a spectrum, not opposites. When the EU says "you can join, but only if you're first a tested and proven democracy," and holds candidate members to that standard... well, they're exporting democracy. Gently, but that's what they're doing.
it is kind of disrespectful to those that suffered and died for the cause, to portray developments towards greater democracy as some sort of imposed order.Tch. Democracies try to export democracy, by a wide variety of means. There are exceptions and exclusions, and the process is sloppy, sometimes violent, and by no means straightforward, but that's the broad historical trend.
If I write an Amnesty International letter for a prisoner in Burma, is that "kind of disrespectful"? I'm not seeing your point here, honestly.
Note again: I'm not taking only, or even mostly, about state-level policies and actions.
Doug M.
Let's not kid ourselves here and acknowledge that most commentary on exporting democracy serves fairly obvious political agendas. Hobsbawm is no exception. (I remember a brief chat I had with him in New York about ten years ago, just after his "Age of Extremes" was published, during which he displayed the most incredible ignorance about events in Yugoslavia -- not ignorance about events, in fact, but about what it all meant: the bigger picture. I couldn't help but feel he was simply nostalgic for the time of Tito and sad that something so wonderful had been destroyed, and full of contempt for those who in his view destroyed it -- along the lines of "who do these Slovenians and Croatians think they are.")
I think some of this is evident from his statement that "'Spreading democracy' aggravated ethnic conflict and produced the disintegration of states in multinational and multicommunal regions after both 1918 and 1989..."
I'm not sure how he could suggest, with a straight face, that the upheavals of 1989 were a result of democracy export policies by the West. Such policies only started working once the system had crumbled from within, so it's simply wrong to present this as some sort of Western invasion of the former Soviet Union, its satellites, and Yugoslavia. (Don't even get me started on 1918.) Plus, he also seems to suggest that dictatorship is fine as long as it keeps those savages under control, because as soon as you give them freedom, you see, they start slaughtering each other.
And in any case, even if correct, wouldn't his theory on 1989 simply demonstrate that democracy export can and does on occasion, and possibly quite often, coincide with the national interest of the great powers?
But the bigger problem I have with the critics of spreading democracy (and let's leave out for the moment specific policies, many of which I find as cynical as some of the posters here) is that they want to have it both ways: they accuse the US for not promoting democracy enough in the past, in cases such as Turkey or South Korea, and then proceed to condemn the current US policy of doing precisely that as imperialism, benevolent or otherwise, or cynicism. I honestly don't think the demonstrators in Tbilisi or Kiev cared too much why exactly the US supported them -- they were happy about it and that's it. Intentions may be an interesting thing for policy wonks to worry about, but for most people who are directly affected by such policies the key question is, does it work.
A point that might be added to Toby's, which seems timely on the weekend that very dubious elections are being held in Iraq, is that elections are not a value in themselves or a guarantee of legitimacy. One of the reasons that the 1990 elections in the Yugoslav republics produced governments that were hostile to one another is that the elections had a preemptive character -- a lot of actors trying to construct mandates in a hurry and be certain that federal elections, were they ever to happen, would have no relevance. It could be that elections in the republics were scheduled and designed in a way to make a democratic Yugoslavia impossible -- the local elites thought they could do a better job of it themselves.
A similar point could be made about the referenda for independence (even though some were required by the Badinter commission), which was a lesson that the Milosevic regime learned well in arranging their own referenda (the Kosovo referendum in 1998 for example). Not to go on too long -- what seems to be happening is that democracy is displaced by the strategic deployment of the form of democracy. It is the sort of thing that led one of those righties-in-leftie-suits that populate so much of the public discussion on the Balkans to tell me about Milosevic, "at least he was elected."
This may be obvious, but small countries are just as good at doing this as big ones, the crucial difference being that they have less ability to control the outcome.
A response: First of all let me begin with a rather contrarian assertion: Democracy (as a concept) is a familiar one to most of the world's population. It is also a popular concept. So much so in fact, that over the past century (at least) it required extraordinary violence to beat the idea out of various population's heads, because (as is its sister, sovereignty) it is a dangerous idea that very often leads to decisions being made that are contrary to established and powerful interests.
Indeed, at least during the cold war, and with the exception of Eastern Europe obviously, the West did its best to undermine anything resembling a meaningful democracy (and a meaningful sovereignty) over most of the world. One could argue that in many cases (South Africa being an obvious one) the US (as a government) supported the *most* undemocratic option, while encouraging corruption, in already corrupt states, and training murderers (death squads all over Latin America). Thus T K Vogel's argument does not apply, IMHO at least: I don't "accuse the US for “not promoting democracy enough in the past, in cases such as Turkey or South Korea", rather I accuse it of actively opposing democracy with all its power in both cases (and certainly in Turkey about which I think I have a more complete understanding). Indeed I think that this was a universal policy. Furthermore I would argue that both the opposition to home-grown democratic movements and its current policy of shoving a Frankenstein version of “democracy” down a conquered people's throat (after reducing them -in the case of Iraq - to utter desolation), are part of the same imperialism - which is now developing into a well defined neo-colonialism.
Eastern Europe is a different issue, for obvious reasons, although some of the resulting "democracies" have left a large part of the population worse off, in many cases, and equally disenfranchised - unless one considers the Yeltsin and Putin eras meanigfully democratic.
As for Doug a lot of our disagreement is semantic. I think he and I (along with Hobsbawm!) are talking about different things. AI reports and the development of democracy in Costa Rica (Mayan? In general? c'mon) are outside the scope of the argument presented here. More, possibly, in another venue but a few points:
- Philippines. What are you saying? The USA never supported Marcos?
- Re: South Korea and Taiwan: These are not third world countries, eh?
- Turkey: As you well know there was a strong democratic movement in Turkey. Without it no amount of pressure from the EU would have made a difference.
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