[Peace-discuss] Hobsbawm - Exporting Democracy

[Lisa Chason]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1396038,00.html
 
The Guardian     Saturday January 22, 2005
 
The dangers of exporting democracy
 
Bush's crusade is based on a dangerous illusion and will fail
 
By Eric Hobsbawm
 
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. 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.
 
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. 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). 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. 
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.
 
Another factor may be the most important: the US has been ready with 
the
necessary combination of megalomania and messianism, derived from its
revolutionary origins. Today's US is unchallengeable in its 
techno-military
supremacy, convinced of the superiority of its social system, and, 
since
1989, no longer reminded - as even the greatest conquering empires 
always
had been - that its material power has limits. Like President Wilson,
today's ideologues see a model society already at work in the US: a
combination of law, liberal freedoms, competitive private enterprise 
and
regular, contested elections with universal suffrage. All that remains 
is to
remake the world in the image of this "free society".
 
This idea is dangerous whistling in the dark. Although great power 
action
may have morally or politically desirable consequences, identifying 
with it
is perilous because the logic and methods of state action are not those 
of
universal rights. All established states put their own interests first. 
If
they have the power, and the end is considered sufficiently vital, 
states
justify the means of achieving it - particularly when they think God is 
on
their side. Both good and evil empires have produced the barbarisation 
of
our era, to which the "war against terror" has now contributed.
 
While threatening the integrity of universal values, the campaign to 
spread
democracy will not succeed. The 20th century demonstrated that states 
could
not simply remake the world or abbreviate historical transformations. 
Nor
can they easily effect social change by transferring institutions 
across
borders. 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. When this consensus is absent, democracy has been suspended 
(as
is the case in Northern Ireland), the state has split (as in
Czechoslovakia), or society has descended into permanent civil war (as 
in
Sri Lanka). "Spreading democracy" aggravated ethnic conflict and 
produced
the disintegration of states in multinational and multicommunal regions
after both 1918 and 1989.
 
The effort to spread standardised western democracy also suffers a
fundamental paradox. A growing part of human life now occurs beyond the
influence of voters - in transnational public and private entities that 
have
no electorates. And electoral democracy cannot function effectively 
outside
political units such as nation-states. The powerful states are 
therefore
trying to spread a system that even they find inadequate to meet 
today's
challenges.
 
Europe proves the point. A body such as the European Union could 
develop
into a powerful and effective structure precisely because it has no
electorate other than a small number of member governments. The EU 
would be
nowhere without its "democratic deficit", and there can be no 
legitimacy for
its parliament, for there is no "European people". Unsurprisingly, 
problems
arose as soon as the EU moved beyond negotiations between governments 
and
became the subject of democratic campaigning in the member states.
 
The effort to spread democracy is also dangerous in a more indirect 
way: it
conveys to those who do not enjoy this form of government the illusion 
that
it actually governs those who do. But does it? We now know something 
about
how the actual decisions to go to war in Iraq were taken in at least 
two
states of unquestionable democratic bona fides: the US and the UK. 
Other
than creating complex problems of deceit and concealment, electoral
democracy and representative assemblies had little to do with that 
process.
Decisions were taken among small groups of people in private, not very
different from the way they would have been taken in non-democratic
countries.
 
Fortunately, media independence could not be so easily circumvented in 
the
UK. But it is not electoral democracy that necessarily ensures 
effective
freedom of the press, citizen rights and an independent judiciary.
 
. Eric Hobsbawm is professor emeritus of economic and social history of 
the
University of London at Birkbeck and author of The Age of Extremes: The
Short 20th Century 1914-1991; this is an edited version of an article 
that
first appeared in the journal Foreign Policy.

 

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