The Pursuit of Democracy By Michael Kinsley

[kpete]

The Pursuit of Democracy
By Michael Kinsley
Slate.com

Friday 3 March 2006

What Bush gets wrong about nation-building.
The case for democracy is "self-evident," as someone once put it. The case for the world's most powerful democracy to take as its mission the spreading of democracy around the world is pretty self-evident, too: What's good for us is good for others. Those others will be grateful. A world full of democracies created or protected with our help ought to be more peaceful and prosperous and favorably disposed toward us. That world will be a better neighborhood for us than a world of snarling dictatorships.
There is no valid case against democracy. You used to hear a lot that democracy is not suitable for some classes of foreigners: simply incompatible with the cultures of East Asia (because deference to authority is too ingrained there), or the Arab Middle East (because everybody is a religious fanatic), or Africa (because they're too "tribal," or too predisposed to rule by a "big daddy," or something). But this line of argument has gone out of fashion, pushed offstage by free and fair elections in some surprising places. Even those who still harbor doubts about whether democracy is possible in this place or that - and even those who think that any democracy achieved in such places is likely to be a real mess - don't generally oppose the attempt. As someone else once said, "Good government is no substitute for self-government."

But the case against spreading democracy - especially through military force - as a mission of the U.S. government is also pretty self-evident, and lately it's been getting more so. Government, even democratic government, exists for the benefit of its own citizens, not that of foreigners. American blood and treasure should not be spent on democracy for other people. Or, short of that absolute, there are limits to the blood and treasure that the United States should be expected to spend on democracy elsewhere, and the very nature of war makes that cost hard to predict and hard to limit.

Furthermore, the encouraging discovery that free elections are possible in unexpected places has a discouraging corollary: If tolerance and pluralism and suchlike Western values are not essential preconditions for democratic elections, they are not the necessary result of elections either. By definition, democracy produces a government that the people - or some plurality of the people - want, at least at that moment. But it may not produce the kind of government that we wish they would want, or - more to the point - that we want.

The present debate over when to use American power in defense of democracies other than our own is at least more wholesome than the previous debate about using force to thwart or overthrow foreign democracies. The argument against tolerating Communist governments elected fair and square used to be that the election that brought them to office would likely be the last. "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people," as Henry Kissinger famously put it in reference to the election of Salvador Allende in Chile. (And we didn't just stand by and watch.) But today's concern about what we might call "nasty democracy" (defined as election results we don't like) is in some ways more profound and depressing. It is not that a regime will use democracy in the short run to stifle it in the long run (thus emboldening us to destroy democracy in order to save it). The danger is that democracy will reveal the people's true and continuing preference for a society with no place for all the other Western liberal values that our founding document calls "self-evident" (equality, freedom to pursue happiness, and so on). Even worse, these societies may decide to export their distaste for Western values just as we try to export the values themselves - and they may not agonize, Western-style, over the distinction between violent and nonviolent means of persuasion.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030506I.shtml

[CTyankee]

1. Athens tried to export democracy 2500 years ago

Guess what happened? Athens lost its empire and its democracy. It went to war with the autocratic regime of Sparta, a militaristic state that curbed freedoms on its citizenry and was backward culturally compared to Athens. Athens at the time was in its golden age. It "exported democracy" to Sicily, overextending itself disastrously. Sparta ended up sinking Athens's superb naval fleet and Athens was pretty much finished as an imperial power. It's all written down in unsparing detail in "The History of the Peloponesian War" by Thucydides.

Do we never learn from history?

[neweurope]

2. What makes me mad about this article is that the author seems to believe

that the Bushistas's aim really is "spreading democracy". Now we KNOW this is not the case.

If they really tried to do this the UN for instance would be a totally different place.

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