|
The myth that shapes Bush's
world
LA Times Opinion
By Mark Helprin
January 15, 2006
THE PRESIDENT believes and often states, as if it were a self-evident truth,
that "democracies are peaceful countries." This claim, which has been advanced
in the past in regard to Christianity, socialism, Islam and ethical culture, is
the postulate on which the foreign policy of the United States now rests.
Balance of power, deterrence and punitive action have been abandoned in favor
of a scheme to recast the political cultures of broad regions, something that
would be difficult enough even with a flawless rationale because the power of
even the most powerful country in the world is not adequate to transform the
world at will.
Nor is the rationale flawless. It is possible to discover various
statistical correlations among democracy and war and peace, depending on how
they are defined and in what time frames. The chief pitfall in such
social-science exercises is in weighing something such as, for example, the
Mughal Campaign in Transoxiana, 1646-47, against something like, for example,
World War II. Generally, a straightforward historical approach is better. And
what does it show?
Even without reference to the case of a democracy that, finding self-defense
insufficient justification and retaliation an insufficient end, makes war on a
non-democracy so as to make the non-democracy a democracy, the postulate on
which the president has in all good faith chosen to rely is contradicted by
inconvenient fact.
Germany, the primary instigator of World War I, was a democracy. Although
party governance weakened immediately before the war, it did so according to
the popular will. When hostilities broke out, power flowed back to the
Reichstag as a result of its increased belligerency in reaction to the threat
of, perhaps ironically, nondemocratic Russia. Democratic Italy joined the
entente because it had been spoiling for a fight to wrest South Tyrol from
Austria. Extending its northern defenses to the natural Alpine barrier was
obviously in Italy's interest, and popular sovereignty acted not as a break on
war for this purpose but as a stimulus.
Less a democracy but a democracy nevertheless, Japan saw its parliamentary
government wax and wane in the decades before World War II, losing eventually
to the militarists but resurging as late as 1937 almost to regain control, with
the Meiji Constitution unrepudiated and in force throughout the war.
What is one to make of the many 19th century colonial conquests on the part
of democratic European powers? What is one to make of the Mexican and
Spanish-American wars, in which, on the flimsiest pretexts, the United States,
the leading democracy in the world, moved to war? And, four score and five
years after the American founding, the most destructive war in American history
arose entirely from within, in belated and necessary fulfillment of the
Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, documents unexcelled as the
guide stars of democracy itself.
Immediate counters to these examples might be that Prussian democracy is an
oxymoron, Italian democracy was more feeble then than it is even now, the
Japanese had made only a shadow play of Western constitutionalism, colonial
conquests don't count because they had begun before the European democracies
matured and were continued out of habit (oops, there goes the Congo; we did it
again). And as for the United States, well, the Mexican War had something to do
with Texas, the Spanish-American with the Maine, and at the time of the Civil
War, not a single woman was able to vote and a large portion of the population
was enslaved.
But such attempts at explaining the complexity of a democracy's relation to
war — young democracies are ferocious, old ones serene; the extent and/or
speed of economic development predisposes a democracy one way or another in
regard to war and peace; as do limitation or extensions of the franchise; etc.
etc. — tend to founder because the sample is simultaneously too varied
and too small to produce valid rules.
And that is just the point. It isn't that democracies are too old or too
young or too fat or too thin, but that none is perfect and that, therefore, all
are subject to forces that may override the theoretical peacefulness of
representative governments. Even perfect democracies, which have never been and
will never be, cannot offer the kind of Pax Democratica that the United States
now seeks to construct among a group of states that are famous for their
immunity to liberal governance.
Other than Israel, the major countries of the region that are the most
democratic are Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon and Kuwait. If democracy in Turkey and
Pakistan could be drawn as a horse, it would have to have a soldier in the
saddle. In Lebanon, it would have a Syrian in the saddle.
And the more Turkey and Pakistan approach the genuine democracy to which
American policy would direct them, the more Islamist they will become and the
more they will want to do exactly the opposite of what we desire. The more
Kuwait democratizes too, the more Islamist it becomes. In the 2003 elections,
only 20% of contested seats went to neither traditionalists nor Islamists, and
of late the democratically nascent governments of Iraq and Kuwait have had to
erect a fence along their border to prevent Kuwaiti youth from crossing to join
the insurgency.
Not only does the U.S. expend a great deal of effort to usher politically
impure states into a form of popular sovereignty that will not stop them from
acting inimically to our interests, but in distancing itself from authoritarian
states that are willing to work with us, it forgoes potentially critical
advantages. For the pleasure of displaying our virtue, we may someday suffer
innumerable casualties in a terrorist attack that a compromised state might
have helped us to prevent.
In foreign policy, carelessness and confusion often lead to tragedy. Thus, a
maxim chosen to guide the course of a nation should be weighed in light of
history and common sense.
Or is that too much to ask? Mark Helprin is a senior fellow of the Claremont
Institute. His novels include "A Soldier of the Great War" and "Winter's Tale."
A version of this article will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Claremont
Review of Books.
|
|