No one vaguely familiar with liberal foreign policy analysis could fail to ponder the possibility of an expanding liberal zone of peace. Since Minister Priya Manickchand’s, unfortunate, 4th of July statement there has been much theorizing about the zeal for the spread of democracy among Western diplomats. I have argued before that in the case of the United States of America, this is rooted in a long tradition (“Lead without leadership,” SN: 14/05/2014). But it also appears to me that much of the democratic evangelizing that today exists in some Western foreign policy circles has to do essentially with their own national security concerns.
In his most recent foreign policy address to graduates at West Point (US Military Academy), President Barack Obama said that the United States must always lead on the world stage and proceeded to outline a vision for the United States that contains four main elements. “Using military force when our core interests are at stake or our people are threatened; shifting our counter-terrorism strategy by more effectively partnering with countries where terrorist networks seek a foothold; continuing to strengthen and enforce international order through evolving our institutions, such as NATO and the United Nations; supporting democracy and human rights around the globe, not only as a matter of idealism, but one of national security” (“America Must Always Lead”: President Obama Addresses West Point Graduates” 28/05/2014, http://www.whitehouse.gov/).
In a 2005 book entitled “Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025,” Mark Palmer, a democracy activist and former US ambassador to Hungary and speech-writer to President Ronald Reagan, called for a global strategy to rid the world of the remaining forty-five autocratic regimes. He would give Obama’s fourth point a higher priority for, according to him, many of our problems – wars, poverty, environmental degradation, genocide terrorism, corruption, etc – can be laid at the feet of dictatorial regimes. In a fully democratic world the most difficult problems will be more amenable to solution.
“We in the democratic world need first of all to liberate ourselves from the conceptual baggage of the past. We need a new understanding of power, national interest, and national security in a world where a majority of nations are now democracies, a world with obvious potential for still further fundamental change, for the achievement of universal democracy. We need to recognise that the world is really divided not between cultures, religions or economies but between democrats and dictators” (ibid).
Palmer’s position reflects a tendency that was observed over two centuries ago by Immanuel Kant and has even deeper roots in the liberalism of John Locke (1632-1704). In his 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace” Kant noted that liberal states tend not to go to war with each other although they usually have little compunction in doing so against non-liberal states. He believed that if states adhered to three “definitive articles”, what he called a “pacific federation” would be established.
The first condition is the establishment of representative government containing an elected legislature, the separation of powers and the rule of law. States so organized would be responsible to the people and less prone to wars. We can see some of this today, when wars are very unpopular with the citizens of many major Western democracies and their leaders are war- shy for fear of being thrown out of office at the next election.
Kant’s other article had to do with respect for the rights of all human beings, which he believed would produce a commitment to respect for the rights of citizens of fellow republics because they are free citizens with similar rights that deserve to be respected. Inherent in this is a suspicion of states in which citizens are not free to choose their governments. Finally, there must be a commitment to social and economic interdependence. Free trade, for example, tends to optimize material benefits and foster cooperation. In other words, the instability caused by persistent conflict is not good for business.
The literature contains many examples of the gradual development of peace among liberal states. For instance, during the nineteenth century Anglo-American relations were punctuated by continual strife and even one war in 1812. But since the Reform Act of 1832 made representation the formal source of the sovereignty of the British parliament, Britain and the United States have settled their disputes diplomatically. Even the 1895 invocation of the Monroe doctrine by the United States and its threat to resist the British demands in its border quarrel with Venezuela “by every means in its power” never came to much!
Much later, notwithstanding severe Anglo-French colonial rivalry, liberal France and Britain formed an alliance against illiberal Germany before the First World War and in 1914-15, Italy, the liberal member of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria, reneged on its obligations to its allies, joining an alliance with Britain and France and declaring war on its former allies.
Today there are some 117 elected democracies and mature liberal democracies tend not go to war with each other. Thus it is understandable that President Obama can claim that the spread of democracy is not mere idealism but a matter of national security and Mark Palmer’s democratic mission can appear so evangelical. Indeed, in the interest of democratization, Mr. Palmer even supports violent regime change. “Though internal nonviolent democratic change aided from the outside is clearly preferable to the use of force, it is not always up to the task. Sometimes it takes military force to oust a dictator and pave the way to democracy.”
Palmer gave examples of other ambassadors and himself being warned by their government to be less strident and stick with the official agenda, but refused to so and was proved historically correct. He also opined “it is breathtaking folly for the foreign policy community to persist in the belief that aggressively promoting democracy and human rights may sound nice…but is irrelevant to and even conflicts with the protection of “national interest” and “stability” and “security”.
Though most comprehensive in his suggestions, Mr. Palmer gave some first steps for dealing with dictatorships. “The initial steps are modest enough,” he surmised, “that dictators can hardly say no.” Guyana is not among the forty-five dictatorships he is seeking to rid the world of and one of the initial steps that he claimed even dictators would find hard to refuse is a demand for “multi-candidate nonparty local government elections”!
henryjeffrey@yahoo.com
