by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n Part II: Spreading Democracy in the Modern World<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n N<\/span>ow coming to more germane questions, what in the world would the United States think they\u2019re doing trying to promote democracy in areas in southeastern Europe, Turkey, and especially the Middle East that have no such tradition?\u00a0 Because before we got democracy in 507 B.C. in Athens, we had, as I said, 200 years of timocracy, or a slow, consensual government evolution to radical democracy.\u00a0 And before we had the present-day European experiment of the E.U., we had to go through everybody from Hitler to Franco and the Inquisition.\u00a0 What makes the United States think that they can implant this finished product almost instantaneously?\u00a0 I think there are some reasons why they think they can, and I\u2019d like to review them in closing.<\/p>\n The first is, after the Cold War, when we really didn\u2019t have 7,000 nukes pointed at us, the old\u00a0realpolitik<\/i>\u00a0that said in the case of the Middle East, pump oil and keep out communists, was not longer the operative principle.\u00a0 In other words, the United States had leeway for idealism.\u00a0 I\u2019m often loathe to criticize the cold warriors who\u2019ve made odious deals with a Somoza or a Shah.\u00a0 I think they were mistaken in retrospect, but I say that in retrospect that I didn\u2019t have the responsibility for the security of the United States against the Soviet Union and a system that had killed 30 million of its own and was nuclearly armed, and pointed at us.\u00a0 But now that that system has collapsed, it seems to me that there\u2019s a lot more alternatives in supporting real grassroots democratic movements, where there is no longer the old warning of a cold warrior that this socialist is not really a socialist, he\u2019s going to turn into a communist and a Stalinist and invite in the Soviet Union.\u00a0 There were more options after the Cold War.\u00a0 That was one reason I think promotion of democracy is very important.<\/p>\n The other is the diagnosis of the problem of Islamicism.\u00a0 I think it would be fair to gauge that the predominant exegesis in the 60\u2019s and 70\u2019s was that Islamicism was a product of post-colonial Arab world, or corporate exploitation, or enforced poverty from the West.\u00a0 Of course, if we had this discussion in 1960, we wouldn\u2019t be talking about Islamicism, we\u2019d be talking about the dangers of the Soviet-imposed totalitarianism on tribal societies and traditional societies, or pan-Arabism.\u00a0 There would have been other -isms, in other words.\u00a0 But the constant through all these metamorphoses is the lack of consensual government in the Middle East, and it\u2019s our responsibility or our burden or our bad luck that we came of age in the period of globalization, where people all over the world could see through CD\u2019s, computers, televisions and movies relative affluence, relative freedom, and all such imbalances instantaneously.\u00a0 And in this region not only was there oil that distorted some of the economies, but there was no democracy.\u00a0 So people in the Middle East, if they once had a comparable gross national product to a Korea or a Venezuela or a Brazil in 1950, at least in Egypt or North Africa, the absence of democratic government, open markets and transparency meant that by 2000 they were way, way behind.\u00a0 Israel is a larger gross domestic product than all of the Arab states of North Africa.\u00a0 Or Egypt had fallen far behind South Korea, even though 40 years earlier they were more or less comparable.\u00a0 And this knowledge of failure now is projected into the living room, and it challenged people to re-think why this was so.<\/p>\n And along with this dilemma was this Western virus that we\u2019ve talked about, of freedom and license and affluence, the good and the bad.\u00a0 And this dynamism questioned the patriarch, who said somebody could marry at a certain age.\u00a0 It questioned the mullah, who said that somebody should pray in a particular way.\u00a0 It questioned every type of hierarchy in the Middle East. One of the solutions with dealing with this awful truth in an undemocratic society was to blame Israel or blame the United States or blame the West for their own, in some ways, self-induced poverty.\u00a0 And if you have autocratic governments who make a devil\u2019s bargain with Islamicists to divert responsibilities, in exchange for sanctuary or in exchange for subsidies to divert that frustration toward the United States, I think you have the calculus for 9\/11, but more importantly, you also have a vision of the solution.<\/p>\n After all, we\u2019re not worried about terrorists in democratic societies.\u00a0 We\u2019re not worried about, to the same degree, that France has WMD or England, or even to the same degree that Russia now has more WMD than it did during the Soviet period.\u00a0 I think there was the thinking that a democratic solution might be comprehensive and systematic and eliminate these pathologies and get the Middle East back on the bus of history, so to speak.\u00a0 But that still doesn\u2019t explain why we thought we could do it after 9-11.<\/p>\n J<\/span>ust as globalization, I think, brought the matter to the fore, it also offered some solution, that unlike the 19th<\/sup>\u00a0or 17th<\/sup>\u00a0or 15th<\/sup>\u00a0centuries, people could not only learn of the relative impoverishment of the Middle East that they suffered under, but they could see people voting in Ethiopia, they could see people voting in the former republics of the Soviet Union, and they can see Western institutions, Western think tanks, Western governments who can lend expertise to sort of jump-start this long 2,500-year process, even though it\u2019s foreign, even though it\u2019s implanted by strangers\u00a0 The belief was that in a globalized society there were new tools or methodologies or protocols that might give us a pass from this hard ancient truth that democracy is an epiphenomenon of a larger cultural tradition and not so easily grafted.<\/p>\n Of course there was some evidence that in the case of Turkey there had been consensual government.\u00a0 Most of the world\u2019s Muslims today perhaps vote under consensual societies in India and Turkey and to a degree in Indonesia and Malaysia.\u00a0 So there was the idea that there was nothing antithetical necessarily between Islam and voting or constitutional government.\u00a0 As I said earlier, in the 50\u2019s the problem wasn\u2019t Islam as much as pan-Arabism that was antithetical to democracy.\u00a0 So there was at least the alternative view that Islam could be compatible with democracy.<\/p>\n And finally there was this age-old truth that if you think about it, democracies really don\u2019t attack other democracies.\u00a0 We can quibble about the war of 1812 or the Boer War or the American Civil War and say there were senates or houses or parliaments, but on examination there was really one society that was open and free, the United States, in a way that Great Britain by 1812 still wasn\u2019t.\u00a0 And the Boers were a very different society than Victorian England.\u00a0 I think the North was a very different society than the South.\u00a0 In that context, not since either republican city-states like Florence and Venice fought each other or Athens invaded democratic Sicily in 413 have you seen a democratic society attacking, another democratic society.\u00a0 They can attack non-democratic societies, but the thinking was there was historical precedent that if you created a nucleus of democratic societies, then there would be less likely problems not only with terrorism and WMD but wars against one another.<\/p>\n And all of that together I think after 9\/11 explains our present policy, not as the first resort \u2014 because remember that we have tried\u00a0realpolitik<\/i>, we\u2019ve tried bribery, we\u2019ve tried arms sales to particular governments, we\u2019ve tried just cash infusion.\u00a0 So this idea that democracy was thought up well before 9\/11 and then implanted in some conspiratorial fashions I think wrong.\u00a0 It was not the first choice.\u00a0 It was the last choice.\u00a0 And I think it was the last choice of desperation after 9\/11, and it was done with some reluctance, because I think that most of the people in the administration came in as realists and realized from a whole body of academic work that democracy is not easily transferred from the West to the non-West, but felt for the reasons I outlined that it was (A), their last choice, and (B) there was some optimism in this 21st<\/sup>\u00a0century that it might just work.<\/p>\n And there we have it, a policy that tries to graft, implant and transfer the imagination of the Greeks, fast-forwarding 2,500 years to a vastly different geographical location, a religious tradition, and a political heritage that\u2019s not only alien but in some cases antithetical to the original aspirations of the Greeks.<\/p>\n I<\/span>\u2019ll just finish by, will it work?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know, but I think the better question is, does anybody have a better alternative?\u00a0 Because as we saw in the Balkans, as we saw in the case of the Middle East, I think\u00a0realpolitik<\/i>\u00a0or simple neglect or giving subsidies or cash grants to dictatorships give a short-term stability but a long-term instability.\u00a0 And that this messy solution, however difficult it seems in the here and now, offers the only possible way out of this paradox in the Middle East, of a society that is traditional and highly religious and yet autocratic and has the ability to witness what\u2019s going on in the world instantaneously.<\/p>\n Let me just finish by saying that I think for all of the horror of the last three years, I\u2019m optimistic If we look at elections in parts of the former Soviet Union, or we look at Ethiopia or we look at Iraq or Afghanistan, and we look at the elections in the Netherlands and France, there does seem to be a commonality.\u00a0 Communism is dead.\u00a0 The great communist power of China seems to be more like America in 1870.\u00a0 It\u2019s hyper-capitalist, laissez-faire.\u00a0 It\u2019s on some type of metamorphosis, but it\u2019s drifting away from a communist mode of production.\u00a0 Fascism is gone from its birth in Europe.\u00a0 I think we won\u2019t see a Mubarak II or an Assad III, instead we will see what we saw in Lebanon and the pressure on the Gulf states.\u00a0 So I think fascism is dead.\u00a0 Islamicism is nihilistic.\u00a0 It offers nothing.\u00a0 Can\u2019t house anybody, it can\u2019t educate anybody.\u00a0 It\u2019s just devolved into a hypercritical reaction to Western affluence and success.\u00a0 It leads nowhere.\u00a0 There is no 8th<\/sup>\u00a0century caliphate that\u2019s going to reappear.<\/p>\n And the other strain which I mentioned at the very beginning, this other strain of Western culture that seeks an equality of result, I think we\u2019re seeing in Europe that whether it\u2019s demographic crisis or low growth or high unemployment, or most importantly fear of an 80,000-man unaccountable bureaucracy in Brussels dictating things from the size of a banana in Greece to an EU-approved beach in Spain, that that\u2019s not going to work either.\u00a0 In other words, when we get down to it all, what\u2019s left is Western liberal government coming from the Greeks and the Romans, and then evolving to an Anglo-Saxon model of open markets and individual liberty. For all its excesses, it\u2019s really the only paradigm that works.\u00a0 I think that the world is slowly coming to that acknowledgement.\u00a0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Speech Given to the Woodrow Wilson Center on Democracy by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers Part II: Spreading Democracy in the Modern World<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[787],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-182","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4460,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-hard-road-to-democracy\/","url_meta":{"origin":4342,"position":0},"title":"The Hard Road to Democracy","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 31, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Fostering elections in Iraq is a hard road, well apart from the daily violence of the Sunni Triangle. The autocratic Sunni elite of surrounding countries prefers democracy to fail, warning us that an Iranian-sponsored theocracy will surely follow in Iraq, legitimizing a new\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2005"","block_context":{"text":"January 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/january-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4492,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-democracy\/","url_meta":{"origin":4342,"position":1},"title":"Why Democracy?","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 11, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Ten reasons to support democracy in the Middle East by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Neoconservatives hope that a democratic Iraq and Afghanistan can usher in a new age of Middle Eastern consensual government that will cool down a century-old cauldron of hatred. 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The first one regards democratization in Iraq and the Middle East,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2005"","block_context":{"text":"July 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/july-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1683,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/democracy-at-risk\/","url_meta":{"origin":4342,"position":3},"title":"Democracy at Risk","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 26, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim American Thinker A review of\u00a0The War of Ideas: Jihadism Against Democracy\u00a0by Dr. Walid Phares (Macmillen, 2007, pp. 288) first appeared inThe America Thinker\u00a0under the book's title. After the strikes of 9\/11, a plethora of books dealing with the threat of radical Islam appeared in the West. 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