Democratizing the War on Terror?

What exactly is wrong with democracy promotion? There are a number of things that are not wrong with the idea. The most notable, which we have mentioned before, is its so-called idealism. Not only is idealism quite possibly a good thing, especially in these cynical, post-political times, but actually existing is not so much wild-eyed utopianism as one way of lowering our expectations for democracy. Those who criticize democracy promotion for being too utopian and unrealistic only push further on down the long road to political nihilism.

Nor is the problem with democracy promotion merely that it serves as moral window-dressing on imperial designs. It’s not that this isn’t true, but that there are a lot of different kinds of imperial window-dressings, and each is problematic in a way not reducible to the underlying interests they serve.

In fact, one interesting feature of the administration’s emphasis on democracy promotion is the way it reveals the inner weakness of the war on terror. Despite their best efforts to develop a foreign and domestic policy based entirely on fear and security, over time, the administration has been forced to try and enchant the raw exercise of American power in other ways. Democracy promotion, far from a bold and exciting project they have been championing from the start has been more of a rearguard effort to patch over a fraying foreign policy. It really came into its own as the central justification for invading Iraq and for Middle East diplomacy generally with the 2005 Iraqi elections, and subsequently Condoleeza Rice’s editorial substituting democratic peace for pre-emptive war as a strategic doctrine. Democracy promotion, in this sense, registers a kind of failure of the politics of fear – although of course, the attempt to defend democracy by suggesting that it makes people safe also signals how powerful security rather than liberty-based thinking is, at least in DC.

A deeper problem with democracy, though, is the way it views those who are to be ‘democratized’. A recent issue of The Washington Quarterly, devoted to democracy promotion, illustrates the problem. The debate ‘raging’ in those pages is how to improve democracy promotion. One article suggests Europe might offer a superior model to America’s, while another presents it as question of tactics – aid, might or diplomacy. The presumption they all share is that democracy is something you can export, or bring to other people, not something won through the independent efforts of the demos itself. For example, the article on diplomatic tactics presents itself as a critical alternative by arguing:

‘Democratization involves not only building up the democratic opposition—a key ingredient for successful democratic breakthrough—but also weakening or dividing the autocrats in power. NGOs, whose focus in these cases is usually and rightly to strengthen
the opposition, lack the ability to confront the regime directly. In contrast, the U.S. government has the power and resources to challenge autocratic regimes…’

As the article on Europe reminds us, this is not a uniquely American view: ‘the potential for conflict with the Europeans may be much more a matter of how democracy is promoted rather than whether it should be promoted.’

These are not arguments for emancipation of a people so much as for extensive meddling by various external agencies. It presumes the inability of the people themselves to be agents in winning their own freedom. In fact, it presupposes that they have no capacity for political self-organization, little awareness of what democracy entails, and are too intimidated to do anything but cower in abject helplessness. It even encourages third world populations to act as if they really were like that, with the misguided intent of spurring Western powers to intervene on their behalf.

Of course, any ‘democratic’ institutions founded by a third party on the premise that those taking part in them are too passive to achieve freedom on their own are unlike to be very stable, let alone function in a particularly democratic way. Just look at Afghanistan and Iraq, or even the European Raj in Bosnia for that matter. What limits can be set on an exercise of power that operates according to this logic of ‘interpassivity’? Representatives of the powerless are not constrained by the formal mechanisms of accountability the way properly elected representatives are. Democracy promoters need not even take into account the informal mechanisms of public criticism from their putative constituents, since the latter are presumably 'unable to speak'. In this light, democracy promotion is the most undemocratic exercise of power on offer.

The most sinister aspect of democracy promotion, therefore, is that it shares the same view of the individual as the war on terror. Policies are formed around the premise that individuals are victims first, and free agents a distant second. On this view, democracy is best promoted not by safeguarding personal and public autonomy, and by respecting principles of non-intervention, but by interfering extensively on others' behalf. One can only build empty institutional husks and passive citizens that way. Democracies and citizens are not built, they are self-made.