International democracy promotion as a political ideology: upsurge and retreat

Abstract

The meta-narrative of ‘democracy promotion’ rose to international ascendancy in the 1990s. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked its apparently unstoppable advance; the terrorist assaults of 11 September 2001 its culmination and subsequent retreat. This article interprets the post-2001 retreat of democracy promotion as a foreseeable consequence of the 1990s overreach. A threefold argument is set out here. First, that in its ascendant phase, this meta-narrative displayed core features of a ‘strong’ political ideology. Second, while events since 2001 have proved it partly wanting, foundational reassessments have been blocked by the prevalence of binary analysis, counterposing autocracy and democracy, and democracy promotion and prevention. Third, it reviews the merits of using tripartite schemas to understand the ‘democracy prevention’ or ‘anti-democracy promotion’ responses elicited by the ideology and practice of democracy promotion. It is argued that, however clear in theory, binary polarities are never absolute opposites in practice and that contemporary ‘democracy prevention’ cannot be seen as a straightforward mirror image of 1990s orthodoxy about democracy promotion. It concludes that tripartite classifications open the door to ‘second best’ predictions and prescriptions. Such an approach permits a more pluralist and self-critical take on the prospects for advancing political freedom than binary analysis, and thereby repositions the debate in a more intellectually defensible manner.

Notes

^1. The evolution of western thought and practice on democracy promotion can be traced through the insightful contributions of Tom Carothers at the Carnegie Endowment. See, in particular, Tom Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve (Washington, DC: Carnegie, 1999); Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion (Washington, DC: Carnegie, 2004); Democracy Promotion during and after Bush (Washington, DC: Carnegie, 2007); and ‘The continuing backlash against democracy promotion’, in P. Burnell and R. Youngs (Eds) New Challenges to Democratization (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 59–72, which also contains Nancy Bermeo's analysis of the priority of US military spending over democracy assistance.

^2. Michael Freeden, The Political Theory of Political Thinking: The Anatomy of a Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 59.

^3. The foundational text in this idiom was Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay, ‘The end of history and the last man’, subsequently published under that title in book form by the Free Press in 1992. Tony Blair's speech to the Economic Club in Chicago in April 1999 probably represents the apogée of this doctrine. It is worth noting that Fukuyama (though not Blair) moved on, as can be seen in his America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).

^4. William J. Dobson, The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (London: Harvill Secker, 2012).

^5. Rachel Vanderhill, Promoting Authoritarianism Abroad (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner, 2013).

^6. The term was coined by François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), in which Lyotard characterizes postmodernity as the age of ‘incredulity’ regarding all grand or meta-narratives. The fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to reawaken our capacity for credulity, if one accepts the view posited here about democracy promotion.

^7. For the purposes of this article, the definition of ideology adopted here is very close to that of Destutt de Tracy, who coined the term idéologie during French Revolution to describe his ‘science of ideas’. It consists of a comprehensive explanatory theory of the world, sets out an abstract programme of social and political organization that seeks to recruit and persuade adherents and foster commitment, the implementation of which involves a struggle.

^8. The stronger the ideology and greater the commitment to the ‘total’ view, the greater the confirmation bias, described thus by Francis Bacon in Novum Organum, in 1620: ‘The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else-by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusion may remain inviolable’.

^9. John Stuart Mill, ‘A few words on nonintervention’, Fraser's Magazine, 1859; Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, 1795 (London: Hackett Publishing, 2003); and Thucydides, A History of the Peloponnesian War (London: Penguin, 2000).

^10. There is an evident analogy here with Kuhn's proposal concerning scientific paradigms. ‘In the development of any science, the first received paradigm is usually felt to account quite successfully for most of the observations and experiments easily accessible to that science's practitioners. Further development, therefore, ordinarily calls for the construction of elaborate equipment, the development of an esoteric vocabulary and skills, and a refinement of concepts that increasingly lessens their resemblance to their usual common-sense prototypes. That professionalization leads, on the one hand, to an immense restriction of the scientist's vision and to a considerable resistance to paradigm change … By ensuring that the paradigm will not be too easily surrendered, resistance guarantees that scientists will not be lightly distracted, and that the anomalies that lead to paradigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core’. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1962), pp. 64–65.

^11. ‘Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back’. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936).

^12. Laurence Whitehead, ‘Introducing immanent democracies’, in G. Gretchen, D. King, R. Lieberman and L. Whitehead (Eds) Democratization in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 35–55.

^13. William P. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). It is also instructive to compare Tony Smith, America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), with his post-Iraq follow-up A Pact with the Devil: Washington's Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise (London: Routledge, 2007). Recently at a more theoretical level, Tzvetan Todorov's The Inner Enemies of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014) categorized western democracy promotion by force since the 1990s as a new variant of ‘political messianism’, one that generates an internal threat to the democratic countries themselves.

^14. A mis-description that calls to mind ideological use of the term ‘the free world’ prior to 1989.

^15. Examples of such tautologies might include ‘the proof that Guatemala was not a democracy in 1954 is that Arbenz was overthrown by the CIA’, or ‘Lebanon cannot have been a democracy in 1982, since it was invaded by Israel’. For a critique of the idea of democratic peace, see Christopher Layne, ‘Kant or Cant: The myth of the democratic peace’, International Security, 19(2) (1994), pp. 5–49.

^16. The military regime that seized power in Pakistan in 1999, for example, managed to deflect democracy promotion pressures while also selectively sheltering a variety of Taliban and al Qaeda operatives.

^17. William J. Dobson, op. cit., Ref. 4.

^18. Although Osama Bin Laden was a prominent Saudi who attacked the US on the grounds that its liberalism was corrupting the umma.

^19. For more on this ‘menu of options’, see Laurence Whitehead, ‘Anti-democracy promotion: four strategies in search of a framework’, Taiwan Journal of Democracy, 11(1) (Forthcoming).

^20. Laurence Whitehead, ‘On “cultivating” democracy: enlivening the imagery for democracy promotion’, in Christopher Hobson and Milja Kurki (Eds) The Conceptual Politics of Democracy Promotion (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 19–37.