Dialogue on Democracy Promotion

I have received an e-mail comment on my previous blog, “Is it Moral to Promote Democracy?” from a friend (whom I’ll call “CD” because I haven’t asked his permission to name him in a public way). My reply here will be in the form of boldface insertions within the text of his letter. However, the most important comment should come first. I was astonished to read, at the end of his letter, CD’s comment:

“You know that you & I agree on the acceptability --and near
moral obligation-- to support democratic movements within other countries. I'm not reneging on that conviction.... You write as though beaming a reasonable news broadcast into Burma were part of an array of measures to be deployed in promoting democracy round the world, along with humanitarian intervention like bombing the bridges across the Danube.”

I have to express my astonishment that someone I have known for many years could misunderstand me so. I am completely committed to nonviolence. At no point, either in my essay or anywhere else, have I ever said I approve of bombing as a way of assisting people to obtain their freedom. Please, CD, re-read my essay carefully and you will see that I do not approve of any coercive intervention to promote democracy. I can only assume that you have accepted the prevailing assumption that to promote democracy is necessarily to promote the bombing of Serbia. Not so! Nonviolence is the only acceptable way of helping people in another society gain their freedom. Now, with that issue out of the way, let me proceed to reply to each point in his letter.

Metta, it is really sad to be so profoundly out of sympathy with your essay, after so often supporting you. I deplore your position. Strange though this is, it ought not to surprise you,
because much that I say below I've said to you before. Yet it may strike you as new, for it surely doesn't seem to have had any impact! First but not most central is the bizarre array of sources
you invoke. Political reality: if you want to forge an alliance including supporters of Science for Peace and of Peace Magazine, you really can not include Samuel V. Huntington among your standard-bearers. Huntington was among the most prominent academic apologists for all the wars we have opposed over a half-century. His doctrine of clash of civilizations is nothing but a convenient rationalization of fighting any chosen enemy outside the Western alliance. His
social science may not be pure bunk, but it includes enough bunk to horrify many observers (I can give you amusing references).

Let’s disentangle this. I do not accept Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, nor indeed most of his earlier work. I used to know him at Harvard when he was the inspiration behind the horrible “village pacification“ strategy in the Vietnam War. TheClash of Civilizations notion mistakenly equates democracy to Western civilization. As Amartya Sen has pointed out, various Asian civilizations have developed democratic institutions in the past.

However, I was not referring to either of these aspects of Huntington’s biography, but rather to his book The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. It is not an ideological tract but rather an empirical analysis of the trends in the rise and fall of democracy over time. The findings have stood the test of time and rigorous criticism by other social scientists. I may dislike the man’s politics but that doesn’t permit me as a political sociologist to discount this book, just as you cannot discount the work of another mathematician whom you dislike personally. Social science literature includes hundreds of other papers and books dealing with the “third wave” discovery, and so far as I can see, no one has significantly challenged his findings.

Similarly for Freedom House. Lee Lorch made the relevant observation that H. Gideonse was a leading Red-hunter in the 1950s and Freedom House never repudiated this campaign by one of its presidents.

I don’t know Mr. Gideonse. I do know that Freedom House was founded by Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt and was chaired for a long time by Bayard Rustin, a black American who followed Gandhi. (See Rustin's photo.) I will insert at the bottom of this post the most recent ratings of the world’s countries and I invite you to look it over. At a dinner party recently, I brought it out and asked people to assign their own rankings to all the countries with which they were personally familiar. Our own rankings were surprisingly similar to those of Freedom House.

And I am very dubious about Freedom House's ability to titer democracy of a state. I am dubious that such ratings are of much use, but especially I am suspicious of the criteria FH applies.
You ought to ask this, as you choose to rely on their ratings so. Seeing FH's Cold War alignment, I would check for pro-Washington bias. Did you? What did you find?

There is a long section on methodology under the “Freedom in the World” analysis section of their web site. It is too long to quote. All I can say is that it has been spelled out in excruciating detail, evidently attempting as much objectivity as possible. They work with extensive check-lists and they name about 50 professional analysts, giving a paragraph about their backgrounds. They appear to me like the staff of any other really good academic journal, except many times as numerous. Nothing raised my eyebrows.

I'm sure we will differ, not only on the procedure of making these ratings, but also on the scores specific states get. Why would I leap to that conclusion, despite often agreeing with you on
specific issues in the past? Let me just give one example: the conclusion you reach (in agreement with T. Homer-Dixon, whose side I less often find myself on) that democracies make war never against other democracies, only against non-democracies.

I am glad to know that about Tad. I have had strong differences with him in the past because he did not appear to care anything about democraticization. I hope you are right that he accepts the Democratic Peace findings. But why wouldn't he? Virtually everybody in political science and peace studies does.

Come now! Let us assume that FH's criteria, whatever they are, guarantee the USA falls
always and forever in the ranks of the democracies. (You will surely concede that I am not being over-cynical in assuming that! And I bet you can document it, though I have not.)

I have not gone back through all the US’s previous rankings, but at present, it scores 1 along with 47 other states, including Kiribati and Nauru. I cannot evaluate the degree of political freedom in all those countries. Some of the reports cover pages and pages of incidents, positive or negative. Others are sketchier. For example, here’s their capsule appraisal of Kiribati: “Kiribati (2008) Capital: Tarawa. Population: 100,000 Political Rights Score: 1 Civil Liberties Score: 1 Status: Free Overview: Independents took the majority of seats in the August 2007 parliamentary elections, but President Anote Tong and his Pillars of Truth party secured a second four-year term in the October general elections.“

And yet the USA made war on democratic governments in Iran in 1953, in Guatemala in 1953, in the Dominican Republic in 1965, in Chile in 1973, in Haiti at least once (the expulsion of Aristide and cancelling of elections), in Grenada in 1985, in Panama at least once, etc. For counter-examples not involving the USA, I might wait for you to tell me who else beside the USA is regarded as democratic by Freedom House.

See above.

But why bother? Your generalization (and Homer-Dixon's) is preposterous. War is complex and needs to be studied in detail.

Do you suppose that war has NOT been studied in detail? I wish people realized that there is a field of research called Peace and Conflict Studies, which could and should be an independent discipline, for we who do the research and teach in it actually know a few things. In fact, the Democratic Peace theory (or empirical generatlization) has been analyzed in hundreds, possibly thousands, of other studies. I discussed it with Hanna Newcombe in the interview that I published in Peace Magazine a few years ago. She has followed it closely and agrees that it is extremely well supported. She mentions the example of India and Pakistan and Germany and France. Although these states have frequently gone to war with each other, neither have done so when both were democratic. Researchers have gone beyond trying to determine whether it is true or not, turning instead of studies that attempt to explain the mechanism behind the fact. The most recent work that I’ve been reading on the subject is a 512-page book, The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century by Paul K Huth and Todd L. Allee. It summarizes the whole literature on the subject, citing hundreds of sources. I can lend you my copy if you are interested. Now let me turn to some of the touted exceptions. The conflicts that you mention were all ones with less than 1,000 persons killed. This is the long-established definition of a war, which was developed by the Stockholm Peace Research Institute. Two of the countries that you mention, Grenada and Panama, were not democracies when the Us invaded them. grenada was a one-party dictatorship. Panama was a military dictatorship under Noriega. The other countries you cite, Iran, Guatemala and Chile, were democracies. US action against them was not in the form of a war, and not just because of the casualties count. What the US did was give assistance to undemocratic groups in these countries to mount a coup. The theory of the democratic peace does not suggest that this type of plotting will cease when there is more widespread democratization. The situation in Haiti is more complex. The US intervenes to bring Aristide’s party back to power. Despite the US involvement here, backward and forward, Aristide’s party, if not he personally, is still in power. The same is true in Nicaragua. The US aid to the contras just forced a fair election, which the Sandinistas lost. They were subsequently re-elected and are now running the country again. (I owe these observationx to my friend John Bacher.)

Second, I don't agree at all that the danger to democracy in North America is the tyranny of the majority.

You are right. That’s one danger that has been handled pretty well since Tocqueville wrote his amazing book, Democracy in America. We have Bills of Rights and judicial institutions that protect minority rights and civil liberties. My main point was that it is not enough to have a system of “majority rule” to count a country as a democracy; for it to be civilized, there have to be rules protecting the groups that are out-voted.

The danger to democracy in North America is the tyranny of the ultra-rich and
their henchmen.

Yes, that and voters' political cluelessness. I am watching the Republican Convention with the sound off while I write this. This Palin woman seems to be a real asset politically, which certainly points out Americans’ worst problem, that they have such limited awareness. And Canada is gearing up for an election too, with another major problem: We will divide up the votes among four leftist or centrist parties and leave the election for Harper to win.

You know this, Derek Paul knows it, all the protesters against NAFTA and its clones know it. The defence against their selling off of the public good and the destruction of the planet is democracy-- reasserting the right of the people to make laws which the rich are bound by (even if those laws are in contravention of the treaties the G8 have made without consulting the
electorates, and even if those laws include things blasphemous to the plutocrats, like progressive taxation). Our present rulers don't make destructive decisions out of stupidity or bad luck
(though stupidity and bad luck may aggravate the destruction); they make destructive decisions out of greed.

At least partly so. I don’t know how to fight that.

You know that you & I agree on the acceptability --and near moral obligation-- to support democratic movements within other countries. I'm not reneging on that conviction. Nevertheless I am distressed by the context in which you put it in this essay. This is my third main disagreement with your line of thought. You write as though beaming a reasonable news broadcast into Burma were part of an array of measures to be deployed in promoting democracy round the world,

Isn’t it?

along with humanitarian intervention like bombing the bridges across the Danube.

Where the hell did I say or even suggest THAT? Never in my life have I supported such a thing. Why do you imagine that I do?

Michael Ignatieff might agree with you. You can't expect us to.

I stood up and argued with Michael Ignatieff at the Munk Centre before he had even returned to Canada to run for office. I said that it might have been possible to mount a nonviolent resistance against Saddam Hussein – there were Iraqi expatriates in the Netherlands who were preparing to do that – but he and the other supporters of the war did not even give that option a moment’s thought, according to the essays he had been publishing almost every week in the NY Times Magazine. He said, “That would be the most irresponsible thing I can imagine!” (Like, yeah, somebody might have got hurt!) I was so carried away with my criticism that they had to tell me to sit down and stop talking. But after ward I followed Ignatieff to his car and talked to him the whole time about supporting nonviolent opposition movements inside dictatorships. Having made myself known as a fierce opponent of his, I did not accompany the group that went to lobby him for the Department of Peace because I didn’t want to screw up the possibility of getting him on board. So don’t tell me I am like Michael Ignatieff! That is ridiculous and completely unsubstantiated. You are making things up instead of reading what I wrote.

Furthermore, those Michael Ignatieff now serves won't invite you or the Norwegians to sit down at the policy planning table with them and decide whether to send news broadcasts or missiles into Iran; so you won't get an opportunity to argue that broadcasts are better.

True. We’ve got a lot of work to do to fix our own democratic shortcomings. There’s no reason, however, why we can’t do that while also encouraging others for whom the task is even harder.

The kind of promotion of democracy you want to work at has no resemblance in principle to Huntington's or Fukuyama's, let's face it.

No I think that Huntington and Fukuyama would probably agree fairly well if we all sat down and tried to classify different countries into two or three categories in terms of their degree of democracy. Freedom House does an adequate job. If you don’t like it, try the Economist, which made a list of its own. It correlates pretty well with Freedom House’s 2008 rankings, which I show below.

Please, free your vocabulary and your theoretical considerations from their pious jingoism.

Please give my article another reading. You have distorted the hell out of it. I make it very clear that assisting nonviolent democratic opposition movements to gain their rights is entirely different from imposing democracy on another society, whether violently or through some other coercive pressure.
Peace, CD
Peace to you too. Metta

Combined Average Ratings – Independent Countries 2008
FREE 1.0
Andorra Australia Austria Bahamas Barbados Belgium Canada Cape Verde Chile Costa Rica Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Dominica Estonia Finland France Germany Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Kiribati Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Marshall Islands Micronesia Nauru Netherlands New Zealand Norway Palau Poland Portugal Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia San Marino Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden Switzerland Tuvalu United Kingdom United States Uruguay
1.5
Belize Bulgaria Ghana Greece Grenada Israel Japan Latvia Monaco Panama St. Vincent and the Grenadines South Korea Taiwan
2.0
Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Benin Botswana Brazil Croatia Dominican Republic Mauritius Mongolia Namibia Romania Samoa Sao Tome and Principe South Africa Suriname Trinidad and Tobago Vanuatu
2.5
El Salvador Guyana India Indonesia Jamaica Lesotho Mali Mexico Peru Senegal Serbia Ukraine
PARTLY FREE
3.0
Albania Bolivia Colombia Ecuador Honduras Macedonia Montenegro Mozambique Nicaragua Papua New Guinea Paraguay Seychelles Sierra Leone Turkey
3.5
Bosnia-Herzegovina East Timor Guatemala Kenya Liberia Madagascar Moldova Niger Philippines Solomon Islands Tanzania Zambia
4.0
Burkina Faso Comoros Georgia Guinea-Bissau Kuwait Malawi Malaysia Mauritania Nigeria Sri Lanka Tonga Venezuela
4.5
Armenia Bangladesh Burundi The Gambia Haiti Jordan Kyrgyzstan Lebanon Morocco Nepal Singapore Uganda 5.0 Afghanistan Bahrain Central African Republic Djibouti Ethiopia Fiji Gabon Thailand Togo Yemen

NOT FREE
5.5
Algeria Angola Azerbaijan Bhutan Brunei Cambodia Congo (Brazzaville) Congo (Kinshasa) Egypt Guinea Kazakhstan Maldives Oman Pakistan Qatar Russia Rwanda Tajikistan United Arab Emirates 6.0 Cameroon Cote d’Ivoire Iran Iraq Swaziland Tunisia Vietnam
6.5
Belarus Chad China Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Laos Saudi Arabia Syria Zimbabwe 7.0
Burma Cuba Libya North Korea Somalia Sudan Turkmenistan Uzbekistan