Exporting Democracy: What Have We Learned from Iraq?
Archibugi, Daniele
The editors of Dissent posed the following question to several respondents: Iraq has provoked the bitterest debate about American foreign policy since Vietnam. One rationale for the war proposed...
...One rationale for the war proposed by George W Bush's administration was that it would lead to democracy—first in Iraq and then elsewhere in the Middle East...
...Economic muscle is still very important, but the basic principle is that each member has equal dignity...
...www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/press_releases/2006/ burnham_iraq_2006.html...
...Many Americans perceive their country as the champion of the democracy-exporting business despite the fact that since the end of the Second World War it achieved that goal through military invasion only in two small countries, Grenada and Panama...
...Are they wrong...
...The European Union is a champion in persuasion, often combined with powerful economic incentives...
...the attempt is ethically contradictory and politically ineffective...
...Twelve years of Western sanctions kept the Iraqi people hostage to their own tyrant without any possibility of rebellion...
...40 DISSENT / Spring 2007 military presence did not generate a democratic government for at least three decades...
...The prospect of joining the largest market of the world has played a crucial role in stabilizing new democratic regimes in Southern European countries such as Greece, Spain, and Portugal...
...People would laugh if anybody in Brussels threatened to "shock and awe...
...strategic interests, it is handicapping attempts to expand democracy by persuasion and political and economic collaboration...
...Whatever you think of the Bush administration's motives, what is to be learned from the Iraq experience about the export—and import—of democracy...
...There is another reason that made the EU so appealing for those living in nondemocratic countries: political dignity...
...One million Iraqis died in this war, while the West was silent...
...The invasion of Iraq has made the Bush administration the champion of democratization through military force...
...If it has none, the outcome is more likely to be insurgency or civil war than democratic development...
...Four years later, most observers would agree that this effort has failed, despite the holding of several elections...
...The fact that the EU has so many different voices also implies that no single nation can fully dominate the others...
...If Turkey ever joins the EU, it will get a number of parliamentarians equal to France, Italy, and the United Kingdom...
...European countries in the South and in the East already had a high level of social capital and good political infrastructures...
...In contrast, it has failed in a long list of military-occupied countries...
...DANIELE ARCHIBUGI is a research director at the Italian National Research Council in Rome and professor at Birkbeck College, University of London...
...2) South Vietnam and Cambodia, where the United States did not even make an attempt to challenge communism through democratically elected governments...
...3) Afghanistan, still in the middle of a vicious civil war five years after the invasion (Although the Afghan mission is conducted under a NATO umbrella, it is politically and militarily dominated by the United States...
...Rather than discuss, negotiate, and reconcile, Bush and Blair have spoken in messianic terms...
...After Saddam invaded Kuwait, most civilian infrastructures were destroyed by Western bombing...
...and (4) Not even in small and supposedly easily controllable countries such as the Dbminican Republic and Haiti have American troops managed to shift the political climate dramatically and irreversibly in favor of democratic governance...
...I have drawn positive lessons from earlier experiences of foreign intervention in a forthcoming book, A World of Democracy: The Cosmopolitan Perspective (Princeton University Press...
...In order to find clear cases of successful democratization associated with military operations we need to go back to the Second World War, when democracy was restored in Germany, Italy, and Japan thanks to the Allied Powers...
...So far, the EU has included countries relatively likely to embrace democratic faith and institutions...
...But there is a fundamental difference between these cases and what has happened since...
...Germany, Italy, and Japan were the initiators of the war, while the United States and its allies were involved in the conflict against their will...
...THE DEMOCRATIC ideal can be presented to peoples and countries that have not yet embraced it in two entirely opposite ways: through persuasion or through coercion and force...
...The situation in Iraq is made much worse because the different religious communities do not trust each other—so that fair and free elections simply replicate the statistics of religious and ethnic division...
...Many people thought that this was never a serious intention, but it is probably true that some members of the administration believed that the war would make democratization possible in Iraq...
...Thanks to Western support, Saddam Hussein managed to reinforce his domestic power...
...Here we can draw a pragmatic lesson on exporting democracy: the population of the target country should have a prior trusting relationship with the invaders...
...But there is also something specific to the EU: it is a civilian and not a military power...
...This was precisely what happened, successfully, after the Second World War...
...It can be hoped that the EU will achieve the same result in Turkey and—why not?—further enlargement can also be envisaged with regard to countries on the southern shores of the Mediterranean...
...The rhetoric used is also the opposite from that of Brussels...
...Elections were held under the supervision of foreign troops, and the results have basically followed the ethnic census...
...the only institution that managed to survive almost untouched was the Republican Guard, which immediately was used to repress internal opposition...
...Iraq is a colonial creation...
...Perhaps this would induce the American people to be more cautious about whom they elect to the White House...
...By defeating the aggressor, the winners had a political right to try to create an alternative political regime, at least to prevent the old regime from starting a new war...
...It is surprising how effective the power of rhetoric is, and there is no doubt that many of those who voted to reelect Bush in 2004 were influenced by his words rather than his actions...
...As soon as a new member is accepted, it enjoys all the privileges of the oldest members of the club...
...They have very good reasons to be suspicious about the intentions of the invaders, given the long history of misconduct by Western powers (often forgotten in the West...
...We know that American citizens have paid a high price for the adventure in Iraq— the lives of more than three thousand soldiers and between one and two trillion dollars, according to Joseph Stiglitz's and Linda Bilmes's estimates...
...The record of historical failure includes (1) South Korea, where a huge U.S...
...The conditions for democratizing Iraq were much more favorable in 1991, when Saddam Hussein initiated the war by annexing Kuwait...
...HOW COULD anybody expect that ordinary Iraqi citizens would trust an Anglo-American army to build a regime able to serve their interests...
...In more recent years, it is playing the same role in Eastern Europe...
...They have praised liberty and democracy much more than any EU bureaucrat has ever done— and at the same time contributed to the killing of an unknown number of civilians...
...Because democracy promotion has become a rhetorical tool to cover up U.S...
...After the Iraq disaster, the best place for America's democratizing troops for the next quarter century is . . . America...
...The main lesson I would like to emphasize here is a negative one: democracy cannot and should not be exported through military means...
...But the different communities trust the occupation troops even less...
...People in other countries do not trust, and with good reason, an agent who promises to achieve peace and democracy by means of forcible imposition and war...
...But the Iraqi population has paid a much higher price: as many as 655,000 Iraqis may have died since hosDISSENT / Spring 2007 41 tilities began in March 2003, according to a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, published in the Lancet.* In order to avoid a repetition of the same tragedy in other parts of the world, I propose the introduction of a principle of reparations: every time a powerful country intervenes in a weaker country with the aim of improving the conditions of the latter, and then grossly fails to achieve the declared objective, the powerful country has to pay reparations to the weaker country...
...in the 1980s, it was used as a tool to contain Iran in one of the dirtiest wars of the twentieth century...
...This has not been the case since then...
...He explores the relationship between internal and international conditions for democratization in A World of Democracy: The Cosmopolitan Perspective, forthcoming from Princeton University Press...
Vol. 54 • April 2007 • No. 2
