by CKR
Continuing my debate with Mark of ZenPundit.
Update: Mark's first rebuttal
My original post
Mark’s original post (in two parts, here and here)
Challenge from Dr. Demarche
Mark and I agree on many aspects of the uses of history. He has chosen to go into some extended examples in contrast to my sketchier overview with glancing examples. The interesting question then becomes why we come to different conclusions on many issues.
One reason is that we have different assumptions. Mark seems to accept the Bush administration’s assumption that democracy can be spread at the point of a gun. I may be a bit unfair in stating it that way, but I’m not aware that that theory has been clearly enunciated by those in authority. The examples of Germany and Japan miss the point. World War II was not fought for the purpose of bringing democracy to Germany and Japan. It was fought because those two countries attacked others and occupied them. However, once the war was over, both those countries required significant rebuilding. It made sense to couple physical rebuilding with political rebuilding.
Promoting or spreading democracy must be carried out on multiple fronts. This rebuttal will be mostly on spreading democracy by warlike means or after wars fought for other reasons. But I hope we can turn to all the ways America and the democratic nations present themselves and their values to the world, all of which contribute to or detract from the spread of democracy. I might add that if the point of spreading democracy is that democratic nations engage less often in wars, then war is a strange way to spread democracy.
Mark’s example of the American South and the Civil War is possibly more to the point. Interestingly, this one is not often seen in this discussion. One of the North’s motives in that war was to end slavery in the South. However, this was not the main reason.
Although in all these examples, as in Iraq, democracy was imposed from outside, the Bush administration has used others to justify spreading democracy by regime change. In these, they have been less careful than Mark. Except for Japan, the nations in the examples had experience with democracy before their ‘liberation.’ They also experienced the Enlightenment and therefore had significant history of intellectual engagement with liberalism (Enlightenment definition).
The Enlightenment is a European phenomenon. The nations that participated in it have continued to develop its ideas both internally and by interacting with each other. Those ideas underpin our modern practices of democracy. One or more of that cluster of ideas have been adopted by most nations (China’s economic practices, for example), resulting in varying degrees of success and democracy. It might be possible to enunciate a range of conditions that constitute successful democracy, including political and economic parameters along with human rights. A certain freedom of markets is necessary, but China shows us that it is not sufficient. Certain aspects of human rights, like the death penalty, while undesirable, do not negate a country’s being a democracy.
Nor was there much romanticism about Allied occupation authorities being required to implement democracy instantly in Germany, Italy and Japan. Fascist totalitarian parties were prohibited outright in all three states and war crimes trials punished Nazi and Japanese leaders followed by Denazification proceeding, however unevenly implemented, for smaller fry. American leaders excluded the Soviets completely from any meaningful role in Italy or Japan, hampering NKVD support for local Communist cadres and the US secretly funded broad, centrist democratic parties to strentghen the electoral alternative to Stalin's robotic followers.
The administration expected its army to be met in Baghdad in the same way as the Allied army in Paris. The fall of the statue of Saddam Hussein was clearly intended as a reprise of the falling of Lenin statues across the Soviet satellites and republics. Those analogies were romantic and poorly chosen. WWII France was occupied by its enemy, who was also the Americans’ enemy. So the liberators were welcomed. Even if one accepts that Hussein was the enemy of the Iraqi people, that argument was much more abstract than the invading army.
The analogy to the fall of the Soviet Union was just flat wrong, largely because the history was not understood and in fact is poorly understood by Americans to this day. The only reliable book on the period that is accessible to Americans is Anatol Lieven’s The Baltic Revolution, which, owing to its last revision date (1994), is more journalistic than analytic. While the administration chose to honor the journalistically exciting Solidarity demonstrations in Poland, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the pulling down of Stalin statues (mainly in the republics), it has ignored the historical contexts of those actions. Mark discusses the end of WWII as the historical model, but it appears that the administration preferred a romanticized version of the fall of Communism.
For brevity and because I am most closely acquainted with events in Estonia, I will concentrate on that country. Latvia and Lithuania have similar histories, and many events had analogs in other Soviet republics.
Estonia has been occupied by one country or another for most of its history. The Estonians share in the European enlightenment heritage, which was brought there by the Germans and Swedes. Estonia was independent between the world wars and enjoyed a certain amount of autonomy under Russian rule from 1721 through the Russian Revolution; for example, Estonian serfs were freed before the serfs in Russia.
Estonia has a distinctive language and culture that has been protected, the pressures of the invaders making Estonians more determined to preserve that heritage. As a result of the occupations, Estonians developed a culture that was capable of surviving under occupation and that led to the election of card-carrying Communists who in fact were more nationalist than Communist. This was not clear to the dominant Russians, who insisted on using their language for all official business and never learned Estonian. This allowed the Estonians to use their media more freely than the Soviets realized. In the northern part of the republic, Estonians had access to Finnish television. Estonian speakers can understand Finnish, the two languages being about as similar as Spanish and Italian.
So an infrastructure, essentially an alternative government, was in place and ready to move once the Soviet government showed signs of weakness. Many of the alternative government were Communists, there not being any other way to reach office. One of them was Arnold Rüütel, Estonia’s current president, who, as head of the republic’s government in the late eighties, negotiated with Moscow at the risk of imprisonment.
Had that transition been accomplished from outside, it is likely that Communists would have been declared ineligible for office. This would have removed many people who were the most capable of leading the country. As it was, those who were party hacks were removed by elections or removed themselves to Russia. It is much more difficult to make these kinds of distinctions from outside, as the United States is learning in Iraq.
As for the influence of Bernard Lewis and others, the influence of historians on policy is not the same as the influence of historical understanding, and comments on Mark’s part II bring this out. I’ll also note that Condoleezza Rice was extremely busy negotiating the reunification of Germany as the Soviet republics were moving toward independence, so that she may not be aware of the fascinating politics involved. (I agree that Rice is more of an area studies specialist than historian.)
When we faced the Cold War, George Kennan's Long Telegram had an enormous impact partly because much of the bureaucracy was simply ignorant of all things Russian and Soviet and had no answers with which to contest Kennan's analysis.
Ah, but it’s a good thing we had Kennan with his background! Whatever refinements or alternatives we might imagine now, his strategy kept us from nuclear destruction and eventually led to the fall of the Soviet Union. That history played out pretty much as he expected.
I agree with Mark that academic historians have made themselves irrelevant. I disagree that this has to do with their politics, but I agree that their increasing compartmentalization and emphasis on microscopic points of history while shunning and actively discouraging ways of making history more available to the public. There are so many great stories in history, and people love to read them!