by CKR
The Daily Demarche believes that civil discussion on politics is still possible across the divide in the United States. So do I. In that spirit, Demarche has proposed a debate between “left” and “right” bloggers, and I have accepted Mark’s challenge at ZenPundit. The proposed theme is
the future of global democracy and the role which the United States should play in the spread of democracy to oppressed or less developed nations.Mark and I have chosen
How the use of history has shaped or should shape the role which the United States should play in the spread of global democracy to oppressed or less developed nations.
The first posts are to be released simultaneously. Mine’s below the fold. Mark’s is posted in two instalments, here and here.
Update: I may not be able to compose my first rebuttal until later this week. I'm not ignoring Mark by any means, just have too much else keeping me busy. Look for it on Friday.
One of the continuing themes of American history is that of America as an exemplar of democracy with an obligation to share its benefits, the city on the hill. Even a cursory study of history shows that events and the ideas springing out of them constantly influence both leaders of nations and their publics. You can see the marks of the Revolution on France, the constant invasions on Russia, the Abbasid caliphate on the Arab world, and the humiliation of World War II on Germany and Japan.
Historical incidents and accidents are not necessarily a conscious part of the public’s or policy-makers’ opinion. It just seems right to many people that America should spread democracy because that’s what America does and democracy has been so good to them. A bit os history could put this feeling in a context of the Enlightenment and the peculiarities of the American experience: the faith in reason, the equality of man (and the limitations of that definition), and colonial governance, followed by the movement toward independence.
That context opens up relationships with other countries’ interests and the options available for dealing with them. The French Revolution was a product of that same Enlightenment, but it took some different directions. “God” for many of the American leaders for independence was a remote Deist watchmaker. The rest of American history has similar resonances. Was it coincidence that the serfs were freed in Eastern Europe at about the same time slavery was being abolished in America?
The historical view develops a sympathy with people in past times not unlike that required for dealing with other countries and other cultures. They didn’t use words exactly the way we do. Their concepts were different: look at how the definitions of liberalism and conservatism have changed in America since the late 19th century, although not so much in Europe. And their expectations of what made the good life were different. Ask anyone who grew up in the fifties, or even the sixties or seventies.
Unfortunately, politics can make use of history while ignoring or even suppressing this sympathy. Don’t like nuclear weapons? The US never should have dropped the bombs on Japan. Never mind the hundreds of thousands of US deaths, the apparent will of the Japanese to fight up to and beyond an invasion of their islands. Need a club to beat the left? That was some giveaway at Yalta, equivalent to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Never mind that the Soviets already held the territories, the war weariness, the difficulty of driving the Soviets back.
As people search for a way to get a handle on large events, historical analogy is not the worst of these tools. The problem with history is that events are never quite the same. It’s essential to look at historical context, but discussion in the US too frequently mixes politics in. The analogies of Vietnam to Iraq frequently display these difficulties. Vietnam was a geographical backwater; Iraq is square in the center of the Middle Eastern oil country. Casualties in Vietnam were much higher than they are in Iraq, and to a conscripted army. Both of those statements have enormous ramifications. Each could be expanded into a book.
Responsible analysis would examine subsets of those ramifications for similarities and differences, then test theory against them. Politicization takes the facts that agree with me and arranges them against the other guy’s argument.
A study of the history of democracy promotion by the United States (yes, we’ve done it before!) would yield successes and failures, perhaps even some commonalities that point to the likelihood of one or the other. The history of the places where democracy is to be promoted would also yield insights. Probably it’s a good idea not to look like the last oppressor, or maybe the one before that. What’s the record on replacing regimes from the outside? Where are those analogies similar and where are they different? (Those last two questions could have avoided the ridiculous prediction that invading American troops would be met in Iraq as the troops were in Paris.)
As an experimental physical scientist trying my hand at political science, I want data. History is data.