One of the more quickly worn cliches to come out of the Iraq war is "You cannot impose democracy from the outside." The implication tends to be that democracy in itself is an imposition or rather, something that springs organically from the hearts of men when they are deserving of it. The same sentiment could with some stretching be accorded to winning the Powerball or being cured of cancer. It has been around since the Cold War, but with the spread of democratic revolution to historically hostile environs, it has taken on new life.
A quick Google search on the above sentence yields 530,000 results. For the sake of brevity, and because I am enamored of jargon, I have come to call this The Democratic Imposition Doctrine, or DID. The interesting feature of this now conventional wisdom is that many people from both sides of the debate of globalized democratic revolution, when met with this statement will almost invariably pause, shake their head and say something like, "Well, yeah, of course not." However, a few brave souls will perk up and ask, "Why the hell not?"
The latest utterance of DID came from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in response to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent meeting with Belarussian dissidents. At the meeting she decided to go tell it on the mountain that Belarus is on its way to democracy, saying that it was "time for a change." Mr. Lavrov, taking umbrage to what he saw as an implication that the US would get down and dirty in Lukashenko's paradise thusly invoked DID. "[Russia] would not advocate what some people call regime change anywhere," he said. "You cannot im..." Well, you know the rest. Lavrov's fallback on DID so soon implies a certain amount of weakness and wariness on the part of Russia. I cannot find a quote from Rice saying that democracy would be "imposed" on Belarus, only that it was comin' round the bend. It's possible that Lavrov, whose country has a history of its own style of imposition, assumed that The SecState was warning of impending intervention.
Belarus may be where Moscow decides to draw the line against democratic European expansion. With the Empire reliably crumbling in on itself, and having lost both Georgia and Ukraine already, Putin & Co. surely are not in the mood to lose another friendly dictator. Many proponents of democratic revolution are applauding Rice's statement and seeing a concerted push at Lukashenko's throne. I am not as optimistic about Belarus as some, only because I don't think that Lukashenko cares much that he may have a fight on his hands. Edvard Schevernadze and Leonid Kuchma, though corrupt, had no stomach in the end for turning guns on the population. Lukashenko has few such qualms.
The DID has as an antecedent the traditional conflict between cultural preservationists and (mostly Christian) missionaries. I am reminded of an old cartoon portraying a priest in cassock, holding an open Bible while standing in the midst of a primitive village. He has just read the word of God to the natives for the first time and triumphantly announces, "There. Now you're not heathens anymore. You're all heretics now." What strikes me so funny about the cartoon is the look of utter indifference on the faces of the now-heretics. They are completely ignorant of the "fact" that just a minute ago they were innocent and now, by the priest's own actions, are condemned sinners. The lesson of the cartoon, with the pompous priest thinking that he could impose his religion on a bunch of people who were doing just fine, thank you without it, is that change can only come from within and no influence from the outside can make any lasting difference.
One of the best movies on the Irish is the 1990 film The Field
with Richard Harris. In a scene with the parish priest, Harris'
character tells the well meaning vicar that he can convert all the
Irish if he wants, but deep inside they will stay wild forever. Again,
the priest's religion is seen as an unwelcome imposition from outside.
This is a standard viewpoint of anti-religionists who see any
proselytizing as a violation of the basic human right to be left alone.
The Church would counter that the civilizing influence of religion is a
greater good and that no one is performing forced conversions anymore.
The evidence that much of the world adheres in various degrees to some
type of religious practice illustrates the success of speaking to
desires and passions of human beings and offering a way to deal with
those impulses. This gives no comfort to agnostics and atheists, many
of whom view religion as completely void of value and in fact working
against human freedom. The billions of religious around the world
disagree and look on their religion as a grace that has been visited on
them. Religious fervor doesn't necessarily come from the ether,
however. If humankind's natural state is towards worship, then why all
the churches, synagogues, temples and mosques? The spiritual impulse
may or may not come from within, but religion--man's conduit for
spirit--is definitely imposed.
Likewise, the DID states emphatically that democracy is something that cannot, under any circumstances, be imposed (the tag line often being, "on people who don't want it.") But although an argument can be made that humans have an innate predisposition to democracy, human history shows that until quite recently democracy was not the chosen form of governance. The main argument against the Iraq war was not, as some proponents of invasion complained, that Saddam Hussein was just minding his own business and anyway we were provoking him, but that the United States had no right to invade a country and attempt to impose its ways and principles on the people of that country. The corollary of this argument was that the Iraqi people weren't ready for democracy because of their long history under the boot of totalitarianism. Which makes no sense. If Iraq was a democracy there would not have been an issue. The argument became unsustainable as critics who accused the Bush Administration of staging a smash-and-grab operation lost their ground when Iraqi oil was not expropriated to US companies. So the DID was invoked as a stop-gap and talk of Bush's Folly filled the media just as the Iraqi people prepared themselves to elect a government.
In light of the democratic experiments now ongoing in Afghanistan and Iraq and those in vitro in Lebanon and throughout the unfree world, the DID has lost quite a bit of its cache. If one wishes to be crass about it, democracy was indeed "imposed" on Afghanistan and Iraq from the outside. That democratic movements are springing up now serves to illuminate precisely what the Bush Administration has talked about since the 2002 State of the Union Speech. It turns out that democracy can be imposed, although it doesn't necessarily have to be.
The war that rages now is centered on the outcome of elections, constitutions and parliaments much more so than armies. For perhaps the first time in human history, great masses of people are doing battle against rancid ideologies armed for the most part with nothing but their dignity and their confidence in the fact that they, too, deserve and are ready for the grace of self-governance. We will see how this all works. Will Iraq descend into chaos or will the country find a way to become more like Switzerland than Yugoslavia?
Of course, I am voting for democracy, imposed or otherwise. We have witnessed dictatorships becoming democracies. True democracies just do not become dictatorships, no matter what Air America might tell you. The stakes are set and betting is now closed. The race to the future is on. Soon, we may see that the DID is D-E-A-D.
Cross posted on BNN.
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