HISTORY AND SPREADING DEMOCRACY: A DEBATE
The Daily Demarche issued a challenge recently for conservative bloggers to engage their liberal counterparts on the great question of advancing democracy. The first to do so were Marc Schulman of The American Future and Eric Martin of Total Information Awareness. Their debate set a high standard in terms of eloquence, reasoning and civility that all future participants should aspire to match.
CKR of Whirledview has graciously agreed to discuss the following question:
“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.”
CKR’s post can be found here.
Editorial Note to the Reader: Circumstances of a technical nature have forced me to post this essay in two parts but each part represents for the purposes of this debate, only a single post and a continuous thread of argument. Part II will be up shortly and I may possibly re-edit/re-post to combine them into a single smooth entry for archival purposes once CKR has digested them and finished her response.
With that, let the debate begin:
History and Promoting Global Democracy
If we examine 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, we should look first to America’s legacy in that regard and then to how Bush administration policy falls within that tradition. While the road to spreading democracy has been an uneven one for American policy makers, filled with detours, bumps and the occasional dead-end, it is also a long road representing arguably one of the best aspects of American foreign policy.
The Bush administration is redefining and reinvigorating that policy in the GWOT and while their reliance on history as a guide to policy leaves much to be desired, they are also well ahead of previous administrations in that regard. History could be be used a great deal more than it is in the American national security decision making process but that would require a considerable shift in the general philosophy of personnel selection that have prevailed in recent decades.
Part I. Lessons in Spreading Democracy:
Initially, the Founding Fathers, cognizant of the weaknesses and potential internal division of the young American Republic, sought a role of studied neutrality in world affairs. The United States would spread democracy not by force of arms but by becoming an example for the rest of the world to follow. Neither in the case of war with the Barbary states or in the republican revolutions of Santo Domingo and in South America did Washington take an active hand in spreading democracy, though words of encouragement and protection were eventually offered in the form of the Monroe Doctrine to the Southern republics, this was primarily a paper exercise.
Practically speaking, spreading democracy was a policy born not of ideology but of the necessity of war. Prior to the Iraq War, the United States government made its greatest efforts to spread democratic governance with the conquered American South during Reconstruction and Germany and Japan in the twentieth century.
The first attempt at democratization through conquest and occupation by the United States Army was in the Deep South in the aftermath of the Civil War. The period of Reconstruction has been thoroughly mythologized in the popular mind by Southern Lost Cause reactionaries and academic Marxists. The resulting composite view tends to be a cartoonish depiction of rapacious Northern capitalists brutalizing Southerners in a fetid orgy of political corruption with little or no thought to the fate of the former slaves. In reality, Radical Republican leaders like Thaddeus Stevens sought far-reaching democratic reforms in the South to integrate Freedmen as full citizens. If they erred it was not in treating the former Confederate states as ” conquered provinces” but in being unduly gentle with recalcitrant ex-rebel terrorists.
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