Building Democracy: The Road to Freedom

In the spirit of the current Egyptian quest for democracy, I am reminded of a term paper I submitted in 2001. Notice here I have substituted the word "blog" for "paper." I continue to stand by my conclusions.

Building Democracy: The Road to Freedom was the first paper I wrote for my master's degree. I submitted the final draft of this paper to Dr. Euel Elliot for his section in Political Economic Theories, in August, 2001. The spirit of this paper pre dates the tragedy of 911, which was inevitably the impetus to the global discourse on building democracies. For the title Building Democracies: the Road to Freedom, I used a play on the title used by Friedrich von Hayeck's book, The Road to Serfdom, in which Hayeck argues the dangers of the abandonment of individualism, liberalism, and freedom inevitably leads to socialist or fascist oppression and tyranny and the serfdom of the individual.


Building Democracy: The Road to Freedom

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) contends that without government, life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." His conclusion is that a society should agree to obey a monarchy that could keep the peace between its members. This agreement is referred to as a social contract. Subsequent philosophers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) argue that people should conform to laws only if they participated in the creation of such laws. Rousseau's argument supports the underlying principle of democracy, which is rule by the people. History forces us to acknowledge that oppressive governments have always existed somewhere. These are the governments that prop up a few people who relentlessly force their agenda on the rest of the country. Contemporary mainstream media in the West have given attention to the latter governments that exist in countries such as Cuba, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and the Philippines

The focus of this blog is to examine the interrelatedness between the governments and societies in the West and the people of the countries where oppressive governments exist. At first glance we may observe such relationships between the Americans and the Shah of Iran or between the Americans and Marcos of the Philippines. In both cases the Americans helped prop up these oppressive regimes in order to maintain stability. When stability exists, American corporations are able to operate in those countries and generate profit, which then translates into an increased profit. Therefore, rational choice theory supports such a modus operandi. However, it is only in the short run that this sort of want satisfaction by the Western capitalists can be created and maintained. With this in mind, the underlying theme to this blog is first to create a convincing argument that it is in the best interest of the Americans and Westerners alike to promote and create democracies instead of puppet regimes, and then this blog will endeavor to discover ways of creating democracies.

Elements of Social Behavior

Socrates defines morality as "how we ought to live" and more recent scholars have added to that definition, "by reason" (Rachels, pp. 1-19). Therefore, we shall conclude for the purposes of creating and building democracy, in this blog, that the working definition of morality is, "how we ought to live, by reason."

Beliefs are shared ideas regarding how the world functions, and assist in shaping personal and social experiences. Values are expansive, conceptual, shared principles of what is right. "Although values are widely shared, they are seldom adhered to at all times by every member of a culture" (Gelles and Levine, pp 83-4). Norms are shared regulations concerning how people should act, what they should say, or think in a specified situation. A norm written into an official code by the state is a law (Gelles and Levine, pp.85-6).

Culture can be viewed as a way to regulate the human behavior within a society. "Because human beings have been given 'incomplete' genetic programs, our species cannot get its bearings in daily life until we acquire cultural gyroscopes. Culture of necessity becomes analogous to genetic instructions that tell us how to do the things we do in our workaday lives" (Rosaldo, pg. 97). Emile Durkheim has linked constraint and law with society in order to develop an opposition to the utilitarian concept of maximizing the maximum number of individual interests while concurrently achieving the highest good for society. Durkheim parallels the Hobbesian view for social order (Rosaldo, pg.99). "Where interest is the only ruling force each individual finds himself in a state of war with every other since nothing comes to mollify the egos, and truce in this eternal antagonism would not be of long duration. There is nothing less constant than interest. Today it unites me to you; tomorrow, it will make me your enemy" (Durkheim, pp. 203-4). Durkheim argues that without social-cultural order, individuals would collectively yield chaos and disorder. In his view, it is the collection of norms within a society and its culture that act as the moral authority.

To this end, and turning our attention to political obligation, we must give pause to the meaning of consent. An act of consent is an act, free of threat or coercion, that involves the voluntary agreement of a person, so that a person giving consent to something is also in agreement to that act (Steinberg, pg.14). "There is no necessary reason to conclude that consenting to obey the law means that obedience to law is consistent with acting freely, since consenting to obey the law actually reconciles acting freely with incurring an obligation to obey the law, and this, in turn, serves only to define disobedience as an act one is not morally entitled to do. Furthermore, consenting to obey the law becomes a means of morally justifying the use of coercion to either compel obedience or punish disobedience, since the individual's consenting to obey the law is the means by which government acquires the moral right to compel obedience forcibly or punish disobedience forcibly" (Steinberg, pg.16).

Since the 17th century, liberal political theory has been predisposed by the credence of natural law and natural rights philosophies, rejecting those philosophies in favor of utilitarianism, then rejecting utilitarianism. The development of liberal political thought incorporates the acceptance of laissez-faire economic theories, and then the rejection of those theories by those in doubt of the appropriateness of laissez-faire capitalism. The correlation between liberal political thought and democratic government is an association in which liberalism stands in opposition to democracy, develops into an alignment with democratic theory and practice with the description of liberal democracy, and then becomes linked with the virtues of twentieth century democratic government. Considering the multiple theories and influences that create and develop the tradition of liberal political thought, we must be able to distinguish the one unifying element that allows us to examine liberal political thought with coherent diversity. Individual freedom is the fundamental element that unites historical liberal political thought with contemporary liberal political thought. In each version, there is a commitment to approaching the quandary of how to organize a society so that it is functionally able to coordinate a society that will maximize the freedom of its citizens. (Steinberg, pp. 23-4).

Robert Dahl distinguishes a democratic State as one that displays the provisions of public contestation and membership with a voting franchise for a significant portion of its citizens, contested elections, and an executive that is voted into office or accountable to an elected legislature (Dahl, 1971). "Of the roughly 6 billion people who inhibit the world today, fewer than 1 billion are found in advanced democracies. More than 4 billion live in what the World Bank classifies as 'low income' or 'lower middle class' countries." (Harrison, pg. xviii)

Philippines

America obtained the Philippines, along with Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Guam, as part of its rewards from its war against Spain, which was contested in quest of its "Manifest Destiny". The Spanish-American war ended with the signing of the Treatise of Paris (Bonner, pg. 28).

While Filipinos may have been elated to have the Spanish colonial power removed from their lives, the transfer of power to America was certainly an anticlimactic event for the Filipinos. In fact, the revolutionary movement that the Filipinos had staged against Spain, picked up with America, right where they left off with the Spanish. "It was a dirty war, marked by racism and atrocities. The Filipinos were considered 'savages, barbarians, a wild and ignorant people.' Entire towns were burned to the ground; in one village every male over ten years old was ordered shot." (Bonner, pg. 29)

From the American perspective, the underlying principles supporting the "Philippine-American War" were businessmen in search of new profits; generals who needed bases; and as Rudyard Kipling wrote in 1899 other Americans wanted to do good- "the white man's burden." President McKinley coined the movement as "benevolent assimilation," a policy created to "uplift and Christianize" Filipinos. However, since the ..Philippines.. had been the home to Catholicism for three centuries, and since the priests and nuns, who were sent out by ....Spain...., kept Protestant missionaries out of their colonies, one should infer that "hat McKinley was really all about was Americanizing the Filipinos." (Bonner, pg. 29)

Clearly, the Americans were determined to protect their economic interests in the ......Philippines....... However, they were just as determined to protect their military interests "Independence ended the colonial relationship between the two countries, but the United States had no intention of relinquishing control over the islands. The nature of the relationship was very quickly dictated by the fears of communism and the cold war." (Bonner pp 32-33)

In 1947, George Kennan, the first director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff wrote:

…we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of ....Asia..... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming…. (quoted in Bonner, pg.33)

On Friday, September 22, 1972, Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. A silent response came from ........Washington......... The Marcos regime existed during five American administrations. The American governments sat silently as Marcos stripped the Filipinos of between $5 and $10 billion. The American governments were silent as Marcos drained the country of its most important institutions such as the courts, the schools, and the political parties. "After 1972 Ferdinand Marcos was a dictator, in the dictionary definition: He had the authority and control to issue the decrees by which the people were governed without their consent." (Bonner, pp 4-7)

Democracy and Peace

"Democratic government rests on the consent of the governed, but justice demands that consent not be abused." (Russett, pg. 112) Legalized violence to conformity constitutes coercion and violates the citizens' legitimate rights. Opposition is expected and required in order to achieve an efficient system of policy making. Democratic States all subscribe to the compelling norms against the use of deadly force within the states and among the states. Within the democratic States exists the powerful norm that disagreements can be settled without violence through a political process. The political process guarantees the balance of majority rule and minority rights. The norm of equal rights towards human dignity exists within democratic States (Russett, pg. 112).

In Perpetual Peace Immanuel Kant prophesized that democracies will not go to war with one another. John Rawls reinforces that vision with his belief that the future of humanity exists in the proliferation of liberal democratic societies (Nagel, pg. 43). Bruce Russett points out, however, that in part peace is correlated with auspicious economic conditions provided by capitalist markets. A growing economy complemented with high prosperity, low levels of inequalities in income, and a concentrated system of trade and mutually beneficial relationships deters violence through a cost-benefit analysis. If peace is contingent on successful economies, then recession and stagflation will be the source of chaos and disorder. Conversely, democratic States can withstand destitute economies, as this fact has been proven repeatedly in ....Latin America.... (Russett, pg.110). The concept of peace between democratic States should not be confused with the relationships between democratic States and the rest of the world.

The citizens of democracies have achieved an overwhelming consensus in the belief that within a democratic society differences are resolved through compromise and without recourse to brutality. That is the aspiration of norms created within democratic systems. Since those norms are a fundamental characteristic of democratic States, it can easily be inferred that this moderate behavior prevails in international affairs between democratic societies. Within a global democratic culture, the democratic peoples are viewed as owning human rights and possessing the ability to exercise those rights with the will of achieving self-interest. "Acknowledgement of those rights both prevents us from wishing to dominate them and allows us to mitigate our fear that they will try to dominate us." (Russett, pg.115)

Authoritarian States violate the norms that are widely celebrated in democratic societies and therefore cannot be viewed as representing the will of their citizens. If authoritarian States were designed to represent the will of their citizens then they would not have to rely on the undemocratic principle of coercion to govern their peoples. Since authoritarian governments are in a condition of antagonism with their own people, they cannot be expected to reform their attitudes with respect to international affairs. "Authoritarian governments are expected to aggress against others if given the power and opportunity. By this reasoning, democracies must be eternally vigilant against them and may even sometimes feel the need to engage in preemptive or preventive (defensively motivated) war against them." (Russett, pg. 117)

Democracy and Culture

At the end of World War II the Marshall Plan was created to resurrect Western Europe and Japan from the vestiges of destruction. Hope developed from the tide of success achieved through the Marshall Plan turning the Western World's attention to "ending the poverty, ignorance and injustice in which most of the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America lived." (Harrison, pg. xvii) Since the attempt to emulate the success of the Marshall Plan, hope has been deposed by disappointment. Exceptions to the overwhelming disappointment have been: ....Spain, Portugal, South Korea, ....Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

We find it difficult to argue away the failures of building democracies by merely explaining the effects of colonialism and dependency. Opponents to such arguments, insist that the statute of limitations has long expired and are no longer viable justifications to the explanations of hardships in third world countries, such as those in Africa and elsewhere. Then we should investigate a new approach; one that argues culture is the link between values and progress. Notwithstanding, it is important to review the merits for the lasting effects of colonialism and dependency.

Dependency is seldom discussed as an issue of importance since, as the opponents of such an argument cite the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe; the transition of communist China to a progressively more free market authoritarian regime; the failure of the Cuban economy after Russia terminated financial support; the triumph of the East Asian "dragons" in the global economy; the victory over the Sandanistas in the 1990 Nicaraguan elections; Mexico's resourcefulness of joining the United States and Canada in NAFTA (Harrison, pg. xx). However, the World Bank constructs a convincing argument for the lasting negative effects of dependency. They argue "the Cold War left a legacy of ineffective aid, partly in the form of loans that have accumulated into large debt stocks." (World Bank, pg. 238) Aid donors have used aid to "advance their values, their commercial interests, their cultural aspirations, and their diplomatic and political objectives." (World Bank, pg. 238) In many cases, especially in ..Africa.., this aid has served to enable the recipients and has effectively disabled them so that in most cases, third world countries are no better off today than what they were forty years ago in addition to their large accumulation of debt. It must seem as though, to many citizens of third world countries, that as they increase their efforts to assimilate into the global economy-the farther behind they fall and the more in debt they become. If this were the case, then it would be no wonder why they would be consumed with self-fulfilling prophecies such as, "why am I working so hard? I'm always going to be poor!" This also does have a significant explanatory power as to why these political arenas have fallen into a state of chaos and disorder.

To understand the deep wounds of colonialism, we should turn our attention, momentarily, to domestic issues in America Underachievement of Black Americans has been easy to discern as a result of the refusal of opportunity in education, employment, and voting rights- "to the minority that had never been invited into the melting pot, the minority for whom the bill of rights really didn't apply." (....Harrison...., pp. xx-xxi) And while de jure racism no longer exists, and de facto discrimination is at a minimum level, there is still a substantial Black-White racial gap.

There is a vast body of literature that describes the success of poor Chinese immigrants in the United States One argument against past racism explaining the current Black-White racial gap is that if poor Chinese immigrants can arrive to the United States impoverished and unable to speak English, and still achieve successful lives in America, then the past racism argument is no longer valid. The argument usually goes to explain the exploitation of the Chinese railroad workers during the mid to late 1800's, and that the violence and hatred towards Chinese-Americans absorbed much of the back lash against African-Americans after the emancipation proclamation, so that if Chinese-Americans can overcome this adversity, then African-Americans should be able to overcome the adversity of the past. However, this argument ignores one very important fact; there has been a discontinuity in the African-American culture. The Chinese-Americans have been able to overcome huge obstacles because they have retained their culture.

Similarly, the argument against colonialism as an explanation for current failures insists that four former colonies have been able to climb into the first world order; two British (Hong Kong and ..Singapore..) and two Japanese (..South Korea.. and ..Taiwan..) (..Harrison.., pg xx). We should, however, measure their success in terms of how much of their culture they were able to retain, and then compare this continuity in culture to the discontinuity in culture for the peoples in such places as ....Africa..... Scholars who are now focusing their attention "…on the role of cultural values and attitudes as facilitators of, or obstacles to, progress…. are the intellectual heirs of Alexis de Tocqueville, who concluded that what made the American political system work was a culture congenial to democracy; Max Weber, who explained the rise of capitalism as essentially a cultural phenomenon rooted in religion" (Harrison, pg. xxi)

In the case of the Marshall Plan's successes in Japan and Germany, and the inability to replicate that success elsewhere, we are beginning to arrive to an understanding that it is much easier to rebuild buildings and infrastructures in countries that have been demolished by war than it is to rebuild the culture of a society that has been demolished by colonialism. That being said, it is now the Western world's moral obligation to understand and accept the diversity throughout the entire planet and its potential. Once the West is able to conceptualize these realities, then they will be able to incorporate and enfranchise the multifaceted cultures that exist into the new global partnership. Because of the increasing nature of the global economy, the West cannot reach its Pareto optimum until the rest of the world is allowed to become free members of the global society and be the best they can be.

Conclusions

The first modern authoritarian planner, Saint-Simon, predicted that those who did not obey his proposed planning boards would be "treated as cattle." Nobody saw more clearly than the political philosopher de Tocqueville that democracy stands in a diametrically opposed conflict with coercive governments: "Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man…" (quoted in Hayek).

Peter Drucker maintained in 1939, "the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following." (quoted in Hayek) Hayek explained that the relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known. Their practice showed how closely they were related. Totalitarians are potential recruits made of the right timber; they know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom. With the totalitarian, what is promised to us as the Road to Freedom is in fact the Highroad to Servitude. It is not difficult to see what must be the consequences when democracy embarks upon a course of totalitarianism (Hayek, 1944).

When the Western world is able to understand other cultures, able to incorporate those cultures into the melting pot and then sell the finished product back to the rest of the world, then societies once depleted of their own culture will be able to take ownership of their own destinies. This enfranchisement will allow humankind to advance towards the "highest attainable happiness on earth." (Chekhov) Democracy allows this advancement. The advancement is towards individual freedom and ontological freedom.

RIP