Recent Articles The American Prospect - articles by author en Chicken Little Goes to Europe <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <blockquote><p><b><a href=";o=1&amp;p=8&amp;l=as1&amp;asins=0385518269&amp;fc1=000000&amp;IS2=1&amp;lt1=_blank&amp;m=amazon&amp;lc1=0000FF&amp;bc1=000000&amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;f=ifr">Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West</a></b> by Christopher Caldwell, Doubleday, 422 pages, $30.00</p></blockquote> <p>What will be the consequences for Europe of decades of immigration, much of it from the Muslim world? In the eyes of Christopher Caldwell, a culturally conservative columnist at the <i>Financial Times</i> and an editor at the <i>Weekly Standard</i>, Europe is being remade, or rather unmade, from the ground up. As a result of the growing "nation of Islam" in Europe -- including 5 million Muslims in France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Great Britain -- societies that used to be homogeneous and therefore coherent have become multicultural and internally divided. </p> <p>But multiculturalism may be merely a halfway house. Echoing Edmund Burke in his title, Caldwell suggests that Europe is undergoing a "revolution" vaguely analogous to what happened in France in 1789. In his first letters on those events, Burke claimed to see a human society being dissolved and replaced by a world of monsters. This isn't far from how Caldwell portrays Europe today. The monstrosities he parades before us include honor killings, "menacing North African slums," anti-Semitic outrages, European police who "are petrified of Muslim men," vandals rampaging through the <i>banlieues</i>, and young zealots marching through European streets with signs reading "Death to anyone who insults Islam!" </p> <p>You may doubt that a socially marginalized, economically impoverished, politically disorganized, and territorially dispersed minority could pull off a revolution, seizing the commanding heights from native Europeans who dominate their countries' institutions and own virtually all of Europe's wealth. After all, the groups in question are trapped in pockets of violent weakness where smoldering anger does not translate into significant power. But Caldwell mocks such doubts: "There were probably fewer Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 than there are Islamists in Europe today." </p> <p>Once the book gets under way, however, the concept of "revolution" plays virtually no role in the analysis. Instead, Caldwell wants us to see Muslim immigration into Europe as a kind of reverse colonization that may lead, you guessed it, to the Islamification of Europe. Because Europe's population is imploding and its territory is being reoccupied by non-Europeans, the homeland of Western civilization may be destined to vanish into the mists of time, in the manner of the Byzantine Empire. </p> <p>If Caldwell and his fellow doomsayers are to be believed, Muslims have now done what they failed to do at the gates of Vienna in 1683. They have breached Europe's defenses and created "beachheads" behind enemy lines, "patiently conquering Europe's cities, street by street." We shouldn't view Muslim immigrants merely as seeking better lives for themselves and their families, Caldwell says. They should be seen instead as the avant-garde forces of a long campaign of cultural replacement. </p> <p>Some may object that this way of seeing Europe's immigration problem is inflammatory, but the more serious problem is that it makes no sense. Given the huge numbers of non-Muslims mixed into Europe's immigrant population, Caldwell can only sustain his thesis by the gratuitous assertion that Romanian, Chinese, Dominican, and other immigrant groups will rally behind the banner of Islam in a campaign to blot out traditional European civilization. </p> <p>Even if, for the sake of argument, we accept this fringe-conservative way of framing the issue, it leaves us wondering: Why are the Europeans, with so many material resources, losing this war? Caldwell's answer is that theirs "is a civilization in decline." Unlike Americans who often seem to love themselves uncritically, Europeans are mired in "self-loathing" and "hand-wringing self-detestation." He explains, "Whether or not [Europe] can defend itself, it has lost sight of why it should." </p> <p>A "guilt-based moral order" took root in Europe, according to Caldwell, when shame and remorse about both the Holocaust and colonialism threw Europeans into spasms of "moral self-flagellation." Ashamed of their past persecution and oppression of non-Christian peoples, European elites began to espouse an "ideology of tolerance." You might suppose that an "ideology of tolerance" would be ethical and principled, but in Caldwell's telling, it is actually an expression of unprincipled self-disgust. </p> <p>Supposedly, it is this self-loathing that has led Europeans to see the admission of Muslim immigrants as "a moral duty." In other passages, Caldwell argues more reasonably that Europe opened its doors to immigration in a fit of absentmindedness, when its own work force had been decimated by war and the reconstruction of a devastated continent required laborers from abroad. So why, after arguing persuasively that Europe opened its doors to mass immigration without thinking through the consequences, does he go on to argue, inconsistently and implausibly, that Europe invited mass immigration because of its guilt-stricken conscience? </p> <p>The second idea is important to him, it turns out, because it helps him unmask humanitarian universalism. He wants to reveal to the world the ugly reality hidden behind the pretty ideology of universal human rights. His thinking, to the extent that I can reconstruct it, goes something like this: When rich nations subscribe to universal human rights, they lose all moral grounds for keeping out poor immigrants. After World War II, Europeans abandoned their traditional intolerance of non-Christian peoples in the name of universalism. Their inability to turn away immigrants who "present themselves in suffering humanity's name" may look like a moral choice, but it is actually a refusal to defend their own values and traditions. </p> <p>And the cultural malady that allowed the Muslim invasion, as Caldwell sees it, goes back even further than postwar guilt. The true source is "Europe's spiritual void," the product of "ideological secularism, which aims to break every link between religion and public life, shepherding people out of religion altogether." As Europeans lost their Christian faith, they also lost their "anchor" (one of his favorite words). Skepticism eroded the moral justification for cultural self-preservation because "all European cultures depend for their stability on certain ethical survivals of Christianity, and would have a difficult time defending their 'values' without them." </p> <p>Readers may be forgiven for feeling lost at this point. Isn't Christianity one of the cultural sources of humanitarian universalism? After all, Christ allegedly died for all mankind. That is obviously what a secular philosopher such as Jürgen Habermas has in mind when he writes, in a passage cited by Caldwell, that "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization." So how can Caldwell apotheosize Christianity for its contribution to European culture and then go on to unmask the moral decay and self-loathing that motivates the universalism that is said, in his own book, to be Christianity's most inspiring legacy? </p> <p>The simplest answer, again, is that his book contains some strange contradictions. But we can untangle the yarn a bit by pointing out that Caldwell's Christianity has less to do with universalism than with dignity and a certain kind of spiritual vigor. </p> <p>Once they had lost their Christian faith, Europeans were bound to become what Caldwell sees them as today -- promiscuous consumerists without souls. Such an unqualified generalization may seem cartoonish; and, indeed, Caldwell has a jolly time defending it. The principal characteristics of today's Europe are "its atomization, its consumerism, its sexual wantonness." What is the chance that the European civilization we discover in "the shopping mall, the pierced navel, online gambling, a 50 percent divorce rate, and high rate of anomie and self-loathing" could defend itself against the Muslim advance? Very little: "The spiritual tawdriness Islamic immigrants perceive in the modern West is not imaginary. It may be Europe's biggest liability in preserving its culture." </p> <p>This is why Caldwell refers to poverty-stricken Muslim enclaves as "the strongest communities in Europe" -- strong, that is, in the context of a pitifully weak post-religious and post-nationalist Europe. "Islam is not the second religion of Europe but the first," he says, because it has maintained its "vital energy," while there is nothing left to European Christianity but a superficial "lifestyle." He even ends up agreeing with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, that Europe's "materialist civilization" is "on the verge of collapse." Caldwell feels more at home with Muslim values than with the values of contemporary Europe -- as, he says, would Dante. And Caldwell also values women's chastity more than women's autonomy because chastity (not to mention virginity) "can further dignity, responsibility, and self-respect." You may think that burqas and niquabs demean women, he ironizes, but what about "jeans that cinch halfway down the bum crack"? </p> <p>And that is not all. "The closer one gets to European culture, the farther one gets from family and its raison d'être, children." While Muslim women living in Europe have an average of 2.34 children, nonreligious European women have an average of less than one (only 0.86), thereby doing everything in their power to insure that the descendants of native Europeans will be radically outnumbered by the offspring of immigrants. This is apparently how cultural self-loathing is put into practice. </p> <p>Caldwell's unexpected embrace of Islamist criticisms of the West comes to an even less expected culmination. Europe's "most recent encounter with Islam" has been "painful and violent," he says. But it has also been "an infusion of oxygen into the drab, nitpicking, materialistic intellectual life of the West. It is a liberation to be able to talk about God once more, even in someone else's language." </p> <p>Having inhaled this blast of oxygen, Caldwell is ready to turn to that old neoconservative hobbyhorse, the unbridgeable gulf between Europe and the United States. One difficulty with this analysis is that Caldwell himself asserts that Europe's national cultures have been eroded by "a homogenized, one-size-fits-all mass consumer culture" originating in America. "Europe is being taken over culturally," he suggests, not only by Islam but simultaneously "by a (market) liberalism that accords no particular value to Europe's most cherished traditions." </p> <p>Unlike Europe, however, America will not be flushed down history's drain. At least not yet. For one thing, America "has not yet had any mass immigration of Muslims" and "scale matters." In addition, America has retained the moral fiber that Europe has lost. It is more Christian and more convinced that Christianity is morally superior to Islam. It is also less squeamish about using force to defend itself abroad (Iraq, Afghanistan) or at home. When Caldwell remarks that "a quarter of the prison inmates in the world are held in the United States," he means this not as criticism but as praise. Reflecting on U.S. "policies that are distasteful to most Europeans," such as the death penalty, he observes that such toughness means that "American cities and suburbs are extremely inhospitable places for immigrants who are criminally inclined." This is one of the principal ways in which America, unlike Europe, "exerts Procrustean pressure on its immigrants to conform." Most important, the United States believes in itself, while "Europeans are confused about whether they are citizens of the world or citizens of their own nations." No wonder they can neither defend their borders nor distinguish clearly between members and nonmembers of their community. </p> <p>Near the beginning of his book, attempting to explain why Europeans have lost faith in their traditions, Caldwell quotes a remarkable passage from the French sociologist Raymond Aron: "Europeans would like to exit from history, from la grande histoire, from the history that is written in letters of blood." This brings us to the heart of the matter. Unlike the post-nationalist Europeans, Americans remain willing to write history in the letters of blood. Not Christ-like concern for the weak and the marginalized but readiness for organized violence is presumably why America's culture strikes the editors of the <i>Weekly Standard</i> as less drab than Europe's. America shares nationalist bellicosity with some parts of the Muslim world, and this is a good thing. European Muslims, he informs us, have "kept alive dreams of cultural, national, and even racial glory that were beyond the reach of Europeans' universalism because they were beyond the reach of Europeans' understanding." But thanks to America, equivalent dreams of patriotic (even "racial"?) glory have not entirely vanished from the West. Despite its sometimes-tawdry consumerism, America is pumped for war and is therefore well-positioned to take on the Islamic threat. </p> <p>Yet it turns out that Caldwell has not entirely abandoned hope for Europe. While Europe's elites despise their own culture, the average, love-it-or-leave-it, tabloid-reading man in the street believes correctly that "Islam itself" is "dangerous" and understands simple truths, such as: Muslims living in Europe make life crummier. The "smoldering rage among working-class voters," moreover, suggests that at least these Europeans have not yet been drained of moral vitality. </p> <p>But what can they do "to stem the implantation of Muslim culture" in Europe? Caldwell holds out three possibilities. One is deportation, an option that he broaches when he asks about rioters in the French <i>banlieues</i> who shout "Fuck France!": "Ought these people, assuming they are noncitizens, be put on the next plane out of the country?" A second possibility is conversion: "It no longer seems unreasonable to demand that immigrants who want to stay in Europe give up the ways of their parents." About the third possibility, Caldwell does not speak so directly, but he raises it in a parable about the fate awaiting guests who overstay their welcome: "The most spectacular illustration history offers of the kinship of hospitality and mistrust is that of Captain Cook, who was feted, flattered, and worshipped for a month by the Hawaiian islanders in Kealakekua Bay in 1779. When he and his crew returned on an emergency visit to repair a broken mast, they were massacred." </p> <p>I do not suppose Caldwell is seriously encouraging Europeans to return to their venerable tradition of mass murder. But readers may be forgiven for wondering what he really thinks about writing history in letters of blood. </p> <p>To be fair, I need to add that Caldwell weaves into his work a number of more reasonable claims that, while not especially original, remain instructive. Although his general argument is that "Islam itself" is responsible both for the failure of Muslims to integrate successfully in Europe and for the rise of jihadist violence, he also dwells more usefully on the role of modern communication technology, bad city planning, and the trauma of displacement -- none of which has anything to do with "Islam itself." By discussing the hostile reaction of 19th-century Boston Protestants to the arrival of "the violent and crime-prone Irish," and the mutual misunderstandings between American whites and blacks caused by lack of social contact, he manages to de-exoticize the European experience. And when he describes "Islam itself" not as a cause of political violence but rather as "an idiom useful for rallying the disgruntled," he is speaking common sense. I have omitted these and other thoughts from my discussion of his book not because they are uninteresting but because they are random flashes of sobriety at odds with, and unintegrated into, the main argument. </p> <p>I have tried to dive beneath the jibes and anecdotes and to restate, as clearly as possible, Caldwell's central thesis. Spelling it out, I believe, is a sufficient refutation. Few of his audacious generalizations can survive serious scrutiny. European elites are not uniformly "self-loathing." (His own examples of their complacency and snobbery suffice to refute this claim.) Europe is not a "spiritual void." "Islam itself" is not a unified actor capable of formulating aims and carrying out strategies. Islamist criticisms of the market economy are, at best, half-truths. Non-Muslim immigrants in Europe will not rally behind the Islamist flag. "Racial glory" is not a worthy aim. Societies were not healthier when the norm of female chastity was enforced (while male philandering was allowed). Life does not become colorless and petty when metaphysical questions are no longer in the air. </p> <p>And, above all, immigrant communities in Europe are not "beachheads" for a likely Islamic takeover. Caldwell's suggestions to the contrary are sophomoric fantasies, contributing little to the understanding and nothing to the resolution of the very real problems surrounding immigrant communities in Europe today. About his half-veiled thoughts on how a post-post-nationalist European public should confront its immigrant communities, the less said the better. If you like this sort of exercise, you may read it for the author's wit. For wisdom, look elsewhere.</p> </div></div></div> Fri, 14 Aug 2009 05:25:10 +0000 148153 at Stephen Holmes The European Dilemma <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <blockquote><p><strong>Infidel</strong> by Ayaan Hirsi Ali <em>(Free Press, 368 pages, $26.00)</em></p></blockquote> <blockquote><p><strong>Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance</strong> by Ian Buruma <em>(Penguin, 288 pages, $24.95)</em></p></blockquote> <p>The world came to know Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a result of the murder of Dutch ﬁlmmaker Theo van Gogh, with whom she had collaborated on a film holding Islam responsible for the battering and humiliation of Muslim women. In November 2004, a Moroccan Dutch Islamist named Mohammed Bouyeri shot van Gogh in a street in Amsterdam, slit his throat, and pinned to his body a death threat against Hirsi Ali, who was already a highly visible member of the Dutch parliament despite having arrived in the Netherlands as a Somali immigrant only 12 years earlier. Now living in the United States, she has been alternately celebrated and excoriated on both sides of the Atlantic as an uncompromising critic not only of Islam but also of multiculturalism, which she contends is mistakenly tolerant of the Muslim world's endemic benightedness and cruelty.</p> <p>Bouyeri's murder of van Gogh and the emergence of Hirsi Ali as a magnetically appealing and inflammatory inter-national celebrity have crystallized a debate among liberally minded Europeans about what their societies ought to do in response to the growth of poorly assimilated Islamic immigrant communities. In contrast to those who call for tolerance of religious and cultural diversity, Hirsi Ali urges Europe to launch a frontal assault on Islam's seemingly inherent misogyny. </p> <p>Hirsi Ali argues that the fable of the Prophet Muhammad's infallibility keeps alive an outmoded warrior ethos characteristic of a 7th-century Arab tribal culture and consequently authorizes both violence against women and the punishment of apostates with death. In Hirsi Ali's view, adherence to "true Islam" is "irreconcilable with a secular liberal state," and even incompatible with a willingness to share the planet with non-Muslims. She interprets the events of September 11, which triggered the loss of her residual faith in the existence of God, as an authentic expression of Islam. And today her political mission is to cajole Europe's Muslim immigrants into reforming what she provocatively calls their "backward" religion.</p> <p>Two new books, Hirsi Ali's memoir, <em>Infidel</em>, and <em>Murder in Amsterdam</em>, by the Dutch English writer Ian Buruma, help us make sense of the events in the Netherlands and the wider controversy over Islam in Europe. Through a series of character sketches, Buruma's book circles outward from the murder of van Gogh and provides a novelistic exploration (Joseph Conrad's <em>The Secret Agent</em> comes to mind) of how Holland, once virtually a "playground of multi-cultural utopianism," turned into a savage crime scene. </p> <p>Bouyeri himself appears as a radical loser on welfare, one of those "desperadoes who imagine themselves as part of a small elite, blessed with moral purity, surrounded by a world of evil." In their film <em>Submission</em>, van Gogh and Hirsi Ali had shown verses from the Koran justifying misogynist violence projected onto a female body, implying that religious texts impel Muslim men to "write" male superiority on women in the language of wounds and bruises. Bouyeri was apparently responding to this film when he "wrote" Islamic superiority on van Gogh's body by pinning to it the death threat against Hirsi Ali. </p> <p>Bouyeri and Hirsi Ali, Buruma remarks, represent "two different visions of the universal, one radically secular, the other radically religious." Whereas the young Dutch Moroccan man wants to awaken the sleeping Muslims, the young Dutch Somali woman wants to awaken the sleeping Europeans. In exploring such parallel lives, Buruma is not being impartial toward a murderer and his real and potential victims, as some intemperate critics have recently alleged; he is simply trying to make sense of these and other psychologically complex, often tortured, characters.</p> <p>Hirsi Ali's <em>Infidel</em> is the vivid story of her own voyage to escape bigotry and violence, moving "from the world of faith to the world of reason," as she came to see it. Instead of fantasizing, like Bouyeri, about a super-harsh father figure (Allah) who could humiliate the proud West, she fled to Europe to escape her real father's stifling demands. And whereas Bouyeri came to see the West as frustration and Islam as salvation, she came to view Islam as a cage and the West as liberation. </p> <p>The daughter of a Somali resistance fighter, Hirsi Ali was brought up partly in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and Ethiopia -- an itinerant life that exposed her to many varieties of cultural prejudice and loosened the hold of the parochial customs of her native land. Although she claims to have become an ardent individualist and a believer in personal responsibility, she does not seem to blame her grandmother for inflicting genital mutilation on her when she was 6 years old, viewing this bit of primitive cruelty as the action not of her grandmother, really, but of the premodern culture that inhabited most Somali women of her grandmother's generation. </p> <p>When Hirsi Ali arrived in Europe, escaping an arranged marriage and thereby breaking dramatically with her father, she was shocked to experience firsthand the gaping divide between Islamic and non-Islamic societies. To her, the most obvious difference was that the so-called House of War (the nonbelieving West) was not "soulless," as she had been warned, but prosperous, welcoming, and basically at peace, whereas the House of Islam remains mired in poverty, cruelty, inequality, and bloody conflict. </p> <p>Although her decision to run away was wholly individualistic (inspired, she says, by the romantic heroines of "trashy" novels), she managed to survive thanks largely to the collectivist efforts of a Dutch welfare state that generously granted food, shelter, and a temporary stipend to an unknown runaway from Africa. This palpable dependency of individual freedom on social resources managed by a government provides a lesson that might usefully be contemplated by her free-market colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute, where she currently works.</p> <p>For Hirsi Ali, the supremacy of reason means that a Muslim woman today who is told to subject her 6-year-old daughter to genital excision should not kneel before authority, but rather use her own head and ask if this is really a good idea. Hirsi Ali says her aim is to find "other women held captive in the compound of irrationality and superstition" and convince them "to take their lives into their own hands." To this end, she speaks passionately about the dark side of multiculturalism, which she believes has "reinforced the immigrants' urge to build enclaves." And she argues fiercely against the idea of "elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life." This tolerance, she contends, will needlessly and painfully prolong the transition to modernity in immigrant communities. To those who warn that her uncompromising attitude risks alienating a potentially receptive audience, she retorts that secular liberals who express chronic uncertainty about the superiority of their own ideals will never compete successfully with religious extremists for influence over the minds of confused young European Muslims. It is simply incoherent, she argues, to affirm both the freedom of the individual from traditional authority and the right of immigrant subcultures to smother individuality (especially of women) in the name of traditional authority.</p> <p>Buruma, for his part, disapproves of European politicians who pretend that Muslim immigration is not a problem and refuse to discuss high crime rates in Muslim communities. He agrees, as a matter of principle, with much of what Hirsi Ali stands for. While he too thinks that it is futile to speak sweet reason to inflamed zealots, and that the sexual mutilation of children and honor killings cannot be justified religiously or in any other way and should be punished as crimes, he disagrees both with Hirsi Ali's most rhetorically prominent explanation of the problem and her recommendation for what to do about it. </p> <p>What causes violent extremism? Hirsi Ali focuses attention on Islam itself, with its premodern worldview seemingly frozen in its unalterable sacred texts. Buruma answers plausibly that the Koran didn't cause Bouyeri to kill van Gogh any more than <em>Das Kapital</em> caused Stalin to create the Gulag. Honor killings, forced marriages, and female genital mutilation are the vestiges of rural, village, and tribal culture, not of Islam per se. </p> <p>Moreover, Buruma argues, young Berber men from the Rif Mountains in Morocco, if compelled to transit practically overnight from a strictly regulated society to a freer and more open one, may suffer a partial disintegration of personality, causing them to clutch at certainties and to attribute their inner torment to a scapegoat such as "the West." To state flatly, as Hirsi Ali sometimes does, that a radical interpretation of Islam causes extremist violence is to ignore plentiful evidence that young immigrants whose ambitions are blocked are <em>drawn to</em> radical interpretations of Islam that promise to make sense of their existential rage, suggesting that Islamist beliefs are as much a symptom as a cause.</p> <p>Why have many Islamic immigrants failed to integrate successfully in countries such as Holland? Hirsi Ali focuses on postcolonial guilt, moral relativism, and the melting away of European self-confidence. Pim Fortuyn -- the anti-immigrant gay Dutch political leader who was assassinated by a non-Muslim in May 2002 -- held much the same view, declaring that the Dutch had become "too tolerant of intolerance." Buruma answers that technology, especially the satellite TV that beams Arabic- and Turkish-language programming into immigrant neighborhoods, has as much to do with the failure of integration as the purportedly excessive tolerance of Europeans toward Muslims. Persuading European authorities to become less hospitable toward Islamic practices that violate elemental principles of Western individualism will do nothing to reverse the revolution in global communication and travel that has made cultural integration more difficult than it was before.</p> <p>Moreover, when Buruma describes the Dutch attitude toward Muslim immigrants as "an odd combination of charity and indifference," he is suggesting that European tolerance for the alien habits of immigrants has less to do with meek cultural relativism than with its opposite: a residual arrogance about the cultural, if not racial, superiority of Europeans. In the age of colonialism, Europeans were never overly concerned about the moral life of natives, and they seem to have imported this colonial laissez-faire back into the heart of a democratic society.</p> <p>In her fine print, if not in her head-lines, Hirsi Ali acknowledges many of these complexities. For example, after saying that the kind of thinking she observed "in Saudi Arabia, and among the Muslim Brotherhood in Kenya and Somalia, is incompatible with human rights and liberal values," she adds, "It preserves a feudal mind-set based on tribal concepts of honor and shame." Similarly, when discussing how her female Moroccan friends in Holland would rail about humiliation by the Dutch without mentioning the violence they suffered at the hands of their husbands, she diagnoses anti-Dutch feeling as "really a comfort mechanism, to keep people from feeling personally inadequate and to externalize the causes of their unhappiness." Furthermore, her descriptions of everyday life in Somalia and Saudi Arabia and at her multi-denominational school in Nairobi thoroughly corroborate Buruma's point that Islam is highly variable in practice. Nevertheless, Hirsi Ali relentlessly presses the case that Islam is grimly uniform in some respects, such as its insistence that women cannot marry without the approval of a parent or guardian. Her general point seems to be that Islam has an inherent tendency to keep alive premodern traditions that are incompatible with peaceful adaptation to a modern society. </p> <p>Perhaps the most important difference between Hirsi Ali and Buruma lies in the latter's belief, following the French political scientist Olivier Roy, that the only way forward is for Islam to be fully accepted as a European religion. Buruma is noncommittal about the claim of some moderate members of the Dutch Muslim community that "only properly organized religion will stop young men from downloading extremism from the Internet," but he wants to avoid making Islam itself responsible for the disappointments of Muslim integration in Europe, because the majority of Europe's Muslims are not going to follow Hirsi Ali into outright atheism. This is what leads Buruma to conclude: "Attacking religion cannot be the answer, for the real threat to a mixed society will come when the mainstream of non-revolutionary Muslims has lost all hope of feeling at home." </p> <p>One of Hirsi Ali's reiterated themes is that well-meaning Europeans frequently hesitate to criticize Islam "for fear of being called racist." Buruma is more troubled than Hirsi Ali is about the unintended political consequences of eradicating such a fear. Indeed, he worries, not unreasonably, that her version of the Enlightenment has been brazenly converted into a weapon of the racist right, which opportunistically paints its xenophobia with a veneer of universalism. Something of the sort happened during the "cartoon intifada," when anti-immigrant activists with scant interest in freedom of the press invoked that liberal ideal to justify their "right to insult others on the grounds of race or creed." Hirsi Ali argues that the anti-racism of western Europeans, a lesson painfully distilled from the Nazi cataclysm, has prevented them from recognizing the threat posed to European values by unassimilated Muslim immigrants. It is no reflection on her motives to point out that her high-minded criticism of anti-racism and her plea for Europeans to stand up and "fight" for their civilization have inevitably appealed to people who refuse coexistence with Muslim immigrants on much cruder and more emotional grounds. </p> <p>One of the most fascinating of Buruma's characters is Fortuyn, the outspoken critic of Islamist homophobia and sexism, the "populist who played on the fear of Muslims while boasting of having sex with Moroccan boys." Fortuyn's spectacular political success, Buruma suggests, was due to his willingness to listen sympathetically to the hate raging in the hearts of the Dutch against Moroccan and Turkish immigrants. Political entrepreneurs of hate do not strike Buruma as particularly worthy heirs to the tradition of Spinoza, however, even if the source of their "venom" is that they have only recently and "painfully wrested themselves free from the strictures of their own religions" and cannot stand the thought of restarting that particular struggle from scratch.</p> <p>The leader of the party founded by Fortuyn, Buruma adds, "saw Islamic and Western civilizations at war on Dutch soil." That a clash of civilization is also heartily endorsed by Islamist extremists should make us sit up and take note. Rather than signaling an admirable willingness to defend the Enlightenment against its enemies, eagerness to participate in such a clash implies a wholesale abandonment of one of the Enlightenment's main pillars -- namely, the overcoming of collective punishment or group-on-group revenge by the strict individualization of culpability. The Islamophobia of the European right is obviously no less tribalistic than the Islamists' hatred of the West. Although the tribalization of the Enlightenment by European xenophobes clearly distresses Buruma, it does not even interest Hirsi Ali. </p> <p>One comes away from these two remarkable books suspecting that neither compromise nor confrontation will do much to avert the coming train crash between a resentful minority of indigenous Europeans and a potentially violent minority of young men among the millions of Muslims now permanently residing in Europe. Various scholars have published statistics suggesting that the slow but successful integration of Europe's Muslims is already under way. But Buruma and Hirsi Ali do not leave their readers feeling so complacent. Read together, their books suggest that no simple formula will work -- neither Western chauvinism nor multiculturalism, neither assailing Islam as "backward" nor offering Muslims a perhaps insincere and therefore erratic respect. Accommodations may whet the appetite of the radicals, whereas a refusal to make accommodations seems bound to drive more young men into the radical camp. Perhaps Europe needs politicians who can artfully shift back and forth between adherence to principle and accommodation to diversity as each case demands. If such wise and skillful leaders do not appear sometime soon, the long-term consequences of current trends may prove impossible to manage peacefully.</p> <p>One might even argue that, in today's Europe, the Enlightenment ideal of universal citizenship is already dead. Europeans are becoming increasingly habituated to living in dual states, where "real" citizens live side by side with poorly assimilated immigrants who (in the minds of the majority) will never become full-fledged members of the community. This may not be a clash of civilizations destined to evolve into violent confrontation, but it is a profoundly disquieting moral crisis, which these two original and stimulating books invite us to ponder.</p> <p><em>Stephen Holmes is a professor at New York University Law School and the author, most recently, of </em>The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror.</p> </div></div></div> Mon, 19 Mar 2007 01:09:04 +0000 146133 at Stephen Holmes How the War Was Lost <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <blockquote><p><b>Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq</b> by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (<i>Pantheon Books, 603 pages, $27.95</i>)</p></blockquote> <p>This vivid book wraps a political bombshell inside a riveting tale. Its central chapters deliver a blow-by-blow account of the unstoppable American dash toward Baghdad, blinding sandstorms and all, in March and April 2003. The co-authors -- Michael Gordon is the senior war correspondent for <i>The New York Times</i>; Bernard Trainor, a former Marine Corps lieutenant general -- tell stories of skilled leadership, combat heroics, and the campaign's ultimate success at driving Saddam Hussein from power, without neglecting the inevitable battlefield snafus, poor coordination among combatant units, wildly misleading intelligence, and scenes of gruesome carnage.</p> <p>For the American invaders, the greatest surprise turned out to have been the unconventional tactics of the enemy. On the drive to Baghdad, U.S. forces did not initially confront, as they had been led to expect, either the demoralized regular army or Saddam's Republican Guard but rather the highly motivated Fedayeen Saddam: “The enemy faced by U.S. forces” was “largely amorphous, not in uniform, and rarely part of an organized military force.” It leveled the battlefield, to some extent, “by ignoring the rules of conventional warfare.” It fought “using guile, deception and ambush.” At one point, the Pentagon's original war plans looked to be in shambles thanks to “the work of an enemy who was not supposed to exist.” The decision to seize Baghdad at lightning speed and therefore to dart past pockets of unexpected guerrilla-style resistance in the south, rather than lingering to mop them up, remains one of the most controversial choices of the war. </p> <p><i>Cobra II</i>, however, would not be such an important book if it were merely a fascinating and unflinching work of military history. It is much more than that. Gordon and Trainor may have tossed the stone that loosed an avalanche in the ongoing generals' mutiny against the leadership of Donald Rumsfeld. Gordon and Trainor freely acknowledge that extensive interviews with military officers from all services shaped their perspective on the war. By publicly documenting the depth and breadth of military disenchantment with Rumsfeld, their book may have emboldened the half-dozen dissenting generals to speak bluntly about what they consider the wretchedly incompetent performance of the defense secretary. This public dissent suggests intense conviction on their part, or at least white-hot anger, considering that it may jeopardize lucrative future employment in the defense industry.</p> <p>Rumsfeld's military critics regularly lambaste him not only for the many catastrophic decisions he has made, but also for his overbearing decision-making style and even for a pathologically autistic personality. In one of the most hilarious passages of the book, Trainor and Gordon reproduce Rumsfeld's answer, in December 2005, to the question of what he had learned from the war in Iraq: “I think if I had to pull out one lesson that we've learned over the past four or five years, it would be that in the 21st century we're going to have to stop thinking about things, numbers of things, and mass, and think also and maybe even first about speed and agility and precision.” In other words, what Rumsfeld “learned” from the war in Iraq is nothing other than the military doctrine that he had been preaching for many years. </p> <p>Rumsfeld's commitment to a streamlined invasion force scandalously contradicted the casus belli that the administration alleged for the war. Bush rallied political support for the invasion by presenting it as an act of pre-emptive self-defense on the grounds that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and had cooperative relations with transnational terrorist groups. If Rumsfeld had taken such allegations seriously, however, he would have had to double the size of the invading force: “Securing the WMD required sealing the country's borders and quickly seizing control of the many suspected sites before they were raided by profiteers, terrorists and regime officials determined to carry on the fight.” The force that Rumsfeld eventually assembled, by contrast, “was too small to do any of this.” In other words, Rumsfeld's fixation on slimming down the invasion force trumped Bush's wish to prevent WMDs from falling into the hands of terrorists. A doctrinaire commitment to a peculiar method of war fighting contradicted and subverted the primary declared purpose of the war.</p> <p>This inconsistency between methods and aims remains just as striking if we turn to the long-term war objective of creating a stable, pro-American regime in Iraq so as to transform the politics of the region and make the Middle East more hospitable to American national-security interests. Whenever the aim of war is to stabilize a country politically, mass becomes more important than speed. Rumsfeld's failure to grasp this imperative or indeed to take any noticeable interest in the prerequisites of political stability explains, according to the authors, how he managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The “messy aftermath of a seemingly decisive war” was due mostly to “military and political blunders in Washington.” The insurgency flared from a small spark into a raging conflagration -- so the authors contend -- because Rumsfeld did not commit enough soldiers to the Iraqi theater to damp it down. </p> <p>Long before the invasion, Rumsfeld was granted full control of the postwar situation in Iraq. But it interested him so little that he did almost nothing to prepare for it. “After the Pentagon established its primacy in postwar Iraq, the Phase IV [i.e., postwar] planning effort slowed to a crawl.” Rumsfeld is renowned as a chronically impatient micromanager. In this particular case, however, he “did not seem anxious about the lack of momentum.” Why not? Absurd as it may sound, “Rumsfeld and his aides viewed the building of a new Iraq as a relatively undemanding pursuit.” Alternatively, the defense secretary vaguely imagined that yet-unidentified subservient allies would miraculously appear in the wake of a spectacular American victory to perform the unglamorous chores of peacekeeping and nation building. These expectations seem to explain why, shockingly, “No military headquarters or staff was selected in advance to secure postwar Iraq.”</p> <p>Neglect of postwar stability was a conscious choice, Trainor and Gordon insist, made in defiance of plentiful advice to the contrary. Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, who was publicly derided by Paul Wolfowitz after telling a congressional committee that hundreds of thousands of American troops would be needed in Iraq, is only the best-known example. Others inside and outside the Pentagon were arguing for a constabulary force at the ready to control the criminal anarchy likely to break out when the ghastly dictatorship collapsed. But Rumsfeld and his cadre of yes-men did not listen. </p> <p>Speaking of yes-men, Rumsfeld's haughty impatience with dissent and disagreement apparently explains his choice of the self-effacing Richard Myers as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “After hearing Rumsfeld testify on troop levels around the world,” Trainor and Gordon recount, “Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, said cuttingly there was no need to hear from Myers as well since he knew the chairman was incapable of expressing an independent view.” The Gulf War in contrast, according to the authors, saw a robust and productive back-and-forth between Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and a strong chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell. Rumsfeld preferred a deferential military leader, ensuring that his own ideas, however half-baked, invariably prevailed.</p> <p>Like Myers, General Tommy Franks has recently sallied forth from retirement to defend the defense secretary against his critics. But the portrait of Franks sketched in <i>Cobra II</i> is no more flattering than the portrayal of Myers. For one thing, “Tommy Franks never acknowledged the enemy he faced nor did he comprehend the nature of the war he was directing.” He is also described as vainglorious, taking credit for a war plan developed by subordinates and “airbrushing” history when regaling journalists such as Bob Woodward with stories of the war. Even though he at first proposed dispatching more than 300,000 troops to Iraq, he allowed himself to be browbeaten by Rumsfeld into sending the streamlined force that proved unable to control the postwar anarchy.</p> <p>Rumsfeld also seems to have had similar reasons for appointing L. Paul Bremer III as administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Having no familiarity with the Middle East and no experience at all with nation building, Bremer could not talk back to his boss with the confidence reserved for the knowledgeable. The original plan was to team Bremer with Zalmay Khalilzad, now ambassador to Iraq, who at the time was the only high-level member of the administration personally acquainted with all of the important players in the Iraqi diaspora. But at this point Bremer (to the astonishment of Powell and others) pulled a Rumsfeld: “Determined to solidify his authority, Bremer squeezed out Khalilzad, the one official who knew the Iraqi politicians well.” </p> <p>The defining moment of Bremer's Iraqi tour occurred on May 23, 2003, when he issued the order to disband the Iraqi army, oblivious to the role of the military as an employment agency providing subsistence to hundreds of thousands of armed Iraqis and their families. The folly of this decision can be debated. What is crucial to note is that, while Rumsfeld was calling the shots, the Joint Chiefs, Secretary of State Powell, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice all learned about this weighty decision after it was made. Decision making by a small handful of men, behind closed doors and without consultation even inside the executive branch, may suit the authoritarian personality of the defense secretary. But can anyone argue that it promotes an intelligent approach to national security?</p> <p>During the invasion, Gordon was “embedded” with the Coalition Forces Land Component Command. It is not surprising, therefore, that Iraqi voices and perspectives are largely absent from <i>Cobra II</i>'s account of the fighting. The one marvelous exception is the authors' retelling of the invasion from the vantage point of Saddam Hussein and his inner circle. Their account is based on postwar debriefings of high-ranking Iraqi officers, who were induced to talk not by harsh and humiliating treatment, it should be mentioned, but, on the contrary, by lavish banquets and buttering up.</p> <p>The key revelation here is that Saddam was long convinced that the United States would never launch an all-out assault. He knew that he had no stockpiles of WMD and no working ties with Islamic terrorists targeting America. He was therefore perfectly confident that Bush had no casus belli. As a result, “He saw no reason why the Americans would want to invade Iraq.” </p> <p>So fearful was Saddam of his own countrymen, by contrast, that he hesitated to arm Iraqi tribes to defend the country: “There was always a chance that he himself could end up as the target of the people's war.” By discouraging fraternization among his officers he made a coup less likely, but he also weakened the military's capacity for coordinated defense. One Republican Guard commander explained exactly how autocracy breeds obtuseness, remarking that, in Saddam's Iraq, “the clever men learned not to involve themselves in any decision-making.” Saddam appointed one of his close cousins as commander of the Special Republican Guard forces responsible for the defense of Baghdad, even though the man was a militarily inexperienced drunkard, precisely because “he was not clever enough to put a coup together.” His subordinates dared not contradict Saddam for fear of death and worse. The regime operated with virtually no sanity checks. Saddam sometimes made even important decisions on the basis of his dreams.</p> <p>But the self-weakening nature of Saddam's autocracy was displayed most visibly in his elevation of loyalty over capacity: “Republican Guard and other senior officers were often chosen on the basis of family ties and loyalty, not competence.” Gordon and Trainor dwell on this theme, presumably to evoke an ironic comparison with the Bush administration. Of course, Rumsfeld merely fired the people who dared contradict him, while Saddam murdered them along with their families. So the comparison is loose, at best. To underscore both the sharp differences and remote similarities, the authors report an encounter that took place soon after Bush assumed the presidency between an Army colonel and Steve Cambone, Rumsfeld's chief aid. “Cambone jested that Rumsfeld thought the Army's problems could be solved by lining up fifty of its generals in the Pentagon and gunning them down.” That joke was presumably funnier in Washington than it would have been in Baghdad.</p> <p>Some commentators have alleged that Saddam planned an insurrection against the American conquerors, to be unleashed after he was toppled from power. Zero evidence supports such speculations, Trainor and Gordon tell us. “Saddam was no more farsighted than the Americans in preparing for the aftermath,” they mischievously comment. The real story is more complicated and more interesting. First, Saddam did not anticipate being ousted by force. But he did believe that the Americans might successfully ground the Iraqi air force, including its helicopter gunships, and then proceed to foment a Shiite rebellion in the south. To prepare in advance for such a dangerous development, Saddam distributed caches of small arms, guarded by Baathists, along with Fedayeen units, throughout southern Iraq. Although unit commanders were forbidden to communicate with each other lest they conspire against Saddam, the Fedayeen would presumably have been able to fight off local insurrections long enough to allow the Republican Guard to arrive by land. Once the American invaders had plowed through the south and on to Baghdad, driving Hussein from power, the potential dual use of both the pre-stashed arms and the Fedayeen's cell-like command structure came into view: “[T]he very force designed to counter an insurgency” ultimately became “the core of the insurgency against the Americans.” </p> <p>Having absorbed the biases as well as the insights of their principal informants, Trainor and Gordon tend to exonerate the uniformed military from serious responsibility for the Iraqi debacle. “The violent chaos that followed Saddam's defeat,” they argue, “was not a matter of not having a plan but of adhering too rigidly to the wrong one.” If a better plan had been contrived, presumably incorporating higher troop levels and well-trained constabulary forces, violent chaos would not have erupted or, if it had erupted, it would have been contained.</p> <p>That the uniformed military should not be granted blanket exoneration, however, is strongly suggested by the parade of officers who have now rallied in support of their besieged defense secretary. <i>Cobra II</i> itself acknowledges that Franks knew no more than the civilian Rumsfeld about “the actual structure of political power in Iraq.” Both are described as refusing to listen to experts and professionals who knew what needed to be known. But who exactly within the U.S. government knew better? </p> <p>The CIA and U.S. Special Forces had many contacts in Afghanistan, dating back at least to the 1980s. Iraq, by contrast, had been a denied area, meaning the war was inevitably planned by amateurs with measly knowledge of the country the United States was about to invade. Civilians in the administration were no more knowledgeable or thoughtful. After the American military had thoroughly destroyed the Tikriti clan that had ruled Iraq for decades, Rice explained, “the institutions” of the country (the ministries, the courts, the provincial governments, and the police) would go on working normally. Here are her own words: “The concept was that we would defeat the army, but the institutions would hold, everything from ministries to police forces.” And she added, “You would be able to bring new leadership, but we were going to keep the body in place.” Such statements betray an appalling ignorance of the dependence of formal institutions on informal social networks. </p> <p>Gordon and Trainor sometimes seem to suggest that the Iraq War could have ended successfully if only Rumsfeld had not been in charge. But does this make sense? Admittedly, a powerful argument can be made that a large peacekeeping force is more effective than a small one. Not only do small peacekeeping forces “encourage adversaries to think they could challenge the peacekeepers” but, even more important, they lead the peacekeepers “to rely more on firepower to make up for their limited numbers.” But while this is plausible, it is not a decisive argument. An equally persuasive case can be made that a “bigger footprint” will prove politically destabilizing. Larger numbers of rowdy and culturally ignorant American soldiers blasting heavy-metal music outside mosques on Friday afternoons will not necessarily calm down the population of an occupied country. In other words, a bigger footprint may be either stabilizing or destabilizing. It can cut either way. Because we cannot be certain ahead of time which of the two contrary effects will predominate, we cannot be sure that higher force levels would have prevented a disastrous outcome of the Iraq War.</p> <p>A related unknown, touching directly on American war aims in Iraq, concerns the armed wing of the Iraqi state bureaucracy. The question is this: Was it ever realistic to expect Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites to be melded together within fully integrated Iraqi police, military, and state security units -- that is, within the core institutions of the state? If not, and there are good reasons to doubt it, the very project of turning power over to “the Iraqis” was unfeasible from the start. In any society deeply divided along tribal, sectarian, and ethnic lines, it is difficult to create a government that is both representative and coherent. (Saddam's government was to some extent coherent because it was in no degree representative.) When a society's basic subgroups not only fear and distrust each other but also are weakly organized and fragmented internally, they are unlikely to be able to negotiate stable bargains and share power. </p> <p>The authors are on firm, not to mention well-trodden, ground when they claim that the occupation of Iraq has been disastrously mismanaged. But they sometimes intimate that it was realistic for Bush to try to reform the Middle East to America's advantage though a military attack. The problem here lies deeper than strategy or tactics. The administration knew so little about the country it decided to invade that its expectations were basically indistinguishable from wild guesses. Its entire approach to the challenge also reflected an unwarranted confidence in the politically transformative power of superior force. That something even more dishonorable may have been going on is implied by a six-page article, “How and Where to Apply Shock and Awe,” penned by Air Force General Charles Horner and forwarded to Franks by Rumsfeld in December 2001. Trainor and Gordon quote Horner's extraordinary concluding sentences: “In the end, if we are going to lead, then we must be considered the madmen of the world, capable of any action, willing to risk anything to achieve our national interests. ... If we are to achieve noble purposes we must be prepared to act in the most ignoble manner.” This is how tyrants and terrorists think. That such ideas may have influenced the administration's decision to invade Iraq suggests that it has much more to answer for than its incompetence. </p> <p><i>Stephen Holmes is a professor at the New York University School of Law.</i></p> </div></div></div> Sun, 21 May 2006 18:17:58 +0000 145452 at Stephen Holmes Must Democracy Wait? <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <blockquote><p> <b>The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad</b> By Fareed Zakaria, W.W. Norton, 286 pages, $24.95 </p></blockquote> <p>Fareed Zakaria's wide-ranging examination of the difficulties and downsides of democracy makes gripping reading today, especially as the Bush administration announces its plans to hand a shocked and awed Iraq back to the Iraqis. Writing before the toppling of the Baath regime in Baghdad, Zakaria speculates, "Were the United States to dislodge Saddam and -- far more important -- engage in a serious, long-term project of nation-building, Iraq could well become the first major Arab country to combine Arab culture with economic dynamism, religious tolerance, liberal politics, and a modern outlook on the world." And, because "success is infectious," Zakaria suggests that there is merit to the theory popular among hawks that sees a new Iraq as the ignition of a democratic chain reaction throughout the Middle East.</p> <p> As a realistic observer of world events, however, Zakaria can distinguish the desirable from the likely. He worries that efforts to press "premature democratization" on countries unprepared for democratic government may lead to disaster. Given Iraq's relative poverty, the mutual distrust seeded by decades of tyranny, old ethnic and sectarian divisions, and affliction by the "oil curse" (which seldom eases the path to democracy), Zakaria believes we need to be careful to do first things first. Above all, he says, we should delay national elections, and he even tells us for how long (five years).</p> <p> Paul Wolfowitz take note: "The haste to press countries into elections over the last decade," Zakaria writes, "has been, in many cases, counterproductive." Americans, he suggests, are especially liable to self-defeating impatience in this regard because, as a matter of national ideology, we are blind to democracy's "dark sides." In deeply divided societies, however, competitive elections give political entrepreneurs an incentive to mobilize voters along ethnic and sectarian lines, inflaming intolerance and factionalism, as Amy Chua has likewise argued in her recent book, <i>World on Fire</i>. [See "<a href="/print/V14/4/polakow-suransky-s.html">Free Market Furies</a>," Sasha Polakow-Suransky, <i>TAP</i>, April 2003.] Zakaria's own thinking about illiberal democracy seems to have been stimulated by the recent political history of his native India. Might not an overnight leap to electoral politics in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq have similarly ruinous results?</p> <p> To avert the dangers of a premature turn to democracy, Zakaria calls for putting priority on the development of "constitutional liberalism" -- that is, checks and balances, private property, a market economy and religious tolerance, which in his view provide vital safeguards against the demagoguery and instability that popular elections may unleash. Such sequencing sounds reasonable enough. But his simple contrast of democracy and liberalism does not work quite as neatly as he would like. Many classic features of constitutional liberalism, such as divided government, federalism, and the freedom to preach and proselytize, can also open the door to extremist violence, even in the absence of electoral politics. In Indonesia, neoliberal economic reforms, rather than "too much democracy," created high levels of unemployment and sparked ethnic rampages. Authoritarianism certainly does not guarantee social peace. Indeed, as Zakaria himself admits, the absence of democratic outlets in the Arab Middle East has pushed political protest into the mosques and made political Islam into the language of frustrated and unemployed young men. But though he recognizes some of these problems, Zakaria nevertheless insists that elections on the basis of universal suffrage should wait until liberal constitutionalism is firmly in place.</p> <p> But even if we grant that liberal constitutionalism ought to take priority, we need a way of establishing it, and Zakaria never adequately explains how that is to be accomplished. In certain passages he comes close to implying that mere political will is enough, as when he suggests that moderate politics could be brought to Kazakhstan simply by crafting a better constitution. But the formal provisions of constitutions cannot create a politics without regard to the forces operating in society; the rule of law itself needs social support and cannot be built from scratch, or against the grain, by political will. </p> <p> Zakaria's proclivity for magical constitutional thinking is evident in his discussion of Boris Yeltsin. That bad czar, he explains, weakened the courts and the legislature and failed to develop a healthy consultative relation with Russian society. But such criticisms ignore underlying realities. Where in Russia's society or polity during the 1990s could Yeltsin have found strong partners for economic reform? In the absence of such partners, he ruled by decree and failed to develop the institutions of constitutional liberalism that Zakaria rightly admires. This was a failure of social support, however -- a product of circumstance, not a failure of political will.</p> <p> If liberal institutions will not survive without political backing from well-organized social forces, we need to ask how such forces are created in the first place. Zakaria's implicit answer turns out to be economic growth. He suggests that we attend to economic development before democratization because democracies become more stable as countries grow richer and because liberal political institutions require strong constituencies, especially a "genuinely entrepreneurial business class." Historically, Zakaria wants us to believe, liberal institutions reflect middle-class bargaining power. In 19th-century Britain, for instance, "the economic and political independence of [the] bourgeoisie" was the motor behind democratic reforms. Only a middle class can force lethally armed political power to curtail its rapacious and capricious behavior and begin to deliver good governance, such as reliable contract enforcement. </p> <p> This historical lesson, Zakaria suggests, can guide America's nation-building efforts in places such as Iraq. In the Middle East, the Arab rulers of Oman, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain and Morocco, though corrupt and autocratic, "are still more liberal, tolerant, and pluralistic than what would likely replace them" if democratic elections were held today. But once independent business classes have entrenched the necessary limitations on power in a liberal constitution, it would be safe to open the floodgates and allow popular elections.</p> <p> Although Zakaria has no more idea how to create economic growth than anyone else, he has been impressed by "liberalizing autocrats" in, for instance, Singapore, Chile and South Korea. In many cases, military juntas have brought into being the prosperous middle classes that tend to moderate and liberalize democratic government. Zakaria expands this flickering thought into the broad generalization that liberalizing autocracies can lay "the groundwork" for stable democracies. His discussion of China in this context is revealing. "If economic development and a middle class are keys to sustaining democracy," he writes, "China is moving in the right direction." This claim makes clear that Zakaria is not really thinking about putting the pursuit of liberty before the creation of democracy, as China seems no closer to one than to the other. In some cases at least, Zakaria seems ready to postpone liberty, too, for the sake of economic development.</p> <p> There are many practical as well as moral problems with this approach, some of which the author acknowledges. For one thing, autocracies have produced their share of developmental disasters. And for every Chile or South Korea, where economic development has occurred under an undemocratic government, there is an Ireland or a Japan, where spectacular growth has occurred under democracy. As the political scientist Adam Przeworski has shown, no robust conclusions can be drawn from the historical evidence about the impact of dictatorship or democracy on economic growth. Successes and failures seem to be equally likely under both sorts of regimes.</p> <p> We can agree that democracy can be dangerous without liberal safeguards, that such safeguards can be maintained only by a robust and independent middle class, and that such a middle class will become politically self-assertive only after a period of economic growth. But what should we be doing to get such a process off the ground, besides hoping for the arrival on the scene of a benevolent czar with good intentions? That such a weak hope may not be Zakaria's last word is suggested by two examples.</p> <p> The first comes from western Europe. The devastation of World War I provided "breeding grounds" for fascists, "some of whom used democracy to destroy liberalism." After World War II, vowing not to allow a rerun of the previous postwar disaster, the United States kept a substantial military presence in Europe. Under U.S. protection, western European economic growth undermined the appeal of extremist movements and led to the creation of a substantial middle class that, by now, provides a solid domestic constituency for liberal democratic governance.</p> <p> A second example comes from India. Here again an outside power, this time the British, provided the crucial foundations for development: "courts, legislatures, administrative rules, and a (quasi-) free press," which Indians inherited when they achieved independence in 1947. Just as Indian courts often used British law as precedent, so India's Congress Party drew its commitment to press freedom, judicial independence and religious tolerance from British models. Britain put its liberal stamp not only on Indian institutions and ideology but also on the leadership cadre itself. As Zakaria reminds us, Jawaharlal Nehru spent his formative years "training to be an English gentleman."</p> <p> Taken together, these two examples suggest an alternative to waiting for liberalizing autocrats to emerge of their own sweet will. Instead, a benevolent superpower can take matters into its own hands and play good czar to the world. True, the United States cannot behave in Iraq exactly as Britain behaved in India. It's even unlikely that America will replicate in Iraq its postwar reconstruction efforts in West Germany. But by implication at least, Zakaria aligns himself with the new liberal imperialism of the administration's self-described "Wilsonian hawks." </p> <p> When the author turns his attention directly to the United States, however, he describes a country that is in no condition to play such a farseeing global role. He tells us, for instance, that American politics is now a "hyper-responsive, poll-driven system" that has "gone haywire." Although he confusingly applies the same term, "illiberal democracy," to pathologies of government in both the United States and the developing world, the problems are not the same. America obviously does not suffer from "premature democratization," but Zakaria says it has increasingly fallen for "a simple-minded populism that values popularity and openness as the key measures of legitimacy." </p> <p> Zakaria's most prodigious feat here is to interpret America's scandalously low voter turnout as a fruit of too much democracy. One mechanism he mentions is the fatal weakening of political parties by the primary system. Once the capacity to select candidates was taken away from party elders, he says, political parties almost inevitably degenerated into fundraising vehicles for "telegenic" candidates. This process may be disturbing to contemplate, but it does not quite explain decreased voter turnout. To blame that on too much democracy, Zakaria basically interprets democracy as "openness" and then points out that increased permeability has led to the invasion of government by swarms of lobbyists. It is "the rise of interest groups [that] has made American government utterly dysfunctional." When combined with the disappearance of any social elite worthy of respect, that dysfunctionality has led to citizen disgust with politics and reduced participation.</p> <p> While enlightening in part, this analysis of the United States suffers from some of the same deficiencies as Zakaria's treatment of developing countries. For one thing, the openness and permeability of government -- allowing lobbyists to play public officials against one another -- are as much a product of liberalism as of democracy. The difficulty in reforming campaign finance is due as much to the First Amendment -- that is, to liberal constitutionalism -- as to democracy. Similarly, the sins that Zakaria attributes to democratic excesses could equally well be associated with the dominance of consumerism, capitalism and marketization. Indeed, Zakaria himself says as much, explicitly arguing, in the last two chapters, that democratization and commercialization go hand in hand. This analysis makes very confusing reading for anyone who has studied the first part of the book, where Zakaria consistently treats the fostering of market economics as a preventive cure for the diseases of democracy.</p> <p> Living under perhaps the most self-insulated national administration since World War II, it is amusing to read that the greatest defect of American politics is excessive openness, and that the American "system of checks and balances assur[es] that no single leader can drag a country into war." But the deeper puzzle with which Zakaria leaves us is another: If American democracy is as dysfunctional as he contends, how can it orchestrate the emergence of liberal self-government half a world away among a people it poorly understands?</p> <p> Zakaria's proposal to postpone national elections in Iraq for five years looks less plausible by the day. Waiting for the business and professional classes to assert themselves politically would be reasonable only if no other forces were stirring in the interim. But Iraq's Shia are quickly awakening to their majoritarian status. Failure to hold elections will neither dampen their aspirations nor guarantee civil peace. It would only confirm suspicions that the United States has come to occupy Iraq, not to liberate it. Besides, many of the institutions that Zakaria insists be built <i>before</i> introducing democracy, most obviously political parties, would not attract serious commitments until electoral politics is under way. The situation is delicate, and the chances for success unknown. But paper safeguards for Sunni Arabs and Kurds would have no practical effect unless a national political authority committed to minority rights is viewed as legitimate. Because electoral legitimacy is probably the only feasible alternative to religious legitimacy, creating the former must be a priority. Constitutionalism, admittedly, has an important role to play in this process. Power-sharing agreements must be congruent with Iraq's ethnic, tribal and sectarian landscape. And destabilizing winner-take-all institutions, such as a popularly elected national presidency with extensive powers, must be avoided. On the other hand, the Shia majority must come to believe that it can pursue its legitimate aspirations within, not outside, agreed-upon rules of the game. Zakaria tells ardent sponsors of democratization to keep the complex preconditions of stable and moderate democracy constantly in mind. In the case of Iraq, alas, this sage counsel gives greater grounds for trepidation than for buoyant hopes.</p> </div></div></div> Fri, 16 May 2003 17:25:02 +0000 143031 at Stephen Holmes Why We Need Europe <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <blockquote><p> <b>Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order</b><br /><br /> By Robert Kagan, Knopf, 112 pages, $18.00 </p></blockquote> <p>France and Germany's refusal to accept the Bush administration's definition of the Iraqi threat has made shockingly visible the decade-long weakening of the Atlantic alliance. Robert Kagan looks behind such wars of words to discover why, after the end of the Cold War, Europeans and Americans "understand each other less and less." Unbelievable as it may sound, his thesis is that Europeans and Americans have trouble coordinating their foreign policies because Europeans are utopian and deluded and Americans are tough-minded and unafraid to look reality in the face. He first advanced this unusual claim in an essay published in the summer of 2002, which he has now updated and expanded into a book. That essay quickly became a sensation among European diplomats and policy-makers. But how did a conservative American polemicist such as Kagan manage to provoke such storms of soul searching among Europeans? He did so partly by suggesting that European nations, despite their endless squabbles, share more values with one another than they share with the United States, an idea that some Europeans, at least, devoutly wish to be true. He also attracted attention by implying that Europe's own foreign-policy disarray has contributed fatally to the United States' dangerous unilateralism.</p> <p> While mentioning that "the crisis over Iraq has cast the transatlantic problem in the harshest possible light," Kagan seeks the roots of U.S.-European tensions in the different military postures of the world's two great economic powers. In his view, "The key difference is less a matter of culture and philosophy than of capability." The premise of his argument here is intriguing: Rather than searching for tools to achieve their pre-established goals, both individuals and states, Kagan believes, unconsciously adapt their desired objectives to their available resources. In short, capabilities create intentions. Because the United States is a military colossus and Europe is a military pygmy, they will never agree about the shape of the dangers they face. Kagan drives his point home with the following folktale:</p> <p> The psychology of weakness is easy enough to understand. A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling the forest is a tolerable danger, inasmuch as the alternative -- hunting the bear armed only with a knife -- is actually riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never attacks. The same man armed with a rifle, however, will likely make a different calculation of what constitutes a tolerable risk. Why should he risk being mauled to death if he doesn't need to? This perfectly normal human psychology has driven a wedge between the United States and Europe.</p> <p> This little passage contains the gist of Kagan's argument. It is not simply that Americans, being armed to the teeth, are willing to venture forth in search of monsters to slay while Europeans, being military weaklings, pusillanimously shun confrontations. It is rather that weak powers routinely fail to take the full measure of actual threats, indulging in the fantasy that looming dangers can be allayed by diplomatic finesse and international law, while strong powers are able to see the floodlit world as a frighteningly dangerous place where freedom will perish if not defended by force.</p> <p> For their part, Europeans want us to interpret a devotion to multilateralism, diplomacy and international law as a sign of superior morality. But Kagan sees the European fondness for multilateral solutions as a symptom of helplessness, or perhaps as an expression of resentment. Tacitly drawing on Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, the author argues that Europeans are slyly trying to unman their American allies by employing "strategies of weakness." They hope to hobble the United States by slow-walking it into diplomatic negotiations and international legal regimes. "In what may be the ultimate feat of subtlety and indirection," Kagan writes, "they want to control the behemoth by appealing to its conscience." And, he warns, these devilishly crafty Europeans may even succeed in derailing the United States from sober realism into the pursuit of pacifist illusions, presumably with some help from homegrown Wilsonian idealists and Vietnam-era liberals.</p> <p> This Euro-liberal attempt to charm the United States into abandoning war as an instrument of foreign policy, Kagan maintains, is a self-defeating folly. Even today, more than a half-century after the destruction of Nazi Germany, Europe's pampered civilians remain "dependent on the United States' willingness to use its military might to deter or defeat those around the world who still believe in power politics." European leaders, therefore, should simply admit "the vital necessity of having a strong, even predominant America." If Europeans would learn to defer politely to the United States, Kagan expects or hopes that American officials would return the courtesy by avoiding gratuitous put-downs that serve no purpose other than deflating European self-importance.</p> <p> <span class="subhead">America as Mars, Europe as Venus</span><br /><br /> Kagan's intellectual framework may seem rather unsophisticated, but it does boast a philosophical foundation. Its premise is that a domestic realm built along liberal lines, where force and fraud are repressed and the rule of law prevails, can be stabilized and defended only by a vigorous foreign policy -- where force and even fraud are deployed ruthlessly against unscrupulous adversaries and where laws are respected only when convenient. Kantian dreamers of peace and reason may not know it, but their hyperliberal utopia always depends on a Hobbesian willingness to apply organized violence, without regard to rules, to fend off barbarians at the gate. It is naive to believe that a dangerously turbulent world can be managed by United Nations resolutions, foreign aid, diplomatic negotiations and a deepening of commercial ties. </p> <p> That Kagan's argument here has some force will be recognized even by those who strenuously disagree with it. The same cannot be said for the emotionally charged mythology with which he decorates it. Just as prewar German nationalists loved to oppose <i>Helden</i> to <i>Händler</i> (Teutonic "heroes" to English "merchants"), so Kagan enjoys contrasting masculine Americans with effeminate Europeans: "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus." Gun-shy Europeans are able to putter around their Kantian garden only because lethally armed Americans are out there patrolling the Hobbesian jungle to prevent the "post-historical paradise" from being destroyed by various ayatollahs, Saddam Husseins and Kim Jong Ils. Kagan brings his gendered interpretation of United States-European Union relations to a surprising culmination when, in his final paragraphs, he reinvents himself as a marriage counselor, urging the quarreling couple to kiss and make up, for their own sake and the world's.</p> <p> This is amusing, in its way, all the more so because it is basically unserious. Unfortunately, Kagan's more sober attempt to trace trans-Atlantic discord to differences in military capacity founders on the experience of the Cold War, when Americans and Europeans agreed on a definition of a common threat even though their military capacities were just as asymmetrical as they are today. Countries that are militarily weak will sometimes defer quietly to allies that are militarily strong. At other times they will strenuously dissent. Capabilities alone, therefore, do not bear the explanatory burden that Kagan places upon them. Moreover, a much simpler explanation suggests itself. Europeans no longer feel that the United States is protecting them from a dangerous threat because the likelihood of a military invasion from the East has disappeared. Without U.S. help, Kagan claims, Europe will be unable to prevent itself from "being overrun, spiritually as well as physically, by a world that has yet to accept the rule of 'moral consciousness.'" But who, exactly, is about to overrun Europe "spiritually as well as physically"? There may be a good answer to this question, but if Kagan knows, he isn't telling. Lack of a clear and convincing answer to the "What military threat?" question explains tensions in the alliance more economically than differences in military capacity.</p> <p> <span class="subhead">The European Enigma</span><br /><br /> But even if Kagan were right that different levels of military preparedness necessarily give rise in Europe and the United States to differing assessments of threats, how does he explain the vastly different levels of military preparedness? Europe is rich enough to be a military superpower, so why have European nations been so reluctant to increase their defense spending or even to assemble on schedule their much-discussed rapid-reaction force?</p> <p> Kagan's answer to this critical question is a blur, partly because he cannot consistently invoke the objective disappearance of a shared military threat. Perhaps the United States after World War II successfully retired Europe from world history, reprogramming the once-militaristic Germans into harmless merchants and civilians. Perhaps bitter memories of <i>Machtpolitik</i> and chauvinistic militarism have dampened the European appetite for war. Perhaps other Europeans continue to fear that Germany's homicidal impulses could be reawakened in a remilitarized Europe. Perhaps the successful experience of building the European Union has given the Europeans an illusion that similarly legalistic methods could be used to fashion a new global order. Perhaps Europeans are simply free riders, smartly purchasing domestic tranquility by generous social spending in the expectation that American taxpayers will foot the bill for European security. Perhaps they are simply unable to switch quickly from the posture of territorial defense to which the United States assigned them during the Cold War to a policy of force projection, which is what it would take to compete militarily with the United States today. Or perhaps the European population is simply aging, its animal spirits waning, a process of decay witnessed in zero or even negative population growth. Kagan rehearses these various factors but provides little guidance about how to interrelate or weigh them.</p> <p> But the real weakness of his argument is something else. However we may explain European criticisms of American policy, it is unreasonable to suggest that the French, say, disagree with U.S. foreign policy because they are pacifists. The French are not busy watering tulips in their walled gardens; they are out there in the "jungles" of the Côte d'Ivoire. Kagan even admits that French and British (and even German) militaries are willing to absorb more casualties than their American counterparts, suggesting again that his contrast between American "men" and European "women" is eye-catching but bogus. </p> <p> Kagan informs us repeatedly that "the new Europe really has emerged as a paradise ... freed from the laws and even the mentality of power politics." But what Europe is he talking about? Algerian youth in the <i>banlieues</i> of Paris have little experience with the humanitarian softness of the French police. Elected officials in Poland or Hungary will not agree that the new Europe is a realm rinsed free of power asymmetries where all peoples are treated equally under law. One source of Kagan's comprehensive confusions is his odd tendency to treat law and force as antonyms. He knows that law is useless without enforcement, but he does not think through the implications of this simple truth. Contrary to his repeated claims, moreover, law does not erase asymmetries of power. The pervasive favoritism of every known rule-of-law system suggests that law expresses and stabilizes asymmetries of power. (Because no party is strong enough to rule without a degree of voluntary cooperation, law often stabilizes asymmetries of power by moderating them to some extent.) </p> <p> This tendency of law to look favorably on the interests of the powerful explains why, from Nuremberg to the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, the United States, as the world's leading power, has been the champion of international law. That would be incomprehensible if law were simply a shackle placed by the weak on the strong. The United States created the current international legal regime and has used it for half a century to its own and its allies' advantage. The current crisis over Iraq came about not because the Europeans were trying to hobble U.S. sovereignty by imposing international law but rather for the opposite reason. Americans could not persuade Europeans in the 1990s to take international law (in the form of UN resolutions) seriously. In other words, the Iraqi crisis itself reveals the hopelessness of a stylized contrast between Europeans living in a Kantian world of reason and rules and Americans living in a Hobbesian world of force and fraud.</p> <p> <span class="subhead">The Military Lens</span><br /><br /> The book's basic argument keeps crumbling under inspection because it rests on a sleight of hand. Its elementary fallacy lies in a <i>selective</i> application of its theoretical premise. A country's foreign policy can become unrealistic if specially favored instruments prevent policy-makers from facing up to threats that must be addressed by other means. From this true premise, however, we cannot infer, as Kagan does, that Europe's meager military capacities make European assessment of threats unrealistic while the United States' formidable military capacities make American assessment of threats realistic. The illusions of the jungle are no less pernicious than the illusions of the garden. Kagan touches on this point when he allows, "The stronger may, in fact, rely on force more than they should." But he does not integrate this insight into his basic argument. Indeed, he devotes no attention at all to the role of irrationality in the making of American foreign policy, even though he knows full well that a missionary impulse pervades Washington's understanding of the United States' global role, spoiling his clean contrast between realistic Americans and utopian Europeans. </p> <p> A militarily weak society will typically underestimate problems that cannot be solved by <i>civilian</i> means alone. Just so, a militarily powerful society will typically underestimate problems that cannot be solved by <i>military</i> means alone. Both mistakes are possible and both can be fatal, but Kagan pays attention only to the former. This is why, despite the occasional justice of his remarks about European self-delusion, he comes across more as a Bush-administration apologist than as a foreign-policy analyst. Are Paris and Berlin really more "in denial" than Washington? Do Europeans have a more distorted view of the contemporary security environment than Americans? Kagan thinks so, but he is wrong. </p> <p> The United States' unrivaled military power is not just a "tool." It is also a warped lens distorting the way the Bush administration defines the direst threats facing the country. Acute problems that cannot be addressed by a unilateral deployment of American military power (such as North Korea's horrifying slide toward becoming a serial proliferator of nuclear weapons) get much less sustained attention than problems (such as Iraqi noncompliance with UN resolutions) that can be addressed unilaterally and militarily. Oil dependency, underinvestment in foreign-language skills and global warming are three disparate examples of neglected national-security threats that are not made any less acute simply because they cannot be managed by unilateral military force.</p> <p> Kagan's talk of American heroes patrolling the Hobbesian world obscures these and other irrationalities that afflict George W. Bush's foreign policy. An ideological conviction that government is the problem and that laxly regulated private exchanges are the answer, for instance, has seduced the administration into thinking that rogue states are invariably more dangerous than failed states. As a consequence, Washington seems even now to be underestimating the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction entering the clandestine arms market after Baghdad's centralized control is destroyed by an American attack and before our forces secure an Iraqi territory "the size of California" crisscrossed by well-developed smuggling routes. Deeply held Christian beliefs prevent the administration from grasping the fatal threat posed to the United States by religious certainty. Myopic domestic lobbies, interagency rivalries and Cold War habits of mind all distort the administration's understanding of the current security environment. And so forth.</p> <p> <span class="subhead">Europe's Relevance</span><br /><br /> But the most striking and by far the most dangerous misperception afflicting Bush's approach to foreign affairs concerns the war against transnational terrorism. Kagan asserts that Europe "has had little to offer the United States in strategic military terms since the end of the Cold War." Widely shared inside the administration, this view is based on the premise that the "end of the Cold War did not reduce the salience of military power." Military power is just as central to American security today as it was during the Cold War -- that is what Kagan would have us believe. And after the Cold War, "European military incapacity" means that our former allies have become almost wholly irrelevant to U.S. security. That is the assumption behind this book and, presumably, behind the unfathomably cavalier attitude of the Bush administration toward our European allies.</p> <p> That this assumption is fallacious is the very least that might be said. The September 11 attacks were partly planned, organized and financed in Europe. The Muslim diaspora communities into which terrorist cells can invisibly blend remain the likeliest staging grounds for future al-Qaeda attacks on the United States. In other words, Europe remains a frontline region in the war against terrorism just as it was in the war against communism. As daily press reports also reveal, the European police have been acting in a perfectly Hobbesian manner, arresting scores of suspected terrorists. In other words, despite his pose as a no-nonsense realist, Kagan has apparently failed to realize the degree to which the contours of American national security have been redrawn since 9-11. The home front and the foreign front have now been disconcertingly blurred. National-security strategy must now operate in a domain where soldiering and policing have become of coequal importance. This profound change helps us understand the erroneous premise of Bush's foreign policy. In our new security environment, despite the prevailing cliché, the United States is <i>not</i> the world's only superpower. </p> <p> The war on transnational terrorism depends essentially on information gathering and policing, and in these respects the Europeans are anything but security pygmies. Their capacities to respond effectively to today's greatest security threats easily rival those of the United States. Europeans' linguistic skills and cultural knowledge alone ensure that they can make indispensable contributions to U.S. security. They can perform essential tasks of monitoring, infiltration, disruption and apprehension for which our own unrivaled military machine is patently inadequate. Dismissing the "platitude" that the United States cannot protect itself without European help, Kagan announces that "the United States <i>can</i> 'go it alone.'" This is apparently the thinking (if you can call it that) behind the administration's mindlessly denigrating remarks about Europe. True, European leaders can sometimes be hypocritical and foolishly condescending. But let it pass. We cannot afford, for the sake of a frisson, to undermine American security by further poisoning relations with capable allies in a time of unprecedented national peril.</p> </div></div></div> Wed, 26 Mar 2003 01:30:24 +0000 142978 at Stephen Holmes What Russia Teaches Us Now <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><font class="nonprinting"></font></p> <p> <font size="+2">F</font>or half a century, the Soviet Union was not only our principal<br /> military adversary. It was also our ideological and moral "other."<br /> Both left and right in America defended their competing visions<br /> of a liberal society in reaction to the Stalinist nightmare. In<br /> this sense, the Cold War profoundly shaped our public philosophy.<br /> Indeed, we might say that the Cold War was our public philosophy.<br /> The demanding contest with Soviet communism guided how we thought<br /> about the core principles underlying our basic institutions. For<br /> liberalism was, or appeared to be, totalitarianism turned inside<br /> out.</p> <p> What features of the American creed did this master contrast lead<br /> us to stress? Freedom of speech and the press, first of all, and<br /> freedom of conscience, for these were cruelly repressed under<br /> Moscow's sway. In the same spirit, Americans underscored the freedom<br /> of movement, the right to form private associations, the right<br /> to a fair trial, and the right to vote in competitive elections<br /> where incumbents might be toppled from power. Likewise emphasized<br /> was the latitude to accumulate private wealth, on the assumption<br /> that a decentralized and unplanned economy alone could provide<br /> the basis of both prosperity and political freedom. </p> <p> Revulsion at the Gulag and the thought police encouraged a particular<br /> way of construing these classical liberal freedoms. They were<br /> styled, in general, as "negative" liberties, as rights<br /> against the state, as shields guarding vulnerable individuals<br /> from governmental abuse.</p> <p> Now the Soviet Union has been swept off the map, but all is not<br /> well in Russia. Outside of Moscow, living conditions have deteriorated<br /> so severely that some Russians have reverted to subsistence agriculture.<br /> Ironically, Russians today have more reason to worry about the<br /> debility of the state than about its power. Symptoms of internal<br /> disarray are ubiquitous: prison outbreaks, railroad bandits, soldiers<br /> begging cigarettes in public places, packs of dogs on the streets<br /> of provincial cities, unrepaired oil leaks. The state barely has<br /> the resources to function as a result of massive tax evasion and<br /> the murders of tax inspectors (26 were killed in 1996), the stiff-arming<br /> of Moscow by regional leaders, and the eye-popping enrichment<br /> of prominent individuals who sit astride public agencies and semiprivatized<br /> enterprises.</p> <p> The debility of the Russian state not only inflicts suffering<br /> on Russians, but also is the source of new specters haunting the<br /> West: more Chernobyl-style meltdowns, over-the-counter sales of<br /> nuclear know-how to rogue states, the proclaimed technical and<br /> financial inability to liquidate existing stockpiles of biological<br /> and chemical weapons, shamefully maintained oil tankers, a contagious<br /> disease crisis that may eventually threaten Europe, organized-crime<br /> activity metastasizing alarmingly abroad, the inability of the<br /> central government to live up to its obligations (as in the case<br /> of NASA's space station), a questionable command-and-control system,<br /> and lack of coordination among the defense and foreign ministries<br /> on questions vital to neighboring states.</p> <p> Talented young reformers may be welcomed into the Kremlin, but<br /> they will not soon resolve their country's grave crisis of governability.<br /> While the buses still manage to run, the Russian government is<br /> conspicuously unable to enforce its own laws. Total tax revenues<br /> as a percentage of gross domestic product hover somewhere below<br /> 10 percent (this excludes the vast and untaxable gray economy),<br /> compared to roughly 30 percent in the United States and an average<br /> of 45 percent in western Europe. The problem liberal reformers<br /> face is no longer censorship and the command economy, nor is it<br /> frustrated national pride and xenophobia (though these exist),<br /> but something quite new: an incoherent state tenuously connected<br /> to a demoralized society.</p> <p> What can we learn from this shocking situation? How should we<br /> reassess the celebration of "free markets" and "spontaneous<br /> exchange" when we observe totally unregulated markets in<br /> ground-to-air missiles and other lethal leftovers of the Soviet<br /> arsenal? And what about "pluralism," "decentralization,"<br /> "countervailing powers," "private associations,"<br /> and the "independence of society from the state"? Perhaps<br /> we have as much to learn about these ideas from communism's aftermath<br /> as we once believed we had to learn from communism itself.</p> <hr size="1" /><center><br /><a href="/subscribe/"><img src="/tapads/mini_subscribe.gif" border="0" alt="Subscribe to The American Prospect" /></a> <p></p></center><br /><hr size="1" /><p> During the Cold War, when all political evils seemed to swarm<br /> from "too much government," the threat posed by too<br /> weak a government played little role in liberal self-understanding.<br /> (I use "liberal" in the expansive philosophical sense,<br /> embracing both contemporary American conservatives and liberals.)<br /> But this was not always so. In Madison's famous formulation in<br /> the <i>Federalist</i>, constitutional restrictions on government<br /> assume that we "first enable the government to control the<br /> governed." If the public authorities can be outgunned or<br /> bribed, the vibrancy of the private sector can be pathological.<br /> For there is no rule of law until the Mafia needs lawyers. Of<br /> course, the increased visibility of grave social harms from unregulated<br /> markets and cutthroat bands should not prompt us to embrace ironfisted<br /> government. But the woes of Russia's politically disorganized<br /> society should heighten our appreciation of the role of government<br /> in promoting liberal freedoms and serve as a lesson to those among<br /> us who see the state only as a threat to liberal values.<br /></p> <p> </p><hr noshade="noshade" size="2" /><h3>NO PUBLIC POWER, NO INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS</h3> <p> Classical liberal theory deemed political authority necessary<br /> because individuals are partial to themselves and, left to their<br /> own devices, the strong and the deceitful have an irresistible<br /> proclivity to exempt themselves from generally valid laws. That<br /> old insight is amply confirmed in Russia today. When the state<br /> that once owned everything is now so easy to despoil, why play<br /> by rules that apply equally to all? Libertarians sometimes argue<br /> that the coercive authority of the state extends only to the prevention<br /> of harm and the protection of property rights. In the Russian<br /> context, the word "only" here strikes a very false note.<br /> Limited government, capable of repressing force and fraud, turns<br /> out to be mind-bogglingly difficult to erect in a chaotic setting.</p> <p> Today's Russia makes excruciatingly plain that liberal values<br /> are threatened just as thoroughly by state incapacity as by despotic<br /> power. "Destatization" is not the solution; it is the<br /> problem. For without a well-functioning public power of a certain<br /> kind there will be no prevention of mutual harm, no personal security,<br /> and no "standing rule to live by," to use a Lockean<br /> phrase. The rights inscribed in the 1977 Brezhnev Constitution<br /> went unprotected because of a repressive state apparatus. The<br /> rights inscribed in the 1993 Yeltsin Constitution go unenforced<br /> because the government lacks resources and purpose, and because<br /> incumbents are more keen on harvesting kickbacks and insider giveaways<br /> than on solving public problems.</p> <p> Russia's disorder affects both state and civil society. The system<br /> of central control and coordination is in shambles, and the citizenry,<br /> while resenting political elites, remains passive and inert. Incumbents<br /> are venal and incompetent, and social interests are too anemic<br /> and diffuse to coalesce into effective collective organizations<br /> or constituencies for reform capable of disciplining those in<br /> power. While not especially oppressive (with the important exception<br /> of Chechnya), the government is fragmented, unaccountable, and<br /> seemingly indifferent to the plight of its citizens. Social services<br /> atrophy and life expectancy plummets, while ordinary Russians,<br /> expecting nothing from politics, eke out a living on their own.</p> <p> That political fragmentation and the dissipation of authority<br /> make it impossible to realize liberal freedoms suggests that liberalism<br /> does not aim exclusively, or even principally, at diffusing power.<br /> What stands out, in the light of recent Russian experience, is<br /> the capacity of liberal government to unify power in accountable<br /> hands and to use it effectively.</p> <p> Russian political dissidents are no longer being jailed, it is<br /> true. No one is punished or even threatened for violating the<br /> party line, for there is no party line. Journalists are blown<br /> to smithereens by suitcase bombs, but only when they rummage indiscreetly<br /> into corruption at the Ministry of Defense. No one is being incarcerated<br /> for their heretical beliefs, for heresy is not possible in the<br /> absence of orthodoxy. Both ideological censorship and indoctrination<br /> have disappeared along with ideology itself. No one in power fears,<br /> or takes any guidance from, political ideas.</p> <p> The image of the lone refusnik crushed by a remorseless Behemoth<br /> reinforced a one-sided interpretation of liberal rights. It placed<br /> the accumulated weight of painful experience behind the assumption<br /> that rights are essentially "walls" erected against<br /> state power. This metaphor no doubt contains an element of truth.<br /> But its ultimate inadequacy is disclosed by the Russian situation<br /> today, where the defeat of liberal reforms is most clearly visible<br /> in the wall of indifference separating state from society. Corrupt<br /> incumbents, uninterested in oppression, live in a separate world<br /> from depoliticized citizens. Moscow, a sparkling enclave that<br /> misleads foreign observers, also symbolizes the total disregard<br /> of the Russian rich for the Russian poor. The faltering of Russia's<br /> liberal reforms, in other words, suggests that liberalism, best<br /> understood, aims not to seal off society from the state but, on<br /> the contrary, to keep open robust and transparent channels for<br /> consultation and partnership between honest public officials and<br /> honest private citizens.</p> <p> Russia lacks legitimate political authority. But liberal rights<br /> depend essentially on the competent exercise of a certain kind<br /> of legitimate public power. This is why violating an individual's<br /> rights involves disobeying the liberal state. Statelessness is<br /> such a deplorable condition because it signals the absence of<br /> the sole institution that is capable of extending its protection<br /> to the vulnerable. Put differently, the largest and most reliable<br /> human rights organization is the liberal state. Beyond the effective<br /> reach of such a state, rights will not be consistently protected<br /> or enforced. Unless society is politically well organized, there<br /> will be no individual liberties and no civil society. It is an<br /> obvious lesson, but one that runs counter to what the antitotalitarian<br /> ethos induced us to assume.</p> <p> Why do basic rights to decent treatment go unenforced in pretrial<br /> detention cells across Russia? Among the many reasons is a breakdown<br /> of the chain of command. The right to be treated decently by policemen,<br /> prosecutors, judges, and prison guards presupposes effective systems<br /> of monitoring, subordination, and accountability. Custodial personnel<br /> behave more decently when monitored. The enforcement of rights,<br /> in other words, presupposes stable relations of authority and<br /> obedience.<br /></p> <p> <font size="+2">B</font>y illustrating vividly the dependence of individual liberty<br /> on state power of a certain kind, the new Russia should help us<br /> focus more clearly on how authority enhances freedom in our own<br /> system. If the state is to have a monopoly of violence, the monopoly<br /> must be vested only in officials whom the public can hold accountable<br /> for its use. Liberalism demands that people without guns be able<br /> to tell people with guns what to do. While any credibly liberal<br /> government must be limited in important ways, it must not be so<br /> crippled or irresolute that, for example, local military or police<br /> or secret service authorities escape centralized civilian control.</p> <p> In other ways, too, the blockage of liberal reform in Russia can<br /> conceivably bring liberal and individualist thought back to basics.<br /> The explosive growth there of legally unregulated social sectors<br /> should deflate overblown rhetoric about that "autonomous"<br /> sphere where American families can keep every penny they earn<br /> and from which government is scrupulously barred. Indeed, observing<br /> the devastating effects of a genuinely hands-off regime should<br /> help us clear up some serious confusions surrounding the words<br /> "dependency" and "independence" as they are<br /> casually heaved about in our political debate.</p> <p> The right of a creditor to have a loan repaid is obviously a product<br /> of law and state authority. An American who asserts his rights<br /> in contract law or tort law must necessarily avail himself of<br /> the public power. When I sue, I am neither acting on my own in<br /> a coercion-free sphere nor am I trying to get the state off my<br /> back. Rather, I am asking the state to perform. A state that leaves<br /> loan collection to private thugs and can offer no remedy to victims<br /> of aggravated negligence cannot be a liberal state in the most<br /> basic sense.</p> <p> That the same analysis applies to constitutional rights is obscured<br /> by the description of our Bill of Rights as a "charter of<br /> negative liberties." Constitutional rights are underenforced<br /> in Russia today because they, too, require governmental authorities<br /> to perform rather than merely to forbear. The right to vote is<br /> meaningless if electoral officials take bribes or fail to show<br /> up for work. The right to just compensation for confiscated property<br /> is empty if the treasury has nothing to disburse. The right to<br /> subpoena witnesses in one's own defense is useless if the court's<br /> solemn writs are greeted with laughter. The constitutional right<br /> to due process presupposes that, at the taxpayers' expense, the<br /> state maintains and makes accessible complex legal institutions<br /> that perform the cumbersome formalities of fair adjudication.<br /> For this reason, a nonperforming state cannot be a liberal state.</p> <p> </p><hr noshade="noshade" size="2" /><h3>TAXES AND LIBERTY</h3> <p> Basic rights go unenforced in Russia not only because the state<br /> is distracted and inconsistent, but also because it is insolvent.<br /> Chronic underfunding erodes individual liberty for the same reason<br /> it damages military preparedness. That rights depend on the efficient<br /> use of public resources, as well as on the competent exercise<br /> of public authority, becomes clear when we examine the sickening<br /> conditions in Russia's correctional facilities, where rampant<br /> tuberculosis (2,000 inmates died of the disease in 1996), even<br /> among guards, and high mortality rates are due less to custodial<br /> abuse than to horrible overcrowding, inedible food, and the absence<br /> of basic medical care. Not torture, in this case, but a breakdown<br /> of public finances is the principal cause of the violation of<br /> inmate rights. So a bankrupt state cannot be a liberal state,<br /> whatever the "cultural level" of its citizens.</p> <p> What I mean by insolvency is not a lack of resources in society<br /> at large or the absence of wealthy citizens, for Russia has both.<br /> An insolvent state, in the pertinent sense, is one that cannot<br /> extract, in a way that is widely deemed to be fair, a modest share<br /> of social wealth and then channel the resources extracted into<br /> the creation and delivery of public services, rather than into<br /> the pockets of incumbents and their cronies. The Russian state<br /> is an illiberal state partly because it is insolvent. And it is<br /> insolvent because it is corruptbecause norms of public service<br /> are weak, and potential taxpayers do not trust the government.</p> <p> One of the principal lessons of the new Russian illiberalism is<br /> that individual rights are unprotectable without the power to<br /> tax and spend. To extract resources efficiently, a government<br /> must be able to mobilize cooperation. Strong-state liberalism<br /> is not ironfisted because "state strength," in a liberal<br /> context, depends essentially on the legitimacy of authority, the<br /> capacity of the government to enlist voluntary support. Threats<br /> of reprisal for nonpayment of taxes, growled by self-enriching<br /> state officials, do not elicit honesty about private assets. To<br /> raise revenue with relative efficiency, a state must not only<br /> be seen to treat citizens fairly, but it must also communicate<br /> public purposes in an understandable way and strike partnerships<br /> with important social groups and actors in an attempt to solve<br /> common problems.</p> <p> The Russian government cannot protect basic rights for the same<br /> reason that it cannot provide such elementary public goods as<br /> a nontoxic environment, books in elementary schools, x-ray film<br /> in public hospitals, veterans' benefits, a nationwide highway<br /> system, railroad maintenance, and potable water. It cannot protect<br /> rights because it cannot target extracted resources to the provision<br /> of public goods. Courts are working, it is true, but judicial<br /> dockets are chronically backlogged because budgetary outlays earmarked<br /> for the judiciary are pitiful and often do not arrive. The dependency<br /> of basic rights on tax revenues helps us see that rights are public<br /> goods. Far from being walls bricking out the meddlesome state,<br /> even the so-called negative rights are taxpayer-funded and government-managed<br /> social services designed to improve collective and individual<br /> well-being.</p> <p> </p><hr noshade="noshade" size="2" /><h3>PROPERTY AND THE STATE</h3> <p> This includes property rights. Soviet Russia drew attention to<br /> the way laws and regulations can stifle economic activity. Post-Soviet<br /> Russia lends credence to the opposite truth. Without clearly defined,<br /> unambiguously assigned, and legally enforceable property rights,<br /> ownership does not encourage stewardship, just as privatization<br /> does not elicit an entrepreneurial response.</p> <p> It is not merely that government must supplement and perfect the<br /> market. The point is more basic and cuts deeper. The market is<br /> created, sustained, and constantly attuned by legislative and<br /> adjudicative decisions that prove unenforceable in a politically<br /> disorganized society. Just as you cannot have capitalism where<br /> everything is planned, so you cannot have capitalism where everything<br /> is for sale, not at least if the salable items include employees<br /> at the public registry of titles and deeds. Markets presuppose<br /> a competent and honest bureaucracy.</p> <p> My rights to enter, use, exclude from, sell, bequeath, mortgage,<br /> and abate nuisances threatening "my" property all palpably<br /> depend on something that does not yet exist in Russia: a well-organized,<br /> well-funded, authoritative, and relatively honest court system.<br /> A liberal legal system does not merely protect and defend my property.<br /> It lays down the rules of ownership specifying, for instance,<br /> the maintenance and repair obligations of landlords or how jointly<br /> owned property is to be sold. It therefore makes no more sense<br /> to associate property rights with "freedom from government"<br /> than to associate the right to play chess with freedom from the<br /> rules of chess.</p> <p>The contemplation of weak-state capitalism should make plain the<br /> hopeless limitations of a libertarian conception of "independence."<br /> An autonomous individual cannot create the conditions of his own<br /> autonomy autonomously, but only collectively. If the wielders<br /> of the police power are not on your side, you will not successfully<br /> "assert your right" to enter your own home and make<br /> use of its contents, as the Muslims evicted from West Mostar in<br /> Bosnia have repeatedly learned. For property is a complex set<br /> of rules enforced by the state. Even more dramatically, private<br /> property is a sham if the community cannot train and equip an<br /> army capable of defending its territory against foreign marauders<br /> and predators. That is the lesson of, say, Srebernica.</p> <p> The implications are worth spelling out: All liberal rights presuppose<br /> or imply the dependency of the individual on the collectivity<br /> and on the principal instrument of the collectivity, that is,<br /> on the coercive-extractive state. This is a truism and a banality.<br /> But it is another one of those truisms that Cold War-dominated<br /> thought did not fully absorb. <br /></p> <p> </p><hr noshade="noshade" size="2" /><h3>THE DEBILITY OF RUSSIAN CAPITALISM</h3> <p> At the basis of a liberal economy lies the willingness of people<br /> to rely on each other's word. Trust, like thrift and industriousness,<br /> is a psychological attitude with roots outside the legal order.<br /> But while liberal systems elicit and reward such attitudes, illiberal<br /> systems asphyxiate them. Because contracts are not reliably enforced<br /> in Russia, payment by the installment plan is not an attractive<br /> arrangement for creditors. In the autonomous realm, beyond the<br /> reach of government, extortion is rampant, but borrowers have<br /> a hard time obtaining long-term loans. For one function of the<br /> liberal state is to lengthen the time horizons of private actors<br /> by predictably enforcing known and stable rules. Property is worthless<br /> if you, and potential purchasers, do not believe in the future.</p> <p> Capitalists know this and tend not to invest in countries, such<br /> as Russia, whereto employ a different idiomthe discount rate<br /> of economic actors is high. Long-gestation investment in productive<br /> facilities, where jobs might be created, is unlikely when fixed<br /> assets are difficult to defend against lethally armed extortionists.<br /> In such circumstances, capital tends to flow into the removal<br /> of natural resources that can be guarded at the site of extraction<br /> and during transshipment and that fetch a handsome price on world<br /> markets.</p> <p> Currency stabilization alone is not enough to improve Russia's<br /> investment climate because the instability of trade, banking,<br /> customs, and tax regulations, too, casts a cloud over the future.<br /> While the Russian government is no longer oppressively tyrannical,<br /> it is not yet predictable, and therefore remains illiberal. Because<br /> the state's capacity to tax is inadequate, authorities have taken<br /> to slapping retroactive taxes on foreign firms, which keep honest<br /> books and are in no position to refuse. This myopic raiding of<br /> potential investors is a fair example of the effects of political<br /> disarray on the public welfare.<br /></p> <p> <font size="+2">M</font>oral outrage at weak-state capitalism is not necessarily<br /> a reflection of residual socialism or aversion to inequality,<br /> as is often assumed. In Russia, the current distribution of ownershipwhich<br /> underlies the marketappears illegitimate to ordinary people because<br /> most owners did not work for their wealth or inherit it according<br /> to publicly known and accepted rules. Private property is a more<br /> troublesome and troubled institution in Russia than in the West<br /> because, for obvious reasons, no postcommunist society can consistently<br /> implement the rule "give back what is stolen."</p> <p> Profit seekers also still assume that the most appropriate means<br /> for dealing with business competitors are plastic explosives.<br /> The unpoliced economy arouses discontent when its principal players<br /> are seen as racketeers whose techniques for "dispute resolution"<br /> run the gamut from intimidation to contract killings. State incapacity<br /> is also revealed in the way new Russians have managed to exploit<br /> a pervasive lack of corporate accountability for personal gain.<br /> Directors of state-subsidized enterprises buy inputs from friends<br /> at inflated prices and sell outputs to friends at bargain prices,<br /> thereby decapitalizing their firms and siphoning public wealth<br /> into private pockets. They walk away with assets and dump liabilities<br /> back into the public debt. They can skim so deftly only because<br /> no one with the public interest in mind has the power to stop<br /> them.</p> <p> Dog-eat-dog capitalism also thrives on the absence of enforceable<br /> antifraud law. The impunity of con men, although it will surely<br /> not last forever, keeps people out of the market today who might<br /> otherwise come in. Ordinary Russians are less put off by the act<br /> of buying and selling than by their vulnerability to possible<br /> scams; hence they cling to suppliers they know personally. </p> <p> In the West, consumers benefit from a competitive market in restaurants<br /> because, as voters and taxpayers, they have created and funded<br /> sanitation boards that allow them to range adventurously beyond<br /> a restricted circle of personally known and trusted establishments.<br /> Thus, the feebleness of markets in Russia, despite economic liberalization,<br /> suggests the importance of political organization and state performance<br /> for fostering the trust among strangers necessary if the market<br /> is to become national and not merely local. A sausage factory<br /> in Samara will not sell to a retailer in Nizhnii Novgorod if it<br /> is unable to collect debts across oblast borders.</p> <p> For a punishing percentage, thugs may selectively enforce the<br /> repayment of loans. Obligingly, they will also kill your creditors.<br /> But the one thing they are not going to do is enforce general<br /> rules against fraud or unfair business practices. The reason is<br /> obvious. Antifraud law is a common good, based on a biblically<br /> simple moral principle (cheating is wrong), the benefits of which<br /> cannot be captured by a few but are diffused widely throughout<br /> society. So here again, Russian conditions draw attention to the<br /> way liberal markets depend, for their moral basis, on a liberal<br /> style of governance.</p> <p>Wild capitalism could nevertheless win public approvaldespite<br /> its ruthlessness, stunning inequalities, and fondness for fraudif<br /> it produced general prosperity. But Russians living outside Moscow<br /> have not received a booming economy to compensate for their loss<br /> of job security. For state incapacity entails not only gangland<br /> massacres and pyramid schemes, but also a paucity of investments<br /> in infrastructure and skills, feeble enforcement of stockholders'<br /> rights, lack of securities-exchange oversight, weak trademark<br /> protection, legal unclarity about the status of collateral, and<br /> inadequate regulation of the banking sector to ensure a steady<br /> flow of credit to businessmen rather than cronies. The nonenforcement<br /> of antitrust law may also reduce the shared benefits of economic<br /> liberalization. For these reasonsand above all because property<br /> rights are not clearly defined and impartially protected"privatization"<br /> in Russia does not foster innovation, encourage investment, boost<br /> worker productivity, raise production standards, or stimulate<br /> the efficient use of scarce resources.</p> <p> </p><hr noshade="noshade" size="2" /><h3>THE DEMOCRATIC CHARADE</h3> <p> These lessons also apply to the Russian political system. Russia<br /> mounts elections and tolerates a free press, but it does not have<br /> democracy. Why not? Voting in Russia is not a means by which citizens<br /> discipline their rulers. Elections in Russia, in fact, do not<br /> create power. For the most part, they mirror the power that already<br /> exists. Incumbents find their supporters in hidden networks. They<br /> do not draw their power, in any way, from the majority of average<br /> voters, which is why the public, although bitterly resenting its<br /> rulers, has given up actively opposing the government.</p> <p> Russian elections do not produce anything even vaguely resembling<br /> accountable or responsive government largely because of institutional<br /> weakness. Popular cynicism about "democracy" is perfectly<br /> understandable: If the state is too weak to enforce its own laws,<br /> what is the point of seeking a share of the lawmaking power? Since<br /> the bicameral parliament has little knowledge of, and no control<br /> over, decisions made in the ministries, electing a deputy does<br /> not contribute one iota to governmental accountability.</p> <p> What Russia's electoral charades bring home is something we already<br /> knew: Democratic procedures are of value only if they establish<br /> some sort of dependency of public officials on ordinary citizens.<br /> While free citizens are dependent on the government for the exercise<br /> of their rights, incumbents elected popularly and pro tempore<br /> presumably have a reason to behave responsibly, to act as the<br /> agent of society, and to produce benefits of palpable value to<br /> a majority of voters.</p> <p> Many Russian officials apparently see no reason to act this way.<br /> They live in a secretive bubble, supportedhere I exaggerate to<br /> make a pointby stolen assets, the International Monetary Fund,<br /> and various criminal affiliations. This lack of "dependence<br /> on the people" means that incumbents have little incentive<br /> to produce public goods that the average voter might find of some<br /> value. Just as society is undisciplined by "general and equal<br /> laws," so the state is unperturbed by the predicament of<br /> ordinary voters. Just as citizens will not cooperate in the enforcement<br /> of laws and decrees, so the government seems unable to profit<br /> from the decentralized information and intelligence of private<br /> individuals.</p> <p> Contemplating this lack of any discernible partnership between<br /> honest public officials and honest private citizens should lead<br /> us to reidentify the principal function of liberal constitutionalism.<br /> For liberal constitutionalism is valuable not only because it<br /> protects us from the tyranny of the minority or the majority,<br /> but also because it establishes a mutually beneficial alliance<br /> between the many and the few.</p> <p> The social contract in Russia today can be described as an exchange<br /> of unaccountable power for untaxable wealth. This, needless to<br /> say, is a contract among "elites," a sleazy deal between<br /> political and economic insidersthe so-called criminal-nomenklatura<br /> symbiosiswho, in bed with each other, engage in mutually beneficial<br /> unpunishable misdeeds. The Russian government's most urgent task<br /> today is to decriminalize the economy and stimulate the development<br /> of organized rule-of-law constituencies, presumably businessmen<br /> who accumulate wealth without force or fraud. But thoroughly compromised<br /> incumbents cannot even begin such a process of reform. And where<br /> could they find honest businessmen to support them if they tried?</p> <p> The overriding question in Russia is not: "Who governs?"<br /> but rather: "Why govern?" Why take the trouble to govern,<br /> if you can feed off the imperial remains and vacation frequently<br /> in European resorts? The rest of society, the great mass of citizens,<br /> is left out of the contract, leftin extreme casesto die out<br /> in a Darwinian struggle for survival.</p> <p> Russia seems to be a broken-hourglass society in which the privileged<br /> do not exploit or oppress or even govern but simply ignore the<br /> majority. Labor quiescence is due to the fact that, roughly speaking,<br /> the rich are opportunistic scavengers who have gained their wealth<br /> by "cherry picking" and exporting raw materials, not<br /> by taking advantage of the working masses. Outside of a few sectorsespecially<br /> those involving exportable natural resources where workers are<br /> paid well and on timestrikes would yield no benefits. Workers<br /> cannot credibly threaten to strike at a bankrupt state-owned enterprise,<br /> where outputs have a lower market value than the sum of inputs.<br /> No one needs their cooperation. You cannot create a "middle<br /> class" by handing workers shares in negative-value-added<br /> firms that retain their residual welfare functions and will never<br /> be able to compete on world markets. </p> <p> </p><hr noshade="noshade" size="2" /><h3>REDISTRIBUTION AS INCLUSION</h3> <p> Communism's unexpected aftermath might also encourage us to reconceptualize<br /> our contested social expenditures. Soviet-style regimes made it<br /> plausible to conceive of entitlements in liberal societies as<br /> a kind of dependency. For what is a recipient of public aid if<br /> not the antithesis of an enterprising individual? But the current<br /> disorder in Russiawhere public officials have taken antipaternalism<br /> to the point of child abandonmentmight encourage us to view social<br /> spending more as a choice between inclusion and exclusion.</p> <p> The fiscal crisis of the Russian state is not caused principally<br /> by pensioners and others clamoring for handouts to which they<br /> have become accustomed. The chief impediments to budgetary responsibility<br /> (and to responsible governance in general) are the "spoiler<br /> elites" who thrive on legal chaos. Budgetary outlays for<br /> vulnerable groups have fallen for the same reason that all government<br /> expenditures have dropped. The Russian state is unable to tax<br /> and spend.</p> <p> Why are pensioners, veterans, and former Chernobyl cleanup workers<br /> infuriated by rumors that their welfare entitlements are soon<br /> to be reduced even further for budgetary reasons? Their problem<br /> is not (or not only) that seven decades of socialism have weakened<br /> their moral fiber. Rather, they do not relish being advised to<br /> tighten their belts, to give up, say, their pension benefits on<br /> which they counted their whole working lives, by unscrupulous<br /> apparatchiks who recently became windfall millionaires through<br /> insider-giveaways of assets that once ostensibly belonged to all<br /> and who are now surreptitiously stashing Russia's investable resources<br /> in Cypriot banks. The roots of postcommunist popular discontent<br /> lie less in deplorable habits of dependency than in accurate perceptions<br /> of betrayal.</p> <p> Notice that the pathological disconnect between the Russian government<br /> and the Russian people is simultaneously a disturbing insulation<br /> of the rich from the poor. The separatism of the privileged, their<br /> palpable relief at not being in the same boat with their unfortunate<br /> fellow citizens, should force us to specify, by way of contrast,<br /> the kinds of rich-poor relations desirable in a liberal regime.<br /> During the Cold War, worries about poverty were sometimes, however<br /> implausibly, associated with the road to serfdom. Today, the terms<br /> of reference have changed. Should not the spectacular inequity<br /> of nomenklatura privatization lead us to ask how much and what<br /> kind of distributions are compatible with liberal principles?<br /> How unfair can a good society be? How does the liberal social<br /> contractwhere citizens pay taxes and public officials provide<br /> public servicesdiffer from a nomenklatura-criminal swap by which<br /> insiders simply wash their hands of the rest?</p> <p> At the origins of liberalism lay the perception that private property<br /> could not be reliably protected by the police power alone, and<br /> that only a system of public assistance could moderate the desperation<br /> that would drive the poor to theft and arson. Liberalism never<br /> aimed at the abolition of classes but at class compromise. In<br /> its twentieth-century form, the liberal "mixed regime"<br /> honors the property rights of the well-to-do, while guaranteeing<br /> procedural fairness, voting rights, the right to strike, entitlement<br /> to public education, and various welfare rights to the less advantaged.</p> <p> Perceptions of gross unfairness severely damage group morale.<br /> In order to fight wars, impose law and order, and even promote<br /> economic growth, liberal states have found it useful to take the<br /> edge off conspicuous economic inequality by relieving desperation<br /> and providing a bottom floor beneath which no one might drop. A free economy, where great accumulations of private wealth must<br /> be protected from the appetites of foreign and domestic predators,<br /> presupposes that the less privileged feel some perceptible stake<br /> in the system. A liberal state cannot claim, with any degree of<br /> plausibility, to be the impartial agent of society as a whole,<br /> unless it emphatically identifies exclusion as a moral problem<br /> and responds to it vigorously as a political challenge.</p> <p> That is our political challenge, not Russia's alone.<br /> During the Cold War, the Soviet Union's closed society taught<br /> us to value the openness of our own society. In communism's aftermath,<br /> Russia's politically disorganized society reminds us of liberalism's<br /> deep dependence on efficacious government. The idea that autonomous<br /> individuals can enjoy their private liberties if they are simply<br /> left unpestered by the public power dissolves before the disturbing<br /> realities of the new Russia. To protect our freedom, we had better<br /> protect the legitimate political authority that enables and sustains<br /> it. And until we have responded more effectively to our own increasingly<br /> disturbing forms of social exclusion, we had better spare the<br /> world any smug self-congratulation. </p> <p></p> <p><br /><br /><!-- dhandler for print articles --></p></div></div></div> Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:15:54 +0000 141131 at Stephen Holmes Managing the Rage <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>As the fog lifts from the September 11 attacks, the FBI and CIA are presumably honing in on the identity and aims of the people behind the plot. An organizational explanation focused on conspiratorial networks will be easier for us to accept than a broader sociological one, since anyone who draws attention to the "root causes" of anti-American hostility in the Islamic world risks sounding like an apologist for the terrorists.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>We need to deepen our understanding of anti-American rage, however, not so much because it lay behind the plot as because it lies ahead of it. As Osama bin Laden hinted in his pretaped "response" to U.S. military operations, the September 11 atrocities may have been a carefully laid trap. Indeed, subsequent events suggest that they were designed to provoke an indiscriminate U.S. retaliation that would bring Arab and Islamic publics to a boil and destabilize America's allies throughout the Middle East. If such a scenario were to unfold, the initial stakes would be Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and Saudi Arabia's oil. To avoid either or both falling into the hands of fanatics, we need to calibrate our response to avoid doing what our ruthless enemies may hope and expect us to do. The question is: How can we retaliate without recruiting more foot soldiers to the war against us and without putting allied governments at risk?<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>From the outset, the Bush administration seemed soberly conscious that a military response had to be accompanied by nonmilitary moves designed to diminish the outrage that counterstrikes would predictably awaken in the Islamic world. It quickly recognized that refugee camps are not only humanitarian disasters but also breeding grounds for terrorism and thus a long-term security threat to the United States. Even before launching military action on October 7, the United States began organizing food drops inside Afghanistan and helping to provide United Nations assistance to those fleeing the country. These are fair examples of modest nonmilitary gestures designed to moderate the anti-American passions that any U.S. military assault on or within a Muslim nation will ignite.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Renewed American interest in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process manifestly serves the same purpose. On October 1, the U.S. State Department announced that the United States had decided to back the creation of a Palestinian state. Such an intention will be difficult to carry through. But the stakes for the United States now appear much larger than they were before September 11. Reaching a highly visible milestone in the effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could at least partly abate Arab anger fueled by what might be a long, drawn-out military response.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>In other areas, however, it is unclear how quickly and appropriately American thinking will adapt to the new situation that confronts us. Retreating into our gated community will not guarantee our security, since committed killers, perhaps armed with lethal pathogens, can stealthily outflank whatever shields we choose to erect. Homeland defense therefore requires us to go out into the world and take the war to our enemies. But what ideas will guide our armed voyage abroad?<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The greatest danger, paradoxically, comes from partially persuasive ideas rather than crudely simplistic ones. The problem is not that our policy makers believe that Islam is a monolith or that all Muslims seek a holy war against the West. These simplifications have no influence--and therefore no pernicious influence--on the thinking of the administration, which is making an effort to break the poisonous identification of Islam with anti-American terrorism. But subtler ideas with a palpable sway over American policy remain worthy subjects of debate.<br /></p><p><span class="subhead">The Trouble with Multilateralism</span><br /></p><p>Multilateralism invites probing inquiry precisely because its reasonableness may obscure its limitations. After the atrocities of September 11, Colin Powell succeeded in cobbling together an antiterrorist coalition, even working through the United Nations (which the administration had earlier shunned) so that, among other things, cooperating governments in the Muslim world might not appear to their own populations as servile clients of the United States. This sudden volte-face in Bush's foreign policy seemed to vindicate critics who had assailed the administration for withdrawing from international treaties and generally acting as if the United States could afford to ignore other countries entirely.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>But as the administration abandoned unilateralism, its former critics began to point out that an effective coalition against terrorism, which must include countries outside the industrialized democracies that comprise the G-7, entails dangers of its own. For one thing, many of our potential and actual allies in the current campaign define "terrorist" in a less restrictive way than we do. Russia, India, China, and Israel all have restless Islamic populations inside and near their borders. In the worst of cases, they could draw the United States into a confrontation between Islamic and non-Islamic populations, thereby reinforcing the appeal of transnational Islamic radicalism despite concerted American efforts to avoid such a polarized outcome.<br /></p><p>But it will not be easy to keep our distance from the aspirations of such vital allies, for what Bush calls a war against "every terrorist group of global reach" cannot boil down to a war solely against terrorists who can reach the United States. Having signed up an eclectic group of partners with diverse private agendas, the administration must now articulate clearly the common interests that we share with others. And it must walk a fine line to avoid alienating indispensable allies on the one hand and reinforcing the appeal of transnational Islamic militancy on the other.<br /></p><p><span class="dropcap">W</span>hile manifestly useful, multilateralism also raises problems when it includes, as it must, cooperation with moderate Islamic regimes. For how can we construct a stable whole from unstable parts? We urgently require the kind of on-the-ground intelligence that only the security apparatuses of these governments can give us, just as we need the airfields and overflight rights that only local dictators can provide.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>What's more, to elicit such cooperation we cannot simply twist arms and issue ultimatums; we must also be forthcoming. And this means that we must become increasingly thick with unaccountable and perhaps corrupt incumbents. An antiterrorist partnership with repressive and nonparticipatory governments may offer us partners poorly positioned to help us attenuate anti-American passions in the region. For a powerful catalyst of popular hostility to the United States is the perception that America hypocritically advocates democracy in principle while supporting nondemocratic regimes in Arab and Islamic countries. By entangling us further with weakly legitimate regimes, our coalition against terrorism may only corroborate such malignant preconceptions.<br /></p><p><span class="subhead">The Trouble with Nation Building</span><br /></p><p>Before the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., President Bush and his advisers repeatedly explained that "nation building" abroad had embroiled the United States in intractable problems and should therefore no longer be included among our principal foreign-policy goals. In the wake of September 11, many commentators replied that that our current woes stem in part from the U.S. decision to abandon Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, thereby creating a power vacuum in which foreign terrorists could operate undisturbed. Others added, in the same spirit, that poverty and inequality contribute to political instability--the implication being that the United States, in order to win the global battle for hearts and minds, should channel economic aid to those nations that incubate the most venomous forms of anti-Americanism.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Signs are that the administration has embraced these and similar suggestions. Once a political settlement is in place, U.S. help in reconstructing the devastated Afghan economy--whether we call it nation building or not--could be designed to discredit the accusations that radical Islamists lodge against America. Prominent among these is the notion that the United States is an autistic and irresponsible power, unaware of how its actions affect other peoples and particularly unwilling to help Islamic countries the way it helped, for example, Germany and Japan after World War II. Admittedly, Germany and Japan provided more favorable underlying conditions for economic reconstruction than Afghanistan does today. Our aim in this case should simply be to provide decent prospects for ordinary people. By focusing especially on education and health care for Afghan girls and women, we could also answer the moral absolutism of Islamic fundamentalists (who regularly accuse the West of materialism and relativism) with a moral absolutism of our own: Half a country's population cannot be brutally degraded in this way.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>But the genuine appeal of nation building should not be allowed to mask its inherent dangers and the enormous difficulty of managing it successfully. Not only are massive financial transfers unlikely to fix a broken economy or buy lasting gratitude, but a half-serious program designed to stimulate economic development may give youths a technical education only to throw them out into a distressed society with heightened expectations and few prospects for employment. A postmilitary commitment to economic assistance for Afghanistan must therefore be as unflagging as it was in postwar West Germany; for where U.S. development assistance has been halfhearted, failure has frequently been the result.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Without domestic support, governments inclined to support the United States feel boxed in and cannot cooperate effectively in dismantling transnational terrorist networks. But can we successfully coax Arab and Islamic regimes allied with us into moderating their ways--reforming their habitual methods of governance, reducing repression, and increasing democratic participation--without risking their ouster and replacement by radically uncooperative regimes? Can they become more responsive to their own societies without turning their backs on us?<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>This question brings us full circle. We cannot sustain an <i>effective</i> coalition against terrorism, which includes Arab and Islamic states, unless we reach past rulers into the societies that they govern and somehow reduce popular Arab and Islamic hostility toward America. Building nations, like building coalitions, requires the United States to walk a very fine line. We must encourage liberalization without provoking instability. This is a perilous task, requiring the kind of deep understanding of other countries and cultures that has been visible only occasionally in postwar American foreign policy.<br /></p><p><span class="subhead">A Wider War?</span><br /></p><p>If the military war spreads beyond Afghanistan, managing anti-American rage may become even more critical. Some in Bush's administration advocate toppling Saddam Hussein and destroying his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, even if he had no material hand in the events of September 11. A land invasion of Iraq, however, would involve enormous risks, including the possibility of unintended civilian casualties (in Israel as well as Iraq) and the inflammation of popular passions across the Arab and Islamic world--not to mention incalculable regional instability in case the country broke up.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>What auxiliary steps could the United States take, in such a hypothetical situation, to avert or minimize a dangerous Islamic backlash and to prevent a regional war in case of territorial fragmentation? We could, for one thing, exploit the occasion of an invasion to vacate our bases in Saudi Arabia, transferring troops to Iraq to stabilize the Gulf militarily while slightly reducing the offense to Islamic sensibilities caused by stationing soldiers directly in the land of Mecca and Medina. And the United Nations could hold prompt elections, at least in the south, producing some sort of local Shiite government untainted by Saddam's Sunni clique, thus in some measure conciliating Iran to a U.S.-led military action. (Saudi and Turkish concerns would need to be assuaged in other ways.)<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>None of these actions would make a highly risky U.S.-led invasion of an Arab country seem legitimate in Muslim eyes. But policies of this general sort could conceivably lower the temperature on Arab and Islamic streets. As the military drama unfolds, in any case, we must think hard about the wider theater of action. If anti-American rage turns into a firestorm, the terrorists who struck on September 11 may very well have hit their true target.</p> </div></div></div> Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:10:20 +0000 142294 at Stephen Holmes Focus on Iraq <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>The terrorists who attacked New York and Washington on September 11th were not trying to make a point. They were trying to provoke a foolish reaction. They hoped to lure the United States into the kind of poorly targeted retaliation that would destabilize our allies in the Islamic world and recruit more foot soldiers into the campaign to "free" the holy lands. Our response will be successful only if we avoid the trap they have cruelly laid.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Does our apparent strategy of punishing "states that harbor terrorists" live up to this demanding standard? It sounds plausible at first. Since we cannot get directly at the diffuse and amorphous terrorist networks themselves, we should exert pressure where we can, namely against those governments who tolerate terrorists on their territory as well as those who directly sponsor it. But there are some problems with addressing our efforts against "states that harbor terrorism."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>For one thing, interpreted literally, culprits include Germany and Canada as well as the United States. The record suggests that a typical "breeding ground" for Islamic militancy is the Technical University of Hamburg -- the point being that terrorists lurk undetected in the anonymous interstices of free societies, harbored not by governments but by ethnic diversity and freedom itself.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>And that is not all. We can bring another dimension of the problem into focus by observing that failed states incubate terrorism. A refugee camp is not just a humanitarian disaster, it is a generator of militant rage and thus a security threat to the West. Desolate and ravaged Afghanistan is a prime example. The Taliban presumably host foreign armed militias because they are too weak to secure a monopoly by force on their own territory. Telling our presumptive allies in the Islamic world to choose sides sounds decisive on our part. But pressuring rickety states may cause their collapse, leaving militant Islam to pick up the pieces. Pakistan is usually mentioned first in this context because everyone fears a breakdown of the Pakistani army and subsequent emergence of a fundamentalist regime, allied with the Taliban, with nuclear weapons at its disposal.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>But the problem is more general and extends to America's Arab allies as well. Alongside the idea that we must punish states that harbor terrorism is a vague claim that we can simply issue instructions to allied Arab governments and compel them to squelch anti-American voices in their societies. The premise behind this thought is that a functioning state, able to control its own territory, can safely consider the United States to be a more important constituency than its domestic public. In other words, the sway of an American diktat around the world assumes the stability of non-participatory states. Whatever its pedigree (and a colonialist mind-set is a plausible candidate), the idea that governments in the region can indefinitely keep their populations docile is dangerous and misleading. "Shell regimes," with little moral prestige in their societies, may collapse under the onslaught of aroused populations if they show themselves to be the toys of an arrogant U.S. regime. The consequence would not be an improvement of American security.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>So what is to be done, assuming we want to avoid falling into our attackers' trap? The focus today is on Afghanistan and Iraq, countries that present very different challenges to a U.S. campaign against terrorists with a global reach. In Afghanistan, where we seem to be concentrating, terrorists are "harbored" not by a state but by the impossibly rocky and mountainous terrain. The Taliban manifestly does not have a monopoly on the means of violent coercion on its own territory. Nor did Afghanistan provide the soil that bred Arab terrorist organizations. Rather these groups transferred their training camps there because it is one of the few places on earth where no government's authority extends.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The Taliban has relations of exchange and partnership and ideological sympathy with the terrorist groups but it does not control them. Therefore, to destroy the sanctuary of the terrorists it would not suffice to liquidate the Taliban. Instead we would have to take away the natural advantage of the landscape that provides them with their real haven. To do that will be difficult and will require more than aiding the Northern League and establishing a secure area for special operations. It will probably require invasion and occupation. Since those making the decisions in the U.S. administration presumably have no personal interests in Central Asian oil, are certainly keenly aware of the folly of being lured into "the Soviet Vietnam," and no doubt hesitate to pour kerosene on Islamist passions in Pakistan, they are probably not planning, in the case of Afghanistan, to burn down the haystack in order to find and destroy the needles.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Iraq is another matter. Universally unpopular among contiguous states, Saddam Hussein's regime not only tolerates, but actively sponsors, terrorism. And it is working furiously to produce weapons of mass destruction that can be used against us. That bin Laden's Islamic terrorists can be sponsored by secular governments even while cleaving devotedly to their own cause is obvious from the way the United States used their jihad against the Soviet forces in the 80s. If the U.S. had persuasive evidence now that Iraqi intelligence (perhaps trained by rogue KGB agents in basic techniques of counter-intelligence and obliterating their own traces inside the United States) had a hand in the attack, it could not reveal this evidence publicly without alerting the Iraqis to a pending invasion. In any case, a move to topple Saddam's regime, to be effective, would require support from allies in both Europe and the Middle East. It would also have to be integrated into a multi-dimensional regional strategy. For one thing, an invasion of Iraq, unlike an invasion of Afghanistan, would provide an opportunity to remove a bitter irritant to Islamic public opinion: We could relocate our troops away from the vicinity of Mecca and Medina, not in retreat or bowing to pressure but rather in order to occupy Iraq, and thereby to continue stabilizing the region militarily. We could call an immediate election that would result in a Shia government, which would have the collateral benefit (if combined with a go-ahead for a trans-Iranian oil pipeline) of conciliating Iran to our cause. Discontent stimulated by a post WWII-style American occupation of Iraq, devoted to political and economic reconstruction, would be tempered by the end of grueling sanctions (and bombings to the extent that these have occurred) from which Iraqi civilians have long suffered. The Syrians and Saudis could also be brought to support this effort if, along with some other incentives, we combined the toppling of the despised and feared Saddam with a all-out effort to create a viable Palestinian state, compatible with Israel's basic security, along the lines of the Mitchell plan, with perhaps some sort of international protectorate in East Jerusalem -- not sometime later, but now.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p> </div></div></div> Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:10:18 +0000 139563 at Stephen Holmes The Liberal Idea <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Liberalism looms prominent in contemporary debates -- in this journal and elsewhere. But the term, however ubiquitous, remains elusive. By some, it is treated with cruel derision; by others, with breathtaking sanctimoniousness. A few writers, such as Alasdair MacIntyre or Christopher Lasch, finger liberalism as the source of all our miseries; others, such as Milton Friedman, preach that our most painful problems would be solved if we returned to liberalism in a pure and uncorrupted form. Some argue that the United States is a radiant monument to the liberal ideas of its Founders. Others retort that our society has evolved in unexpected ways and that stale eighteenth-century principles have become largely irrelevant to twentieth-century problems. Such postures are exhilarating. But they do not help us understand what liberalism was or how it has changed.</p> <p>One claim about liberalism, common in textbooks, is that a major discontinuity divides classical from twentieth-century liberals -- James Madison from Franklin Roosevelt, Adam Smith from John Maynard Keynes. Both left and right seem to agree about this purported reversal in theory and practice. Contemporary welfare programs, conservatives assure us, represent a betrayal of the liberal legacy. And progressives in principle agree: we would never have implemented Social Security and a progressive income tax if we had not turned our backs on the devil-take-the-hindmost attitude of eighteenth-century liberals. </p> <p></p><center>* * *</center> <p>But is this true? What is liberalism? What was it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Was its original promise fulfilled or betrayed? Have American liberals, following Roosevelt, simply misappropriated a term that originally meant the opposite of what it has come to mean today? </p> <p>"Liberalism" is not a vague Zeitgeist or the outlook of modern man, but a clearly identifiable cluster of principles and institutional choices endorsed by specific politicians and popular movements. The early history of liberalism, in fact, cannot be detached from the political history, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of England and Scotland, the Netherlands, the United States, and France. Liberal principles were clearly expressed not just in theoretical texts but in the English Habeas Corpus Act, Bill of Rights, and Act of Toleration (1679,1688-89), and the first Ten Amendments to the American Constitution and the <i>Declaration de les droits de I'homme </i>(both of 1789). Some liberal politicians, such as the Federalists, succeeded brilliantly; others, such as their contemporaries, the French Feuillants, just as dramatically failed. </p> <p>The political theorists who most cogently defended liberal aspirations -- Milton, Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Voltaire, Blackstone, Smith, Kant, Madison, and J.S. Mill -- were deeply immersed in contemporary controversies. Each spent his life responding to local challenges, agitating for specific reforms, struggling with circumscribed problems. They faced different enemies and allied themselves with different social forces. Their epistemologies and metaphysical beliefs were sometimes diametrically opposed. None can be fully understood if plucked ahistorically from his political and intellectual context and forced to march in a syllabus-like parade of liberal greats. </p> <p></p><center>* * *</center> <p>The positions they defended, nevertheless, tend to converge. Their common liberalism -- for we might as well call it that -- has nothing whatsoever to do (as their critics say) with "atomistic" individualism or a hostility to the common good. So what did it involve? Liberals are sometimes said to advocate "the priority of liberty." While not totally false, this catch-phrase is needlessly telegraphic. A list of the basic components of liberalism would have to include, at a bare minimum, religious toleration, freedom of discussion, personal security, free elections, constitutional government, and economic progress. But much more was and is involved. </p> <p>Most liberals were both anticlerical and antimilitaristic, for instance. They were also opposed, in varying degrees, to hereditary monopolies, especially to the privileges of a few "great" families who owned large tracts of land. They scorned ties of vassalage and peonage and aimed to universalize the condition of personal independence. Most believed in the value of literacy and secular education for all, a fairer system of taxation, and the legitimacy of social mobility within and across generations. They welcomed immigration and freedom of movement in general. They supported the right to divorce. They opposed legal disabilities on religious minorities (so long as national security was not at stake). They endorsed the freedom to establish churches and to preach. </p> <p>Legitimate authority, they argued, is based on popular consent, not on divine right or dynastic succession. They therefore defended not merely electoral politics but also the right of rebellion in some form. They advocated political pluralism and government by public discussion among provisionally elected and publicly accountable representatives. They hoped that bloody confrontation between armed factions could be, to some extent, replaced by rational bargaining and debate. They proposed a constant widening of the suffrage, more or less in tandem with the expansion of literacy, the relaxation of religious orthodoxy, and the abatement of religious passions. They also favored an independent judiciary, as well as laws that were clearly framed, publicly proclaimed, and fairly enforced. They prescribed the abolition of torture and savage punishments, legal checks on the police, guarantees both against retroactive legislation and arbitrary imprisonment, and jury trials in criminal cases. They tended to conceive punishment as a means of deterrence rather than a form of revenge. They advocated civilian control of the military. And they admired science or free inquiry as a deepening of human understanding, not merely as an instrument for mastering nature. </p> <p>They were devoted not only to legal equality, but also to equality of economic opportunity. They were more distressed by poverty and personal dependency, how- ever, than by inequality of income or wealth. Thus, they urged a wide and rapid diffusion of private property. They believed that contracts should be enforced. They favored the abolition of domestic customs barriers, free entry into trades and occupations, and the freedom to exchange goods and services. In other words, they had a generally welcoming attitude toward commercial society. They looked favorably on commercialism because they believed that economic competition would create (among other things) enough general prosperity to improve the lives of even the poorest members of the community. Adam Smith defended free trade, for example, on the grounds that it would increase the welfare of "the lowest ranks of the people" and work "for the benefit of the poor and the indigent." </p> <p>This cluster of moral principles and most-favored practices provides the best starting-point for an understanding of the liberal tradition. By an inversion and simplification, we can convert this unwieldy catalogue into a shorter list of liberalism's most-disliked institutions and regimes. Four classically illiberal arrangements leap to the eye: autocracy, aristocracy, theocracy, and collective ownership. (Today we might add ethnocracy.) </p> <p>In an autocratic regime, a single faction, party, or clique monopolizes power, the press is censored or superintended by the government; individuals can be imprisoned for long periods without legal recourse; the secret police are given enormous discretion to liquidate "unreliables" and enforce political subservience; the ordinary police are poorly monitored and controlled; the economy is centrally managed; criticism of political rulers is forbidden and, therefore, government is likely to be capricious, oppressive, corrupt, and grossly misinformed. In an aristocracy, access to privilege is determined almost wholly by pedigree; landownership is the key to life; a closed oligarchy monopolizes political power; and social mobility within and across generations is minimal. In a fundamentalist theocracy or clerical authoritarian regime, bigotry is rewarded, innovation is sacrificed to indoctrination, intellectual exchange is quashed, deviations punished, orthodoxy enforced. </p> <p>All three regimes are patently illiberal. None stirs much sympathy in the West. Outrage is expressed whenever their vestiges are discovered in liberal societies today. Remedies are proposed and sometimes applied. To the extent that autocracy, aristocracy, and theocracy are decried, liberal rhetoric, at least, has triumphed. </p> <p></p><center>* * *</center> <p>It is different with communism and the principle of economic levelling on which it is purportedly built. The socialist tradition, despite its trumpeted embrace of "progress," has assiduously cultivated and kept alive an archaic inequality taboo, inherited, it seems, from subsistence economies of the distant past. (The archaic roots of communism may partly explain the extraordinary contagiousness of authoritarian socialism in underdeveloped countries where traces of a premodern communalist ethos remain strong.) </p> <p>What characterizes liberalism, by contrast, is its unembarrassed repudiation of ancient and Christian prohibitions on inequality of resources. While adamantly opposed to any sort of caste system, liberalism is notoriously tolerant of disparities in income and wealth. Liberals are intensely concerned about poverty and economic dependency, about absolute levels of well-being (including a "bottom floor" of decent subsistence) as well as economically entrenched relations of mastery and control. Liberals did not, however, view inequality of wealth itself, apart from problems of dependency and poverty, as an unacceptable social evil. </p> <p>Critics often assert that liberal acquiescence in economic inequality stems from a profound belief that superior talents "deserve" superior rewards. But that is a dubious claim. Liberals accepted inequality of resources, in fact, because they saw it as an inevitable side effect of a productive economy. They viewed the inequality taboo as an expression of irrational envy, it is true. But they rejected it primarily because they saw it as an infallible formula for reproducing scarcity and exacerbating dependency. As Alexis de Tocqueville said in 1848: "socialism wants equality in poverty and slavery." Collective ownership is not only economically inefficient; it also destroys the independent resources on which political opposition is based. </p> <p>In these pages, I do not offer a concise definition of liberalism. Without identifying liberalism's essence, I nevertheless sketch out a set of claims that are broadly characteristic of liberal political thought, including what I consider to be its three "core norms." I examine the basic contours of the liberal idea by looking sequentially at five concepts: the state, interests, rights, democracy, and welfare. </p> <p><font class="headline">State Power </font><br /> Liberalism is classically defined as an attempt to limit the power of the state for the sake of individual freedom. Liberals, it is true, were obsessed with curbing political tyranny. Their driving concern, many historians have argued, was to prevent hypertrophic government from oppressing individuals and groups. The essence of liberalism, from this perspective, lay in techniques for taming absolute power. </p> <p>There are good reasons for emphasizing the antipower ethos within the liberal tradition. Liberals have a better grasp of economic realities than socialists and Marxists. But the most obvious superiority of liberal over Marxist thought stems from liberalism's persistent concern for -- and Marxism's infamous blindness to -- abuses of accumulated political power. </p> <p>In fact, the antityrannical strand has always been, and remains today, a vital element within liberal thought. But it is not the whole story. To identify liberalism with a crusade to restrict state power is inadequate. For one thing, liberal states have, since the very beginning, proved breathtakingly powerful. The twentieth century provides some outstanding examples of the superiority of liberalism over autocracy from purely military and administrative perspectives. It is enlightening to reread, after the events of 1989, the speeches that Solzhenitsyn delivered in the United States during the 1970s. There he tells us that the West -- infected by the spirit of liberalism -- is becoming weaker and weaker, while the Soviet Union is moving with doom-like inevitability toward world domination. Many people made the same error about fascism in the 1930s. Liberal states are stronger than those awed by authoritarian power believe. </p> <p>The dramatic story of nineteenth-century Britain is another case in point. The age of free trade and the industrial revolution, of course, was simultaneously the age of the British Empire. Shockingly enough, a small island off the northwest coast of Europe gained mastery over a third of the globe. The classic country of political liberalism did not display state weakness in any obvious sense. Liberal politics, in fact, seems to have been accompanied by a startling increase in the capacity of the state to mobilize resources for collective purposes. </p> <p>This was already clear in the early eighteenth century. In the first great wave of liberal propaganda, Voltaire and Montesquieu praised England not only for its liberties, but also for its power -- for the number of ships in its harbors. Oppression, they both argued, weakens a state. Intolerance deepens sectarian conflict and drives useful citizens abroad. Censorship blocks the flow of information vital for the governance of a large nation. Cruel and excessive punishments crush the spirit of ordinary citizens, depriving the government of their active collaboration. Heavy-handed regulations of trade decrease the private wealth that might be tapped for the public treasury. A liberal polity is much better situated than a tyrannical one for enlisting citizen cooperation in the pursuit of common objectives. Voltaire, and even Montesquieu, identified liberalism with a welcome magnification (along some dimensions) of state power. </p> <p>This line of reasoning makes perfect sense. It is implausible, after all, to view liberal rights as naturally incompatible with political power, as if such rights flourish only when the state withers away. Authority and liberty are interdependent, not simply opposed. As Kant, among others, made dear, rights (including property rights) are defined and enforced by the state. Referring to "natural rights," Emile Durkheim convincingly wrote that "the State creates these rights, gives them an institutional form, and makes them into realities." To violate liberal rights is to disobey the liberal state. In a sovereignless condition, rights can be imagined but not experienced. In a society with a weak state, such as Lebanon for the past decade, rights themselves are weak or underenforced. Statelessness means rightlessness, as the story of migrating Kurds, Vietnamese and Caribbean boat people, and many others should by now have made abundantly clear. </p> <p>The positive correlation between individual rights and state capacities is an important theme in the history of liberal thought. An emblematic figure in this regard is Pierre Bayle, one of the originators of the liberal defense of religious toleration. Bayle was a theorist of toleration. But he was also an "absolutist," that is, an advocate of increasing the powers of the crown or centralized state. The logic of his position may seem anomalous to those who understand liberalism as vehemently antistatist. But the Baylean linkage of liberal rights to sovereignty is actually quite straightforward. Only a powerful central state can protect individual rights against local strongmen and religious majorities. Only a powerful state can defend the weak against the strong. In France, to be more specific, only a powerful state could resist the pressure of ecclesiastics to persecute the Protestant minority. (Bayle was a Protestant.) Historians of liberalism, as I said, tend to repeat that liberalism was born in protest against state power. This is an accurate but one sided picture. Bayle's tolerationism was born in protest against a lack of state power. His liberalism was most lucidly displayed in his plea to extend the protection of the secular state to a beleaguered sect. </p> <p></p><center>* * *</center> <p>Libertarian rhetoric about "getting the government off our backs" makes the positive correlation between individual rights and state power difficult to comprehend. Better guidance comes from classic liberals, who insisted that, when organized constitutionally, liberty and authority can be mutually reinforcing. Consider David Hume's famous essay, "Of Commerce." In this classic defense of liberal political economy, Hume argues that Britain should deregulate commercial and industrial life and welcome the accumulation of private wealth, because such a system will increase the resources "to which the public may lay claim." An autocratic government, intent upon controlling all economic life, will decrease the stock of private wealth and thereby indirectly undermine its own power. It is a lesson that the leaders of the Soviet Union have absorbed only today. </p> <p>Not private property alone, but all typically liberal institutions were partly justified because they strengthened the state's capacity to govern and solve collective problems. Consider, by way of illustration, one of the most fundamental institutions of liberal constitutionalism: freedom of discussion. We might justify freedom of speech by arguing that the sphere of individual liberty must be maximally expanded while the sphere of state power must be contracted to a proportional degree. But liberals thought about free discussion in another way. Immanuel Kant, for example, argued that a government could not stifle freedom of the press because, by so doing, it would lose access to vital information and undermine its own capacity to govern. </p> <p>Early modern theorists of absolutism, such as Jean Bodin, were the first to focus attention clearly on the advantages of liberty for the power of the state. In his <i>Six Books of the Republic </i>(1576), Bodin provided a series of extremely influential <i>raison d'etat</i> arguments for constitutional limits on governmental power. Limited power is more powerful than unlimited power. That is the master thought of his great treatise and his principal legacy to the liberal tradition. Consider the following example. One of the most acute problems any ruler will face is control of his own officials. How will the king know what his agents are doing, especially in remote regions of the kingdom? Are they exceeding his commands? Are they taking bribes to enforce his laws selectively? How can such information travel from the periphery of a large kingdom to the center? How can a ruler monitor the activities of his "staff" without creating another "staff" whose activity would also be suspect and need monitoring? How can the king hear anything his inner circle of advisors do not want him to hear? Bodin's answer to all these questions is that if a king wants to learn promptly about the misdeeds of his own agents, he ought to create an assembly where representatives from the entire kingdom can come together and complain openly under a grant of immunity. Freedom of speech in a national assembly is an indispensable tool in the modern "art of governance." </p> <p>What can we learn by looking at preliberal arguments for typically liberal political institutions? We can learn, I think, to question the conventional interpretation of classical liberal theory as ardently anti-statist. Liberals were not anarchists. They were opposed to capricious and oppressive authority, not to authority in general. They embraced state power as a means both to prevent anarchy and to enforce impartial laws (against the grain of human partiality). Because they assumed that political rulers will themselves be human, and therefore partial and potentially unjust, they also devised institutional machinery to contain authority within legal channels. The constitutionalizing of authority is anti-authoritarian. But it does not imply a weakening or crippling of the state. </p> <p>As the countries of Eastern Europe struggle to establish constitutional democracies in difficult circumstances today, we should ask ourselves again how the United States managed to stabilize a liberal-republican regime at the end of the eighteenth century. The endurance of the Constitution written at Philadelphia in 1787 was not foreordained. The members of the Constituent Assembly in Paris in 1791, whose ideals were not radically distant from those of the American Founders, produced a respectable liberal constitution that guttered to a swift and miserable end. Why did the Americans succeed and the French fail? There are many reasons, of course, stemming from the different political, religious, economic, demographic, and military situations of the two countries. But one neglected reason deserves to be pointed out. Unlike their French contemporaries, the American Founders wrote our Constitution after a period of frustration with the <i>weakness</i> of central government. They aimed, therefore, not only to prevent tyranny, but also to create a sturdy government with the capacity to govern effectively and "promote the general Welfare." This devotion to governmental effectiveness was virtually absent at the French Constituent Assembly of 1791. The desire simultaneously to limit and reinforce the state resulted, in the American case, in a constitutional regime that was neither tyrannical nor weak. </p> <p>When granting powers to the government, the American Founders looked for guidance to the great European liberals. What powers should government be assigned, from a liberal point of view? These powers were not trivial. The power to defend the country from foreign invasion is usually mentioned first. But what should be the domestic powers of a liberal state? Liberals, for one thing, expected the government to provide security from private as well as public violence. In other words, they sought to create not only a police force, but also the mechanisms for monitoring and controlling the police. The liberal state was also expected to define property rights and enforce property law, contract law, and trespass law. No rules for the inheritance or conveyance of property existed in the state of nature; they had to be created by political means. Civil society, therefore, was society "civilized" by the state. The state imposed civilization on society, among other ways, by constantly breaking up spontaneous economic and social monopolies. </p> <p>But the power of the liberal state did not stop here. Constitutional government also had a significant allocative role. It had to make available judicial institutions for private litigation. It had to deliver fair procedures in criminal cases, allowing a reasonable defense for the accused. It had to provide poor relief. And, of course, it had to provide a whole series of public goods: canals, highways, safe water, street lights, sewers. State-help was conceived as providing the preconditions for self-help. This idea was nowhere more apparent than in liberal advocacy of subsidized education. Adam Smith, for one, favored a publicly financed system of compulsory elementary education aimed to help the indigent. John Stuart Mill, too, held it to be "the duty of the government" to supply "pecuniary support to elementary schools, such as to render them accessible to all the children of the poor." Far from being a road to serfdom, government intervention was meant to enhance individual autonomy. Publicly financed schooling, as Mill wrote, is "help toward doing without help." </p> <p><font class="headline">Interests</font><br /> From a Marxist perspective, the primary liberal right is the right to economic liberty: the right to own property, to make contracts, to enter into business, to buy and sell, to exchange goods and services. But is it true that liberals viewed economic rights as somehow primary or exemplary? According to Max Weber, freedom of conscience was the first and basic liberal right. More generally, liberals embraced religious toleration, freedom of discussion, the right to criticize government officials, and prohibitions against bodily torture for their own sakes -- not merely because these practices were good for trade. However important, economic liberty was merely one of the core practices valued by liberals. </p> <p>This is not to deny the emphasis that many liberals placed on market freedoms and economic self-interest. The role of self-interest in liberal theory, however, has been poorly understood. All too often, commentators assume that liberals who adopt a friendly attitude toward self-interest are advocating some sort of hyperegoistical attitude in which nothing matters but the pursuit of personal gain. This is an overly theatrical view of the liberal tradition. </p> <p>Liberals are often accused of psychological reductionism. They purportedly believed that human beings are propelled by rational self-interest alone, as if benevolence, love of others, and devotion to the common good were wholly unreal motivations. This accusation is reckless. The truth is that, before the nineteenth century, motivational reductionism was virtually unknown. Most human behavior was understood to spring from irrational passions. Rational choice of action was exceptional. Self-destructive and wasteful conduct was rampant. Most individuals were compulsive or impulsive, hide-bound by habit or victimized by passing frenzies. For neo-stoics, calculating and self-interested behavior was a rare moral ideal. It could be achieved only by a few philosophers after a strenuous process of moral discipline, whereby irrational passions were systematically weakened and purged. It could certainly not be expected from everyone. </p> <p>Given this cultural background, it is implausible to assume that classical European liberals were motivational reductionists. Their focus on calculating self-interest must be understood in a subtler way. It was not a descriptive claim, first of all, but rather a normative recommendation. We can see this most clearly in the work of the greatest of all preliberal theorists, Thomas Hobbes. If human beings were rational pursuers of their own self-interest, Hobbes reasoned, history would not be an endless chronicle of wasteful butchery and self-destruction. Civil wars are so frequent because some individuals are prepared to risk death for the sake of "higher" ideals such as glory and salvation. To eliminate the destructive violence of civil war, it is crucial to discredit all ideals that tempt individuals to defy death. In Hobbes's ideal society, people would rationally pursue their self-preservation, oblivious to the siren-songs of aristocratic glory and religious redemption. While he favored such a purging of irrational motivations, Hobbes did not believe that most people could be wholly rescued from preposterous habits of mind. He cannot be accused of thinking that human beings were self-disciplined enough to be rational and self-interested in an emphatic sense. </p> <p>The same is true of the liberals who built upon Hobbes's thought. Montesquieu, for instance, believed that economic growth would discourage irrational and self-destructive behavior. It would weaken the vise-grip of xenophobia and bigotry. It would incite forethought and sharpen people's awareness of the remote consequences of their actions. Neither Montesquieu nor any other liberal, however, thought that human beings were programmed at birth to be calculating maximizers of individual well-being. </p> <p></p><center>* * *</center> <p>There is also a moral component to the liberal emphasis on universal self-interest. To say that all individuals are motivated by self-interest is to assert that, from a political perspective, all human beings are fundamentally the same. For political purposes, no individual can claim to have motives that are morally superior to his neighbor's. There are no higher types. Everyone has interests. And one individual's interests are, in principle, as worthy of satisfaction as another's. The right to rule cannot be grounded on natural superiority. All people, including rulers, are driven by self-interest. As a result, constitution-makers must design institutions (such as periodic and competitive elections) to make the interests of rulers coincide with the interests of the ruled. The concept of universal self-interest can thus be said to provide the anthropological foundations for democracy. </p> <p>The concept of self-interest, in short, contains an implicit reference to some sort of universalistic or egalitarian norm. Moreover, liberals uniformly took an additional step and endorsed the norm of fairness even when it spelled coercive checks on the principle of self-interest. </p> <p>There is nothing shameful about the pursuit of personal advantage. That concession is a distinctive innovation of the humanism to which all liberals subscribed. Self-interest is not a sign of moral depravity or cowardice (though it does express a novel insouciance toward would-be social "superiors"). Advantage-seeking nevertheless presents an important social problem. Government is necessary, as Locke and the others argued, precisely because individuals are partial to themselves. Liberals worried about self-interest, then, because they were conscious of the damaging effects of human partiality. A self-interested individual will prefer that everyone else obeys the law, while he or she continues to disobey it. Such an arrangement would be in the individual's private interest, but it would also be wrong from a liberal point of view. To benefit from the self-restraint of others, while continuing to benefit from one's own lack of self-restraint, is flagrantly unjust or unfair. Individuals who exempt themselves from otherwise universal constraints implicitly assert, contrary to liberal principles, that they are special, superior, higher types. </p> <p>Liberalism is a norm-based, not an interest-based, theory. The <i>self-exemption taboo</i> is the first core norm of liberal thought. This norm -- the injunction to play by rules which apply equally to all -- was most systematically expounded by Kant; but it is unambiguously advanced in the works of all liberal theorists. It would be in the interests of each of us to make an exception of ourselves; we would prefer to free ride on the taxes paid by our neighbors or to break the speed limit whenever convenient while benefiting from the well-monitored driving of others. But we cannot be permitted to do this because self-exemption from generally valid laws would be unfair. For liberals, in short, a norm of fairness overrides the motive of self-interest. </p> <p><font class="headline">Rights</font><br /> Classical liberals uniformly believed that rights are specified and maintained by state power. And they saw economic liberty as only one kind of right, of no greater importance than, say, freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, freedom from bodily fear, freedom of conscience, the right to vote. In "On the Jewish Question,"the young Marx accused bourgeois rights of destroying community. It has never been dear, however, why limitations on the discretion of armed policemen should be anticommunal. In fact, liberal rights do not protect the atomized individual from society. They protect fragile channels of social communication (such as the press) from being infiltrated, controlled, and destroyed by political authorities. Authoritarian regimes, based on fear, are much more "atomistic" than liberal societies organized around rights. </p> <p>One of the greatest obstacles to a fresh understanding of liberal rights is <i>the tyranny of false polarities</i>. Political theory lives in thrall to a sequence of binary schemes: individualism versus community, self-interest versus virtue, negative liberty versus positive liberty, limited government versus self-government. Indeed, the history of modern political theory has recently been reconstructed as a running battle between two rival traditions: liberalism versus republicanism. Republicanism, it appears, was everything that liberalism was not. Supposedly, republicans believed in virtue, community, and citizen involvement in politics, whereas liberals were devoted to base self-interest, personal security, and private independence. This stylized contrast between liberalism and republicanism, however, does not provide an accurate picture of the real alternatives that confronted seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought or that confront us today. </p> <p>One source of the misleading antithesis between liberalism and republicanism seems to be Isaiah Berlin's famous essay on negative and positive liberty. The faults of this stimulating essay are well-known. For one thing, Berlin employs the term "positive liberty" in an ambivalent sense. He uses it to mean <i>both</i> the romantic realization of the real self and democratic self-government. This is an unfortunate conflation, since collective self-rule and individual self-fulfillment have no necessary connection with one another. </p> <p>The second major problem with Berlin's position is his claim that negative and positive liberty are logically, institutionally, and historically unrelated: it is easy to have one without the other. This is a perplexing claim. Political participation has plainly proved to be an indispensable tool for protecting individuals against capricious, corrupt, and tyrannical government. That, after all, is the essential meaning of "no taxation without representation." Similarly, the protection of private rights provides a crucial precondition for "positive liberty" in both of Berlin's senses. If the police can knock down our doors at midnight and drag away our families to unknown dungeons or graves, our chances for "personal fulfillment" will be drastically reduced, as will our desire to participate actively in political life. There is no good reason, again, why controls on police misconduct should be considered either undemocratic or unromantic. </p> <p>The German liberal Alexander Humboldt argued that limited government makes self-realization possible. His contemporary, James Madison, argued that limited government makes collective self-rule possible. Both claims are reasonable and, taken together, provide good grounds for doubting the adequacy of Berlin's scheme. Madison's argument runs as follows. All attempts to organize popular government in the past have failed miserably. Republican regimes seem doomed to collapse into factionalism and anarchy. To escape from the intolerable chaos, some sort of Caesar or Cromwell is inevitably handed absolute power. The constitutional problem was how to thwart this powerful historical pattern. How could the Americans design a popular government that, unlike all other republics throughout history, would have a decent chance to survive? </p> <p>Liberal rights are democracy-reinforcing. For self-government to endure, Madison reasoned, it must be <i>limited government</i> in a special sense. For the will of the majority to prevail, outvoted minorities must be willing to comply with electoral results. They must not resort to violence whenever they lose an election. To purchase minority compliance, the electoral majority must assure the electoral minority that its most precious values and rights will not be violated. A baseline of universal security, provided to all citizens, will create a willingness among the outvoted to acquiesce peacefully in the decisions of the majority. </p> <p>Madison's famous sensitivity toward property rights should be seen in this light. While expecting and encouraging a greater diffusion of property ownership, Madison foresaw the maintenance in the United States of an important distinction between the rich and the poor. For a popular government to endure, the mass of poorer citizens must keep the confidence of the wealthy. Without the willing cooperation of the rich, no system as inherently unstable as collective self-rule could possibly last. If property-holders believe that democratic procedures will lead to confiscatory policies, they will not go along. They will sabotage the workings of popular government. The likely outcome is class warfare, anarchy, and the universal call for a dictator-on-horseback. </p> <p>This line of reasoning may seem excessively cynical. Are property rights merely concessions that the many make to the few in order to purchase their cooperation in the workings of popular government? The impression of cynicism is mitigated, however, once we recall that Madison also assumed an economic rationale for property rights. They are productive, not merely protective; they contribute to overall prosperity, enhancing the well-being of the poorest members of the community. </p> <p>Madison's argument suggests not only that positive liberty is a necessary precondition for negative liberty, but that negative liberty is a necessary precondition for positive liberty. A market economy alone cannot guarantee a democratic government or liberal legal institutions. (Germany has notoriously had more or less the same "market system" under the Kaiser, the Weimar Republic, Hitler, and the Federal Republic.) Without decentralized economic power, however, liberal democracy is very unlikely, if not wholly unable to survive. Economic liberty is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the creation and endurance of a liberal-democratic or liberal-republican regime. </p> <p></p><center>* * *</center> <p>Negative liberty does not refer solely to economic freedom. It refers, even more essentially, to personal security. In a liberal state, individuals generally assume that, if they obey the law, they will not be harassed, tortured, or killed by the police. The logical, psychological, and historical connection between negative and positive liberty becomes even more persuasive when we take this into account. </p> <p>Individuals want their private rights protected because, among other reasons, personal security allows them (1) to exercise their virtues and realize their potentials, and (2) to participate without inhibition or fear in public debate and processes of collective self-rule. Liberalism's critics seldom take the virtue-fostering and democracy-enabling functions of private rights into account. Citizens will not throng voluntarily to the public square, as I said, if their homes can be ravaged at will by the police. </p> <p>Note, finally, that negative liberty makes another crucial contribution to democratic government. Individual rights of religious conscience and group freedom of worship do not merely protect a non-political (but still social) sphere. They also help keep a divisive issue off the political agenda. By privatizing religion in a multi-denominational society, liberal freedom helps make public discussion and majoritarian decision-making more effective. By securing a "private space" for religious activity, constitutional government encourages citizens to engage in mutual learning and cooperation on a whole range of non-sacred issues. Separation of church and state unclutters the democratic agenda and creates an opportunity for collaboration across sectarian lines. Again, because rights are protective, they can also be productive. </p> <p><font class="headline">Democracy</font><br /> The claim by the critics of classical liberalism that it was inherently hostile to democracy is baffling from a historical point of view. First, the only countries in which the majority of citizens has any chance at all to exercise influence on political decisions are those with liberal-constitutionalist regimes. Second, the democratization of the suffrage in the West did not seriously threaten the primary predemocratic liberal gains: religious toleration, freedom of the press, constraints on police misbehavior, freedom of entry into occupations and trades, and so forth. So from whence derives the myth that liberalism and democracy are mutually exclusive? </p> <p>For one thing, liberals have always viewed political participation as voluntary and part-time. In a large nation densely populated with busy citizens, collective decision-making can occur only in a representative assembly, informed and stimulated by national discussion conducted by means of the free press. Those who identify democracy with direct full-time, obligatory participation in public life, therefore, have traditionally smeared liberals as anti-democrats. Aspiring to an unrealizable ideal, they condemn liberals for the sin of being practical-minded. To be sure, liberals did not look back with nostalgia to the ancient Greek polis. But was their skepticism, in this regard, antidemocratic? On the contrary. While admiring the extraordinary freedom of discussion in the Greek assemblies, liberals did not want to imitate most of the other characteristics of impoverished, slave-holding, militaristic oligarchies that managed to consume themselves in class warfare. </p> <p>Another common argument for liberalism's antidemocratic bias relies upon the historical debate over the restricted suffrage. Liberals did have doubts and worries about majoritarian politics, and some were legitimate. Mill, for instance, was naturally distressed at the election of Louis Napoleon to the presidency of the Second French Republic by universal manhood suffrage. Nevertheless, despite practical reservations, liberals provided a strong theoretical basis for democratic politics as it eventually developed. </p> <p>To be free, for liberals, was to obey laws made by oneself or one's representatives. That, in fact, was the second core norm of liberal theory. "Freedom to choose," liberals argued, includes freedom to choose the laws under which all citizens must jointly live. It is not surprising, therefore, that the two main political institutions of every liberal regime are the suffrage and a representative legislature. Citizens are bound to obey only those laws made by those expressly authorized to do so, laws made by legislators whom the electorate can oust from office if it wills. Locke insisted that the legislative power is "but a delegated Power from the People" and that "the Legislative being only a Fiduciary Power to act for certain ends, there remains still in the People a Supream Power to remove or alter the Legislative, when they find the Legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them." </p> <p>That is the classic liberal formulation of a right of rebellion. Democratic politics, as we now know it, is but a routinization of this fundamental liberal right. Our legislators are our trustees whom we remove from office when they violate our trust. Madison was simply following his liberal predecessors when he asserted that "a dependence on the people" is "the primary control on government," more important even than the separation of powers. </p> <p>The third core norm of liberal theory and one that again reveals the interconnection between liberalism and democracy, is the idea that public disagreement is a creative force. The standard view, among preliberal political theorists was that uniformity of belief is necessary for social order. John Milton was one of the first to reject this traditional idea, scorning what he called "obedient unanimity" and "a grosse and conforming stupidity." The creativity of public disagreement is the theme of Milton's <i>Areopagitica</i> (1644). This improbable idea had an earlier incarnation, among other places, in a few city-states of ancient Greece. But it was only encoded in the political systems of large nations during the liberal period. It is so radical that not even Rousseau, the father of modern radicalism, accepted it. </p> <p></p><center>* * *</center> <p>Liberal rights, as mentioned, are not only protective. They are also productive. The purpose of freedom of speech, from this perspective, is less the protection of individual autonomy than the production of intelligent political decisions. Participation in "the free market of ideas" does not guarantee self-fulfillment or emotional identification "among citizens. Instead, it is a technique designed to enlist the decentralized imagination and knowledge of citizens, to expose errors, and to encourage new proposals. The free market of ideas is an implicitly egalitarian idea, moreover. It assumes that every citizen can, in principle, make a useful contribution to public debate. Milton wrote of "the voice of reason from what quarter soever it be heard speaking." A regime built around free-wheeling debate, finally, can be said to be based on "human nature" in a loose sense. Human beings are animals capable of self-correction. Government-by-discussion is a political embodiment of the elemental human capacity to learn from experience and repair mistakes. </p> <p></p><center>* * *</center> <p>Suppose you wanted to create a political system for a large nation in which the majority would have a chance to influence public policy. What would you do? You would certainly avoid giving excessive power to urban mobs, who never represent more than a slim minority of the population. The only technique available to you would be electoral politics of some sort. Liberal universalism implies that every individual's vote should count the same. The only morally justified decision-making rule in liberal politics, therefore, is majoritarianism. </p> <p>Liberal polities, however, while based on free and periodic elections, have all instituted a variety of restraints on majority rule. How can these limits be reconciled with a commitment to democracy? </p> <p>Liberal limits on the power of electoral majorities have basically five justifications. The first three follow directly from the majority principle itself. First, the present majority must not be allowed to deprive future majorities of the right to correct earlier mistakes. Second, the present majority needs the willing cooperation of outvoted minorities, whose personal rights must therefore be protected. Third, without freedom of debate, shielded from majority censorship and bullying, elites will capture power and ensconce themselves beyond criticism, eventually confiscating the majority's own power. </p> <p>Finally, there are two powerful non-majoritarian principles at work behind liberal limitations on majority rule. One is the norm of fairness. Majorities cannot be allowed to apply laws selectively or unequally. The second is the idea that political decisions will be more intelligent if produced by a process of wide-open debate and subjected (even after they are made) to an ongoing process of criticism. The majority cannot silence its critics, even if it would love to do so. This prohibition insures that its decisions are more thoughtful and informed than they otherwise would be. The latter restrictions are indeed anti-majoritarian. But they are not antidemocratic if "democracy" includes -- as it surely does -- both equality before the law and government by discussion. </p> <p>One additional point needs to be made about majority rule. Both conservatives and radicals enjoy citing the passage in <i>The Federalist Papers</i> where Madison writes that "the people in its collective capacity" should have no role in political life. This phrase has always seemed oddly dissonant with other passages where Madison insists that the constitution being framed will create a "popular government." The solution to this paradox lies in the nature of majoritarian politics. As I mentioned, the only way to give power to the majority is through elections. To allow "the people" to act collectively, like the Roman mobs, is to disenfranchise the majority. Only when the people act individually as voters, rather than collectively as a mob, can some influence of the majority over the long haul be secured. </p> <p></p><center>* * *</center> <p>The problem with this arrangement, of course, is that the power wielded by voters on election day is relatively feeble. To make popular participation compatible with majority rule, liberalism makes it dangerously weak. What, then, can be done to increase the marginal leverage that a majority exerts through popular elections? </p> <p>To this problem, liberals provided a classic solution: the separation of powers. The separation of powers was a liberal application of the old maxim: divide and rule. Traditionally, the divide et impera strategy had been employed by tyrants against their restive subjects. Liberals boldly turned this technique into a tool that the people could use against their rulers. By introducing internal divisions within government, liberals did not simply want to prevent tyranny. They were trying to create a regime that was relatively easy to influence from the outside. A "balance" is not stable. On the contrary, it can be upset by a grain of sand. Thus, a multi-branch and multi-level government provides a sensitive barometer for registering changes in public opinion, electorally expressed. This analysis, brilliantly advanced by Hamilton in <i>The Federalist</i>, number 28, suggests again that liberalism and democracy, far from being enemies or rivals, are mutually reinforcing. </p> <p><font class="headline">Welfare</font><br /> Transfer programs presuppose the continued existence of private property. Only a robust market economy, relying on individual incentives, can produce a surplus worth distributing by political means. In fact, welfare measures were originally proposed by liberals to improve liberal economies and enhance their chances of survival. Such policies were not designed to create equality of resources but only a "bottom floor" under which the indigent would not be allowed to fall. This is why communists, who favored collective ownership, were consistently opposed to welfare. They despised the incipient welfare state because they saw it as hostile to collectivism -- as irredeemably liberal. </p> <p>The historical relation between eighteenth-century rights and modern welfare entitlements is somewhat obscure. But the case for some sort of continuity between the two is quite strong. Spinoza's assertion that "the care of the poor is incumbent on the whole of society" is echoed by every major liberal theorist. One of the key liberal values, moreover, was <i>security</i>. True, this concept originally referred primarily to protection from violence. But as the resources of liberal societies expanded enormously, it was only natural for the concept of security to be gradually stretched to include unemployment insurance and other programs of "social security." </p> <p>The government should protect citizens from force and fraud, libertarians argue, but it should take no "positive" action. Individuals should not be pampered by the nanny-state. This way of conceiving our constitutional system is inadequate. All liberal rights, including those enshrined in the first Ten Amendments, are exercised on the basis of resources furnished by the state. The government alone is in a position to define and enforce property rights, for example. And what other institution can provide citizens with a sense of physical security? (The social contract, according to Locke, required individuals to surrender the right of violent self-defense to the state.) In a liberal society, self-help always depends upon state help. There is nothing at all illiberal, then, about the idea of an entitlement. Liberal citizens are entitled to a fair trial and to a high school education, for example. Do libertarians doubt this? The widely endorsed plan to give vouchers to every school-age child is illuminating in this regard. In the public discussion about vouchers, all sides on the ideological spectrum plainly accept the liberal state's duty to provide a minimum level of resources to all citizens. Entitlements to affirmative state action, then, are a staple of the liberal tradition. The controversy begins only when we ask: what sort of help, and how much, should the government provide? This is a proper topic for political debate, a debate that cannot be preemptorily dosed by the assertion that our liberal Constitution forbids the government to provide individuals with resources of any kind. </p> <p></p><center>* * *</center> <p>Liberalism is individualistic. Liberals believe that individuals should be rewarded for achievement and merit. In no liberal society, however, are benefits and burdens allocated wholly on the basis of individual desert. Many of society's delights are purchased by means of inherited resources while its headaches fall disproportionately on those who are born without. The current rate of black infant mortality is only the most shocking example of a nonindividualistic pattern in the allocation of social goods. The decisiveness of inherited resources in all modern societies, in fact, presents a huge dilemma for liberals. We cannot justify the vastly unequal distribution of inherited resources (including parental attention) on individualistic grounds. No infant deserves either to be reared in luxury or to shiver undernourished and poorly clothed in a dangerous and drug-ridden tenement. Liberals will argue, of course, that inheritable property is indispensable for maintaining the prestige and cohesion of the family (the best environment we know for the socialization of individuals). They will also point out that the right to bequeath is itself a form of liberty, that it provides an incentive for industriousness and savings, and so forth. </p> <p>But liberal inheritance law remains a radical concession to an institution that is not truly individualistic at all. Thus, liberals have naturally sought to redeem individualism by providing some life-enabling means to children who are born (through no conceivable fault of their own) without inherited resources. Child nutrition programs, according to this line of reasoning, are redistributive and yet wholly individualistic. They are attempts not to create a society of equals, but simply to compensate in a modest way for a maldistribution of inherited resources, difficult to justify on liberal grounds. </p> <p>Liberalism is also universalistic. No individual has, by nature, greater entitlements than another. Human equality extends across class, ethnic, racial, and religious lines. It also extends, and for the same reason, across borders. Why should someone starve because he or she happens to live on the wrong side of a political frontier? Can this be "justified" within a liberal framework? No. There is no moral reason for such grim fate. But there is, alas, brute necessity. </p> <p>Liberals have succeeded in realizing some of their ideals. But they were able to do so only because they willingly compromised with the realities of national sovereignty. Liberal rights are meaningful only within the confines of a liberal state, only where there exists a rights-enforcing power. To the extent that no enforcing power operates between states or across borders, liberal rights are futile. </p> <p>So, liberals reason in the following manner. It is morally obligatory to secure a "bottom floor" of subsistence to all humanity. Unfortunately, it is unrealistic to attempt domestic-scale redistributions across borders, not only because of scarce resources, but also because of the location of sovereign power. Hence, although we may urge benevolence toward the poor beyond our borders, enforceable welfare rights will remain limited to co-nationals. </p> <p>Contrast this argument to communitarian thinking about welfare. Communitarians argue that we owe special attention to co-nationals, not on practical considerations, but on grounds of solidarity: We are morally obliged to love our countrymen and to prefer them to foreigners. A liberal would demur. </p> <p>Being practical, of course, liberals are willing to compromise with human passions. If a sense of "common identity" makes inhabitants of Scarsdale accept income transfers that benefit inhabitants of Harlem, there is nothing objectionable in that. A sense of shared nationality does seem to mobilize support for economic redistributions. (European countries with higher degrees of ethnic homogeneity are more successful in winning electoral support for transfer programs than welfare advocates in the ethnic crazy-quilt of the United States.) Such communitarian considerations may be very useful strategically. They do not, however, provide a moral reason for redistribution from a liberal point of view. </p> <p><font class="headline">Liberal Discontent</font><br /> The classical liberals were reformers and social critics. They were not hand-holders and flag-wavers for established regimes. Today, no liberal in the United States would advocate a wholesale remaking of our constitutional, legal, and economic system. But neither can a liberal heir of Locke and Mill ignore the painfully illiberal features of our society. In many places, urban violence makes a mockery of the promise to protect every citizen from physical fear. The homeless are deprived of the elementary security a liberal regime owes to all. Decaying schools represent a national betrayal of liberalism's pledge to the next generation. The steady increase of children living in poverty conflicts rudely with a liberal commitment to equal opportunity. The rising costs of litigation have thrown into doubt the principle of equal access to the law. Rising campaign expenditures suggest that economic inequality is being converted directly into political inequality, against all liberal norms. And how can liberals accept the continuing marginalization of women from positions where political and economic influence is wielded? Finally, black Americans still live to an appalling extent as a stigmatized caste. Infant mortality, poverty, unemployment, school and housing segregation, and reduced access to health care all indicate that social resources are being allocated according to skin color, not along individualistic lines. </p> <p>A reconstruction of the liberal tradition cannot provide recipes for solving stubborn problems such as these. But it can help us understand why they are problems from a liberal point of view. And it can embolden us to reaffirm today the aims that liberals have traditionally pursued. Those aims are difficult to realize, but not Utopian. A liberal nation is a nation that keeps them steadily in sight. </p> </div></div></div> Tue, 05 Dec 2000 02:51:49 +0000 141582 at Stephen Holmes