Vivek Chibber
The second one is important because it’s being brought up again and it will make the rounds if the United States starts saber rattling again. This is the view that Bush’s mistake was to import democracy to a culture that wasn’t ready for it. Ironically, this is the favorite liberal criticism.
The problem, this criticism goes, is that these are regions that have never had democracy. And you can’t shove democracy down a people’s throat through a military invasion if they’re not ready for it. In a minute I’ll get into why it’s empirically mistaken. But let me just point out how profoundly racist it is. It presumes what colonial masters have been saying for a hundred years, which is that the darker nations, the nations in Africa, in Asia, the problem they have is that they’re not ready for democracy and it’s the West’s job to either tutor them or to wait till they’re ready. And that’s what the relationship of trusteeship is.
The idea is that the West will rule them until they’re ready. And then when that golden hour comes and they’re culturally suited to govern themselves, the West can dutifully hand over power to these nations.
It’s racist because what does democracy actually require? Democracy is simply the institutionalization of people’s desire for some kind of self-determination, for having control over their own fates. Now, why is that something that’s deemed to be absent in the Middle East or absent in other parts of the world?
Where was it in the West? When the West got democracy, was there a foreign power that tutored them? Was there a period of tutelage?
The way you learn about democracy is by having democracy. So when are the people in any region of the world culturally ready for it? Well, they’re always ready.
They’re always ready because it is an elemental fact about human nature that people don’t like being bossed around. If you see democracies failing in parts of the world, it isn’t because the people aren’t ready. It’s because elites have the power and the wherewithal to resist democratic changes.
And this brings us to the empirical record. If you look at the actual history of the Middle East in the twentieth century, the entire century is a story of ordinary people in the Middle East trying to establish a national sovereignty — that is, independence from imperial powers — and have popular control over their governments. And ironically, Iran has been one of the countries that led the struggle. So in 1905, Iran had what was called a “constitutional revolution,” which is one of the first attempts to install a constitutional regime in the region.
Then again in 1954, famously, the United States and the CIA toppled a nationalist regime led by Mohammad Mossadegh, which was trying to take control over Iranian oil reserves.
Same is true of Iraq. The same is true of Syria. The story of the twentieth century is people of the Middle East trying to establish their sovereignty against empire and against their local dictators.
And in each case, it was foreign powers allied with the local ruling classes that suppressed democracy. So the idea that the Iraqis have to wait until they’re ready or Iranians have to wait until they’re ready is simply absurd. They’ve been ready for over a century.
It’s been the local allies of the United States that have suppressed it for a simple reason. In Saudi Arabia, in the Gulf states, in all of these regions, the ruling regimes are incredibly unpopular because they’re dictatorial. And because they’re dictatorial, they survive through the helping hand of the United States. So this idea that liberals have that the mistake that the United States makes is that it tries to import democracy into regions that aren’t ready for it is the most cynical thing imaginable because the opposite is true. Americans have never once tried to implant democracy in these regions. Always and everywhere, their goal has been to suppress it.
Great Job Vivek Chibber & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
