Anthony Barnett & Isabel Hiltons depiction of democracy is too indulgent of the Islamist threat and too in thrall to leftwing pieties to be convincing, says Thomas Cushman.
Anthony Barnett & Isabel Hilton open their essay, Democracy and openDemocracy, by specifying three forces that threaten democracy in the modern world: terrorism, fundamentalism, and the imposition of the neo-liberal form of globalisation. They note that democracy is under attack from without, and even more insidiously from within by these forces. But the authors fail to specify the relative dangers of each, the proportion of the threat of each of these dark forces to democracy. Some fundamentalists, after all, worship their gods in peace and live in peace with the rest of humanity; others wish to kill strangers and their gods. So-called neo-liberal globalisation builds skyscrapers, and terrorists turn them into infernos.
Thomas Cushmans article forms part of a debate on Opening democracy, consisting so far of these articles:
Anthony Barnett & Isabel Hilton, Democracy and openDemocracy"
Roger Scruton, Democracy or theocracy? A response to Barnett & Hilton
John Dunn, Getting democracy into focus
Anatol Lieven, Democratic failure: festering lilies smell worse than weeds
Mishal Al Sulami, Democracy in the Arab world: the Islamic foundation
Fred Dallmayr, Mobilising global democracy
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Barnett & Hilton agree with George W Bush and Tony Blair that terrorism is barbaric, immoral and indefensible. Yet in making the assertion that it is terrorism and the response to terrorism that threatens democracy, the authors repeat the same mistake made by most critics of the war on terror: believing that those who are actually engaged in the fight against terrorism are as dangerous to democracy as the terrorists themselves. This moral equivalence is starkly evident in the disproportionate focus on the errors and intransigencies that have occurred in the war on terror and the elevation of those errors and intransigencies to the same plane of evil as the abominable actions that provoked them.
If one were to read the New York Times, or any other liberal American newspaper throughout the course of the war in Iraq, it would be evident that the moral disapprobation expressed in its pages has been reserved almost exclusively for the allied prosecution of the war. The liberal press and liberals more generally have seldom granted any attention or legitimacy to the positive democratic outcomes of this war.
Barnett & Hilton list the entire panoply of terrorist atrocities committed around the world by Islamofascists and then ask us to believe that they did not directly threaten the state, the government or the way of life of the societies which were attacked.
Focusing only on the case of 9/11, one might reasonably challenge that assertion. Four planes were hijacked; two were smashed into the economic centre of American society; one was smashed into the Pentagon, which is the very centre of the security apparatus which makes democratic rights and freedoms possible; and the fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, but was presumably headed toward targets in Washington, DC, the political centre of American society and the protector of American democracy and its way of life.
It is hard to understand how such acts could not be seen as a direct threat to the American state, government, or way of life. If they are not, then what else could they be? Taken in conjunction with the other atrocities listed by Barnett & Hilton, it is entirely clear that terrorism is a direct threat to the global spread of political freedom, and to democracy as a way of life, as Sidney Hook once put it. Im not convinced that America or George W Bush present any remotely comparable threat to democracy.
The wrongs of human rights
Barnett & Hilton note, quite rightly, that most people in the world, given the opportunity, prefer to live under a government of their choosing, buttressed by the rule of law, run by men and women whom they trust and who conduct themselves transparently, honestly and with integrity people of most cultures and political persuasions tend to prefer democracy to tyranny. Its hard to disagree with this assertion and I would add that nowhere is this more the case than in Iraq.
Thomas Cushman is professor of sociology at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. His most recent book is (as editor) A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq (University of California Press, 2005)
Barnett & Hiltons essay makes little comment on the war except to say that it was an invasion of a country not linked to terrorist attacks, a judgment which they accept as a truism, but which has been challenged by many. Of course, they have other and more general considerations in mind in their discussion. Nevertheless it is surely pertinent to take note of the way in which writers on the left have tended to deflect our attention, in recent months, from the real causes of the war on terror.
Instead of focusing on the downfall of a tyrant and the prospects for democracy, many people on the left have construed George W Bush as a tyrant and Tony Blair as his poodle. Instead of focusing on the wonder of 7 million people voting in the first free and democratic elections in Iraqi history, they have focused on Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, and made few, if any, moral judgments about the atrocities of al-Qaida jihadists and former Baath party thugs.
Instead of support and acclaim for the new Iraqi constitution, they have pessimistically declared that the process of writing a constitution in such a fractured society was doomed to failure. Karl Marx once wrote about religion that man becomes governed by the products of his own brain. Many left intellectuals have become so governed by the products of their own brains that they simply cannot see the war for democracy in anything other than negative terms, terms which block any affirmation of the progressive and democratic prospects for Iraqs future.
No one of authentic liberal disposition could disagree with the authors concern over the conduct of the Bush administration with regard to human rights. Yet I disagree with their insinuation that this conduct is a threat to democracy comparable to the nihilistic cult of death which is al-Qaida. The ideology of human rights has always existed in a tense relationship with utilitarian thinking; hence Jeremy Benthams vicious attack on the Rights of Man as nonsense upon stilts. Taken to their extremes, each ideology can threaten democracy utilitarianism for its ability to override human rights in the interests of social and political stability, and the advocacy of human rights for its persistent absolutist stance and its refusal to consider that there are times when human rights must be defended by practices that are fundamentally alien to them.
In his criticisms of pacifism during the second world war, George Orwell wrote: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." Security is the precondition for the enjoyment of rights. It is entirely clear in light of Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur and the persistence of gross violations of human rights that the United Nations Security Council cannot provide such security. Those who are interested in the future of democracy and the protection of human rights need to reread Thomas Hobbes, not to absorb the message that the world is a war, each against all, but to understand that democracy and human rights are only guaranteed by security.
The anatomy of fundamentalism
Barnett & Hiltons argument is praiseworthy in its recognition of the dangers of fundamentalism. Yet fundamentalisms are not all alike. The Dalai Lama is something of a fundamentalist Buddhist. There are quite a few pacifists with a fundamentalist commitment to peace. Fundamentalist Christians in the US, many of whom are not without their excesses (especially in domestic political affairs), have played a central role in getting Bush to call the unfolding tragedy in Darfur a genocide.
I think that many liberals believe, but are reluctant to say either in their closed circles or in public, that it is Islamic fundamentalism that poses the biggest threat to democracy in the world today. Surely it is time to recognise that the advocacy of jihad against the infidel, and of the sharia as the highest legal authority even in a state where there are many non-Muslims, are not very obviously compatible with liberal democracy as Barnett & Hilton describe it?
The authors acknowledge in the last part of their essay that much that is positive flows from global trade and development, but that the process of globalisation should not be allowed to unfold in the uncontrolled manner promoted by neo-liberalism. To be sure, there is nothing positive about globalised terrorism. But Barnett & Hilton do not offer a careful enough delineation of that threat. Instead, they appear to throw such items as multinational corporations, powerful states, opaque financial institutions, the global media and climate change into a big container conveniently called globalisation, thereby diverting attention from the immediate global threat.
The authors recognise that the discussion of globalisation needs clarity. This is exactly right, but one clarification they do not make is that globalisation, as an economic process which encourages the freedom of the marketplace, can have positive benefits for democracy and, especially, for the promotion of individual rights and liberties.
My experiences in the contemporary academic setting since 9/11 have convinced me that the left, which controls that precinct, tends to offer one-sided, quasi-religious trumpetings of the sins of the United States and of American empire and its quest for global domination, while being unwilling to name and confront the reality of Islamofascism.
Yet it seems to me that the most interesting and vibrant experiment in democracy today is occurring in Iraq. Long after Bush is gone, the democratic mechanisms that he and the social democrat Tony Blair set in motion will still be evolving. There is every reason to believe that the Iraq experiment in democratisation is of immense importance to the future of democracy. That it was achieved by means which some people rightly and honestly believe to have been illegitimate ought to be acknowledged. Yet this does not mean that our default position should be to return to the failed structures of global governance which have done so much to block the global expansion of democracy.
I would respectfully suggest to those who think about the future of democracy that they try to regain some of the optimism that inspired earlier generations of liberals solidarity with the weak, a commitment to anti-fascism, and the need to assist those whose structural circumstances do not allow them to claim their status as free human agents or to enjoy the rights which such a status confers. Abandonment is not an option.
