Nonsense on the inevitability of democracy...

[marmar]

Nonsense on the Inevitability of Democracy
by James Bovard, Posted August 7, 2006

Many Americans are being lulled into assuming that democracy is inevitable. This is a favorite theme of President Bush’s beating on the same drumhead used by President Clinton, President Wilson, and other notable demagogues. But the fact that politicians agree does not make something true.

Since Woodrow Wilson proclaimed that democracy was the destiny of humanity, more than 100 democratic governments have crashed and burned around the globe, replaced by dictators, juntas, or foreign conquerors. Yet we continue to be assured that democracies are inevitable and that universalizing democracy will solve almost all of the world’s political problems.

The current cult of “democratic inevitability” was jump-started by Francis Fukuyama, whose 1989 article (later expanded into a book) “The End of History” made him an instant intellectual cult figure. Fukuyama was a Reagan political appointee at the State Department and is currently on the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy. He hailed the “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism” and proclaimed that “we in the liberal West occupy the final summit of the historical edifice.” He announced,

What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
Fukuyama revealed that “the present form of social and political organization is completely satisfying to human beings in their most essential characteristics.” Fukuyama is the Pangloss of political philosophy: liberal democracy is the best of all possible worlds, and we should all be happy because its triumph everywhere is fated.


Democracy and the French Revolution

Fukuyama hailed German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel as the supreme “philosopher of freedom.” But Hegel was as much a champion of freedom as Nietzsche was a champion of Christianity. Fukuyama reminds readers that Hegel

proclaimed history to be at an end in 1806. For as early as this Hegel saw in Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena the victory of the ideals of the French Revolution, and the imminent universalization of the state incorporating the principles of liberty and equality.
Fukuyama stresses that the 1806 battle “marked the end of history because it was at that point that the vanguard of humanity (a term quite familiar to Marxists) actualized the principles of the French Revolution.” He notes that “the present world seems to confirm that the fundamental principles of sociopolitical organization have not advanced terribly far since 1806.” He neglected to mention Hegel’s rapturous comment after the battle of Jena — “I saw the emperor, this soul of the world, riding through the streets.”

To view the armies of Napoleon as engines of liberal democracy is peculiar. Napoleon, aside from crushing the Venetian republic, destroyed freedom of the press, had political opponents in France assassinated, brutally suppressed popular uprisings against French rule in Spain and elsewhere, and spawned wars that left millions of Europeans dead. Perhaps Fukuyama was merely ahead of his time, championing democracy’s being imposed by foreign conquests. But Napoleon’s invasions did not create democracies; instead, they spurred a backlash of repressive reaction throughout Europe. His wars profoundly stimulated efforts to unify Germany, which did not exactly advance liberty in Europe.

The rest is at: http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0605c.asp

[Odin2005]

1. The idea that democracy is inevitable is Western Universalist rubbish....

...based on the myth of "progress." The dominance of democracy in the West and in some parts of East Asia is simply the result of the Allies winning WW2.

[Demeter]

2. Only if It's a Tradition!

American colonials had to go it alone--England was too far away to count on. The democratic traditions grew out of this need to deal with all as equals, for the survival of the individual and the group.

In the Middle East: tribal, clan, or religious solidarity is the tradition. We have vestiges of this in America, and some who would preempt democracy to revert to religious or tribal forms of organization. But America has been too much of a melting pot for that to happen, short of a cataclysm that BushCo will now not be able to pull off, I hope.