What's Wrong With
This year of elections is
almost enough to make one give up on democracy--or at least on the idea that
democracies are inherently more committed to peace than other forms of
government.
The
Israeli chief of state, who was totally committed to the peace process, was
defeated by a candidate who openly played on Israeli fears of Palestinians. The
victor's idea of peace-through-strength may make peace highly problematic.
In
Russia, a majority of the electorate voted for openly nationalistic--even
imperialistic--candidates in the first round. Boris Yeltsin won the second
round only by recruiting Alexander Lebed, a retired general with frightful
views on Jews and other religious minorities.
And in
Bosnia, the mere discussion of elections has exacerbated ethnic tensions,
allowing the most virulent nationalists to gain support, and led to predictions
that this democratic procedure could finish the country.
What is
going on? Why is this most cherished belief not being borne out by events?
Could it even be that under certain circumstances, democracies might be
more warlike than other states? If so, what does that portend for us and
our search for a more peaceful world?
The idea that democracies are the most peaceful political
systems is attractive and plausible, but there is little evidence to support
the notion: Fewer than a dozen countries have been continuously democratic over
the past century--not an especially large sample--and only two of them, Canada
and the United States, share a common border. Many of these democracies have
gone to war, and not always in response to attack.
Still worse,
democracies--or at least the electoral systems at their core--have produced
monsters, some of them committed to waging war. One thinks of Hitler's
exploitation of the electoral system in Germany, but one can see similar, if
smaller, figures in Serbia and elsewhere.
In the
countries emerging from the former Soviet Union, aggressive nationalism has
been a winning formula for leaders who can deliver little else to their
populations--not just Lebed, but Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic,
Armenia's Levon Ter-Petrosyan, and others as well.
It's tempting to view these examples as transitional. Both
the Soviet and Yugoslav systems were based on the cynical exploitation of
ethnicity, so it's only natural that succeeding systems continue the tradition.
One could argue that the cure for despotism is democracy itself. But that begs
the question of why democracies, and often more established ones, have been
less than peaceful.
The West's belief in
"peaceful democracy" endures, in part, because it celebrates us, because we
think that the spread of democracy will usher in a period of peace that will
allow us to concentrate on our own needs and ignore those of others. Our
conviction reflects a widespread belief that the people are basically good and
pacific, while governments are fundamentally suspect and aggressive.
If our
cherished belief isn't correct, the reverse may be true--that under certain
conditions, democracies might be even more given to warlike behavior than other
forms of government. Totalitarianism kept ethnic hatreds in check in many
places, especially Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Now that the
Communist totalitarians have been replaced by nominal democrats, murderous
hatreds and regional conflicts have re-emerged.
While it's probably true that democracies are unlikely to
go to war unless they're attacked, sometimes they are the first to take the
offensive. And once involved in a conflict, democracies may actually be less
willing than authoritarian regimes to end it short of "total victory." These
views may make conflicts longer and more bloody than they would otherwise
be.
While authoritarian
regimes can make war without the consent of the governed--as any number of
democratic enthusiasts have pointed out--they can also make peace without
consulting the voters. Indeed, democracies that take too many risks for peace
may not win popular support, as the Israeli elections show.
Nor
does democratization change the underlying reality of international relations:
geography. With the possible exception of Poland, countries do not move around
very much, and thus their geopolitical concerns and the conflicts arising from
them do not change very much. The last decade has seen the triumphant return of
geography in international relations and the enshrinement on the world scene of
the old American political principle that "where you stand depends on where you
sit."
Russia's interest in gaining access to warm-water ports did
not arise under communism--nor has it now disappeared. We can hope that Moscow
will seek different means of advancing its interests differently than it has in
the past, but democracy by itself won't repeal these pressures. In fact, the
disintegration of the Soviet empire has recreated the geographic relationship
between Berlin and Moscow that was the seedbed of World War I and World War
II.
These
observations don't mean that we should withdraw our support for democracy in
the former Soviet bloc. Democracy has done a great deal for all those who have
experienced it, but democracy alone is not enough. Transforming those nations
into peaceful members of the international system will require more than just a
few elections and economic reform. As the American Founders knew, the rule of
the people can be dangerous unless constrained by representative institutions
and constitutionalism. Only if these additional arrangements exist can these
countries--or our own--avoid disaster.
We seem to have lost sight of the fact that democracy is as
much about procedures as about preferred outcomes, excusing Boris Yeltsin's use
of tanks against his own Parliament and his dispatch of troops to Chechnya a
year later. This has made many people in the region, who are still learning
about democracy, cynical about what the system means. And it has undercut our
authority as democracy's backers.
Democracy by itself won't
solve all international problems; it won't relieve us--in Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn's phrase--"of having to worry about defending ourselves." Instead,
we must work even harder to integrate these countries into the West and into
the values that have brought peace, prosperity, and freedom to so many people
here.
That won't be easy. Many
will grow discouraged, especially in the short term, as more open politics in
the former Soviet bloc lead not to peace, but to more conflicts. But we
shouldn't blame democracy; we should only understand what it can and can't
do.
