Two leaders who have been trying to export democracy are soon to leave office, with the screams of rage over their attempting to do such a thing dinning in their ears. George W. Bush and Tony Blair now experience the ebbing of their power, and their countries are teeming with those who lust for a time after they have gone, when foreign policy can change away from this dangerous activity.
Yet when other leaders get their hands on foreign policy, they will be faced with a choice. They will either seek to return to a posture in which nations, or groups of nations such as the European Union, try to find security in national or regional strategies, limit their foreign intervention to aid and refuse foreign entanglements as far as possible. Or they will look at the world through lenses not so different from those of Bush and Blair - and find, perhaps, that these departing leaders may, in history’s judgment, be accused of exporting too little democracy rather than too much.
The main charge on the Bush/Blair sheet is that exporting democracy to the Middle East is based on a wholly mistaken view of the societies in the region. They are not ready for it, and they don’t want it from an imperialist America or an ex-imperialist Britain. Besides, it conflicts with an Islam which, even in its moderate form, is at best uneasy with the secularism necessary to confer equality on faiths, political views and individual conscience.
Yet if not democracy, what? And if not now, when? The Tunisian scholar Mohamed Charfi - in Islam and Liberty: the Historical Misunderstanding (Zed Books, 2005) - writes that Arab societies have, for centuries, remained chained to Islamic values that have neither adapted nor renewed themselves, so that “our main problem today, the powerful brake on our emancipation and development, is that we are still collectively chained to our past.” If there is no collective cutting of these chains, and a move towards a society in which freedom, as commonly understood, is extended, then the future looks bleak. Bleak for their people, bleak for their economies and bleak for the states of the west that the Islamist ideologues regard as enemies - whether it be the Great Satan America with its worldwide imperial designs, or the annoying little devil of Denmark with its stinging cartoons of the Prophet. Those who, in the US and Britain (and elsewhere), gesture towards a different foreign policy will find the same hard calculation applies: to engage with and encourage the democratic modernisation of these societies is risky, not to is... risky.
But in seeing democratic criteria as confined only to such states, we make it the harder. Within the US, an administration that has had to bear the burden of fully confronting mass suicide-terrorism has made it heavier by presenting its struggle as a party matter - as if the promotion of democracy were a monopoly of the Republicans. The extraordinary partisanship of the Bush White House, and its extreme reluctance to explain, debate and justify Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition, pushes not just its political foes but the large mass in the middle ground into opposition, or at least doubt. A pro-democracy strategy is best served by bringing on-side democrats - and Democrats - for at least some of the aims of the war.
Europeans behave badly when they merely see the US as a blundering giant. They behave well when, as Italy has done, they step forward smartly to put troops into Lebanon, to assist its government in the forlornly hard job of creating a state that has authority over its own territory and its own defence policy, rather than leasing those out to the terrorist group Hizbollah. Europe as a Union has presently little coherence; calls for it to find some, routinely made by those who see Tony Blair as one who damaged such a quest by an over-reliance on the US, must explain what better chances there are of that in the immediate future. Foreign and defence policy cannot be common until there is a common understanding of power and posture to project. There is no such common understanding. Thus Europe, in a dangerous time, is bound to rely on the US - which means it must seek to influence it. No other useful position is possible.
Europe’s great tasks in the next decade or so are to cope with the decrease in its native populations; to integrate as full and responsible citizens millions of immigrants, a disturbing number of whom are hostile to the states in which they live; and to consolidate democracy and decent government in the new entrants. Add to that the still-unresolved question of how to achieve a popular mandate for government from Brussels, and the European democratic deficit can be seen as rather large.
The challenge is greater elsewhere. China has so far solved severe political problems by growth and enrichment; but such shifts tend to increase the pressure for democratisation from people whose economic agency increases their desire for a political equivalent. India has both formal democracy and real growth - but not the responsibility in the world that should counterpoint its size, nor the internal disciplines to protect many among the hundreds of millions of poor from local exploitation and sectarian attack. Africa shows few signs that good governance will emerge unaided: indeed, it will be a large challenge for South Africa to maintain its relatively good democratic record after President Thabo Mbeki goes. In all these states, lack of popular and individual autonomy perpetuates deadly conflict, or makes it more likely.
Has the promotion of democracy favoured by Bush and Blair given that project a bad name? Easy to answer yes: harder to conceive of a series of policies and attitudes that will address a refractory globe, as they have had to. Harder still to imagine that a reversion to a stance of benign indifference to what regimes do to their own people will achieve anything better.
