Guardian: The dangers of exporting democracy

IMHO, Guadian is one of the most liberal media among the western countries, here is an interesting article regarding exporting democracy.

The dangers of exporting democracy

Bush's crusade is based on a dangerous illusion and will fail

Eric Hobsbawm
Saturday January 22, 2005
The Guardian

Although President Bush's uncompromising second inaugural address does not so much as mention the words Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror, he and his supporters continue to engage in a planned reordering of the world. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are but one part of a supposedly universal effort to create world order by "spreading democracy". This idea is not merely quixotic - it is dangerous. The rhetoric implies that democracy is applicable in a standardised (western) form, that it can succeed everywhere, that it can remedy today's transnational dilemmas, and that it can bring peace, rather than sow disorder. It cannot.
Democracy is rightly popular. In 1647, the English Levellers broadcast the powerful idea that "all government is in the free consent of the people". They meant votes for all. Of course, universal suffrage does not guarantee any particular political result, and elections cannot even ensure their own perpetuation - witness the Weimar Republic. Electoral democracy is also unlikely to produce outcomes convenient to hegemonic or imperial powers. (If the Iraq war had depended on the freely expressed consent of "the world community", it would not have happened). But these uncertainties do not diminish its justified appeal.

Other factors besides democracy's popularity explain the dangerous belief that its propagation by armies might actually be feasible. Globalisation suggests that human affairs are evolving toward a universal pattern. If gas stations, iPods, and computer geeks are the same worldwide, why not political institutions? This view underrates the world's complexity. The relapse into bloodshed and anarchy that has occurred so visibly in much of the world has also made the idea of spreading a new order more attractive. The Balkans seemed to show that areas of turmoil required the intervention, military if need be, of strong and stable states. In the absence of effective international governance, some humanitarians are still ready to support a world order imposed by US power. But one should always be suspicious when military powers claim to be doing weaker states favours by occupying them.

Another factor may be the most important: the US has been ready with the necessary combination of megalomania and messianism, derived from its revolutionary origins. Today's US is unchallengeable in its techno-military supremacy, convinced of the superiority of its social system, and, since 1989, no longer reminded - as even the greatest conquering empires always had been - that its material power has limits. Like President Wilson, today's ideologues see a model society already at work in the US: a combination of law, liberal freedoms, competitive private enterprise and regular, contested elections with universal suffrage. All that remains is to remake the world in the image of this "free society".

This idea is dangerous whistling in the dark. Although great power action may have morally or politically desirable consequences, identifying with it is perilous because the logic and methods of state action are not those of universal rights. All established states put their own interests first. If they have the power, and the end is considered sufficiently vital, states justify the means of achieving it - particularly when they think God is on their side. Both good and evil empires have produced the barbarisation of our era, to which the "war against terror" has now contributed.

While threatening the integrity of universal values, the campaign to spread democracy will not succeed. The 20th century demonstrated that states could not simply remake the world or abbreviate historical transformations. Nor can they easily effect social change by transferring institutions across borders. The conditions for effective democratic government are rare: an existing state enjoying legitimacy, consent and the ability to mediate conflicts between domestic groups. Without such consensus, there is no single sovereign people and therefore no legitimacy for arithmetical majorities. When this consensus is absent, democracy has been suspended (as is the case in Northern Ireland), the state has split (as in Czechoslovakia), or society has descended into permanent civil war (as in Sri Lanka). "Spreading democracy" aggravated ethnic conflict and produced the disintegration of states in multinational and multicommunal regions after both 1918 and 1989.

The effort to spread standardised western democracy also suffers a fundamental paradox. A growing part of human life now occurs beyond the influence of voters - in transnational public and private entities that have no electorates. And electoral democracy cannot function effectively outside political units such as nation-states. The powerful states are therefore trying to spread a system that even they find inadequate to meet today's challenges.

Europe proves the point. A body such as the European Union could develop into a powerful and effective structure precisely because it has no electorate other than a small number of member governments. The EU would be nowhere without its "democratic deficit", and there can be no legitimacy for its parliament, for there is no "European people". Unsurprisingly, problems arose as soon as the EU moved beyond negotiations between governments and became the subject of democratic campaigning in the member states.

The effort to spread democracy is also dangerous in a more indirect way: it conveys to those who do not enjoy this form of government the illusion that it actually governs those who do. But does it? We now know something about how the actual decisions to go to war in Iraq were taken in at least two states of unquestionable democratic bona fides: the US and the UK. Other than creating complex problems of deceit and concealment, electoral democracy and representative assemblies had little to do with that process. Decisions were taken among small groups of people in private, not very different from the way they would have been taken in non-democratic countries.

Fortunately, media independence could not be so easily circumvented in the UK. But it is not electoral democracy that necessarily ensures effective freedom of the press, citizen rights and an independent judiciary.

· Eric Hobsbawm is professor emeritus of economic and social history of the University of London at Birkbeck and author of The Age of Extremes: The Short 20th Century 1914-1991; this is an edited version of an article that first appeared in the journal Foreign Policy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1396038,00.html

 

I did some research on google and found this:

Eric Hobsbawm
Marxist historian
Eric Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria to a middle-class Jewish family in June 1917. Between the world wars, the family moved first to Vienna and then to Berlin.
He long retained a memory of himself as a 14-year-old boy who read on a newspaper board the headline announcing the accession of the Third Reich. 'Anybody who saw Hitler's rise happen first-hand could not have helped but be shaped by it, politically,' he said. 'This is still there in me. That boy is still somewhere inside, always will be.'

Hobsbawm's parents both died during the Depression and he and his sister were taken in by his uncle, who worked for a Berlin branch of a Hollywood, USA, based firm. Soon thereafter, the family moved to England, following his uncle's job, and for three years, Hobsbawm experienced what he has rarely felt since - that history was happening without him. He was bored and dislocated by the transition from the intensities of pre-war Germany to the complacencies of a south London grammar school. It was not until he got to Cambridge that he sensed he could carry on with the conversations that he'd started in Berlin.

Hobsbawm has defined and explained the progress of the last century as mankind learning to 'live in expectation of apocalypse'. He responded to those intimations in himself by joining the Communist Party. He would, he says, certainly have become a member earlier, but that his uncle was 'rather stiff' on the subject. 'He used to say, "You kids don't know what you are letting yourselves in for".' Hobsbawm smiles now, seeing his life unspooling in that prophecy. 'He was right, of course.'

You could imagine that the gangling young émigré, uprooted and orphaned, might have been attracted to the certainties of the party as a surrogate family and consequently begin to explain the strength of the attachment as a powerfully emotional as well as an intellectual one. Looking back, he suggests that 'probably that kind of security was one of the appeals', but also that he 'never felt short of family... it was more that you just felt things were going to pieces, and you felt it needed a revolution to re-create it, to put it back together'.

After the war, these political commitments no longer seemed quite so innocent. Hobsbawm applied for a series of Oxbridge jobs, and was 'turned down right, left and centre' He fetched up instead, happily, at Birkbeck where the student body was part-time, lectures were held in the evenings and the challenge among the faculty was to keep its audience awake in the graveyard slot between eight and nine. Hobsbawm, by all accounts, achieved this effortlessly and sustained his intellectual energy after hours.
Hobsbawm considered that, given his sympathy for communism, he got into academia 'under the wire'; a year later, after the Berlin Airlift in 1948, his story, he believed, would have been markedly different.

Though he never proselytised unlike many of his comrades, Hobsbawm did not leave the party after 1956. It may be that partly because of his political affiliations, he did not get promotion to a professorship until 1970.

According to Hobsbawm the historian's task, "is not simply to discover the past but to explain it, and in doing so to provide a link with the present." For Hobsbawm, history is a cumulative, collective enterprise to uncover "the patterns and mechanisms" that have transformed the world.
Historians commonly have diverse viewpoints; indeed, partisanship or commitment (to Marxism and socialism, in Hobsbawm's case) this possibly injects new creative energy into research and prevents the field from turning inward and becoming ossified.

Hobsbawm's later writings display a general pessimism and estrangement, arising from his sense of how far humanity had slipped from the nineteenth century and its expectations of civility and human progress.
The start of World War I in 1914 (even more than the Russian Revolution in 1917) represented, in Hobsbawm's estimation, the great historical turning point separating an age of human progress from one of increased barbarism.
Reflecting on mankind's trajectory from the Sarajevo of 1914 to the Sarajevo of the fall of Yugoslavia -- total warfare, the state sanctioned genocides of Nazism and Stalinism, the annihilatory madness of the Cold War arms race, and the latest monstrosities -- he declares his unwavering commitment to the ideas and values of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as "one of the few things that stands between us and an accelerated descent into darkness."
The Enlightenment may not be fashionable ("a conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs," Hobsbawm jokes) but it is the only basis, he insists, on which "to build societies fit for all human beings to live in anywhere on this Earth, and for the assertion and defence of their human rights as persons." And "the worst of it is that we have got used to the inhuman. We have learned to tolerate the intolerable."

This commitment also throws light on the combative, inflexible tone of his Marxism, now curiously linked to a certain nostalgia for past civility. If Marxism no longer supplies Hobsbawm with a political vision, neither is it for him simply a theory of historical development, the best tool to be found for making sense of the past. With its positivist values and clear affirmation of progress in history, Marxism is central to his moral and cultural critique, linking him firmly to that "Enlightenment project" dedicated to rationalism and human improvement.
Whether or not we agree with Hobsbawm's historical judgments or share his fears for the future, his voice remains loud and clear.

Marx seemed to him the best guide for understanding the mechanisms of historical change in the modern world, and he repeatedly affirms that he has since then discovered no comparable analytic tool. His analysis of Marxist concepts and his subtle and flexible use of them in his writing -- abundantly illustrated in several of these essays -- has been enormously influential. In this collection, however, the most recent essay on "Marx and History" dates from 1983 and so it addresses neither recent critiques nor his personal reactions to the collapse of the Soviet Union and other recent changes that, in the eyes of many historians, have diminished the working class as an historical actor.

As the Communist walls were coming down in 1989, Hobsbawm was often asked to explain his continued commitment. Typically, he replied both as a conviction historian - 'I think the movement has achieved at least one absolutely major thing, and that includes the Soviet Union, namely the defeat of fascism,' - and as a rose-tinted loyalist: 'I don't wish to be untrue to my past or comrades of mine, a lot of them dead, some of them killed by their own side, whom I've admired [as] models to follow, in their unselfishness.'

His landmark trilogy on the nineteenth century synthesised myriad competing social swells into great epochal waves: the Ages of Revolution, and of Capital, and of Empire. He has characterised his own time and tide as the Age of Extremes, the tempestuous force of which conspired to deposit him on the shore of the present as the Last Marxist; still, he refuses to believe himself beached. One old friend observes: 'Eric has long ago worked out his precise intellectual position and he's quite happy there, thank you very much.'

These four volumes are probably the most widely admired of his works -- not simply because of their erudition and bold analysis, but for the author's conviction that historians must write large-scale interpretations of the past without minimizing its diversity and complexity and, at the same time, make them readable, jargon-free, and accessible to non-professionals. If more scholars have recently taken up the challenge of historical synthesis, it is due in no small part to Hobsbawm's example

http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/history/historian/Eric_Hobsbawm.html