Commentary by Carlo Pelanda: "Democracy Is Peeping Out From Under the Burqa" Reference: 1. eup20041008000036 milan corriere della sera (internet version-www) italian 8 oct 04

Originally published on 10/13/2004 by Il Giornale in Italian

[FBIS Translated Text]

The most important fact to have emerged from the election in Afghanistan does not concern the difficulties and the lack of transparency that were an inevitable feature of the way it was held. It concerns the surprisingly large numbers of Afghan citizens who turned out to vote. That fact has a major impact on the theory whereby democracy is a specific product of Western history which is precisely why it fails to spontaneously develop in systems with a different history, but when people are offered the chance to adopt it, they embrace it with enthusiasm. That strengthens the hypothesis that democracy is what people wish for regardless of their kind of culture or religion: It is a "pan-social" phenomenon, and thus it imbues global democratization with the prospect of feasibility, as being the best possible solution to security problems. It prompts us to define a new mission of "active democracy." But if we are to do that, we need to realize why the mission has been "passive" to date.

[18th century philosophers] Kant and Rousseau had already realized that democracy minimizes a country's aggressiveness. Subsequent research has shown that democracies do not start wars and that therefore this political model is the concrete tool for the construction of international security. Sure enough, that is the concept that lay behind the architecture for the United Nations drafted at Bretton Woods in 1944 in an attempt to prevent future world wars. And it was from there that pressure for democratization was organized under US leadership. This later weakened, and there are four reasons for that: a) strategic priorities gave pride of place to the befriending of countries against a common foe, with their democratization taking second place; b) the idea took hold that development should come first in the world's poorer countries and democracy only thereafter; and indeed that principle still underlies the guidelines for action adopted by the World Bank, by the International Monetary Fund, and on a more general level, by aid policies not pegged to the priority of democratization; c) more recently we have seen the development both of a theory regarding individuals' global rights and of a pacifist doctrine not demanding that a country democratize immediately but allowing it not to do so in exchange for "peace" or for less repressive authoritarianism; d) that climate has been supported by anthropological analyses that do not consider democracy to be exportable to cultures other than that of the West.

We can base the future mission of "active democratization" on the fact that the last three points are clearly false, thus making the real obstacle raised by the first point easier to surmount. Precisely events in Afghanistan, as stressed above, show that democracy can be exported. Equally and perhaps even more important is the recent discovery that it is not necessary to first develop a poor country before democratizing it; indeed it is necessary to do the exact opposite. For the analytical data on the subject I would refer readers to an essay by Joseph T. Siegle in the October 2004 edition of Foreign Affairs. For a hypothetical answer to the question "Why?," I will dip into a book that I am writing together with Professor Savona entitled "Sovereignty and Confidence," due out in March 2005.

If a democracy was constructed in the past, there was then no one to finance it. And such economists as Lipset (1959) who called for development first and democracy later were not totally wrong. Today, on the other hand, there is a global economy that immediately buys into poverty because it transforms it into competitive productivity, thus capitalizing a poor country as long as that country enjoys even the lowest level of stability and of order that democracy guarantees. Putting it in a nutshell, democracy today is a precondition for development, it is no longer an obstacle to it (if indeed it ever has been). That means, if we combine those facts, that global democratization is not only possible but also useful as a factor both for wealth and for security. That is why the pacifist theory that prefers the absence of war to democratization -- for instance, the acceptance of Saddam Husayn as less of a threat than his elimination -- appears to be mistaken.

But having established its morality and its usefulness, how much democratizing pressure can one realistically bring to bear in the world? The war on terrorism is based on the guiding principle that democratization is the solution to eliminate terrorism. But it shows how its implementation demands a maximum of influencing power, thus huge costs and risks. Yet those costs and risks are difficult to manage today solely because they are laid almost exclusively at the United States' door and hardly, if at all, shared by others. If the Europeans and the Americans were to converge for a mission of "active democracy," the scale of their combined power would ensure that the military, economic, and political means were equal to the task and that would actually diminish the risks themselves.

Sure enough, that is the formula that I propose for debate. The United States and Europe must unite for global democratization on the basis of the evidence that it serves both to eliminate terrorism now and to root it out for the future because it is the guarantee of an orderly and efficient globalization process: a new world order based on about 200 countries all becoming democratic within the space of a few decades.

[Italian Senate Speaker Renato] Pera has posited the priority of Euro-US convergence in a splendidly lucid manner [see first referent item]. [Corriere della Sera editorialist Angelo] Panebianco has shown that political science sees in democratization the real solution to security problems [see second referent item]. Let us complete the concept by merging the scenario of Euro-US cooperation against terrorism with the broader mission of democratization and let us force Europe to turn it into an active policy. Italy is in out there in the vanguard; let us believe in it.

Milan Il Giornale in Italian -- right-of-center daily owned by the Berlusconi family