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