Peddling democracy the US way
By Chalmers Johnson
There is something absurd and inherently false about one country trying to
impose its system of government or its economic institutions on another. Such
an enterprise amounts to a dictionary definition of imperialism. When what's
at issue is "democracy", you have the fallacy of using the end to
justify the means (making war on those to be democratized), and in the
process the leaders of the missionary country are invariably infected with
the sins of hubris, racism and arrogance.
We Americans have long been guilty of these crimes. On the eve of our entry
into World War I, William Jennings Bryan, president Woodrow Wilson's first
secretary of state, described the United
States as "the supreme moral
factor in the world's progress and the accepted arbiter of the world's
disputes".
If there is one historical generalization that the passage of time has
validated, it is that the world could not help being better off if the
American president had not believed such nonsense and if the United
States had minded its own business in
the war between the British and German empires. We might well have avoided
Nazism, the Bolshevik Revolution, and another 30 to 40 years of the
exploitation of India, Indonesia, Indochina, Algeria, Korea, the Philippines, Malaya and
virtually all of Africa by European, American and
Japanese imperialists.
We Americans have never outgrown the narcissistic notion that the rest of the
world wants (or should want) to emulate us. In Iraq, bringing
democracy became the default excuse for our warmongers - it would be
perfectly plausible to call them "crusaders", if Osama bin Laden had not already appropriated the term -
once the George W Bush lies about Iraq's alleged
nuclear, chemical and biological threats and its support for al-Qaeda melted away.
The president and his neo-con supporters have prattled on endlessly about how
"the world is hearing the voice of freedom from the center of the Middle
East", but the reality is much closer to what Noam
Chomsky dubbed "deterring democracy" in a notable 1992 book of that
name. We have done everything in our power to see that the Iraqis did not get
a "free and fair election", one in which the Shi'ite
majority could come to power and ally Iraq with Iran. As Noah
Feldman, the Coalition Provisional Authority's law advisor,
put it in November 2003, "If you move too fast the wrong people could
get elected".
In the election of January
30, 2005, the US military
tried to engineer the outcome it wanted (Operation Founding Fathers), but the
Shi'ites won anyway. Nearly a year later in the
December 15 elections for the national assembly, the Shi'ites
won again, but Sunni, Kurdish and American pressure has delayed the formation
of a government to this moment. After a compromise candidate for prime
minister was finally selected, two of the most ominous condottiere of the
Bush administration, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, flew into Baghdad to tell
him what he had to do for "democracy" - leaving the unmistakable
impression that the new prime minister is a puppet of the United
States.
Hold the economic advice
After Latin America, East Asia is the
area of the world longest under America's
imperialist tutelage. If you want to know something about the US record in
exporting its economic and political institutions, it's a good place to look.
But first, some definitions.
The political philosopher Hannah Arendt once argued
that democracy is such an abused concept we should dismiss as a charlatan
anyone who uses it in serious discourse without first clarifying what he or
she means by it. Therefore, let me indicate what I mean by democracy. First,
the acceptance within a society of the principle that public opinion matters.
If it doesn't, as for example in Joseph Stalin's Russia, or
present-day Saudi Arabia, or the
Japanese prefecture of Okinawa under
American military domination, then it hardly matters what rituals of American
democracy, such as elections, may be practiced.
Second, there must be some internal balance of power or separation of powers,
so that it is impossible for an individual leader to become a dictator. If
power is concentrated in a single position and its occupant claims to be
beyond legal restraints, as is true today with our president, then democracy
becomes attenuated or only pro forma. In particular, I look for the existence
and practice of administrative law - in other words, an independent,
constitutional court with powers to declare null and void laws that
contravene democratic safeguards.
Third, there must be some agreed-upon procedure for getting rid of
unsatisfactory leaders. Periodic elections, parliamentary votes of no
confidence, term limits and impeachment are various well-known ways to do
this, but the emphasis should be on shared institutions.
With that in mind, let's consider the export of the American economic, and
then democratic "model" to Asia. The
countries stretching from Japan to Indonesia, with the
exception of the former American colony of the Philippines, make up
one of the richest regions on earth today. They include the second most
productive country in the world, Japan, with a per capita income well in
excess of that of the United States, as well as the world's fastest growing
large economy, China's, which has been expanding at a rate of more than 9.5%
per annum for the past two decades. These countries achieved their economic
well-being by ignoring virtually every item of wisdom preached in American
economics departments and business schools or propounded by various American
administrations.
Japan
established the regional model for East Asia. In no
case did the other high-growth Asian economies follow Japan's path precisely,
but they have all been inspired by the overarching characteristic of the
Japanese economic system - namely, the combining of the private ownership of
property as a genuine right, defensible in law and inheritable, with state
control of economic goals, markets and outcomes.
I am referring to what the Japanese call "industrial policy" (sangyo seisaku).
In American economic theory (if not in practice), industrial policy is
anathema. It contradicts the idea of an unconstrained market guided by
laissez faire. Nonetheless, the American military-industrial complex and our
elaborate system of "military Keynesianism" rely on a Pentagon-run
industrial policy - even as American theory denies that either the
military-industrial complex or economic dependence on arms manufacturing are
significant factors in our economic life. We continue to underestimate the
high-growth economies of East Asia because
of the power of our ideological blinders.
One particular form of American economic influence did greatly affect East
Asian economic practice - namely, protectionism and the control of
competition through high tariffs and other forms of state discrimination
against foreign imports. This was the primary economic policy of the United
States from its founding until 1940.
Without it, American economic wealth of the sort to which we have become
accustomed would have been inconceivable. The East Asian countries have
emulated the US in this
respect. They are interested in what the US does, not
what it preaches. That is one of the ways they all got rich. China is today
pursuing a variant of the basic Japanese development strategy, even though it
does not, of course, acknowledge this.
Marketing democracy
The gap between preaching and self-deception in the way we promote
democracy abroad is even greater than in selling our economic ideology. Our
record is one of continuous (sometimes unintended) failure, although most
establishment pundits try to camouflage this fact.
The Federation of American Scientists has compiled a list of more than 201
overseas military operations from the end of World War II until September 11, 2001, in which
we were involved and normally struck the first blow. (The list is reprinted
by Gore Vidal in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So
Hated, p 22-41.) The current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not
included. In no instance did democratic governments come about as a direct
result of any of these military activities.
The United States holds the unenviable record of having helped install and
then supported such dictators as the Shah of Iran, General Suharto in Indonesia, Fulgencio
Batista in Cuba, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Sese
Seko Mobutu in Congo-Zaire, not to mention a series
of American-backed militarists in Vietnam and Cambodia until we were finally
expelled from Indochina. In addition, we ran among the most extensive
international terrorist operations in history against Cuba and Nicaragua because
their struggles for national independence produced outcomes the US did not
like.
On the other hand, democracy did develop in some important cases as a result
of opposition to our interference - for example, after the collapse of the
Central Intelligence Agency-installed Greek colonels in 1974; in both
Portugal in 1974 and Spain in 1975 after the end of the US-supported fascist
dictatorships; after the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in
1986; following the ouster of General Chun Doo-hwan
in South Korea in 1987; and following the ending of 38 years of martial law
on the island of Taiwan in the same year.
One might well ask, however: what about the case of Japan? Bush has
repeatedly cited our allegedly successful installation of democracy there
after World War II as evidence of our skill in this kind of activity. What
this experience proved, he contended, was that we would have little
difficulty implanting democracy in Iraq. As it
happens though, General Douglas MacArthur, who
headed the American occupation of defeated Japan from 1945
to 1951, was himself essentially a dictator,
primarily concerned with blocking genuine democracy from below in favor of
hand-picked puppets and collaborators from the pre-war Japanese
establishment.
When a country loses a war as crushingly as Japan did the
war in the Pacific, it can expect a domestic revolution against its wartime
leaders. In accordance with the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, which Japan accepted
in surrendering, the State Department instructed MacArthur
not to stand in the way of a popular revolution, but when it began to
materialize he did so anyway.
He chose to keep Hirohito, the wartime emperor, on
the throne (where he remained until his death in 1989) and helped bring
officials from the industrial and militarist classes that ruled wartime Japan back to
power. Except for a few months in 1993 and 1994, those conservatives and
their successors have ruled Japan
continuously since 1949. Japan and China are today among the longest-lived
single-party regimes on earth, both parties - the nucleus of the Liberal
Democratic Party and the Chinese Communist Party - having come to power in
the same year.
Equally important in the Japanese case, MacArthur's
headquarters actually wrote the quite democratic constitution of 1947 and
bestowed it on the Japanese people under circumstances in which they had no
alternative but to accept it. In her 1963 book On
Revolution, Hannah Arendt stresses
"the enormous difference in power and authority between a constitution
imposed by a government upon a people and the constitution by which a people
constitutes its own government." She notes that, in post-World War I
Europe, virtually every case of an imposed constitution led to dictatorship
or to a lack of power, authority and stability.
Although public opinion certainly matters in Japan, its
democratic institutions have never been fully tested. The Japanese public
knows that its constitution was bestowed by its conqueror, not generated from
below by popular action. Japan's
stability depends greatly on the ubiquitous presence of the United
States, which supplies the national
defense - and so, implicitly, the fairly evenly distributed wealth - that
gives the public a stake in the regime. But the Japanese people, as well as
those of the rest of East Asia, remain
fearful of Japan's ever
again being on its own in the world.
While more benign than the norm, Japan's
government is typical of the US record
abroad in one major respect. Successive American administrations have
consistently favored oligarchies that stand in the way of broad popular
aspirations - or movements toward nationalist independence from American
control.
In Asia, in the post-World War II
period, we pursued such anti-democratic policies in South
Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Indochina (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam), and Japan. In Japan, in order
to prevent the Socialist Party from coming to power through the polls, which
seemed likely during the 1950s, we secretly supplied funds to the
representatives of the old order in the Liberal Democratic Party.
We helped bring wartime minister of munitions Nobusuke
Kishi to power as prime minister in 1957; split the
Socialist Party by promoting and financing a rival Democratic Socialist
Party; and, in 1960, backed the conservatives in a period of vast popular
demonstrations against the renewal of the Japanese-American Security Treaty.
Rather than developing as an independent democracy, Japan became a
docile Cold War satellite of the United
States - and one with an extremely
inflexible political system at that.
The Korean case
In South Korea, the United
States resorted to far sterner
measures. From the outset, we favored those who had collaborated with Japan, whereas North
Korea built its regime on the
foundation of former guerrilla fighters against Japanese rule. During the 1950s,
we backed the aged exile Syngman Rhee as our puppet dictator. (He had actually been a
student of Woodrow Wilson's at Princeton early in
the century.) When, in 1960, a student movement overthrew Rhee's
corrupt regime and attempted to introduce democracy, we instead supported the
seizure of power by General Park Chung-hee.
Educated at the Japanese military academy in Manchuria during
the colonial period, Park had been an officer in the Japanese army of
occupation until 1945. He ruled Korea from 1961
until October
16, 1979, when the chief of the Korean Central Intelligence
Agency shot him to death over dinner. The South Korean public believed that
the KCIA chief, known to be "close" to the Americans, had
assassinated Park on US orders because he was attempting to develop a
nuclear-weapons program the US opposed.
(Does this sound familiar?) After Park's death, Major General Chun Doo-hwan seized power and instituted yet another military
dictatorship that lasted until 1987.
In 1980, a year after the Park assassination, Chun smashed a popular movement
for democracy that broke out in the southwestern city of Kwangju and among
students in Seoul. Backing
Chun's policies, the US
ambassador argued that "firm anti-riot measures were necessary".
The American military then released to Chun's control South Korean troops
assigned to the United Nations command to defend the country against a North
Korean attack, and he used them to crush the movement in Kwangju.
Thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators were killed. In 1981, Chun would be
the first foreign visitor welcomed to the White House by the newly elected
Ronald Reagan.
After more than 30 post-war years, democracy finally began to come to South
Korea in 1987 via a popular revolution
from below. Chun made a strategic mistake by winning the right to hold the
Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988.
In the lead-up to the games, students from the many universities in Seoul, now
openly backed by an increasingly prosperous middle-class, began to protest
American-backed military rule. Chun would normally have used his army to
arrest, imprison and probably shoot such demonstrators as he had done in Kwangju seven
years earlier, but he was held back by the knowledge that, if he did so, the
International Olympic Committee would move the games to some other country.
In order to avoid such a national humiliation, Chun turned over power to his
co-conspirator of 1979-80, General Roh Tae-woo. To
allow the Olympics to go ahead, Roh instituted a
measure of democratic reform, which led in 1993 to the holding of national
elections and the victory of a civilian president, Kim Young-sam.
In December 1995, in one of the clearest signs of South
Korea's maturing democracy, the
government arrested Chun and Roh and charged them
with having shaken down South Korean big business for bribes - Chun allegedly
took US$1.2 billion and Roh $630 million. Kim then
made a very popular decision, letting them be indicted for their military
seizure of power in 1979 and for the Kwangju massacre
as well.
In August 1996, a South Korean court found both Chun and Roh
guilty of sedition. Chun was sentenced to death and Roh
to 22-and-a-half years in prison. In April 1997, the Korean Supreme Court
upheld slightly less severe sentences, something that would have been simply
unimaginable for the pro forma Japanese Supreme Court. In December 1997,
after peace activist Kim Dae-jung was elected
president, he pardoned them both despite the fact that Chun had repeatedly
tried to have Kim killed.
The United States was
always deeply involved in these events. In 1989, when the Korean National
Assembly sought to investigate what happened at Kwangju on its
own, the US
government refused to cooperate and prohibited the former American ambassador
to Seoul and the
former general in command of US Forces Korea from testifying. The American
media avoided reporting on these events (while focusing on the suppression of
pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing in June
1989), and most Americans knew next to nothing about them. This coverup of the costs of military rule and the suppression
of democracy in South Korea, in turn,
has contributed to the present growing hostility of South Koreans toward the United
States.
Unlike American-installed or supported "democracies" elsewhere, South
Korea has developed into a genuine
democracy. Public opinion is a vital force in the society. A separation of
powers has been institutionalized and is honored. Electoral competition for
all political offices is intense, with high levels of participation by voters.
These achievements came from below, from the South Korean people themselves,
who liberated their country from American-backed military dictatorship.
Perhaps most important, the Korean National Assembly - the parliament - is a
genuine forum for democratic debate. I have visited it often and find the
contrast with the scripted and empty procedures encountered in the Japanese
Diet or the Chinese National People's Congress striking indeed. Perhaps its
only rival in terms of democratic vitality in East Asia is the
Taiwanese Legislative Yuan. On some occasions, the Korean National Assembly
is rowdy; fist fights are not uncommon. It is, however, a true school of
democracy, one that came into being despite the resistance of the United
States.
The democracy peddlers
Given this history, why should we be surprised that in Baghdad, such
figures as former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority L Paul Bremer,
former ambassador John Negroponte and current Ambassador Zalmay
Khalilzad, as well as a continuously changing
cohort of American major-generals fresh from power-point lectures at the
American Enterprise Institute, should have produced chaos and probable civil
war? None of them has any qualifications at all for trying to "introduce
democracy" or American-style capitalism in a highly nationalistic Muslim
nation, and even if they did, they could not escape the onus of having
terrorized the country through the use of unrestricted military force.
Bremer is a former assistant and employee of former secretaries of state
Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig. Negroponte was
American ambassador to Honduras, 1981-85,
when it had the world's largest Central Intelligence Agency station and
actively participated in the dirty war to suppress Nicaraguan democracy.
Khalilzad, the most prominent official of Afghan
ancestry in the Bush administration, is a member of the Project for a New
American Century, the neo-con pressure group that lobbied for a war of
aggression against Iraq. The role
of the American military in our war there has been an unmitigated disaster on
every front, including the deployment of undisciplined, brutal troops at
places such as the Abu Ghraib prison.
All the United States has
achieved is to guarantee that Iraqis will hate it for years to come. The
situation in Iraq today is
worse than it was in Japan or Korea and
comparable to the US tenure in
Vietnam. Perhaps
it is worth reconsidering what exactly the US is so
intent on exporting to the world.
Chalmers Johnson is, most recently, the
author of The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the
End of the Republic, as well as of MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982)
and Japan: Who
Governs? (1995) among other works. This piece originated as
"remarks" presented at the East Asia panel of
a workshop on "Transplanting Institutions" sponsored by the
Department of Sociology of the University of California, San
Diego, held on April 21. The chairman
of the workshop was Professor Richard Madsen.
(Copyright 2006 Chalmers Johnson)
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