Globalization, Power, and Democracy 9780801876684, 9780801865688

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Globalization, Power, and Democracy

A Journal of Democracy Book • BOOKS IN THE SERIES

Edited by Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner

The Democratic Invention (2000) (Edited by Marc F. Plattner and Jo~ao Carlos Espada) Democratization in Africa (1999) Democracy in East Asia (1998) Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies (1997) (with Yun-han Chu and Hung-mao Tien) Civil-Military Relations and Democracy (1996) The Global Resurgence of Democracy, 2nd ed. (1996) Economic Reform and Democracy (1995) Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Democracy (1994) Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy Revisited (1993)

Published under the auspices of the International Forum for Democratic Studies

Globalization, Power, and Democracy Edited by Marc F. Plattner and Aleksander Smolar

The Johns Hopkins University Press

© 2000 The Johns Hopkins University Press and the National Endowment for Democracy All rights reserved. Published 2000 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 987654321

An abridged version of chapter 5 of this volume appeared in the April 2000 issue of the Journal of Democracy. Earlier versions of chapters 2 and 3 appeared in the January 1999 issue of the Journal.

The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd. London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Globalization, Power, and Democracy/ edited by Marc F. Plattner and Aleksander Smolar. p. cm. — (A Journal of Democracy book) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-XXXX-XXXX-X. — ISBN 0-XXXX-XXXX-X (pbk.)

PLEASE NOTE:

NEEDS NEW CIP DATA PLUGGED IN; WILL SEND REVISED APPLICATION FILE & LASER PRINTOUT ONCE CIP DATA IS PROVIDED. A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

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Introduction, Marc F. Plattner and Aleksander Smolar

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I. The International System After the Cold War 1. Culture, Power, and Democracy, Samuel P. Huntington

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2. Globalization and Fragmentation, Jean-Marie Guéhenno

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3. Integration and Disintegration, Robert Cooper

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II. The European Dimension 4. Democracy, the EU, and the Question of Scale, Philippe C. Schmitter 43 5. Eastern Europe: The International Context, Jacques Rupnik

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III. Promoting Democracy 6. The Role of the International Community, Adam Daniel Rotfeld 7. The Centrality of the United States, Robert Kagan

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IV. The International Economy 8. Trade, Monetary Policy, and Democracy, Kyung Won Kim 9. The Pluses and Minuses of Globalization, Ethan B. Kapstein and Dimitri Landa 133 10. Epilogue: Democracy’s Uncertain Triumph, Zbigniew Brzezinski 149 Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book had its origins in a conference on “International Relations

and Democracy” held in Warsaw on 25–28 June 1998 under the joint sponsorship of the Stefan Batory Foundation (Warsaw), the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies (Washington, D.C.), and the Institute for National Policy Research (Taipei). It was an extraordinary gathering, bringing together leading scholars, government officials, and democratic activists from East Asia, the United States, and both Eastern and Western Europe. The proceedings opened with remarks by Polish foreign minister Bronis³aw Geremek, included major addresses by Polish deputy prime minister Leszek Balcerowicz and Taiwanese foreign minister Jason Hu, and were brought to a close with comments by former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Ten papers were presented at the conference, and revised versions of nine of them (along with an epilogue based on Brzezinski’s concluding remarks) appear in this volume. The conference also benefited from the comments of a diverse and distinguished group of discussants: Tun-jen Cheng, Elemer Hankiss, Andrzej Olechowski, Yun-han Chu, William Pfaff, Galina Starovoitova, Carl Gershman, Vesna Pešiæ, Laurence Whitehead, Jagdish Bhagwati, Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, Marek Dabrowski, Ghia Nodia, and Bohdan Osadczuk. All the participants were shocked by the tragic assassination of Russian parliamentarian Galina Starovoitova only a few short months after the meeting, and we dedicated to her memory a report on the conference published in May 1999. (This report can be found on the Internet at www.ned.org/pubs/relations/ toc.html.) The costs of the conference were divided among the three sponsoring institutions. We are grateful to the Institute for National Policy Research for agreeing to collaborate on this project, and we warmly thank its president Hung-mao Tien and his colleagues Yun-han Chu and Tun-jen Cheng for their help in organizing the conference. The International Forum also wishes to express its gratitude to the Carnegie Corporation of New York for a grant that supported its share of the expenses.

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The success of a conference of this magnitude depends not only on the contributions of the participants but on the dedication of those who work behind the scenes. We were very fortunate to be able to rely on the efforts of Debra Liang-Fenton of the International Forum and Joanna Zaluska and her collaborators at the Batory Foundation. We also wish to thank Henry Tom of the Johns Hopkins University Press for his valuable guidance and the staff of the Journal of Democracy for its superb assistance with the editorial process that brought this book into being. Earlier versions of three of the essays in this volume—those by Jean-Marie Guéhenno, Robert Cooper, and Jacques Rupnik—had previously appeared in the Journal, and thus had already been improved by the editing of Mark Eckert. The remaining manuscripts benefited from editing by former Journal senior editor Phil Costopoulos, as well as by Zerxes Spencer and Jordan Branch. Zerxes also corresponded with the authors, and Jordan compiled the index with great efficiency. Stephanie Lewis did her usual quick and masterful job of turning edited manuscripts into camera-ready copy. Unfortunately, Larry Diamond, coeditor of the Journal (and codirector of the International Forum), was unable to attend the Warsaw conference and thus did not actively participate in this project, but his influence is always present in the work done by his colleagues at the Journal.

Common\warsaw.bk\intro.doc created by JB from laptop on 3/24/2000. Revised version saved on common by JB on 3/27/2000. Saved as WP document (that automatically replaced boxes with curly quotes), ZS, 4/5. Saved as intro.txt by JB 4/6/2000. JB edits entered on 4/6/2000. First and last sections added, and reformatted, by JB from MP email 4/18/2000. JB edits on first and last sections entered 4/18/2000. MP edits entered by JB on 4/21/2000. PGS created from TXT by SL on 4/21.

INTRODUCTION Marc F. Plattner and Aleksander Smolar

Although the year 2000 marks the turn of the century and of the

millennium, the great turn in the realm of international politics occurred a decade earlier, with the revolutions of 1989–91. The breakup of the Soviet Union’s external empire in Eastern Europe, soon followed by the demise of the USSR itself, destroyed the bipolar structure that had characterized world politics for almost half a century. While the dramatic collapse of communism left no room for doubt that the era of the Cold War had come to an end, there was very little agreement about the nature of the new international order being born. Many competing notions were quickly put forward in an effort to capture the defining attributes of the new post–Cold War world: the global triumph of markets and democracy; a return to the balance-of-power politics that preceded World War I; a clash of civilizations; the West versus the rest; North versus South; the rise of Asia; zones of conflict and zones of peace; premodern, modern, and postmodern states; and the hegemony of the United States. Yet none of these drew widespread assent, and many of them were more sharply criticized than defended. As the 1990s progressed, one shorthand way of describing the emerging new order began to take hold: “globalization.” A number of authors expressed the view that the era of the Cold War had been succeeded by the era of globalization. This new characterization was based on some developments that were universally recognized: a striking increase in international trade, investment, and capital flows; dramatic progress in communications technology (especially the rise of the Internet); and a considerable enhancement of the role of multilateral institutions, along with a corresponding weakening of state sovereignty in both law and practice. Yet other observers argued that these elements of globalization were at best only one part of a much more complex picture. They noted that technological and economic integration was often accompanied by increasing political disintegration or fragmentation, with old states breaking up along ethnic lines (or in danger of doing so) and new states

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coming into being. At the same time, sharp new divides were being created between the winners and the losers from globalization, both among states and within them. Finally, many claimed that the apparent eclipse of traditional power politics was either wholly illusory or merely a temporary phenomenon and that the crucial underpinning of globalization was the hegemony of the United States, the sole superpower of the post–Cold War period. The debate over the nature of the new international system very much involves the question of the current status and future role of democracy in the world. The worldwide resurgence of democracy that began in the mid-1970s was a key factor in the triumph of the West in the Cold War. It bolstered the West in its ideological contest with Soviet communism, undermined the prestige and attractiveness of the Soviet model, and eventually helped bring down the communist regimes themselves. The end of the Cold War, in turn, gave a new impetus to democratization around the world. The unparalleled legitimacy of democracy, increasingly recognized in treaties and other official documents and in the activities of regional and international organizations, put authoritarian regimes everywhere on the defensive. Although the performance of many of the new democracies was disappointing, authoritarian regimes continued to fall. As the 1990s came to a close, two key regional powers, Indonesia and Nigeria, underwent democratic transitions. Clearly, the international context during the final decade of the twentieth century was generally favorable to the continuing spread of democracy, but it was far from clear how long this would remain the case. The volume that follows is based on a June 1998 conference in Warsaw that sought to illuminate the nature of the emerging post–Cold War international system and its implications for the future expansion and consolidation of democracy. Cosponsored by three nongovernmental institutions from Europe, North America, and Asia, respectively, the conference focused in particular on developments in these dominant regions of the world. Bringing together both experts on international relations and scholars of democracy from all three regions, the meeting aimed at examining the link between these two subjects in a way that is rarely done. (For more details about the conference and its participants, see the Acknowledgments.) While a large body of literature has emerged in recent years on the effects of democracy on international relations (the debate over what is often called the theory of “democratic peace”), we sought instead to examine the other side of this relationship—the impact of the international system on the prospects for democracy. This volume is organized in four principal sections. The first contains broad reflections on “The International System After the Cold War,” featuring essays by authors from the United States, France, and Britain,

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each of whom had already gained some renown for offering a widely discussed interpretation of the emerging international order. The second section focuses more specifically on Europe, with one essay looking at the issues raised by the increasing prominence and growing integration of the European Union, and a second focusing on the ways in which the international context is affecting the progress of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. A third section contains two essays, reflecting very different perspectives, that examine the adoption of democracy promotion as an explicit goal of national and international policy. The two essays comprising the fourth section explore the influence of economic globalization on democracy. Finally, the book concludes with an epilogue by Zbigniew Brzezinski that weaves together many of the key themes discussed by the other authors.

The International System After the Cold War In the opening essay of this volume, Samuel P. Huntington argues that, with the end of the Cold War, the international system has been altered in two fundamental ways: 1) Alliances and enmities among nations are now based largely on cultural rather than ideological differences; and 2) the old bipolar structure of the Cold War world has given way to what he calls a “uni-multipolar system.” By this term he means a system in which the leading power can prevent combinations of other states from undertaking actions it opposes but at the same time cannot effectively resolve major international issues on its own. Rejecting the view of some observers that U.S. predominance is so great as to constitute a unipolar system, he states as the “central thesis” of his essay that “global politics has moved from a brief unipolar moment at the end of the Cold War into a few uni-multipolar decades on its way toward a largely multipolar twenty-first century.” Huntington cites widespread evidence that today other countries, especially key regional powers, perceive the United States to be acting in a unilateral and interventionist manner that threatens their own interests. He acknowledges, however, that so far these countries have not succeeded in forming an “antihegemonic” coalition, as “realist” internationalrelations theory would have predicted. As possible explanations for this fact, he notes that America poses not a threat of military conquest but a “less immediate and more diffuse” danger, and that America can provide considerable benefits to those countries that accept its leadership. Most interestingly, he argues that, in a “multicivilizational” world, countries with very different cultures find it difficult to form power-balancing coalitions; he even suggests that the idea of the sovereign legal equality of nation-states, central to the European system established by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, may be losing its hold with the rise of non-Western powers.

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While affirming that “power is the universal and everlasting essence of all politics,” Huntington insists on the salience of culture in the post– Cold War world and claims that events during recent years have largely vindicated his controversial thesis of the “clash of civilizations.” (He also remains skeptical about the prospects for the spread of democracy beyond the West or countries significantly influenced by the West.) Yet he sharply rejects the charge that his thesis has encouraged clashes among civilizations or that it has the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, he asserts that it has spurred high-level calls for a “dialogue of civilizations” that may help to identify commonalities among different cultures and thus reduce the prospect of intercivilizational conflict. In the next essay, Jean-Marie Guéhenno suggests that a much more fundamental transformation of world politics is under way. He emphatically states that “the age of nation-states”—the era inaugurated by the Westphalian settlement that asserted the primacy of political institutions over religion—“is coming to an end.” While he foresees a resurgence of religion, he rejects the notion that religion or culture will replace ideology as an organizing principle of the international system. Rather than founding new political alignments, the religious resurgence will tend to weaken the traditional interstate system itself. Indeed, Guéhenno questions whether it still makes sense to speak of an “international system” that “can be described according to a single unifying logic.” He especially opposes the notion that the post–Cold War world can be understood in terms of a Manichean dichotomy between the positive forces of globalization and the market and the negative forces of nationalism, ethnicity, and fragmentation. Instead, Guéhenno argues that globalization and fragmentation should be seen as linked rather than opposing phenomena. Fragmentation is precisely a product of the “reaction against the functionalism of the age of progress and science” that is driving globalization. As both tendencies will continue, flexibility and the diffusion of power are the keys to reconciling “the need for global management of global issues with the need for identity and differentiation.” He suggests that the experience of the European Union (EU), “messy” though it may be, offers a possible model. According to Guéhenno, those who believe that globalization represents the triumph of economics over politics are mistaken. Markets will work properly only if the necessary political conditions are present, and the supposedly apolitical world of globalization ultimately rests on the political power of the United States. “That is why globalization is increasingly understood to be a synonym of Americanization.” Yet he also stresses that Americanization seems to be a product more of inadvertence than of political will. Preoccupied with domestic matters, Americans are little interested in foreign affairs or inclined to support imperial policies. “Washington may be the capital of a global empire,

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but it is an empire without an emperor,” and the United States is likely to drift into isolationism if it is unable to share the burden of international leadership. For this among other reasons, Guéhenno holds that the development of a new framework for relations between the United States and the EU is critical for managing the complex world that is now emerging. The following essay, by Robert Cooper, in many respects echoes the themes set forth by Guéhenno. The organizing principle of Cooper’s analysis is the competition between integration and disintegration that has been evident in the international system since the end of World War II and has become dramatically apparent since the end of the Cold War. Like Guéhenno (who uses the terms “globalization” and “fragmentation” rather than “integration” and “disintegration” to describe the same phenomena), Cooper sees these two seemingly contradictory tendencies as essentially linked. Moreover, he emphasizes that the nature of the state itself has been evolving and even speculates about the possibility that “the world will have to be based on something other than liberal nation-states.” What is perhaps most distinctive in Cooper’s analysis is the role that he assigns to democracy as a cause of both integration and disintegration. He points out, for example, that the breakup of the multinational states of the former Soviet bloc was a consequence of democratization: “It is difficult to give people the democratic right to choose their government without also allowing them to choose the community which will embody that right.” He also notes, however, that it was shared democratic values and political systems that enabled the nations of Western Europe to embark successfully on the project of integration that has given rise to the EU. The same is true for NATO, which, as Cooper points out, has displayed a remarkable and unprecedented capacity to maintain itself as a military alliance—even after the end of the Cold War and the demise of the enemy against which it was originally directed. Yet Cooper also highlights a critically important paradox—namely, that the success of economic and military integration has not led, as many had originally expected, to political integration. In fact, “while economics is becoming increasingly global, and military affairs are increasingly conducted in cooperation with others, politics remains stubbornly national and may even be becoming more local.” Cooper cites the EU as a primary example. Despite its continuing success in economic integration, there is no sign that Europe-wide political parties are emerging or that national parliaments are losing their political centrality. For now, at least, “the nation-state remains the primary focus for democratic legitimacy” and the key player in multilateral frameworks. At the same time, however, authority is increasingly being divided among the global, regional, national, and even subnational levels. “Multilayered governance is clearly here to stay,” Cooper concludes, and “it

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may well be that new forms of democracy will be invented to make new forms of government work.”

The European Dimension The next section of this volume features two essays that explore the impact of global and international factors in Europe. The first, by Philippe C. Schmitter, focuses on the questions raised about the international system by the evolution of the EU, taking up a number of the issues discussed by Robert Cooper. Schmitter asserts that Europe today is a locus of both political integration and political disintegration, as both supranational and subnational political units take on more functions and “the ‘traditional’ nation-state finds itself caught in the middle, challenged, as it were, from above and below.” He notes that even the new postcommunist democracies, which have recently affirmed or reestablished their national sovereignty, have sought membership in larger regional units and, at the same time, have been experimenting with new forms of local or provincial government. Like Cooper, Schmitter argues that military and economic imperatives no longer compel a concentration of authority in the nation-state. This makes possible experimentation with both increases and decreases in scale and with new political configurations. Individuals and groups, he contends, “have lost confidence in the assumption that those who govern at the national level can do much to affect their well-being, but they have not yet acquired sufficient faith that the subnational and the supranational levels can do better.” It is widely believed that smaller units encourage citizen participation, but Schmitter argues that the evidence on voter turnout does not seem to support this view. Another common opinion holds that as long as there is no pan-European demos, the EU cannot become democratic. Schmitter, however, questions the notion that a democratically minded citizenry (a “civic culture”) is a prerequisite for democracy, arguing that the causality runs the other way—that a civic culture is a product of experience with democratic practice. In considering the historical roots of the European state system, Schmitter holds that it was a balance of power among multiple states that secured the continent’s remarkable combination of interdependence and diversity. Yet the European balance of power now belongs to the past, having been superseded by the bipolarization of the Cold War. “In the 1990s,” Schmitter asserts, “globalization replaced the Cold War as the central fact of world politics,” leading some to claim that technological or market imperatives demanding increases in scale will soon reduce Europe’s nation-states to “little more than larger versions of Andorra and San Marino.” Rejecting this view, he holds that a range of alternative outcomes is possible. The EU, with its “multilayered” character, is a new type of “regional polity”; if it is ever to democratize, “it

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will have to invent novel practices of citizenship, representation, and decision making.” Jacques Rupnik focuses his essay on the postcommunist countries, noting that in “no other region of the world has the impact of international factors on democratization been as apparent as in Central and Eastern Europe.” The revolutions of 1989 were made possible by the unwillingness of the Soviet Union to resort once again to the use of force to maintain its external empire. Moreover, the region’s new democracies were guided during their transitional phase by the desire to imitate Western models, and more recently their policies have been driven by the goal of integration into Western multilateral institutions. Rupnik notes that new democracies had also been created in EastCentral Europe after World War I, but they all failed during the interwar period. Comparing the international situation prevailing in the post1919 period with that of the 1990s, he concludes that current conditions are much more favorable to democratic survival. First, in East-Central Europe (unlike the Balkans) there is now a relative absence of ethnic minorities or of contested borders, promoting a more stable regional environment. Second, although a large and economically powerful Germany continues to dwarf the smaller states in the region, today Germany is regarded as a model of democracy rather than a threat to it. Third, the balance-of-power considerations that complicated the quest for selfdetermination after 1919 have been superseded by the process of European and Euro-Atlantic integration, which has acted as a democratizing force. Joining NATO and the EU has become a primary goal of the new democracies, and both institutions require that prospective candidates be democratic. The postcommunist countries see entry into these bodies not only as a path to security and prosperity but also as “an indicator of the success and irreversibility of their democratic transitions.” Thus they have strong motives for complying with the “democratic conditionality” that goes with membership. At the same time, however, it is not easy for states that have at last recovered their national independence to embrace the EU’s “culture of negotiation, compromise, and the pooling of sovereignty.” The expansion of the EU is likely to help consolidate democracy in new member states from the East in the same fashion as it did for the Southern European countries admitted in the 1980s. But what will the effect be on those states to whom membership has not yet been extended? “It is crucial,” Rupnik concludes, “that the democratic enlargement of the European Union remain an open process.”

Promoting Democracy The next two essays in this volume, one by Adam Rotfeld and a second by Robert Kagan, directly address the role of external actors

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in promoting democracy. Yet while both authors are strong proponents of vigorous international efforts on behalf of democracy, their approaches could hardly be more different. The context of Rotfeld’s essay is provided by the increasingly rapid evolution of international law and norms, and especially by the tension between the goal of promoting democracy and human rights and the traditional principle of nonintervention in the affairs of sovereign states. While acknowledging that “the sovereign equality and integrity of states remain pillars of international law,” he also insists that sovereignty “is not an absolute.” By ratifying the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international treaties and covenants, states themselves have recognized limits on their sovereignty. Rotfeld points out that UN secretary-general Kofi Annan has argued that the international community cannot accept “a situation where people are brutalized behind national boundaries.” For Rotfeld, the increase in intrastate conflicts, the problem of “failed states” that cannot control their own territories, and the growing recognition that human rights and democratization are “essential to hopes for international peace and security” all call for more assertive international action. “The time is ripe for a new and just world order that . . . sets up truly effectual procedures and mechanisms to restore and safeguard rights that have been violated.” In his view, the new security system aimed at achieving this goal must strengthen and improve upon “the international and multilateral framework that has been built up over the last half-century.” In such a system, enforcement cannot be implemented unilaterally by a single power or alliance without the approval of the international community. Rotfeld calls for a new Charter on European Security that would make “democracy, the rule of law, the market economy, and security cooperation integral parts of the Helsinki process.” The existing principles of sovereignty and nonintervention should be redefined to accommodate the “newly salient principle of international solidarity.” Rotfeld does not believe that national states are about to disappear or that world government can provide a practical answer to the security challenges of the twenty-first century. He insists, however, that international organizations and security structures must grow stronger to deal with the competing tendencies of globalization and fragmentation in the post–Cold War world. Robert Kagan takes a very different view about how best to promote democracy and to secure a benign international order. For him, what counts above all are the foreign policies pursued by the great powers, particularly the United States, which not only is the strongest nation today but also is “the only major power in the world that was democratic at birth, and whose foreign policy . . . has always contained a unique measure of democratic idealism.” In Kagan’s view, the spread of

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democracy in recent years is “intimately connected to the benevolent hegemony” of the United States: “The rise of American hegemony has helped bring about the global democratic revolution. And the global democratic revolution has, in turn, strengthened American hegemony.” In contrast to both Rotfeld’s insistence on multilateral approaches and his cautions against American unilateralism, Kagan argues that, for reasons of both power and history, it is the policy of the United States that will be decisive for the future of democracy. Therefore, Kagan asserts, the current internal debate in the United States about the international promotion of democracy is worthy of attention by supporters of democracy around the world. That debate, at least on the intellectual level, largely pits supporters of a foreign policy that seeks to advance U.S. democratic principles in parallel with U.S. interests against “the so-called realists.” The latter believe that foreign policy should be framed in terms of a narrow definition of national security and are fearful of what they consider to be the “crusading zeal” involved in American support for universal democratic principles. Kagan contends that the lessons of the Cold War show that the realist view is misguided. The United States was able to “pursue its idealistic mission in a fairly prudent way,” and its democratic ideals proved to be an invaluable asset in the ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. In Kagan’s view, it is vital that the realists not win the current debate and that American dedication to promoting democracy abroad remain firm. “The present international order,” he asserts, “was built by American strength and American principles working in tandem. To the degree that either America’s power or its commitment to the universality of its principles begins to decline, so too will that international order.”

The International Economy The last regular section in this volume consists of two essays exploring the impact of the international economy on democracy. Kyung Won Kim begins his essay by considering and largely rejecting two alternative theoretical perspectives—he calls them the “positivistdevelopmental” and the “historicist-holistic” perspectives—for assessing this question. He himself opts for a more modest “functional” perspective that seeks to describe the key institutional features of the international economy and to assess their effects on democracy within states. In his view, the global economic order essentially consists of the international trading regime and the international monetary order, and his essay traces the emergence and evolution of each. As regards international trade, Kim clearly is inclined to believe that, on the whole, free trade has tended to be beneficial for democracy. In the first place, trade has important cultural implications, spreading knowledge and “making social change a little easier.” Kim even suggests

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that there may be a “rough correlation” between foreign trade and individual freedom in a given country, comparing South Korea with nontrading North Korea, and Thailand with nontrading Burma. Trade liberalization also limits the power of the state to protect special interests—though Kim cautions against imposing trade liberalization on a nation whose democratic majority opposes it. This is a reason for proceeding via multilateral negotiations, but the failed December 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle shows that multilateralism “is in deep trouble.” Kim calls upon the United States and other mature democracies to persevere in the drive for freer trade: “Given the benefits of free trade . . . it may not be too much to hope that the campaign against globalization will help make globalization more humane rather than make it impossible.” On balance, Kim argues, the interventionist policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have also worked in favor of democracy. He is sensitive to charges that IMF policies can intrude on national sovereignty, as in the case of Suharto’s Indonesia, but argues that unless one holds “sovereignty to be an absolute, unconditional value,” the IMF cannot simply be condemned on these grounds. While IMF demands pose challenges for all regimes, he contends that democracies have proven to be more resilient than nondemocracies in surviving economic crises. The transparency and accountability required by both the IMF and private international investors also push in the direction of greater democracy, and democratic regimes “seem to be capable of taking advantage of the economic opportunities offered by market integration without losing their autonomy when it comes to policy making.” Kim concludes by noting the rapidity of Asia’s recovery from the 1997 economic crisis, but he also expresses concern about the net loss of middle-class jobs that has resulted and the threat that a shrinking middle class poses to the survival of stable democracy. In their essay, Ethan Kapstein and Dimitri Landa focus not on international economic institutions but on the effects of globalization (or economic openness) on the prospects for democracy. They note at the outset that this relationship “can play out in two different ways. On the one hand, openness promotes economic growth, which is favorable to the development and consolidation of democratic institutions. Yet on the other hand, globalization can also promote economic disruption, income inequality, and job insecurity,” leading to less growth and more social conflict. The basic thesis of their essay is that the key to determining whether globalization helps or hurts democracy lies in national domestic institutions. While not disputing the basic arguments that free trade promotes economic growth and that economic growth is favorable to democracy, Kapstein and Landa regard them as incomplete, for these arguments fail to take sufficient account of the fact that “market processes are mediated

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by existing political conditions and institutions.” If proper policy responses are not made, the income inequality that is fostered by globalization can undo the potentially positive effects of economic openness. The “losers” from globalization, if not adequately compensated, can push for the reestablishment of protectionism in the developed countries and provoke instability and unrest in the developing countries. Effective social safety nets would seem to be one logical way of addressing this problem, but they are almost impossible to create in fledgling democracies, and even in advanced industrial countries they only partially compensate displaced workers for their losses. Kapstein and Landa suggest that a more promising response, especially in developing countries, would be to create more accessible and efficient capital markets, which can bring broader opportunities for the poor and displaced and thus help increase political stability. The authors contend that “the degree of investment in and access to capital markets, especially human-capital markets, will determine a country’s trade and growth prospects, and hence its chances for strengthening its democratic institutions.” They particularly emphasize the importance of increased and better-targeted expenditures on basic education, though they recognize the difficulties of achieving this in elite-dominated fledgling democracies. Concluding with a plea for an increase in foreign assistance and its more effective use in supporting the goal of greater opportunity, Kapstein and Landa suggest that external aid may be essential for “breaking the vicious circles caused by perverse domestic institutions.”

Gazing into the Future Our volume concludes with an epilogue by Zbigniew Brzezinski that revisits a number of the themes addressed in the preceding essays. Like Kagan, Brzezinski emphasizes the preponderance of power (even the “hegemony”) of the United States and the link between American global power and the “global appeal of democracy.” He also stresses the connection of both with the apparent triumph of free-market economics. Yet rather than sounding a note of triumphalism, Brzezinski urges caution and points to the grave challenges ahead. Although he clearly approves of making democracy a central goal of American foreign policy, he notes several difficulties that are likely to be encountered in its pursuit. The first (echoing Guéhenno) is the domestic orientation of Americans and their disinclination to assume the burdens of global leadership. A second is the need to temper the immediate quest to advance democracy with the realities of global power, especially with respect to such issues as relations with China, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation. To some extent agreeing with Huntington, Brzezinski sees American leadership as “transitional”; it

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imposes, he argues, “the obligation to prepare an institutionally sound basis for the devolution of our current preponderance.” Brzezinski also questions the permanence of the ascendancy of freemarket economics. Like Kapstein and Landa, he worries about the capacity of free markets to promote “the more equitable growth crucial for economic stability as well as economic vitality.” Finally, Brzezinski cites a challenge that he considers the most difficult of all that democracy will have to face—dealing with the profound moral and political issues raised by new advances in the biological sciences that will make possible unprecedented control over “what a human being is and can be.” Prediction, of course, is always a hazardous business. Both the current international order and democracy may soon be confronted with challenges that today we can barely imagine. Only in hindsight will the true outlines of the post–Cold War era become clear. The decade of the 1990s may turn out to be a harbinger of the way the world will evolve in the twenty-first century, or it could represent a brief and bright interlude of relative peace and prosperity to be followed by raging storms and impending darkness. We cannot absolutely rule out unforeseen events that could stop globalization in its tracks (as World War I undid an earlier era of globalization), reverse the “third wave” of democracy, or lead to terrible slaughter and devastation. What we can do is to try to glimpse the forces at work in today’s world and to draw out some of their most likely consequences in the years to come. We believe that the essays gathered in this collection make an important contribution to this task and that they provide ample and useful material for reflection on some of the central questions of our own time and of the century ahead.

I The International System After the Cold War

Saved as common\warsaw.98\huntington.NEW from disc, ZS, 5/10/99. home\warsaw\huntingt.txt created by JB on 12/15/99. JB edits entered 12/17/99, 12/21/99, 1/5/2000. Saved as common\warsaw.bk\huntingt.TXT on 1/10/2000. MP edits entered by JB 1/18/2000. AAs entered by JB on 3/9/2000. READY FOR PGS, ZS 3/16. PGS created from TXT by SL on 3/16.

1 CULTURE, POWER, AND DEMOCRACY Samuel P. Huntington

Samuel P. Huntington is Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University and chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His many books include The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (1991) and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).

The international system after the Cold War differs from the Cold War

system in two critical ways. First, the alignments and antagonisms among nations are primarily shaped by culture, not by ideology. Second, the bipolar power structure of the Cold War has been replaced by a “unimultipolar” system that shows every sign of evolving into a multipolar system. I have previously treated the role of culture in contemporary global politics in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Hence this essay deals primarily with the global power structure. Let me begin, however, with a few comments on the cultural dimension of global politics. The publication in 1993 of my article on the clash of civilizations stimulated tremendous discussion and controversy in countries throughout the world.1 Much of the commentary on it was critical or worried; the article bothered people. Six years later, however, I feel vindicated: Newspaper headlines almost every day provide evidence of the centrality of culture in today’s world. Cultural identities, preferences, differences, and similarities are in considerable measure shaping post–Cold War global politics. A vast array of developments in almost all parts of the world has confirmed the validity and the usefulness of this cultural-civilizational approach. Let me just mention those that have occurred in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. For 45 years, the political dividing line in Europe was the Iron Curtain. Now that line has moved several hundred miles east and separates the peoples of Western Christianity, on the one hand, from Muslim and Orthodox peoples, on the

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other. Austria, Sweden, and Finland, countries that are culturally part of the West, had to be neutral and separated from the West during the Cold War. Now they have joined their cultural kin in the European Union (EU). Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have joined NATO and are moving toward EU membership. The formerly captive Baltic republics are now able to escape the Russian grasp and align themselves with their cultural kin to the west. In the Balkans during the Cold War, Greece and Turkey were in NATO, Bulgaria and Romania were in the Warsaw Pact, Yugoslavia was nonaligned, and Albania was an isolated sometime friend of communist China. Now Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece are coming together in what they term an “Orthodox entente.” Slovenia and Croatia are moving toward integration with Western Europe. Turkey is resuming its historic connections with Albanian and Bosnian Muslims. The old antagonism between Greece and Turkey, suppressed during the Cold War by their shared fear of the Soviet Union and communism, has once again come to the fore. Greek and Turkish fighters have challenged each other over the Aegean, and an arms race has begun on Cyprus. In 1999, the governments of the two countries, spurred in part by natural disasters, moved to temper their rivalry and to resolve their differences. It remains to be seen, however, what success they will have. Greece, in fact, is becoming, in many ways, more a partner of Russia than of its allies in NATO. The president of Greece articulated this shift quite explicitly in late 1997 when he said: “Today we do not face any threat from the North. . . . Now those countries have the same religious beliefs as we do. Today we face a cunning threat from the West . . . from the Papists and the Protestants.” 2 The EU, in turn, has put Turkey at the end of its applicant list, and Turkey’s character as a torn country has become institutionalized in the conflict between its Western-oriented military and its growing Islamist movement. The latter’s now banned political expression, the Welfare Party, had the declared objective of taking Turkey out of NATO, and its leader made his first visits abroad as prime minister not to Brussels and Washington but to Tehran and Tripoli. The military then forced his party out of power, and it was declared illegal. In the wars accompanying the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Catholic countries in Europe supported Slovenia and Croatia, Russia and Greece supported the Serbs, and Muslim countries (most actively Iran, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Turkey) provided hundreds of millions of dollars of support to the Bosnian Muslims. In early 1998, a highly predictable war between Serbs and Albanians broke out in Kosovo, and in 1999, NATO intervention for humanitarian reasons escalated into a conflict between the West and Orthodoxy. A civilizational approach obviously does not account for all major developments in world affairs. It would not, for instance, predict the

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Turkish-Israeli alliance, which is a manifestation of the power-politics principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Overall, however, the events of recent years underline the importance of cultural and civilizational factors for understanding the major changes taking place in global politics. During the past few years, some people have accused me of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. They say that because I have identified, described, and called attention to the clashes of civilizations, people will be more eager to engage in them. No prophecy, however, is in itself self-fulfilling: It depends upon what people do. In the 1950s and 1960s many serious and well-informed people predicted that a Soviet-American nuclear war was virtually inevitable. Such a war did not come about because people became aware of the possibility and took steps to prevent it from materializing. In similar fashion today, people have become aware of the danger of clashes between states or groups of different civilizations and are devoting increasing attention to the need to prevent and contain such clashes. Political leaders in a variety of countries, ranging from the president of Germany to the president of Iran, have called for a “dialogue of civilizations,” and many concerned groups have been organizing conferences and seminars to explore ways to reduce civilizational conflicts and to promote intercivilizational understanding. I get at least one invitation every week to such meetings, and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, which I chair, has launched a program to explore civilizational commonalities. The clash of civilizations thesis thus may happily turn out to be a self-defeating—or at least self-limiting—prophecy.

The New Global Power Structure While culture has particular salience for post–Cold War global politics, power is the universal and everlasting essence of all politics, and now, as in the past, power considerations shape the policies of states and relations among them. Ten years ago, as the Cold War was ending and the Soviet empire was imploding, many saw the emergence of a single-superpower world. Since then there has been much debate over whether this world is unipolar (as some have suggested), multipolar, or something else. To answer this question, it would be useful to define what is meant by these terms (or at least how I understand them). A unipolar world is one in which a single state acting unilaterally, with little or no cooperation from other states, can effectively resolve major international issues, and no other state or combination of states has the power to prevent it from doing so. A multipolar world is one in which a coalition of major powers is necessary to resolve important international issues, and if the coalition is a substantial one, no other single state can prevent

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Culture, Power, and Democracy

the coalition from acting. A uni-multipolar world is one in which resolution of key international issues requires action by the single superpower plus some combination of other major states and in which the single superpower is able to veto action by combinations of other states. My central thesis is that global politics has now moved from a brief unipolar moment at the end of the Cold War into a few unimultipolar decades on its way toward a largely multipolar twenty-first century. In the existing uni-multipolar world, the global power structure has four levels. At the top, of course, is the United States as the only superpower with unchallenged preeminence in every domain of power: economic, military, diplomatic, ideological, technological, and cultural. It is the only country with truly global interests extending to virtually every part of the world. At the second level are major regional powers who are the dominant actors in important areas of the world but whose interests and capabilities do not extend as far globally as those of the United States. These countries, which vary greatly in importance, activity, and degree of dominance, include the GermanFrench condominium in Europe, Russia in Eurasia, China in East Asia, India in South Asia, Indonesia in Southeast Asia, Iran in Southwest Asia, Israel in the Middle East, Nigeria and South Africa in Africa, and Brazil in Latin America. At a third level are secondary regional powers whose influence is less than that of the major regional powers and whose interests often conflict with those of their more powerful neighbors. These include Britain in relation to the German-French combination, Ukraine in relation to Russia, Japan in relation to China, Pakistan in relation to India, Australia in relation to Indonesia, Saudi Arabia in relation to Iran, Egypt in relation to Israel, and Argentina in relation to Brazil, with no significant secondary regional powers existing in relation to Nigeria or South Africa. Finally, at a fourth level are the remaining countries, some of which are quite important, but which exist in some sense apart from the power structure I have described.

Perceptions of the Superpower In this uni-multipolar world, the superpower is driven to act unilaterally and attempts to impose its will on other countries, creating tension and conflict, particularly with the major regional powers. Among other things, the United States has attempted or is perceived as having attempted unilaterally: • to pressure other countries to adopt American values and practices regarding human rights and democracy; • to prevent other countries from acquiring military capabilities that could counter American conventional superiority;

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• to enforce American law extraterritorially in other societies; • to grade countries according to their adherence to American standards on human rights, drugs, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, missile proliferation, and religious freedom; • to apply sanctions against countries that do not meet American standards on these and other issues; • to promote American corporate interests under the slogans of free trade and open markets; • to shape World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies to serve those same corporate interests; • to intervene in and resolve local conflicts in which it has relatively little direct interest; • to promote American arms sales abroad while attempting to prevent comparable sales by other countries; • to force out one UN secretary general and to dictate the appointment of his successor; • to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, but no one else at this time; • to threaten military action against Iraq and to prevent the easing of economic sanctions against that state; and • to categorize certain countries as “rogue states” and to exclude them from global institutions and the global economy because they refuse to kowtow to American wishes. Most importantly, in the perception of other countries, the United States has hectored and lectured them on the extent of American power, the success of the American economy, and the superiority of American principles. This was manifested in the president’s boasting about American economic vitality at the June 1997 G-7 summit in Denver, the bragging by the secretary of state that the United States is the “indispensable nation” and that “we stand tall and hence see further” than other nations, and the claim by the then–deputy secretary of the treasury that the United States is the “first nonimperialist superpower,” a claim that manages in three words to exalt American uniqueness, American virtue, and American power. The responses in other societies to these and other assertions of American superiority are as one might expect. This came dramatically to my attention in November 1997 when the Harvard Academy held a conference entitled “Conflict or Convergence: Global Perspectives on War, Peace, and International Order.” This meeting brought together scholars and experts from all the world’s major countries and regions to discuss the views of their political and intellectual elites on the existing international system. As reported by conference participants, the leaders of countries with at least two-thirds or more of the world’s people— Chinese, Russians, Indians, Arabs, Muslims, Africans—see the United States as the single greatest external threat to their societies. They do

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Culture, Power, and Democracy

not see America as a military threat; they see it as a threat to their integrity, autonomy, prosperity, and freedom of action to pursue their interests as they see fit. They see the United States as intrusive, interventionist, exploitative, unilateralist, hegemonic, hypocritical, applying double standards, engaging in what they label “financial imperialism” and “intellectual colonialism,” and pursuing a foreign policy driven overwhelmingly by domestic politics, particularly the Israeli lobby. Let me quote a few of the papers prepared for that conference. For all Indian elites, the Indian scholar reported, “The United States represents the major diplomatic and political threat. On virtually every issue of concern to India, the U.S. has ‘veto’ or mobilizational power, whether it is on nuclear, technological, economic, environmental, or political matters. That is, the U.S. can deny India its objectives and can rally others to join it in punishing India.” The sins of the United States are “power, hubris, and greed.” In the views of Russian elites, the Moscow participant said, the United States subjects Russia to a policy of “coercive cooperation,” and all Russians oppose “a world based on a dominant U.S. leadership which would border on hegemony.” In similar terms, the Beijing participant argued that Chinese leaders believe that the principal threats to peace, stability, and their country are “hegemonism and power politics,” by which they mean the United States, whose policies, they say, are designed to undermine and create disunity in the socialist states and developing countries. A distinguished Japanese diplomat spoke at the conference and argued that, after World War II, the United States pursued a constructive policy of unilateral globalism, promoting collective goods like security, trade, and economic development. Now, however, it is pursuing a policy of global unilateralism, acting alone to promote its own special interests throughout the world.3 Reactions such as these are natural. Americans believe that the world’s business is their business. Other countries believe that what happens in their own part of the world is their own business, not America’s. Or, as Nelson Mandela said, don’t try to tell us who should be our friends; we cannot accept the United States as the world’s policeman.4 In a bipolar world, the United States was welcomed by many countries as their protector against the other superpower. In a uni-multipolar world, in contrast, the world’s only superpower is automatically a threat to, and is seen as a threat by, other major powers. One by one, the major regional powers are making it clear that they do not want the United States intruding into the affairs of the regions where their interests are predominant. The government of Iran, for instance, strongly opposes the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf. If the Iranian Revolution had not occurred and the Shah’s son now ruled Iran, would his view be any different? During the Cold War, an American presence protected the

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Gulf against Soviet domination; now an American presence obstructs Iranian domination of the Gulf.

Responding to the “Hegemon” In this uni-multipolar world, the central relationship is that between the superpower and the major regional powers. Neither side is entirely happy with this relationship. The superpower would prefer a unipolar world and is continually tempted to act as if it were in one. The major regional powers would prefer a multipolar world and believe global politics is moving in that direction. A uni-multipolar world is stable only to the extent that these conflicting pulls can be balanced. In the longer term, they probably cannot be balanced, and if, as seems probable, the superpower cannot create a unipolar world, global politics will gradually evolve in the direction of a multipolar system. The United States, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has said, will have been the first, last, and only global superpower.5 State Department officials, it is reported, have become concerned with what they term “the hegemon problem,” and they should be. One can identify various possible levels of response to American superpowerdom. At a relatively low level, there are simply feelings of fear, resentment, and envy, which clearly are widespread. At a somewhat higher level, resentment may turn into dissent, with other countries refusing to cooperate with the United States. In a wide variety of instances—involving the Persian Gulf, Cuba, Libya, Iran, extraterritoriality, nuclear proliferation, human rights, and trade policies—this has clearly happened, with countries refusing to follow the policies that the United States was urging on them. In a few cases, dissent has turned into outright opposition, with countries attempting to defeat U.S. policy. The highest level of response would be collective counteraction, the formation of an antihegemonic coalition involving several major powers. An antihegemonic coalition is impossible in a unipolar world because the other states are too weak to mount it. It appears in a multipolar world only when one state becomes strong enough to provoke it. It is, however, a natural development in a uni-multipolar world, and realist international-relations theory predicts that, in such a situation, the major powers would coalesce together to balance and contain the superpower. Some incipient antihegemonic cooperation does exist. Relations among non-Western societies are, for the moment, generally improving. Gatherings occur from which the United States is conspicuously absent, including the Moscow meeting of the leaders of Germany, France, and Russia, from which America’s closest ally, Britain, was also excluded; the bilateral meetings of the heads of China and Russia and of China and India, with their ritual denunciations of hegemonism; the

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Culture, Power, and Democracy

rapprochements of Iran with Saudi Arabia and Iraq; and the highly successful Organization of the Islamic Conference meeting hosted by Iran, which coincided with the disastrous Qatar meeting on Middle Eastern economic development sponsored by the United States, to which almost no one came. Undoubtedly the single most important move toward an antihegemonic coalition, however, predates the end of the Cold War: the formation of the EU and the creation of a common European currency, the euro. Europe must come together on its own, as French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine has said, and create a counterweight to stop the United States from dominating a multipolar world. Clearly, the euro could pose an important challenge to the hegemony of the dollar in global finance. Russia’s former prime minister promulgated the so-called “Primakov doctrine” to the effect that Russia, China, and Iran must cooperate to counterbalance American hegemony—a doctrine that reportedly has substantial support across the entire Russian political spectrum. Yet the question remains as to why a more broad-based, active, and formal anti–American-hegemony coalition has not yet emerged. Several possible explanations come to mind. First, it may be too soon. Over time, the response to American hegemony may escalate from resentment through dissent to opposition and, eventually, to collective counteraction. The American hegemonic threat is less immediate and more diffuse than the threats of imminent military conquest posed in the past by European hegemons to their neighbors. Hence other powers can be more relaxed about forming a coalition to counter American hegemony. Second, while countries may resent U.S. power and wealth, they also want to benefit from them. The United States rewards countries that acquiesce to its leadership with access to the American market, exemption from sanctions of one sort or another, foreign aid, military assistance, silence about deviations from U.S. norms (as with Saudi human rights abuses and Israeli nuclear weapons), support for membership in international organizations ranging from NATO to the World Trade Organization, bribes and White House visits for political leaders, and a variety of other advantages. Given the benefits the United States can distribute, the sensible course for other countries may well be not to “balance” against the United States but to “bandwagon” with it. Over time, however, if American power declines, the benefits to be gained by cooperating with the United States will decline, as will the costs of opposing the United States. Hence, this factor reinforces the possibility that an antihegemonic coalition could still emerge in the future. Third, the international-relations theory that predicts balancing under the current circumstances is a theory developed in the context of the European system established in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. All of the countries in that system shared what they recognized as a common European culture, which distinguished them sharply from the

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Ottoman Turks and other peoples. They also took the nation-state as the basic unit in international relations and posited the legal and theoretical equality of nation-states despite their obvious differences in size, wealth, and power. Cultural commonality and legal equality facilitated the operation of a balance-of-power system (which nonetheless often functioned quite imperfectly) to counter the emergence of a hegemonic power. Global politics now, however, is multicivilizational as well as multipolar. France, Russia, and China may well have common interests in challenging U.S. hegemony, but their very different cultures are likely to make it difficult for them to organize an effective coalition to do so. In addition, the idea of the sovereign legal equality of nation-states has not traditionally played a significant role in relations among non-Western societies. Hierarchy rather than equality has more often been assumed to be the natural relation among peoples. The central questions in a relationship are: Who is Number One? Who is Number Two? At least one factor that led to the breakup of the Sino-Soviet Alliance at the end of the 1950s, for instance, surely was Mao Zedong’s unwillingness to play second fiddle to Stalin’s successors in the Kremlin. Similarly, an anti-American coalition between China and Russia is now unlikely because of Russian unwillingness to play second fiddle to a much more populous and economically dynamic China. Cultural differences, jealousies, and rivalries are hence likely to be formidable obstacles to the major powers coalescing against the superpower. Fourth, the principal source of contention between the superpower and the major regional powers is superpower intervention to limit, counter, or shape the actions of the major powers in their regions. For the secondary powers in those regions, on the other hand, superpower intervention is a potential resource to be mobilized against threats from their region’s major power. The superpower and the secondary regional powers will thus often, though not always, have converging interests against major regional powers, and secondary regional powers will have little incentive to join in a coalition against the superpower.

The Democracy Factor Let me conclude with two comments on the implications of this analysis for the relation between democracy and the international system. First, it is widely believed that democracy has an impact on the international system. The so-called “democratic peace” hypothesis holds that democracies do not fight other democracies; hence the more democratic countries there are, the greater the zone of peace in the world. This democratic peace thesis is the principal rationale of the Clinton administration’s efforts, now somewhat abated, to promote democracy

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in other countries. It has also been the subject of an immense literature and great controversy among American scholars. This thesis is, I believe, historically valid. Except for a few marginally dubious cases, democracies have not fought democracies. This could have been because until the mid-twentieth century so few democracies existed that they had little opportunity to fight one another, while for the Both the cultural and past 50 years almost all the democracies power dimensions of in the world were part of an alliance systhe post–Cold War tem dominated by the United States. Yet international system there are still, I think, good institutional are likely to complicate and ideological reasons inherent in the the further spread of nature of democracy to explain the demodemocracy in the cratic peace. There are, however, qualiworld. fying corollaries to the “democratic peace” argument. Jack Snyder and Edward D. Mansfield have argued that the evidence of the past two centuries shows that democratizing countries are more likely to engage in wars than either stable democracies or stable autocracies. 6 In addition, almost all democracies historically have been Western countries or countries heavily influenced by the West, as is the case with the two most significant non-Western democracies, India and Japan. The expansion of democracy to a wide range of nonWestern societies can lead to the rise of political leaders and movements that appeal to indigenous nationalist, religious, and often antiWestern sentiments that increase the likelihood of conflict. For these reasons, a democratizing or even democratic China would not necessarily be a friendly, unassertive, and unaggressive China. The consequences of democratization for the international system are thus mixed and ambiguous. What about the impact of the new international system on democracy? Both the cultural and power dimensions of the post–Cold War international system are likely to complicate the further spread of democracy in the world. The tremendous expansion of democracy during the past two decades has occurred largely, though not exclusively, in Western countries, Latin American countries, and countries significantly influenced by the West. It will be much more difficult to achieve democracy in the remaining undemocratic countries: China and related East Asian societies, the Muslim world, and much of Africa. American efforts to promote democracy are often resented and resisted by major regional powers, and as we move into a multipolar world, the ability of the United States to influence other countries will decline. In addition, the increasing influence of highly particularistic economic interests is weakening the centrality of human rights and democracy in American foreign policy. For those interested in promoting democracy, in short, the principal features of the current

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international system suggest the desirability of emphasizing the consolidation of democracy where it has recently taken hold, as in Central Europe and Latin America, and encouraging processes of democratization where they already exist, as in Russia, Ukraine, and other countries. NOTES 1. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1993): 22–49. 2. President Kosta Stephanapoulos, Eleftherotypia (Athens), 10 October 1997, Takis Michas, trans. 3. Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Conflict or Convergence: Global Perspectives on War, Peace, and International Order (papers presented at Academy conference, Cambridge, Mass., 12–15 November 1997). 4. Nelson Mandela, Washington Post Weekly, 24 November 1997, 15. 5. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 209. 6. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Democratization and War,” Foreign Affairs 74 (May–June 1995): 79–97.

Guehenno.pm6 created from JOD PGS by SL on 2/1. Additional ZS changes entered into PGS by SL on 2/ 2.

2 GLOBALIZATION AND FRAGMENTATION Jean-Marie Guéhenno

Jean-Marie Guéhenno is the chairman of the Institut des Hautes Etudes de Défense Nationale in Paris. He has been head of the policy planning staff in the French foreign ministry and France’s ambassador to the Western European Union. He is the author of La fin de la démocratie (published in English in 1995 under the title The End of the NationState) and L’Avenir de la Liberté: La démocratie dans la mondialisation (Flammarion, 1999). The views expressed in this article are solely his own.

The “international system” is a comforting expression which assumes

that international relations can be described according to a single unifying logic that inspires the actions of well-identified actors. This assumption may have been valid when the Cold War provided a defining issue; the world was divided into two camps, and nonalignment was itself a by-product of alignment. After the end of the Cold War, however, this assumption has become much more problematic. Is there still a defining issue that brings the world together and explains how human communities interact with one another? Do we need enemies? The idea of “us” versus “them” may well be the defining force of any human community, which begins to exist when it can draw a line between those who belong and those who do not. What specifically belongs to the Western political tradition is the idea that we need enemies to overcome our own political divisions. The ancient Chinese thought of non-Chinese not as enemies but as inferior people who were expected to pay tribute to the emperor; the Middle Kingdom existed by itself and had no need for any external challenge. (Actually, it died of that excess of self-confidence.) Yet ever since the Greeks invented the “barbarians,” the reality of political divisions between rival states has echoed the divisions of the rival cities of ancient Greece. We dream of a unity that would be achieved against a common enemy, and the Roman Empire provides us with a nostalgic model of a political unity that would match our universalistic tradition.

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This may explain why we in the “West” are so desperate to find new enemies after the end of the Cold War. The communists were convenient “barbarians”; for a short while, we could speak of the “West” in a way that would have been familiar to the citizens of Athens. We would like to find a similar threat, global enough in its scope to unify our uncertain communities. But where can we find it? Where is the convenient fault line that will give us new certainties? Today, there is no such obvious fault line, and nothing has the potential to give shape to the post–Cold War world in a way comparable to the East-West divide. Yet we still want to think in normative terms. We want to have an enemy that defines us. With the end of the Cold War, we have often been tempted to build up the new opposition between globalization and fragmentation as if it were a substitute for the old East-West divide. According to this logic, history is a battle of good against evil. Globalization and the triumph of the market are the economic consequences of the victory of democracy. The global market will give economic freedom to billions of consumers and producers in the same way that political freedom has given millions of individuals new rights. And it is tempting to see nationalism, ethnicity, and fragmentation as obstacles to that bright global future. They are all relics of the past, and as such, easy to dismiss. Yet we must go beyond that analysis. The proliferation of intrastate wars today suggests that fragmentation may be a product of globalization rather than a remnant of the past and that instead of viewing these two phenomena as opposed to each other, we should consider them linked. Moreover, we should recognize their ambiguity, acknowledging both the limits and risks of globalization and the virtues, if not of fragmentation, then of smaller entities. What is globalization, and is it really global? Is fragmentation always negative? How is stability best achieved, and war avoided? The experience of the Cold War has led us to believe that the world is a safer place when left to the supervision of a couple of superpowers acting as enforcers and stabilizers. Is that model still valid when there is no unifying issue and no enemy, and are we right to consider the evolution toward ever bigger political entities not only as inevitable but also as desirable?

Globalization and Americanization Although one of its versions was defeated when the Soviet Union and the communist system collapsed, scientism is still very much alive. We tend to understand globalization as the outcome of a linear pattern of progress, largely determined by economic forces. As technological evolution makes possible (and requires) economies of scale, human communities are expected to form increasingly larger political entities.

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The city-state was replaced by the nation-state, which has itself been overtaken by the new dimensions of industry and information technology. According to this functionalist view, the only relevant debate now is whether, in a world economy, even the continental state makes sense. Some would actually argue that the global firm does better when its actions are not impeded by the localism of states. Producers as well as consumers should be able to meet freely in the global marketplace. Political institutions are just a nuisance, which will soon be sidestepped by self-regulating authorities and transnational organizations that blur the distinction between private and public and are making public institutions increasingly irrelevant. According to this interpretation of globalization, the world is becoming an apolitical place, in which politicians are relegated to a sideshow. The reality lies elsewhere, in financial markets that get rid of Indonesia’s Suharto, force Russia to reform its economy, and are transforming even China. In fact, of course, markets only function properly if contracts are enforced and if peacekeepers and policemen ensure that a state of law prevails over violence and brute force. The global economy can work only if the world is a predictable place in which individuals and corporations know their rights and can enforce them. In other words, the apolitical world of globalization can prosper only under the aegis of a political entity, its guarantor, the United States. That is why globalization is increasingly understood to be a synonym of Americanization. Globalization has become a euphemism for a unipolar world of which Washington would be the capital. This identification between globalization and Americanization deserves further analysis because it is a source of ambiguity, misunderstanding, and resentment. Does it mean that the United States is the benevolent servant of market forces that are much stronger than any political strategy that could emerge in Washington, and that the world should be grateful to have such a benign cop? Or does it mean that globalization is an instrument of U.S. power, a new ideology that supports an imperial design, just as communism supported Soviet ambitions? Is the new science of the market merely a cover for political ambitions of the most traditional type? In developing countries, as well as in a rich country like France that prides itself on having a universal message, many people harbor this suspicion, and they resent what they see as a U.S. imperialism that threatens the identity of existing communities. Yet anybody who watches the United States today cannot fail to notice how unimperial this allegedly imperial power really is. The pervasive influence of the United States is evident in eating habits, entertainment, and clothing, as well as in the more traditional tokens of power, from Okinawa to Naples. Yet the United States is the first power in history whose imperial

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reach has been achieved not through a concerted design but almost unwittingly. The Americanization of the world often seems to result from a reaction to external events or a spillover of domestic forces rather than a projection of power and political will. In fact, the more “American” the world becomes, the less interested in “foreign” affairs American citizens seem, and the more difficult it becomes for the U.S. government to get public support for its “imperial” interests. This also is unprecedented. No previous empire has been a democracy. The American “empire” depends upon the support of its citizens, and that support, when it is forthcoming, is given for very domestic reasons, because the United States, having become an empire unknowingly, does not see itself as an empire. Actually, its foreign policy looks increasingly like the sum of the special interests promoted by specific internal groups, and the transnational nature of its influence and power means that its links with the rest of the world are increasingly formed through those particular groups. This may strengthen these links and prevent U.S. isolation, but it also presents an obstacle to any global vision. Washington may be the capital of a global empire, but it is an empire without an emperor. Yet much of the rest of the world perceives that an American empire is indeed being built and watches it with a mixture of envy and resentment. These feelings exist in spite of the absence of any grand design on the part of the United States, and perhaps even because of that absence. What fascinates and irks at the same time is the way in which Americans can reduce politics to a clash of interests, and yet maintain the vitality of the American polity. How can one reconcile the fact of globalization, which ignores borders and destroys the old social structures that mediate between the individual and the global marketplace, with this other reality, the American nation, which seems to resist globalization better than most communities? The answer probably lies in the unique history of the United States, which sees itself not as an inherited community but as a community of choice, built on a contract. American patriotism is institutional; it is less linked to a particular territory and is more global than that of most other nations, which have been shaped by the contingent forces of history, not by the free choice of their citizens. This uniqueness of the U.S. experience explains why globalization can be equated with Americanization. It also reveals the limits of globalization. Globalization is much more than the projection of U.S. influence, but it is linked to America’s particular historical experience. The attempt to present it as a universal model triggers powerful reactions from those who feel that their own community is built on more than functional choices, that its roots go beyond the free will of its citizens. This reaction is strongest in poor countries, but it is present even within the United States. It is a reaction of religion against science, one that expresses the

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need for a truth that is not determined by the utilitarian logic of individuals.

The Resurgence of Religion The collapse of scientistic ideologies has brought with it a new longing for religion (taken in its etymological meaning of that which “binds” human beings together). Both rich and poor want their lives to be determined by something more than the contingent necessities of the market and of the individual choices that it provides. The extreme freedom of the market is seen by many as an unbearable burden. Individuals long for a framework that they can interpose between themselves and the global market. They want to belong to a particular community that is not functionally determined. And this longing is not primarily determined by class considerations. It is quite striking to observe how the American Right’s insistence on “family values” parallels the moralistic claims of Jewish or Islamic fundamentalists. Retired Americans who have done well on Wall Street and feel comfortable in a California “gated community” are indeed quite different from the uprooted young men from the slums of big Third World cities who join some radical movement. The second group resents the fact that market forces have left them behind, while the first would like to believe that their success is based on a set of values that the market may reflect but does not create. Yet both groups, albeit for opposite reasons, maintain that values cannot be grounded in a purely functional logic. That belief is widely shared and is likely to get stronger. The driving force behind today’s revival of religion is not what Marx expected it to be—consolation for all those who feel they have missed their chance in this world and hope for a better life in the next. It goes much deeper and should be understood as a reaction against the functionalism of the age of progress and science. The first stage of that reaction was the collapse of communism, which could not deliver on its claim that it would scientifically improve society. A second stage may be coming, and the growth of rightist movements in highly developed capitalist societies is a symptom of that impending crisis. Unlike communism, capitalism has delivered on its promises: The increase in wealth over the past two centuries is unprecedented. Yet that economic success is not enough. Having won the scientific argument over communism, capitalism now has to convince people that a society can be based on science. The more that people question this, the more precarious capitalism’s triumph will be. This new emphasis on values and religion carries with it a great potential for violence. History teaches us that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, human beings are much more willing to die for their ideas than for their interests; interests can be bargained for, but ideas

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are the foundations of identities, and nobody wants to compromise his identity. The diplomats of the seventeenth century who negotiated the treaties of Westphalia understood this well when they confirmed the principle cuius regio, eius religio; after decades of religious wars, they decided that religion should not and could not be the organizing principle of international relations. It had to be the other way around. Princes might be able to accommodate their conflicting interests, provided that religious affiliations gave way to political considerations. We are now in the process of reversing that position. We are putting ideas, beliefs, and values first. Yet this does not mean that we should expect religious states to replace ideological states, or religious interstate conflicts to replace the ideological interstate conflicts of the twentieth century. The fault lines of religion are quite different from the fault lines of ideology, and their impact on the “international system” will not be the same. The growth of ideologies paralleled the growth of the modern state; the resurgence of religion is a sign of its weakening. We would like to believe, however, that religion provides us with a new defining issue that does not call into question the state system as we know it but only changes the reasons for conflict. In Europe, the ideas presented by Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order have found their caricature in the fear that Islamic fundamentalism is the threat of tomorrow. A North-South divide in the middle of the Mediterranean is viewed as the new front line between a tired Judeo-Christian civilization and an Islamic world on the offensive. The Bosnian conflict, the Turkish-Greek rivalry in Cyprus and the Aegean, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are the flashpoints of this new strategic contest. In South Asia, the “Islamic bomb” of Pakistan is the answer to the “Hindu bomb.” According to this theory, each great religion needs to have its own instruments of mass murder. This vision is based on some objective facts, but it misses the reality of tomorrow’s world. To draw such conclusions, we have to assume that political institutions will remain strong enough to transform these huge civilizational communities into coherent actors in the international system, and that the existing nation-states within these religious-cultural areas will overcome their differences and develop compatible policies. The rise of religion, ethnicity, and nationalism is a reaction against the abstract functional world of globalization. Yet it is an illusion to expect these powerful forces to consolidate existing states, let alone groups of states. Their logic is not territorial, and they cut across existing borders. The Cold War did not question existing states; it even consolidated them, because the East-West confrontation made “internal” disputes secondary. Today, however, the land-for-peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, the conflict over Kashmir between India and

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Pakistan, and the Dayton agreement all involve difficult negotiations over maps. The definition of the polity is at stake. Geography remains a central issue, because most people feel their personal safety begins with political control of a territory, but the definition of the territory is no longer an uncontested starting point; it is itself an object of negotiation. The political settlement cannot be separated from the geographic settlement. In other words, existing states cannot be taken for granted anymore. What is being contested is not just the nature of a specific regime that will rule a specific territory; it is the nature of its borders, and eventually the definition of the polity. These are new questions for traditional geopolitics; they erase the convenient separation between domestic and international affairs and undermine the assumption that geopolitical analysis consists in identifying the interests of existing states. The interests of states can be no more permanent than states themselves. The Cold War provided a framework that consolidated the traditional interstate system. Its end may expose previously hidden weaknesses, introducing more flexibility but also more uncertainties into the international system. Today, no issue can be deemed a defining issue, and no state can be assumed to be a permanent actor. The new forces at work—religion, ethnicity, nationalism—are symptoms of the precariousness of existing states in a world where no community can be deemed invulnerable. Religions are not creating the foundations of new continental states; on the contrary, the divisions that they reveal within existing states make superstates look even more utopian. In Europe, for instance, the attitude toward Muslims varies so much from one country to another, depending on the importance of its Muslim minorities, that this issue divides rather than unites Europeans. Confronted with the abstraction of the global economy, human communities search for closer, more concrete relationships. Even when they find them in transnational religious belief, the eventual result is fragmentation, narrower horizons that provide the reassuring proximity of a more tightly knit community, rather than the broader horizons that one might expect of new transnational solidarities.

The Challenges of the Post–Cold War System Fragmentation is the product of globalization, and the international system cannot expect to find stability by denying the increasing demands for identity, the need of human beings for belonging to a particular community. The vision of ever larger communities eventually creating a concert of “continental states” that would play the same stabilizing role played by the concert of nation-states in nineteenth-century Europe is neither realistic nor desirable. Such a change of scale would make the international system very rigid and eventually unstable. On the other

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hand, if every ethnic group were to achieve statehood, the proliferation of states would also be a source of instability and would make the world unmanageable. These tendencies will coexist in the post–Cold War system. The real issue is to make this coexistence dynamic rather than destructive, to reconcile the need for global management of global issues with the need for identity and differentiation. The international system will remain stable only through increased flexibility. Diffusion of power, if it is accompanied by the strengthening of cooperative procedures, may be a much more effective answer to globalization than the concentration of power in oversized institutions, which would progressively become incapable of managing complexity and lose the capability for global leadership. Three issues may soon test this balance between global leadership and local identities, and between the need for cooperation and the need for autonomy and self-reliance. They will decide whether the passive stability of the Cold War will be replaced by a new proactive stability and whether the coming devolution of power will effectively preempt conflicts or will lead to uncontrolled violence. These issues are: 1) the capability of Europe and the United States to share the burden and responsibilities of global management; 2) the capability of the United States and Europe to integrate China into the international system and to stabilize Asia; and 3) the capability of the United States and Europe to prevent the development of a new type of post–nation-state anarchy. Geopolitics is a very cyclical “science.” A decade ago, nobody would have predicted the present supremacy of the United States, the quick collapse of the communist system, or the Asian economic crisis. Today, it is accepted wisdom that Europe has lost its centrality. Many pundits, after having predicted that the euro would never become a reality, have cut their losses and are now confident that it will eventually fail economically and politically. Europe, in their view, has the wrong agenda, and is headed for permanent decline. My own view is that the European model, messy as it is, still has something to teach the rest of the world, and that its success or failure is of strategic importance. Europeans have been learning how to reconcile democracy and interdependence. They are trying to come to terms with the ideas that national sovereignty cannot be the ultimate goal of democracy, that a decision is legitimate only if it takes into consideration the concerns of one’s neighbors, and that limiting power may sometimes be more important than giving power to the people. This is a painful process, one that entails permanent negotiations and reduces the scope of politics because it strikes a new balance between experts and politicians. It is far from perfect and often frustrating, but ultimately efficient. The advent of the euro, which will require even closer coordination

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between the United States and Europe, opens a new phase in this process and raises new questions. Can the organized interdependence that has been achieved within Europe be extended beyond its borders? For only by combining their power and influence can the United States and Europe hope to shape the twenty-first century according to their democratic and universalist values. There is no obvious answer to this question. The European tradition and the American tradition are very similar, but also very different. The United States is indeed a “European power,” shaped by the philosophy of the Enlightenment and sharing with Europe the same fundamental values. Yet it was built in opposition to the corruption of old Europe, and rejected the cynical compromises of traditional diplomacy. It cherishes the sovereignty of the American people, and contemplates with reluctance the prospect of submitting its legal order to an external authority, whether it be the UN Security Council, the World Trade Organization, or an international court. The compromises on which contemporary Europe is building its institutions have little in common with the power politics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the Americans remain suspicious. They expect European institutions to be either weak and ineffective or a cynical camouflage for traditional balance-of-power arrangements. According to this view, American patriotism is the only true institutional patriotism. The Europeans will never be able to combine old-style national patriotism, based on history, with a European patriotism based on institutions and the democratic ambition of Europeans to be interdependent rather than dependent. These doubts are understandable, but they are based on a mistaken analysis. A long-term view of European integration shows that it has been more resilient than most of its critics expected. The real issue of the future is whether the United States will be able to develop a new post–Cold War framework for relations with the European Union that would borrow some features of the European experience. This issue is of strategic importance because Europe is the only continent with which the United States shares both a historical relationship and a moral sense of kinship. If the United States is ever to accept a more collegial management of world affairs, based on interdependence rather than sovereignty, it will be through its European connection. And continued effective involvement of the United States in world affairs is a realistic prospect only if it can share the burden—and the leadership—with like-minded countries. A unilateralist America will eventually become an isolationist America. The transatlantic relationship therefore epitomizes the tensions between globalization and fragmentation. Political will exists only when citizens maintain a sense of belonging to a particular community they can identify with, but effective action requires going beyond one’s particular community, joining forces, and managing multiple identities. The

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Europeans have started that process, but they have to go further and broaden it to a transatlantic dimension that cannot be limited just to NATO and security issues. The question whether the United States is prepared to join Europe on the path of interdependence remains open. If they do join forces, their combined influence may shape the next century; if they fail to do so, the major challenges looming on the horizon may trigger either a catastrophic return to power politics on a global scale or a period of retrenchment, which would eventually lead to chaos.

The Integration of China The biggest challenge for the post–Cold War international system is Asia and the integration of China. The management of power in a country of a billion people could not follow the same patterns as in a traditional nation-state in any case, but the challenge of sheer size becomes even more pressing with transnational economic forces pulling apart the old fabric of Chinese society. The Chinese leadership will find it increasingly hard to maintain its central control while encouraging economic initiative; the temptation will arise to use ethnic nationalism to resist pressures for democratization and to shore up a weakened center. In the coming years, China’s weight and the resources its government can mobilize to strengthen its military power will significantly increase. Although the model of a huge nondemocratic continental state does not provide a credible answer for the long-term development of the country, it is the easiest answer and the one most likely to extend the power of the existing leadership. Inventing a Chinese democracy, which would necessarily be quite different from traditional forms of democracy, would bring the country onto an unknown path that its leaders may be reluctant to take. The integration of China into a global order that fosters stability and predictability on the basis of law and common norms is by no means assured. It is not clear whether China will accept in its external relations legal and procedural disciplines that it does not yet accept in its internal organization. Will it contribute to a global legal order, or will it act as a destabilizer, capitalizing on the discontent of all those who are not satisfied with the status quo? Some of China’s high-technology exports, the support it has given to Pakistan, its maritime conflicts with most Asian countries, and its ambiguous trade practices suggest that a clear choice has yet to be made. During the Asian economic crisis, China enjoyed a temporary and superficial advantage, because it was not bound by the constraints of domestic public opinion or volatile financial markets and thus appeared to be a haven of stability. But while other Asian countries have bounced back, China’s growth is slowing, and Beijing has to confront the political implications of economic reform. In fact, the lack of accountability and

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the “crony capitalism” that have plagued other Asian economies are even worse in China, but they are hidden behind a political façade of stability; if that façade were to crumble, the economic crisis would be combined with a political crisis that would make the Indonesian upheaval look minor. China’s economic and political integration into the international system are therefore closely linked. The effective management of global interdependence will be achieved only through the strengthening of a state of law that blurs the distinction between domestic and international affairs. The Europeans, the United States, and the rest of Asia share the same interest—to avoid having either to contain or to appease China. China has to be integrated, not isolated, but its integration requires some fundamental changes in its political order. These changes can be peaceful only if they are not postponed indefinitely. The Chinese leadership must be under no illusion that it will be allowed to postpone them by playing off Europe against the United States. If these powers fail to develop a coordinated policy on this issue, China’s emergence is likely to be the first major test of the post–Cold War international system. China has enough concentrated power to resurrect the traditional world of power politics; at the same time, power within the democracies and postnational entities has been so diluted that it would be difficult to achieve a stable balance. The emergence of a Chinese superstate playing the traditional game of power politics would certainly trigger a chain reaction throughout Asia. Other states— India, Korea, and eventually Japan—would follow the same pattern, in a context of nuclear proliferation.

Preventing Anarchy The challenge of China points to a more general feature of the post– Cold War order: Globalization brings together societies and political entities that are governed by different logics. People look beyond the nation-state only when they feel confident enough about their national community, but globalization makes many people less confident, and therefore more attached to their particular community and less willing to build the overarching structures that might reconcile their need for an identity with the need for democratic management of interdependence. People who are comfortable with postnational entities will therefore have to coexist with people for whom the nation-state can still mobilize passions much more effectively than the international bureaucratic structures that try to manage globalization. This coexistence of people with widely differing historical experiences may eventually degenerate into paralysis and anarchy. The postnational structures that are being built are still weak and are not designed for crisis management; their logic is slow and procedural,

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better suited for incremental changes than for big decisions. At the same time, frustration grows when globalization is not matched by institutions that can convincingly manage it. The feeling of dependence creates a longing for independence, rather than the acceptance of interdependence. A race has started between the diffusion of power (which will eventually make the international system more flexible) and the development of a global institutional framework that can prevent this devolution of power from creating new obstacles. The more autonomy that smaller communities gain, the greater is the need for globally negotiated norms to define and regulate their relations. Without such institutions, we may feel the negative impact of globalization without enjoying its benefits. Traditional state structures will be further weakened, while international institutions, whose strength is ultimately based on the strength of their member states, will not grow stronger. New actors will occupy the resulting vacuum without being accountable to anybody, and their influence will be increased by the multiplying power of money and modern technology. Weak states will be hijacked by criminal gangs, as the emergence of a global marketplace in the absence of a global community creates new opportunities for manipulation and crime. In Russia, we can already see the links that are developing between corrupt bureaucracies and criminal gangs; where legitimate political communities are lacking, the state itself is sometimes “privatized.” It is naive to expect the free play of market forces and “global democracy” to exert an effective countervailing influence against such dangers. Both the market and democracy need strong institutions to function in a transparent and orderly way. The disappearance of structures able to mediate between the individual and the global setting will jeopardize the market as well as democracy. In the Middle East, the recent progress is very fragile, as local actors react to the forces of globalization by redefining their national identity. The challenge that Hamas represents for the traditional nationalism of Yasir Arafat is paralleled by the redefinition of Israeli domestic politics, which could destroy Prime Minister Barak’s governing coalition if the peace process is again stalled. In many other parts of the world, particularly in Africa, postcolonial nationalism is a spent force, and democratic structures have not created a new legitimacy to replace it. The weakening or quasi-disappearance of the state creates vast areas that are becoming the new terrae incognitae of a postnational world. We still believe that they can be insulated with a cordon sanitaire, but this is a double illusion. Territorial containment becomes meaningless in the world of globalization. Diseases, weapons, and people can move freely. We will find relatively high-tech weaponry in low-tech countries and low-tech poor people in high-tech countries. Eventually, terrorism will show the vacuity of a policy that would limit its ambitions to containing anarchy. Furthermore, the globalization of

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information means that we can no longer pretend to ignore what is happening in those areas of anarchy. While we may temporarily appease our conscience with cosmetic operations, in the long run a cynical policy of nonintervention will destroy democracies from within by destroying their self-respect. The more advanced parts of the world must be proactive if the dynamics of globalization and fragmentation are to be managed in a positive way. The risks of such proactive policies will be accepted only if they are broadly shared. In this respect, also, the relationship between the United States, its European allies, Russia, and Japan will determine our future. If regions that require a concerted effort from these powers, involving the whole range of policy instruments, are seen either as unimportant (Africa) or as arenas of competition (the Middle East), we will fail, and the balance between order and chaos will gradually tip toward the latter. This does not mean that the answer lies in a single unified “Western” policy. On the contrary, a truly multipolar but integrated system would be able to accommodate differences and varying degrees of involvement among its component parts. Yet this useful diversity must find its limits in the understanding that all actors share some fundamental interests, and thus should engage in an organized and continuous negotiation and abstain from unilateral actions. This would require political habits rooted in a tradition of cooperation that has to be built gradually over time.

The Worst Case Is Never the Most Likely Scenario There are many ways in which the post–Cold War system could go wrong, and the conditions that must be present to strike the right balance between the need for global leadership and the legitimate aspiration to local identities are unlikely to be met. These conditions are: 1) a constructive involvement of the United States government (and not just of its corporations) in world affairs through a continuing and deepening relationship with Europe, and the acceptance by the United States of the constraints of multilateralism; 2) a European Union capable of reconciling democracy with interdependence and of becoming an effective partner of the United States; 3) a China that manages a transition toward a new form of democracy and is successfully integrated in the global order; 4) a Russia capable of inventing a postimperial regime that organizes a true devolution of power without destroying its political institutions; 5) a Middle East in which the failing logic of the nation-state is not replaced by a new form of fundamentalism; 6) a successful policy of nonproliferation; and 7) a consolidation of the many human communities that, in the aftermath of the Cold War, have to confront the question of their own identities.

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The age of nation-states was born when the primacy of political institutions over religion was asserted by the treaties of Westphalia. This period is coming to an end, and the pessimists will argue, with good reason, that we may be entering a period comparable to the one that immediately preceded the Westphalian settlement—a time of great violence and religious wars, now made even worse by weapons of mass destruction. But the worst case is never the most likely scenario. Rather than returning to a model of the past, we may be at the beginning of a new paradigm of international relations. Most of the conditions of a stable international order depend on the invention of new political institutions. The post–Cold War world will achieve stability only if it is postnational, able to combine the leadership that traditionally has been associated with nation-states with an organized interdependence based on a global rule of law that evokes the Roman Empire rather than the modern multiplicity of national polities. This reconciliation of democratic ambitions with imperial logic brings us into uncharted territories. Shall we be able to find our bearings in this new world? There is one reassuring thought. The logic of the emerging world weakens intermediate structures and gives increased leverage and influence to individuals and nonstate actors. This new freedom is for some a source of anxiety that can lead to religious fundamentalism and fanaticism. Yet it also opens new ground for the initiative of free individuals and tremendously increases the flexibility of the global system. There are many more actors, making competing small decisions, which are then sorted on a global scale in a huge trial-and-error process. At the very moment when we have been deprived of the big issues of the Cold War, we may now be deprived of the big actors as well. And that may not always be as bad as we think.

3 INTEGRATION AND DISINTEGRATION Robert Cooper

Robert Cooper, a member of the British Diplomatic Service, is currently Head of the Defence and Overseas Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. He has previously served as head of the policy planning staff and as minister of the British Embassy in Bonn. He is also the author of The Post-Modern State and the World Order (1996). The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and should not be taken as an expression of government policy.

H

istory is full of surprises. In 1989, we were reminded of something that we forgot during the Cold War: The international system is in a constant state of flux. The revolutions of 1989 brought us not just a different set of players—one Germany instead of two, 15 new states instead of one Soviet Union—but also a different game. In Europe at least, the game is now security through cooperation instead of through conflict. Whether this will last is not yet certain; the rules are not yet clear, and this is a game that we are still not used to. It is nonetheless clear that the world will never be the same again. Behind these changes lies an evolution in the nature of the state itself. As states change, the state system changes with them—and states have been changing more than we may have noticed. The monopoly on the legitimate use of force noted by Max Weber as the essential characteristic of the state has been modified, and perhaps undermined, by the growth of international treaty commitments and multilateral cooperation. The doctrine of raison d’état has been modified by the democratic influence on foreign policy. And indeed—as the European Union (EU) shows especially clearly—the distinction between foreign policy and domestic policy has become increasingly difficult to make. In 1989, changes that had been taking place over a long time were suddenly brought to the surface. While many of these changes, which have been under way at least since the end of the Second World War, have involved increasing interdependence and integration among states,

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others have gone in the opposite direction, producing growing signs of fragmentation and disintegration. The postwar world provides striking examples of integration, above all in Europe—military integration in NATO; economic, legal, and monetary integration, and much more, through the EU.1 Aspirations to move in the same direction may be seen elsewhere in ASEAN, MERCOSUR, NAFTA, and other regional organizations. In the private sector, we have global firms, global production, and increasingly integrated global markets. In the social and cultural sphere, we have global media, global fashions, and even global grief at the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The wave of disintegration has been no less dramatic. In the first part of the postwar period, we saw the breakup of traditional colonial empires. More recently, the end of the Cold War—an event that in principle heralded an ideologically integrated world—brought with it the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. At the same time, the Warsaw Pact and COMECON also disappeared. Meanwhile, longstanding separatist movements or parties remain active in Canada, Turkey, Spain, France, the UK, and Italy (again, to name only a few). Although these phenomena may at first seem contradictory, I believe that in many respects they are essentially linked. Exploring the sources of integration and disintegration in the contemporary world can help to shed light on some of the challenges facing democracy today.

Sources of Disintegration Disintegration begins with a loss of legitimacy by the central authority, which may come about in many different ways. For the British Empire, the contradiction between the principles of liberal democracy, for which Britain itself stood, and ruling an empire of unwilling subjects proved to be too much. Loss of prestige and resources in World War II made the empire unsustainable; the liberal tradition limited the amount of force that could be used to hold it together. The breakup of the British Empire represented only limited disintegration, since it had never been governed as a single unit, though it did contain such integrative elements as the sterling area, free trade, and, in wartime, military cooperation. A second wave of disintegration, however, followed the breakup of the empire, as a number of former colonies themselves broke up. The most striking example was the partition of the Indian subcontinent, later followed by the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan. Movements toward disintegration in other former colonies, though often unsuccessful, have been fairly widespread, such as Turkish separatism in Cyprus, the movement for Tamil independence in Sri Lanka, the Biafran attempt to secede in Nigeria, and the

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attempt of Katanga to separate itself from the remainder of what had been the Belgian Congo. The breakup of the Soviet Union also began with a loss of legitimacy. What mattered was not the Communist Party’s loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the people—that had disappeared long before 1989—but its loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the leadership itself. Both the Soviet Union’s external empire in Central Europe and its internal empire could have been defended longer. The USSR had, after all, put down rebellions in East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Yet during the 1980s the point was reached where the Soviet leadership no longer had enough faith in communism to shed blood for it. In the Soviet case, like that of the British Empire, the withdrawal of the imperial authority brought two waves of disintegration. First, there was the disintegration of the empire itself. In the Soviet case, this meant the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact and the COMECON system (the military and the economic structures, respectively, of the Soviet external empire), both dependent on Soviet power. This first wave of disintegration was followed by a secondary and more radical disintegration as Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union itself broke up. Though Yugoslavia was not part of the Soviet Empire, its breakup was also a consequence of the delegitimization of communism. This second wave of postimperial disintegration occurs when an authoritarian system is replaced by a more democratic one. An authoritarian (or a colonial) state is essentially run by force. It does not rely on popular support as a democracy does. Those who obey the government do so because of the threat of coercion. Democracy, on the other hand, requires a shared identity and a strong feeling of belonging among citizens. If you are going to accept being overruled by a majority vote or paying part of your income in taxes (perhaps to be transferred to other citizens), or being conscripted and risking death in war for the sake of your fellow countrymen, then a strong feeling of community is required. It is difficult to give people the democratic right to choose their government without also allowing them to choose the community which will embody that right. Even well-established democracies may be troubled by minorities who wish to secede. This represents an especially difficult problem since minorities, by definition, can always be democratically overruled. If, however, there is a strong wish for secession among a majority of the population in a particular region, most democracies today would probably accept it, as Sweden did in the case of Norway in 1905, and as the British Government has announced it would do in the case of Northern Ireland. Precisely because these problems concern the definition of a democratic community, they must be understood as “predemocratic problems.” They must be resolved as a precondition of democratic life,

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as they cannot be solved by normal processes of democracy like elections and majority decision. Sadly, violence often plays a major role in their resolution. Democracy, or at least the end of authoritarian rule, is thus a source, perhaps the source, of disintegration. In theory, it could also be a force for integration—if the feeling of community extended across national boundaries. This was the case in the rather exceptional circumstances of German reunification (and of German and Italian unification in the nineteenth century). Today, however, such cases seem to be extremely rare. Although it is reasonable to apply the term disintegration to the processes that have occurred in the Soviet Union, the British Empire, or the Indian subcontinent, the word is in one sense misleading. Disintegration took place at the level of political structures precisely because there had been no real integration at the level of society. Or at least there had not been the degree of integration needed to create a selfsustaining community with which people identify—that is, a nation. In the past, this high degree of integration has often been achieved through the action of the state, sometimes through coercive action in suppressing local languages, cultures, and other potential sources of separatist identities. (In the case of Britain, we may think of the suppression of Scottish separatism in 1715 and 1745; in France, of the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve or the suppression of the Breton language.)2 In today’s world, with its much greater consciousness of human rights, such procedures would bring about international condemnation, perhaps accompanied by political and economic penalties. At the same time, pressures (both external and internal) for democracy are likely to grow in all countries where democracy is not yet established. Is there a contradiction here? Perhaps. Democracy requires a strong national identity, but liberalism may make it increasingly difficult to create one. In the future, we may be faced with an increasing number of weak states, or, if separatism is successful, with further waves of disintegration and a worldwide trend to “Balkanization.” It may be that the world will have to be based on something other than liberal nation-states.

Sources of Integration When we speak of integration, we are usually thinking of relationships that go beyond normal diplomatic, treaty, trade, or alliance relations and involve some intermeshing of governments, institutions, or societies (though even the most basic level of diplomatic intercourse requires the acceptance of certain common norms). Thus one would not be likely to use the word “integration” for the shifting alliances of the eighteenth century, but NATO, with its common military structures, joint force planning, standing political institutions, and enduring nature, must

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surely be described as a case of integration. The EU, with its shared lawmaking and executive institutions, is clearly an outstanding example of integration. European integration, in the form of the European Economic Community (EEC)—later the European Community and now the EU—sprang from a number of diverse factors. First, a certain political maturity may have been a precondition for the process of integration. It may seem surprising that this most far-reaching example of integration should have taken place among some of the longest-established states in the world. It should surely be easier to achieve integration among newer states with less well-established identities. In fact, however, the reverse seems to be the case. It is relatively new states that are usually most sensitive about interference in their internal affairs—which is what integration often amounts to. It may be argued from the European case that a certain confidence in national identities assists in the process of integration. Indeed, a final settlement of borders in Western Europe may have been a precondition for integration: Definition of the German-French border (through the Saarland referendum in 1955) was a key preliminary step to launching the EU. Removal of border restrictions could be envisaged only where borders were no longer in dispute. It was no less important that Europe was exhausted and demoralized in the late 1940s and early 1950s. After two devastating wars, depression, fascism, the Holocaust, and widespread collaboration with the Nazis, there was an underlying sense that the system had failed and that radical change was called for. The Second World War played another, deeper role. It put an end to the idea of a separate, special German destiny and brought Germany back into the European mainstream of Enlightenment values. This took a practical as well as a philosophical form. In the period after the war, West European countries shared more than just common values—which they had shared, up to a point, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For the first time in three centuries, they also had common systems of government. As the postwar period progressed, the governments of Western Europe all developed as stable market-oriented democracies, with a relatively high degree of social protection. This combination of common values and similar political, economic, and social systems was also an important condition for integration. Within this broad framework, each country had its own motives for finding integration attractive. For Germany, European integration offered a way to regain sovereignty (over iron and steel in the Ruhr), to achieve reentry into the international community, and eventually, by showing itself a reliable member of the Western community, to reopen the possibility of reunification. France saw integration as a way of dealing with the German problem while asserting French leadership in Europe

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(as a German commentator has remarked: “Europe is the continuation of France by other means”).3 For the Benelux countries, it was a way to acquire influence over their bigger neighbors. For Italy, it was a means of catching up with the more-developed north. Later joiners have had a variety of motives. For Spain and Portugal, the EU represented a return to the European mainstream. For Britain, and perhaps for all those who were not founding members, the EU simply became too powerful for them to stay out. Neither the political motives nor the psychological preconditions on their own would have led to the creation of the EU. An essential ingredient was the idea of integration itself—the idea that war could be prevented through unification, and that unification could be achieved through economic integration. The original six members of the EU were all countries that had been shaken by fascism, or by defeat and occupation, and were therefore ready to look for a new beginning. These circumstances prepared the ground for the idea of a united Europe. This was proposed in different forms from the 1920s onwards by people like Altiero Spinelli, developed in the wartime resistance movements as an answer to the ultranationalism of the Nazi party, and then carried forward in practical form by Jean Monnet, Paul-Henri Spaak, and Robert Schuman. One should not underestimate the importance of theories of integration and the idea of European unity. In the end, government leaders, consciously or unconsciously, make decisions on the basis of ideas about how the world can best be managed, manipulated, or controlled. (It was the discrediting of the idea of communism that led to the breakup of the Soviet Union.) Integration was driven by ideas and by governments, but not by European governments alone. The United States was a powerful force for European integration. Washington made it a condition of Marshall Plan aid that European countries should lower barriers to mutual trade. U.S. government lawyers helped Jean Monnet in drafting the treaty for the European Coal and Steel Community. Moreover, through the creation of NATO, the United States made both a direct and an indirect contribution to European integration—direct, because NATO itself has been a major element in European integration, and indirect, because solving the security problem in Europe made the launch of the thenEEC possible. Just as certainty about borders was a necessary precondition for opening them up, it was also vital for other European countries to know what the postwar defense system was going to be and how Germany would fit into it. In fact, European military, economic, and political integration may be viewed generally as a response to the problem of how to deal with Germany. As it turned out, the idea of European integration was a good idea. It worked. Removal of trade barriers contributed to the greatest prosperity

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Europe has ever known, and the political intercourse that integration involved contributed to the longest peace Europe has ever known. The movement for European integration has broadly followed the grain of economic and technological developments. The initial idea of combining German coal and French iron ore had an intuitive appeal; in practice, however, both were shortly to become dying industries that came to rely on the treaties as a means of managing their decline. The idea of a common market had a more lasting value: The basic bargain is usually described as entailing a market for French Against the apparent agricultural products in exchange for a logic of history, market for German industrial products. In NATO has not just practice, the common market has meant far survived, but more than this and has benefited all its prospered. members—especially Italy, which was perhaps the biggest economic success story of the period. Later, as American and Japanese firms took leading positions in world markets, there was a growing realization that only by operating on a continental scale could European companies develop the muscle to compete with them. This realization led to the single-market program. The influence of technology also has been important, but its workings are subtle and judgments about it are inevitably subjective. My view is that railways contributed to nationalism. A railway system, usually centered on a capital city and often state-owned, fit into a pattern of growing national consciousness. Railways made possible a mass society, a mass army, a national industry, and perhaps also a national consciousness. Railways were the dominant transportation technology until the Second World War. Since then, we have been living in the age of the automobile. Whereas railways transport people as a mass, cars transport them as individuals or families. Railways appear as part of a system of industrial production. Cars are, first and foremost, consumption goods—and this reflects a further change in the emphasis of society. Moreover, cars make border crossing much easier for both people and goods, and much more difficult for governments to control. Cars do need roads, which are built by governments, but on balance the internal combustion engine is a technology that liberates people from the state. The same will probably be true of the next generations of technology—not so much air transport, which perhaps functions more like railways than automobiles, but faxes, e-mail, and the Internet. All these have the effect of giving the individual greater independence from the state, and of making borders less relevant and systems of control by the state easier to circumvent. These are technologies that favor transnational activity.

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That second great instrument of integration, NATO, seems at first sight less original than the European Union. In fact, however, it is no less unique. A multilateral alliance, lasting over decades in a time of peace—admittedly, a threatened peace—is something unprecedented. The end of the Cold War has confirmed this. Against the apparent logic of history, NATO has not just survived, but prospered. None of NATO’s current members would contemplate leaving the alliance, and there is a long list of prospective new members. NATO seems less original than the EU because military alliances have always existed. In the past, however, they were confined to wartime. They rarely involved joint commands or common political structures. Unlike the EU, NATO evolved without the driving force of a theory. Instead, it grew out of Anglo-American military cooperation in World War II as a natural response to the external threat from the Soviet Union. Perhaps characteristically of Anglo-American political culture, the facts were created without a theory. Nevertheless, although there has been little talk in the NATO context of pooling sovereignty, that is what the alliance amounts to. Integration in the military sphere, though superficially less original, goes to the heart of what states are about. Changes in military technology did not play any obvious role in this. The dominant new feature of military technology in the postwar period has been nuclear weapons. One argument that favored an alliance was that no country within the confined space of Europe could avoid the impact of a nuclear war, but this argument does not seem to have had much influence on the development of NATO. It did not persuade either Sweden or Switzerland to join, for example. It did, however, have an impact across the Cold War dividing line in Europe. The threat of a nuclear holocaust played a role in bringing the Warsaw Pact and NATO together, through the Helsinki process, in measures designed to prevent war. This process, including the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, should be seen as an element in European integration. In conclusion, the number of factors urging Europe toward integration in the postwar period is striking. These include the victory over an explicitly nationalist ideology; the perception that the nation-state in Europe had failed; shared values and political systems; the contribution of the United States to both economic and military integration; and the economic and technological factors that made the project natural, rational, and successful. This list of factors is a warning not to expect this pattern to be replicated easily in other parts of the world. Some approaches to European integration proved to be blind alleys. Euratom has not proved to be the dynamic force that its founders conceived. The Coal and Steel Community turned out to be a cartel for regulating declining industries. The harmonization of social security foreseen in the Western European Union (WEU) treaty never took place.

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The European Defense Community was stillborn. It was fortunate that the founding fathers of the EU had several strings to their bow, since it was by no means obvious which would succeed.

Social Disintegration A word should perhaps be said about the disintegration of society. Two centuries ago, most people lived in such a way that life and work were one. In a rural village community, the life of the individual, the family, and the community were in close harmony. The community, religion, the natural world, daily work, and the seasons of the year were an integrated whole (which included dirt, hunger, misery, and disease as well as the more attractive elements depicted in pastoral paintings or novels). In an agrarian setting, there was little need for anything like a national identity; one was a part of the village community and that was sufficient. This pattern, which in some areas goes back many centuries, has been overturned by the market, industrialization, and the secularization of society. The move to the city alienated man from the land and the local community, and often from his family as well. The sale of time for money alienated man’s life from his work; the process of industrialization alienated him from his ancestors and from the traditional patterns of life that raised no questions because they offered no alternative. In these circumstances, the question of identity for the first time became one that concerned the mass of the people. While society and individual lives were thrown into turmoil by industrialization, intellectual life, values, and authority were similarly disturbed by the slow death of God. Emperors, and later kings, ruled under the authority of God. As that authority declined, so too did the authority of kings. The authority of the people came to replace them. For this to work, however, “the people” needed for the first time to be defined. Just as the problem of identity became important for individuals, legitimacy through popular sovereignty required the creation of a nation. The process of disintegration described here is, in a sense, the same process that has taken place with the collapse of communism. Like religion, communism provided an external source of legitimacy and a justification for authoritarian rule. With this gone, states have had to fall back on internal legitimation from the people themselves. Religions, by nature, are universal. So, in theory, was communism. Democratic states—also in the nature of things—are limited. Religion and communism each offered the possibility of a universal, global society; the secular state, with government based on popular consent, implies the division of mankind into nations and into states. The story of the West has been the story of the triumph of a bounded political institution (the state) over a universal social institution (the church).

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In the postreligious, postideological world, legitimacy has largely been based on nationalism and a strong sense of national identity, built upon what Ernest Renan described as “a community of solidarity born out of the consciousness of the sacrifices that have been made for it and the sacrifice that people are still willing to make.” 4 Yet the picture is still in motion. This language of collective identity, of the individual sacrificing himself for the community, seems out of date in the era of the automobile, the Internet, and satellite television. Within Europe, national identities remain, but they are increasingly complemented by regional identities and perhaps even vestigial or incipient European ones. The more sophisticated a society, the more identities its citizens are likely to have—political, professional, cultural, ethnic, and regional. When the nation was the sole focus of political life, when it defined the boundaries of the market and represented the source of both external security and internal rights, a single strong national identity was possible. In those days, the idea of sacrifice for the nation was plausible. Today, the focus is less clear and the consciousness is more complicated; few today would think in the terms that Renan described. The gradual disappearance of conscript armies may be one symptom of this. It is no coincidence that of the men who helped translate these social changes into political form in the EU, Robert Schuman and Alcide De Gasperi had both held more than one nationality and Konrad Adenauer was from Germany’s ambiguous border region.

Political Integration Every case of integration requires some central or common authority, or at least commonly accepted standards. In this sense, all integration has a political dimension. The EU single market is backed by the lawmaking processes of EU institutions and enforced by the Commission and the European Court of Justice. World trade is governed by rules established by World Trade Organization (WTO) conferences and enforced by WTO procedures for settling disputes. Among developed nations, the economic integration implied in the term globalization has been backed by common rules and standards established through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), together with numerous other standard-setting bodies. In NATO, policy choices are made by the NATO Council meeting at the level of ambassadors, foreign ministers, or defense ministers. Strategic decisions have usually been taken at NATO summit meetings. The globalization of values is pursued by bodies such as the UN Human Rights Commission and the Council of Europe. Decision-making processes remain primarily intergovernmental. Bodies such as the NATO Assembly, the WEU, or the Council of Europe Assemblies do not play a central role in decision making. This is true

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even in the case of the European Union, where the role of the European Parliament is not insignificant. At bottom, the European Union is an intergovernmental process rather than one governed directly by individual democratic choice. There are no European political parties. Both economic and military integration have been supported by cooperation and integration among administrations rather than by the integration of democratic processes. Instead, it seems that political (as opposed to administrative) processes are going in the opposite direction. As people become more educated and more conscious of their rights and freedoms, it is natural that they should want to participate in the processes that govern their lives. It is perhaps for this reason that we see growing membership in organizations like environmental groups, the sprouting of citizen initiatives, and pressures for more local autonomy. The mass politics of the nation-state worked well enough in the era of mass production and mass transportation. In an age that places a higher value on individuals and self-realization, there may be a declining readiness to accept representation through elites. Where people want to participate directly in the political process, it seems likely that politics will become increasingly local. The trend in this direction is already discernible in a number of European countries. The more people want to participate actively in politics, the smaller political units have to be. The founding fathers of the EU believed that economic integration would lead to political integration. It may turn out that exactly the opposite is the case. Economic (and military) integration may instead provide the background for political disintegration. There have always been two primary motives for the unification of states. One was military; the other, economic. The big state has two advantages over the small state—a big army and a big market. The military motive has been present throughout history. The economic motive was especially important in the nineteenth century. (Note, for example, the process of German unification through a customs union.) Within Europe, at least, it now seems that the military problems can be solved through the permanent alliance within the NATO framework, and the economic problems can be solved through the EU’s single market. Yet while economics is becoming increasingly global, and military affairs are increasingly conducted in cooperation with others, politics remains stubbornly national and may even be becoming more local. How should this contradiction be resolved? The EU has solved the problem not by political integration, as its founding fathers expected, but by depoliticizing economics. Not only is the single market managed by administrative rather than by political integration; in order to create a single currency, it has also been agreed to depoliticize monetary policy and put it in the hands of an independent central bank.

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This solution could be regarded as the triumph of economics over politics. The power of the financial markets makes it increasingly difficult for governments to operate independent monetary policies. Those who offend against orthodoxy are punished by the markets. Depoliticizing monetary policy is, in some sense, a recognition of the powerlessness of politics in this field. This is not the only area in which governments are no longer setting the agenda. In the past, it was the Roman Empire that spread Roman law, and the British Empire that spread the English language, English law, and English accounting. The international languages of the future— computer languages—will be established by private companies such as Microsoft.

The Age of Individualism The story of integration and disintegration in the postwar period is striking in a number of ways. First, there is a notable asymmetry in the cases of political integration and disintegration. Disintegration has consisted primarily of the breakup of states or empires and the creation of new states. Integration has taken place as states have combined to create common institutions, but it has not usually resulted in the creation of new states. Second, there is an asymmetry of subject matter. Economics is increasingly global and military affairs are conducted through alliances, but politics is increasingly local. The EU provides the clearest example. As the EU has gone forward, the contrast between the success of economic integration and the relative lack of political integration has become ever clearer. Markets may integrate and firms may merge, but there is no sign of European political parties emerging or of national parliaments becoming less significant relative to the European Parliament. The single market is a more potent force than the common foreign policy. At the beginning of this century, the nation-state was the focal point of legal authority, military power, and market organization. Today, authority is increasingly being divided along functional lines. In the economic sphere, some regulation takes place at the global level, some at the regional level (in Europe, at the EU level), and some at the national level. Legal authority is divided among global, regional, and national organizations. In some cases, powers may be delegated below the national level. Military operations are largely conducted with allies. Yet the nation-state remains the primary focus for democratic legitimacy and thus plays a critical role in the cooperative framework of multilateralism. This does not exclude further disintegration into smaller units. Indeed, as the wider economic and military frameworks become more firmly established and the risks of war or market disintegration become more remote, the opportunities will become greater for further

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devolution of democratic authority, and perhaps even for political disintegration. Yet as we noted at the beginning, history is full of surprises. Economics is more dynamic and politics more flexible than we sometimes imagine. Democracy may have broken up empires, but democratic values have also been a precondition for integration in Europe. Multilayered governance is clearly here to stay; it may well be that new forms of democracy will be invented to make new forms of government work. Behind this complex development of international society lies the atomization of national societies. Individuals, freed first from the village and now, increasingly, from the nation, possess increasingly complex identities. This enables them to operate with different loyalties at the regional, national, and community level, corresponding to their different concerns in the economic, political, or environmental field. It is this trend toward greater individualism that permits integration and, at the same time, brings pressures for disintegration.

NOTES 1. Although this essay has focused primarily on Europe, movements for integration are by no means confined to that continent. The success of the EU has probably been a factor in this: It has provided a model that others such as ASEAN or MERCOSUR can draw on as they choose. In any case, economic liberalization is sometimes most easily pursued on a regional basis. A further factor encouraging the growth of regional groupings is the sheer number of states. In a world of 185 or more states, it is difficult for individual small or medium-sized states to have an impact. There are therefore foreign-policy as well as economic reasons to operate in regional groups. 2. This process was described best by Rudyard Kipling in “The Anvil”: England’s on the anvil—hear the hammers ring— Clanging from the Severn to the Tyne! Never was a blacksmith like our Norman King— England’s being hammered, hammered, hammered into line! England’s on the anvil! Heavy are the blows! (But the work will be a marvel when it’s done.) Little bits of Kingdoms cannot stand against their foes. England’s being hammered, hammered, hammered into one! There shall be one people—it shall serve one Lord— (Neither Priest nor Baron shall escape!) It shall have one speech and law, soul and strength and sword. England’s being hammered, hammered, hammered into shape! 3. Christopher Coker, Twilight of the West (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998), 94. 4. Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une Nation?: et autres écrits politiques (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1996).

II The European Dimension

Schmitte.new created by SL from disk on 2/10 (6819 words). Scmitter.txt created from email (from PJC—w/ PJC edits) by SL into common/warsaw.bk on 1/10 (6395 words). MP edits entered by ZS on 1/18. Aas entered by ZS on 1/28. READY TO BE PGSd. PGS created by SL on 2/7.

4 DEMOCRACY, THE EU, AND THE QUESTION OF SCALE Philippe C. Schmitter

Philippe C. Schmitter is professor of political and social sciences at the European University Institute in Florence. He has previously taught at Stanford University and the University of Chicago and is the coeditor (with Guillermo O’Donnell and Laurence Whitehead) of Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (1986).

Europe today is paradoxically a place of both political integration and

political disintegration. Larger-scale and smaller-scale political units are becoming more prominent and taking on more functions. The “traditional” nation-state finds itself caught in the middle—challenged, as it were, from above and below. The European Union has been a major beneficiary as well as an occasional victim of these contradictory trends. Of all the institutions that have emerged since the Second World War, it alone can lay claim to creating voluntarily a “polity” on an enlarged scale. Nowhere else in the world has the attempt to create a viable middle ground between the well-entrenched nation-state and the newly emergent global system been so persistent and successful. If Europe cannot produce a “regional polity” partly to replace the nation-state and partly to resist the trend toward a universal nonstate, then no other part of the world is likely to do so. Yet why is it that the present international system seems to have such a bifurcated impact on the units that compose it, and why does this ambivalence encourage actors to experiment with both larger and smaller units of politics at the same time? I propose three working hypotheses (or better, hunches) about this issue of scale. First, the units within which Europeans acquire their social identities, around which they organize their economic activities, and through which they recognize the legitimacy of political authorities are by no means as fixed and, especially, as spatially and functionally coincident, as existing scholarship would have us believe. The last great and manifest reshuffling of these dimensions occurred following the First World War. Except for the cases of Germany and Poland, only relatively minor

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adjustments to national boundaries took place after World War II. Then in the late 1980s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire, a veritable rash of changes broke out not only in Eastern and Central Europe, but also in the republics of the former Soviet Union. Most of these new democracies emerged within their previously established borders. Some asserted new identities and seceded from larger units. Virtually all have been clamoring for membership in even larger regional units. Even internally, they have been experimenting with new forms of local, municipal, or provincial governance, although perhaps less than has been the case in Latin America or Southern Europe. Second, we may be witnessing a loosening of the military and economic imperatives that once put relatively narrow limits on the degree to which the units of production, of identity, and of authority could vary in their scale. The needs for national security and marketplace competitiveness remain, but it would seem that they no longer dictate scale so absolutely. Third, if habit is not all-confining nor technology all-constraining, it makes sense to assume that the responses of different units and levels of aggregation within Europe will vary. Some will opt for increases in scale; others, for decreases. Some will try new alternatives; others will attempt to defend existing configurations. Instead of a uniform trend— whether toward larger and larger units1 or “small is beautiful” 2—we should expect to see diversity according to the various conditions prevailing within Europe’s different cultures, countries, sectors, polities, and so forth. After 1945, West Europeans simultaneously sought to go beyond existing national units with a bewildering variety of intergovernmental organizations and international regimes, and to make important changes at subnational levels of administration and governance. In response to competition and new technologies, for instance, they expanded the scale of certain industries even as they were fostering medium-sized and small enterprises in others. Some individuals took on a more cosmopolitan “European” identity, while others revived local and parochial loyalties long thought moribund. In unprecedented numbers they moved further and further from home for purposes of employment, education, or tourism, yet most remained closely identified with their town or region of origin, and resisted assimilation into their new surroundings. Europeans adopted many aspects of U.S.-style mass culture and standardized consumption, while by and large rejecting the full-scale “Americanization” of their own more fragmented and differentiated societies. The postwar welfare state brought centralization and standardization within functional policy areas, but the implementation of these policies often meant more dependence upon territorially dispersed agencies and local actors. It is tempting to see such shifts as mere instances of democracy’s

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genius for “changing without changing” in the face of contextual pressures, but I think that there is an underlying and underrecognized problem of legitimacy here.

An Underlying Problem In its heyday, the “classic” nation-state with its single, overarching sovereign authority was the single most important unit in European culture, politics, and economics. Although it did not describe every “national” situation in Europe, the model did prescribe a stable and legitimate order. As people throughout Europe become more aware that these spheres no longer coincide plausibly in space or function, they are likely to question the authorities responsible for managing this noncoincidence. Everywhere the “goodness of fit” has diminished, and citizens sense that their capacity to produce the outcomes they desire is dwindling. Individuals and groups no longer believe that the political units that govern them, the economic units that produce valued goods, or the cultural milieus within which they live are coincident with each other and, hence, amenable to control. They have lost confidence in the assumption that those who govern at the national level can do much to affect their well-being, but they have not yet acquired sufficient faith that the subnational and the supranational levels can do better. This, I suspect, has little or nothing to do with regime type, and everything to do with the scale of politics and its relationship to production and culture. In an inchoate and intuitive fashion, different groups within society respond through what I call “experiments with scale.” Some of these take place below the national level and others take place above it. Moreover, any given set of actors may experiment with both at the same time and quite independently of one another, at least initially.3 Behind these seemingly contradictory experiments, however, it is possible to discern a growing convergence. As the recent evolution of the European Union shows, subnational and supranational actors have begun to “find each other” politically and to create alliances that do not by any means eliminate the national level, but do circumscribe its policymaking autonomy. Thus we have three levels interacting (four, if we count municipalities) within a European Union that has no “federal” constitution to assign jurisdiction among them. What is emerging is a “multilayered Euro-polity” without a clear internal hierarchy and no definitive locus of external sovereignty.4 Deliberate actions by the European Commission and its Eurocrats are partly responsible for this, but mostly it has been a matter of départements, Länder, estados autonómicos, regioni, cantons, and counties spontaneously forging alliances, forming associations, signing agreements, and implementing common

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policies across national borders, often without bothering to tell their national governments.5 This poses two critical questions for democracy. The first has to do with democratic theory, the second with democratic practice. To its eternal embarrassment, democratic theory has no ontology. It holds that any given political unit should be democratic, but has no concept of how or why any particular political unit should exist. There is no democratic reason for the existence of Portugal or Poland or any other national unit. They have all come about by undemocratic means: wars, revolutions, partitions, uprisings, or, in more fortunate cases, peaceful alliances or dynastic machinations and marriages. Appealing to the principle of “national self-determination” merely throws us back on the democratically irresolvable question of what constitutes a nation. A plebiscite can be of no help, since its outcome will hinge on a prior and never-voted-upon decision about who is eligible to participate in the first place. Economists speak of the “optimal” size for a production unit, common market, or common currency area, but “optimal” does not mean “democratic.” We political scientists do have the appealing normative principle of subsidiarity, which implies that policy (and, presumably, identity) should be based on the smallest possible unit for governing a group’s common affairs. Moreover, it is widely believed that the smaller a unit is, the greater the incentives that individual citizens will have for participating in its politics. Sadly, the evidence from elections does not seem to bear this out. There is no significant correlation between the size of a country and its voter-turnout rate. In most countries, moreover, local elections draw smaller shares of voters than national races. In all of Europe, only the Swiss vote and participate more in local than in cantonal or national elections, but Switzerland’s absolute turnout levels are perennially among the continent’s lowest. Could subsidiarity have been of any help in deciding whether the Czech Republic and Slovakia should have split apart? The “Velvet Divorce” was a product of elite power calculations, not a citizen mandate. Are these two polities more democratic apart than they would have been had they remained together? It seems doubtful to me, and in any case cannot be proven either way. Democratic practice has often assumed that the appropriate unit for democratization is some preexisting or predemocratic community, regardless of how it came about and what size it is—in other words, demos precedes demokrateia. Another way of expressing this that was very influential in Anglo-American political science during the 1960s and 1970s is the notion that, in order for a country to be democratic, it must first have a “civic culture.” Only communities with a strong common identity, high levels of mutual trust, willingness to compromise,

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and tolerance for a diversity of interests could expect to bear the intrinsic uncertainty built into “free and fair” competitive politics. Needless to say, such “civic cultures” were rare, so there were few democracies. Only the Anglo-American ones were truly secure; the Germans were still only “instrumental” in their attachment to democracy, and the Italians and Mexicans, decidedly unsuited for it.6 The experience of the democracies that have arisen since 1974 shows that this argument got things 180 degrees wrong. That citizens who at least professed civic values were more numerous in well-established democracies did not mean that those values had been predominant when those democracies were founded. It seems more plausible that the chain of causation ran the other way: A country that managed to practice democracy long enough (whatever its initial political culture) would eventually foster a civic culture that, in turn, could help preserve accountable government. What had been prescribed as a prerequisite could be better described as a product. Countries with no experience of democracy—Albania or Mongolia or Mozambique, for instance—are of course not going to have civic cultures. Yet instead of concluding that democracy can never be consolidated in such settings, we would do better to imagine that, with some virt`u (and a bit of fortuna as well), political leaders could play by democratic rules long enough to teach civic values to themselves and their fellow citizens. This same notion of a “prerequisite” has been applied to the European Union. As long as a pan-European demos is lacking, runs this logic, there is nothing the EU can or should do to overcome its “democracy deficit.” There are no Europeans, after all, but only 15 (or by some counts, 30) national demoi with which individuals identify primarily while secondarily recognizing (and even appreciating) the existence of the EU. If we look more closely at how these demoi came into existence, the perspective changes radically. Virtually none of them had an uncontested identity, much less a stable set of civic norms, before they started practicing democracy on a regular basis. France is often used as the model case of nation-state formation, but the French did not form a cultural and social community, much less a political whole, until after 1871, when their National Assembly chose republican democracy by a onevote margin. When the central government called up conscripts to fight the Prussians in 1870, most of the recruits could not speak French. If a shared national language or languages is an intrinsic part of forming a demos, it was a product of, not a prerequisite for, French democracy.

A Distinctively European Preoccupation? Europeans have long had to live with these issues of the appropriate scale of production, authority, and identity—whether they have liked it

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or not and whether they have thought about it or not. Three of the most distinctive characteristics of this small region of the world are directly and inescapably related to this problem and its “nation-state” solution: 1) Historically, Europe’s territorial, cultural, functional, proprietary, and authoritative units of demarcation have been extraordinarily varied in their size, intensity, and scope—more so than in any other world region. 2) These units have been unusually autonomous with regard to one another and have never effectively been subordinated within a single normative or political order, despite repeated attempts to do so. 3) These units have existed in close physical proximity and engaged in exceptionally high rates of social, economic, and political exchange, not to mention armed conflict. In short, there is nowhere else on the globe where such diverse units of cultural identity, economic production, and political choice have been so close together, so sensitive to one another’s actions, and so dangerous to one another’s survival. Europe, and Western Europe especially, has been a crowded and contentious place for most of its history. In these contentions, the scale of the actors involved has often been crucial in determining outcomes. All this is well known, and has been stressed repeatedly in efforts to explain why this small peninsula has had such a distinctive history and made such an enormous impact upon the rest of the world. 7 One prominent hypothesis is that all this crowdedness and contentiousness created an almost constant need to innovate and made it tempting for European states to seek outside allies, whether Ottomans, Swedes, Russians, or, more recently, Americans. European exploration and colonialism, in this view, were driven by the desire to resolve (or forestall) “internal” conflicts through external expansion, which in turn redirected additional material resources and technological stimuli back to Europe. Scale was a crucial element in this distinctive trajectory. Despite the memory of Rome and the expectation that only such a far-flung empire could realize the effective economies of scale that would permit physical security and demographic growth, modern Europe never became unified. 8 Nevertheless, the Europeans’ very success in creating a relatively stable system of sovereign national states allowed them to exploit the advantages of a wide range of scalar relationships. In hindsight, this appears at least partially attributable to Europe’s many natural topographical barriers. Mountains, marshlands, and arms of the sea divide the continent into a congeries of basins, peninsulas, and islands, each with the potential of becoming a node of ethnic or linguistic distinctiveness. Such physical features do seem unique when compared to the terrain of China, the Indian subcontinent, or the Middle East. Another, more political, way of making the same point would be to stress that, in Western Europe, the costs of incorporating new territory

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or assimilating new populations were relatively high and remained so despite improvements in military technology and communications. Here, what is peculiar is the surprisingly resilient system of states, the relatively sovereign but highly interdependent political units that emerged after 900 A.D. and at last consolidated themselves after the Thirty Years’ War. The process was far from neat, of course. It involved the elimination of many preexisting units and the rejection of many alternative systems. Western Europe has witnessed “experiments” with theocratic federations (the Holy Roman Empire), mercantile networks (the Hanseatic League), regional alliances (the Swabian Städtebund and various arrangements among Swiss cantons), matrimonial dynasties (the Habsburgs), sets of city-states (the United Provinces of the Netherlands), and empires built on conquest (Napoleon’s and Hitler’s). None of these managed to impose its logic for very long. The nation-state system became and has remained the basis of relative order and security for the region. According to one calculation, the formation of the two dozen or so units that comprised this system in 1900 had required the elimination of nearly a thousand other political units since 1400.9 Needless to say, within the sovereign units that were eventually victorious an even greater number of subnational entities with some degree of cultural, economic, or political autonomy were either eliminated or forced to conform to centrally established norms. The mainspring of Europe’s state system was the balance of power. It had the singular effect of combining unity with diversity. It encouraged widely varied and frequent exchanges among the constituent units while protecting their identities and freedom of action. Through the balance of power among several states, Western Europe attained a relatively high level of cultural and economic interdependence and even the rudiments of an international legal system. This opened up the economies of scale associated with larger units, but without the stultifying diseconomies that a land empire or single power-center might have produced. E.L. Jones goes farther and credits the system with creating a unique sort of freedom derived “from the existence of nearby countries to which one might remove or flee, where one’s religion or opinions were not obnoxious and might even be orthodox, and where the way of life was not completely unfamiliar.”10 In this context of competitive interaction and overlapping cultures, sizeable numbers of political and religious refugees, migrant workers, mercenaries, technical experts, scientists, and scholars moved from unit to unit spreading new ideas and technologies and thereby helping to make development fairly uniform across the region. “The multi-cell system possessed a built-in ability to replace its local losses, a vigorous recombination, regrowth or substitution effect. The system had its own signature and was more than the sum of its parts,” Jones continues. “The pith of the European miracle,” he

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concludes, “lies somewhere here, in politics rather than in economics.”11 This miracle, let us remember, did not include democracy—at least not until very recently, and then only with a significant element of outside help. It is especially relevant to my argument here that the European balance of power did not result in the elimination of scalar diversity. It was never purely a matter of maneuvering among a few large-scale actors, but instead tolerated (and, in the case of Belgium, even helped to create) a number of small and medium-sized units. Nor have these minor states been pawns.12 On the contrary, they have repeatedly shown themselves capable of independent action. Indeed, the important cultural, economic, and political innovations that have come from “lesser” countries show that differences in scale are not just the object of possible experimentation but may also influence the opportunity for engaging in it.

Exploring a Contemporary Dilemma But all this is “ancient history.” It may help to explain certain enduring features of scale in Europe, especially its western part, but it can hardly furnish us with an adequate framework, let alone a set of substantive hypotheses, for analyzing the contemporary dilemmas of democracy in this region. Whatever is presently transforming the scale of some of its units, freezing others in their past configurations, or encouraging experimentation with still others, it is no longer the balance of power. After World War II, the bipolarization of the world system, the permanent alignment within it of most European countries, and the subordinate role played by all of them in superpower calculations swept away the old system of flexible Eurocentric feints, interventions, and alliances. In the 1990s, globalization replaced the Cold War as the central fact of world affairs. According to the most common view, Europe is now destined to find that the scale of its units will be determined “from above” by the technological or market imperatives of a metasystem whose mainsprings are increasingly remote from the region. To be sure, some theorists of globalization grant that “atavistic” entities of identity, production, and authority will persist for a while, but argue that the effectiveness of these smaller units is waning. Their importance is increasingly symbolic, and they will eventually be replaced by better functioning, more competitive units. If they continue to exist at all, it will be as curiosities and attractions for tourists and consumers. Is this true? Are the nation-states of Western Europe fated to become little more than larger versions of Andorra and San Marino? To repeat, my hunch is that such matters of scale are not clearly predetermined by technological or market forces. My indirect evidence is the observation

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that contemporary European responses at various levels and in various domains have so far certainly not gone in any one direction. This is due, I suspect, not only to the inertia of preexisting national institutions, but also to the range of viable alternatives, which seems to be broader than anticipated. Some communities, firms, and polities have chosen to remain the same size or even to become smaller, and they have not done badly as a consequence. On the contrary, those countries that have not joined the EU have so far economically outperformed those that have. And public opinion in the relative EU newcomers Austria and Sweden now seems disillusioned with the results of having entered into such a largescale entity.

The European Union and Democracy This brings us to the EU. What has been the impact of this experiment in large-scale government upon democracy? The EU is not itself a democracy, but it has served to promote democracy at the national level, first in Southern Europe and more recently in Eastern and Central Europe.13 Yet there is reason to fear that the EU’s impact may henceforth be negative, not because it will ever consciously or directly undermine “domestic” democracy as such, but because the overall effect of the EU’s existence and activities will be to diminish “the accountability of rulers to citizens acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their representatives.”14 Given the range of the EU’s activities and powers and their functionally skewed nature, it is highly unlikely that the effects of the EU will be neutral with regard to either the type or the quality of democracy, even if the EU’s “multilayered” character means that at times these effects will cancel one another out. As far as democracy is concerned, the EU’s most salient impact is likely to be differential empowerment. Being affected by or involved with the EU will give some actors more power and others less at the national and, increasingly, even the subnational level. Roughly speaking, those institutions or individuals that are most directly subject to the “authoritative allocations” of the EU should be able to increase their influence relative to those less affected by EU policies unless—and this is a big caveat—the form or content of the EU attention actually weakens their capacity for collective action more than it would have been had they never been subject to the EU’s authority. Now, who interacts more with and is more directly subject to the authorities of the EU than its member governments, and particularly their executive branches? It is tempting, therefore, to presume that the EU’s net effect will be to strengthen the role of national executives over other national institutions that are not as closely involved with or wellinformed about the EU and its doings. This has already become an ingrained perception: Critics frequently accuse national executives of

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willfully exaggerating their EU commitments in order to force through policies over the objections of national parliaments, party comrades, and interest groups, all of which are left feeling ever more powerless and marginalized. Is it reasonable, however, to suppose that national executives would be significantly weaker in the absence of the EU? I doubt it, and can see at least five other reasons for doubting this presumption of ever-growing “executive-centeredness” under EU influence. First, an increase in the relative power of the executive branch (if indeed this is what is happening) does not necessarily strengthen the state itself. There is ample scholarship demonstrating the ineluctable tension that subsists between the government of the day and the permanent administrative structure of the state. This conflict is likely to be especially sharp in countries such as those in Western Europe, where the administrative state is run by a longstanding and highly professionalized civil service. The EU might increase or appear to increase the leverage that the temporary holders of executive power can exert in their day-to-day dealings with legislators, parties, and interest groups. Yet this does not exclude, and in some circumstances might even promote, the longer-term undermining of a given nation’s permanent government. Second, the “executive-centered” hypothesis ignores the elementary truth that political power is relational. To note only the arguments put forth by national executives is to tell at most half the story. What about all the things that national executives cannot say or do because they are entangled in the reciprocal obligations of the EU? There is every reason to believe that participation in continual intergovernmental bargaining and subjection to supranational agenda-setting have their price. Third, it leaves out the growing role that national judiciaries have assumed as a side effect of their becoming empowered by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to question the compatibility of national laws, decrees, and administrative acts with the “quasi-constitution” of the EU. Growing powers of constitutional review at the national level have supplemented and strengthened this supranational process. In countries where this “check-and-balance” was previously absent (France and Britain, for example), executive officials have been especially chagrined to find themselves thus newly constrained by their own national judiciaries. Fourth, what about the possibility that citizens, firms, associations, and movements within the member states of the EU can coalesce across national boundaries (often with the EU’s complicity, it must be added) in order to exert leverage of their own against those supposedly empowered national executives? This process does seem to be occurring, with powerful help from exchanges of information that permit national actors (and supranational bureaucrats) to argue compellingly about the Europewide consequences of actions taken by national executives. By fragmenting and restructuring the patterns of interest articulation, such

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new coalitions and information exchanges can have a dramatic effect upon assessments of the “national interest.” The fifth and final flaw in the presumption of ineluctably growing “executive-centredness” is its implicit and unrealistic denial that the choice of national-level executive officials will eventually be influenced by expectations about how a given candidate will perform at the European level. Without claiming that it has already become the norm, one can find considerable evidence not only that EU issues are beginning to make a difference (admittedly, often a negative one) in the outcome of national elections, but also that candidates are being scrutinized for their “Euro-compatibility.” Can it be an accident that far-right parties that advocate much greater “discretion” for national executives also oppose the “Europeanization” of their national politics? Are the people in these parties just too stupid to recognize that the EU promotes greater powers for the executive? Applying the same flawed assumptions as above, one could arrive at a second general conclusion: Just as the EU promotes a functional concentration of power within government agencies, so too it promotes a territorial centralization of power among levels of government. It is, after all, national governments and national governments alone that sign EU treaties, and national governments continue to send by far the most representatives to Brussels. And yet, perhaps contrary to the expectations of national authorities, subnational governments—especially at the “regional level”—seem to have found their way there and even to have been able to exploit their (admittedly less significant) exchanges with EU institutions in ways that empower them relative to their national “superiors.” Therein lies a second lesson about power in democracies: its “relativity” across levels of political aggregation. The impact of the EU in altering the relative degree of power among different levels of government could be more important than its impact on their absolute degree of power, especially if it tends to alter relativities that have been long-standing or subject to contrary trends in the past. On one point, virtually all agree: Given its functionally skewed agenda, the EU has tended both to benefit interest groups over other forms of collective political action and to benefit those categories of interests that have done the best job of organizing themselves across national borders. Concretely, this has given business an edge over labor interests and favored more specialized sectoral associations (Fachverbände) over peak associations (Dach oder Spitzenverbände). Having myself arrived at this conclusion and even accused the EC of signifying “Executive Committee for the Management of the Common Affairs of the European Bourgeoisie,”15 I now wonder whether this will continue to hold in the future. In recent years, an impressive array of “causes” and “passions” have managed to find their way to Brussels and Strasbourg (and onto the dockets of the ECJ in Luxembourg), and there are some indications

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that they may be becoming more successful at that level than they were previously within their respective national homelands. Finally, no realistic or compelling assessment of the impact of the EU on domestic democracy can afford to ignore taking counterfactuals into account. One has to begin with some plausible scenario of what national democracies might look like today if they had not benefited and suffered from several decades of European integration. To observe that party organization, ideological conviction, partisan identification, parliamentary “sovereignty,” citizen respect for authority, the prestige of politicians, the sense of political efficacy of many individuals, and so forth have been in decline in domestic democracies hardly proves that the EU is responsible for this. After all, there is abundant evidence that the same trends are afoot in other advanced capitalist, liberal democratic polities that are not members or even neighbors of the EU.

A Provisional Conclusion The impact of the large-scale experiment in EU governance upon domestic democracy is a process and not an outcome—at least not yet. This impact has changed sporadically with shifts in the functional content of the integration process and in the jurisdiction of EU institutions. Moreover, these institutions themselves have not yet come anywhere near adopting a stable and legitimate set of rules. They might even “democratize” themselves someday, which would inevitably generate even greater consequences. Looking back, it is difficult to pick out a distinctive, much less a definitive, contribution, since the net effect of the EU seems to be to complement (and probably to enhance) trends that were already affecting domestic democracies. Indeed, the entire “Euro-polity” might best be seen as nothing more than an exaggerated version of both the positive and negative features that have increasingly characterized the regimes of its member states. Existing theories of democracy all take the political unit itself as a given and so have little to say about such an “experiment with scale.” They all have the same implicit preamble: “Take an existing national state—whatever and wherever it is—and. . . .” Yet the EU is not an existing state and may never fully develop the attributes of one.16 Does this mean that we should give up on the prospects for democratizing it? Does that mean that its impact on domestic democracy is likely to be no greater than that of the myriad other international organizations? Existing practices of democracy are also not likely to be of much help. “Federalism” of one sort or another is often trotted out as the prototype, but that presupposes the existence of a central authority with a state-like monopoly of legitimate violence over a distinctive territory, something that the EU does not have. If the EU is ever to democratize,

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it will have to invent novel practices of citizenship, representation, and decision making for a very large-scale population that has already been aggregated into a resilient set of political units of varying sizes, and which as yet possesses no overriding sense of “supranational” identity.17 Then there is a final catch. Even if they do manage to devise and agree upon these novel practices, there is no guarantee that Euro-citizens will recognize them as legitimately democratic, so different will they necessarily be from any that these citizens have experienced within their own national states! NOTES 1. Here are two representative quotations. Both, incidentally, come from exiled Eastern Europeans. “One of the obvious features of the modern world is the increase in the scale of social political units.” Ernest Gellner, “Scale and Nation,” in Fredrick Barth, ed., Scale and Social Organization (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1978), 133. “Under the pressures of economics, science and technology, mankind is moving steadily toward large-scale cooperation. Despite periodic reverses, all human history clearly indicates progress in this direction.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Penguin Books, 1970), 296. 2. Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957); E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1973); Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1980). 3. I should observe that “experimenting with scale” has not been the only way of coping with the challenges and opportunities of a globalized environment. Indeed, by far the more common assumption has been that individuals, families, firms, agencies, and states would respond either by “experimenting with content” or by “experimenting with form” but leave untouched the units of their identity, interest, and authority. What I find particularly striking is, on the one hand, the perception that policy options within Europe are so limited that little is to be gained by experimenting with “unorthodox contents.” On the other hand, when one considers the regime forms that one might experiment with, the range of tolerance seems even more limited. Not only do all national polities in Western and Central Europe profess to practicing democracy (and have virtually no major parties that advocate anything else), but they have confined themselves to an extraordinarily narrow range of the type of democracy, that is, to the liberal parliamentary variant. In all the excitement about extending democracy eastward, not a single effort has been undertaken to experiment with new “post-liberal” institutions— just good, old-fashioned “normal democracy.” 4. For an analysis of the EU based on this assumption, see Gary Marks, Fritz W. Scharpf, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Wolfgang Streeck, Governance in the European Union (London: Sage, 1996). 5. According to an article that appeared in El Pais on 10 January 1993, the presidents of the estados autónomicos of Spain made 124 trips to other countries during 1992, often signing agreements with foreign governments or ministries. Rarely did they bother even to inform the national government in Madrid of the content of the “treaties,” and when they did, not only did the texts not correspond, they often ignored provisions in existing treaties signed by the Spanish government. 6. The locus classicus is Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). For some revised thoughts in which the Italian case is reinterpreted in less

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ethnocentric terms by Giacomo Sani, see Almond and Verba’s later work, The Civic Culture Revisited: An Analytic Study (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980). 7. E.L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 106. 8. Robert Wesson, The Imperial Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); and Robert Wesson, State Systems: International Pluralism, Politics, and Culture (New York: Free Press, 1978). 9. Charles Tilly, “Introduction,” in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). 10. E.L. Jones, The European Miracle, 118. 11. Ibid., 124–25. 12. In European studies, perhaps the best known contemptuous dismissal of the small countries is Barrington Moore’s: “The fact that the smaller countries depend economically and politically on big and powerful ones means that the decisive causes of their politics lie outside their own boundaries. It also means that their political problems are not really comparable to those of the large countries.” Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), xiii. Even as acute an observer of history as the late Ernest Gellner could claim: “The situation is now changed. It is the large and effective units which seem natural, and it is their breakdown and fragmentation which is eccentric and requires special explanation. Small units do indeed survive, but one may well suspect that they are parasitic on the larger ones in various ways.” Gellner, “Scale and Nation,” in Fredrik Barth, ed., Scale and Social Organization, 133. Gellner’s reference to “large and effective units” begs the question, of course. 13. I examine this in my Come democratizzare l’Unione Europea e perché (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999) and my “La démocratie dans l’Europe politique naissante: Déficit temporaire ou caract`ere permanent,” in Mario Tel`o and Paul Magnette, eds., Repenser l’Europe (Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1996), 45–68. 14. For more on this generic definition of democracy that I formulated in collaboration with Terry Karl, see our essay, “What Democracy Is . . . and Is Not,” Journal of Democracy 2 (Fall 1991): 75–88. 15. Philippe C. Schmitter and Wolfgang Streeck, “Organized Interests and the Europe of 1992,” in Norman J. Ornstein and Mark Perlman, eds., Political Power and Social Change: The United States Faces a United Europe (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1991), 46–67. 16. Philippe C. Schmitter, “Imagining the Future of the Euro-Polity with the Help of New Concepts,” in Marks, et al., Governance in the European Union, 121–50. 17. In the works cited in Note 13 above, I suggest a number of reforms—some “modest” and others “not so modest”—that might be expected to initiate this process of democratization.

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5 EASTERN EUROPE: THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT Jacques Rupnik

Jacques Rupnik, senior fellow and professor at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris, is the author of The Other Europe: The Rise and Fall of Communism in East-Central Europe (1989) and Le Déchirement des nations (1995) and the editor of International Perspectives on the Balkans (forthcoming). He was executive director of the International Commission on the Balkans, whose report Unfinished Peace was published by the Carnegie Endowment in 1996.

The democratic revolutions of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe have

been described as the culmination of the “third wave” of global democratization that began in Spain and Portugal in the mid-1970s. It is indeed tempting to see the disintegration of the Soviet empire as part of a worldwide crumbling of dictatorships. This view certainly influenced how the democratic transition in East-Central Europe has been perceived in the West (as the “end of history”) as well as by some of its protagonists. Ten years later, however, despite extensive Western efforts at democracy promotion, the democratic tide has somewhat retreated, leaving a picture of successes in Central Europe (as well as in Latin America and parts of Asia) offset by setbacks in the former Soviet Union and the Balkans (but also in China and most of Africa). In no other region of the world has the impact of international factors on democratization been as apparent as in Central and Eastern Europe. The revolutions of 1989 were characterized by two important features: First, they were made possible by the lifting of the Soviet imperial constraint. The Soviet bloc imploded, rapidly and peacefully. The falling dominoes of Soviet hegemony in East-Central Europe seemed to complete the triumph of the periphery over the center of the empire. To be sure, the roots of the ideological, political, and economic decay of the communist system go back at least to the post-1968 “restoration of order” and to continuing resistance and dissent in Central European societies, most powerfully exemplified by the Solidarity movement in Poland. Western policies, both public and private, also no doubt played a part in

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undermining the old order. Future historians will establish the proper weight to be attributed to each. Yet at the critical moment, the victim was a consenting one: Gorbachev’s decision not to back the communist regimes in East-Central Europe with military force marked the beginning of the end. Until Gorbachev came to power, the countries of East-Central Europe hardly featured in the discussions about prospects for democracy. In a 1984 article entitled “Will More Countries Become Democratic?” Samuel Huntington argued that “the likelihood of democratic development in Eastern Europe is virtually nil. The Soviet presence is a decisive overriding obstacle, no matter how favorable other conditions may be in countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland.”1 That constraint was gradually lifted under Gorbachev, finally opening the possibility for a successful transition to democracy. Second, the revolutions of 1989 were unique in that they proposed no new model of society. Imitation of existing Western models and reconnection with the precommunist past were seen as the quickest path to democracy and prosperity. The Cold War came to an end in 1989 with the triumph of the Western liberal democracies. The scale of the changes that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall was every bit as great as those that followed either of the two world wars, with one major difference: After the Cold War, there was no victor willing or able to impose a “new international order.” Neither the United States, the sole superpower, nor the European Union (EU) was willing to play that part. Instead, they served as an inspiration, a pole of attraction (“Magnet Europa,” to use Konrad Adenauer’s phrase) for the new democracies in East-Central Europe. It was only later that the prospects of integration into Western institutions began to act as an external democratizing force.

1919 and 1989 In examining the relationship between the international system and democracy-building in East-Central Europe, the most relevant historical comparison is with the situation after World War I. Then, as after 1989, liberal democracy was seen as the most desirable form of government. Then, as now, the victory of the Western powers was widely presented as the victory of democracy over autocracy. This triumphalist view is reflected in the writings of Tomás G. Masaryk, the founder of Czechoslovakia (and is in many ways echoed by his post-1989 successor as “philosopher-king,” Václav Havel). In his book World Revolution: The Triumph of Democratic Revolution (published in English under the more sober title The Making of a State2), he puts the making of a new Europe of democratic nation-states in the context of World War I, which he interprets as a conflict pitting the forces of Western democracy and

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humanism against a backward, semifeudal order of authoritarian theocracy. The phrase “end of history” was not used then, but the confidence in the forces of democratic progress echoes the democratic euphoria of the “velvet revolutions” of 1989. The new democratic states in post-1919 East-Central Europe were created in this spirit. Then, as now, the new democracies borrowed much from existing Western models. The constitution of the French Third Republic was widely imitated in Central Europe (including the Baltic states), while constitutional monarchies were established in the Balkans. (Romania, for instance, adopted a copy of the Belgian constitution.) Western guarantees to the new states created by the Versailles Treaty went hand in hand with the promotion of Western constitutional models. Yet few of these democratic regimes survived into the early 1930s. Understanding why the interwar attempts to promote democracy failed can be of relevance in assessing the chances of success today. In the aftermath of World War I, critics of the democratic triumphalism of Wilson and Masaryk raised three questions that would have a crucial bearing on the success of democratization in East-Central Europe. The first issue was raised by Oskar Jaszi, the Hungarian democrat, historian, and political figure, who identified the proliferation of unviable small states as a major obstacle to the development of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. The problem of national minorities (between a quarter and a third of the population) in the newly created states made them internally weak and also prone to conflicts with hostile neighbors. The Hungarian political philosopher István Bibó, in what remains the best work on the subject, The Misery of the Small East European States3 (1944), identified the authoritarian or fascist threat to would-be democracies arising from the tension or conflict between “the cause of the nation and the cause of freedom.” The second reason for the failure of the new Central European democracies in the interwar period was the rise of Nazi Germany, or, more generally, the imbalance between the political fragmentation of EastCentral Europe and the “weight” of an undemocratic Germany. The French conservative historian Jacques Bainville, in a book published in 1920 entitled The Political Consequences of the Peace,4 predicted the collapse of the new democracies and of the system established by the Versailles Treaty (“written by Bible readers for Bible readers”): “Amid this mix of nationalities, religions, and races, Germany alone remains concentrated, homogeneous, and relatively well-organized. Its weight, hanging over the void of Eastern Europe, threatens to shake the entire continent one day.” The third issue of importance for the fate of the interwar democracies was raised by French liberal sociologist Elie Halévy. In a lecture delivered at Oxford in 1920,5 he questioned the wisdom of redrawing the map of Europe exclusively on the basis of the principle of nationalities:

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“Simple ideas are revolutionary ideas and lead to war.” A stable order in Europe, he argued, required that the principle of self-determination be matched by that of maintaining a balance of power in Europe. These three issues provide a useful point of comparison with the post1989 transitions. 1) The viability of the Central European nation-states. Unlike their Balkan counterparts, the Central European states of the 1990s have become much more homogeneous than their predecessors of the 1920s. As Ernest Gellner once noted, Central Europe in the interwar period resembled a painting by Kokoschka, full of subtle touches of all shades. Today it has come to resemble a painting by Modigliani, made up of single-color blotches. Poland and the Czech lands are, for the first time in their history, virtually homogeneous states. The absence of major minority or border issues at least partly accounts for the relative weakness of nationalist forces and for the lack of conflict among neighboring states. Slovakia has been the exception that confirms the rule: Priorities of nation-state building (vs. Prague) and tensions with Budapest over the Hungarian minority issue were major ingredients of Vladimír Meèiar’s authoritarian populism (1991–98). In contrast to the quasi-permanent tensions among Central European states in the interwar period—described by Hugh Seton-Watson as a “private civil war”—the 1990s were marked by a modest degree of cooperation. The Visegrád group (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland), launched in February 1991, had a triple goal: to de-Sovietize Central Europe, to encourage regional cooperation, and to coordinate the process of integration into the EU. This cooperation remained limited, partly because the members had different definitions of Central Europe and different expectations. An understandable reaction against the legacy of Soviet-sponsored cooperation also played its part: After 1989, everybody was looking to the West rather than at their neighbors. Unlike the 1980s, when the rediscovery of the idea of Central Europe was important to dissident intellectual elites, the 1990s were marked in the region by a denial of identity. The Czecho-Slovak separation at the end of 1992 reduced Visegrád cooperation to a minimum—a free-trade association (CEFTA). Yet even if the Central European environment did not make a significant contribution to the democratic transition, it certainly did not hinder it—a major contrast with the situation between the wars. 2) The role of Germany. A superficial analogy would stress the contrast between a reunited Germany and an East-Central Europe even more fragmented than it was in 1919. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia are no more. The revolutions of 1989 meant the end not just of Yalta but of Versailles as well. This gives rise to a question that evokes memories of hegemony rather than prospects of democratic transition: Is a new version

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of Mitteleuropa—a German sphere of influence—in the making? Germany (both East and West) was where the interplay between Western influence and change in East-Central Europe was most obvious. It was the collapse of communism in Central Europe that helped to bring down the Berlin Wall and thus brought about the reunification of Germany. Conversely, German reunification (the change of an internationally recognized border in the name of the principle of democratic selfdetermination) established a precedent for those in East-Central Europe who considered the territorial status quo inherited from World War II to be unjust or even an obstacle to democratic transition. As important as German influence has been in the 1990s, however, it has been primarily economic rather than military, and exerted through the Bundesbank rather than the Bundeswehr. Between the wars, EastCentral Europe was divided into two camps: 1) authoritarian, “revisionist” regimes (Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania) that turned to Nazi Germany as the challenger of the Western-imposed Versailles system; and 2) would-be democracies (mainly the Little Entente: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania) that looked to the West for support and inspiration. After 1989, by contrast, Germany was seen as a model for the democratic transition, mainly because the postwar Federal Republic was widely regarded as a successful exit from totalitarianism to democracy. Historically, Germany had been seen in East-Central Europe both as a modernizing influence and as a potential threat to national identity. After 1989, however, for the first time Germany also appeared to its Eastern neighbors as a model of democracy. This points not only to a different European context but also to a different kind of German reunification: While Bismarck’s unification was, to use A.J.P. Taylor’s phrase, “the conquest of Germany by Prussia,” Kohl’s reunification was essentially the “conquest” of Prussia by West German federalism and the “Rhineland model.” No longer an obstacle to Central Europe’s integration into the democratic West, Germany has become an agent of that integration. 3) Self-determination, democracy, and the European order. In 1989, democracy returned to East-Central Europe together with national sovereignty, thus reinforcing the strong historical connection between democracy and the nation-state. Today, the counterweight to national self-determination is no longer the concern for the balance of power in Europe, but the process of European and Euro-Atlantic integration. While the former was a potential constraint on the new democracies in the interwar period, the latter has, on the whole, acted as an external democratizing force in postcommunist East-Central Europe. In sum, the three-part comparison with the failed democratic transitions of the interwar period suggests that the regional and international environment in the 1990s has been exceptionally favorable to the

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democratic transition in East-Central Europe. Russia is weak, its influence in the lands of the former Soviet bloc is shrinking, and it seems to have understood (at least under Yeltsin) that it could not democratize and remain an Today, the empire. It has given up Central Europe and now concentrates its attention on the former counterweight to Soviet republics—the so-called “near abroad.” national selfThe question for the Central Europeans thus determination is becomes: How near is Russia’s “near no longer the abroad”? Germany is more powerful but also concern for the more democratic and anchored in the West. balance of power in Its influence has thus become a strong force Europe, but the for integration in the democratic European process of European and Atlantic communities. Today there are and Euro-Atlantic no significant regional conflicts within Central Europe. A degree of regional coopintegration. eration is now seen by all the countries concerned as part of the process of “EuroAtlantic” integration, and consolidating democracy in each country is seen as part of the shared goal of regional stability. The Central European regional environment contrasts with that of Southeastern Europe in all these respects. Paradoxically, it is the countries that were the most independent of Moscow (Yugoslavia, Albania, and Romania) that have been the least successful in their transition to democracy. The “independent” or “national” communism asserted by Tito (and later, by Enver Hoxha in Albania and Nicolae Ceauºescu in Romania) proved to be an even greater handicap than sovietization, allowing postcommunist national elites to sidetrack the democratic transition. As for Germany, it has so far shown less interest in promoting the enlargement of the EU and NATO to the Balkans than to Central Europe. Finally, the regional environment in the Balkans has proven to be much less favorable to democratic transitions than in Central Europe. Over the past decade, it has been marked by instability and tensions between neighboring states: the “Wars of Yugoslav Dissolution,” the collapse of the Albanian state, the fragility of Macedonia, and, last but not least, the rivalry between Greece and Turkey. A decade after the fall of communism, a clear distinction can be made between the relative “success story” of Central Europe and the problems in the Balkans, where democratic transitions have been derailed by nationalist agendas, economic backwardness, and an unstable regional environment. It remains difficult to assess the extent to which this difference is due to external factors (including Western policies). Other factors, such as the legacies of communism, the economic situation, the state of civil society, and the degree of “homogeneity” of populations,

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not to mention older historical or cultural legacies, may in most cases have been more influential.6

From Inspiration to Integration The most important contribution of the Western democracies to bringing down the communist system was simply their existence. Throughout the Cold War, in the eyes of most East Europeans, the “really existing democracies” provided an obvious alternative to what the Soviets called “really existing socialism.” In that broad sense, 1989 was a victory for the Western political and economic system. A remarkable (though not altogether surprising) degree of consensus prevailed in East-Central Europe in the aftermath of 1989: The Western democracies were seen as a source of inspiration and as an ideological, social, and political model. In due course, Central Europeans began to differentiate between two complementary, but in some respects also competing, reference points: America and Western Europe. One of the paradoxes of post-1989 Central Europe is that the “return to Europe” (which became a “code word” for democracy and prosperity) often became identified with the American model (or “American dream”). One reason for this is that while Western Europe was still learning to speak with one voice on democratic values and foreign policy, the United States, as the victor in the Cold War, seemed more at ease in assuming its “democratic mission.” It had defeated communism in the Cold War just as it had helped defeat the ancien régime in World War I and Nazi totalitarianism in World War II. For many in EastCentral Europe, recognition of America’s “manifest destiny” as a democracy promoter and its major role in opposing Soviet totalitarianism combined to grant legitimacy to its international primacy. These perceptions provided the context in which the Central Europeans chose between competing sources of inspiration in shaping their new democratic institutions. Some of the West European bafflement at Central Europe’s “Americanophilia” in the 1990s stems from a misunderstanding of these perceptions. 1) Political and constitutional models. Although the prestige of American democracy in post-1989 Central Europe was high, little thought was given to imitating the American political or constitutional system (except perhaps in Russia, where federalism and presidentialism had some appeal among advocates of democratic reforms). American-style federalism could be of little inspiration to multinational federal states such as Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia (where the very word “federalism,” like the word “socialism,” had been discredited by the communist experience). Similarly, presidentialism, the rigid separation of powers, and the system of “checks and balances” required a shared legal and political culture that none of the postcommunist countries had. In line with the American tradition, the prime focus in U.S.-sponsored democracy-promotion efforts

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was constitution-making. The underlying assumption (as Europeans saw it) was that there is no complex human and political problem inherited from an undemocratic past or from the resurgence of ethnic tensions that cannot be fixed by a good constitution. The record on this, however, from the Balkans to the former Soviet Union, is far from convincing. One of the main lessons of the past decade is that the countries which were among the first to adopt new “democratic” constitutions (often drafted under Western supervision) were by no means the most democratic. On the contrary, the “success stories” of the democratic transitions, such as Hungary or Poland, are precisely those countries that did not hurry to adopt a new constitution but just kept amending the old one. In that process, constitutionalism—that is, the internalization by all the main political actors during the course of the debate of the binding character of a constitutional framework (albeit imperfect)—proved to be more important that the actual wording of the constitution itself. This, in the long run, is a better guarantee for the success of a democratic transition than the adoption of the best constitutional blueprint. The second main feature identified in East-Central Europe with the “American model” of democracy is emphasis on an independent judiciary and independent media. Both are obviously crucial to the distinction between democratic form and substance, between “electoral democracies” and liberal democracies. Yet recent developments in the United States have undermined the prestige of the American model in precisely those two areas. The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment process were widely perceived in East-Central Europe (and indeed, in the whole of Europe) not as a triumph of “transparency” but as an alliance of independent (liberal) media with an independent (conservative) judiciary to undermine one of the basic tenets of a democratic system—the separation between the public and private spheres. Central Europeans are particularly sensitive to this since, under the totalitarian system, citizens’ private lives were made “transparent” while the public sphere was kept “opaque.” Liberal democracy was understood to mean the opposite. In this respect at least, the new democracies of Central Europe seem more in tune with their West European counterparts. There is no single “European model,” only a variety of Western European influences. British parliamentary democracy has often been admired from afar by Central European liberal democrats. The Hungarian parliament, built on the embankment of the Danube as a copy of Westminster, is a testimony to the attraction of the British model for the late nineteenth-century Hungarian liberal gentry, of which Count Etvos, the Hungarian Tocqueville, was a leading representative. Yet it is not easy to borrow from a system based on a thousand-year-old history and an unwritten constitution. The French model (the constitution of the Fifth Republic) does not pose that sort of problem. Yet two of its features—centralization and

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the primacy of the executive over the legislature and judiciary—were not particularly attractive in East-Central Europe, where it was precisely the excesses of centralization and the abuse of unchecked executive power that had to be corrected. In the eyes of many Central Europeans in the immediate aftermath of communism, democracy was identified with weak central power. In choosing between parliamentary and presidential regimes, the Central Europeans opted for the former, while the Balkans and most of the former Soviet Union chose the latter. (Havel and Wa³êsa practiced a semipresidential system in the early 1990s, but both eventually accepted the constraints of a parliamentary constitution.) Those who advocated following the “French model”—Wa³êsa (without success), Iliescu in Romania, Tudjman in Croatia—were not necessarily the most democratic. Perhaps the most influential West European political model in the East-Central European transitions was Germany. As has been noted above, this was because the Federal Republic was widely seen by its Eastern neighbors as an example of a successful transition from totalitarianism to stable democracy. At least three features of Germany’s political system are worth mentioning in this context: decentralization of government, the role of the Federal Constitutional Court (which directly inspired its Hungarian and Czech counterparts), and most importantly, the electoral system. In contrast to the majoritarian system, which seemed unfavorable to the reemergence of party pluralism, the German system of proportional representation (PR) corresponded better to the initial post-totalitarian phase, in which each political grouping seeks to establish its identity on the political scene. The 5 percent threshold to enter parliament provided a sufficient constraint to avoid fragmentation and instability. The presence of ethnic minorities (especially in Southeastern Europe) was an additional reason for the pronounced preference for PR. The influence of the German model owes a good deal to the very active role of the German political-party foundations. Through the network that they established in Central and Eastern Europe (with offices and permanent representatives), these foundations, with varying degrees of success, have played a role in the emergence of political parties similar to the one they played in the democratic transitions in Spain and Latin America. Although newer organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy in the United States or Great Britain’s Westminster Foundation for Democracy also were active in the 1990s in giving assistance to the new democracies in East-Central Europe, the German foundations were closer geographically and were able to devote far greater resources to these efforts. 2) Socioeconomic models: market, state, and society. In the debate between the Anglo-American liberal free-market model and the continental European model of the “social-market economy,” the Central

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European elites in charge of the first phase of the transition took the side of the former. After half a century of socialist statism, they were attracted to its most radical opposite. The American model provided both free-market liberalism and the myth of a society without a state. What mattered, to put it in a somewhat simplified form, was that America stood for the superiority of the free market and the individual over the state. Hence the paradox: Chicago-school economic liberalism was introduced in Poland under the banner of a trade union called Solidarity. The architect of Poland’s “shock therapy” looked to Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs for advice, while his Czech counterpart, Václav Klaus, never missed a chance to quote Milton Friedman (or Margaret Thatcher) to justify his policies. While Western Europe was preparing the “social charter” adopted at Maastricht in 1992, the Central European debate, in the early days of postcommunism, seemed confined to one “between Hayekians and Friedmanites.”7 Two arguments were used to justify this course. One was that, in the first phase of the transition, it is too early to chose between the subtleties of existing models. As Jeffrey Sachs put it (Václav Klaus also used a similar argument): Eastern Europe will still argue over whether to aim for Swedish-style social democracy or Thatcherite liberalism. Yet Sweden and Britain have nearly complete private ownership, private financial markets, and active labor markets. Eastern Europe has none of these institutions; for it, the alternative models of Western Europe are almost identical. The second argument is that, in the context of globalization, choices become restricted and the prime goal of the transition in East-Central Europe should be integration into the international economic and political process (where open markets and democratization go hand in hand). As Sachs and Andrew Warner put it: “A global capitalist system is taking shape, drawing almost all regions of the world into arrangements of open trade and harmonized economic institutions. . . . Globalization promises to lead to convergence for the countries that join the system. . . . There is the spread of international rule of law, largely through institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the IMF. There is the spread of democracy. . . .”8 In the new divide between what Charles Maier called the “globalists” and the “territorialists,”9 the Central European liberal reformers seemed more closely identified with the former (or American) side of the argument. Yet a growing number of observers are questioning Sachs’s assumption that there is a direct connection between marketization and globalization, on the one hand, and the progress of democracy and the rule of law, on the other. The former have too often been presented as the weakening or “withering away” of the state, whereas the latter require an accountable state. The critics argue that the equation between market and democracy—indeed the very concept of “market democracy”—is

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not just too simplistic to be true; it ignores the vital importance of a functioning state and the rule of law for the market and democracy alike. Marion Dönhof, the publisher of the leading German weekly Die Zeit, describes a 1990 meeting of the editors with Jeffrey Sachs: “At the beginning of our discussion, I said I could hardly imagine the shift from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, from totalitarianism to an open society, without building the basic institutional structure. To which Sachs replied: ‘You have completely missed the point. It requires only two things: to establish private property and the deregulation of prices. The market will look after everything else.’”10 The result can be seen in Russia or Albania. The argument concerning institution building and the role of the state is also of more general relevance. In a devastating criticism of American advisers and pundits, Anatol Lieven writes that “doctrinaire free-market ideology, open theft and the collapse of state power came together” in the Russian reform process. “The seizure of state assets by the new financial elite was justified by the argument that the most important thing was to weaken the power of the state over the economy—despite the fact that the state was crumbling away. Western free marketeers, like communist ideologists, have been unable to admit that politics took precedence over the ideological plan.”11 Stephen Holmes, a specialist on Russian and East European legal reform, takes the argument one step further in an article entitled “When Less State Means Less Freedom.”12 Liberal values, he argues, are threatened just as much by a state unable to enforce its own laws as they are by despotic power. If the social contract of democracies is “no taxation without representation,” for a growing number of postcommunist pseudodemocracies the appropriate formula seems to be a deal between “unaccountable power and untaxable wealth.” According to Holmes, the Russian state (and the argument holds true for the Balkans as well) is “an illiberal state partly because it is insolvent. And it is insolvent because it is corrupt—because the norms of public service are weak, and potential taxpayers do not trust the government.” In other words, the rollback of the state is not the solution; it is the problem. To be sure, it is important to stress that “illiberal democracies” are more widespread in the former Soviet Union and the Balkans than in Central Europe. Yet the record of the past decade suggests that too often the main dilemma of the transition period has been reduced to the alternative between the free-market economy (the dismantling of the state presumably leading to democracy) and the return of communism. The main flaw in this ideological projection onto East European realities of a Western debate about the role of the market and the state is that it misreads the nature of the state under communism. As Thomas Lowitt’s studies have shown, the state under communism has little to do with its Western liberal counterparts. It is essentially the instrument (or one of

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the incarnations) of the “polymorphous Party.”13 Once the totalitarian party falls, the state itself faces disintegration. Albania represented the most extreme form of that process, collapsing from the most omnipotent totalitarian state into a Hobbesian war of all against all. “Weak states, weakly related to weak civil societies” (Holmes’s phrase) are a byproduct of the transition to democracy that must be taken into account in any discussion of the influence of European and American “models” of economy and society. 3) Civil Society: myth and realities. The emergence of a civil society, as Ernest Gellner has convincingly argued, is an essential “condition of liberty.”14 The notion that a plurality of institutions “both opposing and balancing the state, and in turn controlled and protected by the state” is vitally important for the success or failure of the democratic transition has gradually gained acceptance. Just as arguments about the rise of “illiberal democracies” focus on the absence of the rule of law, the arguments about formal democracies as empty shells stress the absence, or the weakness, of civil societies. A “civil society strategy,” as Michael Ignatieff has argued, should therefore be central to Western efforts at helping the democratic process in Eastern and Central Europe: This means funding independent media; maintaining ties not simply with governments and regimes but with their oppositions; providing aid and assistance to strengthen key institutions of civil society, the courts, judiciary, and police; developing charitable and voluntary associations so that the population ceases to look to the state and begins to look to its own strengths; developing nongovernmental channels for the delivery of Western technical aid and assistance, and educational and cultural exchanges. A civil society strategy for strengthening reform and democracy starts with the search for partners outside the state, the leading parties, and the bureaucracy.15

Although much of the thinking behind the “civil society strategy” is widely shared in the Western democracies, the impetus and the capacities to implement it vary in relation to the dynamism of civil society in the Western country concerned. Much as Germany enjoys primacy with respect to political-party foundations, so the United States has the most active foundations involved with democracy and civil society assistance. The Soros foundations, with their network all over the former communist bloc, have clearly been the most influential and have no equivalent among their European counterparts. “Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association,”16 wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America. His words still apply today. The idea of “civil society” was simultaneously rediscovered over 20 years ago by dissidents in East-Central Europe and by liberal intellectuals

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in the West. It has since become a slogan associated with the democratic revolutions of 1989, much used and sometimes abused. It poses at least three problems. First, there is a discrepancy between the myth and the reality. In the West, civil society has developed over centuries from the bottom up. Can it be introduced in postcommunist Europe quickly and promoted from above or outside? There are areas where the answer undoubtedly is yes, such as in training new elites or helping to establish policy thinktanks. Yet one should be cautious and patient about the possibilities of success in the absence of independent institutions and of social forces capable of sustaining them. Under communism, there was both a moral and a utopian element in the reinvention of the notion of civil society as an alternative community, a parallel society united against the communist regime. That version lost relevance after 1989 and was sometimes replaced by the hope of a conversion from ethical resistance to political participation, from a “counter-society” to a community of citizens. This is where old debates on “antipolitics” and on the relative merits of direct and representative democracy resurface. A second and related issue is the tendency (often encouraged by the Western agencies involved) to confuse civil society with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). NGOs are no doubt a part—but only a part—of a civil society. A discourse developed over the last decade concerning the intrinsic democratic virtues of NGOs assumes that, by definition, they are doubly “pure,” corrupted neither by the market nor by state power. Sometimes (in Serbia, Croatia, or Bosnia) NGOs have been looked upon as a substitute for a weak and fragmented political opposition. To be sure, there are cases where NGOs (substantially helped by Western partners) have made an important contribution to bringing about democratic change. Slovakia in 1998 was a remarkable example, yet one can also argue that the “NGO strategy” against the Meèiar regime in Slovakia worked precisely because a “real” civil society was more developed there than in Southeastern Europe.17 The discussion about “civil society” has considerably subsided in Central Europe in the 1990s. Meanwhile, associations of free entrepreneurs have over 800,000 members in Hungary (with only 10 million inhabitants) and a similar number in the Czech Republic. Both countries have considerably fewer NGOs (including those involved in the promotion of democracy and civil society) than, say, Romania. The postcommunist divide on this subject is between those who have an emerging civil society and those who merely talk about it. Third, in ethnically mixed areas, a civil society that allows people to cooperate along horizontal (rather than vertical) lines is crucial in order to build relations of trust and thus to help defuse conflict. Yet as the Yugoslav case abundantly illustrates, there can be no multicultural civil society without a strong state. The example of Yugoslavia suggests, as

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Michael Ignatieff put it, that “no civil society has the strength to withstand tribal or ethnic warfare once the state loses its capacity to maintain order. Invisible hands are no substitute for the magistrate’s sword.”18 If a cosmopolitan order depends on the rule-enforcing capacities of the nation-state, then the paradoxical conclusion is that the best way to promote a democratic civil society in failed or fragile states (from the Balkans to the Caucasus) is in fact . . . state-building.

Integration and Democratic Consolidation The post–Cold War predicament in Europe can be summed up as follows: The continent’s geopolitical center of gravity has shifted eastward, to the center of Europe, while its institutional center of gravity has moved to the west. NATO and the European Union have become the only game in town. It is in East-Central Europe that this tension (some would call it a contradiction) is being confronted. Joining both institutions has been identified in most of postcommunist Europe as the prime foreign-policy goal of the transition, and both institutions consider the consolidation of democracy to be a prerequisite for membership. European and Euro-Atlantic integration is therefore a unique case of a foreign-policy goal that requires internal (legal and institutional) democratic change as a precondition. Since the cases of NATO and the EU are different, let us examine each of them in turn. 1) NATO enlargement and “democratic security.” The revolutions of 1989 heralded the “return to Europe,” which was widely identified with the European Union. Ten years later, three Central European countries (Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic) have already joined NATO, while the EU enlargement process is still moving slowly, with no established target date. The European dream has begun to materialize under the auspices of the Atlantic Alliance. How can we account for this paradox, which also coincides with the candidate-members’ own priorities? First of all, it can be explained by the primacy of security concerns. Allowing East-Central Europe once again to become a security void, a no man’s land, would not bode well for the stability of the new democracies. As the situation in the former Yugoslavia has demonstrated, security is the precondition of a successful transition. Democracy, in turn, is the best way to enhance security, since democracies tend not to go to war with each other. Democratic transitions are unlikely to be consolidated if they do not establish proper socioeconomic foundations by integrating into Western economies and institutions. That, however, requires . . . security. Following this logic, joining NATO takes precedence over joining the EU.

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Second, Central Europeans perceive the United States as the guarantor of European democracy. The democratic order imposed at Versailles did not survive long after America withdrew from Europe. America’s staying in Europe after World War II allowed democracy to survive in the West and eventually created the conditions for its return to the East. Unlike some West Europeans, Central Europeans have no problems with the primacy of American power and (particularly in the case of Poland) see their own role in the region or in the Alliance as closely connected to it. They see their membership in NATO and the U.S. presence in Europe not only as a counterweight to their relationship with Russia but also as providing a framework for their new relationship with Germany. While NATO debated its new strategic concept, the East European newcomers would have been quite content with the old one: “To keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” Third, NATO is perceived in East-Central Europe as a more “valueinfused institution” (to use Aleksander Smolar’s phrase) than the EU, which (rightly or wrongly) is seen as primarily an economic institution with complicated bureaucratic procedures—a political project disguised as a currency device. Paradoxically, when in March 1999, barely a week after Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined the Alliance, NATO embarked on its first military intervention in half a century in defense of what it considered to be Western democratic values, the new members (particularly the Czechs) were anxious and perplexed. Instead of escaping Balkan instability by joining the democratic club, they had been drawn closer to it than ever. Finally, joining NATO is less demanding than joining the EU. There is, of course, an important element of democratic conditionality, but the actual preparation for enlargement concerns civilian control over the military and an official secrets act, along with the restructuring of the military itself, including English-language courses for officers. That explains why there was little public debate in the candidate countries about what the shared values and responsibilities of NATO membership entailed: The Poles (rightly) assumed overwhelming support anyway, and the Hungarians were concerned not to compromise the results of the popular referendum on membership, while the Czechs simply trusted Václav Havel. Although some objections were voiced to NATO expansion on strategic grounds, few doubted that NATO membership would enhance democratic stability in Central Europe. The only democracy-related objection concerned Russia: Would NATO enlargement undermine the (already tenuous) prospects for democracy in Russia by playing into the hands of the nationalists and the communists? The New York Times feared that expansion would be “a mistake of historic proportions”19: America (or the West) should not seek to isolate Russia or treat it as a threat but should help make it democratic, just as it did with Germany and Japan after World War II.

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This argument is unconvincing on several grounds. First, since Russia, unlike Germany and Japan, had not been militarily defeated, democracy could not be introduced or imposed there from outside. Moreover, the argument that small democratic gains for the West in Central Europe could jeopardize bigger democratic gains in Russia raises serious doubts about the latter: What kind of democrats would feel “threatened” by the consolidation of a Western, democratic anchor in Central Europe? More importantly, the persistence in Russian political culture of non-Western institutions and anti-Western attitudes casts doubt on the assumption that, except for the issue of NATO expansion, Russia is on a course of democratic convergence with the West. “Who lost Russia?” Certainly not the Central Europeans. 2) The European Union: from reluctant model to democratizing force. Joining the European Union has generally been viewed as the ultimate goal of the East-Central European transition. The post-1989 hopes for reuniting the continent became identified with the enlargement of the EU. Central Europeans, driven by a moral-superiority complex mixed with resentment, emphasized the shared European culture, civilization, and democratic values that had survived crumbling ideologies. A divided Europe, they claimed, is a Europe emptied of its substance. From Milan Kundera’s famous article about Central Europe as the “kidnapped West” to Pope John Paul II’s vision of a united Christian Europe, we can find both secular and Christian variations on this theme. The West Europeans responded with embarrassment (there is nothing to make you doubt your own democratic principles more than the discovery that several hundred million of your neighbors have suddenly converted to them!) and with concern that enlargement could empty Europe of its substance. Although the EU may have been a model for the Central Europeans, it was a reluctant one. Beyond cultural identification, the aspirants to EU membership also had a political motive. They saw integration into the EU as an indicator of the success and irreversibility of their democratic transitions. In other words, they hoped that the European Union could do for the Poles, the Czechs, and the Hungarians what it had done successfully for democratic consolidation in Spain, Portugal, and Greece. There were also economic reasons for integration—the EU was seen as a club not only of democracies but also of prosperous countries. Central Europeans looked forward to the expected benefits of the principle of solidarity and redistribution that has worked so well over the last 20 years for the benefit of the EU’s less-developed members. Moreover, as the bulk of East-Central European trade shifts to Western Europe, pressure is increasing to adopt its legal norms and institutions. No less importantly, one can argue that if economic dependency on Western Europe is the likely East European future, it will be acceptable to the

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societies concerned only if there is a parallel process of political integration among European democracies. Otherwise, the backlash of economic nationalism is always possible. Finally, there is the “democratic security” motive already mentioned in connection with NATO expansion. While NATO has a “curative” function, in that it can intervene in response to latent threats or actual conflicts, the EU has a more “preventive,” or indirect, security purpose— to create such a web of interdependence among member states as to make conflict unthinkable. Just as the EU was the fruit of Franco-German reconciliation, it should now provide the impetus to consolidate PolishGerman or Czech-German reconciliation. It can also provide the proper framework for bilateral or regional efforts to deal with the problem of national minorities. Hungary’s dealings with its neighbors “in Europe’s name” is the most successful case in point.20 Obviously, the appeal of the “European model” and the strength of the incentives for EU membership vary considerably across the postcommunist landscape. They are strong for Polish or Hungarian elites, marginal in most of the former Soviet Union, and nonexistent for Miloševiæ. In other words, the attraction of the EU depends on a mixture of factors such as geographical proximity and the orientation of postcommunist elites. The EU did not play the decisive role in whether a country followed a democratic (Central European) or authoritarian/ nationalist (“Balkan”) pattern of exit from communism; its influence was most effective where the domestic commitment to democratic reform was already strong.

Democratic Conditionality The magnitude of the international influence on the transition is related not only to the strength of the candidate’s motives for joining the “club” of Western democracies but also to the plausibility of its prospects for being admitted. The relationship in the 1990s between the East-Central European candidates and the Union went through three main phases: an initial euphoria over the “return to Europe”; the disappointment that followed the first association agreements of 1991 and the realization that membership remained a distant prospect; and a third, more “realistic” phase once the accession negotiations with the five leading candidates began in March 1998. This latter stage is where we move from indirect influence to direct leverage or democratic conditionality. Democracy is the first condition for EU membership, as was made clear in the criteria spelled out at the June 1993 EU summit in Copenhagen: 1) democracy and human rights, 2) economic readiness to join the single market, and 3) the capacity to implement EU legislation. The degree to which prospective candidates met these conditions was assessed by the EU Commission in the ten avis (“opinions”) published

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as part of Agenda 2000 in July 1997. Five countries (Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, and Estonia) were recommended for negotiations on accession. Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, and Lithuania were not included, primarily on economic grounds. Slovakia was the only country excluded on explicitly political grounds—for failing to meet the democratic criteria. “A democracy cannot be considered stable,” the Commission said about Slovakia, “if respective rights and obligations of institutions such as the presidency, the constitutional court or the central referendum commission can be put into question by the government itself and if the legitimate role of the opposition in parliamentary committees is not accepted.”21 The subsequent role of the EU as an external democratizing force must be analyzed in terms of its effect on two distinct groups of countries—those on the fast track to EU membership, and the others. The first group has entered into an Accession Partnership with the EU that clearly spells out the specific requirements for membership and provides assistance to the candidates in meeting them. Thus the PHARE program, which used to be “demand-driven” (that is, assistance was provided according to the needs of the transition, as established by the recipient), is now “accession-driven” (that is, assistance is now designed to help candidates reach the goals set by the EU as criteria for acceptance of new members). The “screening” process, with annual reports released by Commission experts, monitors each candidate’s progress in adopting the required reforms and legislation. In the fall of 1999, for instance, the progress of Hungary and, to a lesser extent, Poland was evaluated fairly positively, while that of the Czech Republic and Slovenia was considered inadequate (reform of public administration and of the judiciary are considered the main weak points). The procedure is tedious, sometimes almost humiliating, but it has been accepted, primarily for two reasons: 1) Most of these reforms (such as the establishment of an independent judiciary or civil-service reform) would be necessary for a liberal democracy even if it did not wish to join the EU. The EU constraint, in fact, can be an effective tool for governments in forcing through unpopular measures over the opposition of lobbies or established bureaucracies. 2) Even when they resent the intrusiveness of the process, Central European political elites are well aware that the domestic political costs of failure on the EU accession issue (and relegation to the second group of candidates) would be potentially high. The result is clear enough: Although Poland has had eight different governments in ten years, it has basically followed the same reform-oriented economic policy and Western-oriented foreign policy. Much the same can be said about Hungary. The accession process considerably restricts the room to maneuver of would-be members. That is precisely what some leaders in the second group of countries wished to avoid. Meèiar in Slovakia, Iliescu in Romania, and the former

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communists in Bulgaria all thought they could pay lip service to the goal of rejoining Europe while ignoring its constraints at home (as in their treatment of the media or of ethnic minorities). In late 1996 in Romania and in the spring of 1997 in Bulgaria, a mixture of economic unrest and external pressure helped democratic, reform-minded coalitions topple the former communists, but these democratic changes came too late and were too fragile to have a decisive influence on the NATO and EU enlargement process. Lack of progress on the latter front could well undermine reformers in both countries. Slovakia is certainly the clearest case so far of the effectiveness of EU democratic conditionalities. The decision in July 1997 to exclude Slovakia from the first wave of enlargement came as a shock to Slovak society and was widely seen as a verdict on Meèiar’s nationalist authoritarian regime. There was some concern before the September 1998 Slovak elections that the opposition’s use of the “European” card could backfire. Meèiar repeatedly rebuffed European interference, while accusing the opposition of damaging the country’s image abroad. But external pressure (mainly from Europe) combined with pressure from Slovak civil society helped to compensate for the weaknesses of the coalition of democratic opposition parties. In fact, the issues of EU and NATO enlargement have been a major unifying factor in an otherwise weak and divided post-Meèiar government (better described as a coalition of coalitions). Since 1998, on issues ranging from respect for the rule of law to the new language law accommodating the aspirations of the Hungarian minority, Slovakia’s desire to catch up with its Central European neighbors on the road to Europe has been a powerful incentive for democratic reforms. These conditionalities, however, can be effective only as long as the prospect of joining the EU is considered a realistic one. To a great extent, the legitimacy of several governments in the region (Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania) depends on the EU enlargement issue. Including Slovakia in the first group would stabilize the moderate reformist government there and would also be a major boost to Central European cooperation (within the Visegrád Group). The Bulgarian and Romanian cases are no less important, since the current governments, despite their limitations, are more committed to democratic, Western-oriented reforms than any of their successors are likely to be in the foreseeable future. Both countries are in danger of being ignored by the West, because, while they do not fit the Central European pattern of the first wave of enlargement, they are not conflict-ridden disaster areas requiring the imposition of an international protectorate (as in Bosnia or Kosovo-Albania-Macedonia). Neglecting Bulgaria and Romania could prove counterproductive for the West, since it is precisely the success or failure of countries like these, which might go either way, that could have a positive “snowball effect” on the rest of Balkans.

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The Balkan wars and their consequences challenge the hitherto prevailing concept of EU enlargement. Paradoxically, the failed states in the Balkans, where protectorates are being established, could find themselves more closely associated with the EU than are the Central European candidates for enlargement. This would mean integration not through shared democratic and market institutions, but through conflict and protectorates. Such a development could have two unfavorable consequences: First, it could slow down even further the EU enlargement process in Central Europe, simply because political and financial priorities would be shifted toward the emergencies in Southeastern Europe. Second, it could make the task of democratic consolidation even harder for countries like Bulgaria and Romania, which are being asked to cooperate in the EU-sponsored Balkan Stability Pact launched in the summer of 1999 while waiting patiently—perhaps for more than a decade—for EU membership. Such a policy risks widening the gulf (already apparent during NATO’s Kosovo intervention) between the pro-Western political elites now in power in these countries and the rest of society, and may thus inadvertently prepare the return of nationalist populists. If there are no tangible dividends from a policy course identified with the democratic West, there could well be an authoritarian, nationalist, antiWestern backlash. History moves faster than politics, which moves faster than institutions. The war in Kosovo, and more generally the Balkan crisis, should lead the European Union to rethink its enlargement policy. Democratic conditionalities will create a positive dynamic of “democratic contagion” only if the prospects for integration remain credible—that is, if they are seen as moving forward. Granting political membership promptly to the consolidated democracies of Central Europe (while working out a schedule for the continuation of economic reform and legal harmonization) could be a powerful incentive to democratic reforms in the countries of the “second circle” (from Lithuania and Latvia to Bulgaria and Romania).22

The EU and the New Democracies The interplay between EU integration and the democratic transformation of East-Central Europe poses three large issues. The first concerns the relationship between democracy, sovereignty, and the nation-state in East-Central Europe and the specific nature of the EU as a political entity. After a history marked by the discontinuity of statehood and four decades as satellites of the last colonial empire, the nations of East-Central Europe have recovered their sovereignty and democracy. Yet they are told that their democratic future in the EU requires them to abandon part of that sovereignty to an institution whose democratic modus operandi, transparency, and accountability are not always

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obvious, even to citizens of its current member-states. This is more than simply a matter of a democratic model confronting its own “democratic deficit.” The EU was built on the principle of consensus, not that of majoritarian democracy. Its culture derives from a permanent process of negotiations among member states whose aim is to create a community built on interdependence and trust. Hence the confusion between the means and the ends, the process and the goal, the journey and the destination. Hence also the concern voiced by critics within the EU about creating a political void where legal procedures substitute for political content. The question posed by the EU to its member-candidates is this: Can they endorse and internalize this culture of negotiation, compromise, and the pooling of sovereignties? The question reopened by the enlargement of the EU to include the new democracies is: Does the nation-state remain the framework par excellence of democracy? If it does not, then what is the supranational (European) or subnational (regional) dimension of democracy? Second, after a decade of democratic transition there are already clear signs, even in the Central European countries considered “success stories,” of democratic fatigue—low election turnout, diminishing trust in the institutions of representative democracy, and contempt for political parties. The new democracies of the Eastern part of the continent already seem to be suffering from the same ills as the established democracies of Western Europe. The crisis of political representation, the gulf between political elites and the electorate, and the rise of populist parties (from the Italian Northern League or Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria to their Slovene and Slovak counterparts) are all now trans-European phenomena. Democracy is not the only “contagion” that could spread to East-Central Europe. Finally, we must note the distinction between the borders of European democracy (the EU) and the borders of Europe itself. The EU can be considered in some respects as a functional equivalent in Central Europe of the Habsburg Empire—it is meant to neutralize tensions among the Central Europeans, but also to provide a balance and a framework for their relationship with Germany. Yet there is an essential difference as well: The EU is a reluctant “empire” that grows through the expansion of democracy and the market economy. A new map of the continent has been in the making since 1989, the contours of which remain uncertain. The new dividing lines are drawn not by imperial or great-power ambitions but by a differentiation process among postcommunist transitions. These transitions, as has become clear in most of the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, do not always lead to democracy. Hence a series of questions arises: How far can, or should, democratic Europe expand? What do the new, enlarged borders of democratic Europe imply for the future fate of democracy beyond those borders? Every inclusion is by definition also an exclusion. The EU en-

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largement process thus raises the question about its relationship with Russia and Turkey,23 two semi-European countries too large for comfort, which are unlikely any time soon to become Western-style democracies acceptable for membership. What kind of relations or partnerships can be established to help democratic change there? The EU is unlikely to be decisive in either case. It can, however, make a difference on the periphery of Central and Southeastern Europe. The relations that will be established between the “ins” and the “outs” in the EU enlargement process will, therefore, be of utmost importance. Will a “soft” border concept prevail, making the Central European newcomers to the EU a factor in promoting democracy further east and south? Or will “hard” borders (such as the “external” borders created by the 1993 Schengen Accords) be imposed on the new members (who perceive them as a reallocation of risks and constraints upon the weakest members of the Union), thus creating de facto a new dividing line further east. Such a policy not only risks reinforcing the feeling of exclusion, it also could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, actually hastening the destabilization or failure of the democratic transition on Europe’s eastern periphery. Nobody can yet tell what the eastern borders of democratic Europe will be, and that is for the best. It is crucial that the democratic enlargement of the European Union remain an open process where it is the nature of the project that shapes the borders, and not the other way around. NOTES 1. Samuel P. Huntington, “Will More Countries Become Democratic?” Political Science Quarterly 99 (Summer 1984): 217. 2. Tomás G. Masaryk, The Making of a State: Memoirs and Observations, 1914– 1918, Henry Wickham Steed, ed. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1927). 3. István Bibó, Mis`ere des petits Etats d’Europe de l’Est (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986), 115. 4. Jacques Bainville, Les conséquences politiques de la paix (Paris: La Nouvelle Librarie Nationale, 1920), 19. 5. See the reprint of Elie Halévy’s lecture in Commentaire (Spring 1992): 125–27. 6. These internal factors are spelled out in more detail in Jacques Rupnik, “Eastern Europe A Decade Later: The Postcommunist Divide,” Journal of Democracy 10 (January 1999): 57–62. 7. Timothy Garton Ash, “Eastern Europe: The Year of Truth,” New York Review of Books, 15 February 1990. 8. Jeffrey D. Sachs and Andrew Warner, Economic Reform and the Process of Global Integration (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995), 63. 9. Charles Maier, “Territorialisten und Globalisten. Die neuen ‘Parteien’ in den heutingen Demokratien,” Transit (Vienna) 14 (Spring–Summer 1997): 5–14.

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10. Marion von Dönhof, “Co ohro•uje otevøenou spoleènost,” Pøítomnost (Prague), March 1997, 16. 11. Anatol Lieven, “History is Not Bunk,” Prospect (October 1998): 24. 12. Stephen Holmes, “When Less State Means Less Freedom,” Transitions 4 (September 1997): 66–77. 13. See Thomas Lowitt, “Le parti polymorphe en Europe de l’Est,” Revue française de science politique 4–5 (October 1979): 812–46; and also “Y-a-t-il des Etats en Europe de l’Est?” in Revue française de sociologie 2 (April–June 1977): 431–64. 14. Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (London: Penguin, 1994). 15. Michael Ignatieff, “On Civil Society: Why East European Revolutions Could Succeed,” Foreign Affairs 74 (March–April 1995): 129. 16. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Henry Reeve, trans., Phillips Bradley, ed. (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1994), vol. 2, 106. See also the theoretical literature on democracy promotion, especially Larry Diamond, “Promoting Democracy in the 1990s: Actors, Instruments, and Issues,” in Axel Hardenius, ed., Democracy’s Victory and Crisis: Nobel Symposium 1994 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Thomas Carothers, Assessing Democracy Assistance: The Case of Romania (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment, 1996). 17. See Martin Bútora and Zora Bútorová, “Slovakia’s Democratic Awakening,” Journal of Democracy 10 (January 1999): 80–95. The authors speak of a “civil archipelago” with its networks of NGOs as crucial for the defeat of the Meèiar regime. It remains to be seen how effective they will be as partners (or critics) of the new government’s democratic agenda. 18. Michael Ignatieff, “On Civil Society,” 135. 19. “NATO and the Lessons of History,” The New York Times, 29 April 1998. 20. After 1919, Hungary sacrificed democracy for the goal of changing borders. After 1989, it opted for a European democratic strategy that aimed at a devaluation of borders in order to establish closer ties with Hungarian minorities in neighboring states. 21. Heather Grabbe and Kirsty Hughes, Enlarging the EU Eastwards (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1998), 46. 22. At the December 1999 EU summit in Helsinki, these countries were included as “candidates” and the two groups were merged. Each candidate will be assessed on its “merits,” which means back to differentiation. 23. In December 1999, the EU acknowledged the legitimacy of Turkey’s application to join the organization. Although it has been reluctant to expand into Central Europe, it now suggests the possibility of expanding into the Middle East, with prospective borders with Iran, Iraq, and Syria.

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6

THE ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY Adam Daniel Rotfeld

Adam Daniel Rotfeld, who received his Ph.D. in 1969 from Poland’s Jagiellonian University, is director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), an international think tank in Sweden devoted to the study of security, arms control, and conflict resolution. A member of diverse academies and boards, he is the editor of the SIPRI Yearbook 1999: Armament, Disarmament, and International Security and the volume From Helsinki to Istanbul and Beyond: Analysis and Documents of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1973–99 (2000).

The emergence of democracy promotion during the 1990s as a high

priority for many states and international bodies has raised a series of fundamental questions: To what extent does the goal of promoting human rights and democracy justify intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign state? Should matters of human rights and the rights of minorities, as well as the closely associated right of peoples to selfdetermination and a democratic order (pluralism and the rule of law), even be considered “internal” affairs, especially when rights violations are massive and severe? If we agree that the international community cannot tolerate such violations, then who is to decide how states may be coerced into respecting the rights that are being violated, including the rights of their own citizens? All these questions raise an issue that is more basic still: To what extent should human rights, political pluralism, and the rule of law be acknowledged as universal tenets undergirding the new internationalsecurity system that is rising from the ruins of totalitarianism? This question is all the more salient now, given current debates about the durability of the system that was created by the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. By marking the definitive recognition of sovereign states as sole actors on the international scene, Westphalia put an end to medieval aspirations toward universalism and ushered in a new epoch in world affairs. The resulting nation-state system, which has played a central role in the functioning of the

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international regime for more than three centuries, now faces a severe challenge. Relations in the contemporary world are being shaped, on the one hand, by centripetal processes such as globalization and integration and, on the other, by the centrifugal phenomena of state fragmentation and erosion. In 1997, when Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued his first report on the work of the UN, he defined some of the key forces that are transforming the world and thus the UN agenda. The secretary-general listed the ethnic conflicts that erupted after the end of the Cold War and the breakup of several multiethnic states. He went on to mention globalization, the most profound source of international transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Also discussed were the growing importance of information technologies such as the Internet, the intensification of global environmental interdependence, the transnational expansion of civil society, and the closely related trend toward democratization and respect for human rights (120 countries now hold free and fair elections, the highest number in history). Finally and less happily, Annan listed the expanding global networks of “uncivil society,” meaning gangsters, drug traffickers, money launderers, and international terrorists. Paradoxically, integrative trends are accompanied by rising fragmentation. Yet as Annan correctly noted, “[i]n some instances, what appears to be fragmentation is in fact a move towards decentralization in policymaking and administration due to the desire for greater efficiency, effectiveness and accountability, thus posing no grounds for concern.”1 In some parts of the world, fragmentation is a by-product of the Cold War’s end and the erosion of state power. Weak or collapsing states with few or no deep-rooted democratic institutions are particularly susceptible to domestic conflicts of an ethnic, religious, or otherwise communal nature. In extreme situations, as in Albania, BosniaHerzegovina, Cambodia, and Rwanda, the conflicts have led to chaos and the breakdown of the state, rendering it unable, without external intervention, to impose order on the basis of respect for democratic norms and the rights of individuals and minority groups. In sum, the new world security environment has generated internal destabilization in some states, with uncertainties and insecurities that affect not only states but also regions and even the entire international community, as in the case of the dictatorships of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Slobodan Miloševiæ in Yugoslavia. It is increasingly recognized that human rights, democratization, and “good governance” are essential to hopes for international peace and security. Good governance means the rule of law, effective state institutions, transparency and accountability in the management of public affairs, respect for human rights, and opportunities for all citizens to participate freely and meaningfully in the political process. The

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obligations of states in this regard are regulated by both national legal instruments and treaties under international law. Thus the principles of sovereignty and nonintervention cannot prevent multilateral organizations and states from showing interest or becoming involved in the affairs of other states. 2 In analyzing the intrastate conflicts that have flared up since the Cold War, two often-underestimated aspects deserve attention. First, whatever the banner under which they are waged—ethnic, religious, or any other— civil wars today occur chiefly in failed states. This is especially true when the state’s economy and legal (or judicial) institutions have broken down. Second, in stark contrast with the acceptance of certain restraints on the use of violence in “classic” international wars, post–Cold War conflicts are typically waged without regard for humanitarian codes of conduct like the Geneva Convention. Barbarous means of warfare, accompanied by the spread of organized crime and lawlessness, make it extremely difficult for international institutions to intervene effectively to achieve the peaceful settlement of disputes.

Shaping a New Security System The process of shaping a new security system began in the early 1990s and continues on many planes. In the past, the main organizing principle of the security system was fear of external threats. That factor drove states to build up their armed forces to carry out their nationalsecurity policy, and it prompted the international system to develop measures and mechanisms aimed at preventing sudden attack. When the Cold War ended, the situation changed dramatically. In many regions, particularly in Europe, the threat of a surprise attack has disappeared. European countries need not spend the vast amounts they once did for military might. The sovereign equality and integrity of states remain pillars of international law. Yet sovereignty is not an absolute. In exercising their sovereign rights over their own citizens within their respective territories, states are limited by various commitments that they have adopted under international law. These include the principles and norms of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two 1966 International Covenants, the first on Civil and Political Rights and the second on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. These three instruments, along with the UN Charter and many other treaties, conventions, and agreements, form indisputable mainstays of the emerging international system. On this basis, states undertake to recognize the inherent dignity and the equal and unalienable rights of all members of the human family as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”3 The provisions of these documents and their implementation on the

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level of national laws mean that a significant limitation has been introduced on sovereignty and the principle of nonintervention in internal affairs. As a rule, states today do not question the notion that the obligation to respect human and minority rights is an integral part of international law. The 1998 agreement to establish a permanent International Criminal Court at the Hague was a big step on the road toward an international system based on universal human rights and the rule of law.4 The enforcement of international law, however, differs substantially from domestic law enforcement. The matter becomes particularly complex when international law is violated by the constitutional authorities of a sovereign state. Coercive measures taken by the international community should also be proportional to the crime and should “not additionally increase the suffering of victims.”5 Major disagreements exist as to who can apply coercion, and under what conditions, against a state that has committed ethnic cleansing or genocide or otherwise violated human rights on a massive scale. The decision to take decisive action against such crimes cannot be an arbitrary move by one or a few states. Rather, it must be made in accordance with agreed procedures and norms. No state can have a monopoly on the enforcement of international law. According to the UN Charter (Articles 41 and 42), only the Security Council may decide what measures are to be employed. If it considers that measures short of armed force have proved to be or most likely would be inadequate to restore peace and security, the Council may decide to take military action. Yet the requirement that the five permanent members (P5) of the Security Council adopt such decisions unanimously means that any one of the P5 can hamstring the Security Council at will. Moreover, their motives for disagreeing over military action may differ. They are often guided more by their national interests than by the need to restore peace or defend international law. In practice, this means that the UN is almost helpless. In his statement to the Fifty-Fifth Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, Annan declared: “When civilians are attacked and massacred because of their ethnicity, as in Kosovo, the world looks to the United Nations to speak up for them.” Then he asked: “Will we say that rights are relative, or that whatever happens within borders shall be of concern to an organizations of sovereign States? No one that I know of can today defend that position. Collectively, we should say no. We will not, and we cannot accept a situation where people are brutalized behind national boundaries.” 6 The time is ripe for a new and just world order that not only embraces declarations of respect for human and minority rights, but also sets up truly effectual procedures and mechanisms to restore and safeguard rights that have been violated. Military interventions must be mandated and legitimized by broad acceptance of the international community of states (“a critical mass of

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nations”). As experience shows, “[i]f power is used to do justice, law will follow.”7 In sum, the international-security system that is taking shape today includes legal actions in accordance with binding treaties, UN Security Council decisions, and customary law, as well as “nonlegal actions,” a term of art that designates steps that are morally justified and not illegal, but that are not yet legally regulated. This term of art has come into use because of the gaps that persist in contemporary international law where the regulation of humanitarian intervention is concerned. The debate on the establishment of a new and just international order has been aimed more at streamlining existing institutions and creating new ones than at putting into effect existing norms and principles. It has hitherto concerned particularly the regional and subregional security organizations and structures in Europe. In the search for a new security system, states will increasingly be involved in integration processes and will seek to use multilateral institutions as a means of managing international interdependence. Thus at the top of any future security agenda must be the goal of preserving, rationalizing, and strengthening the international and multilateral framework that has been built up over the last half-century. Institutions by their very nature must be rather static; security processes are anything but, especially when the international system as a whole is undergoing a fundamental restructuring. Europe’s existing security structures—the UN, NATO, the Western European Union (WEU)—all date from the immediate post–World War II or Cold War era. They all need reforms that will make them equal to the changes and new challenges that have radically altered the security environment. The transformed and adapted multilateral institutions must respond to new requirements, new policy areas, new competences, and new instruments and decision-making procedures. Two things are worth noting in this regard. The first is the common view that legally binding obligations (treaties) are more important than political and moral decisions. In practice, the International Covenants on Human Rights, signed in 1966 and ratified by the required number of nations ten years later, proved less influential than the political commitments adopted within the Helsinki process starting in 1975. The Helsinki commitments were not subject to ratification and created no obligations under international law. As the prominent Russian humanrights activist Sergei Kovalev observed, The fatal error of the Central Committee of the CPSU is said to have been the publication by Izvestia in 1975 of the full text of the CSCE Final Act, including the so-called ‘Basket 3,’ or the basic human rights accords, by all participants in the agreement. True, political persecutions did not cease in its wake, but millions of Soviet citizens learned that some of these rights were under the protection of international agreements

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signed also by the Soviet government. As a result, the movement in defense of human rights got a new impulse.”8

The point is that it avails little to have a law or treaty on the books unless those concerned are aware of it. The second thing worth noting is that while the UN, its Human Rights Commission, and other organizations have long promoted human rights and the idea of the rule of law the world over, in Europe it was the CSCE (Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe) and the Council of Europe that mattered most, for they furnished the institutional framework needed to press for the implementation of human-rights guarantees in the Soviet Bloc countries. And what made the CSCE process so prominent? The answer is . . . its accountability. As the search for a new security system continues, we can see fundamental change in the form of at least three new phenomena: 1) Globalization and transnational networks are proving that power and wealth are no longer determined by territorial authority. 2) Human rights, respect for minorities, and the rule of law are accepted (at least in principle) as the common values of the contemporary world order. 3) Political leaders are now being held individually responsible for crimes under international law. These are all important new elements of world governance, a part of which is the international-security system. The norms of this system cannot, however, be imposed unilaterally by any power or alliance without the approval of the international community acting through the United Nations.

New Risks and New Challenges Since the Cold War’s end, there has been a fundamental change in the character of the threats to peace and stability in Europe. The old threat posed by conflicts between states has now largely dissipated. The new threat is posed by conflicts within states. Among other things, this shift in the “substance” of security means that we need a broader understanding of the very concept of security. It is possible to identify an almost endless list of potential or actual security risks and challenges that demand attention. But if it is too broadly defined, “security” begins to lose its meaning, and it becomes impossible to set priorities for action. The key task is therefore to determine which risks and challenges are fundamental and lasting, and which are derivative and transitional. In the 1996 report on A Future Security Agenda for Europe by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), we identified four principal categories of risk: 1) The resurfacing of ethnic and religious conflicts in the absence of

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democratic institutions capable of accommodating the new problems presented by ethnic, national, religious, and language groups. Separatist movements exist in a number of European countries, for example, but they are more problematic in those new states where political pluralism and democratic institutions are nascent or nonexistent. 2) Political instabilities associated with the transformation of totalitarian, one-party systems into pluralistic democracies based on the rule of law. In some of Europe’s fledgling democracies, it is common to find abuses of power by unconstrained interest groups and military and police forces that are very imperfectly subject to civilian and democratic control. Of special concern are the formidable problems facing the newly independent states that have emerged out of the collapse of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. These problems are connected with those of independence and stability and are particularly acute because there has been little prior state-building in these countries. 3) Social tensions stemming from the transformation of centrally planned economies into market economies. Mass unemployment, the deterioration of the social safety net, and uneven development across regions can breed potent nostalgia for authoritarianism, as people begin to long for the guarantees provided by even rudimentary social-welfare and health-care programs and other forms of social protection by the state. 4) Environmental hazards posed by poorly designed, unsafe nuclearpower facilities and obsolete chemical-manufacturing plants.9 The SIPRI Report also identified five central challenges facing participants in the European security system. They are as follows: 1) Preventing the “renationalization” of security policy at a time when there is no single obvious threat. The danger that such a development will occur is already apparent, albeit still inchoate. Failure to forestall it could mean another lasting division of the continent, which is why there is a pressing need to promote cooperative initiatives at the subregional level. Although the Iron Curtain has been down for over a decade now, the division of Europe has not been fully overcome. The continent remains split by large social and economic gulfs that threaten to become permanent, but which must not be allowed to become so. 2) Managing the international-security system in Europe. International institutions must develop and implement effective strategies for managing crises, preventing conflicts, and resolving conflicts if and when they do break out. 3) Developing early-warning mechanisms, as well as confidence- and security-building measures (CSBMs), that can address the kinds of emergent intrastate conflicts that have turned out to be post–Cold War Europe’s biggest single security problem. Ironically, the former Yugoslavia—one of the principal architects of European CSBMs—has become an object lesson in the need for these new measures. 4) Maintaining military and strategic stability in the period of change.

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The “classic threat” associated with war between states still figures in the European security equation. Mistrust between neighbors can give rise to security anxieties and lead to dangerous arms races. A high priority must be given to the full implementation of existing arms-control and arms-reduction agreements and confidence-building measures. In addition, follow-up measures need to be devised and implemented. 5) Developing effective means for managing arms proliferation. Military-spending cuts across Europe and North America, combined with the downturn in the volume of global arms acquisitions, have created adjustment problems for defense industries. In some countries—most notably Russia—these problems have reached crisis proportions and need immediate attention to stem the pressures for proliferation.

Pursuing New Principles, Redefining Old Ones The principles and norms of the new security system are still being shaped. We would be ignoring the new European reality if we did not address anew the contents of some of these principles and their interrelationships in a new Charter on European Security. This involves making democracy, the rule of law, the market economy, and security cooperation integral parts of the Helsinki process. In this light, there is a need to redefine some basic principles. The SIPRI Report recommended adding to the decalogue of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act a commitment to democracy in connection with security and the right to what might be called “cooperative intervention” under the authority of the UN Security Council. It is time to reinterpret or redefine the relationship between the existing principles of sovereignty and nonintervention in light of the newly salient principle of international solidarity. There is also an urgent need to redefine the relationship between the principle of state integrity and the right to self-determination (which should not be identified with a putative right to secession or independent statehood). In short, Europe’s new security regime should rest upon shared values and the rule of law. While discussing the concept of interventionism, one international lawyer rightly noted that the risks posed by a universal system that provides no escape from lawfully centralized coercion remain greater than the risks of a system that lacks coercive enforcement mechanisms.10 The principle of sovereignty in its present form, as reflected in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, gives the state the “right freely to choose and develop its political, social, economic and cultural systems as well as its right to determine its laws and regulations.”11 This does not commit states to respect either democracy or political pluralism. The principle has already been modified in documents approved at meetings in Paris (1990), Helsinki (1992), and Budapest (1994). A new document adopted

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in Istanbul (1999) codified the changes that have taken place so far and sorted out the agreed provisions. In this context, the content of Helsinki Principle 6, which prescribes nonintervention in internal affairs, cannot be ignored. Many decisions adopted in recent years, including the Code of Conduct approved by the 1994 OSCE Summit Meeting in Budapest, are incompatible with it. The time is ripe for the elaboration of a principle of solidarity among European states. Such a principle would, in a sense, offset those current provisions according to which, “The participating States will refrain from any intervention, direct or indirect, individual or collective, in the internal or external affairs falling within the domestic jurisdiction of another participating State regardless of their mutual relations. They will accordingly refrain from any form of armed intervention or threat of such intervention against another participating State.”12 What is needed, in fact, is just the opposite of Principle 6—namely, a principle of legitimate and cooperative international interventionism. The EU has proposed such a principle, in the form of what it calls “solidarity in assistance.” Recent developments in many parts of Europe, and especially the functioning of the Dayton Agreement in BosniaHerzegovina, are practical manifestations of cooperative interventionism. Recent decisions and activities regarding Kosovo may also be considered as a new type of interventionism: NATO declared that “[t]he status quo is unsustainable” and signaled its interest in containing the crisis and seeking a peaceful solution.13 In fact the crisis in Kosovo represents a fundamental challenge to the values for which the Atlantic Alliance has stood since its foundation: democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. Confronted with Slobodan Miloševiæ’s deliberate policy of oppression, ethnic cleansing, and violence, NATO decided to intervene militarily in Serbia. Its aim was to end the violence and repression in Kosovo through an international military presence intended to secure the safe and unconditional return of all refugees and provide them with unhindered access to humanitarian aid.14 The European Union declared its commitment to taking the lead in the reconstruction efforts in Kosovo.15 At its initiative, the Cologne Ministerial Conference of 10 June 1999 adopted the Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe. The OSCE, under whose auspices the Stability Pact has been placed, also has a key role to play in rebuilding a multiethnic society in Kosovo. The Istanbul Summit Declaration of 19 November 1999 confirmed the OSCE’s commitment to continuing its assistance and to working closely with the European Union and other international organizations.16 Some other matters also call for rethinking, among them the relationship between the “territorial integrity of states” and the “equal rights and self-determination of peoples.” Here it would be desirable to prepare an extensive catalogue of possible forms that the principle of

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self-determination might take in practice. This principle cannot be identified exclusively with the right to secession. It can and must be implemented in terms of a range of different forms of autonomy. In other words, it is time to start devising new ways in which the principle of self-determination can be acted upon without fracturing societies and causing civil wars and atrocities.

The Global Dimension It would be naive to suggest that world government is the answer to the new security challenges of the twenty-first century. While the international system is jeopardized by the existence of weak states, particularly those that have only recently gained independence, the number of sovereign states is not decreasing but growing. In 1945, the UN Charter was signed by 53 nations; today there are 185 UN member states. In the search for solutions to the transnational security problems posed by organized crime, international terrorism, environmental pollution, and the like, states have been systematically cooperating for years at the level of police, judicial, ministerial, and parliamentary agencies. The result, as one author has noted, “is not world government, but global governance. . . . The state is not disappearing, it is disaggregating into its separate, functionally distinct parts.”17 Five features characterize the international security environment that has taken shape in recent years. First, it is marked by the new challenges of both human rights and increasing instability. The main sources of crisis, conflict, and general instability in the world today are weak or even outright “failed” states— countries where the government cannot control the territory over which it is nominally sovereign. Many of these governments also largely or completely lack democratic legitimacy. Their all-around weakness, combined with undemocratic governance, makes them prone to local or domestic crises that they cannot manage or contain and that consequently become threats to international security. Second, the trends of globalization and internationalization, mainly in the spheres of economics and information technology, are in conflict with the trends toward fragmentation and regionalization that we see on the political and civilizational levels. A third key element in the strategic perspective is the new role of the United States, both globally and regionally. The United States holds a position of power unequaled by any other country by virtue of its economic and technological muscle, its military might, and its associated political ability to shape the international security system. This makes it difficult for the United States to withstand the temptation to conduct security policy on a hegemonic basis, instead of acting in partnership with other states.

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A fourth factor is weapons of mass destruction (WMD). For the members of the Atlantic Alliance, nuclear forces have a fundamentally political purpose. For India and Pakistan, who remain in conflict over Kashmir, their purpose is different. Continued or suspected cases of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons proliferation by Iraq, North Korea, and Libya raise the question of how best to prevent the spread of WMD, the materials for producing them, and their means of delivery. Regional nonproliferation efforts are of special significance in the Korean peninsula, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The U.S.-sponsored Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (also known as the Nunn-Lugar program) has helped Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine to become non– nuclear-weapon states. This program is also helping Russia to meet its obligations under the START I treaty, although sizeable quantities of Russian fissile material remain unprotected. The profound economic crisis in Russia, as well as then-President Boris Yeltsin’s decision to increase the readiness of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces, threatens to undermine some of the progress already made. The marginalization of nuclear weapons in international security—a precondition for lowering the number of warheads and for eventual disarmament—is incompatible with the emphasis placed on the role of nuclear weapons in the new Russian military doctrine.18 Paradoxically, the shrinking relative significance of nuclear weapons creates pressure for the highly industrialized countries to begin arming themselves with more sophisticated and destructive conventional weapons. If that happens, other nuclear powers might feel forced to increase rather than reduce their reliance on nuclear weapons. Efforts to streamline and modernize anti–ballistic missile (ABM) defense systems may be particularly risky in this regard. Not only would the 1972 ABM Treaty be undermined, but the global situation would be destabilized if only a single nuclear superpower were capable of ensuring strategic immunity for itself. The fifth issue that raises special concern is small arms. Democratic institutions, the rule of law, and socioeconomic conditions may in the long run do more than anything else for the cause of peaceful crisis resolution. Yet in the search for security for conflict-prone regions, especially those where state structures are fragile, steps need to be taken “to curb the flow of small arms circulating in civil society.”19 When viewed as a process, the democratization of international relations covers both internal and external transformation. Indivisible international security cannot be identified with “equal security.” The often-declared principle of equal security does not exist in practice. In the nature of things, great powers can do more independently to ensure their own security than can small and medium-sized states, which see their admission to multilateral structures as an indispensable “insurance policy” against worst-case scenarios. Three basic values should be

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included in the security agenda: “[E]ach state must still be responsible for its own security, even if it belongs to an alliance; security problems should be addressed according to the principle of subsidiarity—i.e., where feasible, they should be dealt with on the subregional or regional level; and there must be solidarity between states with regard to security issues.”20

The Agenda Ahead As the twenty-first century dawns, the biggest threat to world security is not great-power rivalry or a revolution in military technology but sheer human poverty. More than one-quarter of the developing world’s population is still mired in want. About 1.3 billion people—a fifth of the global population—subsist on incomes of less than $1 a day, and global pressures are creating or threatening further increases in poverty. There is a clear relationship between domestic and regional conflicts and the spread of poverty and stagnation or decline in some 100 developing countries. Eradicating poverty worldwide should therefore be seen not only as a moral imperative and a commitment to human solidarity but also as a practical political strategy for promoting peace. Other major challenges affecting the security agenda are related to domestic transformations aimed at consolidating democracy and the rule of law. These transformations cannot be achieved merely by rewriting constitutions and laws or implementing institutional reform. Steps in those areas are necessary, of course, but the implementation of democracy and the rule of law is more than a technical problem. As the experience of recent years shows, at bottom it is a “people problem.” It is human beings and their ways of thinking and acting that ultimately will do the most to help or hinder the related causes of peace and democratic self-government: Rule-of-law reform will succeed only if it gets at the fundamental problem of leaders who refuse to be ruled by the law. Respect for the law will not easily take root in systems rife with corruption and cynicism, since entrenched elites cede their traditional impunity and vested interests only under great pressure. Even the new generation of politicians arising out of the political transitions of recent years are reluctant to support reforms that create competing centers of authority beyond their control.21

In other words, the rule of law—defined as a system in which “the laws are public knowledge, are clear in meaning and apply equally to everyone”22—should be based on the public control, transparency, and accountability of governments. This applies particularly to the military. Democracy cannot be consolidated until the military becomes firmly subordinated to civilian control and committed to the democratic

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constitutional order. The rule of law and democracy cannot be reduced to or identified solely with free elections. A new cooperative-security system should take into account both the specific features of various states and regions and the needs of the global community as a whole. It should help states in transition to build democratic institutions, promote the rule of law, develop respect for human rights and the protection of minorities, and prevent the proliferation of both weapons of mass destruction and conventional arms. An inclusive and cooperative security order in Europe requires the promotion of a community of shared values and the shared management of national political and economic interests. From the Urals to the Atlantic, the continent needs a system in which the equality of states and democratic principles are reconciled with acknowledged leadership and efficient decision making. As the post–Cold War world order continues to take shape, we are left wondering whether globalization or fragmentation will prevail. In reality, of course, the choice is not that stark, and both phenomena will continue to exist—and perhaps to thrive—in parallel. States will not wither away but will adapt in various ways to each of these two tendencies. Multilateral security structures will have an increasing impact, directly and indirectly, on the internal transformations of states. International institutions will keep trying to stave off, de-escalate, and resolve the conflicts that inevitably accompany the formation of new national entities. We can expect the impact of international organizations and security structures to grow. The forces of stability and the forces of fragmentation will continue to clash, but we can hope that the emergence of a new multilateral security system will help to balance and mitigate the resulting tensions. NOTES 1. United Nations, Report of the Secretary-General on the Work of the Organization, UN Document A/52/1, 1997, 3. 2. Article 2, Paragraph 7 of the UN Charter states, “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” Similar provisions are reflected in the Declaration on Principles Guiding Relations Between Participating States (Principle VI on nonintervention in internal affairs) of the Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Helsinki, Finland, 1 August 1975. 3. Preamble of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 4. See the Statute of the Court, approved at a UN Diplomatic Conference of 160 countries and 200 nongovernmental organizations in Rome on 17 July 1998. 5. Janusz Symonides, “New Human Rights Dimensions, Obstacles and Challenges: Introductory Remarks,” in Janusz Symonides, ed., Human Rights: New Dimensions and Challenges (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1998), 37.

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6. “Secretary-General Calls for Renewed Commitment in New Century to Protect Rights of Man, Woman, Child—Regardless of Ethnic, National Belonging,” UN Press Release SG/SM/6949, 7 April 1999. 7. Michael J. Glennon, “The New Interventionism: The Search for a Just International Law,” Foreign Affairs 78 (May–June 1999): 7. 8. Sergei Kovalev, “Human Rights as a National Idea,” Izvestia (Moscow), 15 May 1998, 5. 9. A Future Security Agenda for Europe, Report of the Independent Working Group established by SIPRI, Stockholm, Sweden, October 1996, 4–6. 10. Michael Glennon, “The New Interventionism,” 7. 11. Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (Helsinki, Finland, 1975), Principle I, “Sovereign Equality, Respect for the Rights Inherent in Sovereignty.” 12. Helsinki Principle VI, “Nonintervention in Internal Affairs.” 13. NATO Final Communique, 28 May 1998, Luxembourg. 14. “The NATO Summit Statement on Kosovo,” Washington, D.C., 23–24 April 1999, NATO Review, Summer 1999, Documentation, D1. 15. See Cologne European Council, “Presidency Conclusions,” (Doc. 150/99, para. 65, 3–4 June 1999). 16. See Istanbul Summit Declaration, 19 November 1999. 17. Anne-Marie Slaughter, “The Real New World Order,” Foreign Affairs 76 (September–October 1997): 184. 18. See Krasnaya zvezda (Moscow), 9 October 1999, 4. The draft was preliminarily approved in February 2000 for final acceptance in the spring of 2000; see also The Stockholm Agenda for Arms Control, SIPRI Report, Stockholm, November 1999, 2. 19. See Paragraph 50 of Kofi Annan’s 1997 report, cited in Note 1 above. 20. A Future Security Agenda for Europe. 21. Thomas Carothers, “The Rule of Law Revival?” Foreign Affairs 77 (March– April 1998): 96. See also John Eatwell et al., Transformation and Integration: Shaping the Future of Central and Eastern Europe (London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 1996). 22. Thomas Carothers, “The Rule of Law Revival?” 96.

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7 THE CENTRALITY OF THE UNITED STATES Robert Kagan

Robert Kagan is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he directs the U.S. Leadership project. He is the author of A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977– 1990 (1995) and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. Between 1985 and 1988, he served as a deputy for policy in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Inter-American Affairs and as principal speechwriter for the secretary of state. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Commentary, and The New Republic.

T

he heated debate over whether the promotion of democracy should be a primary objective of foreign policy—a debate that now consumes American policy makers and policy intellectuals perhaps more than those of other nations—comes at an odd moment in history. By any measure, the world is more democratic today than at any time in human history. In the wave of democratization that swept the world between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, more than 30 nations of diverse cultures and geographical locations became democratic. Many of these transformations were quite literally unimaginable at the beginning of the 1980s. (Who would have thought democracy possible in Taiwan? Nicaragua? Romania? or South Africa?) Some of the new democracies have since faltered and slipped backward toward various forms of tyranny (which was only to be expected), but most have driven the stakes in deep and appear to be settling in for a longer stay. Over the past few years, skeptics have repeatedly declared that this democratic wave has ended and that the world has already entered a new period of retrenchment or even reversal of these earlier democratic gains. Impressive new theories of cultural differences have been elaborated to predict an end to further democratization, particularly in Asia. And yet every new bit of evidence points to a continuation of the wave. Free elections in South Korea, followed soon thereafter by the collapse of the Suharto regime in Indonesia, have given a battering to

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the theory that “Asian values” would triumph over “Western values”— a view widely held until very recently—and to Samuel P. Huntington’s prophecy of a new Chinese-style capitalist authoritarianism rising as an alternative model to American-style liberal democratic capitalism. Yet in American intellectual circles at least, the skeptics continue to outnumber and to outwrite the optimists. In 1997, the leading article on this topic was Fareed Zakaria’s “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” in which Zakaria advanced the notion that instead of making the world safe for democracy, democracy needed to be made safe for the world.1 Zakaria’s argument built on a growing new literature that suggests that, contrary to popular wisdom, democracies are a greater threat to international peace than dictatorships. Robert D. Kaplan tried to debunk the idea that democracy created stability in developing nations, recommending that the United States and other nations “shift our emphasis in the third world from holding elections to promoting family planning, environmental renewal, road building and other stabilizing projects.”2 Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder tried to disprove the notion of the “democratic peace,” arguing that history actually revealed a “pattern of democratization, belligerent nationalism, and war.”3 Their analysis was based on a dubious rendering of history—for instance, they blamed Germany’s belligerent behavior in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not on the Kaiser’s Weltpolitik but on a “mass nationalist sentiment” which “pushed [Germany’s] vacillating elites toward war.” What is most interesting about such arguments is not their new contribution to understanding democratic regimes (which is minimal) but the way in which critics of democracy promotion have shifted tactics. Instead of questioning the possibility of promoting further democratization, as they had tried to do for the first few years after the end of the Cold War, the skeptics have now begun to question the very desirability of promoting democratic governance around the world. This shift in tactics is revealing, for it indicates that pragmatic judgments about what does and does not work, how to weigh competing objectives, or whether the “rule of law” needs to be established before elections are not really at issue. What is truly of concern to the critics of democracy promotion—and should be of paramount concern to its advocates as well—are much broader questions: What ought to be the appropriate foreign policies for the United States and other democratic nations in the post–Cold war era? Should those policies be shaped and informed by the principles that serve as the foundation of democratic societies? Do leading intellectuals in democratic nations still maintain their belief in the universality of those principles, and indeed, do they still have faith in their applicability at home? Each of the world’s democratic nations will have to answer these questions for itself. And

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each will respond in ways that reflect its history, its political culture, and its traditional style of foreign policy.

The Historical Roots of Foreign Policy A nation’s foreign policy is a reflection of its identity and selfperception. It is not, however, a reflection only of that nation’s present form of government. Rather, it is an accretion of habits and styles, many of which were developed at much earlier stages of a nation’s political development. For most of the world’s great powers, enduring styles and habits of foreign policy were developed when they were monarchies—when, for instance, raison d’état meant putting foreign policy in the service of the crown. Though they may be flourishing democracies today, such powers have no history of supporting democratization abroad. Indeed, not so far back in the history of many great powers can be found long periods when their foreign policy aimed at extinguishing various forms of liberal revolution abroad that threatened their monarchical or absolutist form of government. The advent of democratic government in these countries in the modern era cannot be expected to erase completely centuries of foreign-policy habits and convictions that were either indifferent or hostile to international liberalization. France, for instance, has not made the promotion of democracy a high priority in those parts of Africa or the Arab world where it has historically been imperial master or exerted hegemonic influence. This has remained the case even as, over the past century and more, France’s devotion to democracy at home has become ever more firmly entrenched. The idealism of French foreign-policy thinking runs in a different direction, toward European integration, which may be viewed by some as tending to strengthen democratic institutions, at least in Europe. But beyond Europe—indeed, beyond Western Europe—France seems to have retained its traditional approach, remaining largely unconcerned about the promotion of democracy. Germany today remains untested as a democratic great power because since the end of World War II it has been denied, and has denied itself, the full attributes of a world power’s foreign policy. So far, one detects few clear signs that Germany plans to make the promotion of democracy beyond its borders a very high priority in its foreign policy. Similarly, there is little evidence that the Asian democratic great powers of Japan and India are willing to make international democratization a primary goal of their foreign policies. So far, their foreign policies are more reflective of other aspects of their national identity than of their democratic character. British foreign policy has traditionally reflected a more complex identity. On the one hand, the British ruled subject peoples for centuries

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with varying degrees of indifference to their rights. On the other hand, British foreign policy, even during its imperial era, was always conceived by most Britons as advancing the cause of Western Civilization and, more specifically, of an Anglo-Saxon model of liberalism and moderate constitutional governance. British citizens today view with some pride the fact that most of Britain’s former colonies are democracies, though on the whole Britain’s foreign policy has only sporadically placed a premium on the spread of democracy abroad. The United States is the only major power in the world that was democratic at birth and whose foreign policy, therefore, has always contained a unique measure of democratic idealism. Since the founding of their nation, Americans have taken an interest in the spread of liberal government, believing that the fate of their own experiment in self-government depends to some degree on the fate of liberalism elsewhere. As a great world power in the twentieth century, the United States has rather consistently attempted to support democracy abroad, though with much less consistent results. In addition, it has been and remains one of the few nations in the world with enough power and international influence to affect the behavior of other, smaller nations without taking undue risks. In short, while one might hope that democracy promotion will become an international endeavor, the reality is that the driving force for global democratization is unlikely to come from either Asia or Europe. For reasons both of power and of history, then, it is the United States that will have to provide the energy needed to keep democracy promotion high on the international agenda. What the United States does or does not do, in fact, will have the most decisive effect on the future. That is why the current debate in the United States ought to be of particular interest to those around the world who favor the international promotion of democracy. That debate is not so much about the specific tactics of foreign policy as it is about America’s identity—as a world power and as a democracy.

The Influence of the United States Critics of democracy promotion sometimes argue that it is an instrument of Western domination. I would frame the issue somewhat differently and ask whether the spread of democracy is intimately connected to the benevolent hegemony that the United States has increasingly exercised throughout the world over the past two decades. The answer seems obvious: There is a strong connection between America’s unparalleled influence in the world and the spread of democracy. That connection works in both directions. The rise of American hegemony has helped bring about the global democratic revolution. And the global democratic revolution has, in turn, strengthened American hegemony.

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No one can seriously doubt that the United States has played a central part—indeed an indispensable part—in spurring and supporting the global democratic transition of the past two and a half decades. To be sure, in Latin America and Asia in the 1970s and 1980s, growing economies and indigenous political forces made the lives of dictatorships more precarious. Within the Soviet Empire, stagnation and decay hollowed out communist tyranny from within. Yet without persistent American exhortation, pressure, and in some crucial cases, direct intervention, these broad historical trends could easily have been cut short. The result might have been victories by communist guerrillas, military coups, or violent repression; instead, the initiative was seized by leaders like Corazon Aquino, José Napoleon Duarte, Lech Wa³êsa, and Boris Yeltsin, who benefited from American support at crucial turning points in their national sagas. These were only the active influences that the United States exerted on behalf of democracy. By merely being at the center of the only economic system capable of increasing wealth for all its participants, the United States drew others into its orbit. It is no accident, moreover, that countries with a long history of association with the United States or uniquely dependent on the United States for their security (like South Korea and Taiwan) made transitions to democracy, while their brethren in nations fiercely independent of and hostile to the United States (like North Korea and China) did not. More generally, as a model of political and economic success and as the “winner” (for the second time in less than half a century) of a grand global struggle for the future, the United States made itself worthy of respect and emulation to all but a handful of states. It hardly seems necessary to point out that the spread of democracy these past 20 years has been a good thing for the United States, not to mention the world. Nor does it seem necessary to explain why there was wisdom in the decision by U.S. policy makers in the late 1970s and throughout most of the 1980s to place a special value on promoting democratic governance abroad as part of America’s grand strategy. In 1991, Samuel P. Huntington published his well-known book The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, which chronicled and celebrated the advance of democracy around the world from the mid-1970s onward. In his preface, Huntington declared that he wrote the book “because I believe that democracy is good in itself and that . . . it has positive consequences for individual freedom, domestic stability, international peace, and the United States of America.” 4 Huntington recognized some significant obstacles to further democratization, not least among them the resistance of certain cultures, especially the Islamic and Confucian cultures, to political pluralism and individual rights. But he pointed out that similar arguments for cultural determinism—like the once-dominant view that Catholicism

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was incompatible with pluralism and individual rights—had been proven wrong by the “third wave” of democratization, which included such Catholic nations as Spain, Portugal, Poland, and many countries in Latin America. In The Third Wave, Huntington insisted that “arguments that particular cultures are permanent obstacles to development in one direction or another should be viewed with a certain skepticism. . . . Cultures evolve.” 5 On the question of whether the spread of democracy abroad was good for the United States, Huntington was unequivocal. “[T]he future of democracy in the world,” he wrote, “is of special importance to Americans.” He urged the United States to take a leading role in encouraging democracy around the world. Democratic progress depended on certain broad, impersonal forces—like economic growth—but these were only necessary, not sufficient. “Economic development makes democracy possible; political leadership makes it real.” Democracy would continue to spread, Huntington declared, only “to the extent that those who exercise power in the world and in individual countries want it to spread.” At several points in the book, Huntington himself openly departed from cool social-science analysis to provide some “Guidelines for Democratizers.” “If that makes me seem like an aspiring democratic Machiavelli,” he declared, “so be it.”6

Advancing Interests by Advancing Principles The idea, embedded in Huntington’s analysis, that a great power might advance its interests by advancing its principles abroad and by encouraging other peoples to govern themselves in a like manner is hardly novel. Indeed, it has ancient roots. In the conflict between Athens and Sparta that led to the Peloponnesian Wars in the fifth century B.C., democratic Athens generally allied itself with democratic elements in other city-states, often encouraging them to revolt against oligarchies that were backed by oligarchic Sparta. Sparta, in turn, generally supported like-minded oligarchs, and when it defeated Athens in the war, it replaced Athens’s democratic rulers with a pro-Spartan oligarchy. Both Sparta and Athens may have acted more out of pragmatic than purely principled motives, but that is exactly the point. Both powers considered city-states with governments like their own to be more reliable allies. For Athens, supporting democrats made sense in large part because such men had a natural affinity for Greece’s strongest democratic power. Such considerations also shaped the foreign policies of great powers in the modern world long before the advent of the Cold War. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth, when the Enlightenment stirred liberal revolutions in Europe and North and South America, democratic and reactionary conservative leaders on both

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sides of the Atlantic saw their own fates as being intimately bound up with those of their ideological confr` e res elsewhere. After 1776, for instance, Americans considered all the European monarchies essentially hostile to the Revolution. The secretary to the American legation in London, William Smith, expressed the view that monarchs would “always watch us with a jealous eye while we adhere to and flourish under systems diametrically opposite to those which support their governments and enable them to keep mankind in subjection.”7 Richard Henry Lee was convinced that there existed “a general jealousy beyond the water of the powerful effects to be derived from republican virtue here.”8 These American fears were justified. Some monarchies on the continent did fear the liberties taking root in the New World. As the Spanish minister in Paris remarked about the United States: “This federal republic is born a pigmy. A day will come when it will be a giant, even a colossus, formidable in these countries. Liberty of conscience, the facility for establishing a new population on immense lands, as well as the advantages of the new government, will draw thither farmers and artisans from all nations. In a few years we shall watch with grief the tyrannical existence of this same colossus.”9 Americans of all political stripes welcomed news of the French Revolution, just as the progenitors of that Revolution believed, for a time, that they were merely following the Americans’ example. Even more conservative Americans, including those, like Alexander Hamilton, who would be labeled realists in the twentieth century, initially welcomed the revolution in France. No less a figure than John Marshall later recalled, “We were all strongly attached to France—scarcely any man more strongly than myself. I sincerely believed human liberty to depend in a great measure on the success of the French Revolution.”10 Americans of that era were certainly not alone in believing that nations and governments on both sides of the increasingly sharp ideological divide had an interest in seeing their own form of governance prevail elsewhere. As the wave of “liberal” revolutions crested in Latin America in the 1820s, even Austria’s premier “realist,” Prince Metternich, asked: “If this flood of evil doctrines and pernicious examples should extend over the whole of America, what would become . . . of the moral force of our governments, and of that conservative system which has saved Europe from complete dissolution?”11 That was precisely what Benjamin Franklin had meant when he predicted to a French colleague in 1782: “Establishing the liberties of America will not only make that people happy, but will have some effect in diminishing the misery of those who in other parts of the world groan under despotism, by rendering it more circumspect, and inducing it to govern with a lighter hand.” 12 In the nineteenth century, the rulers of absolutist governments in

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Europe joined together to try to prevent the outbreak of liberal revolutions in Poland and elsewhere. That was how Russia earned its reputation among liberals as the “gendarme” of Europe. Meanwhile, British foreign policy throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was frequently shaped by sympathy for the fate of those selfsame liberal stirrings in such “developing nations” as Greece and Turkey. The fact that the United States abstained from direct involvement in these European ideological conflicts during the nineteenth century has been seized upon by modern realist theoreticians as evidence of an American tradition of placing “interest” above “ideology” in its foreign policy. In fact, however, it was American weakness and the allconsuming task of conquering the North American continent that best explain the noninvolvement of the United States in Europe’s ideological wars. When the United States joined the ranks of the great powers at the end of the nineteenth century, casting its gaze beyond the continent it had already conquered, it immediately began to behave as great powers have often behaved—shaping the world around it to suit not only its material interests but also its philosophical predilections. The promotion of a semblance of liberal governance in the Caribbean began not with Woodrow Wilson but with William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, and the practice continued well into the Republican administrations of the late 1920s. Concern with the fate of American principles abroad, then, was in no way an innovation of the Cold War era. It is no accident that the period in which American power was exercised most robustly around the world, from the inauguration of the Cold War under President Truman to its conclusion under Presidents Reagan and Bush, was also the period in which democracy took root in allied Europe, in Germany, and even, remarkably, in Japan. In retrospect, it would also seem to be no accident that the present worldwide democratic revolution took off during the waning years of the Cold War and the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Empire. At the end of the Cold War, it was clear that the successful expansion of American power had both strengthened and been strengthened by the spread of democracy elsewhere. It should be equally clear that America’s continuing acceptance of vast global responsibilities after the Cold War has helped to ensure that this revolution is sustained.

America’s Realists It is perhaps also no accident, then, that the attacks on the policy of promoting democracy abroad emerged at the same time that the entire thrust of American foreign policy after the Cold War was being questioned by many American intellectuals and policy makers. The call

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to scale back American commitments in the world, to adopt a more restrained—or, as some called it, a more “normal”—posture in world affairs, closely coincided with the new skepticism about both the possibility and desirability of promoting democracy abroad. In the United States, leading thinkers began to decry American “arrogance” and “imperialism,” and this seemed necessarily to go hand in hand with an assault on America’s role as a supporter of democracy. The correlation between criticism of American global involvement and attacks on the idea of democracy promotion could be seen most clearly in the writings of Samuel P. Huntington, who by 1996 was among those railing at American “arrogance.” In striking contrast to his own statements just a few years earlier, Huntington wrote, “The belief that non-Western peoples should adopt Western values, institutions, and culture is, if taken seriously, immoral in its implications. . . . The interests of the West are not served by promiscuous intervention into the disputes of other peoples.”13 Huntington was joined by many others who had never believed that the promotion of democracy was a proper objective of foreign policy and, indeed, had always worried that such ambitions were dangerous precisely because they placed too few constraints on the exercise of American power. These were the so-called realists, who had waged a long and not very successful battle against what they decried as a “crusading” foreign policy during the Cold War. After the successful conclusion of the Cold War, ironically, the realists emerged as the leading voice in American foreign policy, perhaps precisely because their concern for placing limits on American ambitions fit nicely with a prevailing post– Cold war political mood that was, if not neoisolationist, at least minimalist in foreign policy. Today, the leading debunkers of democracy and democracy promotion in the United States (such as Fareed Zakaria and Owen Harries, not to mention Henry Kissinger and his former aides) hail from the realist tradition. Given its influence on U.S. foreign policy today, it may be worth recounting briefly the origins of realist thought in the United States, if only to explain the hostility toward democracy promotion—and indeed, toward democracy itself—that animates much of the U.S. foreign-policy debate these days. During the early days of the Cold War, the leading prophets of this influential school of thought, Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, and Walter Lippmann, viscerally opposed the intrusion of ideology into foreign policy as dangerous and even immoral. They constantly warned that “crusades” on behalf of democracy would lead either to nuclear holocaust or to the immoral dominance of one arrogant great power— the United States—over all others. The truth was that they did not like democracy all that much, either at home or abroad. Kennan believed that democracies, especially in Latin America and other parts of the

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developing world, were weak and untrustworthy allies in the fight against communism. At the same time, the realists were also unembarrassed about expressing their grave doubts about American democracy. In the early Cold War years, Kennan compared American democracy to “one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as [a] room and a brain the size of a pin.”14 Lippmann believed that the most important questions of national policy were too complex for an ignorant populace—the “pictures inside people’s heads” formed by newspapers and radios simply did not “correspond with the world outside”—and he found the postwar American public “stubbornly naive” about the realities of the world.15 Of even greater concern to realists than American incompetence was American idealism. They considered revolutionary ideologies— including American liberal democracy—to be the enemy of the balance of power, and therefore of the “national interest.” Morgenthau feared that the revolutionary nationalisms that had shaken the European balance in 1789 and 1848 and then destroyed it in 1914 had been succeeded in the middle of the twentieth century by something even more dangerous. The postwar world possessed not one but two Napoleons who threatened to upset the balance of power in the name of universal belief. Indeed, in Morgenthau’s eyes, American democratic values and Soviet communist ideology were forms of the same “nationalistic universalism,” a paradoxical hybrid that claimed “for one nation and one state the right to impose its own valuations and standards of action upon all other nations.”16 The rival American and Soviet claims to universal truth had, in Morgenthau’s pessimistic view, “dealt the final, fatal blow to that social system of international intercourse” that had made occasional, fragile peace possible in the nineteenth century. 17 Most realists considered the universal principles proclaimed by nations like the United States, the Soviet Union, and revolutionary France to be little more than elaborate hypocrisies. The realists were so suspicious of moral claims that they wished to see moral questions banished insofar as possible from the public discussion of foreign policy. American diplomacy had to be “divested of the crusading spirit,” Morgenthau insisted, because international circumstances were too perilous. With both superpowers engaged in “competitive contact throughout the world [and] . . . fired by the crusading zeal of a universal mission,” the world was doomed.18 Only if both powers could define their national interest strictly and narrowly in terms of national security could peace and humanity be preserved. Morgenthau thus enunciated the central theme of realist doctrine, which resonates with even greater power today in all discussions of American “national interest”: “[G]reat powers which dream of remaking the world in their own image and embark on world

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wide crusades,” Morgenthau warned, were a danger to themselves and to every other nation.19

The Lessons of the Cold War One might have thought that, after the conclusion of the Cold War, the realists would be a bit chastened. After all, it seems clear in retrospect, as it did to many at the time, that American idealism was a key factor in the successful conduct of the Cold War. At home, Americans derived enormous strength and even a measure of consistency in foreign policy from their convictions during the Cold War. Their steady belief that freedom, democracy, capitalism, the rule of law, and the right to selfdetermination were the aspirations of all peoples everywhere and that communism and dictatorship were the enemies of these aspirations gave Americans confidence, a reservoir of energy in keeping up the long Cold War struggle, and even wisdom about how to conduct it. Those “moral impulses” that Kennan derided enabled Americans to understand the need for maintaining a military presence in Europe, for resuscitating European and Asian economies, and for playing the international role that the realists deemed essential. The ideological struggle against communism reinforced the strategic need for enduring overseas commitments. All of these actions were in America’s self interest, but it was an enlightened and farsighted notion of self-interest that depended upon Americans’ acute sense of moral right and wrong. As Robert Osgood noted in 1953, rational calculations of interest “unenlightened by idealism” could easily have led to a dangerously limited view of the national interest. “Idealism,” Osgood noted, was an “indispensable spur to reason.”20 The dangerous “messianism” that the realists so feared never materialized. American foreign policy and the rhetoric of American politicians often ignored realist prescriptions, but the United States generally did not behave rashly. Errors committed in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, and elsewhere could be attributed only in part to a “crusading” spirit. The really huge disasters that American realists claimed to fear— national destruction, national bankruptcy, nuclear holocaust—did not occur, even under that most “messianic” of presidents, Ronald Reagan. America, it turned out, could pursue its idealistic mission in a fairly prudent way, without failing in its role as international balancer, without frightening the Soviet Union into a catastrophic misstep, and without blowing up the whole world in an effort to remake it. Apparently, a nation like the United States could be both an international revolutionary and an international conservative at the same time. It is equally obvious today that the Cold War was won not only by strategic and conventional weapons, by command of the seas and useful alliances, but also by a powerful set of American ideals that shaped the

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behavior of both friends and foes. The realists’ tendency to view the two competing “ideologies” of the Cold War as equally invalid claims to universal truth, each canceling the other out as “weapons” in the struggle for power, proved to be another important analytical error. The ideals championed by the Soviet Union simply could not compete with those championed by the United States, either in the material sense of producing the goods or in the spiritual sense of responding effectively to human yearnings. This imbalance in the ideological sphere manifested itself over time all around the world. It attracted to America’s orbit the world’s most powerful industrial nations and others of lesser stature on every continent. It eroded the legitimacy of Soviet rule in its East European empire, encouraged criticism of communist tyranny within the Soviet Union itself, and, over time, fostered self-doubt even among the Soviet leadership. The principles of world order that the United States proclaimed gave it a form of influence over its allies unique in history. It was clear that the United States, for reasons both of principle and convenience, did not seek to exercise imperial dominion over its weaker allies. On the contrary, from the early days of the Cold War, the United States wanted only to put the European powers and Japan back on their feet so that they could serve as bulwarks against the spread of communism. It can be argued that the billions of dollars spent on the Marshall Plan and the restoration of Japan served the United States’s selfish interests, but this was a unique form of selfishness that served the interests of many other nations as well. If there was a degree of hypocrisy and national arrogance in America’s constant equation of the world’s interests with its own, the American claim also proved far more justified than any similar claim made at any time in history. America’s strength during the Cold War, like its unprecedented supremacy today, derived in large measure from the fact that so much of the world came to agree that the goals Americans claimed to seek were both worthy and sincere. Despite their refutation by the experience of the Cold War, however, the old realist themes are still prevalent today. Indeed, they are arguably more prevalent now because their call for limits on American power and on the natural American aspiration to want to “remake the world” in its own image suits America’s current global weariness and aversion to overseas involvement. Modern realists like Owen Harries have complained about the “arrogance” of American efforts to impose democratic values on others, just as Huntington does in his latest incarnation. The common view that democracies may be too weak to withstand the onslaught of Muslim fundamentalism—in Algeria, Turkey, or Egypt— echoes Kennan’s fears about democracy’s inability to resist communism. Among realists like Henry Kissinger, one finds more than a trace of admiration for what has come to be called “Asian values” (the emphasis on “order” and “community” over individual rights and freedoms), which

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allegedly form the basis of tyrannies in Singapore and China. Fareed Zakaria’s fondness for “liberal autocracy”—whatever that may mean— is in the same vein.

American Democracy at Home and Abroad Today, as before, doubts about the universal applicability of democracy spring in part from a lurking doubt about the condition of American democracy. One of the most striking aspects of the new aversion to promoting democracy abroad is the degree to which it is, once again, heavily influenced by a deep pessimism about the health of American democracy—especially, but not exclusively, among conservatives. There is little doubt that the realists’ hostility to ideology in the 1950s was closely related to their disgust at what they perceived to be the wild and irresponsible behavior of the American masses during the McCarthy era. Today many conservatives are similarly disgusted, though for different reasons, and their disenchantment with the course of American democracy is just as surely affecting their view of how vigorously the American way of life should be promoted abroad. The catalogue of conservative fears about American political and cultural life is lengthy, and this is not the place to delve into an exploration of these anxieties. Suffice it to say that concerns about American culture (or rather the balkanization of that culture), about the impact of multiculturalism on America’s national identity, about threats to the American family, about an overweening government bureaucracy, and about a surge of individual license have led many conservatives to question whether the America they have known can long survive. This is certainly Samuel P. Huntington’s concern. In The Clash of Civilizations, he declared Western civilization to be in a state of decline. “The central issue for the West,” he warned, “is whether, quite apart from any external challenges, it is capable of stopping and reversing the internal processes of decay.”21 Like many conservatives, Huntington worries about the effects of immigration on national identity, about the trend toward cultural relativism in education, about the alienation of Americans and other citizens of the West who allegedly prefer to go to bowling alleys alone. In “the wealthy industrialized democracies of the world,” Huntington wrote in 1996, “people have become pervasively alienated from politics and public discourse, deeply cynical about their political leaders, decreasingly involved in political and other social organizations, and less and less trustful of other people.”22 Trying to spread liberal values to other cultures, in Huntington’s view, is not only futile but a dangerous expense of diminishing energies that ought to be directed at shoring up liberal institutions within the West. The strong current of isolationism in conservative and Republican ranks is at least partly the product of strong antigovernment

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sentiments—a “big” foreign policy generally requires a “big” government. Democracy promotion has become linked, in the minds of many American conservatives, with the excesses of big-government liberalism, the welfare state, the “Great Society” reforms, and the social engineering that has characterized left-of-center policies since the New Deal. Michael Mandelbaum’s employment of the term international “social work” to decry U.S. interventions in Bosnia and Haiti resonated deeply with American conservatives, as it was intended to. 23 And there is a similar connection between domestic issues and foreign policy on the American left, where concerns about the alleged erosion of workers’ standard of living at home has led to an aversion to all things foreign, especially to the expenditure of resources to spread abroad the very political and economic system that has so damaged the fabric of American society. The idea that the United States should generally be less engaged abroad because it has so many problems at home has achieved a wide currency. Even Francis Fukuyama has argued that there is “a genuine crisis in American civil society today, from the family to public education to crime, race, and a variety of related problems” that makes it appropriate “for the United States to concentrate on domestic problems right now.”24 Most of the attacks on the idea of democracy promotion, in short, have little to do with specific issues of foreign policy, or with whether one tactic of democracy promotion works better than another. The issue of democracy promotion, at least as it is now debated in the United States, is closely intertwined with much larger issues of American identity and is in fact subsidiary to them. Those who favor a policy that seeks to promote democracy around the world need to engage this battle head-on. I would not presume to advise people from other nations what they ought to do, but I urge Americans to grasp a few central facts. The present international order was built by American strength and American principles working in tandem. To the degree that either America’s power or its commitment to the universality of its principles begins to decline, so too will that international order. There is no stasis in international affairs. The only question is which direction change will take. The present era, moreover, is inherently unstable, in ways both good and bad. The world has not returned to “normal,” whatever that might mean. It is a revolutionary era, one in which the United States and its democratic allies are the leading revolutionary powers. This may not be comforting to some, who look back fondly, if mistakenly, to earlier times when transitions from one type of regime to another often took centuries. But those times have passed. The question today is one that Samuel Huntington posed, in Lincolnesque fashion, seven years ago: “How long can an increasingly interdependent world survive part democratic and part authoritarian?”25 Huntington’s point was not that the world would

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ever become completely one or the other but that the modern, closely interconnected world must move generally either in one direction or the other—toward greater liberty or greater tyranny. Is there anyone who truly believes that which direction the world takes is a matter of indifference to the security and well-being of the United States? And Is there anyone who is there anyone who believes that democbelieves that racy will continue to flourish without the democracy will continued exercise of American power on continue to flourish its behalf? without the If Americans choose wrongly, they may continued exercise of lose something even more valuable than American power on their security. The day Americans cease its behalf? viewing democracy as a primary concern in their foreign policy and adopt a neutral posture toward the fate of democracy elsewhere in the world is the day they deny their own essence. American conservatives worried about the national identity and the challenges posed to that identity by multiculturalism and growing cultural relativism should be the first to recognize that the only identity Americans possess as a nation is rooted in their commitment to certain principles that they believe are universal. Americans can hardly expect to unite their country around the only thing that truly unites them—their common commitment to individual liberty and democracy—if they decide that such principles apply only in a few, rare circumstances to a limited number of blessed peoples. Nor can Americans expect to achieve renewal at home while they conduct themselves abroad in a mood of despair and cynicism about the very things that they hold most dear. It is often argued that vitality abroad depends on vitality at home. Yet throughout their history, and especially in this century, the reverse has also been true: The active defense of American principles abroad has compelled Americans to support them even more vigorously at home. The fight against the fascists and the communists in the 1940s and 1950s helped build the national consensus in support of the civil-rights movement. In the Reagan era, confidence about the democratic project at home was closely linked to confidence about America’s beneficial role in the world. America’s identity as a nation, Huntington wrote, “is inseparable from its commitment to liberal and democratic values. Other nations may fundamentally change their political systems and continue their existence as nations. The United States does not have that option. Hence Americans have a special interest in the development of a global environment congenial to democracy.”26 Some day, of course, the world may well turn back to autocracy. The world’s leading democratic power could lose a major war to some rising nondemocratic power. (One need only imagine what might have become

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of the liberal idea if Nazi Germany had won the Second World War—an outcome that was not entirely impossible.) Or some calamity, whether man-made or not, might devastate our civilization. Nothing lasts forever. The task for America is to preserve and extend the present democratic era as far into the future as possible, in the full knowledge that democracy is not inevitable but requires the ongoing attention of individuals and nations wishing to sustain it. As it happens, the present era offers an especially favorable opportunity to advance democratic principles successfully and in relative safety. It would be a timeless human tragedy if the United States failed to seize it. NOTES 1. Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 76 (November– December 1997): 22–43. 2. Robert D. Kaplan, “Democracy’s Trap,” New York Times, 24 December 1995, sec. 4, 9. 3. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Democratization and War,” Foreign Affairs 74 (May–June 1995), 80. 4. Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), xv. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., xv, 29, 316. 7. Quoted in Frederick W. Marks III, Independence on Trial: Foreign Affairs and the Making of the Constitution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 115. 8. Ibid. 9. Quoted in Norman A. Graebner, Foundations of American Foreign Policy: A Realist Appraisal from Franklin to McKinley (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1985), xxxii. 10. Quoted in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 310. 11. Quoted in Bradford Perkins, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, Volume 1, The Creation of a Republican Empire, 1776–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 48. 12. Franklin to the Chevalier de Chastellux, 6 April 1782, in Albert Henry Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin collected and edited with a life and introduction by Albert Henry Smyth (New York: Haskell House, 1970), vol. 8, 416. 13. Samuel P. Huntington, “The West: Unique, Not Universal,” Foreign Affairs 75 (November–December 1996), 41. 14. George Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 66.

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15. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippman and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 181. 16. Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 269. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 440. 19. Hans Morgenthau, “Another ‘Great Debate’: The National Interest of the United States,” The American Political Science Review 46 (December 1952), 977. 20. Robert Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in American Foreign Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 448. 21. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 303. 22. Samuel P. Huntington, “Democracy for the Long Haul,” Journal of Democracy 7 (April 1996), 11. 23. Michael Mandelbaum, “Foreign Policy as Social Work,” Foreign Affairs 76 (January–February 1996), 18. 24. Francis Fukuyama, untitled letter to the editor, Commentary, December 1994, 8. 25. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave, 29. 26. Ibid., 30.

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IV The International Economy

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8 TRADE, MONETARY POLICY, AND DEMOCRACY Kyung Won Kim

Kyung Won Kim is president of the Institute of Social Sciences, a leading private research center in South Korea. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught political science at Harvard, York University (Toronto), New York University, and Korea University. His publications include Revolution and the International System (1970). He has also held important government posts, including ambassador to the United Nations and ambassador to the United States.

I

n the spring of 1998, as I was preparing the initial version of this essay on the impact of the international economy on democracy, a drama in which this question played a major role was unfolding on the streets of Jakarta. President Suharto was being forced out of power, and the authoritarian regime that had ruled Indonesia for 32 years was about to begin an uncertain, difficult, and still fragile transition to democracy. The Indonesian drama raised more questions than it answered. What brought down Suharto’s dictatorship? Was it the International Monetary Fund (IMF), with its interventionist policies, or the will of the Indonesian people? If the fall of an authoritarian regime does not always portend a transition to democracy, what is it that makes the difference between a case where it does and one where it does not? Finally, if it was indeed the IMF that brought down Suharto and opened the way to a new, more democratic era, what gave such an external actor the right to put the Indonesian people in a situation where they were, in effect, “forced to be free”? Answers to these and other questions will not be found by staring at the “facts” of the Indonesian drama. One need not be a thoroughgoing Kantian to know that our “answers” depend on the perspective from which we choose to approach these questions as well as on what the facts are. There are, broadly speaking, three different perspectives from which to view the impact of the international economy on democracy: 1) the positivist-developmental perspective; 2) the historicist-holistic perspective; and 3) what, for lack of a better term, I call the functional perspective.

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The developmental perspective sees democracy as a stage that a state reaches by acquiring certain “social requisites.”1 These requisites are identified empirically rather than conceptually. It is statistical frequency that establishes correlation, not a philosophical insight into the nature of democracy. To be sure, an intuitive understanding of why these requisites help democracy does play a role in making imperfect correlations acceptable. It is easy to see why, for example, even methodologically rigorous social scientists are inclined to accept the notion of a positive and nonspurious correlation between education and democracy. Among the most discussed of these requisites, at least among those who adopt the developmental perspective, is the attainment of a certain level of economic development. The experts, of course, warn that “the relation between economic development, on the one hand, and democracy and democratization, on the other, is complex and probably varies in time and space.”2 Complexity and variation notwithstanding, however, developmental positivists think that the correlation between wealth and democracy is no accident. They hold that, in the words of political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, “over the long-term, economic development creates the basis for democratic regimes.”3 If Huntington is right, the impact of the international economy on democracy is straightforward. If international economic conditions promote the economic development of a state, they ipso facto promote its political democratization as well. We need not dwell on the details of what impact the international economy has on the domestic political structure of a state. All that is subsumed under the observed correlation between wealth and democracy. The simple formula suggested here is not without historical evidence, which at least intuitively suggests that the correlation which it assumes is valid. The Bretton Woods system established at the end of the Second World War did promote economic development in many nations. For allies of the United States, the international economy meant access not only to U.S. technology and capital but also to the enormously rich U.S. domestic market, in return for which Washington did not insist on reciprocal access until the 1970s. The Marshall Plan for Western Europe and, to a lesser extent, the economic assistance that the United States gave to its allies in Asia created conditions favorable to the growth of democracy. Except for Japan, the East Asians were slower to establish stable democratic institutions, but their lower levels of economic development in the benchmark year of 1950 can explain the lag. Eventually, as we know, the international economic environment did allow many Asian nations to “catch up” politically once they had developed socioeconomically to the point where a shift toward democracy became both possible and necessary. This auspicious situation in the aftermath of World War II was the

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fruit of a conscious effort to avoid the mistakes made in the decades following World War I, when harsh reparations demands and protectionist trade policies deepened and prolonged the Great Depression. For the small, newly independent nations of Central and Eastern Europe, the democratic window of opportunity that had opened briefly after 1918 slammed mercilessly shut when the Nazis took over Germany. Of course, some might argue that it was acute economic crisis and not chronic underdevelopment that doomed democracy in these lands. Yet that distinction is less important than the fact that economic failure, brought on by the particular circumstances of the international economy at the time, had deadly consequences for nascent democracy. A more relevant point is that those disastrous international economic circumstances were not “givens.” They were the products, however unintended, of policies that men and states had chosen deliberately to adopt. The statistical correlation between wealth and democracy does provide a workable criterion for judging the desirability of international economic policies from the viewpoint of promoting democracy. Yet the correlation is too crude to be of any use in sorting out such practical problems as those raised by a policy that promotes long-term economic development at the cost of shoring up an authoritarian regime in the here and now. Those charged with overseeing U.S. foreign assistance policies have long grappled with this dilemma.4 They have often found themselves hard-pressed to choose between helping economic development first of all and refraining from steps that might have the effect (however unintended) of propping up authoritarianism. The upshot has been a tendency to vacillate between the two alternatives. This is understandable, for the dilemma appears insoluble when viewed from within the positivist-developmental perspective.

The “Holistic” Approach This brings me to the second perspective, the one that I call “historicist-holistic.” This approach begins by seeing the domestic structure of any given state as an inherent part of a global system. The most representative example of such a view is Immanuel Wallerstein’s theory of the modern world-system.5 Confronted with the diversity of stages of modernization and of cultural patterns in the world, many students of society resort either to the positivist strategy of trying to explain away diversity by applying regularities or to the alternative historicist strategy of citing a single law of development. In the case of the former, regularities yield explanations by means of different independent variables. The trouble is that explaining a dependent variable by means of one or more independent variables raises a new question about what explains those. Eager to avoid the endless chase after causes, historicists claim to

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have discovered a single pattern or law of historical development in which changes and variations are seen as emanating from the nature of the whole. The whole encompasses the world and does not render itself as a series of causes (understood as repeatable positive regularities). It was Hegel who applied this historicist strategy most powerfully, for he developed a “law of becoming” under whose rule the drama of worldhistorical change unfolded as a process both actual and rational at the same time. But Marx, by setting Hegel’s idealist construct on what Marx thought was the firmer foundation of materialism, created a theory with far more powerful political appeal. Immanuel Wallerstein adapts Marx’s theory to the post-Marxian age. Wallerstein begins and ends with the concept of the world as a single social system, which he defines as “historical capitalism.” By “historical” he means actual—namely, “concrete, time-bounded, space-bounded, integrated.” By “capitalism” he means a system in which “the endless accumulation of capital has been the economic objective or ‘law.’” Once these definitions are given, every meaningful historical event or development—the appearance of new kinds of inequality, the transformation of the labor force, the emergence of territorial states, and so on—is explained as a by-product of contradictions and tendencies inherent in capitalism. The modern “world-system” is not a descriptive concept. Although Wallerstein tries to locate the genesis of the modern world-system in late fifteenth-century Western Europe, he does not arrive at this concept by accumulating observed facts but rather by triumphantly confirming facts that he predicted based on his definition of “historical capitalism.” If what happens in the world-system happens by virtue of the nature of the world-system, then, obviously, it is of no great importance to ask what impact the international economy has on internal politics. Internal phenomena should be understood as occurrences taking place inside the womb of an external system. Thus they cannot be otherwise. They are as they are, by necessity. Wallerstein, therefore, does not believe that the international economy can have any other impact on domestic political structure than the one that it does in fact have. The whole determines each of its parts. Or as Wallerstein himself says, “in assessing the politics of any given state, the internal/external distinction is . . . not too helpful to our understanding of how the political struggles actually occurred.”6 The irrelevance of the “internal/external distinction” implies that it is meaningless to ask whether any aspect of the external environment (such as the international economy) influences domestic political circumstances (such as the prospects facing democracy) in a given country. Domestic institutions are part and parcel of the world-system. The only explanation for their existence and evolution comes from “historical capitalism.”

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It is equally clear that capitalism, driven by its all-consuming logic of endless capital accumulation, cannot in the nature of things promote democracy. In the Marxian language of Immanuel Wallerstein, capitalism means “the commodification of everything.” The territorial state comes into existence as part of the capital-accumulation process. The thought that it might serve some other historical end or ends is nothing but a sentimental fantasy. Politics and war are nothing if not instruments utilized by capital to enlarge itself through conquest and control. At this point, Wallerstein introduces the concepts of core and periphery, from which the notion of dependencia draws its conceptual sustenance. That the language of core, periphery, and dependencia touched a sensitive chord in intellectuals’ perceptions of the contemporary world balance (or rather imbalance) of power is not in doubt. Plausibility, however, is not the same as truth. As an empirical matter, the distribution of power is far more complex than is dreamt of in the philosophy of Wallerstein and the dependencia theorists. In the real international system, more gradations of power exist than the binary distinction between core and periphery implies. In measuring power, one should be careful not to confuse factors that help to generate power with power itself. Military strength is certainly a factor in the making of power, but the correlation between power—understood as the ability of one actor to compel another to do its bidding—and the relative military strength of the two actors is never a simple matter. Factors that produce the effect of power—such as military strength, wealth, and political will—change over time, thus making the hierarchy of power not only complex and varied but also unstable and uncertain. Dependencia is neither so onesided nor so permanent as the neo-Marxists seem to think. If the more naive among developmental positivists are wrong in thinking of democracy as a stage in history that nations can reach by diligently acquiring certain social requisites, holistic historicists err in ruling out the possibility of democracy as a meaningful political system that does not owe its existence to the whole. Thus we must turn to a third perspective, one that seeks neither empirical correlations nor a grasp of the whole so profound that it obviates any need to study the parts. Instead, this third approach rather modestly asks: What effects does the international economy have on democracy within states? To answer this question, we must first find out what the international economy is.

The Impact of International Trade Broadly speaking, the international economy means the international trading regime and the international monetary order (in practice, the two are closely linked). Since the first great onset of international commerce in the nineteenth century, there have been two opposed views

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on the advantages and disadvantages of free trade. Classical liberal free traders hold that the law of comparative advantage means everyone benefits from free trade. Nationalists counter that, while this may be true in some aggregate sense, trade in fact always bestows its costs and benefits unequally. Across the sweep of nations, regions, firms, and individuals, then, actually existing free trade necessarily creates particular “winners” and “losers.” Who wins and who loses depends on circumstances, but winners and losers there always will be. This debate still goes on today. Powerful forces are arrayed on both sides. Yet the overall trend has been toward the lowering of trade barriers and the expansion of trade across national boundaries. In 1948, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was created to promote “freer and fairer trade” through nondiscrimination, multilateralism, and application of the Most-Favored Nation Principle to all signatories; reduction of trade barriers; and unconditional reciprocity among all signatories. Under what has been called the “compromise of embedded liberalism,” countries could accept the obligations of the GATT without jeopardizing their domestic economic and social objectives. The GATT was never intended to end all state intervention in the domestic economy. Successive rounds of trade negotiations within the GATT framework resulted in substantially lower tariffs and rapidly growing international trade. Between 1985 and 1994, the so-called Uruguay Round of the GATT talks produced a far more comprehensive trading regime by integrating such critically important new areas as agricultural products, intellectual-property rights, and services into the GATT regime. How has the continuing liberalization of international trade affected the situation of democracy within territorial states? To begin with, trade has cultural implications. Trade means contact across national boundaries, and this cannot help but affect values and ideas within the societies involved. As knowledge spreads, tolerance may grow, making social change a little easier than it is in societies that do not engage in trading activities. North Korea is one extreme example of a nontrading society, but there are others. In fact, it may be possible to establish a rough correlation between the degree to which a society engages in foreign trade and the amount of freedom enjoyed by individuals within it. North Korea and Burma are Asian examples of nontrading nations, whereas South Korea and Thailand are clearly among the world’s most active trading nations. One also thinks of the contrast between nontrading Sparta and Athens, where both international trade and individual freedom were extensive. The cultural impact of trade and its political ramifications deserve more attention, although developing the proper indices of measurement will not be easy. A more direct effect of trade liberalization on domestic politics is liberalization’s tendency to curtail the state’s power to protect special

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interests. Protectionists customarily appeal to the general interests of the nation. Yet protectionism, like free trade, always produces specific winners and losers. Governments, not surprisingly, are anxious to shield the interests of groups whose political support they need. Import liberalization, by reducing (or eliminating) tariffs, import quotas, export subsidies, or overvalued exchange rates, reduces the state’s capacity to protect particular groups against market forces. In the case of debtor nations whose economies are in crisis, import liberalization may come as part of a “structural-adjustment package” imposed by the World Bank. Whatever the means of its advent, the effect of freer trade is always the same: The state loses much of its power to favor certain political or economic groups over others.7 Is the weakening of state power brought on by import liberalization a plus or a minus for democracy? If we assume the classic dichotomy of state versus society, then the weakening of state power must be regarded as helpful to democratic consolidation. If the state recedes, then society (understood as the arena of free speech, free association, and free political mobilization) has more room to grow and assert itself on behalf of free and peaceful self-government. Yet this classical view overlooks a deeply troubling question: What if import liberalization has been imposed from outside, against the wishes of most citizens in a given country? And what if those wishes are justifiable? Think of a nation that has only recently begun to feed itself. Is it wrong for a majority in that nation to want to protect the farmers who grow its basic foodstuffs? In circumstances like these, for an outside agency to force the ending of protectionist measures seems hard to celebrate from the point of view of common sense, let alone democracy. Perhaps we should reconsider our earlier willingness to regard any weakening of state power as a positive development from the viewpoint of democracy. Carried to its extreme, the proposition that less power for the state means more democracy points toward anarchy, which is hardly promising ground on which to erect a democratic edifice. In the end, whether free trade has a positive or a negative impact on democracy depends on the particular circumstances of the society in question. If an undemocratic government protects special interests without popular support for such policies, external pressure to remove import barriers should prove a boon to democratization. In the case of a state that is already democratic, external pressure to further liberalize its import policy may not be in the best interests of democracy. If, however, the pressure for trade liberalization comes from global and regional trends, and not in the form of a deliberate policy of a specific actor, we cannot say that it is inconsistent with democracy. It is for this reason that multilateral liberalization is by far preferable to a bilateral process, especially from the point of view of promoting and protecting nascent democracies. Multilateralism, however, is in deep

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trouble. The December 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle, which was supposed to launch a new round of trade liberalization talks, had to be called off under pressure from protesters opposed to globalization. Since then, the opponents of globalization have gone on to disrupt the private World Economic Forum meeting in Davos and the UNCTAD meeting in Bangkok. The success with which those opposing globalization were able to form an alliance and organize protest campaigns suggests that we may be witnessing the birth of a new international order increasingly shaped by fast-growing nongovernmental organizations. The fact that so many groups dedicated to different and often mutually inconsistent aims were able to form an alliance for the sole purpose of disrupting the process of globalization also suggests that there are genuine issues raised by the process of globalization that are not being given proper attention. It would be a mistake, however, to give all the credit for killing the Seattle meeting to the alliance of nongovernmental groups opposed to globalization. The states scheduled to take part in the new trade round had never managed to agree on an agenda for the Seattle meeting. The disagreements between the United States and the European Union (EU) over agriculture and between rich countries and poor ones over so-called labor standards remained huge. What was needed to bridge the gaps and get the new round of talks under way was leadership, which only the United States could provide, since it has the only economy big enough to offer concessions that could start the process of deal-making. In an election year, however, no American administration can be expected to do what is needed for the long run at the expense of what is expedient in the short run. Under the circumstances, it was quite understandable that President Clinton would express his sympathy with the views of the antiglobalization demonstrators, but it was also clear that his failure to provide leadership doomed the Seattle meeting to failure. The future of the WTO hangs on how mature democracies, primarily the United States, the EU, and Japan, respond to domestic pressures against freer trade. The stakes are too high for the world to give in to the kinds of domestic political demands that are unavoidable in democracies. The future of the international trade regime, in other words, depends on how successfully democracies deal with their domestic constraints. The historical record is not reassuring, but neither is it hopeless. Given the benefits of free trade, which are not so difficult to fathom, it may not be too much to hope that the campaign against globalization will help make globalization more humane rather than make it impossible.

The Impact of the International Monetary Order All international monetary systems reflect some sort of compromise between the need to allow autonomy of national policy and the need for

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international monetary stability.8 The nineteenth-century system rested on the twin pillars of the gold standard and Great Britain, the premier economic power of the day. In the final analysis, what ensured the stability of the system was Britain’s ability and willingness to enforce its rules. When World War I ended British preeminence, the monetary order became nationalized. As countries decided to protect their gold supplies and disengage from the fixed exchange rate, the gold standard collapsed. The triumph of domestic primacy, however, was a hollow one. The nationalist policies adopted by the major powers helped to cause the Great Depression. Nor did interwar assertions of national autonomy do much for democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, where democracy’s prospects would have been shaky even in the absence of economic crisis. At times during the 1930s, it seemed as if even the deep-rooted democratic institutions and traditions of the North Atlantic nations might be in jeopardy. A few years later, the close of the Second World War found the leaders of the West determined to achieve economic growth with full employment. Keynesian macroeconomic management required substantial autonomy in domestic economic policy as well as international monetary stability. To achieve the latter, the experts who designed the Bretton Woods system decreed that the international monetary order should be based on fixed exchange rates. In practice, fixed exchange rates meant currencies pegged to the U.S. dollar, with the United States committing itself to keeping the dollar convertible into gold at $35 per ounce. The United States then became the main source of international liquidity and had to tolerate frequent deficits in its balance of payments. This arrangement effectively ended in 1971, when massive U.S. spending on the Great Society and the Vietnam War led to a severe deterioration in its balance-of-payments situation. Confronted with massive outflows of gold and repeated runs on the dollar, President Richard Nixon suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold and placed the world monetary system on a pure dollar standard. In 1976, a meeting of leading IMF members in Kingston, Jamaica, formally decided to adopt floating exchange rates. The United States could no longer continue to play the role of economic hegemon. Nixon made his decision to abandon the fixed exchange-rate system in part because, under dollars-to-gold convertibility, the resurgent economies of Western Europe and Japan were able to put restraints on the autonomy of U.S. economic policy. Washington preferred keeping its freedom of action to maintaining the fixed exchange-rate system created at Bretton Woods. While flexible exchange rates probably made it easier for the world economy to deal with the energy shocks and hyperinflation of the 1970s, it is also true that the breakdown of the fixed exchange-rate system has led to greater monetary disorder, not to a new order. In these new and more anarchic conditions, the private

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capital market, increasingly deregulated by major countries, has grown enormously. The end of fixed exchange rates also forced the IMF, which was originally created to help member countries deal with temporary foreignexchange shortages, to find a new role. In the 1980s, Mexico and other Latin American countries became unable to make the interest and principal payments on their large borrowings from overseas commercial banks. As part of the debt-restructuring plans these countries worked out, they agreed to raise taxes, cut government spending, and tighten credit at home. The IMF assumed the role of monitoring these “structural adjustments.” In the 1990s, the IMF played a much more active role in advising the postcommunist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union on making the shift to markets. By providing substantial financial rewards to countries that accepted its advice, the IMF was able to persuade the governments of troubled countries to accept its prescriptions. In the late 1990s, the IMF has been playing an even more active role in Southeast Asia and Korea, applying there the formulas it used in Eastern Europe (structural change as a condition for IMF funds) and in Latin America (tighter credit) as well as its traditional mix of fiscal policies (higher taxes, less government spending). 9 The IMF’s role in East Asia has generated debate about the wisdom of its prescriptions for economies that are so different from those in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Yet whatever the economic soundness or unsoundness of the IMF program, there remains the question of what impact the IMF program has on democracy in these nations. The commentators and experts who debate the IMF’s role in East Asia seldom mention the implications for democracy, usually preferring to talk about “sovereignty.” 10 Thus Martin Feldstein writes, “The legitimate political institutions of the country should determine the nation’s economic structure and the nature of its institutions. A nation’s desperate need for short-term financial help does not give the IMF the moral right to substitute its technical judgments for the outcomes of the nation’s political process.”11 One is immediately struck by the adjective “legitimate,” which seems to imply that the defense of sovereignty should not apply to states with governments lacking in legitimacy. Suharto’s Indonesia certainly comes to mind. Yet the concept of legitimacy is notoriously slippery, and it is doubtful whether democracy can claim a monopoly on it. So does any sovereign regime ipso facto have a case against the intrusive IMF? Should we regret the fall of Suharto because the IMF helped bring it about? It was, after all, IMF pressure that drove Suharto’s government to raise fuel and electricity prices on 7 May 1998, triggering the severe protests that in turn prompted U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to make

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her May 20 public statement calling on Suharto to “preserve his legacy” by permitting a democratic transition. Suharto stepped down the next day, and his successor B.J. Habibie promised the release of political prisoners and fresh elections under amended election laws. Clearly, the outcome of the process created more possibilities for eventual democratization than before the IMF intervened. Thus the issue comes down to the question of whether we prefer democracy or sovereignty. If one does not hold sovereignty to be an absolute, unconditional value that cannot be compromised under any circumstances, then one cannot automatically condemn the IMF because it impinges on a nation’s sovereignty. It may be dangerous to try to draw a line between democracy-enhancing and democracy-damaging intervention, but it is even more dangerous to treat sovereignty as an absolute. It must also be borne in mind that states are not forced to accept the IMF’s advice. The types of conditions commonly attached to IMFsponsored relief are well known, but states can remain free of them, provided they are prepared to cope without help from the International Monetary Fund. Typically, IMF conditions aim at both a structural overhaul of the economy and a contractionary macroeconomic policy of higher taxes, reduced government spending, and higher interest rates. In Indonesia, the immediate cause for Suharto’s downfall was provided by the IMF demand for higher taxes and reduced subsidies. Yet Suharto knew that the reforms demanded by the IMF would bring down the financial and industrial empire that he and his family controlled. That is why he resisted the IMF program, which, in the end, he could not escape because of the exchange crisis. In Korea, the initial reaction to IMF intervention was negative and resentful. The Korean press predicted the end of economic sovereignty for Korea. Kim Dae Jung, who was then a leading opposition presidential candidate, promised that, if elected, one of his first orders of business would be to renegotiate the terms of the IMF agreement. Yet Kim, while still a candidate, changed his position. After reviewing Korea’s precarious foreign-exchange position, he declared that in order to avoid the unthinkable alternative of a debt moratorium, the country would have to accept the IMF program “one hundred percent.” On 18 December 1997, Kim Dae Jung won the election and became the first opposition candidate ever to reach the presidency. While the exchange crisis undoubtedly contributed to the defeat of the governing party’s candidate, there is no evidence that Kim Dae Jung’s election had much to do with what the IMF was doing at the time. Here, the interesting question is what effect democracy had on the public acceptance of the IMF role. The free debate that went on in Korea over the IMF program during the presidential campaign—including Kim Dae Jung’s change of mind after his initial doubts—made the general public more willing to view the harsh IMF-imposed conditions as bitter but necessary

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medicine. In Thailand also, the democratic legitimacy of the government made the IMF program more acceptable, although there, too, doubts were initially expressed about its necessity. Comparing the case of Indonesia to those of Korea and Thailand, it is possible to suggest that the IMF program threatens democracies less than it threatens authoritarian regimes. To be sure, the democracies also ended up with changes of government. Such transfers occurred, however, as part of the normal political process within the framework of the established constitution. In authoritarian Indonesia, by contrast, the IMF program’s impact was much more traumatic. The contractionary macroeconomic policies demanded by the IMF pose challenges for democracies and nondemocracies alike. Yet democracies seem to be more capable of dealing with threats to social peace than nondemocracies. As events in Korea and Thailand indicate, democracies may be better able to survive economic crises than nondemocracies because democratic governments have greater credibility. The impact of structural reform, which is the other component of the IMF prescription, is more profound. Although it too can pose immediate challenges to the viability of the political regime, its more important impact lies in the long-term changes it brings about. The adjustments demanded by the IMF have to do with corporate governance and structure, the transparency of industries and banking institutions, independent central banking, opening domestic financial markets, and liberalizing import policies and foreign-investment laws. The idea is to reform the economy so as to gain the confidence of international investors, whose funds the country in distress needs to attract. And a country can attract private foreign money only if it is prepared to remake itself to meet the expectations of foreign private investors. These are economic changes with enormous and fundamental political effects. Transparency will make it impossible for the government or ruling party to raise the kind of money which, in Korea, for example, used to be taken out of corporate funds by chaebol owners without leaving any visible trace. Consolidated bookkeeping and more rigorous accounting methods will put an end to the kind of huge illegal money that allowed those in power to finance their campaigns and grease the wheels of machine politics. The end of such “secret funds” is good news for democracy. It makes ruling parties more honest and less able to hang on to office by, in effect, buying it. Those in power understand all this, of course, but they have no choice. The economy cannot be sustained without the confidence of international investors, which in turn requires transparency and accountability. And an economy gone sour for lack of investor confidence will be enough to push the government out of power, secret funds or no secret funds, as happened in Indonesia. On balance, then, the IMF’s interventionist policy seems to work in

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favor of democracy. Its demand that troubled nations reform their institutions so as to gain the confidence of international capital markets is consistent with the requirements of democracy.

The Global Capital Market and Democracy Yet there is a larger and more fundamental issue than the question of what effect the IMF policy has on domestic politics. Behind the IMF role, there is the assumption that the unfettered movement of capital across national borders is not only a desirable goal but also an inevitable trend to which all national governments must adjust. Economists are not all persuaded that unfettered capital flows will bring more benefits than costs, even in a purely economic sense.12 As for the political fallout of global capital-market integration, most observers seem to share the view that massive capital movements beyond the control of national authorities severely restrict the autonomy of national governments and even threaten the continued viability of nationstates. The need to compete for global capital forces every nation-state to join in a “race to the bottom,” thus depriving nations of the option of applying active policies in an effort to correct market-generated inequalities.13 If this is true—that is, if global capital-market integration means that states can choose only the most market-friendly policies— then democracy is in serious danger. Democracy, in practice, has functioned on the basis of competition between the right and the left. If it is true that the world of free capital mobility means a world without the left, this has highly disturbing implications for the future of democracy. And yet, most observers seem to agree that is what is happening today. One dissenting view belongs to Geoffrey Garrett, who argues that, contrary to the prevailing view, “the relationship between the political power of the left and economic policies that reduce market-generated inequalities has not been weakened by globalization.” He contends, on the contrary, that “it has been strengthened in important respects.”14 Garrett makes this claim based on his research into the political economy of industrial democracies. It is, therefore, difficult to see exactly how his research would apply to East Asian states, whose politics are so unlike those of European democracies. Social democracy is conspicuous by its absence on the Asian scene. We cannot, therefore, ask if the international economy is destroying what does not exist. We may, however, ask what the effect of the Asian financial crisis will be on the elements that may yet come together to constitute the basis for a social democratic alternative. It is interesting to note in this connection that, in Korea, the IMF regime has actually compelled the Korean government and people to become serious about creating a social safety net for the unemployed.

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Labor unions had to agree to legalized layoffs. Yet at the same time, a radical trade union confederation, the Korean Democratic Union, gained legal recognition and labor activists began to stand for elective offices. In other words, the net domestic political effect of global capital-market integration may not necessarily be a dead end for the democratic left. Whether this is so or not may depend on the domestic political conditions of the states concerned. In conclusion, it seems reasonable to suggest that the domestic political impact of the global integration of markets in goods, services, and capital depends essentially on domestic conditions in particular countries. States with strong democratic institutions seem to be capable of taking advantage of the economic opportunities offered by market integration without losing their autonomy when it comes to policy making. By contrast, authoritarian states, partly due to their lack of transparency and accountability, may be most vulnerable to the crises brought on by large movements of capital. The political consequences for nondemocratic regimes can be fatal. The challenges facing emerging democratic states in this era of globalization are complex. Such states seem better equipped than nondemocratic states to handle the trauma of social discontent brought on by financial crisis. Clearly, however, prolonged social unrest would severely test democratic political institutions that in most cases are not yet as strong as those in more established democracies. Fortunately for Asian nations, their economic recovery has been very fast. In 1999, Asian economies grew on average more than 5 percent, with South Korea going from a 6.5 percent decline in 1998 to 10.2 percent growth in 1999. In fact, Korea and Thailand have already graduated out of the IMF regime. This rapid recovery of precrisis growth rates in Asia stands in sharp contrast to the Latin American record. An explanation for the contrast may be found in the different weights of trade in the overall economy in the two regions. Asian nations are highly trade-dependent. In Korea, for instance, trade (import and export) is equivalent to 70 percent of GNP. In contrast, Brazil has a tradedependency ratio of only 16 percent and Argentina of 18 percent. Once Asian countries succeeded in turning their current-account deficit into a surplus (thanks to a jump in exchange rates, higher interest rates, a credit crunch, and a fall in domestic demand), they were able to restore confidence in their hard-currency position because of the overall weight of trade in their economies. The achievement of a trade surplus meant a great deal more for them than it did for Latin American economies. Despite Asia’s rapid recovery, however, serious problems remain. There are serious flaws in its financial and corporate structures that could bring about another crisis if they are not corrected in time. Asian nations depend on foreign capital, yet most of them still have not developed rules to guarantee transparency and accountability, without which it is

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difficult to sustain the confidence of the foreign financial community. The rapid recovery of Asian nations in terms of macroeconomic indicators should not make them complacent about the need to complete the job of restructuring. A more serious problem from the standpoint of democracy is the shrinking of the middle class as a result of the financial crisis. The closure and downsizing of banks, security firms, trading companies, and manufacturers entailed massive layoffs of people who had regarded themselves as belonging to the middle class. In this respect, the economic recovery has not led to the restoration of the precrisis status quo. The unemployment statistics have gone down, but the jobs that are now available pay less. Given the pressures to conform to the requirements of globalization, emerging democracies must find a way to arrest and reverse this shrinking of the middle class. Otherwise, they may lose the single most important element for sustaining a stable democracy. Clearly, the international economy has a significant impact on the evolution of domestic political structures. In most cases, its effects have been positive for democracy. At the same time, however, pressures generated by the international economy can pose serious threats to new democracies. Learning how best to respond to these threats is one of the key challenges in today’s world.

NOTES 1. Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review 53 (1959): 69–105. 2. Ibid., 72. 3. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 59. 4. Joshua Muravchik, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America’s Destiny (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1992), 182–88. 5. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974); The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); The Modern World System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980). For a condensed version of the central ideas from the above books, see Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization (London: Verso, 1995). For a friendly introduction to Wallerstein’s ideas, see Charles Regin and Daniel Chirot, “The World System of Immanuel Wallerstein: Sociology and Politics as History,” in Theda Skocpol, ed., Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 276–312. 6. Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization, 18. 7. Paul Mosley, “On Persuading the Leopard to Change His Spots: Optimal Strategies

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for Donors and Recipients of Conditional Development Aid,” in Robert H. Bates, ed., Toward A Political Economy of Development: A Rational Choice Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 52–53. 8. For an overview of the history of international monetary orders that stresses their political aspects, see Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 118–70. 9. Martin Feldstein, “Refocusing the IMF,” Foreign Affairs 77 (March–April 1998): 20–33. 10. Kyung Won Kim, “The IMF Reforms Can Make South Korea More Democratic,” The International Herald-Tribune, 26 February 1998, 8. 11. Martin Feldstein, “Refocusing the IMF,” 27. For a detailed account of the Asian financial crisis, see Yung Chul Park, Financial Liberalization and Opening in East Asia (Seoul: Korean Institute of Finance, 1998). 12. Jagdish Bhagwati argues that “the claims of enormous benefits from free capital mobility are not persuasive” and that free capital movements are prone to repeated crises. “The Capital Myth: The Difference between Trade in Widgets and Dollars,” Foreign Affairs 77 (May–June 1998): 7–12. 13. I owe these and other ideas to Prof. Chung Chin Yong, “Sekekumyungkwa Minjujui,” Sasang (Seoul: Sahoekwakakwon, Summer 1998): 182–208. There is a considerable body of literature on the impact of capital mobility on domestic policy: David M. Andrews, “Capital Mobility and State Autonomy” International Studies Quarterly 38 (1994): 193–218; Louis Pauly, “Capital Mobility, State Autonomy and Political Legitimacy,” Journal of International Affairs 48 (Winter 1995): 369–88; John Gerard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” in Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983). 14. Geoffrey Garrett, Partisan Politics in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1.

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9 THE PLUSES AND MINUSES OF GLOBALIZATION Ethan B. Kapstein and Dimitri Landa

Ethan B. Kapstein is Stassen Professor of International Peace at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and the department of political science at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He is the author, most recently, of Sharing the Wealth: Workers and the World Economy (1999). He previously served as vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations, principal administrator of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and executive director of the Economics and National Security Program at Harvard. He is a consultant to the World Bank, the OECD, and other public and privatesector agencies. Dimitri Landa is a doctoral candidate in the department of political science at the University of Minnesota.

Does economic openness strengthen or weaken emerging democracies?

The experts as yet have no unequivocal answer, for it seems that the relationship between openness and democracy can play out in two different ways. On the one hand, openness promotes economic growth, which is favorable to the development and consolidation of democratic institutions. 1 Yet on the other hand, globalization can also promote economic disruption, income inequality, and job insecurity. The result then is less growth and more social conflict, hardly promising outcomes for the stability of weak or fledgling democratic states.2 The burden of this essay is to argue that domestic institutions—and especially those designed to help workers open up new opportunities for themselves despite the hard knocks that economic opening can cause—are the key to determining whether globalization helps or hurts democracy. More than a half-century ago, Paul Samuelson pointed out that economic opening can have massive distributive effects, creating new winners and losers in a given society.3 Out of the experience or even the anticipation of these effects will grow coalitions of individuals and groups who will feel powerful incentives to support or oppose the steps that will decide the nature of national economic and political development, including the endurance of democratic rule. These incentives

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can be molded. The task for friends of democracy, both within the society and in the world at large, will be to fashion mechanisms and institutions that shape these incentives in ways favorable to democracy. Our argument refines Dani Rodrik’s claim that “[s]ocieties that benefit the most from integration with the world economy are those that have the complementary institutions at home that manage and constrain the conflicts that economic interdependence triggers.” 4 Rodrik is referring mainly to social-insurance schemes, but as recent empirical work shows, direct-transfer mechanisms have only partially compensated the losers of globalization. And redistributive channels more generally show little evidence of being affected by the bottom-up demand for welfare equalization. Given the political and economic factors that limit the impact of direct transfers, institution-builders in emerging democracies should focus on the development of capital markets, including especially human capital. Increasing and appropriately targeting investment in such markets will do the most good by making it easier for disadvantaged citizens to acquire marketable skills and entrepreneurial capital. We emphasize that the role of capital markets in enabling globalization’s losers to transform themselves into long-run winners is of considerable political potency and has important implications for emerging democracies and the advanced industrial states that wish to support their development. When these markets are closed or grossly inefficient, shortterm economic losers may react in a way that can prove damaging or even fatal to a fledgling or otherwise shaky democracy.5 In effect, efficient capital markets shield both democratic rule and the long-term benefits of globalization from popular backlash by creating new opportunities for “losers” to better themselves. Thus one of the critical determinants of whether openness will in fact promote democracy is the manner in which domestic institutions affect the allocations of capital.

Openness, Growth, and Democracy In classical economic theory, the relationship between economic openness and growth is straightforward: Openness promotes growth. Countries that embrace free trade and the division of labor implied by the principle of comparative advantage liberate the factors of production and enable them to work more efficiently. Such countries produce and consume more than they could under a protectionist regime, even if their trading partners retain restrictive policies. For reasons that classical theory largely overlooked, free trade boosts growth in ways that transcend the one-time efficiency gains brought by economic opening. An economy open to new flows of trade, investment, and people is one that special-interest lobbies have a much harder time rendering “sclerotic” with their growth-stifling efforts to secure “rents”

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and other unearned advantages. As the late Mancur Olson wrote in his classic The Rise and Decline of Nations, “if there is free international trade, there are international markets out of the control of any lobbies. . . . Free trade undermines cartelization of firms, and indirectly also reduces monopoly power in the labor market.” He went on to note that while “free trade alone is not enough” to break domestic cartels and monopolies, it can play a powerful role “in combination with other policies.”6 In sum, free trade promotes growth through both its direct effects on the division of labor and its indirect effects on would-be rent-seekers. 7 A second—and for our purposes more immediately relevant—line of argument holds that economic growth strengthens democracy. This insight, which was adumbrated by Aristotle, had its most influential modern expression in Seymour Martin Lipset’s observation of the correlation between wealth and democracy. Lipset’s finding has received strong support from subsequent empirical studies.8 What is still missing, however, is an account of how wealth actually helps to cause stable democracy. Perhaps the most ambitious recent attempts to demonstrate the causal connection between wealth and democracy are those of Richard Posner and Robert Barro. Posner explains the correlation of higher median-income levels with political stability by arguing that wealthier countries are better able to support a strong criminal-justice and internal-security system.9 In a similar vein, Barro maintains that “improvements in the standard of living—measured by a country’s real per-capita GDP, infant-mortality rate, and male and female primary-school attainment—substantially raise the probability that political institutions will become more democratic over time. Hence, political freedom emerges as a sort of luxury good.”10 The underlying argument, which has strong parallels in economic analyses of the emergence of environmental standards and labor rights, is that as incomes rise, people become more willing and able to “buy” such things as clean air, better working conditions, and democratic governance. Starting with the necessities of life, the implicit hierarchy of consumer needs moves upward toward such luxury items as political freedom. Joined with the aforementioned arguments for the beneficial effects of free trade on economic growth, the Barro-Posner model implies the ultimate democratic potential of market processes. These, it is expected, will in due time produce desirable political outcomes in the form of democratic regimes. No further institutional interventions should be needed. In short, free trade is seen as a promoter of democracy.

Free Trade, Domestic Politics, and Social Welfare The problem with this view is that market processes are mediated by existing political conditions and institutions, and so will not always operate in such a benign manner. Moreover, free trade as such is

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quintessentially utilitarian. It is predicated on the goal of maximizing aggregate output and consumption, and pays no heed to the substantial distributive effects within or between countries. But such effects produce consequences that are too serious to ignore. Behind these effects lie two mechanisms. The first is indirect, and suggests that free trade has implications for democracy in the global South that are mediated by the distributive effects of trade in the industrialized countries of the global North. The second mechanism links trade directly with distributive effects in the South and then draws a connection between economic inequality and democratic instability. Paul Samuelson and Wolfgang Stolper first formulated the basic theory underlying the distributive effects of free trade in the 1940s. According to Samuelson’s “factor price equalization” (FPE) theorem, two economies that adopt a policy of free trade will find (given certain conditions) that the returns to the factors of production in each country tend toward equalization at some intermediate point. This thinking rested in turn on an earlier theorem of Samuelson and Stolper’s which held that if protectionism raises the domestic price of goods, the return to the factor used intensively in their production (say, unskilled labor) will increase. If protection is abandoned, the corresponding domestic prices and returns will tend toward the lower levels of the international market. From this it can be inferred that the lowering of trade barriers between rich and poor countries will result in lower demand for—and hence lower wages paid to—unskilled workers in the richer states. The logic that Samuelson and Stolper employed is impeccable, but the empirical applicability of their theorems has often been debated. The main issue is the actual existence of the conditions that must hold for the two theorems to be valid. The stakes are real—and high. Can free trade be blamed for the huge gap in earning power that has opened up between skilled and unskilled workers in many developed countries over the last two decades, or are factors such as skill-biased technological change more important? However one resolves this and a number of other issues raised by the relationship between trade, growth, and inequality, it remains true that economic opening may be seen as bad for both aggregate economic welfare and democracy. First, the extent to which openness promotes growth will depend on the degree to which developed countries are able to maintain their commitment to free trade policies over time. Existing welfare transfers in most advanced industrial countries, even when they are generous, provide displaced workers with only partial compensations for their income losses. 11 As a result, both workers and owners or managers of capital in industrialized countries have tended to call for tariffs or import quotas when free trade with developing countries threatens their interests. Cases of “tariff escalation” against refined agricultural products from developing countries (higher tariffs on instant

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coffee than on coffee beans, for instance) provide particularly egregious illustrations of this phenomenon. Such barriers can be “growth-killers” for developing countries, which find themselves denied the dynamic gains from trade associated with technological progress and growth. The significance of this is brought home when we consider the strong empirical evidence that countries become far more likely to democratize and remain democratic once they have achieved a certain level of per-capita income.12 In short, to the degree that protectionism in the global North has real and malign income effects on the countries of the global South, it retards the cause of democratization. If the developed countries are to maintain their free-trade policies, ways must be found to compensate the losers. This suggests an emphasis in turn on the impact that domestic fiscal policy has on capital markets, with their dynamic, intertemporal effects and potentially high comparative economic efficiency. By enabling those who have lost or stand to lose from economic openness to acquire the skills and physical capital they need to maintain at least a comparable standard of living under the new economic conditions, more accessible capital markets both increase aggregate economic welfare and promote a more tolerant attitude toward free trade. Here, then, is our working hypothesis: The weaker the developed world’s domestic capital markets—and hence the harder for governments there to promote free trade—the dimmer the prospects for democracy in the developing world. Let us also note that rather than encouraging people to look to the state for a “bailout” if they wind up on the short end of system-wide effects, we want to offer freedom of opportunity as the primary economic protection, creating a system of individual incentives that is both more efficient economically and more compelling normatively.13 In the developing world, just as in industrialized countries, free trade can lead to greater income inequality. Even workers with relatively advanced skills can find themselves suddenly displaced when the old protectionist barriers come down. Insofar as free trade cuts the returns received by the factors of production, and especially by labor, the prospects grow of a backlash against liberalization and its supporters. In an emerging democracy that is still finding its sea legs, such a backlash can be dangerous indeed. Concern over this has led numerous analysts to stress that economic openness and public expenditure for welfare policies such as income transfers are highly correlated in the advanced industrial economies. And some scholars, including Dani Rodrik, go further to argue that social safety nets ought to accompany the move toward liberalization in developing countries.14 Another effect of openness has been noted in Latin America. There we find that, contrary to what the standard theoretical model predicts,

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trade liberalization is correlated with sharp increases in wage differentials between the top and middle-bottom quintiles of the income (and skill) distribution. This seems to be happening in part because, as trade barriers fall, natural resources are among the few domestic commodities that can successfully compete on the international market in the short term, skewing the distribution of income and wealth in the direction of their owners—in Latin America, a very small proportion of the population.15 To account fully for the growing wage gap, we also have to recall that the production in developing countries of intermediate goods for sale in developed countries relies on technologies that disproportionately reward higher-skilled workers. Of course, a key and traditionally lauded benefit of opening less-developed economies to the world market has been the transfer to such economies of new and more efficient production technologies. The downside is that these technologies often favor the more highly skilled so heavily that others are left by the wayside. As Donald Robbins has shown, as technology transfers flow to the global South, labor markets become increasingly segmented into winners and losers.16 This tendency toward stark segmentation means that if proper institutional safeguards are lacking, the accumulation of new technology may actually wind up undermining its contribution to good economic performance. Yet however reasonable such safeguards may be in principle, effective social safety nets are for all practical purposes a lost cause in many fledgling democracies. If the essential work of tackling the problems that economic development, free trade, and growing inequality raise for democracy is to go forward, another approach will have to be found.

Economic Inequality, Democracy, and Growth We have thus far suggested that free trade may increase inequality in both industrial and developing countries, and that, insofar as it actively diminishes the welfare of large segments of the population, it might provoke domestic opposition, leading to renewed protectionism and even to serious unrest. We have also noted the negative effects of protectionism on growth rates, and hence on democracy. Yet economic inequality also affects growth and democracy directly, and so should be of concern even when the only immediately observable effect of globalization is widening inequality, and no correspondence between globalization and political instability is perceived. Why does inequality have a direct political effect? Because the actual losers of globalization, who will probably be a minority, might seek to swell the ranks of the anti–free-trade coalition by appealing to the disaffection of those near the middle and bottom of the distributional ladder whose welfare may not be much affected by economic openness, but

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who are systematically shut out of opportunities that are routinely available to the wealthier classes. In other words, as regards its effects on growth and democracy, economic inequality should be seen as both an intermediate cause (and an unfortunate side effect of free trade) and as an independent intervening consideration that plays a big role in determining what the net political effect of free trade will turn out to be. We address the effects of economic inequality through the lens of endogenous-growth theory (EGT), which has gained considerable currency in macroeconomics in the last decade and which offers a nicely balanced approach to understanding the relationship between democracy and growth. Models based on EGT have several advantages. First, they focus our attention on domestic responses, both political and economic, to the impact of economic and technological change. Second, they help to clarify the complex manner in which openness, growth, domestic institutions (capital markets especially), and political stability are all linked together in democratic states. Third, they warn of the danger that an increasingly unequal distribution of income within a society undergoing economic liberalization and technological change can end up hurting economic performance. (This is so precisely because extremely sharp and intractable inequalities breed sociopolitical instability, which in turn clouds the prospects for growth.) And finally, these models do not merely point out dangers, but also suggest a constructive—if not very sanguine—view of the relationship between free trade and democracy. EGT has yielded two ways to understand the relationship between income distribution and economic growth. These approaches are usually held to be competing, but are actually complementary. Economist Roberto Perotti calls them “endogenous fiscal policy” and “sociopolitical instability.” These two approaches agree with the basic claim that greater income inequality leads to lower growth, but differ in their analysis of the underlying political mechanisms that generate this outcome. Proponents of “endogenous fiscal policy” posit that income inequality leads to redistribution, which in turn leads to lower economic growth. They argue that discontent over their smaller slice of the pie induces the median (decisive) voters, who cluster around the middle of the income distribution, to enact higher taxes aimed at redistributing income away from the upper income groups who are generally the big early winners of free trade.17 Yet because it is the wealthy who are most likely to save and invest, such taxes will depress investment, and with it, economic growth. In a globalized economy, moreover, any serious effort to “soak the rich” will also spur general capital flight, thereby shrinking investment even further. The sociopolitical-instability approach posits a direct link between economic inequality and political violence.18 Its advocates argue that

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instability, as measured by politically motivated protests and deaths from political violence, is the inevitable and immediate consequence of sharply skewed income distributions that may result from the sudden adoption of free trade. Sociopolitical instability, needless to say, creates a climate of uncertainty that is hardly good for investment. Capital flees, and the government spends a lot building up large and economically inefficient police and military forces. Again, the upshot of inequality is more instability, less growth, and less-secure democracy. It is important to recognize that economic inequality need not always lead to political instability; expectations are key. In developing countries, the poor (including the losers left behind by liberalization) have relatively low expectations regarding their ability to adjust to economic change. Very often, sadly, their pessimism is well warranted. This is so because, to put it in technical terms, developing countries generally have highly wealth-inelastic and inefficient capital markets. In plainer language, it is nearly impossible for poor people in these lands to get the schooling or to borrow the funds they need to better their long-term prospects and become winners in a more open economy. Without accessible and efficient capital markets, the poor will continue to despair. Prospects for preserving democracy may grow grim indeed. People who feel trapped and desperate may resort to destabilizing strategies, up to and including large-scale violence.19 This limns a big difference between developing countries and advanced industrial democracies. In the latter, public access to capital markets is much more open. This spells broader career choices and opportunities for oneself and one’s children, more economic efficiency, and greater political stability.20 This argument conceives of the condition of capital markets as having direct political implications for democratic stability. As such, it is notably distinct from the economic argument for the beneficial effects of efficient capital markets on democracy, which portrays those effects as a distant, second-order phenomenon mediated by economic growth. Our argument is intended to speak directly to the concerns of the disaffected and those who fear for democratic stability in less-developed lands, and does not envision that stability as something which must wait for the generalized effects of economic growth to make themselves felt in a country’s political life.21 While the literature of macroeconomics has tended to treat endogenous fiscal policy and sociopolitical instability as logically distinct, it is important to note that the presence of instability is most likely to be associated with the absence of redistribution. Which of these two outcomes prevails in practice will depend on the extent to which government policies are responsive to the demands of the median voters. The available data reveal no significant correspondence between governmental decisions to redistribute income away from the upper quintiles

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and changes in the actual distribution of income. From this we draw the sobering inference that regimes cannot be counted on to forestall internal sociopolitical instability, and may call themselves “democracies” without providing equity of opportunity to the bulk of their citizens. This conclusion fits well with what we know about the logic of collective action. As long as politics proceeds through the “usual channels of representation,” we may trust that the better-organized upper-income strata will generally succeed in counteracting whatever redistributionist pressure lower-income groups can bring to bear. In other words, political pluralism rewards the better organized and better endowed—a fact of life that the international community should reflect on before it lets itself believe that domestic political institutions in fledgling democracies will take steps to compensate economic liberalization’s initial losers. And even if such steps are taken, the tendency of elected officials to think only as far ahead as the next election will probably ensure that they are “quick fixes” (such as income transfers) rather than long-term and potentially more efficient reforms (such as making capital markets more accessible). It may well be that escape from this trap will hinge on significant assistance from the international community. First, however, let us consider the current state of knowledge regarding the relationship among openness, growth, and human-capital markets. We focus on this particular type of capital market because of the availability of reliable data. Other types of capital markets thus have to be left out of our discussion, but we have no doubt that they need to be developed and made more accessible as well. This point is particularly pressing not only in poorly industrialized countries where the survival of whole families often depends on the uninterrupted employment of all able members and there is no time to spare for the learning of new skills, but also in countries characterized by the presence of what Peter Hall calls “the underemployed salariat.”

Openness and the Development of Capital Markets Capital markets not only are important to individuals and families but can shape the political and economic contours of whole societies. In fledgling democracies especially, social peace and political stability may hinge on the presence or absence of accessible capital markets. Indeed, it may be said that, as a rule, the degree of investment in and access to capital markets, especially human-capital markets, will determine a country’s trade and growth prospects, and hence its chances for strengthening its democratic institutions. According to the World Bank, “some countries have successfully combined openness and investment in learning and education, forming

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a virtuous circle: openness creates demand for education, and learning and education make a country’s export sector more competitive.” 22 Examples of this positive trend can be drawn most prominently from East Asia, at least prior to the financial crisis of 1997–98 (and it is interesting to note that the countries least touched by the crisis, such as Taiwan, would seem to be those where this virtuous circle is the strongest). Yet elsewhere—and especially in Africa and Latin America—it appears that the relationship between openness, education, and growth has become vicious rather than virtuous. For example, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) states that the “low returns to basic education” in regions like Latin America “may reflect the influence of globalization through a number of conduits. The incorporation of China and other less developed countries into world trade may have exerted adverse pressure on earnings for workers with only a basic education. . . . And combined with macroeconomic policies, trade liberalization in Latin America seems to have fostered the adoption of technological change that has displaced labor demand.”23 Tragically, in Latin America it is precisely “workers with only a basic education” who have the least access to the advanced training that they so desperately need if they are to remain competitive in the global economy. Yet the answer is not as simple as spending more money on education. More does need to be spent, but it needs to be spent in the right way, and not in a manner that merely continues the current maldistribution of educational resources and opportunities. The available data on educational expenditure in developing countries paint a sad picture of both the gross level of effort 24 and the way it is distributed across different socioeconomic strata. In particular, the evidence to date from developing countries, especially in Africa and Latin America, suggests that the benefits of education are being captured by a relative few. The “winners,” it seems, are still winning, but democracy is not—at least if it is understood as requiring a reasonable degree of equitable opportunity. There appear to be significant differences in levels of educational attainment depending upon one’s income level and gender. Further, UNICEF reports that spending is not being targeted at basic education, despite the evidence that this delivers the highest economic returns. Instead, “many countries continue to focus on higher (tertiary) education to the detriment of primary and secondary levels.”25 Who is benefiting from this spending on tertiary education? Across the developing world as a whole, the poorest fifth of the population receives only 3 percent of public expenditure on tertiary education, while the richest fifth receives almost 70 percent. In short, the incidence of education, and especially higher schooling, offers no evidence of redistributive opportunity-creation; on the contrary, a disproportionate share of public educational spending is going to the rich.

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In Africa, the data show that “the gains in access to education have been unevenly distributed. . . . In many countries the poor get much less than their fair share of government spending on education.” In Ghana, for instance, the richest 20 percent of households receives 45 percent of state subsidies to tertiary education, while the poorest fifth gets only 6 percent. In Malawi, the distribution is even more skewed, with the corresponding figures being 59 percent and 1 percent.26 Latin America provides similar if slightly less dramatic evidence. “In most countries of the region,” reports the Inter-American Development Bank, “education is more poorly distributed than one might expect.”27 This becomes especially apparent as the level of education increases. For example, whereas 94 percent of poor children in South America complete their first year of primary education, only 63 percent make it through the fifth year and less than 15 percent through the ninth year. As the IDB concludes: “Latin America’s poor educational distribution is not the result of problems of initial access for the poor to the education system. It results instead from high and more rapid dropout rates among the poor. Latin American school systems are quite stratified as a result, and do not constitute a mechanism for social mobility or for reducing income differences.”28 This is not a promising finding for those who care about the future of democracy.

The International Community’s Role So what is to be done? The beginning of wisdom is to recognize that domestic institutional change in the developing world is exceptionally difficult and will, in all likelihood, need outside help. The industrial democracies can use foreign aid to promote capital-market development in fledgling democracies and should do all they can to ensure that it is spent in ways that “target” the need for greater opportunity on the part of those who are least advantaged and the biggest losers from technological and economic change. We hold no illusions that such targeting will be easy, but at a minimum the governing idea of opening up humancapital markets should play an important role in the design and evaluation of foreign-aid programs. Indeed, these programs should be part and parcel of international economic policies designed to promote greater openness. For as we have seen, when openness sharpens inequality in countries where the avenues of opportunity are constricted, both growth and democracy are threatened. In short, trade policy must become sensitive to the domestic politics of the emerging democratic states. That will require both spending more for aid and spending it in a new way. We know that this is an immense political challenge, but we think that a strong case for this strategy can be made.29 Considerations of economic self-interest and national security, to say nothing of democracy promotion, indicate that retargeted and reevaluated aid will be a good

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investment. Everyone should recognize that more accessible humancapital markets are more just, more efficient, and better for democracy. Money judiciously used to open these markets up will be money well spent indeed. Clearly, the spending trend for foreign assistance at present is not promising. Official development assistance by the major industrial countries reached its postwar high of $70 billion in 1991. Since that time, it has tumbled to insignificant proportions, Everyone should largely because of decreased spending by recognize that more the United States; while the U.S. economy accessible humanconstitutes 30 percent of the industrial capital markets are world’s total, U.S. aid contributions repmore just, more resent less than 17 percent of all official efficient, and better flows traveling between the global North for democracy. and South. The end of the Cold War, along with renewed fiscal pressure on the welfare state, has basically doomed aid budgets everywhere. The advanced industrial democracies now allocate less than 0.25 percent of their collective GNP to foreign assistance. That is half of what they were spending just a decade ago. It is hard to think of any other program, domestic or international, that has suffered such reductions. At the same time, perceptions about the utility and effectiveness of aid spending will need to be changed before there is any significant shift in public support. The polling data taken by the aid organizations themselves reveal widespread skepticism about the efficacy of aid programs; the belief that such funds “go down a rat hole” is widespread among the general public. With that in mind, a major step in the right direction by the aid community is provided by the World Bank’s recent report, Assessing Aid. This report is brutally honest about the errors that have been made in the past, and circumspect about future promises. Nonetheless, the report provides clear evidence that it is possible to target aid and make it more effective in supporting the goal of greater opportunity, especially for the least advantaged. Specifically, the World Bank has found the following with respect to program effectiveness: First, foreign aid succeeds when it complements sound domestic economic policies. That is, it can help promote overall growth and the expansion of individual opportunities in those countries that pursue macroeconomic stabilization and structural-adjustment measures. It should be emphasized that the effect of such assistance “is large. . . . [One] percent of GDP in assistance translates into a 1 percent decline in poverty and a similar decline in infant mortality.”30 Second, in such reform-oriented settings, aid and private investment are mutually supportive; contrary to what is often said, there is no

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evidence that aid “crowds out” the private sector. There are several reasons for this positive relationship between aid and investment. For foreign investors, the presence of official development assistance acts as a “security blanket” that boosts their confidence. These investors feel reassured when they see that donor nations are involved in the reform process and are in a position to pressure any government that would seek to extort funds from private investors or to nationalize their holdings. For domestic investors, aid that supports infrastructural and institutional development makes the local setting more attractive and promising over the long haul. Third, aid in the form of technical assistance can increase the capacity and capability of public agencies and officials. It can help countries import effective policies in such areas as health care, education, and the management of environmental risks and resources. Moreover, aid can expand the range of outputs by providing advice about how to use inputs more efficiently. As a result, higher-quality public services end up reaching more citizens. Our arguments suggest that, in the future, aid must be better targeted with respect to both feasible projects and “ground-level” recipients. Instead of being targeted only at those countries that are committed to economic reform, aid should encourage and assist governments that are also committed to expanding educational and work opportunities for the less advantaged. All too often, as the World Bank admits, educational expenditure in developing countries has “not always reached groups that have traditionally had low levels of education (the poor and girls, for instance).”31 One strategy the Bank advocates in this respect is further decentralization of educational expenditure. Indeed, this recommendation is associated with the broad movement toward fiscal decentralization around the world. This could be a promising development, but only if local governments turn out to be more responsive to the needy than central governments have been. World Bank programs of decentralized educational expenditure in El Salvador, Pakistan, and Brazil have produced impressive early results: “In each case decentralizing and involving civil society led to . . . the broader availability of schooling to disadvantaged groups.”32 Whether these gains can be sustained is not yet known. More broadly, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the big donor countries should all reexamine their economic programs and policies in light of the connections that link openness, growth, and democracy. The received wisdom—that open markets promote efficiency, growth, and ultimately democracy— is not wrong, but it is incomplete. It neglects the danger that domestic political institutions may capture the gains from trade for an elite, denying most citizens equality of opportunity. As we have seen, such

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an outcome is regrettably likely to occur, and it will turn economic development into a vicious rather than a virtuous circle, retarding growth and sapping the foundations of democratic stability. Breaking the vicious circles caused by perverse domestic institutions will take great courage on the part of democratic forces within developing countries. Yet without foreign assistance from established democracies, their hopes for a democratic future will be cloudy at best. NOTES 1. See, for example, Robert Barro, “Democracy and Growth,” Journal of Economic Growth 1 (March 1996): 1–27. 2. See, for example, Dani Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1997). 3. The notion of economic openness is multifaceted. It can mean, among other things, free immigration, free trade, and free movement of capital and technology. Our main focus is on the relationship between democracy and free trade, and we consider the question of capital mobility only in that light. The complexities of the relationship between freedom of immigration and democracy and the extensive literature on this topic are left completely outside our analysis. 4. Dani Rodrik, “Globalization, Social Conflict and Economic Growth,” Journal of Economic Growth 1 (December 1997): 8. 5. In what follows, we use the terms “efficiency” and “openness” in relation to capital markets interchangeably. Since space constraints preclude a full explanation of this move, we will simply note that given binding repayment constraints and rationally behaving agents, there can—all other things being equal—be no such thing as “excessively” (that is, inefficiently) open capital markets. 6. Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 142. The classic case of the “sclerotic,” cartel-ridden society, according to Olson, was twentieth-century Great Britain. More recently, Olson’s account of how small, well-organized interest groups use political leverage to gain “rents” and other forms of unearned advantage has been helpful for understanding what has been happening in Russia and other parts of the postcommunist world. 7. For recent cross-sectional studies affirming the positive relation between open trade policies and growth, see Jeffrey D. Sachs and Andrew M. Warner, “Economic Convergence and Economic Policies,” NBER Working Paper No. 5039, February 1995; David Dollar, “Outward-Oriented Developing Economies Really Do Grow More Rapidly: Evidence From 95 LDCs, 1976–85,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 40 (April 1992): 523–44; Dan Ben-David, “Equalizing Exchange: Trade Liberalization and Income Convergence,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 108 (August 1993): 653– 79. For a critical assessment of the inferences drawn from the evidence presented in these papers, see Francisco Rodriguez and Dani Rodrik, “Trade Policy and Economic Growth: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Cross-National Evidence,” NBER Working Paper No. 7081 (April 1999). 8. For a review, see Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 59–72. Important exceptions to the rule include India and Bangladesh, which are poor but democratic.

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9. Richard Posner, “Equality, Wealth and Political Stability,” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 13 (July 1997): 344–65. 10. Robert Barro, “Democracy and Growth,” 23–24. 11. Even assuming the best intentions, structuring well-targeted income-transfer programs has proven difficult, since providing full compensation gives all workers a perverse incentive to identify themselves as “losers.” For a recent review of the evidence, see Louis Jacobson, “Compensation Programs,” in Susan Collins, ed., Imports, Exports and the American Worker (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1998), 473–523. 12. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave, 59–72. 13. For some of the most powerful normative arguments, see Ronald Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (Summer 1981): 185–246 and “What Is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (Autumn 1981): 283–345. 14. Dani Rodrik, The New Global Economy and Developing Countries: Making Openness Work (Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1999), 98. 15. On this situation and the reasons for it, see Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Facing Up to Inequality in Latin America (Washington, D.C.: IDB, 1998), 46, 70, 74; Albert Berry, “The Income Distribution Threat in Latin America,” Latin American Research Review 32 (1997): 3–40. 16. Donald Robbins, Evidence of Trade and Wages in the Developing World, OECD Development Center Technical Papers, No. 119 (December 1996). 17. Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, “Is Inequality Harmful for Growth?” American Economic Review 84 (June 1994): 600–21; and Alberto Alesina and Dani Rodrik, “Distributive Politics and Economic Growth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 109 (May 1994): 465–90. 18. See, most prominently, Alberto Alesina and Roberto Perotti, “Income Distribution, Political Instability, and Investment,” European Economic Review 40 (June 1996): 1203–28; Yannis Venieris and Dipak Gupta, “Income Distribution and SocioPolitical Instability as Determinants of Savings,” Journal of Political Economy 96 (August 1986): 873–83. 19. To be sure, the relationship between income distribution and political stability is also conditioned by factors other than the quality of capital markets. On some of these related institutional factors, see Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Economic Performance, 1950–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). The focus on capital-market institutions in this essay is a function of their particular relevance for the distributive consequences of globalization. 20. For the argument about the relationship between the wealth-elasticity of capital markets and economic growth and discussion of the evidence, see Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire, “A New Data Set on Measuring Income Inequality,” World Bank Economic Review 10 (September 1996): 565–92. 21. John Maynard Keynes, in discussing the sources of economic development in nineteenth-century Europe, claimed that “it was precisely the inequality of the distribution of wealth that made possible those vast accumulations of fixed wealth and of capital improvements which distinguished that age from all others.” The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 19 (italics in original). What prevented domestic revolution, he argued, was a tacit social contract between rich and poor, in which the wealthy saved and invested for the benefit of the

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community as a whole. What Keynes overlooked is that in nineteenth-century England (as elsewhere in Europe), there was a lot of social unrest, and it finally spurred political reforms. Workers gained the franchise, and education was made more accessible. The tacit social contract, therefore, was enforced in part by the threat—and indeed the actuality—of violence. For an account of this history, see Ethan B. Kapstein, Sharing the Wealth: Workers and the World Economy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999). 22. Ramon Lopez, Vinod Thomas, and Yan Wang, Addressing the Education Puzzle (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 1998), 7–8. 23. IDB, Facing Up to Inequality, 46. 24. Between 1980 and 1992, educational spending dropped as a percentage of GNP in El Salvador (where it went from 3.9 to 2.2), Bulgaria (4.5 to 4.2), Malaysia (6.0 to 5.3), Mali (3.8 to 2.2), and Zambia (4.5 to 1.8). Of all countries with developing and transitional economies, only three (Kenya, Ukraine, and Yemen) spent more than 7 percent of GNP on education; the world average was 5.2 percent, or only slightly more than the 4.4 percent spent in 1980. These figures hardly bespeak a major commitment of public expenditure, especially when one considers that, thanks to the end of the Cold War, military spending in the world fell by almost half during the same period, going from 5.2 percent of global GNP in 1980 to just 2.8 percent 15 years later. 25. UNICEF, The State of the World’s Children: 1999 (New York: UNICEF, December 1998), 63. 26. World Bank, World Development Report 1998/99, 45. 27. IDB, Facing Up to Inequality, 42. 28. Ibid., 43 (italics added). 29. See Ethan B. Kapstein, “Reviving Aid,” World Policy Journal 16 (Fall 1999): 35–44. 30. World Bank, Assessing Aid (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 2–4. 31. Ibid., 108. 32. Ibid., 111.

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10 EPILOGUE: DEMOCRACY’S UNCERTAIN TRIUMPH Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski, U.S. national security advisor during the Carter administration, is counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and professor of U.S. foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. His most recent book, The Grand Chessboard, was published in 1997.

The June 1998 conference that gave rise to this volume was rich in

substance, broadly covering a very important and timely issue. It was also rich symbolically, because it involved many people who have long yearned and struggled for the success of democracy, as well as those who are currently in the process of building new democracies. Indeed, the participants’ geographical origins demonstrated the expansion of democratic governance worldwide. It is also worth noting a certain historical symmetry. This conference took place in 1998. Exactly 150 years earlier, in 1848, the world witnessed the so-called “Spring of Nations”—the effervescence of the idea of freedom and the initiation, in many respects, of the “democratic contagion.” We now live at a time when the aspirations of that earlier era have finally come to pass. And that reality has changed the very nature of the international community. The character of international affairs today is shaped by the coincidence of three key factors: the primacy of American global power, the global appeal of democracy, and the seeming success of the free-market economic system’s triumph over its statist competitors. These factors are interrelated and interdependent. Indeed, American power is based on the democratic system, and the American economy is essentially a free-market economy. These conditions have, in part, enabled American economic, military, political, and even scientific dominance. Each of these trends contrasts with the dominant manifestations of the twentieth century, which was arguably the most lethal and vicious in the history of mankind. It was a century dominated by utopian certainty, by fanaticism and dogma, and by the seeming universality of certain

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pseudorational conceptions of how to organize humanity, including the extermination of those deemed a priori as unredeemable—in the case of Nazism, on the basis of race, and in the case of communism, on the basis of class. Those dogmas and their manifestations belong to the past, and we now seem to be enjoying the global triumph of the idea of democracy. I want to ask the following question, however: Just how enduring and secure is this new reality? And I want to consider the uncertain, perhaps even fragile, character of democracy’s triumph. This fragility pertains to the very factors I have identified as interrelated and interdependent: America’s global stewardship and the nexus between democracy and the free market. It is also contingent, however, on the looming momentum of science, its relationship to social control, and its likely impact on the human personality. In brief, whether the triumph of democracy will endure depends greatly on how we deal with the problems of power, with the problems of poverty, and with the complexity of personality.

American Power and Democratic Principles The word “hegemony” is found in some of this volume’s essays, just as it is in other discussions of America’s global role. In a sense, hegemony is a description, and not necessarily a prescription. There is no doubt that we are living in a period of American global preponderance. A very simple test can be applied in response to anyone who questions this reality. Let us imagine that in the next three months American troops were to be withdrawn by Congressional mandate from South Korea, the Persian Gulf, and Europe. What would be the consequences for world peace? There would be an outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula; there would be instant conflict in the Persian Gulf; there would probably be profound insecurity and instability in Europe. Can the same be said about any other nation’s power? Thus the fact of American power is a reality, perhaps the central reality. The United States today is the first global power; it is the preponderant power. This preponderance, however, should not be confused with omnipotence. America is not an omnipotent power, and it cannot be so in a world that is politically awakened and actively striving to fulfill both individual and collective aspirations. Hence there are numerous dilemmas connected with the exercise of American power that make democracy’s ultimate triumph uncertain. The first question that comes to mind is whether a democracy can, in the long run, assume a quasi-imperial role on the world scene, a role into which the United States has now been cast. There are real conflicts between that role and the domestic orientation and aspirations of American society. There is among many Americans a sense of uneasiness about the burdens entailed in that role and a growing preoccupation with

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domestic affairs. There is also the related question of whether America’s growing multiculturalism is weakening the sense of a shared national interest needed to give the United States the kind of coherence in its global involvement that it had during World War II and the Cold War. Another question is raised by changes in American culture—the enormous emphasis today on entertainment and the preoccupation with what can be called virtual reality. Can a democratic society dominated by such a culture bear on a sustained basis the burdens of global leadership, and not merely enjoy its privileges? The key challenge is whether, in the long run, American global preponderance can be translated into effective global cooperation based on the realities of power. I am referring not to idealistic formulations about power sharing (as in the United Nations, for example) but to the existing power realities involving numerous powers of significant scope and growing regional influence. Despite being the only global power, America must, in some fashion, share power responsibly and effectively with other influential nations. That is the central dilemma today in America’s relationship with China—a critical relationship due to that country’s growing strength. If America is to exercise its power responsibly and stably, bilateral relations with China must be nurtured. One may hope that, in the course of such a process, the scope of democracy will be enlarged and the centrality of human rights made more important. The importance of maintaining a stable relationship, however, cannot be sacrificed to these otherwise desirable objectives. Hence the problem of power sharing in the near-to-medium term does require some degree of compromise regarding the centrality of democracy in U.S. foreign relations. There is also the problem posed by the dispersal of power, particularly because of the growing availability of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) to smaller and smaller entities. Indeed, not only may less powerful states, such as North Korea, acquire WMDs, but there is also the danger of private individuals or syndicates obtaining and utilizing such weapons. A great deal has been said about the role of terrorism in our world. What is most striking to me, however, is how technologically antiquated terrorism remains. Most terrorist acts still involve tools similar to those used 150 years ago: a revolver for assassination, a bomb for social terror. The only case of international terrorism that came close to some degree of sophistication was Aum Shinrikyo’s 1995 sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system. How long will this apparent restraint persist, given the growing ease of acquiring WMDs? Will we at some point face the prospect of nuclear guerilla warfare? Here again, the response will require a degree of international policing and cooperation that may compromise democracy’s centrality in U.S. foreign relations. Such efforts may also entail new burdens and obligations. While American

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opposition to WMD proliferation has ostensibly been a universal policy, it has been selective and preferential in practice. We openly aided British efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. And it has been reliably reported that we furnished similar assistance to France, without which there probably would not have been a successful French nuclear weapons program. Such a selective and preferential nonproliferation policy was not a significant impediment to proliferation and is now a dilemma that the United States must confront. Beyond that, a universal nonproliferation policy must involve providing guarantees that those countries that do not seek nuclear weapons will be protected from neighbors who do. In some cases, such commitments may have to be unilateral. The United States is not prepared to do this, however. The U.S. Congress will not give a blanket guarantee to protect any and all nations whose neighbors may acquire nuclear weapons. Yet without that assurance, nonproliferation becomes more a slogan than a policy. The only possibility, therefore, is to cooperate with other nuclear powers in a collective effort to define and stabilize the limits of future proliferation. Once again, such an endeavor will require some compromise with democratic principles, as it would involve a vertical international power hierarchy along with a horizontal concession of principle in dealing with undemocratic powers.

Economics, Science, and Morality The nexus between democracy and the free market is equally relevant to the question of global democratic leadership. America’s ongoing economic success, the visible failure of the communist system, and the collapse of the Soviet economy have all demonstrated the dominance of free-market economics in world affairs, establishing it as the current economic orthodoxy. Indeed, frequent invocation of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek is a reflection of the degree to which that orthodoxy now is personalized and, in some respects, even dogmatized. Yet how certain are we that the predominance of free-market economics will endure? The Asian financial crisis, the symptoms of economic malaise—stagnation and unemployment—in Western Europe, and the persisting failure of both Russia and Ukraine to move forward give rise to some legitimate concerns and pose questions about the prescriptions for economic transformation currently offered. Moreover, just how universal are these prescriptions? Can what was successfully accomplished in Estonia or Poland automatically be transferred to other societies with disparate conditions and different historical legacies? Beyond these questions is the real phenomenon of growing world poverty. World Bank and UN statistics indicate that the proportion of humanity living in absolute poverty is steadily increasing and has done so for the last 30 years. If one also takes into account the demographic explosion—a trend that is shifting the bulk of the world’s populations

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to only two continents—the question arises as to whether our present confidence regarding the relevance of the current path to economic success is, in the long term, globally sustainable. Suppose that China, for example, succeeds in maintaining its dynamic economic progress without undertaking fundamental political change. In other words, suppose it continues to grow without becoming what we would like and expect it to become—namely, a liberal democracy. Suppose it succeeds economically on the basis of a quasi-authoritarian political system? While this may seem improbable, as it is likely that there will at some point be a collision between China’s political system and its economic system, we cannot be too sure. Moreover, suppose democratic India does not succeed economically. What would the implications be for our confidence in the arguably successful link between a free-market economy and a pluralistic democratic society? This, too, is a question that we should consider—one with serious and sobering implications regarding the role of the World Bank and the IMF, not only in encouraging sustainable development, but also in promoting the more equitable growth crucial for economic stability as well as economic vitality. Finally, I believe a third question will loom on the horizon. We have already entered an age in which science—a human tool—is moving from the conquest of the external environment to the conquest of what might be called the internal environment. All of human history until now can be viewed as the continuing expansion of our ability to understand and to control things outside of ourselves: the economy, agriculture, industry, nature, and outer space. Today, however, the most dramatic breakthroughs in science increasingly pertain to “internal” control, to what a human being is and can be. New technologies offer enormous hope and opportunity for such noble goals as extending human life and overcoming illness. Yet if one ponders the long-range implications of cloning, artificial intelligence, and genetic enhancement (ranging from the trivial to the fundamental, from appearance to intelligence), serious moral and political questions arise. How will scientific benefits be distributed globally? Who will they benefit first, and to what extent? These questions point to the risk that new and very fundamental gaps might open among human beings—gaps that could have political implications within and among nations. Moreover, there is the far more difficult and troubling question of who will determine, and on what basis, how these new technologies will be used. Who should and will decide how far to go in controlling, manipulating, improving, or altering the human being’s inner essence? Can this decision be made on a democratic basis? Some of the most perplexing and painful debates in America today already involve similar issues. Abortion, which raises philosophical questions as to when life begins and how life is defined, is one of the most contentious and even

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violent political issues dividing American society. And it is only a matter of time—in fact, the process has already begun—before euthanasia becomes another dominant issue. At what point does society decide that it cannot sustain large numbers of unproductive elderly or terminally ill people who may be failing mentally, and what shall we do with them? Clearly, these are moral as well as political issues. And clearly, they pose a challenge to current conceptions of democratic governance. What will be the role of democracy, of the will of the majority, in addressing them? What is the role of ethical absolutes? If ethical absolutes are decisive—as one might think they should be with regard to what are ultimately philosophical questions—then who defines them? And in an age increasingly skeptical of religious dogma, on what basis should they be defined? Will we abandon any sense of responsibility for what transpires and thereby allow scientific momentum itself to answer these questions? If so, then science’s positive and negative consequences will grow increasingly random and impossible to control. In short, for democracy to enjoy a genuine and enduring triumph, its supporters must be conscious of the fact that the twentieth century’s utopian certainty could well give way to an era of agnostic contingency, a period of great moral confusion and fragmentation. The context created by these three challenges makes it particularly important to recognize that American leadership in the world is itself historically uncertain. It is a transitional responsibility that carries with it the obligation to prepare an institutionally sound basis for the devolution of our current preponderance. Such devolution raises a host of practical questions, and these cannot be fully answered on the basis of democratic principles alone. Similarly, we must be fully aware that the free-market system, if it is to be successful, must offer a form of capitalism with a human face. In a world that is increasingly impatient with social inequality, economic development and reform must ultimately be driven by a sense of social responsibility. Finally, we must remain deeply conscious of the fact that science should be the tool and not the master of humanity. And if it is to be a tool, it must be subjected to ethical absolutes that define how and when it is used. This particular challenge may be the most difficult to resolve. By way of conclusion, I would urge that we be very careful not to become dominated by mechanical optimism. Let us instead be contingent optimists, conscious of our obligation to relate moral purposes to politically realistic conduct. Only by combining the two can we in fact assure the progressive, gradual, and comprehensive triumph of democracy.

Index.wpd created by JB on 4/21. JB edits entered on 4/24. Saved as common\warsaw.bk\index.txt.wpd by JB on 4/24. Index.pm6 created from Index.txt.wpd by SL on 4/24.

INDEX

Adenauer, Konrad, 37, 58 Africa, 6, 7, 12, 26, 57, 99, 142; education in, 143; fragmentation in, 25; nationalism in, 25 Aid. See Development assistance Albania, 4, 47, 61, 62, 67, 68, 75, 84 Albright, Madeleine, 126 Algeria, 108 Americanization. See Globalization: and the United States Andorra, xiv, 50 Annan, Kofi, xvi, 84, 86 Anti–Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), 93 Aquino, Corazon, 101 Arafat, Yasir, 25 Argentina, 6, 130 Aristotle, 135 ASEAN, 29 Asia, ix, x, 21, 23, 24, 57, 97, 100, 101, 107, 118, 129; economic crisis in, xviii, 21, 23, 128, 129, 130–31, 152. See also East Asia; South Asia; Southeast Asia Asian values, 98, 108 Assessing Aid, 144 Aum Shinrikyo, 151 Australia, 6 Austria, 4, 51, 103

Bainville, Jacques, 59 Balkans. See Southeastern Europe Baltics, 4, 59 Bangladesh, 29 Barak, Ehud, 25 Barro, Robert, 135 Belarus, 93 Belgium, 33, 50, 59 Bibó, István, 59 Bismarck, Otto von, 61 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 4, 19, 69, 75, 84, 91, 110 Brazil, 6, 130, 145 Bretton Woods, 118, 125 Britain. See United Kingdom Brzezinski, Zbigniew, xi, xix–xx, 9 Bulgaria, 4, 61, 74, 75, 76 Burma, xviii, 122 Bush, George, 104 Cambodia, 84 Canada, 29 Capital markets: and democracy, xix, 129–30, 134, 137, 140, 141–44; and economic inequality, 129, 137 Capitalism: and democracy, 121; and the international system, 120–21; success of, 18, 101, 108, 149, 152. See also Economic reform Catholicism, 101

156

Ceauºescu, Nicolae, 62 Central and Eastern Europe, ix, 3, 30, 44, 108, 119, 125, 126; civil society in, 68–70; democracy in, xi, xv, 13, 51, 57–78; economic reform in, 65–68; and the European Union, 51, 72–78; and Germany, 60–61; legitimacy in, 75; nation-states in, 60, 76–77; and NATO, 70– 72; sovereignty in, 76–77; and the United States, 63–64, 71 China, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 48, 57, 101, 109, 142; democracy in, 12, 23, 26; need for economic reform in, 23–24; future of, 21, 23–24, 98, 153; nationalism in, 12, 23; and the United States, xix, 8, 151 Civic culture: and democracy, 46– 47 Civil society, 62, 84; in Central and Eastern Europe, 68–70; and democracy, 68–70; and ethnic conflict, 69–70; in the United States, 110 Civil-military relations, 71; and democracy, 89, 94–95; and NATO, 71 Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, The, 3, 19, 109 Clinton, Bill, 11, 64, 124 Cold War, xiv, xvii, 4, 5, 8, 35, 50, 63, 102, 104, 105–6, 151; end of, ix, x, xiii, 5, 14–15, 20–21, 29, 58, 84, 85, 98, 104, 107–8, 144 COMECON, 29, 30 Communism, 15, 67, 107, 108, 150; collapse of, ix, 15, 18, 28, 30, 33, 36, 44, 152 Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 87 Conference on Security and

Index

Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). See Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Conflict: and arms control, 93; and culture, xi–xii, 3–5, 11, 97; and democracy, x, 11–12, 70, 89, 98; and economic inequality, 139–40; and religion, 3–4, 18– 19, 84, 88–89; in weak states, 85, 89, 92. See also Ethnic conflict Confucianism, 101 Congo, 30 Constitutions, 63–64 Cooper, Robert, xiii–xiv Council of Europe, 37, 88 Crime, 85, 92; and democracy, 25; and globalization, 25, 84; in Russia, 25 Croatia, 4, 65, 69 Cuba, 9 Culture: and conflict, xi–xii, 3–5, 11, 97; and democracy, 102, 105 Cyprus, 4, 19, 29 Czech Republic, 4, 7, 46, 60, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74 Czechoslovakia, 29, 30, 58, 60, 61, 63 Dayton Agreement, 20, 91 De Gasperi, Alcide, 37 Democracy: and capital markets, xix, 129–30, 134, 137, 140, 141–44; and capitalism, 121; in Central and Eastern Europe, xi, xv, 13, 51, 57–78; in China, 12, 23, 26; and civic culture, 46–47; and civil society, 68–70; and civil-military relations, 89, 94– 95; and colonialism, 29; and conflict, x, 11–12, 70, 89, 98; consolidation of, 13, 94; and crime, 25; and culture, 102,

Index

105; and economic growth, 101, 102, 118–19, 135; and economic inequality, 131, 136– 41; and economic reform, xvii– xix, 66–67, 117, 122–24, 128, 133–34, 135–46, 153; and education, 118; and ethics, 154; and the European Union, xiv– xv, 21, 26, 47, 51–55, 72–78; expansion of, x, 12–13, 57, 84, 97–98, 101–2, 149; and fragmentation, xiii, 30–31; and France, 59, 64–65, 99; and Germany, xv, 65, 99; and individualism, 39; in Indonesia, 117; and integration, xiii, 31; and the International Monetary Fund, xviii, 117, 126–29; and the international system, x, 11– 13, 84, 102–3, 149; in Latin America, 13, 101; and legitimacy, 46; and minorities, 30, 59; and nation-states, 46, 60; and NATO, 70–72; promotion of, xi, xv–xvii, 6, 12, 57, 63, 68–69, 83, 97–112, 119, 143–44, 149, 154; and religion, 101; in Slovakia, 75; in Southern Europe, 51; and technology, xx, 153–54; threats to, xx, 26, 29, 101, 150; and the United Kingdom, 64, 65, 99– 100; and the United States, xvi– xvii, xix–xx, 17, 65, 68, 97, 98, 100–12, 150–51; universality of, 15, 83, 98, 150; in Western Europe, 32, 50–51, 104 Democracy in America, 68 Development assistance, 143–46; and education, 145; from the United States, 118, 119, 144 Diana, Princess of Wales, 29 Disintegration. See Fragmentation Dönhof, Marion, 67 Duarte, José Napoleon, 101

157

East Asia, 6, 12, 129; education in, 142 Economic growth: and democracy, 101, 102, 118–19, 135; and the European Union, 72–73; and inequality, 139–40; and reform, xviii–xix, xx, 133, 134–35, 145–46 Economic inequality: and capital markets, 129, 137; and conflict, 139–40; and democracy, 131, 136–41; and growth, 139–40; and international lending institutions, 153; in Latin America, 137–38; and reform, 133, 136–38, 154; and technology, 138, 153 Economic reform, 7, 9, 121–22; in Central and Eastern Europe, 65– 68; in China, 23–24; and democracy, xvii–xix, 66–67, 117, 122–24, 128, 133–34, 135–46, 153; and globalization, 66–67; and growth, xviii–xix, xx, 133, 134–35, 145–46; and inequality, 133, 136–38, 154; and the International Monetary Fund, 126; problems of, 89, 152; in Russia, 67 Education: in Africa, 143; and democracy, 118; and development assistance, 145; in East Asia, 142; inequality of, 141–43; in Latin America, 142, 143; and technology, 142 Egypt, 6, 108 El Salvador, 145 Endogenous-growth theory (EGT), 139 Enlightenment, the, 22, 32, 102 Environment, the, 38, 84, 89, 92 Estonia, 74, 152 Ethics: and democracy, 154; and technology, 154 Ethnic conflict, 84, 88–89;

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Ethnic conflict (cont’d) and civil society, 69–70 Etvos, Count, 64 Euro, 10, 21 Europe, x, 24, 26, 100, 102, 104, 107, 118, 120, 125, 129, 152; common market in, 34, 38, 73; democracy in, 32, 50–51, 104; integration of, xiii, xiv–xv, 4, 28, 29, 32–36, 38–40, 43, 44, 99; Islam in, 20; and nationstates, 11, 35, 47–51; nationalism in, 37, 89; political participation in, 46; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in, 35, 90, 152; regionalism in, 38–40, 45– 46, 53; security in, 6, 70, 85, 87, 89–90, 150; and cooperation with the United States, xiii, 21– 23, 26, 33, 35, 108. See also Central and Eastern Europe; Southeastern Europe; Southern Europe European Coal and Steel Community, 33, 35 European Commission, 45 European Community, 32 European Court of Justice (ECJ), 37, 52, 53 European Defense Community, 36 European Economic Community (EEC), 32, 33 European Union (EU), xi, xiii, 4, 28, 32, 36, 37–38, 58, 70, 71, 124; and Central and Eastern Europe, 51, 72–78; as counterweight to the United States, 10; and democracy, xiv– xv, 21, 26, 47, 51–55, 72–78; and economic growth, 72–73; and executive power, 51–53; expansion of, xv, 62, 72–78; federalism in, 54; and France, 32; and Germany, 32, 33; and

Index

human rights, 73; and Kosovo, 91; and legitimacy, 45–46; as a model of integration, xii, 21– 22; and nation-states, xiv–xv, 43, 54; politics vs. economics in, 39; and Russia, 78; and Southeastern Europe, 76; and Turkey, 4, 78. See also Europe: integration of Factor price equalization (FPE) theorem, 136 Federal Constitutional Court (Germany), 65 Federalism: American model of, 63; in the European Union, 54; in Russia, 63 Feldstein, Martin, 126 Finland, 4 Fragmentation: in Africa, 25; in the British Empire, 29–30; and democracy, xiii, 30–31; vs. globalization, ix, xii, xiii–xiv, xvi, 15–23, 24–27, 29, 39–40, 84, 92, 95; of society, 36–37; in the Soviet Union, 30 France, x, 6, 9, 10, 16, 29, 31, 32, 34, 47, 52, 68, 73, 106, 152; 1789 Revolution in, 103; and democracy, 59, 64–65, 99; and the European Union, 32 Franklin, Benjamin, 103 Free trade. See Economic reform Freedom Party (Austria), 77 Friedman, Milton, 66, 152 Fukuyama, Francis, 110 Future Security Agenda for Europe, A, 88–90 Garrett, Geoffrey, 129 Gellner, Ernest, 60, 68 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 122 Geneva Convention, 85 Germany, 5, 6, 9, 28, 30, 31, 32,

Index

34, 37, 38, 43, 47, 59, 62, 68, 71, 72, 73, 77, 104, 112, 119; and Central and Eastern Europe, 60–61; and democracy, xv, 65, 99; and the European Union, 32, 33; nationalism in, 98; political-party foundations in, 65 Ghana, 143 Globalization, 50, 88; backlash against, xix, 16, 17–18, 123–24; and crime, 25, 84; and economic reform, 66–67; and education, 141–43; vs. fragmentation, ix, xii, xiii–xiv, xvi, 15–23, 24–27, 29, 39–40, 84, 92, 95; managing, xx, 24– 25, 26, 27; and nation-states, xi, xii, xiii, 15–16, 19–21, 27, 38, 45, 129; and political integration, xiii–xiv, 37–38; and religion, xii, 18–20; and technology, ix, 15, 34, 39; and the United States, xii–xiii, 16– 18, 44, 124. See also Capital markets; Economic reform Gorbachev, Mikhail, 58 Great Depression, 119, 125 Great Society, 110, 125 Greece, 4, 19, 62, 72, 104; ancient, 14, 102, 122 Group of Seven (G-7), 7 Guéhenno, Jean-Marie, xii–xiii, xix Habibie, B.J., 127 Haider, Jörg, 77 Haiti, 110 Halévy, Elie, 59 Hamas, 25 Hamilton, Alexander, 103 Hanseatic League, 49 Harries, Owen, 105, 108 Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, 5, 7 Havel, Václav, 58, 65, 71

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Hayek, Friedrich von, 66, 152 Hegel, Georg, 120 Helsinki Final Act (1975), 35, 87– 88, 90; and sovereignty, 90–91 Hitler, Adolf, 49 Holmes, Stephen, 67, 68 Holocaust, 32 Holy Roman Empire, 49 Hoxha, Enver, 62 Human capital. See Capital markets; Education Human rights, xvi, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 31; and the European Union, 73; and the international system, 84; and intervention, 83, 86–87; and the United Nations, 85–88; universality of, 83, 88 Hungary, 4, 7, 30, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75 Huntington, Samuel P., xi–xii, xix, 19, 58, 98, 101–2, 105, 108, 109, 110, 111, 118 Hussein, Saddam, 84 Ignatieff, Michael, 68, 70 Iliescu, Ion, 65, 74 India, 6, 7, 9, 12, 19, 24, 29, 31, 48, 93, 99, 153; and the United States, 8 Individualism: and democracy, 39 Indonesia, x, xviii, 6, 16, 97, 126– 27, 128; democracy in, 117 Industrial Revolution, 84 Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), 142, 143 Interest groups, 52, 53–54, 122–23 International Covenants on Human Rights, 85, 87 International Criminal Court, 86 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 7, 66, 125, 145; and democracy, xviii, 117, 126–29; and economic inequality, 153; and economic reform, 126;

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International Monetary Fund (cont’d) and South Korea, 127–28, 129– 30; and sovereignty, xviii, 126– 29 International system: and capitalism, 120–21; and democracy, x, 11–13, 84, 102– 3, 149; economy of, xi, xvii– xviii, 121–22, 124–26; future of, xx, 95, 151; and human rights, 84; multipolar, 5, 9, 26; and nation-states, 28, 43, 83– 84; post–Cold War, ix, xi–xii, xii–xiii, 3–13, 14, 20–21, 24, 26, 27, 28–29, 85–86, 92–94; “uni-multipolar,” xi–xii, 3, 6, 8, 9; unipolar, ix, 5, 9, 16, 150 Internet, ix, 34, 37, 84 Intervention: humanitarian, 7, 86– 87; multilateral vs. unilateral, xvi, 8, 86, 88; principle of, 91; vs. sovereignty, xv–xvi, 83, 85– 87, 90; and the United Nations, 86–87 Iran, 4, 5, 6, 8–9, 10 Iraq, 7, 10, 84, 93 Ireland, 30 Iron Curtain, 3, 89 Islam, 3, 12, 101; in Europe, 20; fundamentalist, 4, 18, 19, 26, 108 Israel, 5, 6, 8, 10, 19, 25 Italy, 29, 31, 34, 47 Izvestia (Soviet Union), 87

Index

Kaplan, Robert D., 98 Kapstein, Ethan, xviii–xix, xx Kashmir, 19, 93 Kazakhstan, 93 Kennan, George, 105, 106, 107, 108 Kim Dae Jung, 127 Kim, Kyung Won, xvii–xviii Kissinger, Henry, 105, 108 Klaus, Václav, 66 Kohl, Helmut, 61 Kokoschka, Oskar, 60 Korea, 24, 93, 107, 150. See also North Korea; South Korea Korean Democratic Union, 130 Kosovo, 4, 71, 75, 76, 86, 91 Kovalev, Sergei, 87 Kundera, Milan, 72

Jamaica, 125 Japan, 6, 8, 12, 24, 26, 34, 71, 72, 99, 104, 108, 118, 124, 125, 151 Jaszi, Oskar, 59 John Paul II, 72 Jones, E.L., 49–50 Judiciary, 52, 64

Landa, Dimitri, xviii–xix, xx Latin America, 6, 12, 44, 57, 65, 102, 103, 105, 126, 130, 142; democracy in, 13, 101; economic inequality in, 137–38; education in, 142, 143 Latvia, 74, 76 Lebanon, 107 Lee, Richard Henry, 103 Legitimacy: in Central and Eastern Europe, 75; and democracy, 46; and the European Union, 45– 46; and nation-states, xiii–xiv, 36–37, 39; and religion, 36; and sovereignty, 126; in the Soviet Union, 30 Liberalism, 31 Libya, 9, 93 Lieven, Anatol, 67 Lippmann, Walter, 105, 106 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 135 Lithuania, 74, 76 Lowitt, Thomas, 67 Luxembourg, 33, 53

Kagan, Robert, xv, xvi–xvii, xix

Maastricht Treaty, 66

Index

161

Macedonia, 62, 75 Machiavelli, Niccol`o 102 Maier, Charles, 66 Making of a State, The, 58 Malawi, 143 Malaysia, 4 Mandela, Nelson, 8 Mandelbaum, Michael, 110 Mansfield, Edward D., 12, 98 Mao Zedong, 11 Market economy, 15, 18, 36; and crime, 25 Marshall, John, 103 Marshall Plan, 33, 108, 118 Marx, Karl, 18, 120 Masaryk, Tomás G., 58, 59 McKinley, William, 104 Meèiar, Vladimír, 60, 69, 74, 75 MERCOSUR, 29 Metternich, Klemens von, 103 Mexico, 47, 126 Microsoft, 39 Middle East, 6, 10, 25, 26, 48, 93, 99 Miloševiæ, Slobodan, 73, 84, 91 Minorities, 65, 73, 75, 83, 84; and democracy, 30, 59. See also Human rights Misery of the Small East European States, The, 59 Modigliani, Amedeo, 60 Mongolia, 47 Monnet, Jean, 33 Morgenthau, Hans, 105, 106, 107 Mozambique, 47 Multiculturalism, 109, 111, 151

129; and the international system, 28, 43, 83–84; and legitimacy, xiii–xiv, 36–37, 39; and liberalism, 31; and religion, 19; and technology, xiv, 49–50 National Endowment for Democracy (NED), 65 Nationalism, xii, 15, 34, 37; in Africa, 25; in China, 12, 23; in Europe, 37, 89; in Germany, 98 Nazism, 150 Netherlands, 33, 49 New Deal, 110 New York Times, 71 Nicaragua, 97 Nigeria, x, 6, 29 Nixon, Richard, 125 Nongovernmental organizations, 69, 124 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 29 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), xiii, 4, 10, 23, 29, 31, 33, 37, 38, 87; and Central and Eastern Europe, 70–72; and civil-military relations, 71; and democracy, 70–72; and European integration, 4, 35; expansion of, xv, 7, 62, 70–72; in Kosovo, 4, 71, 76, 91; and Russia, 71–72 North Korea, xviii, 93, 101, 122 Northern League (Italy), 77 Norway, 30 Nuclear weapons. See Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction

Napoleon Bonaparte, 49 Nation-states: in Central and Eastern Europe, 60, 76–77; and democracy, 46, 60; and Europe, 11, 35, 47–51; and the European Union, xiv–xv, 43, 54; and globalization, xi, xii, xiii, 15–16, 19–21, 27, 38, 45,

Olson, Mancur, 135 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 37 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), 88, 91; and Kosovo, 91. See also Helsinki Final Act (1975)

162

Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), 10 Osgood, Robert, 107 Ottoman Empire, 11, 48 Pakistan, 6, 19, 20, 23, 29, 93, 145 Palestinian Authority, 19, 25 Peloponnesian Wars, 102 Perotti, Roberto, 139 Persian Gulf, 8–9, 150 Poland, 4, 7, 43, 46, 57, 58, 60, 64, 66, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 102, 104, 152 Political Consequences of the Peace, The, 59 Portugal, 46, 57, 72, 102 Posner, Richard, 135 Poverty, 94, 152–53. See also Economic inequality Primakov, Yevgeni, 10 Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, xix, 9, 10, 25, 26, 93, 151–52; in Asia, 24; in Europe, 35, 90, 152; in South Asia, 19, 93; and terrorism, 151; and the United States, 7, 151– 52 Qatar, 10 Reagan, Ronald, 104, 107, 111 Regionalism: in Europe, 38–40, 45–46, 53 Religion, 36; and conflict, 3–4, 18– 19, 84, 88–89; and democracy, 101; and globalization, xii, 18– 20; and legitimacy, 36; and nation-states, 19 Renan, Ernest, 37 Republican Party (United States), 104, 109 Rise and Decline of Nations, The, 135 Robbins, Donald, 138 Rodrik, Dani, 134, 137

Index

Roman Empire, 14, 27, 39, 48 Romania, 4, 59, 61, 62, 65, 69, 74, 75, 76, 97 Roosevelt, Theodore, 104 Rotfeld, Adam, xv–xvi, xvii Rule of law, 67, 75, 83, 84, 94, 98, 107 Rupnik, Jacques, xv Russia, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 26, 48, 62, 67, 71, 90, 93, 104, 152; crime in, 25; economic reform in, 67; and the European Union, 78; federalism in, 63; and NATO, 71–72; and the United States, 8 Rwanda, 84 Sachs, Jeffrey, 66, 67 Samuelson, Paul, 133, 136 San Marino, xiv, 50 Saudi Arabia, 4, 6, 10 Schengen Accords, 78 Schmitter, Philippe C., xiv–xv Schuman, Robert, 33, 37 Science. See Technology Scotland, 31 Security, international. See International system Self-determination, 61, 83, 91–92, 107 Serbia, 4, 69, 91 Seton-Watson, Hugh, 60 Singapore, 109 Slovakia, 46, 60, 69, 74, 75, 77; democracy in, 75 Slovenia, 4, 74, 77 Smith, William, 103 Smolar, Aleksander, 71 Snyder, Jack, 12, 98 Solidarity, 57, 66 Soros foundations, 68 South Africa, 6, 97 South Asia, 19, 93 South Korea, xviii, 97, 101, 122, 126, 128, 130, 150; and the

Index

International Monetary Fund, 127–28, 129–30 Southeast Asia, 6, 93, 126 Southeastern Europe, xv, 3, 4, 57, 59, 62–63, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73, 77; and the European Union, 76; Stability Pact for, 91 Southern Europe, 44; democracy in, 51 Sovereignty: in Central and Eastern Europe, 76–77; and the Helsinki Final Act, 90–91; and the International Monetary Fund, xviii, 126–29; and legitimacy, 126; and nonintervention, xv– xvi, 83, 85–87, 90 Soviet Union, x, xv, xvii, 4, 5, 9, 11, 15, 16, 28, 29, 31, 33, 35, 87, 106, 107, 108; breakup of, ix, 5, 30, 33, 57–58, 89, 101, 104, 152; former, 44, 57, 64, 65, 67, 73, 77, 126; legitimacy in, 30 Spaak, Paul-Henri, 33 Spain, 29, 57, 65, 72, 102 Spinelli, Altiero, 33 Sri Lanka, 29 Stalin, Joseph, 11 START I, 93 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 88– 90 Stolper, Wolfgang, 136 Suharto, Thojib, xviii, 16, 97, 117, 126–27 Swabian Städtebund, 49 Sweden, 4, 30, 35, 48, 51, 66 Switzerland, 35, 46 Taiwan, 97, 101, 142 Taylor, A.J.P., 61 Technology, 44, 92, 118; and democracy, xx, 153–54; and economic inequality, 138, 153; and education, 142; and ethics,

163

154; and globalization, ix, 15, 34, 39; and nation-states, xiv, 49–50; and terrorism, 151 Terrorism, xix, 7, 25, 84, 92; and technology, 151; and weapons of mass destruction, 151 Thailand, xviii, 122, 128, 130 Thatcher, Margaret, 66 Third Wave, The, 101, 102 Thirty Years’ War, 49, 83 Tito, Josip, 62 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 64, 68 Truman, Harry S, 104 Tudjman, Franjo, 65 Turkey, 4, 5, 19, 29, 62, 104, 108; and the European Union, 4, 78 Ukraine, 6, 13, 93, 152 UNCTAD, 124 UNICEF, 142 United Kingdom, x, 6, 9, 29, 30, 52, 66, 68, 104, 125, 152; and democracy, 64, 65, 99–100; empire of, 29–30, 31, 39, 99– 100 United Nations (UN), xvi, 7, 22, 84, 151, 152; Charter of, 85, 92; and human rights, 85–88; Human Rights Commission, 37, 88; and humanitarian intervention, 86–87 United States, x, 24, 26, 34, 48, 68, 124; and Central and Eastern Europe, 63–64, 71; and China, xix, 8, 151; civil society in, 110; and democracy, xvi–xvii, xix–xx, 17, 65, 68, 97, 98, 100– 12, 150–51; development assistance of, 118, 119, 144; domestic problems of, xix, 109– 11; and cooperation with Europe, xiii, 21–23, 26, 33, 35, 108; federal model of, 63; and globalization, xii–xiii, 16–18, 44, 124; and India, 8;

164

United States (cont’d) international backlash against, xi, 6–11; international role of, x, xi, xvi–xvii, xviii, xix–xx, 6– 11, 17, 58, 92, 98, 100–12, 125, 149, 150, 154; realist critiques of, 104–9; and Russia, 8; and weapons of mass destruction, 7, 151–52 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, xvi, 85 Uruguay Round, 122 Vedrine, Hubert, 10 Versailles Treaty, 59, 60, 61, 71 Vietnam, 107 Vietnam War, 125 Visegrád Group, 60, 75 Wa³êsa, Lech, 65, 101 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 119–21 Warner, Andrew, 66 Warsaw Pact, 4, 29, 30, 35 Weapons of mass destruction (WMD). See Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction Weber, Max, 28 Welfare Party (Turkey), 4 Welfare state, 110, 134, 137

Index

Western Europe. See Europe Western European Union (WEU), 35, 37, 87 Westminster Foundation for Democracy, 65 Westphalia, Peace of, xi, xii, 10, 19, 27, 83 Wilson, Woodrow, 59, 104 World Bank, 7, 123, 141, 144, 145, 152; and economic inequality, 153 World Economic Forum, 124 World Revolution: The Triumph of Democratic Revolution, 58 World Trade Organization (WTO), xviii, 10, 22, 37, 66, 124, 145 World War I, ix, xv, 43, 58, 59, 63, 119, 125 World War II, xiii, 8, 28, 29, 32, 34, 35, 61, 63, 71, 99, 112, 118, 125, 151 Yalta, 60 Yeltsin, Boris, 62, 93, 101 Yugoslavia, 4, 29, 30, 60, 61, 62, 63, 69, 70, 84, 89 Zakaria, Fareed, 98, 105, 109 Zeit, Die (Germany), 67