The US invaded Iraq ostensibly to bring democracy to the Middle East. But the Middle East was more in need of liberalism than democracy – then and now. Lying at different points along roughly the same developmental track, Jordan and Tunisia together illustrate a better course for political evolution. Jordan is today an autocracy, under the liberal rule of King Abdullah II. Tunisia had for many years also been a relatively liberal autocracy, until the Arab Spring brought democracy. For decades, both countries have had excellent economic growth – but they are at different stages of development: Tunisian per capita GDP is 50% greater. (Egypt and Libya, which also became democracies in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, are also substantially wealthier than Jordan.) History gives us every reason to hope that Jordan will also, eventually, become a liberal democracy, as its citizens grow wealthier, and demand a larger voice in their own governance.

We might be less hopeful that Egypt will blossom into a liberal democracy, because liberalism did not do especially well under Mubarek. Though the economy grew, extreme wealth inequality kept the middle class relatively small, and corruption was ubiquitous. As for Libya, the present state of affairs is as complicated as was Gaddafi’s leadership. Americans only know Gaddafi for his role in international terrorism, and his regime’s extraordinary repression. Few are aware of his economic reforms – good and bad – which lifted Libyan living standards and life expectancy to among the highest in the region.

Unfortunately, the so-called “rise of the bourgeoisie” that brought democracy to the United States, France and England – and as well to Singapore, Taiwan and Chile – does not occur in countries whose economies are based on mineral wealth, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Brunei and Bahrain. Wealth tends to remain in the hands of the few. Oil gives the state a source of cash, which allows them to keep taxes low and their oligarchs content.

Kuwait – the most liberal and democratic country in the Middle East (including Israel) – is no exception to the rule. Unlike many of its neighbors, Kuwait was a commercial center long before oil was discovered. As in the West, liberalism was born and nurtured in Kuwait among merchants, which yielded a culture that respects rules of trade and property rights. Kuwaitis now enjoy the full gamut of civil and political liberties. Importantly, the example of Kuwait allows us to dispose of the absurd, racist theory that Arabs are somehow ill-suited to democracy.

One cannot fail to mention Hugo Chavez – democratically elected and reelected, and fairly liberal – who in the US was often regarded as illegitimate, or mischaracterized as a dictator. His many policies were a mixed bag and cannot be thoughtfully summed up in the space we have here. But even if you reject them, regimes such as his should be tolerated as hiccups that naturally occur within the framework of the democratic process. (Europeans surely did their best to endure Bush Duh’s two terms with the same sentiment.) The US should not have hesitated to condemn the coup that temporarily removed Chavez from power – because in the long term, Americans are safest and most prosperous in a world of liberal democracies. Once a government evolves to that stage, its perpetuation must be a major US policy goal, overriding the short-term advantages that regime-change might offer.

When time and space permit, the Field Guide will compare and contrast the US response to Chavez’s short-lived coup with its response to the 2014 Ukraine Revolution. And while we’ll revisit the tension between liberalism and democracy in the near future, this coming Friday has been reserved to offer liberals guidance in choosing the best course in the mounting crisis in Iraq.

Refs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_spring

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwait#Politics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Libya_under_Muammar_Gaddafi#Economic_reforms

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Egypt_under_Hosni_Mubarak#Economy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ch%C3%A1vez#Presidency:_1999.E2.80.932013

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Ukrainian_revolution

On Friday, the Field Guide delved into the distinct – and often divergent – traditions of liberalism and democracy. Today we bring them to bear on current events.

The struggle today in the Middle East is eerily familiar. After World War II, with the collapse of colonialism, many countries gained independence, and people across the world got the right to vote for the first time. Going with the political fashion of the day, many voted for socialists. This was extremely troubling for the US and for US business interests: socialist governments were more likely to align themselves with the USSR; and property rights were less secure under socialist democracies than they were under liberal dictators. Largely over the concern of US businesses, the US instigated at least 3 revolutions that overthrew democratically elected governments (Iran 1953; Guatemala 1954; Chile 1973), all of which led to the installation of brutal dictators. Right into the 1980s, Reagan was funding a terrorist organization in its effort to overthrow democratically elected socialists in Nicaragua; while propping up dictatorships from El Salvador to Egypt – including Guatemala and Chile. (Iran deposed its American-sponsored dictator in 1979.)

Analogously, as some in the Middle East vote for the first time, many are going with the most popular political movement in the region today: Islamism. That’s how the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in Egypt, and how Hamas came to power in Gaza – by democratic processes. Elections held today in Iraq or Syria might produce a similar result. And so, once again, the US is finding itself at odds with democracy because of the results it’s producing – while the US is reminded again and again of the usefulness, and-or the lesser evil, of authoritarians.

From a policy standpoint, when judging illiberal democracies and liberal authoritarians, each case must be taken on its own merits. A good rule of thumb for US foreign policy would be that a democracy is good to the extent that it respects minority rights. Given an open and unfettered debate in the marketplace of ideas, one has every reason to believe that such a democracy will naturally find its way to liberalism, simply because it offers the greatest good for every facet of life: economic, health, happiness, and of course, freedom.

What this means is that the US should be tolerant of Islamist-led democratic governments if they allow opposing parties to organize, operate and compete for votes. One must note, however, that parties based on religion, and not reason, tend to be especially intolerant of competing viewpoints, because they often believe that their “truths” are handed down from on high, and thus are not open to debate, much less compromise. The ineptitude of the Tea Party in the US legislature is a fine illustration of this problem. Democracy simply cannot function in the absence of rationality – dogma is anathema to democratic processes.

One might further posit that liberal dictatorships are acceptable, because history has shown that, with time, liberalism begets wealth, and a wealthy populace comes naturally to demand a political voice commensurate with its material well-being. This is the dynamic that brought democracy to much of Europe, and to countries all along the Pacific Rim – and, of course, to the US as well. One hopes the same will happen in China, where an increasingly wealthy class of industrialists should – if history teaches us – also come to demand a role in their own governance. To make a bolder point: within a given polity, it seems constructive for liberalism to precede democracy – for a population to first learn respect for procedural fairness, before taking on self-governance.* That’s how it happened in most of the developed world, perhaps not coincidentally.

Liberal dictatorships, simply put, are not so bad because they tend to be self-eliminating – and liberals should be tolerant of such states as necessary stepping stones toward liberal democracy. Illiberal democracies, by comparison, can be much more persistent, to the considerable expense of their persecuted minorities. The West Bank is a modern example: its Arab population has had no civil or political rights, nor has it known procedural fairness, during nearly a half-century of domination by “democratic” Israel. The Jim Crow South endured for well over 100 years – vestiges are still apparent today, 150 years since the Civil War.

The Field Guide continues Wednesday on the themes of liberalism and democracy, with a look at individual regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Refs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._intervention_in_Chile#1973_coup

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom

* CT thanks Fareed Zakariah for making this and many other acute observations in his excellent book, The Future of Freedom. While the work of many pundits is dated a month after publication, this 2003 work is as compelling and relevant today as ever.

Sure, everyone wants both. But throughout most of human history, you’d have been fortunate to have one or the other. And forced to choose, many prefer the security of liberalism to the dignity of democracy.

Not to be accused of splitting hairs, we can agree that, for certain purposes, democracy is an indispensable part of modern-day liberalism. But each tradition – liberalism and democracy – has its own independent history. For the purposes of this essay, when we use the term “liberalism”, we mean procedural fairness: that cops and courts are neutral in their application of the laws, and specifically that property rights are sacrosanct. This form of liberalism does not encompass the right to vote, which of course is the sine qua non of democracy. One must however recognize that rights of speech, assembly and petitioning the government are not guaranteed by democracy, but by liberalism! Majorities, after all, like nothing more than to illegalize the speech, gathering and petitioning of minorities, as occurred in the US during the McCarthy era, e.g., and in every other democracy at some or another time.

The fact is, an illiberal democracy isnt a very fun place to be. Saying the wrong thing in Classical Athens, Revolutionary France, or modern-day Egypt could get you killed. 4 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank can tell you first hand what it means to be a disenfranchised minority in a democracy whose majority has enshrined into law imperialism, colonialism and apartheid. More than 100,000 Japanese-Americans could have pointed out the shortcomings of democracy from their WWII internment camps – as could millions of slaves in the antebellum American South.

Meanwhile, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Colonial America and England were, for many years, liberal dictatorships, and pleasant places to live and work. Talk to a few Syrians about life under Assad, before the civil war, and they’ll tell you that as long as you didnt spout off on politics, life was peaceful and predictable. You went off to work, you came home to family; the streets were safe; the crazies with bad hair and weird beards were few and far between.

It’s not that the right to vote isnt precious – but rather that the right to live your life and be left alone is no less precious. We tend to make a fuss over democracy wherever it flowers – to be too often reminded that it doesnt always smell sweet. Liberalism, distinct from democracy, also deserves its due. A liberal government, democratic or not, guarantees procedural fairness – what Americans call “due process” and the Brits have called “the law of the land” since 1215. You may not get to vote, and printing op-eds can put you in the clink – but if you have a contractual dispute, you can rely on the courts for a fair adjudication. If you pay your taxes, you dont have to worry about the state taking your home away. Many countries have grown rich and prosperous in the absence of democratic processes, because they were fortunate to have a liberal leadership that understood the economic importance of respecting and upholding property rights.

By contrast, democracies can be excruciatingly illiberal. Today across the American south, majorities, if they had their way, would pack minority children into separate, inferior schools, if only to teach them how 6000 years ago, Jesus and His Angels buried faux dinosaur bones to confuse archaeologists. They’d deny rights to gays and women, while stripping away numerous rights of the accused. One American political party, whose sole objective was the perpetuation of segregation, revealingly called itself “The States’ Rights Party.” Their protest, in the end, was that of a majority, frustrated by Constitutional limitations on what majorities are allowed to do. Liberalism, after all, is what protects us from democracy run amok.

The Field Guide resumes this line on Monday, exploring the sometimes competing traditions of liberalism and democracy, and how tension between the two informs US foreign policy today.