Wolfish Wilsonians

Abstract: There are limits on America's ability to bring democracy to deeply divided societies with little or no history of democracy, and many American, liberal internationalists have succumbed to intellectual and moral paralysis about America's right and ability to spread its system in the rest of the world. The principles of law-governed freedom are in fact important and nearly eternal principles, but they are best spread by America's setting the example as a peaceful democracy. The messianic approach to democracy-promotion adopted by the Bush administration and its liberal allies, rooted in faith in the "American creed" and an emerging "global civil society," can only damage both American power and the cause of democratizing the world. The American approach to democratization needs instead to be governed by rigor of the intellect and generosity of spirit.

* * * * *

The war in Iraq has brutally emphasized the limits of America's ability to bring democracy, peace, and development to deeply divided societies with little or no history of democracy, with impoverished and fragile state-dominated economies, and with strong anti-American prejudices. As Lord Salisbury pointed out more than a century ago, "The free institutions that sustain the life of a free and united people, sustain also the hatreds of a divided people." And this is not the first time that the United States has had to learn this lesson. As Senator J. William Fulbright, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, realist Hans Morgenthau, and a host of other great Americans pointed out four decades ago, the United States went into Vietnam with many of the same illusions.

The values of democracy and law-governed freedom that the United States represents are of inestimable importance and are close to being eternal. They are best spread, however, by America's setting the example as a peaceful democracy. By contrast, the approach to democracy-promotion adopted by the Bush administration and its liberal allies in recent years risks doing terrible damage not only to American power, but also to the cause of democracy in the world.

It is therefore of the greatest importance that we analyze the fundamental national myths that helped to lead America into Iraq, so as to avoid making the same mistake again in the future. This applies above all to American liberal internationalists, all too many of whom have fallen into an intellectual and moral muddle about America's right and ability to spread its system in the rest of the world. This muddle has paralyzed some of them and led others to a position of military interventionism that contributed to the Iraq War. If continued, it will further strain American resources and undermine American prestige in the world.

The origins of this muddle go back both to the nature of American civic nationalism and to a profound ambiguity, amounting virtually to an existential contradiction, that has always lain at the heart of liberal internationalism. It is implied in the very words of this phrase and is present in the UN Charter. This ambiguity has been exploited by the Bush administration, the neoconservatives, and pro-Israeli organizations to cripple liberal internationalism as it previously existed in the United States and to turn aspects of liberal internationalism into liberal imperialism.

"Internationalism" has usually been taken as meaning institutionalized cooperation between countries on the basis of established rules and mutual respect. This is obviously at the core of the whole nature and purpose of the UN, as it was previously for the League of Nations. "Liberal" refers chiefly to the internal nature of states. In recent decades, it has been taken to mean commitment to pluralist democracy, the rule of law, freedom of speech and the media, and a more or less open market economy. Aspirations towards basic freedoms are also embodied in the UN Charter and are held dear by most liberal internationalists.

The obvious problem is that most of the states with which internationalists want the United States to cooperate and which are represented in the UN are not and never have been liberal democracies. There was a time in the 1990s when the world seemed to be moving in this direction, but the rise of China, the move of Russia to semi-authoritarianism, and the faltering of democracies in Latin America and Africa have rendered such hopes moot, for a considerable time to come. China in particular is a country with which it is absolutely and increasingly necessary for the United States to deal if a civilized and cooperative international order is to be preserved. In its case, increased U.S. pressure concerning human rights and democracy will make cooperation impossible.

Furthermore, even states that are genuine democracies in terms of institutions and elections may perpetrate human rights abuses in other nations that are as bad as or even worse than those of some authoritarian states. India and other democracies (France in the 1950s, the United States in the 1960s) have conducted extremely ruthless anti-partisan campaigns. Brazil, Mexico, and other impoverished democracies are also forced to tolerate savage behavior on the part of their police forces. In most cases, these abuses reflect not the state's will, but weakness and inability to prevent its police and troops from acting like private brigands.

As reported in a recent work by Indian journalist Suketu Mehta, India is an especially striking case in this regard.(1) It is a real democracy and an increasingly important, even vital, force on the world stage. It richly deserves a seat on the UN Security Council. It is also a place where monstrous abuses of human rights take place. But a tough Western approach to New Delhi over these internal abuses would be incompatible with productive and cooperative relations.

This dilemma is difficult for liberal internationalists, not only because it is an extremely painful one, but also often because of an ignorance of the history of state-building and progress across much of the world.

The Administration's Approach

The Bush administration and the neoconservatives have seized upon this dilemma and used it very effectively to largely destroy liberal internationalism as a force of effective opposition within the United States and even, to a degree, in Europe. They have done so by using the side of liberal internationalism that is devoted to liberalism to batter the side that is devoted to internationalism. In doing so, they have played upon American civic ideals, with their emphasis on America's role in spreading democracy and freedom in the world.

The administration and its supporters have taken a multifold intellectual and rhetorical approach to internationalism and democratization. They argue that authoritarian states are illegitimate and untrustworthy, and therefore that their views do not really need to be taken into account, even when those views are in fact supported by a large majority of their populations, because the people are manipulated by their rulers and not free to make up their own minds.

In turn, international organizations like the UN are portrayed as worthless because they represent these illegitimate states. This is a view that has been growing in the United States ever since the 1960s, when the former European colonies gained independence and formed a majority in the UN General Assembly.

Because in this view the imperative of spreading freedom is overriding, the United States has the right to spread it by force over the objections of these illegitimate states, even when opponents of U.S. actions make up the great majority of the world community. In any particular case, examples of human rights abuses or denial of freedom can be pulled out to justify the United States' pressuring countries over, for example, economic issues that may have nothing to do with human rights or democracy as such. Thus, in a small but typical example, a writer in the New York Times, arguing for a hostile American attitude to the Chinese space program, declared that "amid calls for joint scientific or commercial ventures in space to improve Chinese-American relations, officials in Washington should consider what kind of cooperation is appropriate with a regime that does not share the United States' tradition of freedom and respect for human rights."(2)

Finally, on the model of the role of Western-sponsored human rights advocacy in the fall of the Soviet bloc, there is a strong desire on the neoconservative side to use pressure for human rights and democracy to destroy from within those states they regard as rivals or enemies. Thus in a piece urging a tough U.S. strategy of confronting and weakening China, Max Boot of the Wall Street Journal wrote:

 

Beyond containment, deterrence, and economic integration lies a strategy that the British never employed against either Germany or Japan -- internal subversion. Sorry, the polite euphemisms are 'democracy promotion' and 'human rights protection,' but these amount to the same thing: The freer China becomes, the less power the Communist oligarchy will enjoy. The United States should aim to 'Taiwanize' the mainland -- to spread democracy through such steps as increased radio broadcasts and Internet postings...In general, the U.S. government should elevate the issue of human rights in our dealings with China. The State Department wrote in its most recent human rights report that the Chinese government's 'human rights record remained poor, and the Government continued to commit numerous and serious abuses.' The U.S. government should do much more to publicize and denounce such abuses. We need to champion Chinese dissidents, intellectuals, and political prisoners, and help make them as famous as Andrei Sakharov, Václav Havel, and Lech Walesa.(3)

 

The merger of the selective use of "democratization" with strategies based on ruthless "realism" has been central to the neoconservatives' approach since the inception of this political tendency during the first decades of the Cold War. In their program, the Soviet Union was to be driven to destruction by a mixture of military and economic pressure, the ruthless repression -- including where necessary U.S. military intervention -- of communist-backed rebellions against U.S. client regimes, and the rigorous preaching of democracy and liberty to Soviet subjects.

The selective, or instrumental, use of moral outrage and calls for liberation -- what Jeane Kirkpatrick, candidly enough, spoke of as the utilitarian value of democracy to U.S. foreign policy -- is a very old pattern in human affairs. Rarely, however, has it been used so systematically, or with such disregard for even the appearance of consistency or intellectual integrity, as by American nationalists, especially from the neoconservative camp. Thus in 1980, when attacking President Jimmy Carter's attempts at consistency in the treatment of U.S. allies and rivals concerning their human rights abuses and lack of democracy, Irving Kristol sounded like George Kennan, Samuel Huntington, or other realist conservative critics of American messianism:

 

It is the fundamental fallacy of American foreign policy to believe, in face of all the evidence, that all peoples, everywhere, are immediately 'entitled' to a liberal constitutional government -- and a thoroughly democratic one at that...As a matter of fact, it is only since World War I -- a war fought under the slogans of 'self-determination for all nations' and 'make the world safe for democracy' -- that American foreign policy began to disregard the obvious for the sake of the quixotic pursuit of impossible ideals. Before World War I, intelligent men took it for granted that not all peoples, everywhere, at all times, could be expected to replicate a Western constitutional democracy.(4)

 

Two years earlier, as part of the same hardline campaign against Carter, Kristol had expressed himself categorically in favor of America's mission as example, not intervention:

 

The proper extent of political rights in any nation is not something that our State Department can have any meaningful opinion about. It can only be determined by the people of that nation, who will draw on their own political and cultural backgrounds in arriving at a suitable disposition of this matter. We can try to set them a good example by making our democratic republic as admirable as possible -- as our Founding Fathers urged. But that is about all we can do -- as our Founding Fathers recognized.(5)

 

But of course Kristol and his school have reserved such moderation for U.S. allies, however savage. Precisely such realist statements as Kristol's have been attacked by neoconservatives when these have been applied to countries which they wish to weaken or undermine, and these attacks have been not only ferocious, but also phrased in terms of the most strident version of America's messianic mission as intervention, and not merely example.(6)

The most pronounced example of this is the way neoconservatives and others have played around with the distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. During the 1980s, this was advanced by a number of anticommunist intellectuals as a key difference between the dictatorial but still culturally, intellectually, and economically open, pro-American regimes of Latin America and the communist states. And this is indeed a valid distinction.(7) However, when Russia and China, both in their different ways, abandoned communism, it turned out that the Americans who had most fiercely argued for this distinction did not really take it seriously themselves. Instead, in these and other cases (like Iran) they did their utmost to blur the line between totalitarianism and authoritarianism. For them, this had been nothing more than a cheap debating trick, intended to demonstrate that Washington's Latin American clients were better than Moscow's Eastern European clients.

This approach has been especially visible in recent policy towards the Middle East. In that region, the administration has used democratization as an ex-post-facto justification for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, after it was unable to find WMD. It has been adopted by pro-Israel U.S. organizations as a way of deferring a settlement with the Palestinians (until they adopt democracy) or even of blocking negotiations with the Arab world altogether on the grounds that authoritarian Arab regimes are inherently aggressive and untrustworthy. Natan Sharansky's influence on Bush has helped bring such thinking into the White House, in ways that are exceptionally damaging to U.S. prestige and the credibility of its commitments to democratization.(8)

Amid Washington's professions of a desire for democracy in the region, the opinions of the vast majority of Arabs concerning the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and U.S. strategy in the region have been disregarded by U.S. administrations, along with much of the U.S. political class and media. It is suggested that these opinions are the product of cynical manipulation by cynical Arab elites; but when relatively free, modern, and liberal Arab media outlets like Al Jazeera reflect the same opinions, they are equally condemned. And in the matter of attitudes to Israel, ordinary Arabs are presented in the media as at best deluded and ignorant sheep, and at worst as filled with primeval, irrational malignancy.

Yet these are the people to whom the Bush administration says it wants to bring democracy, and who it declares are ready for democracy. Meanwhile, all too many American op-eds, essays and books which call for the democratization of the Middle East either skirt round the question of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, condemn this treatment briefly and formally while devoting incomparably more space to Arab anti-Semitism, ignore the issue altogether, or simply take Israel's side.(9)

In a 214-page book on the ideology and roots of Islamic totalitarianism, in which he bitterly condemns a range of Muslim targets and sections of the European Left, the self-described liberal Paul Berman devotes precisely two lines to suggesting that America should act against "the manias of the ultra- Right" in Israel. Elsewhere, he espouses without qualification the view that all blame for the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in 2000–01 lies with the Palestinians.(10)

With such uneven treatment of the Israeli-Palestine issue, these writers discredit themselves in the eyes of Muslims and Europeans, and worse. By suggesting to Muslims and others that on this issue, liberal intellectuals in the United States -- the supposed role model of international democracy -- are motivated not by genuine democratic idealism but by ethnic chauvinism, they undermine not only American prestige in the world but the democratic model they are seeking to propagate.

Unfortunately, this mixture of belief in spreading democracy with the worship of American national power has proved exceptionally appealing to a large number of leading American intellectuals who still vote Democrat and regard themselves as liberal internationalists. Their merging with the neoconservatives has also been facilitated by the fact that the quagmire in Iraq has made the neoconservatives themselves somewhat more moderate.

The result is an effective consensus that spans dominant elements of both main parties, which sharply restricts debate within the United States. In consequence, while the debacle in Iraq has made Washington more cautious, it has not necessarily made it any wiser. And if there were to be another terrorist attack like 9/11, there would be a strong risk of the United States' reacting in the same way.

The American Creed

The central reason why this has occurred is that messianic internationalism not only appeals to many contemporary liberals, but also is deeply rooted in the American civic nationalist tradition and strengthened by certain failings in the contemporary study of political science and international relations. The belief that American values represent salvation for all mankind, in its religious form, is as old as the first White settlement of New England. In its modern, secular form, it was summed up in the National Security Strategy of 2002, which held that the values of "freedom, democracy and free enterprise. . . are right and true for every person, in every society -- and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common-calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages.

Like so many Americans over the years,(11) Bush also casts America as the agent of a historical teleology. Statements that "our nation is on the right side of history"(12) echo the Soviet cliché, "The winds of history are in our sails." The administration appeals to America and the world in the name of the American Creed, using language that might have come word for word from the liberal internationalism of the Clinton administration, as expressed by Madeleine Albright and others; and indeed from President Woodrow Wilson, who declared in January 1917, "These are American principles, American policies...And they are also the principles and policies of forward-looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail."

The strength of the rhetorical appeal by both the Bush administration and the liberal hawks does indeed lie in its deep roots in the American tradition. As Gunnar Myrdal wrote in 1944, "Americans of all national origins, classes, religions, creeds, and colors, have something in common: a social ethos, a political creed."(13) In theory, anyone who assents to the American creed can become an American, irrespective of language, culture, or national origin; just as anyone could become a Soviet citizen by assenting to communism.(14)

The principles of the American thesis are rationalist and universalist. In Tocqueville's words, Americans "are unanimous upon the general principles that ought to rule human society"; this is no less true in the twenty-first century than it was in the 1830s. Partly in consequence of this, the creed is also a basically optimistic set of assumptions. It suggests both that America has achieved the highest possible form of political system and that this great system can be extended to the rest of mankind. Centuries before Francis Fukuyama recoined the phrase, a certain belief that America represented the "end of history" was already common in American thought, and still more so in the American subconscious.

In Richard Hofstadter's words, "It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one."(15) This American thesis is also, both in American belief and in reality, the core foundation of America's "soft power" in the world, and of America's role as a civilizational empire; the American version of Romanita. Both in the past and at present, the American creed has deeply shaped the conduct of American foreign policy.(16)

The essential elements of the American creed and American civic nationalism -- faith in liberty, constitutionalism, the law, democracy, individualism, and egalitarianism -- have remained largely the same as when Tocqueville described them.(17) They are chiefly rooted in the Enlightenment, and derive in turn from England; the liberal philosophy of John Locke, and much older beliefs in the law and in the "rights of free-born Englishmen." The contents of the American thesis are of course no longer exceptional to America; most are also held by the other developed democracies, and indeed by most of the world, at least in public. Two features of the creed are, however, exceptional: the absolutist passion with which these beliefs are held and the degree to which they are integral to American nationalism. According to Samuel Huntington,

It is possible to speak of a body of political ideas that constitutes 'Americanism' in a sense in which one can never speak of 'Britishism,' 'Frenchism,' 'Germanism,' or 'Japaneseism.' Americanism in this sense is comparable to other ideologies and religions...To reject the central ideas of that doctrine is to be un-American...This identification of nationality with political Creed or values makes the United States virtually unique."(18)

Other states have also embodied their own versions of such a thesis in their own civic nationalism. De Gaulle's monument on the Champs-Elysées in Paris is inscribed with an extract from one of his speeches -- "Since time immemorial, there has existed a covenant between the grandeur of France and the liberty of mankind" -- that is an entirely American sentiment. However, in most of these cases the thesis has either been publicly contested by many people, as in the case of France; or, as in the case of imperial China, has been mainly the faith of national or imperial elites. What is unusual about America is the unanimity of belief in these guiding national principles.

The Canadian sociologist Sacvan Bercovitch has described discovering in America "a hundred sects and factions, each apparently different from the others, yet all celebrating the same mission." This ideological consensus, he said, is invested with "all the moral and emotional appeal of a religious symbol." Discovering it gave him "some of the anthropologist's sense of wonder at the symbol of a tribe."(19) In the twenty-first century, the United States may indeed be the most truly ideological nation in the world.

America is not of course the most ideological state on earth. A number of other states still claim an infinitely more rigorous, ruthless, and extensive right of control over the thoughts of their subjects than the American state ever has, or ever could. So did the communist states in their prime. But even then, these ideologies were resisted by large parts of the populations concerned; and after a few decades not only most of the intelligentsia, but most citizens as well lost all genuine belief in them, while continuing to go through the required motions in public. The same became true of theocratic Iran in the course of the 1990s.

Russian and Chinese intellectuals of my acquaintance who came to America in the 1990s after living in this atmosphere of private cynicism towards public ideology often reacted with utter astonishment, and some fear, to the way in which ordinary Americans glorify their country's beliefs, institutions, laws, and economic practices in private conversations, not just as a matter of defensive patriotism, but with a sincere belief in their validity for all mankind: "They actually believe all this! No one is forcing them to say it!"(20) Closely related to this is the sense of national mission: 

All nations...have long agreed that they are chosen peoples; the idea of special destiny is as old as nationalism itself. However, no nation in modern history has been quite so consistently dominated as the United States by the belief that it has a particular mission in the world.(21)

 

Against the background of this ancient ideological tradition, and inflamed by the attacks of 9/11, a number of intellectuals belonging to the Democratic Party have set off in recent years on the same well-worn path as the neoconservatives had done two generations earlier, when most were followers of the anticommunist, pro-Vietnam War, and pro-Israel Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson.(22) Their approach was summarized in a 2003 document, Progressive Internationalism, drawn up by a group of former officials, think-tank members, and academics with a view to influencing the Democratic election campaign and the policies of a future Democratic administration.(23) Like other works by members of this school, this document does differ from works by the rightwing nationalists in that it stresses the need for multilateralism. The problem is, however, that its other statements on the use of force to improve the world are so alien to dominant European thinking that if implemented they would in fact make such multilateralism very difficult. Much of the content and even the language of Progressive Internationalism is indistinguishable from neoconservative tracts. Several of its signatories had joined with neoconservative and other rightwing Republican commentators in supporting the Iraq War.(24)

Armed Missionaries

According to the great historian of nationalism Elie Kedourie,

 

The [traditional] society of European states admitted all varieties of republics, of hereditary and elective monarchies, of constitutional and despotic regimes. But on the principle advocated by the [French] revolutionaries, the title of all governments then existing was put into question; since they did not derive their sovereignty from the nation, they were usurpers with whom no agreement need be binding, and to whom subjects owed no allegiance. It is clear that such a doctrine would envenom international quarrels, and render them quite recalcitrant to the methods of traditional statecraft; it would indeed subvert all international relations as hitherto known.(25)

 

The history of revolutionary and Napoleonic France should be enough to remind us of this. For if on the one hand the French armies did bring genuine progress to many parts of Europe, they also stirred up ferocious resistance, leading to wars that ravaged Europe for a generation. These conflicts not only led in the end to the crushing defeat of France, they weakened it so badly that it never recovered its preeminence in Europe and the world. And this resistance was not only from the forces of the old European resistance, but also from peasant partisans in several countries and from a German popular uprising in 1813 that helped lay the foundations for German radical nationalism. Or as Robespierre himself admitted, "No one likes armed missionaries." When the French Revolution spawned Napoleon, even liberal allies turned against the French, sickened by supposedly democratic invaders who in fact only produced a new crop of hereditary monarchs from among the ranks of Napoleon's brothers and marshals.

In our own day, such a messianic revolutionary attitude has a number of ill effects, even if in practice America rarely implements it. The first is the way in which it fuels self-righteous nationalist extremism in America itself, the chauvinisme cocardier (flaunting chauvinism) with which the Jacobin tradition in France was reproached. Such attitudes openly despise the interests and views of other nations. In particular, the authoritarian nature of most states in the Arab and Muslim worlds is used as an excuse to dismiss not only the views of their rulers, but those of their peoples -- with potentially catastrophic results for the struggle against Islamist terrorism.

This hostility to states and ignorance of other political cultures is fuelled by Western NGOs and human rights organizations. The downside of their commitment to human rights and democratization is often the inability to listen to voices from non-Western cultures; concentration on the views of small groups of liberal intellectuals at the expense of concern for the well-being of whole populations; dismissal of bitter memories of Western colonialism; and, above all, ignorance of the history of the countries in which they are involved.(26)

Such Western groups by their nature are more concerned with state oppression than with anarchy among peoples. These groups are philosophically incapable of even addressing the question of whether in some societies (judging by history, almost everywhere), a strong, even brutal, state may not be necessary in order to hold down and protect people from the depredations of the even more savage forces of heavily-armed, anarchic, predatory, and mutually hostile warlords, barons (both the traditional variety and modern "robber barons" such as the Russian oligarchs), clans, and ethnic groups. This was true of America, too, in the past, and could be so again. As Francis Lieber, "father of American political science," wrote in 1838, "a weak government is a negation of liberty."(27)

Neoconservative hypocrisy aside, liberal interventionism is often rooted in a genuine desire to liberate other peoples from their history. Its proponents claim that it is also antiracist, since it claims that all people can make rapid progress towards democracy regardless of their race, culture, or economic level. But what if the peoples concerned are unwilling or incapable of accepting such liberation? In a pattern familiar to all students of the missionary tradition and mentality, this attitude can all too easily slip into an aggressive, chauvinist, and ultimately even racist attitude toward such peoples. This tendency is enormously fed by the very strong currents of ethnoreligious nationalism which exist in American life alongside American civic nationalism. For after all, if the message is self-evidently true and universal, then any failure cannot be due to the message. It must be due to some failure on the part of the audience.

A Global Civil Society

Liberal internationalists' thinking along such lines has been encouraged by the idea in certain liberal circles that a "global civil society" is emerging as an alternative to state sovereignty.(28) This is an exceptionally dubious proposition, given NGOs' complete inability to administer or police any society, or even to protect themselves without the help of state forces, either from within the country in question or in the form of international intervention. NGOs only briefly and partially replace states when states have already collapsed, and being wholly unsuited to perform state functions, they inevitably make a mess of things.

It is also a profoundly elitist notion. For it is based on the idea that enlightened elites can and should modernize less developed nations, whether they like it or not. Historically, this is indeed just how progress has often occurred. The failure of the NGO world is to recognize that it can usually only do so if the elites and elite groups in question are backed by a strong state. The women and Western-educated technocrats who became members of the Afghan grand national assembly did so not because they were elected, but because they were appointed by the Afghan government at the insistence of its Western protectors. In Turkey under Ataturk, Iran under Reza Shah, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and to a lesser degree even Pakistan under Musharraf, the position of women has been advanced by the decree of authoritarian states -- sometimes, very savage ones.

This hostility to states brings liberal interventionists from the NGO world together with liberal imperialists in an alliance that much of the world is bound to see as highly reminiscent of the alliance between Christian missionaries and Western imperial soldiers in the nineteenth century.(29) For all their often genuine idealism and good intentions, the missionaries in the last resort depended on the soldiers and had to abide by the soldiers' colonial orders, however these might have conflicted with Christian ethics.

As Martin Jacques has argued (in a review of Empire Lite by Michael Ignatieff), what too many of the liberal interventionists have done is to take the admittedly miserable example of most of postcolonial Africa (plus Yugoslavia and Afghanistan) and extrapolate it to the former colonial world as a whole. As a result, they often grossly denigrate the achievements of many postcolonial states in Asia. Since the great majority of states in the world are imperfect from a democratic point of view, this conflation of failed states with undemocratic states risks giving a moral carte blanche to U.S. military intervention -- irrespective of a state's achievements in other fields.

A good many countries are in effect trying to jump in a few decades from something like Britain in the fifteenth or even the fifth century to twentyfirst-century Britain. It is hardly surprising that so many make a mess of it and that the process is so often bloody. There is little historic basis to believe that many of these societies are capable of supporting true democracies at present, or that the kind of democracies that such societies would be able to bring about could sustain rapid and stable economic growth. This is not to say that authoritarian rule is any kind of universal recipe for economic success, either. What it indicates rather is that we actually know very little about universally applicable rules for human progress, assuming such rules exist at all.

In these circumstances, the U.S. and Western approach to democratization in other societies should be governed by rigor of the intellect and generosity of spirit: rigor in studying the history, political culture, and social, economic, and ethnic orders of other societies, and the generosity of spirit derived from both success and modesty. If we have any sense of history, we should know that our own system does not represent the end of history, is not divinely ordained, and will not last forever. It is already clear, for example, that if the environmental challenge facing us reaches extreme dimensions, then Western free-market democracy in general, and the American version in particular, will fail to meet this challenge just as completely as the Chinese Confucian order failed to meet the challenge of Western modernization in the nineteenth century, or as many Muslim societies are failing to do today.

Julien Benda called for Western intellectuals to liberate themselves from the service of their respective nationalisms. American creedal nationalism has identified America absolutely with the achievement of successful modernity, and even with the end of history, through the achievement of a perfect and permanent model for the world. This means that for American intellectuals to liberate themselves from the service of nationalism, they also need to liberate themselves from their present slavery to time. They need to develop an intellectual capacity to step outside the present age and contemplate the broader sweeps of human history; to situate themselves somewhere between Conrad's fictional British Captain Marlowe, remembering that the Thames, like the Congo, was once "one of the dark places of the earth."(30) This is of course a terribly difficult task. It is not, however, an inappropriate one for the intellectual elites of a country that has defined its own role in the sweep of human history as equivalent to that of Rome, the Eternal City.

Instead of being marked by the rigor of the intellect and generosity of spirit that might result from such detachment, the contemporary U.S. approach to democratization all too often combines rose-colored sloppiness of intellect with a bitter meanness of spirit towards specific countries that fail to measure up to American standards or demands. The sloppiness of intellect stems from the absolutist character of the American thesis and the consequences of mixing that thesis up with the short-term objectives of U.S. administrations and ethnic lobbies. The meanness of spirit is more surprising, for in Senator Fulbright's words, "a nation whose modern history has been an almost uninterrupted chronicle of success...should be so sure of its own power as to be capable of magnanimity." (31)

<1 Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (New York: Knopf, 2005).

(2) Jacqueline Newmyer, "Will the Space Race Move East?" New York Times, Oct. 20, 2003.

(3) Max Boot, "Project for a New Chinese Century: Beijing Plans for National Greatness," The Weekly Standard, Oct. 6, 2005.

(4) Irving Kristol, "'Moral Dilemmas' in Foreign Policy" (1980), reprinted in Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 261–65; for a neoconservative attack on just this line of argument, see James W. Ceaser, "The Great Divide: American Interventionism and its Opponents," in Robert Kagan and William Kristol, eds., Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), pp. 25–43.

(5) Irving Kristol, "The 'Human Rights' Muddle," in Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative, pp. 266–9; for an almost identical statement by one of the greatest targets of neoconservative abuse, George Kennan, see his "Morality and Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs, Winter 1985/86.

(6) See Joshua Muravchik, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America's Destiny (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1991), pp. 19–38, 64–81; William Kristol and Robert Kagan, "Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996.

(7) See Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1982).

(8) See Joel C. Rosenberg, "Two Great Dissidents: Natan Sharansky's vision, and President Bush's," , Nov. 19, 2004, for the influence on the administration of Sharansky et al.'s The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom To Overcome Tyranny and Terror (Public Affairs, 2004).

(9) See, e.g., Michael Ledeen, "War on Terror Won't End in Baghdad," Wall Street Journal, Sept. 4, 2002.

(10) Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), pp. 128–32, 189; for a similar omission, see Cheryl Benard, "Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources and Strategies," RAND National Security Research Division, 2003.

(11) See the Atlantic Council's report of 1983, "The Teaching of Values and the Successor Generation" (Washington, D.C., 1983).

(12) George W. Bush speech, "A Distinctly American Internationalism," delivered at the Reagan Presidential Library, Nov. 19, 1999; see also James W. Ceaser, "Providence and the President: George W. Bush's Theory of History," The Weekly Standard, Mar. 10, 2003.

(13) Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944), pp. 1–25. For the original use of the term "American Creed," see G. K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1922), quoted in Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), p. 31.

(14) David Frum, Dead Right (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 130.

(15) Quoted in Kohn, American Nationalism, p. 13.

(16) Cf. Michael Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 125–70.

(17) See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 544ff and passim; see also the definitions of the creed in Lipset, American Exceptionalism, p. 19; Michael Lind, The Next American Nation (Free Press, 1996), pp. 90–1, 219–33; and in Herbert McClosky, "Consensus and Ideology in American Politics," American Political Science Review, June 1964. For "the American Proposition", see USA: The Permanent Revolution, by the editors of Fortune magazine, 1951, quoted in Louis Hartz, Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), p. 305.

(18) Samuel Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 2–3, 25.

(19) Sacvan Bercovitch, quoted in Lipset, American Exceptionalism, p. 291.

(20) Andrei K. Sitov, "America: Back in the USSR?" Tass, Washington, D.C., Aug. 4, 2003.

(21) Russel Nye, This Almost Chosen People: Essays in the History of American Ideas; quoted in William J. Cobb, Jr, The American Foundation Myth in Vietnam: Reigning Paradigms and Raining Bombs (New York: University Press of America, 1998), p. 4.

(22) Lars-Erik Nelson, "Military-Industrial Man," New York Review of Books, Dec. 21, 2000.

(23) Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy, Oct. 30, 2003, at www.ppionline.org.

(24) See the "Statement on Post-War Iraq," June 16, 2003, signed by Ronald Asmus, Max Boot, Ivo Daalder, Thomas Donnelly, Peter Galbraith, Robert Kagan and others, at www.brookings. edu; and Leslie H. Gelb and Justine A. Rosenthal, "The Rise of Ethics in Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs, May/June 2003.

(25) Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson, 1979), pp. 15–16.

(26) Alex de Waal, "The Moral Solipsism of Global Ethics, Inc.," London Review of Books, Aug. 23, 2001.

(27) Quoted in Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 53.

(28) See Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (London: Polity, 2002); and John Keane, Global Civil Society? (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

(29) See Adam Garfinkle, "The New Missionaries," Prospect magazine (London), April 2003.

(30) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 18.

(31) J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 17.