During the chaos of Portugal’s democratic revolution in April 1974, Mário Soares, the provisional government’s foreign minister, visited Henry Kissinger. The U.S. Secretary of State was concerned that Portugal’s communist party would seize power and urged the democratic socialist Soares to take a tougher stance against the Stalinists.
“You are a Kerensky,” Kissinger said, “I believe your sincerity, but you are naive.”
To which Soares replied: “I certainly don’t want to be a Kerensky.”
And Kissinger shot back: “Neither did Kerensky.”
The anecdote was noted by Samuel Huntington, the hugely influential political scientist who passed away Christmas Eve, in a 1997 Journal of Democracy article. Huntington, a member of the International Forum for Democratic Studies‘ Research Council and the Journal of Democracy’s International Advisory Committee, went on to argue that democracy promoters should prioritize transformation of electoral democracies into liberal democracies over democratizing the world’s unfree countries.
He also stressed the need to “develop the sense of community and enhance the forms of cooperation among liberal democracies,” not least through the creation of more publicly funded foundations akin to the National Endowment for Democracy and the UK’s Westminster Foundation for Democracy. “It is also highly desirable that these institutions join together in an international association to coordinate their efforts and to become an effective lobbying group with national governments and international organizations on behalf of democratic development,” he argued.
Huntington was a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey’s 1968 presidential campaign. As “an old-fashioned Democrat” wrote Robert Kaplan, Huntington “always held liberal ideals. But he knows that such ideals cannot survive without power, and that power requires careful upkeep.”
“Even back then we were nation-building,” Huntington told Kaplan. “We rejected religious and ethnic loyalties as counterweights to the Vietcong because we wanted a modern, democratic nation-state with a national army. Our problem with Vietnam was our idealism.”
Fareed Zakaria, amongst others, takes pains to stress Huntington’s conviction that political order took precedence over regime type. “American-style progress — more political participation or faster economic growth – actually created more problems than it solved,” Zakaria argues. “If a country had more people who were economically, politically and socially active yet lacked effective political institutions, such as political parties, civic organizations or credible courts, the result was greater instability.”
Others observe that Huntington’s theory about “modernizing authoritarianism” was either discredited or discarded. “Huntington showed that the lack of political order and authority were among the most serious debilities the world over,” said Jorge Dominguez, Harvard’s vice provost for international affairs. “The degree of order, rather than the form of the political regime, mattered most.”
But, Dominguez contends, Huntington’s 1991 book, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, “looked at similar questions from a different perspective, namely, that the form of the political regime – democracy or dictatorship – did matter“.
Huntington is more widely known for his theory of a clash of civilizations (a phrase in fact coined by Bernard Lewis). “The fundamental source of conflict in this new [post-Cold War] world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic,” Huntington wrote. “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.”
His writings on democracy exhibited sensitivity to the critical function of religious and cultural factors. The Economist notes his belief that “democratization might have more to do with the Second Vatican Council, which had unleashed a wave of democratization across the Catholic world, than with the spread of free-markets.”
Writing in The Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell, suggests that his thesis led him to be more cautious about promoting democracy in regions that lacked Judaeo-Christian cultural or religious underpinnings:
It was unclear to many of Huntington’s readers whether the centrepiece of western diplomacy, spreading democracy, would avert inter-civilizational violence or incite it. Most assumed Huntington thought the former. In fact, he consistently thought the latter.
“My argument remains,” he said in a 2007 interview with Islamica magazine, “that cultural identities, antagonisms and affiliations will not only play a role, but play a major role in relations between states.”
No observation aroused more controversy than his statement that “Islam has bloody borders.” But, Caldwell notes, to Huntington, “this was an empirical statement, not a judgment on Islam’s merits as a civilization and still less an argument for western meddling.”
Anyway, the west’s increasing entanglement with Islam has not been the result of an increasing enmity. On the contrary. Viewed from Orthodox Christian civilization, in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo the west took the Muslims’ side.
Huntington was well aware of the “paradox of democracy“, writes Fouad Ajami:
Democratic experiments often bring in their wake nationalistic populist movements (Latin America) or fundamentalist movements (Muslim countries). The world tempts power, and denies it. It is the Huntingtonian world; no false hopes and no redemption.
Francis Fukuyama, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, takes issue with Huntington’s approach:
While I fully appreciate the power and durability of culture, and the way that modern liberal democracy was rooted in Christian cultural values, it has always seemed to me that culture was more useful in explaining the provenance than the durability of democracy as a political system. [Huntington] underrated the universalism of the appeal of living in modern, free societies with accountable governments. … The gloomy picture he paints of a world riven by cultural conflict is one favored by the Islamists and Russian nationalists, but is less helpful in explaining contemporary China or India, or indeed in explaining the motives of people in the Muslim world or Russia who are not Islamists or nationalists. Nation-states and not civilizations remain the primary actors in world politics, and they are motivated by a host of interests and incentives that often override inherited cultural predispositions.
Now that the Third Wave is well and truly over, and advocates of modernizing authoritarianism gaining confidence and adherents, it seems fitting to return to Huntington’s 1997 JOD article and take heed of his call for a renewed democratic internationalism:
Now, after 20 years of the Third Wave, conditions are much more favorable, and private groups should move to create an international association of organizations and movements dedicated to expanding democracy on a global basis and to enhancing the performance of democracy within countries. The Comintern is dead. The time for a Demintern has arrived. The creation of such an association will be a major step toward ensuring the consolidation and the continuation of the momentous expansion of human freedom that began under the leadership of Mário Soares 23 years ago.
Recent Comments