In 1992, flush with victory in the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama penned an Hegelian book called The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama hypothesized that “liberal democracy may constitute the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.” In other words, he speculated that we had reached a point in history that we would be hard pressed to improve upon…and not only that, but that there was a remarkable worldwide consensus that representative goverment was the best form of government. And, even beyond that, Fukuyama asserted that liberal democracies had broken the dialetic. They did not contain within them the internal contradiction that led to the demise of other systems of government.
As evidence for this Fukuyama cited a chart (with updates) from Michael Doyle’s 1983 article in Philosophy and Public Affairs called “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs”. Doyle defined a liberal democracy as a country with “a market economy, representative government, external sovereignty, and juridicial rights.” Under this criteria, Doyle found the following number of liberal democracies in history.
Prior to 1790= 0
1790= 3
1848= 5
1900= 15
1919= 25
1940= 13
1960= 36
1975= 30
1990= 61
[as an aside here, you will notice that 1975 shows a temporary dip. Here is the list of countries that were considered liberal democracies in 1960 and 1990, but not in 1975. See, if you see a trend: Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Philippines.]
You could make other charts that showed the trend of communist countries, monarchies, and dictatorships. They would all show a downward trend. What’s important isn’t the absolute numbers, but the fact that the ideological underpinnings of communism, monarchism, fascism, and dictatorship have been undermined and show no bright prospect of returning to widespread legitimacy.
One of the consequences of this development is that strongmen lost their ability to make ideological claims to justify their own power. They could no longer place themselves on one or the other side of the Cold War and claim to be protecting the country from either rapacious capitalists or insidious communism.
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A corollary consequence was that the United States (and the West generally) and Russia lost the ability to justify the use of client strongmen as necessary evils in a worldwide ideological struggle. The Soviet collapse was so total that they were left with only one embarrassing legacy: North Korea. However, the West was left with its historic alliances of convenience with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. And the blowback was immediate. In many ways, you can see the rise of groups like al-Qaeda as a natural outgrowth of the loss of legitimacy for the rulers of those countries when the Cold War came to an end. Russia has experienced a similar problem from some of its breakaway provinces: notably Chechnya and Uzbekistan.
Liberals need to articulate a foreign policy that takes into account the reality of a terrorist threat arising from the Cold War legacy, but that doesn’t see the problem in apocalyptic terms. To some degree, the problem is intractable. If the solution is more liberal democracies, that by definition means the overthrow of governments that were valuable strategic allies during the Cold War, but much more importantly…it means instabilty in a very important part of the world. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Any prolonged interruption of Saudi Arabian oil could create huge economic losses and cost millions of jobs around the globe. And an Islamist government in Egypt could have far-reaching and unpredictable consequences.
Furthermore, the overthrow of these governments is not likely to automatically lead to liberal democracies, as happened throughout Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Far East.
We are stuck in a vice between providing economic and political stability, and supporting strongmen that deny their citizens’ basic rights, which gives rise to anti-American sentiment and to anti-American terrorism.
Part of the solution lies in trying to lessen the potential downside of instabilty. The less an interruption of Saudi oil supplies would hurt, the more willing we can be to accept some uncertainty about their form of government. Another part of the solution is to strengthen the anti-proliferation arm of the United Nations. When countries like Pakistan get nuclear weapons, and they do not have the political institutions and civilian leadership of their military to provide basic assurances about the security of those weapons, it puts the international community in a no-win situation. We cannot afford political instability in Pakistan, so we cannot support any liberalization of their form of government. The more we support the dictatorship in Pakistan, the more hostile the populace becomes toward America, and the less we can afford a popular revolution there.
There are no magic bullets that will solve these problems. Each country is unique. A sound policy will look to diminish the downside of instability in each country, to cautiously push for liberal reforms, and to strenghten international institutions that can help prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and that can help provide guidance and assistance as these countries make a difficult transition toward liberal democracy.
Therefore, a liberal foreign policy should emphasize energy independence, human rights, multilateralism, anti-proliferation through the UN, foreign aid, and political liberalization.
Some will see this as a continuation of imperialistic policies. And in some sense, they are imperialistic. But, they are also pragmatic and cautious.
And they incorporate a nearly worldwide consensus on the interests of the global economy and collective security, rather than the narrow unilateral interests of the Bush neo-colonialists.
