Abstract
A political crusade began to take shape in the early years of the twenty-first century that defended the use of armed conflict to achieve the avowed objective of creating democracy. The crusade accepts a variety of widely shared beliefs about the nature of democratic societies, as well as their role within international society. It was an undertaking aimed at providing universalist, transhistorical, transcultural, and secular solutions to problems imposed by social living. Its proponents reject the idea that human societies must work through their own developmental processes to achieve conditions favorable to self-rule. Defending the crusade’s transcultural universalism, former Secretary of State Colin Powell averred, “We reject the condescending notion that freedom will not grow in the Middle East or that there is any region of the world that cannot support democracy.”1 The crux of the matter has much to do with meeting demands of universalist ideological procedures, their plentiful promises, and their unsettling endorsements as casus belli of armed conflict.
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Notes
Robert A. Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 3.
Amartya Sen, “Democracy as a Universal Value,” Journal of Democracy 10, no. 3 (1999): 3–17.
Andrew Fiala, The Just War Myth: The Moral Illusions of War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 127.
Don M. Coerver and Linda B. Hall, Tangled Destinies: Latin America and the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 62. A portion of this quote, from a very resourceful book overall, was brought to my attention in an endnote from Omar G. Encar-nacion’s essay, “The Follies of Democratic Imperialism,” cited below.
Tom Rockmore, “Can War Transform Iraq into a Democracy?,” Theoria 103 (April 2004):19.
George W. Bush, “George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural Address,” last modified January 20, 2005, http://www.whitehouse.gov/inaugural/.
Neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama, though generally supportive of the Bush Doctrine, cautioned that the war in Iraq was likely to bring about more harm than good, by igniting an insurgency and producing further resentment against the United States. However, other neoconservatives such as Charles Krauthammer take a more radical approach, interpreting the so-called democratization of Iraq as a great success and defending interventionist wars in regional nemeses, such as Iran and Syria (though on some level, Iran is already understood as a democracy). For these ideas, see Francis Fukuyama, “The Neoconservative Moment,” National Interest (Summer 2004): 57–68; and Charles Krauthammer, “The Neoconservative Convergence,” Commentary 120, no. 1 (July–August 2005): 21–26.
Michael Walzer, Arguing about War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 148.
Omar G. Encarnacion, “The Follies of Democratic Imperialism,” World Policy Journal 22, no.1 (Spring 2005): 48.
John Rawls seems to espouse the stronger version of democratic peace theory, as illustrated by the following passage: “armed conflict between democratic peoples will tend to disappear as they approach that ideal [democratic peace], and they will engage in war only as allies in self-defense against outlaw states.” John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 54.
Michael Doyle, Ways of War and Peace (New York: Norton, 1997);
R. J. Rummel, Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1997); also see Rawls’s Law of Peoples.
David E. Spiro, “The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace,” International Security 19, no. 2 (1994): 52.
See for instance two classic essays, David Garnham, “War-Proneness,” Journal of Peace Research 23, no. 3 (1986): 279–89;
Zeev Maoz and Nasrin Abdolali, “Regime Types and International Conflict, 1816–1976,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 29, no. 1 (1989): 3–35.
This discrepancy is highlighted by two different overarching arguments that seek to defend democratic peace theory. See David Lake “Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War,” American Political Science Review 86, no. 1 (1992): 24–37; and Michael Doyle, Ways of War and Peace.
John Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War,” International Security 15, no. 1 (1990): 50–51.
Omar G. Encarncion, “Coming to Terms with Iraq,” Ethics and International Affairs 19, no. 3 (2005): 95.
Andrew Arato, “The Occupation of Iraq and the Difficult Transition from Dictatorship,” Constellations 10, no. 3 (2003): 414.
Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), ix.
Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 319. This inclusive version is offered by Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Foundation and coeditor of the Journal of Democracy. Diamond also served as senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority from January to April of 2004, upon pleas made by his former Stanford University colleague and provost, Condoleezza Rice. Though Diamond opposed the war, he accepted the invitation and went to Iraq to assist in the rebuilding effort; after a few short months, he realized it was a hopeless endeavor and returned to Stanford.
John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 1991).
Arend Lijphart, “Self-Determination versus Pre-Determination of Ethnic Minorities in Power-Sharing Systems,” in The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. Will Kymlicka (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 277.
For Lijphart’s widely cited work, see Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977). Lijphart has updated and refined his earlier analysis in a recent work, Thinking about Democracy: Power Sharing and Majority Rule in Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2007).
Gail M. Presbey, “Challenges of Founding a New Government in Iraq,” Constellations 12, no. 4 (2004): 530.
Ted Honderich, Right and Wrong, and Palestine, 9/11, Iraq, 7/7 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 57.
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© 2012 Bassam Romaya
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Romaya, B. (2012). The Question of Democracy. In: The Iraq War. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137055309_4
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