Imperial liberalism

IT IS DIFFICULT both to be good and to be powerful. This seems to be the common view among statesmen, sages, poets and thinkers. A core thesis among thinkers of the realist persuasion has been that in foreign affairs, being good may in the end be bad for the people you serve, and that moral ends may best be served by thinking in terms of power and how it should be preserved, instead of aiming to do directly what seems morally good. This lesson is repeated in the works of Machiavelli, Morgenthau, Kissinger and many others. Realism is about power, and though barren and inadequate as a description of the way international society functions, it is at least consistent. Likewise, liberal internationalism, though its proponents have sometimes mistaken aspiration for reality, is also consistent. But the attempt to combine the two, as Charles Krauthammer did in these pages ("In Defense of Democratic Realism", Fall 2004), presents difficulties in both theory and practice.

One difficulty with democratic realism is the problem of power in a democratic age. Once, we knew what power looked like. It possessed a big army and a big navy. You exercised power by beating someone else's army and taking their land, their money, their women. Sometimes you took over their territory and ruled it and them. In the last decades, these habits have died out among democracies: In an advanced industrial society, land is more a burden than an asset. We have left behind the static aristocratic society in which wealth appeared to be fixed, so that you could become rich only by robbing others. Today, peace and trade provide a better return than war and looting. From the point of view of wealth creation, war is a double negative. It destroys assets and does so at great expense.

In a democratic age, ruling others is problematic. The notion that all men are equal does not sit comfortably with empire. Nevertheless, the idea of spreading the democratic system of government has great attractions. We need an orderly world, and democracies are in the long run more stable than dictatorships. Besides, like it or not, our democratic values are universal. If all men are equal, then oppression anywhere is offensive; it may not threaten our security, but it threatens our self respect, for we are involved in mankind.

The theory that democracies do not fight each other attracts adherents as different as President Bush and Immanuel Kant. There are also skeptics like Alexander Hamilton, who pointed out that Rome and Athens were no less warlike for being republics. These were imperfect democracies, it is true, but so in one way or another are all democracies. Perhaps the fairest conclusion is that the no-war-between-democracies thesis needs more time to establish itself; up to the present, the sample of modern democracies has been too small. But for mature democracies, it does at least seem to have a plausible logic: Most people are cautious about voting for policies that may involve them risking their lives. And the evidence continues to accumulate.

The theory, that well-governed societies will not produce terrorists is manifestly not true: Timothy McVeigh, British-born suicide bombers, and the Japanese terror cult Aura Shinrikyo are among the many counter-examples. But in a well-governed country, there will be a better chance of obtaining the support of the majority of the population against the terrorists. Legitimacy, is usually one of the keys to success. Accountable police and intelligence services ought in the end to be more efficient. But here also evidence is too thin for much certainty.

Nevertheless, a world of well-governed countries with accountable executives, responsible assemblies and independent judiciaries seems instinctively preferable to any of the alternatives. We feel more comfortable with Japan mastering nuclear technology than with someone like Saddam Hussein doing the same. Europe at the end of the 20th century is safer than Europe at its start. East Asia looks to be on the way to being happier and safer than the Middle East.

The argument of the democratic realist thus has a compelling simplicity and logic: Democracy is desirable, perhaps even imperative, for our security, and America is now a dominant power in a way that is without precedent. So American power should be used to promote democracy. The problem with this argument is that American power--or at least the dimension of power in which America is most evidently dominant--is military power, and it is questionable how useful this is in creating democracies. There are several systemic reasons for thinking it may not be the best instrument for this goal.

DEMOCRATIC SYSTEMS and military systems are in many respects opposites. Democracy is bottom up; military is top down. In military systems, hierarchy and rank are fundamental; in democracy, the starting point is that all men are equal. Democracy is about due process, rights, limits to power; military systems work, necessarily, on the basis of obedience to orders. These differences become even more marked when an army has invaded someone else's country. An army gets its way by violence and by the threat of violence, very different from the processes of law embodied in democratic states. And whereas the principle of equality before the law is basic to democracies, there is nothing less equal than the invading soldier and the local civilian. Thus, although a foreign country may invade with the best of intentions and may bring with it professors of politics to explain democratic theory, what it does is fundamentally undemocratic. Its words may say the right things, but its actions tell exactly the opposite story.

Behind this lies an even more fundamental question. How much use is military power in a democratic age? What is the point of being the only superpower, the sole owner of the unipolar moment, if you cannot maintain control of a single medium-sized state or even a medium-sized town? Of course, the story in Iraq is far from over, and the United States, with Iraqi help, may well in the end establish order throughout the country. But--and this is the point--if it does so it will be with Iraqi help. No doubt even without Iraqi help, the United States could take full control by flooding the country with troops and using whatever degree of force was required. This would be in the logic of military power, which after all is about violence and threat. But it would not work. First of all, it would not work because the United States itself is democratic and its people would not permit it, and second, it would not work because Iraq, like every, other part of the world, is infused in a primitive way with a democratic ideology. At the beginning of democracy is the idea of self-determination, the idea that you should be ruled by your own people and not by foreigners. In the violent culture of the Middle East, this may be expressed in insurgency or support for insurgents. In Central Europe, for years it was expressed in sullen resistance, underground movements and ironic humor. There too, forty years of rule, through surrogates but resting ultimately on military force, demonstrated the weakness of military power in a democratic age.

As an authoritarian state, the Soviet Union had less difficulty in being brutal, though even its willingness to use force declined over the forty-year occupation. For America it is not so easy. The United States may be the most powerful state since Rome, but unlike the Roman Empire, it is democratic, and its people will not tolerate Roman methods (solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant). (1) Military force still has its uses, but running or transforming other people's countries is not one of them. To see power only in military terms is a fundamental error in world politics.

KRAUTHAMMER MIGHT reply that while the theory might not work, the practice does. "We have succeeded in the monumental task of reconstructing Germany, Japan and South Korea." It is true that all of these countries have had an American force present over a long period and also that during this period they have become stable democracies. But the causation is not as simple as Krauthammer suggests. In fact, the three countries mentioned had very different histories, and the United States played a different role in each.

Germany under the Nazi Party was a tyranny, and its overthrow was a requirement for the re-establishment of democracy. Without the American contribution in World War II, this would probably never have happened. The same is true of the Soviet contribution. With the occupation, the difference between the American and Soviet approaches became clearer: In the Western zones--which were British and French as well as American--democracy and an open society were refounded; in the Soviet Zone a communist dictatorship was installed. But in the West, democratic institutions were not established but re-established. They were not new. Different parts of Germany had different histories: The state of Baden had universal suffrage from the early 19th century, while Prussia was still an autocracy. It is not clear whether the German state in the time of the Kaiser should be called a democracy or not. Everyone had a vote, but they were of unequal weight. By modern standards it would not qualify as democratic, but that is also true of most other countries of the period. The Weimar constitution, however, was undoubtedly democratic: For example, it gave votes to women a year before the 19th Amendment did the same in the United States and some decades before many other European states.

U.S. policy in occupied Germany after World War II was not directed primarily towards democratization. The Morgenthau Plan for the de-industrialization of Germany was, fortunately, abandoned before the occupation began. Nevertheless, some of the thinking that inspired it remained: JCS1067, the document that set out the main policies for the U.S. occupation, states, "Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation." Lucius Clay, the American military, governor, wisely ignored both the spirit and the letter of U.S. policy. His main motivation for seeking to transfer authority to German politicians seems to have been the wish to end his responsibility for tasks for which he felt thoroughly unprepared. His efforts to get guidance from the State Department on what exactly was meant by either democracy or federalism were fruitless.

This did not matter very much. Audenauer and Schumacher not only knew more about Germany than did any of the occupation forces, they also "knew more about democracy--having watched and suffered under its decline in the 1930s. Perhaps Americans in general, coming from the only state to have been born democratic, are less aware of the difficulties and travails of the process of becoming a democracy. Clay himself made this point: "I think we have a peculiar idea of our government being perfect without knowing really and truly how it works." The process of creating a new German constitution--based largely on Weimar--was essentially a German one. The British had concluded that the best way to deal with postwar Germany would be to ensure that its government was decentralized, but it was Adenauer's commitment to federalism that mattered. Take the case of Trade Union legislation. Although it was the British Military Government that first agreed to the creation of unions, they were created on a German model, which learned some lessons from the pre-war period, rather than following British ideas. The Germans also had their own ideas in education: The minister for culture in Lower Saxony complained at receiving orders from foreigners when the best vision of reform was German. In Bavaria they simply ignored Allied directives in this area. And so on.

The Allies (not just America) played a part in re-establishing German democracy. First they defeated Hitler; then they occupied Germany in a largely benign fashion and took a benevolent attitude to the rebirth of democratic institutions--both quite different from what happened in the Soviet Zone. But the democratic development of Germany after 1945 was first and foremost a German event. To claim otherwise is not only to underestimate the Germans, but also to overestimate the degree to which an occupying military power can control developments.

THE CONSTITUTION of postwar West Germany was a German product. The same cannot be said of the Japanese constitution, which was drafted by Americans working for the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), and--according to some Japanese--still reads like a translation. Nevertheless, the politicians who made it work were authentically Japanese. In an analysis of the occupation period, the scholar Thomas A. Bisson, who himself had worked for SCAP, wrote:

   [T]he occupation authorities came prepared
   to play the role of firm but benevolent
   guardians of a docile and oppressed people
   that had no conception of the meaning much
   less the practice of democratic rights and
   responsibilities. The general consensus of
   opinion was that the majority of the Japanese
   would be meek and apologetic and would
   willingly accept the tutelage of their liberators.
   As it turned out however, the release of
   political prisoners from jail, the granting of
   free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of
   organization, and other rights produced a
   popular movement that startled the occupation
   by its vigor and independence, and by the
   far-reaching character of its demands for
   political and economic reform. (2)

On the whole, the reformers were disappointed by the extent to which the old political and economic structures remained. The purge of politicians and officials thought to be "undesirable" had limited effects. The Japanese government originally identified some 200,000 candidates, but by the time the occupation ended in 1952, just over 8,000 were still banned from office (including some communists who had opposed Japanese militarism). Many of those banned, like Prime Minister Hatoyama, later returned.

Two measures did have a lasting impact: the dramatic land reform, which changed the structure of village society--and also helped ensure a permanent conservative majority in the countryside--and the effective abolition of the armed forces. This last measure made a real difference, since the army had been at the root of the instability that brought down Japanese democracy in the 1930s. It is doubtful that the Japanese people would have done either of these things on their own--even if they have been happy to accept the results.

As in Germany, U.S. policies played a part in the restoration of Japanese democracy, but anyone examining the whole period will reach the conclusion that Japan was rebuilt as a successful democratic society by the Japanese themselves. On reflection, it is difficult to imagine anything else. A few hundred foreign officials, most of them initially ignorant of Japan, few of them able to speak the language, were hardly likely to bring about the complete transformation of Japanese society in a seven-year period.

THE THIRD example quoted by Krauthammer, Korea, is more complicated. The United States never had the role or powers of an occupying authority in Korea, though it did have operational command over the Republic of Korea's armed forces. How much the United States can claim credit for South Korea's democratic transformation over the forty years from the end of the war is questionable. On the one hand, the State Department and the U.S. embassy in Seoul urged progress towards democracy from time to time, and the United States probably saved Kim Dae Jung from execution (and then gave him asylum in the United States). On the other, the United States seems to have had little difficulty in working closely with successive corrupt and authoritarian regimes and at critical moments did nothing to prevent the use of the military against demonstrators. Given the complexity of its security responsibilities and the relationship between Washington and Seoul, there was perhaps little alternative. Nevertheless, this does not look like an active policy of promoting democracy. But while U.S. military power may have done little directly for democracy in Korea, American influence worked a slow and lasting transformation. The contact with American society and government over the forty years following the end of the Korean War played a positive, possibly transforming, role in Korean thinking. And the transition to democracy is above all about changes in ideas.

IT SHOULD not be surprising in any of these cases that democracy came from within rather than in the baggage train of a foreign army. Democracy is rule by the people, and who else but the people themselves could be responsible for its establishment? You can use force to impose your "sonnovabitch" but not to impose democratic politics.

This does not mean that foreigners and military power have no role at all. The first role that foreign armies may play is in the defeat of an undemocratic regime. Few regimes survive a major military defeat. What happens then depends on local circumstances. Often there will be a reaction to the values of the regime that has lost the war and so failed in its primary duty of providing security. The Prussian defeat of Napoleon III brought the return of democracy to France. And when the Third Republic was defeated, it gave way, briefly, to Vichy amid disillusion with democracy. The defeat of the czar in World War I brought a revolution that started with an incompetent attempt at democracy and finished with Lenin. China in the 20th century suffered innumerable defeats at the hands of the Japanese and the West, bringing a series of revolutions that culminated in that of Mao Zedong. The defeat of the Kaiserreich brought a period of democracy, but the incompleteness of that defeat also gave legitimacy to the extreme Right. After World War II, Italy reacted against fascism and created a shaky but ultimately enduring democracy. Force was indeed necessary to establish a new regime in Germany, but that was in the East, where the role of the military was to suppress moves towards democracy. In Greece in 1974, the colonels wisely did not wait to be defeated by Turkey, but resigned preemptively. In the same year, facing unwinnable wars in its colonies, the Portuguese army revolted and began a revolution against the right-wing authoritarian government. The result was very nearly a communist government but in the end settled into a democracy. Thatcher's victory in the Falklands War brought the overthrow of the military regime and a return to democracy in Argentina, an event that seemingly unleashed a democratic domino effect in South America. Military defeat is not the only kind of shock that can destabilize a regime--in the Soviet Union it was loss of empire, in Indonesia a financial crisis--but it remains perhaps the worst shock a country can suffer and one of those most likely to delegitimize a regime.

The second contribution that foreign forces can make is to bring security. War is one of the great enemies of democracy. Control of the military is fundamental to the rule of law. But in situations of national emergency, under threat of attack or under popular enthusiasm for righting the wrongs imposed by foreigners, democracy is at risk. It was the dominance of the military in Japan in the 1930s that undermined its struggling democracy. In Europe both fascism and communism came out of war. For communism it was through revolution brought by defeat. Fascism's appeal in Germany was to those who believed Germany had been betrayed rather than defeated; in Italy it was to former officers who felt they had won Italy's first victories only to surrender them to a cowardly parliament and a peace-mongering church. In both countries the slogans and imagery of the anti-democratic movements were warlike (as was also the case for communism). In South Korea, military coups have characteristically been justified by the need for a "strong" government to deal with the threat from the North. Perhaps in this light it could be argued that it is not an accident that democracy has best developed and survived in countries whose geography gave them some natural protection: Britain and the United States relied on navies, which are inherently less destabilizing than armies; Scandinavia was remote; and the Netherlands had the option of defending itself by breaching the dikes.

THUS, THE United States made a vital contribution to democracy in postwar Europe through the creation of NATO. By giving assurance of security to the countries of Western Europe, it removed the military from domestic politics and herded them into a multilateral world. This was not entirely successful in the case of Greece, where the perceived threat from Turkey remained a source of insecurity, or in Turkey, where some combination of external threat and the Kemalist legacy gave the army a special position. But for the rest of Europe, armies became increasingly removed from politics. (3) Later, a similar process was applied in Spain: Following the death of Franco, Spain left fascism behind by entering into the European Union, while the Spanish army escaped its anti-democratic past through integration into NATO. The importance of the external environment, including its security dimension, was demonstrated again in 1989. The revolutions of Central and Eastern Europe were not democratic by chance. That most of the countries concerned had some, albeit short, democratic experience probably helped, but what mattered most was the security offered by the United States in the form of NATO membership and the existence of a community of democracies in the shape of the European Union (which also offered both incentives and practical help with reform). As a result, the outcome was very different from that of the 1920s and 1930s, when the same countries were sandwiched between communism and fascism and were threatened by both.

In Japan, when introducing the "peace constitution", General MacArthur said: "By this undertaking and commitment, Japan surrenders rights inherent in her own sovereignty and renders her future security and very survival subject to the good faith and justice of the peace-loving peoples of the world." Fortunately for Japan, it has been the United States, rather than the peace-loving peoples of the world, that has safeguarded its security. Possibly Japanese democracy would have done well without the Security Treaty, but by taking responsibility for Japan's security, the United States removed the military threat to democracy that had been so destructive in the 1930s.

This raises the question of why the transition to democracy was so slow in the Republic of Korea. Unlike postwar Japan, Korea's external environment remained a negative factor, in spite of the U.S. security presence, resulting in a state that was too militarized to make it easy for democratic aspirations to bear fruit, even when it had achieved the high-income levels that normally seem to point towards democracy. (4) Yet without the secure environment provided by U.S. guarantees and their visible embodiment in the U.S. force presence, the process might have taken much longer.

THE KOREAN experience, like that of many countries, illustrates that democracy faces external threats as well as internal challenges. The latter are of course essential. No matter how favorable the external environment, democracy will not take root unless some basic compromises can be reached between different groups, classes and ethnicities that establish the rules of the game. The losers in elections must believe in the constitution sufficiently to accept defeat--in the confidence that they will get another chance later on to contest elections. The winners must be sufficiently committed to the constitution not to abuse it and use their power to oppress or disadvantage the opposition. In achieving a settlement of these fundamental questions, outsiders cannot play much of a role.

Some of the enemies of democracy--dictators and their military backing--can be defeated by armies. But not all. Sometimes the real enemy is traditional society in its different forms; sometimes it is a modern oligarchy bringing together politics, especially nationalist or ethnic politics, and economic interest. The spread of ideas and the spread of the market are the most important means to defeat these (which is why modern oligarchs seek to control both). Assisting those who are seeking fairer courts, freer media, genuine elections, better protection for human rights and better commercial law may not produce instant success. (5) But it must be worth trying. Scholarships, libraries and other ways of spreading ideas may also have a part to play in the Middle East, as they did in Korea. They may be slow, pedestrian, uncertain--but no more uncertain than the use of force. In the long run, democracy succeeds because of its success. Its product is the Mercedes Benz rather than the Trabant, education and cultural exchange rather than isolation and starvation. People want democracy because they want a better life; consumerism is not beautiful, but it too is an image of liberty.

Every country is different, and there are as many routes to democracy as there are countries. India took to it naturally; Pakistan has struggled. Indonesia looks increasingly like a success story, against all expectations. Thailand, Chile, Taiwan, South Africa and Spain all have different stories. In many cases the position of the army has been a vital factor. It may be that foreign forces will succeed in bringing democracy to Iraq. It is always a mistake to underestimate either America's will or its capacity for getting things done, and the enthusiasm of most Iraqis for elections is clear. But the choice will in the end be the Iraqis', and there is no way even the most powerful of foreign powers can guarantee the outcome. We all hope for success, but in historical terms it would be a rare case, and it would be unwise to build too much on it. (6) Indeed, we should be careful about using the threat of force to press for democratic change: Nothing is more likely to strengthen the tyrant and legitimize the illegitimate than a foreign threat. No communist regime collapsed as a result of outside pressure; internal change comes easier when people feel more secure externally.

It is not a question of abandoning the Wilsonian vision of encouraging the spread of democracy so much as being realistic about what an outside actor can achieve. Foreigners, especially foreign armies, are not equipped to broker domestic constitutional settlements, but they can create a positive external security environment in which such a settlement will have more chance of prospering. The inability to create an adequate security environment in the 1920s and 1930s was a major reason for the failure of the original Wilsonian package. At that time the failures included the incomplete defeat of Germany, the defects in the Versailles Treaty, the absence of the United States and Soviet Russia from the League of Nations, the League's somewhat cloudy ideas, and the failure to put muscle behind those ideas.

But the basic Wilsonian package was not wrong. Self-determination, democracy and the institutionalization of international security go well together. Self-determination is a precondition for democracy; unless there is a sufficient sense of community, democracy on the basis of majority voting will not work. Democracy in turn contributes to peace. The idea that the peace will be kept by "the force of international public opinion"--on which ultimately the hopes for the League rested--makes sense only if public opinion has a chance to make itself heard. But democracy itself is most likely to prosper in an international environment that creates trust between states.

"Trust between states", the classical realist may scoff, "is impossible." One of the (many) weaknesses of Wilson's rhetoric is that he seemed to base his plans on the idea of a natural harmony of interests among nations. Nothing of the sort exists. Nor, however, is there any natural harmony of interests among men. The triumph of the rule of law is that it manages these natural conflicts. It is the legal framework that enables markets to channel greed into constructive economic activity. In the end, men discover that for all their natural conflicts, they have a common interest in upholding the law. But markets are not natural: They are the outcome of man-made laws.

Nor is democracy the natural condition of mankind. It is simply that experience has taught us that nothing else makes the rule of law sustainable. The compromises necessary to make constitutions work are the price we pay to channel ambition into constructive political activity. Institutions exist to create trust, that indispensable element in human society. The rule of law creates the trust that enables markets to function. Democracy is a way of compensating for the fact that no one is to be trusted with too much power for too long.

International institutions are needed for the same reasons: to provide continuity and predictability--the next best thing to trust--in an uncertain world. They are needed precisely because states, like men, are not to be trusted. It would be logical for those who press the case for domestic institutions--democracy and the market economy--to want institutions at the international level too.

WE ARE now in a democratic era. This may be seen not just in the growing number of democracies--many of them rather shaky--but also in the homage paid to the idea of democracy by those like Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe who fix elections to give themselves a pretense of democratic legitimacy, or by authoritarian countries like the DPRK who nonetheless find it essential to include the "D for Democratic" in their names. The idea is acknowledged even when the reality is denied.

This has consequences for the international system. The realist world of rational policymaking, equilibrium, alliances of convenience and the balance of power worked best when we were governed by rational oligarchs--Richelieu, Pitt, Palmerston or Bismarck. Democratic ideas mean that policy requires a moral basis. The idea of the dignity of man will not go away, and policies have to be based on ideals and human sympathy as well as on interest. In a democratic world, the use of

force becomes more difficult to handle. Wars need greater moral legitimacy than in an autocratic age. To sell them, a Roosevelt or a Reagan is needed. And once started they are more difficult to end. Every war risks becoming a crusade. This was not a problem in the cases of World War II and the Cold War--in both, unconditional surrender was the only acceptable outcome--but it does not suit the conduct of lesser campaigns. Democracy made it difficult for America either to prosecute the Vietnam War with as much ruthlessness as North Vietnam did or to cut its losses and get out.

The balance of power, which calls for the application of power with calculation and restraint, is no longer sustainable in a democratic age. Nor is the exercise of hegemony by force--which has been the other source of stability in the international system. For a democracy, domination by the ruthless use of force ceases to be an option in the international field just as it has in the domestic--as Gandhi well understood when he began the process of dismantling the British Empire.

Neither equilibrium nor domination works well in a democratic age. And if democracies are inherently less bellicose, then basing the international order on a system logically dependent on wars and force is intellectually incoherent and practically mistaken. Nothing is left but to manage international relations through institutions, as Woodrow Wilson foresaw. Those we have at the moment function poorly, which is hardly a surprise, given how short their history is. Even the most competent, such as NATO and the EU, come nowhere near matching the national governments that make them up in either efficiency or legitimacy (the two frequently go together). We have learned something from past failures, but there is much further to go.

Force remains indispensable in international affairs, both because we have not yet achieved the democratic dream and because even if we do, it will still be needed as the ultimate enforcer of law. In the meanwhile we need force to protect ourselves and help create a favorable environment for democracy. But as the world becomes more democratic, and so more civilized, force will be less visible and less prominent in international relations.

WE HAVE chosen to be good rather than to be powerful. Torture is unacceptable, not just because it is ineffective, but because our system is based on respect for individual people. Europeans talk of human rights and the rule of law while Americans talk of freedom and democracy, but they mean the same thing. For America, the way to be good in a world of power used to be to isolate itself. That is no longer possible. Instead it seeks to remake the world in its own image. This is the European project also, though on a more modest, regional basis. We are all Wilsonians now. And we should understand that the true Wilsonian institutions are not bodies like the UN, but rather NATO and the EU, embodying the values of democracy and law.

Charles Krauthammer is right to want to accelerate the spread of democracy, and he is probably right to be selective too--though in practice what happens most often is that countries select themselves. It would indeed be nice to remake the world. But some things are beyond the control even of America. Democracy is one of them. Democracy means rule by the people, and no one else can make their choices for them. The spread of the idea and the spread of the practice are nevertheless impressive. There are many ways we can assist short of employing force--using military power to provide security is one of them--but in the end it is the force of the idea and the power of its practice that conquers. Liberal imperialism may be an oxymoron, but imperial liberalism may be the reality of today. (7)

(1) "They make a desert and they call it peace." Tacitus, Agricola.

(2) T. A. Bisson, Prospects for Democracy in Japan (New York: Macmillan, 1949), p. 74.

(3) The case of France is somewhat different but nevertheless illustrates some of these points: The loss of Algeria brought France to the brink of a military, coup. But even if this had succeeded--and it did not--it is difficult to imagine that it could have resulted in a lasting undemocratic regime.

(4) Robert Dahl, in Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), noted Korea as a country whose leadership had managed to overcome democratic ideas and movements, in spite of having a modern dynamic and pluralist society. The two other countries he cites, Taiwan and Yugoslavia, are also cases where external factors played a part (p. 254).

(5) It is striking how often the tribute that despots pay to democracy in the form of elections can eventually undermine them. It was elections that brought down Milosevic, not war or sanctions. As we have seen in Ukraine, the idea that you are being cheated in an election can mobilize popular feeling to an extent almost nothing else can.

(6) Former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford commented on Vietnam: "In Southeast Asia and elsewhere in the less developed world, our ability to understand and to control the basic forces at play is a very limited one. We can advise; we can urge; we can furnish economic aid. But American military power cannot build nations any more than it can solve the social and economic problems that face us here at home" (Foreign Affairs, July 1969).

(7) The phrase and the thought are not mine, but belong to Professor Joachim Krause of Kiel University in Germany.

Robert Cooper works for Javier Solana at the Council of the European Union. He is a former advisor to Tony Blair. The views expressed here are his own. His recent book, The Breaking of Nations (2004), was reviewed in the Summer 2004 issue of The National Interest.

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