International Crisis Group
It is interesting to ponder just which of our sins it is that – in the league tables of most admired professions – puts politicians down there with used car salesmen and child molesters. I don't think it is any of the familiar seven deadlies: we know from recent US history that electorates can live with lust, and – if my experience in Australia even begins to match that elsewhere – gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride don’t seem to be show-stoppers either.
My own judgment, for what it's worth, is what people most associate with politicians as a class, and most hate about them as a result, is hypocrisy, and all the familiar variations on that basic theme: double-standards, unprincipled inconsistency, saying one thing and doing another. And it's on the dangers and risks of hypocrisy, not just in domestic politics but in international relations, and in a number of different contexts, that I want to focus this evening, Far from consistency being the hob-goblin of small minds, it's something that voters take rather seriously – and so do states in their assessment of each others' international behaviour.
[..]There are quite a few things we've learned about democracy promotion over the last few years, and most of them have emerged pretty clearly in course of discussion at this conference, so I will not labour too long over familiar ground.
First, it is obvious now to just about everyone that democracy – or at least liberal democracy, the only kind that means anything – is about much more than holding elections. Protection of human rights, especially minority rights and those related to freedom of expression, and respect for the rule of law, are indispensable concomitants.
Secondly, it is rather obvious now to everyone, except perhaps those most capable of doing it, that bombing for democracy – trying to deliver it on the tip of precision guided missiles, as my Crisis Group colleague Chris Patten puts it – is not, on the whole, a very good idea.
Thirdly, and maybe not so obviously, democracy promotion can be rather bad news for democrats. I am thinking in particular of the cries of anguish we have been hearing recently from civil society and human rights activists in Iran, who have – following the US announcement that large dollops of democracy funding will be headed their way – been subjected to a rapid increase in state repression. Maybe it's possible for this kind of external support to distinguish between promotion of regime change and support just for building the preconditions of democracy (voter rights, better information flows, transparency and the like), but at the very least we should be asking first those in whose interests we are supposed to be acting. Fighting for our principles to the last drop of someone else's blood is never very edifying.
The fourth big thing we should have learned about democracy promotion, which directly leads into my main theme, but doesn't seem to be at all obvious to most US and European policymakers, is that inconsistency is totally counterproductive: it is wholly damaging to the cause to advocate the case for democracy only when you are sure the that democratic process will produce an outcome you like.
It has not been a pretty sight in this respect to watch the almost universal Western disavowal of Hamas after it won the Palestinian election that the West had so enthusiastically supported. An International Crisis Group report shortly after that election argued strongly that the international community needed to focus on encouraging Hamas to govern responsibly, not to force it out of government or make the government unworkable by imposing conditions that nobody believed could be immediately met, and we summarised the Hamas response as we found it as 'let us govern or watch us fight'. Events since then have done nothing but reinforce the accuracy of that assessment – with the outbreak of civil war-level violence, the complete collapse of the strategy to arm and support Fatah at Hamas’s expense, the takeover of Gaza by Hamas, the collapse of the government of national unity, and the evaporation once more of hopes for resuming any kind of Israeli-Palestinian peace process for the foreseeable future.
[..]
This is another area of international relations where double standards are completely counterproductive, but unfortunately still in evidence. We may be past the Cold War days when political leaders could say openly and shamelessly of a given counterpart that 'he is a tyrant, but he's our tyrant, so what's your problem'? And we do, as an international community generally now accept that, after Rwanda and Srebrenica and Kosovo, that sovereignty is not a license to kill: that when a country's shamelessness reaches the point of a government being engaged in the large-scale killing or ethnic cleansing of its own people, or allowing others within the country to do so, then it’s the responsibility of the rest of the world to do something about it.
[..]
The point I am making is that just as it is part of the essence of liberal democracy that the rule of law prevail, there be no arbitrary decision making and that so far as possible like cases be treated alike, so too it is the essence of a rule-based international order, as distinct from a wholly anarchic order, that like cases be treated alike, that rules and principles be developed and applied to cover the kind of situations that will go on arising, and that those rules and principles be observed, by the great and small alike, consistently, without double standards and without overt hypocrisy.
My own favorite line on exceptionalism – the dangers inherent in applying different standards to oneself than others, and thinking not in terms of creating and applying rules but of exercising raw power – comes from Bill Clinton, speaking a few years ago (and before the understanding of the scale and speed of China's rise was anything like as acute as it is now):America has two choices. We can use our great and unprecedented military and economic power to try and stay top dog on the global block in perpetuity. Or we can seek to use that power to create a world in which we will be comfortable living when we are no longer top dog on the global block.
No comments:
Post a Comment