[A column by David Brooks printed in the New York Times on April 27, 2004.]
These are the crucial months in Iraq. The events in Najaf and Falluja will largely determine whether Iraq will move toward normalcy or slide into chaos.
So how is Washington responding during this pivotal time? Well, for about three weeks the political class was obsessed by Richard Clarke and the hearings of the 9/11 commission, and, therefore, events that occurred between 1992 and 2001. Najaf was exploding, and Condoleezza Rice had to spend the week preparing for testimony about what may or may not have taken place during the presidential transition.
And for the past 10 days, all of Washington has been kibitzing over the contents of Bob Woodward's latest opus, which largely concerns events that happened between 2001 and 2003. Did President Bush eye somebody else's dinner mint at a meeting? Was Colin Powell in the loop on Iraq? When did Bush ask the Pentagon to draw up war plans?
This is crazy. This is like pausing during the second day of Gettysburg to debate the wisdom of the Missouri Compromise. We're in the midst of the pivotal battle of the Iraq war and le tout Washington decides not to let itself get distracted by the ephemera of current events.
Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee did at least hear testimony last week on the political transition in Iraq. But they might as well have held hearings on the supplemental reappropriation cloture amendment for the deputy assistant under secretary of the Postal Services Review Board for all the media attention they received. No networks, save C-Span, provided coverage. You peered behind the witnesses and the room was practically empty. It looked like a Michael Moore book reading at the Citadel. Only a few papers wrote stories.
What's going on is obvious. The first duty of proper Washingtonians is to demonstrate that they are smarter than whomever they happen to be talking about. It's quite easy to fulfill this mission when you are talking about the past. It's child's play for a salad-course solon who spent the entire 1990's ignoring foreign affairs to condemn the administration piously for not focusing like a laser beam on Al Qaeda on Aug. 6, 2001.
It's harder to be a smart aleck about the future, especially in regards to Najaf and Falluja, where none of the choices are good ones. Do the Baathists win a victory every day they hold off our siege? Or if we take them out now, do we undermine Sistani? We Klieg Light Kierkegaards will give you the right answer — three years from now, after whatever option the president takes has been judged and found wanting.
Some people in other places may like to look through keyholes to see women in their underwear. We here in the political class like to look through keyholes to see what happens when a bunch of alpha males (and females) with the jobs we wish we held sit around a table and curse about people not in the room. After two years of Iraq obsession, many of us couldn't tell you what the Dawa Islamic Party stood for if our kids' Sidwell admissions depended upon it, but the frisson we feel hearing the nasty words Colin Powell said behind the back of Douglas Feith! C'est délicieux!
Don't get me wrong. I love living in Washington. I still think it is the least superficial of the interesting American cities, owing to our inability to experience sensual pleasure. But over the past few months it has come to resemble one of those decadent triviality pits, like Paris in the 19th-century French novels.
Meanwhile out in the world, the American people have decided they at least are going to be serious. While we capital Clios are lost in the quagmires of ostentatious parlor game parallelism (Is Iraq Vietnam or the intifada? Is 2004 1920 all over again?), many Americans have decided that it's time to persevere and win. The number of Americans who want to increase troop levels has tripled. Many people want to stick it out, and judging by President Bush's jumping poll numbers, they seem to admire his decision not to engage with us Beltway types.
Over the next weeks, U.S. forces are going to jump from the fires of unilateralism to the frying pan of multilateralism. What's going to happen when our generals want to take on some insurgents but Brahimi and the sovereign Iraqi appointees say no? We here in Washington will have a considered opinion. Our opinion will be that Joseph Wilson really nailed Karl Rove in his forthcoming book.
The Associated Press has published a feature article on Democracy Project's chairman, Candace de Russy. It documents her fight to maintain high academic standards within the State University of New York, of which she is a trustee, and across the country. Higher education plays a vital role in sustaining a free society, and I'm happy to make this article widely available. Winfield Myers
The Associated Press State & Local Wire
April 6, 2004
SECTION: State and Regional
SUNY trustee takes on ivory towers
By MICHAEL GORMLEY, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: ALBANY, N.Y.
Candace de Russy has railed against a State University of New York college's
sadomasochistic sex program to "60 Minutes." She earned a televised pledge
from conservative icon Bill O'Reilly to fight for her job as SUNY trustee,
and won an appointment from President Bush to a board of the scandal-plagued
U.S. Air Force Academy.
Her quill has skewered multiculturalism, radical feminism, some black
studies programs, anti-Americanism on campuses nationwide, and exposed human rights abuses in Soviet gulags and Cuba.
As a member of SUNY's unpaid, 16-member Board of Trustees, she's led
often-solo fights against tuition increases as an assault on New York's
working class, assailed weak professors and grade inflation and fought for
public disclosure of board deliberations. She is the state's link to a
nationwide "academic bill of rights," the movement on colleges to end a
perceived practice of not hiring conservatives and otherwise stifling
conservative and religious debate.
At stake in her conservative crusade against the liberal bastion of
academia, she says, is nothing less than the future.
"It is necessary to preserve our civilization. I do not see it as optional,"
said de Russy, 60, from the upscale New York City suburb of Bronxville.
"This country is now in a civil cultural war and the radical, secular,
'progressive' left may well destroy our traditional principles and
institutions, and notably our education institutions, which is seminal to
the rest of the institutions ... "
She's a hate-her-or-love-her type in the academic world she both attacks and
defends breathlessly, a woman whose own college experience in the 1960s led
her not to radicalism but to Aristotle; who can't operate a VCR but has her
own Web site.
SUNY's faculty union has called for her to be fired since 2002. United
University Professions remains outraged over her criticism of some black
studies programs as weak, feel-good, anti-American curriculums. The union
has called her remarks "stupid" and an embarrassment to SUNY.
Others, including SUNY Stony Brook Africana studies Professor William
McAdoo, have denounced her as racist, fascist, McCarthyite prude.
"She wants to go back to the 'good old days' of the little red school house,
when only people like herself, people who are very privileged, went to
college," said William Scheuerman, president of UUP, which represents SUNY
professors and researchers. "Men went to the factories and women just stayed
home until they were married off. Well, that's not the America the rest of
us live in anymore."
Others who disagree with her message still embrace her ferocity.
Stanley Kurtz of the National Review Online defended de Russy in 2002,
citing her work with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education,
which has defended liberal and conservative faculty: "How sad it is that de
Russy herself should be defamed and attacked by a left-leaning faculty union
who's own freedom of speech is far safer today for the work her organization
has done."
"Being a trustee is not being a cheerleader," said Stephen Balch, president
of the National Association of Scholars based in Princeton, N.J., of which
de Russy is a board member. "Her inspiration is national."
De Russy was appointed by Gov. George Pataki in 1995, but they rarely speak
these days after her public conflicts with his friend and appointee, SUNY
Chancellor Robert King. Pataki, however, recently called her one of the
"great trustees" he's appointed.
"You want to have a dialogue where different viewpoints are expressed and
different points of view are fully aired out," Pataki said.
Two years into her term, she drew national attention over her criticism of a
program called "Revolting Behavior: The Challenges of Women's Sexual
Freedom," at SUNY New Paltz. She said the 1997 conference, which included
the sale of sex toys and presentations on sadomasochism was about
pornography, not women's studies or academic freedom. In 2001, the college
president resigned and de Russy's effort was considered a catalyst.
"It's refreshing to watch someone who is not shy about making her voice and
opinions heard and is willing to stand up to the status-quo to make that
happen," said Miriam Kramer of the student-backed New York Public Interest
Research Group.
Much of what de Russy fights arises from multiculturalism - called tolerance
by supporters, political correctness by critics.
"From the fact that all people should be treated fairly it does not follow
that all cultures are equal," she said. "To hold that all cultural practices
are equal is to equate democracy with tyranny."
In "the extreme," she said, multiculturalism allows the rise of Nazism and
Islamic radicalism. It is especially damaging to minority students by
"nurturing an attitude of racial and ethnic grievance, making it more
difficult for them to continue in democracy."
Yet she embraces the best of other cultures as well as of black and women
studies, saying they should be mainstreamed.
Her journey to this conservative stage was not as a bombastic commentator,
but as an academic and writer.
She learned public policy as the daughter of an elected judge in the
rough-and-tumble world of Louisiana politics. At 12, she was hit by a car
that put her in a body cast for a year's painful recovery. Complications
returned her to a wheelchair when she was in college. Today, she shuns the
leg brace she should wear.
"These experiences teach fortitude," said the mother of two children in
their 20s. She's also a grandmother.
She graduated from a Louisiana Catholic school and attends Mass three to
four times a week. She spent a year studying in France, immersing herself in
the Enlightenment. Her hardline views were forged while documenting the
torture of gulag survivors in the Soviet Union and in encountering the
despair of Cubans under Castro.
De Russy mixes her ideological hardline with warmth and compassion, said
Stephanie Gross, a student at SUNY Oneonta and the SUNY board's student
representative.
When Gross was appointed to the board in the spring, de Russy was the first
trustee to reach out.
"She's a very dedicated trustee. You see that with the persistence and time"
she spends, Gross said. "She is an advocate for the students."
The collaborative relationship has grown despite their differences, said the
"mostly liberal" Gross:
"I think the phrase is, 'We agree to disagree."'
Most readers of this blog know someone who hates Wal-Mart, or who at least claims to hate it when they're not shopping there themselves. Inasmuch as that chain is the largest retailer in the nation, employing over one million people and springing up in communities coast to coast, it represents the cutting edge of American capitalism. That's true not only in its sheer size, but in its ability to offer the 100 million consumers who shop there every week the most product for their hard-earned dollars.
It's the hard-earned part that seems to rile the mega-store's many critics. Jay Nordlinger's cover story in the latest National Review examines Wal-Mart's seemingly endless list of enemies -- the New York Times, Time magazine, assorted politicians on the left -- and rightly concludes that their hatred of the chain springs from the fact that it is so very American. It's huge, dynamic, built for the masses, and efficient.
Nordlinger dispatches all of the standard complaints about Wal-Mart -- that it destroys small town centers, drives mom and pop stores out of business, or forces employees to labor at slave wages. To his commentary, I'd add that Wal-Mart's critics are drawn not merely from the upper middle and upper classes -- i.e., those who don't need to shop there to save money. If there's nothing more bourgeois than the affectation of being anti-bourgeoisie, then few public stances are more cost-free or satisfying than ranting against Wal-Mart.
After all, Wal-Mart is an affront to the snobbery by which the chattering classes define themselves. It isn't aesthetically pleasing, it's situated in the suburbs (and we all know what kind of people live there) and in small towns (ditto); one just doesn't see the right kind of people there. Aesthete reactionaries on the right think it destroys localism and fails to measure up to their golden age of centuries past, where all was well and the proper people ruled. (That these past rulers almost certainly included few of their own ancestors never seems to bother them.) Luddite reactionaries on the left hate its mass appeal and ostensible violations of myriad liberal pieties. Making goods available at lower prices clearly benefits the lower classes most, but left-liberalism long ago ceased to be about aiding "the people."
As Nordlinger argues, Wal-Mart (and other dynamic companies and individuals) is most of all about change. Taking a cue from K-Mart and then going several steps beyond them, Sam Walton and his heirs and their executives have redefined inventory management, production strategies and technologies, pricing, and much more at every level of retail marketing. All of this benefits the consumer and raises the bar for every other retailer. It creates wealth, a fact that alone alienates the old right, which believes wealth should be inherited, and the old/new left, which thinks it should be confiscated. Worst of all, it is unabashedly optimistic, even Reaganesque, in its faith that average Americans will do the right thing.
And perhaps this is the crux of the matter. For inasmuch as the masses, so-called, decide things for themselves, the chattering classes and those who adopt their attitudes in the hope of appearing sophisticated lose clout. Now that's what I call a fair bargain.
[The essay below was delivered by Mark Palmer, former US ambassador to Hungary, on Capitol Hill Wednesday, March 31, 2004. Ambassador Palmer thought it advanced Democracy Project's mission and we agree. Our thanks to Ambassador Palmer for sending us this work. Winfield Myers]
Bringing Democracy to Libya
Strategy and Tactics
Ambassador Mark Palmer
We are at an extraordinarily promising moment in Libya. In the late 1980s, as the American ambassador to Hungary, I felt the ice cracking. As then, extraordinary men of courage like Fathi Eljami are coming forward to tell the truth and lead the way. As then, an entire region is stirring. As then, dictators and even their sons are being forced to say that there will soon be “freedom of the press and freedom of printing,” that “Libya must be a democratic and open country. If it isn’t it will become a reactionary, dictatorial and fascist Arab country.”
Of course, the problem as we all know is that Libya has been “reactionary, dictatorial and fascist” for some time. In this sense as well it is strikingly similar to the regimes of eastern Europe – the same state run economy, the same parallel political cells running everything, the same oppression. And as with the dictators of eastern Europe and so many other countries, Colonel Qaddafi will and must go.
Libyans and democrats around the world now can and should make this our strategic objective. Thirty five years in power is roughly ten times longer than most democratic leaders have before subjecting themselves to the people’s judgment in an election. Qaddafi has repeatedly failed any objective test in meeting the needs of the Libyan people. The only guarantee the United States and the rest of the world can have that he will not continue to abuse the power Libya’s oil gives him -- conducting terrorism, resuming development of weapons of mass destruction, encouraging violence in Africa and the Middle East – is to help Libyans oust him.
But how to get him out? Four sets of actors must learn and play their parts.
First and overwhelmingly the most important are the Libyan people. They know he has failed. As a Libyan taxi driver just said to a Washington Post correspondent: “Qaddafi has driven Libya into the ground.” He added “Thank you America for saving us.” But of course Libya is not saved and Libyans themselves, not Americans must do the heavy lifting. They need to become convinced that it is possible themselves to oust Qaddafi and proceed to develop the organization, the tactical skills and the courage to do so.
Self-confidence can come from many sources. Over half the world’s dictators have been ousted in the past thirty years, and with few exceptions it has been through organized, non-violent people’s power. Through radio, television, internet and smuggled publications, Libyans can absorb the lessons of Poland, Chile, Serbia, the Philippines, Indonesia and dozens of other successful people’s campaigns to oust a dictator.
Gandhi taught us a key lesson – that an oppressor can only remain in power for as long as the people passively or actively cooperate. Once they withdraw their cooperation, initially even in symbolic ways, the dictator’s days are numbered. As I witnessed in Budapest in the late 1980s, small demonstrations of independence give people the confidence to move on to bigger actions. Ultimately the objective is to undermine the dictator’s pillars of support – to get Libya’s oil field and other key workers to go on strike, and to persuade those with guns not to shoot innocent demonstrators.
In Libya the initial objective for a non-violent movement is simply to come into existence. This can begin just with conversations among individuals and “self-publication” for very limited, clandestine distribution. Even brave Libyans are reluctant to become involved in pro-democracy activity, so education and spreading the word are key activities. Some early campaign issues and organizations can be ostensibly nonpolitical – health and environment for example. As a campaign gains support, the goal can become to create groups and organizations that can work together as a shadow or parallel “counter-state.” Underground press, think tanks, and political parties all would work to weaken the authority and scope of Qaddafi and to create a working civil society.
The second key set of actors are the world’s democratic governments and non-governmental organizations. Here there is a vital need to learn to
“walk and chew gum at the same time” – to deal with Qaddafi on a host of issues like WMD and terrorism, even as we work with the legitimate representatives and leaders of the Libyan people like Fathi Eljami to bring about fundamental change. In my own experience, the closer an embassy is to the democratic opposition, the more leverage it has on the dictator and the more he will concede.
Just as we had for Serbia, we need a Libya Democracy Fund to provide material assistance and training to Libyans inside and outside the country. We should fund a Radio Free Libya run by Libyans in the diaspora. Financial assistance for the families of what Amnesty International estimates are more than a thousand political prisoners is particularly important at this stage. These thousand men are proof that there is the courage and passion to bring about democratic change, and to lead the country thereafter. Fathi is right when he says that Qaddafi has sent “Libya’s best to Bu-Sleem prison”. We must see them as democracy’s best allies. Demonstrating on the ground solidarity with men threatened with imprisonment by having ambassadors and senior officials go to their homes is also key. It was splendid that one of our diplomats in Tripoli visited Fathi; but this must become standard practice for more senior Americans and equally important for the British, Swedish, German, Italian and other embassies of democracies in Tripoli.
Showing solidarity in a hundred different ways will help Libyans gain the courage to organize and act. We should insist on visiting them in jail, in courtrooms, in their houses when they are cutoff from communications. We should be present when they demonstrate. We should manifest our support in public statements from the President of the United States on down to our representatives on the scene.
The third set of key actors are Libyan Americans and other Libyans driven into exile by Qaddafi’s brutality and failed economic policies. The statement which 109 of you signed [Ed. note, in Washington on March 31, 2004], “A Vision for the Future of Libya,” is powerful and persuasive. You can be a loud and influential voice for your people. You must continue to force American and European leaders, parliamentarians, diplomats and the press to listen to you. You are following in noble and successful footsteps. I well remember Polish Americans and others who came to my office in the State Department regularly to tell me what to do. They had a huge influence in forcing a more aggressive policy.
But they also had wisdom. They understood that it was critical for the sake of Poland’s liberation to have an American embassy in Warsaw and they strongly supported people-to-people and other programs even when Solidarity was banned and its leaders jailed. We were able to do so much more to open the country and increase the space for the resistance to operate by being present. It allowed a very active program of support for Solidarity itself. So I urge that you not posture yourselves in opposition to the development of those bilateral programs, trade and investment which can help the Libyan people. You need to be seen as favoring progress in all its forms, not as reactionaries who are only set on revenge, who in trying to isolate the regime end up reinforcing Qaddafi’s own efforts to isolate and control the Libyan people.
The fourth and final set of actors are Qaddafi, his son, others who surround him, the security services, army and the rest of the establishment. That great scoundrel Armand Hammer, founder of Occidental Petroleum and wheeler dealer with dozens of dictators from Lenin to King Idris and Qaddafi himself, once taught me a valuable lesson. He said that all dictators are paranoid – that they do not trust anyone around them, including their own family, and for good reason. The tools they use – fear and uncertainty – alienate. Virtually no one is loyal to them. The whole contraption is brittle and the dictator knows it. He is constantly worried about his future and that of his family. His pillars of support likewise are extremely nervous, and looking around.
We need to develop a separate dialogue with each of these regime actors. With Qaddafi, another political leader or an ambassador must get sufficiently close to him to discuss his future, that of his family and country. He should be helped to understand that he can cooperate in allowing Libya to become a democracy, and have a dignified life out of office, or he can share the fate of Milosevic or even Ceausescu. As one of Africa’s Big Men Kenneth Kaunda, who once ran Zambia with an iron hand, recently remarked: “Look at me now. You are watching a relaxed old man”. It should be noted to Qaddafi that the relatives and members of the regime of former dictators are playing active roles in normal democracies, successful in business, even being elected to office.
The dialogue with those around the dictator is equally important. It is critical to convey that the democratic opposition in Libya does not see them as the enemy, that it understands their dependence on and fear of Qaddafi. Those who now decide to side with the opposition will be considered friends. Those who resist, and particularly any who use violence against the democratic movement, will be brought to justice when Qaddafi goes. In Budapest I had such a dialogue with the Worker’s Militia commander, and in Serbia the opposition had it with the police and military. Once these forces can be persuaded not to open fire on demonstrators the game is basically won. Now that the CIA, FBI, MI6, and our various militaries are developing relations with their Libyan counterparts, this dialogue needs to take place between them.
Fathi Eljami has proposed a process of national reconciliation, a roundtable like the ones which worked so well in Poland, Hungary and elsewhere. All elements of Libyan society should come together, from exile as well, and representatives of Qaddafi should participate. Until the roundtable has been convened, the democratic world should work with Fathi and other Libyans to design a democracy development plan and action program with specific deadlines.
If Qaddafi refuses to cooperate, even after a persistent effort at dialogue, sanctions narrowly targeted on him and his entourage – not the Libyan people-- must be deployed. These should include the seizure of his and his family and cronies’ assets overseas, and the drawing up of an indictment for his crimes against humanity and the convening of a court similar to the U.N. mandated court in Sierra Leone which indicted Charles Taylor while he was still the dictator of Liberia. Even after Taylor’s indictment, he received arms from his friend Qaddafi – one of the items to add to Qaddafi’s own indictment.
Out of some 194 countries which Freedom House rates each year, Qaddafi’s Libya is consistently among the nine worst and most backward regimes. But it is exhilarating to realize how dramatically and rapidly that can change. Countries which just a decade ago were ranked among the not free, in one month are joining the European Union, the largest club of prosperous and fully democratic countries in the world. Libya has the human talent and the natural resources to create a similar modern miracle – vaulting itself from international pariah to the most advanced nation in the Arab world. The courage of the Libyan people, the leadership of men like Fathi Eljami, the support of democrats here and around the world will ensure that this vision becomes reality in the near future.
Here are some excerpts from an extremely brave column appearing in the New York Times magazine by Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard:
"The discovery that Hussein didn't have weapons after all surprises me, but it doesn't change my view of the essential issue. I never thought the key question was what weapons he actually possessed but rather what intentions he had. Having been to Halabja in 1992, and having talked to survivors of the chemical attack that killed 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in March 1988, I believed that while there could be doubt about Hussein's capabilities, there could be none about the malignancy of his intentions. True, there are a lot of malignant intentions loose in our world, but Hussein had actually used chemical weapons. Looking to the future, once sanctions collapsed, inspectors had been bamboozled and oil revenues began to pick up, he was certain, sooner or later, to match intentions with capabilities."
And more:
"Critics of the war said all of this was irrelevant. The real issue was oil. But they got the relevance of oil backward. If all America cared about was oil, it would have cozied up to Hussein, as it had done in the past. Oil was an issue in the war precisely because its revenues distinguished Hussein from the run of other malignant dictators. It was the critical factor that would allow him, sooner or later, to acquire the weapons that would enable him to go after the Kurds again, complete the destruction of the Shiites, threaten Saudi Arabia and continue to support Palestinian suicide bombers and, just possibly, Al Qaeda as well.
I still do not believe that American or British leaders misrepresented Hussein's intentions or lied about the weapons they believed he possessed. In his new memoirs, Hans Blix makes it clear that he and his fellow U.N. inspectors thought Hussein was hiding something, and every intelligence service they consulted thought so too."
And even better and more:
"What I found harder to respect was how indifferent my antiwar friends seemed to be to the costs of allowing Hussein to remain in power. The costs -- of doing what they saw as the right, prudent, nonviolent thing -- would be borne by the Iraqis alone. It was Iraqis who would remain locked inside a police state. What this meant was no abstraction to anyone who had actually been in the country. So when people said, ''I know he's a dictator, but . . . ,'' the ''but'' seemed like a moral evasion. And when people said, ''He was a genocidal killer, but that was yesterday,'' I thought, Since when do crimes against humanity have a statute of limitations? And when people said, finally, ''There are a lot of dictators, and the U.S. supports most of them,'' this sounded to me like a suave alibi for doing nothing. Now, a year later, I hear the same people tell me they're glad Hussein is gone, but. . . ."
And he concludes, rightly:
"Interventions amount to a promise: we promise that we will leave the country better than we found it; we promise that those who died to get there did not die in vain. Never have these promises been harder to keep than in Iraq. The liberal internationalism I supported throughout the 1990's -- interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor -- seems like child's play in comparison. Those actions were a gamble, but the gamble came with a guarantee of impunity: if we didn't succeed, the costs of failure were not punitive. Now in Iraq the game is in earnest. There is no impunity anymore. Good people are dying, and no president, Democrat or Republican, can afford to betray that sacrifice."
From the March 2004 Issue of Commentary comes a warning from Gail Luft and Anne Korin about China's growing dependency on Saudi oil. Given its record of arms sales to Syria, Iraq, and Lybia, it's good that two of those nations are being removed from the list of rogue states. But will China try to supplant the US as the dominant power in the Middle East as her dependence on foreign oil increases? The policy challenges that lie ahead must be planned for carefully lest America (and the rest of the industrialized world) be caught off guard.
"China, Napoleon once remarked, is a sleeping giant, and 'when it awakens the world will tremble.'
China is now thoroughly awake. The economy of the world’s most populous country has been growing at a blistering rate of between 8 and 11 percent a year. Last year, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) superseded Mexico as the United States’ main trading partner. It also took Japan’s place as, after us, the second largest consumer of petroleum on the globe.
If the world has not yet quite begun to tremble in the face of these facts, the economic and geopolitical implications of the new Chinese prosperity are nevertheless immense—and not least where energy markets are concerned. Growing wealth is prompting millions of Chinese to abandon bicycles and overcrowded mass transit in favor of private cars. Last year, China’s domestic automobile sales increased by a staggering 69 percent. By 2010, the country is expected to have 90 times more cars on the road than it did in 1990; by 2030, it may have more than the U.S.
Such a gigantic fleet requires fuel. But China’s domestic oil production is declining. Already by 1993, after decades of self-reliance, domestic crude output was failing to meet the growing demand, and the country became a net importer; since then, dependence on foreign oil has increased steadily. According to a conservative estimate by the U.S. Department of Energy, China’s oil imports over the next two decades will grow by 960 percent. The International Energy Agency predicts that, by 2030, those imports, now at 1.9 million barrels a day, will rise to at least 10 million barrels a day, the current import level of the United States.
Some Chinese oil imports come from Kazakhstan, Venezuela, the Sudan, Russia, and Indonesia. These will no doubt continue, and increase. Nevertheless, a decade hence, the lion’s share of China’s energy imports will almost certainly come from one source: the major oil exporters of the Middle East."
George Will, “Can We Make Iraq Democratic?” in the Winter 2004 issue of City Journal
My worry is the assault on the nation-state, which is an assault on self-government—the American project. It is the campaign to contract the sphere of politics by expanding the sway of supposedly disinterested experts, disconnected from democratic accountability and administering principles of universal applicability that they have discovered.
All this is pertinent to today’s headlines, for a reason that may, at first blush, seem paradoxical. The assault on the nation-state involves a breezy confidence that nations not only can be superseded by supranational laws and institutions, they can even be dispensed with. Furthermore, nations can be fabricated, and can be given this or that political attribute, by experts wielding universal principles.
The vitality of democracy everywhere is imperiled by the impulse behind the increasingly brazen and successful denial of the importance and legitimacy of nation-states. This denial is most audacious in Europe. But because many of America’s political ideas arrive on our shores after auditioning in Europe, Americans should examine the motives and implications of European attempts to dilute and transcend national sovereignty.
From Marc F. Plattner, “Sovereignty and Democracy.” Policy Review, December 2003 & January 2004.
My argument is that for democracy to work, there must be an overarching political order to which people feel they owe their primary political loyalty — in short, a state, with clear boundaries and clear distinctions as to who does and does not enjoy the rights and obligations of citizenship. In principle, such an order could equally well be constituted at the level of the European Union or remain at the level of its member states. What I doubt is that it is possible to square the circle of competing sovereignties over the long run or that democracy can work outside or across the framework of a sovereign state. So my plea is that those who are seriously devoted to democracy reconsider their devaluation of the state, or at least think harder about how it can be left behind without also undermining democracy.
The strong tendency today for many proponents of liberal democracy to turn against the state, despite the long and intimate relationship between liberal democracy and the modern state, is striking. I think the reason behind it lies not only in certain historical developments but in a tension that has always existed at the heart of liberal democracy. Elsewhere I have explored the tension between the liberal and the democratic elements that form the cohesive but unstable compound known as liberal democracy.7 The liberal or cosmopolitan element, which emphasizes the universal human rights of the individual, fits uneasily with the particularistic demands of self-government and citizenship that constitute its specifically democratic element. In my view, the European Union, especially as understood by the approach that I have been discussing, represents the exaltation of liberal democracy’s liberal aspect at the expense of its democratic aspect. The real issue is whether liberalism can flourish — or even survive — if it is not anchored in the framework of a democratic state. Can liberalism, as it were, outgrow the state and sustain itself within a transnational or cosmopolitan order?