The events in Iraq this past week have raised issues that need to be discussed in the context of a greater American foreign policy. The Bush administration is following a tenet of contemporary political thought in that it assumes that a democratic Iraq will be progressive and contribute to an overall solution in the Middle East. Indeed, one of the best-known findings of contemporary social science is that no democracies have ever fought a war against each other, given reasonably restrictive definitions of democracy and war. This insight is now part of everyday public discourse and has served as a basis for American foreign policy making in both the Bush and Clinton administrations.
In fact, President Clinton’s 1994 State of the Union address invoked the absence of war between democracies as a justification for promoting democratization around the globe. In the week following the U.S. military landing in Haiti, then National Security Adviser Anthony Lake reiterated that “spreading democracy…serves our interests” because democracies “tend not to abuse their citizens’ rights or wage war on one another.”
It is probably true that in a world where more countries were mature and stable democracies, there would also be a greater likelihood of peace. However, as it now can be seen in Iraq, countries do not become mature democracies overnight. More typically, they go through a rocky transitional period where democratic control over foreign policy is partial-where mass politics mix in a volatile way with authoritarian elite politics and where democratization suffers reversals. In this transitional phase of democratization, countries such as Iraq often become more aggressive and war prone, not less, and indeed they do fight wars with democratic states.
The contemporary record shows that incipient or partial democratization can be an occasion for the rise of belligerent nationalism and war. Two pairs of states-Serbia and Croatia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan-have found themselves at war while experimenting with varying degrees of partial electoral democracy. Russia’s poorly institutionalized partial democracy has tense relationships with many of its neighbors and has used military force brutally to reassert control in Chechnya. Russia’s electorate cast nearly a quarter of its votes for the party of radical nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. This contemporary connection between democratization and conflict is no coincidence.
Transition always means change. Those who were in power before the democratization process tend to desire to hold on to it during and after the process is finished. Elites want a “soft landing” and when this does not seem possible, as is the case with Iraq, they resist vigorously the change. This circumstance creates an inherent weakness in the development of democratic institutions. These threatened elites from collapsing autocratic regimes-many of whom have parochial interests in maintaining economic and other preferences-use nationalist appeals to compete for allies among the masses of the population and with other new elites created by the transition. The democratization process and the development of democratic institutions is hindered by the fact that everyone is not made better off by effective democratic reforms. Many social groups, including these old powerful elites, are likely to be losers from the strengthening of democratic institutions. Thus, the prospects of war increase in these circumstances due to the interests of some of these elites, the effectiveness of their propaganda and in the incentive for weak leaders to resort to prestige strategies with both foreign and domestic power groups in an attempt to enhance their authority over diverse constituencies. This is happening in Iraq today.
One of the major findings of scholarship on democratization is that the process goes most smoothly when elites who are threatened by the transition-especially the military-are given a “golden parachute.” Above all, they need the guarantee that if they relinquish power, they will benefit greatly and will not be prosecuted for any affiliation with the old autocratic regime. The United States has not been completely successful in this regard because Iraq is not a homogeneous nation and therefore the three factions within the country itself seem to preclude elites from any of these groups all benefiting simultaneously. The implications of this difficulty are enormous. If the transition cannot be accomplished in an efficient way, then the risk of war is greatly enhanced. Rather than producing the desired peace and stability promised by a democratic peace, such a state in difficult transition is more likely-according to Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder in their excellent article, “Democratization and the Danger of War”-to fight wars than were states that experienced no regime change. This point seems to have been lost on the Bush administration.
Instead of providing the “golden parachute” for elites, the United States has created a climate of competition among elites in different religious and ethnic groups either for American favor or for the favor of America’s enemies. This competition does not bode well for a smooth transition to democracy and hence it now seems that America’s involvement there will be difficult and long.
Many critics of the administration’s policies now draw on the Vietnam experience and contrast our current difficulties with those encountered so long ago in Southeast Asia. This comparison is a bit premature. While the Bush administration demonstrated arrogance in its approach to Iraq, and while every discipline of international relations theory cautioned against a unilateral move into Iraq-albeit for different reasons-the fact is the United States is there and it is imperative that America succeeds.
For various reasons, the stakes here are so much higher than those of Vietnam. There are three reasons why this is so. First of all, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese never planned to attack targets within the United States itself. Second, vital interests such as vast amounts of oil were not present in Southeast Asia. Finally, with the volatile threat of a much wider war in the Middle East-including the threat of nuclear terrorism, which did not exist back then-failure could be catastrophic. The approaches of the two major parties to this potential debacle is very telling. While both parties believe in the democratic peace as demonstrated by the comments of the Clinton and Bush administrations, the resolution of the crisis for both is very different.
For John Kerry, the answer seems to lie in getting the United Nations involved to a much greater extent. This would entail some sort of confession of a national sin to the international body so that the French and others would come on board and “rescue” the United States from itself. With this international organizational approach, the question becomes, “Do the elites in Iraq itself feel more or less inclined to accept the transition and allow it to go forward smoothly?”
While this, in the short run, might allow cover for the United States, the fundamental problem still exists under this approach in that elites will still compete with each other for prestige and for victory against other elites. The problems in Iraq seem to have exceeded the apparatus of international institutions and their insertion into the current mix will actually hinder conflict resolution. Institutional solutions at the front end will only make a back end democratic Iraq less likely to happen. This is not a happy thought.
In contrast, it seems that the contest in Iraq has been defined by the Bush administration as one of power and interest. Even though Bush has characterized the task as one of democratization and liberation, in fact the interest he has identified is one of democratic realism where the ideal of a democratic government in Iraq has become a vital interest of the United States. This is also dangerous because failure in Iraq translate
s itself into a compromise of an indispensable interest for the United States. This failure will thus invariably lead to a wider war to protect that interest. The dangers of democratization have misled the current administration to believe that only peace will result from the transformation of Iraq into a stable democracy. The problem is clear. The process under which democratization is taking place in Iraq is not peaceful and, in fact, has made the country more war prone.
The answer-before the Vietnam comparison becomes too real-is to hope that the transitional government takeover in June will be real and convincing. If this happens, then the insertion of international institutions will be productive and useful. If the transition to Iraqi rule continues to be messy, a quagmire, not unreminiscent of Vietnam, will indeed become a reality-but unlike Vietnam, our vital national interests will be at stake. The dangers of the democratic peace will have been realized and the United States will be locked in a conflict that must be won to prevent what surely will be unprecedented attacks on our citizens and our territory. The Iraq war has given us a lightning rod to which our foreign policy will be galvanized for quite some time.