There is something absurd and inherently
false about one country trying to impose its
system of government or its economic institutions
on another. Such an enterprise amounts to a
dictionary definition of imperialism. When what's
at issue is "democracy", you have the fallacy of
using the end to justify the means (making war on
those to be democratized), and in the process the
leaders of the missionary country are invariably
infected with the sins of hubris, racism and
arrogance.
We Americans have long been
guilty of these crimes. On the eve of our entry
into World War I, William Jennings Bryan,
president Woodrow Wilson's first secretary of
state, described the United
States
as "the supreme moral factor in the world's
progress and the accepted arbiter of the world's
disputes".
If there is one historical
generalization that the passage of time has
validated, it is that the world could not help
being better off if the American president had not
believed such nonsense and if the United States
had minded its own business in the war between the
British and German empires. We might well have
avoided Nazism, the Bolshevik Revolution, and
another 30 to 40 years of the exploitation of
India, Indonesia, Indochina, Algeria, Korea, the
Philippines, Malaya and virtually all of Africa by
European, American and Japanese imperialists.
We Americans have never outgrown the
narcissistic notion that the rest of the world
wants (or should want) to emulate us. In Iraq,
bringing democracy became the default excuse for
our warmongers - it would be perfectly plausible
to call them "crusaders", if Osama bin Laden had
not already appropriated the term - once the
George W Bush lies about Iraq's alleged nuclear,
chemical and biological threats and its support
for al-Qaeda melted away.
The president
and his neo-con supporters have prattled on
endlessly about how "the world is hearing the
voice of freedom from the center of the Middle
East", but the reality is much closer to what Noam
Chomsky dubbed "deterring democracy" in a notable
1992 book of that name. We have done everything in
our power to see that the Iraqis did not get a
"free and fair election", one in which the Shi'ite
majority could come to power and ally Iraq with
Iran. As Noah Feldman, the Coalition Provisional
Authority's law advisor, put it in November 2003,
"If you move too fast the wrong people could get
elected".
In the election of January 30,
2005, the US military tried to engineer the
outcome it wanted (Operation Founding Fathers),
but the Shi'ites won anyway. Nearly a year later
in the December 15 elections for the national
assembly, the Shi'ites won again, but Sunni,
Kurdish and American pressure has delayed the
formation of a government to this moment. After a
compromise candidate for prime minister was
finally selected, two of the most ominous
condottiere of the Bush administration, Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, flew into Baghdad to tell him
what he had to do for "democracy" - leaving the
unmistakable impression that the new prime
minister is a puppet of the United States.
Hold the economic
advice After Latin America, East Asia
is the area of the world longest under America's
imperialist tutelage. If you want to know
something about the US record in exporting its
economic and political institutions, it's a good
place to look. But first, some definitions.
The political philosopher Hannah Arendt
once argued that democracy is such an abused
concept we should dismiss as a charlatan anyone
who uses it in serious discourse without first
clarifying what he or she means by it. Therefore,
let me indicate what I mean by democracy. First,
the acceptance within a society of the principle
that public opinion matters. If it doesn't, as for
example in Joseph Stalin's Russia, or present-day
Saudi Arabia, or the Japanese prefecture of
Okinawa under American military domination, then
it hardly matters what rituals of American
democracy, such as elections, may be practiced.
Second, there must be some internal
balance of power or separation of powers, so that
it is impossible for an individual leader to
become a dictator. If power is concentrated in a
single position and its occupant claims to be
beyond legal restraints, as is true today with our
president, then democracy becomes attenuated or
only pro forma. In particular, I look for the
existence and practice of administrative law - in
other words, an independent, constitutional court
with powers to declare null and void laws that
contravene democratic safeguards.
Third,
there must be some agreed-upon procedure for
getting rid of unsatisfactory leaders. Periodic
elections, parliamentary votes of no confidence,
term limits and impeachment are various well-known
ways to do this, but the emphasis should be on
shared institutions.
With that in mind,
let's consider the export of the American
economic, and then democratic "model" to Asia. The
countries stretching from Japan to Indonesia, with
the exception of the former American colony of the
Philippines, make up one of the richest regions on
earth today. They include the second most
productive country in the world, Japan, with a per
capita income well in excess of that of the United
States, as well as the world's fastest growing
large economy, China's, which has been expanding
at a rate of more than 9.5% per annum for the past
two decades. These countries achieved their
economic well-being by ignoring virtually every
item of wisdom preached in American economics
departments and business schools or propounded by
various American administrations.
Japan
established the regional model for East Asia. In
no case did the other high-growth Asian economies
follow Japan's path precisely, but they have all
been inspired by the overarching characteristic of
the Japanese economic system - namely, the
combining of the private ownership of property as
a genuine right, defensible in law and
inheritable, with state control of economic goals,
markets and outcomes.
I am referring to
what the Japanese call "industrial policy"
(sangyo seisaku). In American economic
theory (if not in practice), industrial policy is
anathema. It contradicts the idea of an
unconstrained market guided by laissez faire.
Nonetheless, the American military-industrial
complex and our elaborate system of "military
Keynesianism" rely on a Pentagon-run industrial
policy - even as American theory denies that
either the military-industrial complex or economic
dependence on arms manufacturing are significant
factors in our economic life. We continue to
underestimate the high-growth economies of East
Asia because of the power of our ideological
blinders.
One particular form of American
economic influence did greatly affect East Asian
economic practice - namely, protectionism and the
control of competition through high tariffs and
other forms of state discrimination against
foreign imports. This was the primary economic
policy of the United States from its founding
until 1940. Without it, American economic wealth
of the sort to which we have become accustomed
would have been inconceivable. The East Asian
countries have emulated the US in this respect.
They are interested in what the US does, not what
it preaches. That is one of the ways they all got
rich. China is today pursuing a variant of the
basic Japanese development strategy, even though
it does not, of course, acknowledge this.
Marketing
democracy The gap between preaching
and self-deception in the way we promote democracy
abroad is even greater than in selling our
economic ideology. Our record is one of continuous
(sometimes unintended) failure, although most
establishment pundits try to camouflage this fact.
The Federation of American Scientists has
compiled a list of more than 201 overseas military
operations from the end of World War II until
September 11, 2001, in which we were involved and
normally struck the first blow. (The list is
reprinted by Gore Vidal in Perpetual War for
Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated, p
22-41.) The current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
are not included. In no instance did democratic
governments come about as a direct result of any
of these military activities.
The United
States holds the unenviable record of having
helped install and then supported such dictators
as the Shah of Iran, General Suharto in Indonesia,
Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Anastasio Somoza in
Nicaragua, Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Sese Seko
Mobutu in Congo-Zaire, not to mention a series of
American-backed militarists in Vietnam and
Cambodia until we were finally expelled from
Indochina. In addition, we ran among the most
extensive international terrorist operations in
history against Cuba and Nicaragua because their
struggles for national independence produced
outcomes the US did not like.
On the other
hand, democracy did develop in some important
cases as a result of opposition to our
interference - for example, after the collapse of
the Central Intelligence Agency-installed Greek
colonels in 1974; in both Portugal in 1974 and
Spain in 1975 after the end of the US-supported
fascist dictatorships; after the overthrow of
Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986;
following the ouster of General Chun Doo-hwan in
South Korea in 1987; and following the ending of
38 years of martial law on the island of Taiwan in
the same year.
One might well ask,
however: what about the case of Japan? Bush has
repeatedly cited our allegedly successful
installation of democracy there after World War II
as evidence of our skill in this kind of activity.
What this experience proved, he contended, was
that we would have little difficulty implanting
democracy in Iraq. As it happens though, General
Douglas MacArthur, who headed the American
occupation of defeated Japan from 1945 to 1951,
was himself essentially a dictator, primarily
concerned with blocking genuine democracy from
below in favor of hand-picked puppets and
collaborators from the pre-war Japanese
establishment.
When a country loses a war
as crushingly as Japan did the war in the Pacific,
it can expect a domestic revolution against its
wartime leaders. In accordance with the terms of
the Potsdam Declaration, which Japan accepted in
surrendering, the State Department instructed
MacArthur not to stand in the way of a popular
revolution, but when it began to materialize he
did so anyway.
He chose to keep Hirohito,
the wartime emperor, on the throne (where he
remained until his death in 1989) and helped bring
officials from the industrial and militarist
classes that ruled wartime Japan back to power.
Except for a few months in 1993 and 1994, those
conservatives and their successors have ruled
Japan continuously since 1949. Japan and China are
today among the longest-lived single-party regimes
on earth, both parties - the nucleus of the
Liberal Democratic Party and the Chinese Communist
Party - having come to power in the same year.
Equally important in the Japanese case,
MacArthur's headquarters actually wrote the quite
democratic constitution of 1947 and bestowed it on
the Japanese people under circumstances in which
they had no alternative but to accept it. In her
1963 book On Revolution, Hannah
Arendt stresses "the enormous difference in power
and authority between a constitution imposed by a
government upon a people and the constitution by
which a people constitutes its own government."
She notes that, in post-World War I Europe,
virtually every case of an imposed constitution
led to dictatorship or to a lack of power,
authority and stability.
Although public
opinion certainly matters in Japan, its democratic
institutions have never been fully tested. The
Japanese public knows that its constitution was
bestowed by its conqueror, not generated from
below by popular action. Japan's stability depends
greatly on the ubiquitous presence of the United
States, which supplies the national defense - and
so, implicitly, the fairly evenly distributed
wealth - that gives the public a stake in the
regime. But the Japanese people, as well as those
of the rest of East Asia, remain fearful of
Japan's ever again being on its own in the world.
While more benign than the norm, Japan's
government is typical of the US record abroad in
one major respect. Successive American
administrations have consistently favored
oligarchies that stand in the way of broad popular
aspirations - or movements toward nationalist
independence from American control.
In
Asia, in the post-World War II period, we pursued
such anti-democratic policies in South Korea, the
Philippines, Thailand, Indochina (Cambodia, Laos
and Vietnam), and Japan. In Japan, in order to
prevent the Socialist Party from coming to power
through the polls, which seemed likely during the
1950s, we secretly supplied funds to the
representatives of the old order in the Liberal
Democratic Party.
We helped bring wartime
minister of munitions Nobusuke Kishi to power as
prime minister in 1957; split the Socialist Party
by promoting and financing a rival Democratic
Socialist Party; and, in 1960, backed the
conservatives in a period of vast popular
demonstrations against the renewal of the
Japanese-American Security Treaty. Rather than
developing as an independent democracy, Japan
became a docile Cold War satellite of the United
States - and one with an extremely inflexible
political system at that.
The
Korean case In South Korea, the United
States resorted to far sterner measures. From the
outset, we favored those who had collaborated with
Japan, whereas North Korea built its regime on the
foundation of former guerrilla fighters against
Japanese rule. During the 1950s, we backed the
aged exile Syngman Rhee as our puppet dictator.
(He had actually been a student of Woodrow
Wilson's at Princeton early in the century.) When,
in 1960, a student movement overthrew Rhee's
corrupt regime and attempted to introduce
democracy, we instead supported the seizure of
power by General Park Chung-hee.
Educated
at the Japanese military academy in Manchuria
during the colonial period, Park had been an
officer in the Japanese army of occupation until
1945. He ruled Korea from 1961 until October 16,
1979, when the chief of the Korean Central
Intelligence Agency shot him to death over dinner.
The South Korean public believed that the KCIA
chief, known to be "close" to the Americans, had
assassinated Park on US orders because he was
attempting to develop a nuclear-weapons program
the US opposed. (Does this sound familiar?) After
Park's death, Major General Chun Doo-hwan seized
power and instituted yet another military
dictatorship that lasted until 1987.
In
1980, a year after the Park assassination, Chun
smashed a popular movement for democracy that
broke out in the southwestern city of Kwangju and
among students in Seoul. Backing Chun's policies,
the US ambassador argued that "firm anti-riot
measures were necessary". The American military
then released to Chun's control South Korean
troops assigned to the United Nations command to
defend the country against a North Korean attack,
and he used them to crush the movement in Kwangju.
Thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators were
killed. In 1981, Chun would be the first foreign
visitor welcomed to the White House by the newly
elected Ronald Reagan.
After more than 30
post-war years, democracy finally began to come to
South Korea in 1987 via a popular revolution from
below. Chun made a strategic mistake by winning
the right to hold the Olympic Games in Seoul in
1988. In the lead-up to the games, students from
the many universities in Seoul, now openly backed
by an increasingly prosperous middle-class, began
to protest American-backed military rule. Chun
would normally have used his army to arrest,
imprison and probably shoot such demonstrators as
he had done in Kwangju seven years earlier, but he
was held back by the knowledge that, if he did so,
the International Olympic Committee would move the
games to some other country.
In order to
avoid such a national humiliation, Chun turned
over power to his co-conspirator of 1979-80,
General Roh Tae-woo. To allow the Olympics to go
ahead, Roh instituted a measure of democratic
reform, which led in 1993 to the holding of
national elections and the victory of a civilian
president, Kim Young-sam.
In December
1995, in one of the clearest signs of South
Korea's maturing democracy, the government
arrested Chun and Roh and charged them with having
shaken down South Korean big business for bribes -
Chun allegedly took US$1.2 billion and Roh $630
million. Kim then made a very popular decision,
letting them be indicted for their military
seizure of power in 1979 and for the Kwangju
massacre as well.
In August 1996, a South
Korean court found both Chun and Roh guilty of
sedition. Chun was sentenced to death and Roh to
22-and-a-half years in prison. In April 1997, the
Korean Supreme Court upheld slightly less severe
sentences, something that would have been simply
unimaginable for the pro forma Japanese Supreme
Court. In December 1997, after peace activist Kim
Dae-jung was elected president, he pardoned them
both despite the fact that Chun had repeatedly
tried to have Kim killed.
The United
States was always deeply involved in these events.
In 1989, when the Korean National Assembly sought
to investigate what happened at Kwangju on its
own, the US government refused to cooperate and
prohibited the former American ambassador to Seoul
and the former general in command of US Forces
Korea from testifying. The American media avoided
reporting on these events (while focusing on the
suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators in
Beijing in June 1989), and most Americans knew
next to nothing about them. This coverup of the
costs of military rule and the suppression of
democracy in South Korea, in turn, has contributed
to the present growing hostility of South Koreans
toward the United States.
Unlike
American-installed or supported "democracies"
elsewhere, South Korea has developed into a
genuine democracy. Public opinion is a vital force
in the society. A separation of powers has been
institutionalized and is honored. Electoral
competition for all political offices is intense,
with high levels of participation by voters. These
achievements came from below, from the South
Korean people themselves, who liberated their
country from American-backed military
dictatorship.
Perhaps most important, the
Korean National Assembly - the parliament - is a
genuine forum for democratic debate. I have
visited it often and find the contrast with the
scripted and empty procedures encountered in the
Japanese Diet or the Chinese National People's
Congress striking indeed. Perhaps its only rival
in terms of democratic vitality in East Asia is
the Taiwanese Legislative Yuan. On some occasions,
the Korean National Assembly is rowdy; fist fights
are not uncommon. It is, however, a true school of
democracy, one that came into being despite the
resistance of the United States.
The democracy
peddlers Given this history, why
should we be surprised that in Baghdad, such
figures as former head of the Coalition
Provisional Authority L Paul Bremer, former
ambassador John Negroponte and current Ambassador
Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as a continuously
changing cohort of American major-generals fresh
from power-point lectures at the American
Enterprise Institute, should have produced chaos
and probable civil war? None of them has any
qualifications at all for trying to "introduce
democracy" or American-style capitalism in a
highly nationalistic Muslim nation, and even if
they did, they could not escape the onus of having
terrorized the country through the use of
unrestricted military force.
Bremer is a
former assistant and employee of former
secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Alexander
Haig. Negroponte was American ambassador to
Honduras, 1981-85, when it had the world's largest
Central Intelligence Agency station and actively
participated in the dirty war to suppress
Nicaraguan democracy.
Khalilzad, the most
prominent official of Afghan ancestry in the Bush
administration, is a member of the Project for a
New American Century, the neo-con pressure group
that lobbied for a war of aggression against Iraq.
The role of the American military in our war there
has been an unmitigated disaster on every front,
including the deployment of undisciplined, brutal
troops at places such as the Abu Ghraib prison.
All the United States has achieved is to
guarantee that Iraqis will hate it for years to
come. The situation in Iraq today is worse than it
was in Japan or Korea and comparable to the US
tenure in Vietnam. Perhaps it is worth
reconsidering what exactly the US is so intent on
exporting to the world.
Chalmers Johnson is,
most recently, the author of The Sorrows of
Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of
the Republic, as well as of MITI and the
Japanese Miracle (1982) and Japan: Who
Governs? (1995) among other works. This piece
originated as "remarks" presented at the East Asia
panel of a workshop on "Transplanting
Institutions" sponsored by the Department of
Sociology of the University of California, San
Diego, held on April 21. The chairman of the
workshop was Professor Richard Madsen.
(Copyright 2006 Chalmers Johnson)
(Used by permission Tomdispatch
)
