“If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation.”
– Theodore Roosevelt, 1904
Hello!
Happy Sunday/Monday. It’s almost spring in Buenos Aires, and despite graduating in June (kind of), I’m miraculously as busy as ever. Next week, I’m starting an internship at NACLA, where I’ll get some overdue experience with real life journalism in Latin America.
The other night, I had a great conversation about democracy with an exchange student, David. It made me want to write, so here’s some thoughts the conversation inspired.
David studies international relations, and at some point he dropped this fun fact: In the last hundred years, no two democratic nations have gone to war with each other. I had no idea if that was true, but it isn’t that important for the conversation that followed, so let’s just take the statement at face value.
David’s observation sounds like a pretty infallible justification for global democracy. If democracies don’t tend to go to war, countries should definitely be democratic and avoid the worst of human suffering.
However, I think it’s important to tread carefully here. Mainly because the statement “democracies don’t go to war with each other” obscures the fact that democracy is a historically monumental reason nations go to war in the first place. On the level of discourse, the spread or defense of democracy has justified some really terrible wars, particularly invasions by the US after WWII. Iraq and Vietnam are probably the most egregious examples, but dictatorships in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina also stand out for having received extensive financial, military, strategic, and diplomatic support from the US. Though these interventions weren’t justified strictly in the name of democracy, democracy was certainly a lynchpin of the US ideological package, alongside individualism, the free market, and a pair of Golden Arches. It’s also worth emphasizing these Western values were advanced through enormous violence far before the 20th century. By enshrining democracy as a break with a barbaric past, however, one conveniently obscures the continuity between historical (from ~16th century onward) and current relationships of regional domination. Claiming democracy as a Western value, furthermore, ignores the great many democratic societies that predate the Englightenment, Columbus, and the West itself. Nevertheless, the way we celebrate democracy today invites a sense of great moral progress. In my eyes, this progress is overstated because it conceales how the spread of Western intellectual values during this period has not been a natural diffusion, but an installation that accompanies social domination.
“Democracies don’t go to war with each other” seems to position democracy as the evolutionary end-point of social organization. In doing so, we accept that democracy is a legitimate possibility for all countries, as long as they sow the right social and institutional seeds. But the image of the international community helping an individual country pursue its trajectory towards democracy forgets that the great lengths that model Western democracies have gone to smash coherent and genuinely representative governments abroad. These interventions (again, from ~16th century until today) are not incidental to the success of the US’s coveted social contract: the strain of capitalist democracy that the US pursued after WWII facilitated the massive transfers of wealth and labor necessary to maintain its international dominance. Today, international dominance is not always achieved through acute physical violence. Indeed, finding new ways to concentrate profit is a constant site of innovation, and includes using tools like debt to accumulate wealth under palettable international optics.
The democracies we see today are inseparable from the resource extraction and labor exploitation that uphold them. The dominance of global capitalism has increased the range and velocity at which we transport food, people, medicine, machinery, etc., a simple fact which has required exponenetially more energy than ‘slower’ models of life. We continue to source this energy by pulling an extraordinarily scarce and toxic liquid from the ground, and the idea that our way of life can be sustained any other way is increasingly utopian. Why does this matter for democracy? Because ‘winner’ capitalist democracies must justify and intensify state violence in “transitioning” democracies around the world to continue extracting (and innovating on the extraction of) this energy. On the flipside, the democratic integrity of ‘periphery’ countries now depend on things that are theoretically completely unrelated to democracy, like global commodity prices and Europe’s energy transition. I contend that the spread of democracy is often advocated to accelerate this commodification and extraction rather than in the interest of a truly representative and inclusive form of organization.
Since “being ready for democracy” represents a minimum level of integration with global supply chains, modern democracy demands a specific way of organizing a country’s productive forces. What’s the program? Sack worker protections and unions, cut social spending, and start exporting. Modern understandings of democracy are inseparable from a country’s manufacturing capacities (and increasingly, their financial sector), which themselves generate violence for globalization’s losers.
In order to have a democratic country today, you need a lot of parallel systems to also be working harmoniously, like schools, grocery stores, a justice system, and independent journalism. This is what David was getting at when he rebuked that some countries “just aren’t ready for democracy”: they don’t have the necessary supporting institutions. Precisely because of this, advocating for global democracy on the basis that it is peaceful has a sharp edge—the lifelines that modern democracies need to function are deeply entangled with processes of forced dislocation, occupation and extraction. I wonder whether democracy, as it applies to modern nations, is more of a privilege of “winning” globalization than an ethical milestone as a society.
In the abstract, democracy is a dandy way of organizing people and making decisions. But statements like “democratic nations never go to war with each other” are not abstract; they only make sense within the context of centralized states, industrialization, borders, and resource competition. Advocating for global democracy, then, often revolves around pushing countries to integrate more deeply into global markets, often against the will of their citizens. Fortunately, this is not what democracy must be. One can, of course, be pro-democracy and anticolonialist—now that I say it, being truly pro-democracy requires being anticolonialist, which already implies thinking beyond the framework of bringing backwards societies to the light. Who will be democracy’s protagonists, responsible for its integrity? Will the productive forces and political institutions that support democracy be owned by a country’s workers or a multinational corporation? How will people get their information and education? What will the living conditions of people in this democracy be? The main thing I hope to get across here is that modern democracy is not only a way of coming to decisions, it’s a web of social organization. As as it stands, our way of life requires that individuals rely on global markets for most aspects of their well-being, and the success of a democracy effectively relies on a country’s role within those markets. I hope to have shown that this dependence on structurally violent and unequal global markets itself undermines the possibilities for a benevolent U.S. role in constructing representative democracies abroad. We should think about how institutions must be arranged to support a representative democracy, and whether the people who currently advocate global democracy are the ones we actually want in charge of those institutions.
Hope you found something to think about in this blog.
Until next time,
Lucas