What could be more vibrant than free markets, more defining of the social condition than Jeffersonian democracy? They underpin a citizen’s human right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and thus their export by America would represent a gift to less privileged societies. Right?
Only when countries in the Middle East and South Asia embrace free markets and American-style democracy will they find a cure to the ills that bedevil them, with their peoples becoming richer and the rest of the world safer.
This is not vexing knee-jerk American nativism, propounded by dogma-flaunting Ugly Americans throwing cowboy hats in the air asking to bring ‘em on and get down to the get down with them for’ners. The notion has been an article of faith to President Bush’s administration since Sept. 11. But as of last week, senior White House and State Department officials set out to formalize it internationally by eliciting the support of key European allies.
A master plan of sorts, it will be put forward this summer at the Group of Eight, NATO allies and the European Union. Known as the Greater Middle East Initiative, it would call for Arab and South Asian governments to adopt major economic and political reforms, and “be held accountable on human rights,” particularly those of women.
All fine and dandy, except it also happens to be further evidence of persistent American naiveté, including that of the smarmy neoconservative theoreticians in government who believe themselves to be in possession of astonishingly precise knowledge about how to reorder the world we inhabit.
They assume that America’s markets-and-elections approach would revamp, in one fell swoop, the developing world’s centuries-old cultures — their socialization norms, gender relations, value systems, and other social variables that have come, over generations, to define a community’s inward preoccupations.
This transition paradigm is way too facile, and recently has found sundry skeptics who complain that America’s democratization policies are at best simplistic, in that they to seek to encourage, or foist, political liberalization in nations that do not have the social, political and economic conditions necessary to sustain it. “We’re not prepared to understand, assess and respond to the complexities of other societies,” Jeffry Sachs said in the New York Times. No one is arguing here against democracy, free markets, women’s empowerment, liberal education, social justice and, well, heck, even the pursuit of happiness. One is arguing against their imposition on our societies at a time, in a manner, and for a reason, not of our choosing.
Another article faith held by a great many Americans is that the reason “they hate us” is because there is something in Islam, in the constitution of the Arab personality or in a rage born out political frustration that drives them to do that. The transition to democracy, this conventional wisdom has it, will change all that.
Wrong! The issue is more — much more — complex.
No doubt it would be a revelation to these Americans that, at a seminal level, Arabs in fact love America. There’s the rub, you see. For when they suffer gusts of exasperation at it, it is because they see it as a dominant party to history and to the grit of man’s condition, a messenger of the labors of justice. For years, Arabs have chased after it, catching it by the skirt, as it were, insisting on contract, dialogue and equity, in Palestine as elsewhere in their world, only to have it turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to their entreaties. So as in marriage, or the bond between father and child, there are moments when love is transformed into something very much like itself, hatred.
From Omayyad Damascus to Islamic Spain, Arabs took part in the moral, intellectual and philosophical noon of human civilization. Their erudite urbanity both quickened and enriched the entire contour of Western thought. Thus, they are not, by religious faith, national temperament or cultural archetype, unresponsive to democratic ideals.
But before they embrace American democracy, they must see its putative messenger diffuse justice. And for that we begin in Palestine. What more is there to say?
