Hopedance

The rapidly rising costs – in all sense of the term – of our Iraq and Afghanistan adventures make it increasingly imperative that the United States abandon its proclaimed policy of bringing democracy to the nations of the Middle East, whether they want it or not. With rare exceptions, that policy of “democratic nation building” has been unsuccessful in the past; it is unsuccessful today; and is almost surely certain to be equally unproductive in the foreseeable future.
In their new book, The Failure of Democratic Nation Building: Ideology Meets Evolution, Albert Somit of Southern Illinois University and Steven A. Peterson, Director of the School of Public Affairs at Penn State Harrisburg argue that humans are social primates with an innate tendency for hierarchical and authoritarian social and political structures, and that democracy requires very special “enabling conditions” before it can be supported by a state, conditions that require decades to evolve. As a result, attempts to export democracy through nation-building to states without these enabling conditions, as is clearly the situation in both Iraq and Afghanistan, are doomed to failure.

The major thesis of The Failure of Democratic Nation Building: Ideology Meets Evolution is that the United States should drastically curtail, if not abandon, its efforts to establish democratic governments elsewhere, i.e., the so-called policy of “nation building.” With rare exceptions, that policy has been unsuccessful in the past; it is unsuccessful today; and is almost surely certain to be equally unproductive in the foreseeable future.

The book’s argument runs as follows: Viable democracies require the conjunction of very special material and social “enabling conditions.” As the relative rarity of democracies and the overwhelming predominance of authoritarian governments throughout human history testify, that conjunction happens infrequently. These special conditions are necessary because we ( Homo sapiens) are social primates and evolution has endowed the social primates with an innate proclivity to hierarchically structured social and political systems and an innate tendency to dominance and submission behaviors. In short, authoritarianism is the “default option.” A species so genetically inclined is hardly promising democratic material – which is why democracies require special conditions, why even today they are a definite minority among governments, why they are so hard to establish, why they tend to be fragile – and why the resources expended on nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan would be more productively devoted to strengthening democracy at home rather than in trying to establish it elsewhere.

At the same time, the American democracy is experiencing increasingly serious economic, political, and social strains. That is, or should be, a matter of concern not only for Americans but for all fellow democracies, since, as Jean Elshtain has said, “… trials and tribulations of the American republic have a way of setting the agenda for other democratic societies – for better or for worse, and no doubt some of both.” The long-term prospects of democracy world-wide, the authors contend, would be much better served by using American human and financial resources to strengthen democracy here at home rather than by squandering them, as is currently the case, in almost assuredly fruitless “nation-building” ventures abroad.