Near-Tragic Dilemmas
In the West, and especially in Europe, the predominant view holds
that geopolitics and democracy promotion do not, and should not, mix.
Their motives are mutually inimical, and in practice one gets in the
way of the other. Geopolitics, also known as power politics, is about
the naked struggle for power between states that want to expand their
dominions and influence. But democratic countries are supposed to be
free from such irrational cravings. For them, democracy promotion is a
moral imperative based on values and a sense of solidarity.
But democratic governments do not have the power to turn all autocracies
into democracies. Moreover, even democratic governments
remain obliged to serve the security and economic interests of their own
respective nations in an international realm that is still largely the anar-
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chy described by Thomas Hobbes as “a perpetual and restless desire of
power after power.” Democracies, in other words, have no choice but
to carry on pragmatic relations with autocratic governments: signing
oil and gas deals with them, balancing less dangerous dictators against
more threatening ones, and the like. This inevitably exposes the West
to charges of double standards and deprives it of the moral high ground
that it would like to claim as a champion of freedom.
There is a Kantian theory of democratic peace that is supposed to
provide a bridge between democratic moral imperatives and the selfish
interests of nations. Democracies do not go to war against each other,
this theory goes, and therefore democracies share a natural wish to live
in a world where all or most actors are democracies: Such a world is
safer for them. This theory is hard to dispute in the long term, but trying
to use it as a guide to short-term action may bring serious problems.
One need not read Jack Snyder’s critique3
to recall cases in which democratization
has shown itself to be not only messy and unpredictable,
but even dangerous and deadly. Countries in the throes of democratic
opening can become not less but more conflict-prone. Consider the role
that “bottom-up” pressure for democratization (in the form of popular
protests inspired by the “Arab Spring”) played in triggering the current
bloody quagmire in Syria. How many leaders of democratic countries
today have entertained a private wish that the Arab Spring had never
happened, at least not on their watches?
There is no way to escape the dilemma of national interests versus
democratic moral imperatives. The West will be damned whatever it
does. If Western countries follow their national interests, they will be
criticized for propping up tyrants. Once people living under an autocracy
hit the streets to protest their repressive and corrupt rulers, domestic and
international public opinion will force democratic governments to drop
their pragmatic alliances with the autocracy in question, as happened
several times during the Arab Spring. If Western governments arrange
their foreign policies around support for democracy and opposition to
tyrants just for being tyrants, there will be cries that these governments
are na¦ve and driven by ideology. More than likely, they will also be accused
of applying double standards, since no democracy can take on all
tyrants at the same time.
In order to suggest a way out of this dilemma, Charles Krauthammer
a decade ago coined the term “democratic realism.” The West cannot
attack all tyrants all at once and everywhere, he noted, but it can
and should act against them selectively, based on its own interests.4
Yet
Krauthammer made this argument while trying to justify the U.S.-led
invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. However we may ultimately judge
the legitimacy or outcome of that use of force, it surely did not contribute
to the international credibility of humanitarian interventions aimed
at replacing autocracies with democracies.
142 Journal of Democracy
To summarize, promoting democracy is never politically safe. The
West is doomed to be inconsistent, opportunistic, and exposed to charges
of double standards. Democracy promotion also inevitably means poking
various autocratic bears, big or small, and there is always a chance
that when they become irritated and existing power balances become
unsettled, dangerous and unpredictable results may ensue. This is what
the European Union learned the hard way in Ukraine.
From the autocrats’ perspective, there is no such thing as idealistic,
value-based democracy promotion. Rather, it is all hypocrisy: The West
plays its old power games, but this time calls them “democracy-promotion
efforts” or, in extreme cases, “humanitarian interventions.” In
particular, this has been the clear and consistent rhetoric of Vladimir Putin—rhetoric,
moreover, that he gives every sign of sincerely believing.
The West, led by the United States, uses talk of democracy and human
rights as part of a strategy to encircle, weaken, and humiliate Russia.5
As noted above, it has become fashionable among political scientists
to speak of “autocracy promotion” as a kind of symmetrical opposite of
democracy promotion. But the taste for equivalence so common among
Western scholars turns misleading here. These two phenomena are not
equal, and this is not because we like democracy more. What we vaguely
and generally call “autocracy” is usually a kind of default setting, a
historically entrenched way of ruling in countries that traditionally lack
power centers capable of offsetting whoever holds executive authority.
In other words, most autocratic behavior is homegrown and not an import:
There is no need to “promote” it from abroad. As a rule, democracy
is a novelty that has to be introduced in defiance of local resistance; autocracy
is something that is already there, and only has to be maintained.
In uncertain and hybrid regimes, autocratic behavior is also a matter of
old habits, even if superficially transformed, that might or might not be
replaced by new democratic norms, institutions, and practices. These
innovations may indeed benefit from some foreign help. But what is
countering them is democracy resistance, not autocracy promotion.
There is another kind of asymmetry at work here as well. Universalist
ideas undergird democracy promotion; autocrats have nothing so allencompassing
to promote. The “divine right of kings” is hard to resuscitate,
while concepts such as political Islam or “Asian values” enjoy no
currency outside certain culturally defined regions. The “Eurasianism”
that lies at the heart of Putin’s aggressive behavior is nothing but a new
incarnation of the Russian imperial idea: It can only be attractive to
Great Russian nationalists.
And yet democracy resistance does have an international character.
This comes from the generic element within it, which is resentment
against the main actor behind democracy promotion—the West. Not all
criticism of the West is antidemocratic, but the fight against democracy
promotion is usually anti-Western. At its ideological core, what is be-
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ing called “autocracy promotion” is really nothing but anti-Americanism
and anti-Europeanism. Again, Putin’s Russia can serve as a case
in point. Russian democracy resistance seeks to claim the high moral
ground by “exposing” Western democracy promotion as covert imperialism,
but Russian spokespeople do not stop there. They also like to use
postmodernist language to present Russia as a champion of multiculturalism
and multipolarity against Western attempts to achieve singlehanded
predominance.6
This tactic brings Putin multiple Western supporters and empathizers
from both the left and right. The latter are attracted by the way he exposes
Western “immorality” as represented, for instance, by gay rights
(interpreted as “propaganda” for homosexuality). The left, meanwhile,
likes anything that threatens to stick a wrench into the gears of Western
military, political, and economic dominance.7
But ultimately, both are
resisting liberal democracy’s status as the “hegemonic discourse” of our
times. In the world dominated by democracies, “autocracy promotion”
masquerades as defense of the underdog.