Split Personality

The publisher’s blurb for Bob Rae’s Exporting Democracy: The Risks and Rewards of Pursuing a Good Idea is intriguingly provocative. “The way most western politicians talk, democracy is the pinnacle of civilization, the best political system there is. Many think it’s the system the rest of the world ought to adopt. Bob Rae’s not one of them,” pronounce the PR gurus at the publishing house.

This reviewer was hooked. Bob Rae, leading Liberal (and liberal) luminary, a democracy skeptic? The former head of the Forum of Federations, an organization devoted to promoting federalism abroad, now wary of getting his hands dirty in foreign lands? The same author who argued so eloquently in The Three Questions: Prosperity and the Public Good that “we need more of [the democratic spirit] to give hope to those who feel abandoned and bewildered in this brave new world of rapid change,” turned from idealist to Kissingerian foreign policy realist?

Publisher’s blurb notwithstanding, Bob Rae has not mounted a scathing critique of democracy assistance in Exporting Democracy. Instead, this book is a general reflection on democracy, human rights and the history of modern conflicts, based on an informed exposition of classical political theory and leavened with insights gained from Rae’s personal experiences in Sri Lanka, Iraq, Nigeria and elsewhere. Rae makes clear that he continues to believe it imperative to include the promotion of liberal and democratic values in foreign policy, citing international treaties on landmine reduction, interventions to halt genocide, efforts to eradicate disease, conflict prevention programs and international solidarity in support of freedom in countries such as South Africa as examples of values-based, cooperative, multilateral efforts.

Rae’s thesis is a simple one: democracy as a word and concept has a wide range of meanings and only emerged as the dominant political system in the West after a long struggle. It is one of several “western values”—respect for human rights, pluralism, equality between men and women, gay rights—that are difficult to defend and promote in much of the world. His call is not to abandon democracy promotion but to think more “strategically” about how and if these values can take root where they are absent.

Much of the book—easily a third—is a sort of layperson’s tour of political philosophy and not a critique of democracy promotion at all. The extended discussions of political theory are intelligently written and insightful and all of the usual suspects make an appearance—Jefferson, Hobbes, Burke, Paine, Rousseau, de Tocqueville, Hegel, Marx, Orwell and even Hitler, Stalin and Franco.

Comparing and contrasting American liberal thinker Thomas Paine’s volatile revolutionary idealism with Edmund Burke’s staid British devotion to institution building and political moderation, Rae urges “a healthy dose of Burkean realism,” lest our passions “lead us dangerously astray.” While sympathetic to those who believe that democracy can and should spread around the world, Rae portrays himself as a steely-eyed pragmatist, who, steeped in the study of modern history and political thought, can somehow coldly decide which democracy projects merit support. The implication is that some modern democracy promotion advocates are blunderers blinded by their ideals.

On one level, it is hard to take issue with Rae’s call to be pragmatic about pursuing democracy abroad. One suspects that if Canadians, or anyone for that matter, were polled on the question of whether they preferred their political leaders to exhibit impractical idealism or idealism tempered with realism, they would choose the latter. Similarly, they would probably choose cautious optimism over unbridled enthusiasm and so forth. I have heard of no public opinion groundswell advocating for rash planning or slapdash policy making and few voters ask their governments to embrace lost causes.

Since we can probably all agree with the assertion, which appears on page 13, that “we need to think more strategically,” perhaps Rae should have stopped there and sought a publisher for an article, not a book. He did not of course, and that is one of the weaknesses of Exporting Democracy. It is not rigorous enough to be a significant contribution to the democracy promotion literature; it is more policy-oriented than most memoirs; and it is too technical for many casual readers. It is part political theory primer, part foreign policy contemplation and part political platform, aimed, it would seem, at a smart, informed readership willing to adopt the posture of admiring student to the professorial Rae.

Given the title of the book, Rae had to find an example of democracy promotion to critique, but since his heart is not in it, he picks on an easy target: Iraq. To be sure, seven years into the Iraq misadventure, it is easy to assert that “some in the Bush administration believed that democracy needed a beachhead in the Middle East” and wanted to show for all time “that the battle for democracy knew no boundaries.” If there is one lesson to be learned from the invasion of Iraq, Rae posits, it is that “issues of democracy, women’s rights, and competing visions of the relationship between religion and the secular world … cannot be imposed by force by the West.”

Rae should have heeded the words of the old professor who once reminded him that “there is a difference between saying something and proving something.” Instead he resurrects the simplistic and oft-repeated conventional wisdom about the invasion of Iraq to construct his own straw man. “Democracy,” intones Rae, “cannot be exported like so many refrigerators or computers.” To which I say, amen, but who ever said it could?

At best, democracy promotion was a flimsy, after-the-fact pretense for the invasion of Iraq to obfuscate the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. The governance office of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq was underfunded, understaffed and marginalized—a state of affairs documented by Stanford University democracy scholar Larry Diamond in his 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq. Diamond, a former colleague of Condoleezza Rice, was dismayed when he arrived in Baghdad in 2004 to discover that democracy was barely on the CPA agenda.

One of the great ironies of U.S.-Iraq policy is that democracy programs ended up being championed by a leading war critic and one of the most liberal members of the Senate, the late Ted Kennedy, who used his legislative prowess to earmark $104.5 million for democracy programs when little was forth-coming from the administration. Speaking to his appropriations amendment co-sponsored by senators Joe Biden, Patrick Leahy and Mitch McConnell in May 2006, Kennedy said,

Of course, Bob Rae is not the first or only person to tie the painful experiences in Iraq to the failure to “export democracy.” By the time of Barack Obama’s election in late 2008, Iraq fatigue meant that even Democrats were embracing a “security and stability first” approach to foreign policy, with Democratic leaders such as Senator John Kerry sounding more like Brent Scowcroft than Woodrow Wilson. Rae describes this phenomenon, noting that “it is an irony of our time that the forces of the conservative right speak more happily in the tongue of Paine and many on the left are borrowing the language of Burke, although neither are particularly steeped in either.”

If we ignore Rae’s unsatisfying excursion into the motivations for invading Iraq, Exporting Democracy is more an impassioned defence of intervention in favour of democracy than a cautionary tale of democrats gone wild. Rae even suggests that issues many believe belong in the moral domain should be actively promoted by western nations, saying, for example, that, “we have no choice but to use what leverage and influence we have to argue that gay rights are human rights, period.”

But surely this assertion challenges Rae’s own call for pragmatism and his admonition to “beware governing in the name of a theory.” When it comes to an issue that flies in the face of deeply held social values in much of the developing world, Rae would abandon realism, indulge his passions and “offend many people who will see homosexuality as a Western depravity.” It is hard to see how one could be more comfortable promoting abroad a concept still so controversial in established democracies— gay rights—while fearing to do so with one deeply popular around the globe—democracy itself.

Arab Barometer surveys show that a strong majority—more than 80 percent—of Arab citizens believe that “democracy may have its problems but is better than any other form of government.” Yet some features of liberalism—equality of the sexes, sexual liberation and religious freedom, for example—while almost universally accepted in western countries, are a source of acrimonious debate in most Arab and Muslim countries. (1) For many people, it is entirely consistent to desire a conservative social atmosphere with its attendant limits on personal freedom and still to value the basic elements of democracy.

Given the strong adherence to traditional social values in much of the world, an argument could be made that democracy is neither an imposition nor exclusively a western concept but that liberalism, clearly linked to western social values, is. Promoting gay rights in predominately Muslim nations would be an uphill battle, to say the least. As an enthusiastic democracy advocate, I agree that we should not shy away from expressing and demonstrating our own convictions abroad, including gay rights, but shouldn’t Rae heed his own guidance and “think of consequences as well as rights” before encouraging such a potentially divisive endeavour?

It is not that democracy promotion does not lend itself to analysis and criticism, but the territory has already been well mined and, inexplicably, Rae ignores many major writers and works on the subject. While he does allow that Larry Diamond’s The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World is “worth a look,” Thomas Carothers’s Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve does not rate a citation, nor does Michael McFaul’s Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should and How We Can. George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq is considered by many to be the definitive account of neocon miscalculation in Iraq but it does not make the cut either.

Exporting Democracy includes a chapter on China, India and Africa and another on the Middle East. Oddly, given its centrality to the Canadian foreign policy debate, Afghanistan shares space with a retrospective on the war in Vietnam and Rae’s reflections on Iraq. Surprisingly anodyne given his role as foreign affairs critic for the Official Opposition, Rae concludes on Afghanistan that “we certainly have the people with the skills to be more engaged, at more levels, in what it will take to make a difference in this exceptionally difficult challenge.”

More engagement turns out to be Rae’s clarion call. He concludes on Africa that “the time to re- engage, with eyes wide open, is now.” The Middle East section is passionately written and the author’s command of the issues is obvious. But it, likewise, ends with a whimper, saying that Middle East issues “will require a Canada that is fully engaged.” It is slightly baffling that the informed, usually opinionated Rae generally demurs just when a reader would wish less equivocation. One is left wondering which region of the world does not deserve Canada’s engagement.

The chapter on Sri Lanka is the most fully realized—rich in detail, nuanced and eloquently argued. Rae, while not glossing over the excesses of the civil war and the unreasonable demands of both the Tamils and the Sinhalese, concludes that “democracy and human rights are not just the idle dreams of Western radicals; they speak to the aspirations of ordinary Sri Lankans in both communities, which I have seen and heard expressed.” No democracy assistance practitioner could have stated their motivations better.

The chapter on Canada rarely rises above political boilerplate and almost seems an afterthought. With somewhat passing references (at least compared to his long excursions into political theory) to budget cuts, the proroguing of Parliament, Omar Khadr and other political issues of the day, Rae is difficult to pin down. He argues that foreign policy is about politics and diplomacy but also about “economics and business; war, terrorism and security; ecology and the environment; human rights; the reduction of poverty and disease; and humanitarian assistance in the face of catastrophe,” not to mention “the steady, practical, and peaceful extension of the rule of law, democracy, and freedom.” It is not so much that I would quibble with Rae’s priorities, but the length of the list is incongruous, to say the least, in a book so self-consciously about making sober, strategic and practical choices about our interventions abroad. After counselling the reader so many times to adhere to Burke’s admonitions, Rae jettisons the conservative philosopher to become Paine on steroids.

It should be easy to praise Exporting Democracy. Bob Rae’s bona fides are beyond question, his intelligence beyond doubt. Some editing could produce a masterful précis of what modern Liberal Party foreign policy could and should be. It is certainly an intelligent introduction for the aspiring student of political theory and a heartfelt reminiscence of an eminent Canadian’s personal efforts to bring more peace and democracy to the world. Contrary to the publisher’s promise, it is only a half-hearted critique of democracy promotion, so look elsewhere if that is the book you would like to read.

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