Sometime after 9/11, the Bush administration outlined a forceful, even aggressive, initiative aimed at democratizing the world. American resources and patience are no doubt insufficient for the task. Yet to state the thesis at all takes the President beyond the idealism of President Wilson when he strove to create a world of free states. Wilson assumed that newly independent states would develop into bastions of free government. President Bush assumes that the adoption of formal democratic processes by the world´s political systems will necessarily bring freedom to the peoples living under these systems. Like Wilson, the ideal world he imagines will be a world that has transcended war. As proof of this proposition, President Bush often quotes from the latest “finding’ of political science: no free people fights another free people.
The most questionable aspect of the proposals of both Wilson and Bush is their unwillingness to face the fact that modern democratic processes, encapsulated in the phrase “free and fair elections’ do not bring freedom to communities within established political boundaries where the demographics mean that these communities can never win a “free and fair election’. As Ambassador Galbraith has repeatedly pointed out, the Kurds of Iraq have campaigned since before World War I for a state of their own in what is now Iraq . Yet the United States has in the end always turned away, letting them slip again under the domination of the more numerous peoples controlling the lowlands. Galbraith fears that we will once again betray the Kurds.
Yet if we do, we will be consistent with our larger understanding of what the Administration includes and excludes from its concept of “freedom’. Washington repeatedly makes tepid attempts to improve the human rights situation in China. But what it does not do is make it clear that the Uighurs, Tibetans, Taiwanese and others caught within what the world accepts as China´s borders have as much right to live in freedom as the Han Chinese.
Africa south of the Sahara is a boiling cauldron of nationalisms. Conventionally, if a colonial power established a border to serve its interests in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, then the world community feels that it must avert its eyes from the fact that the resultant “state nationalisms’ of countries such as both Congos, Sudan, Somalia, Ivory Coast, even Nigeria are meaningless or even hated by many of those forced to live within artificial borders. India has grown into a beacon for democratic aspirations in the developing world. Yet many peoples along the fringes of India have no more feeling that they are Indians than you or I. Indonesia is a creation of nineteenth century colonialism. We hear much of the long struggle of the Acehnese to have an independent state. Less attention is paid to the peoples of West Irian who have at least as much right to a separate existence as the people granted independence across the border in Papua New Guinea. In fact, the ways of life and languages and religions of the Irianese are much further removed from general Indonesian culture than those of the people of Aceh. Yet in our desire to have good relations with what is now a more or less democratizing Indonesia, we are unlikely to hear many rude suggestions from the Bush Administration relating to the freedom of West Irian.
The administration has been much more forthcoming in its advice to the Russians concerning their problems in Chechnya. Apparently, since we frequently fail to view Russia as an ally in our march to a free and peaceful world, we have a freer scope for expressing our deepest ideals.
Hidden within these lines, there is no argument that the United States and its allies, willing and unwilling, should begin stirring the pot of insurrection in the world´s many diverse hot spots. But there is an argument that in advancing the general and noble cause of freedom for all peoples, we should carefully consider the multitude of remaining questions of unresolved ethnic nationalism. We are not going to achieve a world in which freedom equals democracy equals peace until we address more effectively than we have the challenges posed by the continued existence of peoples forced to live within borders not of their making. For better or worse, these peoples will play an important role in the turmoil of the 21st century.