Strongmen strike back [Robert Kagan] (fb2) читать постранично, страница - 2

liberalism in Spain, Italy, Poland and the German principalities. Alexander I even contemplated extending the anti-liberal campaign across the Atlantic, to Spain’s rebellious colonies, prompting President James Monroe to proclaim his famous doctrine.

To 19th-century Americans, European authoritarianism was the great ideological and strategic challenge of the era. The American republic was born into a world dominated by great-power autocracies that viewed its birth with alarm — and with good reason. The American revolutionaries founded their new nation on what, at the time, were regarded as radical liberal principles, set forth most clearly by the 17th-century Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, that all humans were endowed with “natural rights” and that government existed to protect those rights. If it did not, the people had a right to overthrow it and, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, to form a new government “most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Natural rights knew no race, class or religion. The founders did not claim that Americans’ rights derived from English political “culture” and tradition. As Alexander Hamilton put it, the “sacred rights of mankind” were not to be found among “parchments or musty records” but were “written, as with a sunbeam . . . by the hand of the divinity itself” and thus could never be “erased or obscured by mortal power.”

We long ago lost sight of what a radical, revolutionary claim this was, how it changed the way the whole world talked about rights and governance, and how it undermined the legitimacy of all existing governments. As David Ramsay, a contemporary 18th-century American historian, put it: “In no age before, and in no other country, did man ever possess an election of the kind of government, under which he would choose to live.” Little wonder, as John Quincy Adams later observed, that the governments of Europe, the church, the “privileged orders,” the various “establishments” and “votaries of legitimacy” were “deeply hostile” to the United States and earnestly hoped that this new “dangerous nation” would soon collapse into civil war and destroy itself, which it almost did.

The battle between liberalism and traditional authoritarianism was the original ideological confrontation, and it remained the ideological confrontation for another century and a half. The principles of Enlightenment liberalism, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence, were the core issue over which the Civil War was fought. When the United States miraculously survived that war and emerged as a great power in its own right in the late 19th century, the autocratic challenge remained in the form of a Germany still ruled by Hohenzollerns, a Russia still ruled by the czars, an Austria still ruled by Habsburgs, a Turkey still ruled by Ottomans, and a Japan and China still ruled by emperors.

The nadir of authoritarianism

World War I, fought mainly in the trenches along the Western Front from 1914 to 1918, was very much a war between authoritarianism and liberalism. (John Warwick/National Library of Scotland)

Historians and political scientists long ago drained World War I of ideological import. But for those who fought it, on both sides, it was very much a war between liberalism and authoritarianism. For the British and French, and eventually the Americans, it was a fight to defend what British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith in 1914 called “the liberties of Europe,” by which he meant liberal Europe, against “militarism,” “Prussianism” and autocracy. And Germans agreed. Steeped in the Romantic, Counter-Enlightenment tradition, they regarded the Anglo-Saxons as soulless materialists.

Germans exalted the primacy of the state and the community, the Volk, the Kultur. When President Woodrow Wilson took the United States to war in 1917 in the hope of making the world “safe for democracy,” it was to defend the liberal “Atlantic Community” against this coherent, anti-liberal ideology backed by a German military machine of unprecedented strength and efficiency. The rise after the war of two even greater challenges to liberalism — in the forms of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan — marked the failure of that hope. Their defeat in World War II gave it a new birth.

The end of that war marked the nadir of authoritarianism. All the authoritarian great powers of the 19th and early 20th centuries had been destroyed over the course of four decades — czarist Russia, along with the Habsburg, Ottoman, Chinese, Prussian, and later, German and Japanese empires. They fell not because they lost some historic battle of ideas, however. They lost actual battles. They were brought down by wars, or, in the case of Russia, by an unlikely communist revolution that could only have succeeded because of disastrous wartime experience.

Nor did communism defeat Nazism in World War II. Russian and U.S. armies defeated German armies. The subsequent division of the world between a liberal American superpower and a communist Soviet Union was also the product of war. The old Russian empire was catapulted into an unprecedented and, as it turned out, untenable position of global influence. The Cold War was not a final showdown between the only ideologies left for humanity to choose from. It was just the confrontation of the moment.

LEFT: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations in New York in October 1960. RIGHT: President John F. Kennedy speaking to a joint session of Congress in May 1961. (Associated Press photos)

It is not surprising that we saw communism as the greatest challenge democracy could face. It had the power of the Soviet Union behind it, while the authoritarians were weak pawns on the chessboard of the Cold War. The goals and methods of the Bolsheviks, the terror and oppression they employed to raze an entire economic and social order, seemed not only uniquely pernicious but also irreversible. That was the key point of Kirkpatrick’s 1979 essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” in which she laid out her famous doctrine of supporting “traditional autocracies” in the struggle against “totalitarian” communism. While the former could, over time, possibly make the transition to democracy, she argued, there was “no instance of a revolutionary ‘socialist’ or Communist society” making a transition to democracy.

The thesis turned out to be wrong, however: Communism was neither unreformable nor irreversible. The fanatical utopianism of the Marxist-Leninist project proved too much at odds with fundamental elements of human nature, including the desire to amass wealth and property as the fruits of one’s labor. It could not easily survive in a competitive world. Though, in different circumstances, it might have lasted much longer, any transformation that required so much violence and state repression was fighting an uphill battle.

Communism’s other problem was, ironically, that its leaders chose to compete on the same plane as liberalism: They measured success in material terms. Soviet leaders promised to meet and surpass the West in improving the standard of living of the average citizen. They failed, and suffered a crisis of confidence about their ideology. When Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the system by introducing elements of political and economic liberalism, he inadvertently brought about its demise. China adopted a state capitalist system without the political reform. Both proved that communism was neither invincible nor inadaptable.

Humans do not yearn only for freedom. They also seek security — not only physical security against attack, but the security that comes from family, tribe, race and culture. Liberalism has no particular answer to these needs.

The liberal democracies had overestimated the challenge of communism, and they underestimated the challenge of traditional authoritarianism. And this, too, was understandable. Throughout the years of the Cold War and during the era of liberal dominance that followed, the world’s autocracies were too weak to challenge