Exporting the American Model
Peddling Markets and Democracy
By Chalmers Johnson
05/03/06 -- - There is something absurd and inherently false
about one country trying to impose its system of government or
its economic institutions on another. Such an enterprise amounts
to a dictionary definition of imperialism. When what's at issue
is "democracy," you have the fallacy of using the end to justify
the means (making war on those to be democratized), and in the
process the leaders of the missionary country are invariably
infected with the sins of hubris, racism, and arrogance.
We Americans have long been guilty of these crimes. On the eve
of our entry into World War I, William Jennings Bryan, President
Woodrow Wilson's first secretary of state, described the United
States as "the supreme moral factor in the world's progress and
the accepted arbiter of the world's disputes." If there is one
historical generalization that the passage of time has
validated, it is that the world could not help being better off
if the American president had not believed such nonsense and if
the United States had minded its own business in the war between
the British and German empires. We might well have avoided
Nazism, the Bolshevik Revolution, and another thirty to forty
years of the exploitation of India, Indonesia, Indochina,
Algeria, Korea, the Philippines, Malaya, and virtually all of
Africa by European, American, and Japanese imperialists.
We Americans have never outgrown the narcissistic notion that
the rest of the world wants (or should want) to emulate us. In
Iraq, bringing democracy became the default excuse for our
warmongers -- it would be perfectly plausible to call them
"crusaders," if Osama bin Laden had not already appropriated the
term -- once the Bush lies about Iraq's alleged nuclear,
chemical, and biological threats and its support for al Qaeda
melted away. Bush and his neocon supporters have prattled on
endlessly about how "the world is hearing the voice of freedom
from the center of the Middle East," but the reality is much
closer to what Noam Chomsky dubbed "deterring democracy" in a
notable 1992 book of that name. We have done everything in our
power to see that the Iraqis did not get a "free and fair
election," one in which the Shia majority could come to power
and ally Iraq with Iran. As Noah Feldman, the Coalition
Provisional Authority's law advisor, put it in November 2003,
"If you move too fast the wrong people could get elected."
In the election of January 30, 2005, the U.S. military tried to
engineer the outcome it wanted ("Operation Founding Fathers"),
but the Shiites won anyway. Nearly a year later in the December
15, 2005 elections for the national assembly, the Shiites won
again, but Sunni, Kurdish, and American pressure has delayed the
formation of a government to this moment. After a compromise
candidate for prime minister was finally selected, two of the
most ominous condottiere of the Bush administration, Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, flew into Baghdad to tell him what he had to do for
"democracy" -- leaving the unmistakable impression that the new
prime minister is a puppet of the United States.
Hold the Economic Advice
After Latin America, East Asia is the area of the world longest
under America's imperialist tutelage. If you want to know
something about the U.S. record in exporting its economic and
political institutions, it's a good place to look. But first,
some definitions.
The political philosopher Hannah Arendt once argued that
democracy is such an abused concept we should dismiss as a
charlatan anyone who uses it in serious discourse without first
clarifying what he or she means by it. Therefore, let me
indicate what I mean by democracy. First, the acceptance within
a society of the principle that public opinion matters. If it
doesn't, as for example in Stalin's Russia, or present-day Saudi
Arabia, or the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa under American
military domination, then it hardly matters what rituals of
American democracy, such as elections, may be practiced.
Second, there must be some internal balance of power or
separation of powers, so that it is impossible for an individual
leader to become a dictator. If power is concentrated in a
single position and its occupant claims to be beyond legal
restraints, as is true today with our president, then democracy
becomes attenuated or only pro forma. In particular, I look for
the existence and practice of administrative law -- in other
words, an independent, constitutional court with powers to
declare null and void laws that contravene democratic
safeguards.
Third, there must be some agreed-upon procedure for getting rid
of unsatisfactory leaders. Periodic elections, parliamentary
votes of no confidence, term limits, and impeachment are various
well-known ways to do this, but the emphasis should be on shared
institutions.
With that in mind, let's consider the export of the American
economic, and then democratic "model" to Asia. The countries
stretching from Japan to Indonesia, with the exception of the
former American colony of the Philippines, make up one of the
richest regions on Earth today. They include the second most
productive country in the world, Japan, with a per capita income
well in excess of that of the United States, as well as the
world's fastest growing large economy, China's, which has been
expanding at a rate of over 9.5% per annum for the past two
decades. These countries achieved their economic well-being by
ignoring virtually every item of wisdom preached in American
economics departments and business schools or propounded by
various American administrations.
Japan established the regional model for East Asia. In no case
did the other high-growth Asian economies follow Japan's path
precisely, but they have all been inspired by the overarching
characteristic of the Japanese economic system -- namely, the
combining of the private ownership of property as a genuine
right, defensible in law and inheritable, with state control of
economic goals, markets, and outcomes. I am referring to what
the Japanese call "industrial policy" (sangyo seisaku). In
American economic theory (if not in practice), industrial policy
is anathema. It contradicts the idea of an unconstrained market
guided by laissez faire. Nonetheless, the American
military-industrial complex and our elaborate system of
"military Keynesianism" rely on a Pentagon-run industrial policy
-- even as American theory denies that either the
military-industrial complex or economic dependence on arms
manufacturing are significant factors in our economic life. We
continue to underestimate the high-growth economies of East Asia
because of the power of our ideological blinders.
One particular form of American economic influence did greatly
affect East Asian economic practice -- namely, protectionism and
the control of competition through high tariffs and other forms
of state discrimination against foreign imports. This was the
primary economic policy of the United States from its founding
until 1940. Without it, American economic wealth of the sort to
which we have become accustomed would have been inconceivable.
The East Asian countries have emulated the U.S. in this respect.
They are interested in what the U.S. does, not what it preaches.
That is one of the ways they all got rich. China is today
pursuing a variant of the basic Japanese development strategy,
even though it does not, of course, acknowledge this.
Marketing Democracy
The gap between preaching and self-deception in the way we
promote democracy abroad is even greater than in selling our
economic ideology. Our record is one of continuous (sometimes
unintended) failure, although most establishment pundits try to
camouflage this fact.
The Federation of American Scientists has compiled a list of
over 201 overseas military operations from the end of World War
II until September 11, 2001 in which we were involved and
normally struck the first blow. (The list is reprinted by Gore
Vidal in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So
Hated, pp. 22-41.) The current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are
not included. In no instance did democratic governments come
about as a direct result of any of these military activities.
The United States holds the unenviable record of having helped
install and then supported such dictators as the Shah of Iran,
General Suharto in Indonesia, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba,
Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and
Sese Seko Mobutu in Congo-Zaire, not to mention a series of
American-backed militarists in Vietnam and Cambodia until we
were finally expelled from Indochina. In addition, we ran among
the most extensive international terrorist operations in history
against Cuba and Nicaragua because their struggles for national
independence produced outcomes that we did not like.
On the other hand, democracy did develop in some important cases
as a result of opposition to our interference -- for example,
after the collapse of the CIA-installed Greek colonels in 1974;
in both Portugal in 1974 and Spain in 1975 after the end of the
U.S.-supported fascist dictatorships; after the overthrow of
Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986; following the
ouster of General Chun Doo Hwan in South Korea in 1987; and
following the ending of thirty-eight years of martial law on the
island of Taiwan in the same year.
One might well ask, however: What about the case of Japan?
President Bush has repeatedly cited our allegedly successful
installation of democracy there after World War II as evidence
of our skill in this kind of activity. What this experience
proved, he contended, was that we would have little difficulty
implanting democracy in Iraq. As it happens though, General
Douglas MacArthur, who headed the American occupation of
defeated Japan from 1945 to 1951, was himself essentially a
dictator, primarily concerned with blocking genuine democracy
from below in favor of hand-picked puppets and collaborators
from the prewar Japanese establishment.
When a country loses a war as crushingly as Japan did the war in
the Pacific, it can expect a domestic revolution against its
wartime leaders. In accordance with the terms of the Potsdam
Declaration, which Japan accepted in surrendering, the State
Department instructed MacArthur not to stand in the way of a
popular revolution, but when it began to materialize he did so
anyway. He chose to keep Hirohito, the wartime emperor, on the
throne (where he remained until his death in 1989) and helped
bring officials from the industrial and militarist classes that
ruled wartime Japan back to power. Except for a few months in
1993 and 1994, those conservatives and their successors have
ruled Japan continuously since 1949. Japan and China are today
among the longest-lived single-party regimes on Earth, both
parties -- the nucleus of the Liberal Democratic Party and the
Chinese Communist Party -- having come to power in the same
year.
Equally important in the Japanese case, General MacArthur's
headquarters actually wrote the quite democratic Constitution of
1947 and bestowed it on the Japanese people under circumstances
in which they had no alternative but to accept it. In her 1963
book On Revolution, Hannah Arendt stresses "the enormous
difference in power and authority between a constitution imposed
by a government upon a people and the constitution by which a
people constitutes its own government." She notes that, in
post-World War I Europe, virtually every case of an imposed
constitution led to dictatorship or to a lack of power,
authority, and stability.
Although public opinion certainly matters in Japan, its
democratic institutions have never been fully tested. The
Japanese public knows that its constitution was bestowed by its
conqueror, not generated from below by popular action. Japan's
stability depends greatly on the ubiquitous presence of the
United States, which supplies the national defense – and so,
implicitly, the fairly evenly distributed wealth -- that gives
the public a stake in the regime. But the Japanese people, as
well as those of the rest of East Asia, remain fearful of
Japan's ever again being on its own in the world.
While more benign than the norm, Japan's government is typical
of the U.S. record abroad in one major respect. Successive
American administrations have consistently favored oligarchies
that stand in the way of broad popular aspirations -- or
movements toward nationalist independence from American control.
In Asia, in the post-World War II period, we pursued such
anti-democratic policies in South Korea, the Philippines,
Thailand, Indochina (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam), and Japan. In
Japan, in order to prevent the Socialist Party from coming to
power through the polls, which seemed likely during the 1950s,
we secretly supplied funds to the representatives of the old
order in the Liberal Democratic Party. We helped bring wartime
Minister of Munitions Nobusuke Kishi to power as prime minister
in 1957; split the Socialist Party by promoting and financing a
rival Democratic Socialist Party; and, in 1960, backed the
conservatives in a period of vast popular demonstrations against
the renewal of the Japanese-American Security Treaty. Rather
than developing as an independent democracy, Japan became a
docile Cold War satellite of the United States -- and one with
an extremely inflexible political system at that.
The Korean Case
In South Korea, the United States resorted to far sterner
measures. From the outset, we favored those who had collaborated
with Japan, whereas North Korea built its regime on the
foundation of former guerrilla fighters against Japanese rule.
During the 1950s, we backed the aged exile Syngman Rhee as our
puppet dictator. (He had actually been a student of Woodrow
Wilson's at Princeton early in the century.) When, in 1960, a
student movement overthrew Rhee's corrupt regime and attempted
to introduce democracy, we instead supported the seizure of
power by General Park Chung Hee.
Educated at the Japanese military academy in Manchuria during
the colonial period, Park had been an officer in the Japanese
army of occupation until 1945. He ruled Korea from 1961 until
October 16, 1979, when the chief of the Korean Central
Intelligence Agency shot him to death over dinner. The South
Korean public believed that the KCIA chief, known to be "close"
to the Americans, had assassinated Park on U.S. orders because
he was attempting to develop a nuclear-weapons program which the
U.S. opposed. (Does this sound familiar?) After Park's death,
Major General Chun Doo Hwan seized power and instituted yet
another military dictatorship that lasted until 1987.
In 1980, a year after the Park assassination, Chun smashed a
popular movement for democracy that broke out in the
southwestern city of Kwangju and among students in the capital,
Seoul. Backing Chun's policies, the U. S. ambassador argued that
"firm anti-riot measures were necessary." The American military
then released to Chun's control Korean troops assigned to the
U.N. Command to defend the country against a North Korean
attack, and he used them to crush the movement in Kwangju.
Thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators were killed. In 1981,
Chun Doo Hwan would be the first foreign visitor welcomed to the
White House by the newly elected Ronald Reagan.
After more than thirty postwar years, democracy finally began to
come to South Korea in 1987 via a popular revolution from below.
Chun Doo Hwan made a strategic mistake by winning the right to
hold the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988. In the lead-up to the
games, students from the many universities in Seoul, now openly
backed by an increasingly prosperous middle class, began to
protest American-backed military rule. Chun would normally have
used his army to arrest, imprison, and probably shoot such
demonstrators as he had done in Kwangju seven years earlier; but
he was held back by the knowledge that, if he did so, the
International Olympic Committee would move the games to some
other country. In order to avoid such a national humiliation,
Chun turned over power to his co-conspirator of 1979-80, General
Roh Tae Woo. In order to allow the Olympics to go ahead, Roh
instituted a measure of democratic reform, which led in 1993 to
the holding of national elections and the victory of a civilian
president, Kim Young Sam.
In December 1995, in one of the clearest signs of South Korea's
maturing democracy, the government arrested generals Chun Doo
Hwan and Roh Tae Woo and charged them with having shaken down
Korean big business for bribes -- Chun Doo Hwan allegedly took
$1.2 billion and Roh Tae Woo $630 million. President Kim then
made a very popular decision, letting them be indicted for their
military seizure of power in 1979 and for the Kwangju massacre
as well. In August 1996, a South Korean court found both Chun
and Roh guilty of sedition. Chun was sentenced to death and Roh
to twenty-two-and-a-half years in prison. In April 1997, the
Korean Supreme Court upheld slightly less severe sentences,
something that would have been simply unimaginable for the pro
forma Japanese Supreme Court. In December 1997, after peace
activist Kim Dae Jung was elected president, he pardoned them
both despite the fact that Chun had repeatedly tried to have Kim
killed.
The United States was always deeply involved in these events. In
1989, when the Korean National Assembly sought to investigate
what happened at Kwangju on its own, the U.S. government refused
to cooperate and prohibited the former American ambassador to
Seoul and the former general in command of U.S. Forces Korea
from testifying. The American press avoided reporting on these
events (while focusing on the suppression of pro-democracy
demonstrators in Beijing in June 1989), and most Americans knew
next to nothing about them. This cover-up of the costs of
military rule and the suppression of democracy in South Korea,
in turn, has contributed to the present growing hostility of
South Koreans toward the United States.
Unlike American-installed or supported "democracies" elsewhere,
South Korea has developed into a genuine democracy. Public
opinion is a vital force in the society. A separation of powers
has been institutionalized and is honored. Electoral competition
for all political offices is intense, with high levels of
participation by voters. These achievements came from below,
from the Korean people themselves, who liberated their country
from American-backed military dictatorship. Perhaps most
important, the Korean National Assembly -- the parliament -- is
a genuine forum for democratic debate. I have visited it often
and find the contrast with the scripted and empty procedures
encountered in the Japanese Diet or the Chinese National
People's Congress striking indeed. Perhaps its only rival in
terms of democratic vitality in East Asia is the Taiwanese
Legislative Yuan. On some occasions, the Korean National
Assembly is rowdy; fist fights are not uncommon. It is, however,
a true school of democracy, one that came into being despite the
resistance of the United States.
The Democracy Peddlers
Given this history, why should we be surprised that in Baghdad,
such figures as former head of the Coalition Provisional
Authority L. Paul Bremer III, former Ambassador John Negroponte,
and present Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as a
continuously changing cohort of American major-generals fresh
from power-point lectures at the American Enterprise Institute,
should have produced chaos and probable civil war? None of them
has any qualifications at all for trying to "introduce
democracy" or American-style capitalism in a highly
nationalistic Muslim nation, and even if they did, they could
not escape the onus of having terrorized the country through the
use of unrestricted military force.
Bremer is a former assistant and employee of Henry Kissinger and
General Alexander Haig. Negroponte was American ambassador to
Honduras, 1981-85, when it had the world's largest CIA station
and actively participated in the dirty war to suppress
Nicaraguan democracy. Khalilzad, the most prominent official of
Afghan ancestry in the Bush administration, is a member of the
Project for a New American Century, the neocon pressure group
that lobbied for a war of aggression against Iraq. The role of
the American military in our war there has been an unmitigated
disaster on every front, including the deployment of
undisciplined, brutal troops at places like the Abu Ghraib
prison. All the United States has achieved is to guarantee that
Iraqis will hate us for years to come. The situation in Iraq
today is worse than it was in Japan or Korea and comparable to
our tenure in Vietnam. Perhaps it is worth reconsidering what
exactly we are so intent on exporting to the world.
Chalmers Johnson is, most recently, the author of
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the
Republic
, as
well as of MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982) and Japan: Who
Governs? (1995) among other works. This piece originated as
"remarks" presented at the East Asia panel of a workshop on
"Transplanting Institutions" sponsored by the Department of
Sociology of the University of California, San Diego, held on
April 21, 2006. The chairman of the workshop was Professor
Richard Madsen.
Copyright 2006 Chalmers Johnson
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