Legitimacy and Force: State Papers and Current Perspectives

Volume 1: Political and Moral Dimensions

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351317948
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Relations internationales

Legitimacy and Force, Volumes One and Two are the state papers of Jeane J. Kirkpatrick as the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations. The volumes feature all of the ambassador's UN and congressional testimonies, addresses, speeches and statements and a broad selection of speeches on international affairs and human rights. Together they present a lucid and comprehensive account of the position of one of America's most controversial UN representatives.

Volume One is oriented around themes of democratic societies and undemocratic systems, human rights and political obligations. Kirkpatrick examines the nature and legitimacy of democracy and the illegitimate nature of undemocratic nations. She also offers poignant commentary on the presidential election of 1980 and what the "Reagan phenomenon" has meant to the United States and the West.

Volume Two offers Kirkpatrick's formal remarks on nations and nation-building. She focuses on Grenada, Poland, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and the Soviet Union. She provides a particularly trenchant analysis of Israel: the Camp David accords, the assault on Israel inside the United Nations, and on the Middle East in general. Essential reading for everyone interested in the policymaking arena, these volumes exemplify Kirkpatrick's articulate conceptual underpinning of present-day American foreign policy.

These volumes, far from the usual government position papers, range widely and personally over the major international issues of our times. They are amplified in essays and articles written by Dr. Kirkpatrick for special occasions not related to specific UN work. In addition, the volumes contain crucial papers that were written after her resignation from the UN ambassadorship-and hence reflect Kirkpatrick's current interests and persuasions.

Part I
FREEDOM AND UNFREEDOM

1

Democracy, the Method of Consent

Address before the Politique Internationale-Hachette Prize Ceremony, Paris, France, October 16, 1984.

It is a special honor and pleasure to receive this award from this distinguished jury of Frenchmen. It is no secret that I am fascinated by French politics, admiring of the French “life style” and enormously interested in French intellectual life. I have long been persuaded that France is one of those rare countries which is not only a nation, but also a civilization: an intellectual, esthetic, political, moral, institutional whole. It defines and illustrates a distinctive way of being human—a synthesis powerful enough to shape the subjectivities of generations and of many with whom it comes in contact.

So naturally, I am pleased to have this award, and also surprised. I have not done anything remarkable enough to qualify for such an award. It is true that I have in the past four years said unpopular and unexpected things in the United Nations when I felt it was really necessary. The experience of doing so has led me to reflect on the culture of the United Nations. Often, I have wondered more about what is not said in the United Nations than about what is said there. After all, no one is arrested for what they say at the United Nations, in defense of unpopular causes.

Some powerful conventions have developed within the United Nations, which command general conformity from its members. This is interesting because the members of the United Nations are so divers in their national values, cultures, governments and goals. Probably it is those conventions that largely account for what is not said in the UN It is, I suppose, always easy to underestimate the human tendency to conform to dominant norms in whatever social context they find themselves. That is doubtless the reason John Stuart Mill gave such importance in his essay, “On Liberty,” to convention and public opinion as constraints on freedom, innovation, creativity, science. I formerly believed that Mill exaggerated the importance of social pressure on intellectual life and human behavior. Now I am less sure. Mill himself suffered terribly from public disapproval, especially for his relationship with Mrs. Taylor, and from attacks on his philosophy; but he did not abandon either Mrs. Taylor or his views. I suspect he would have suffered as much in the United Nations as in victorian England.

Like most institutions, the United Nations has developed its own subculture, its own conventions, dogmas, patterns of behavior, which no one is expected to violate. Many of these are borrowed from the norms of professional diplomats and diplomacy, which emphasize decorum and smooth relations. Some derive from the power relations inside the United Nations itself. As it works out, diplomatic decorum reinforces power relations among members of the UN. Any challenge to these power relations comes to be regarded as unorthodox, shocking, and in rather bad taste.

This is what explains why delegates so often sit silent in the face of extraordinary assertions: As, for example, when Israel was accused of poisoning 1,000 Palestinian schoolgirls. A letter was actually circulated to all members of the Security Council charging that “without question a new phase in Israel’s campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people has been launched,” and a formal meeting of the Security Council was held at which no one except the Israelis themselves suggested that the charges were on their face so implausible as to be absurd. Instead, a formal resolution was adopted, which called for an independent investigation of these “poisonings” by the Secretary-General. Similar silence met similar charges several months later, when Israel was accused of having wounded and slaughtered scores of unarmed Palestinian civilians in Ein El Hilweh. Again, an investigation was ordered. No one commented, either, when the investigation failed to confirm poisonings or the murders. This week no one will speak about the moral and political incongruity of Iran’s seeking to oust Israel from the General Assembly on grounds that she is not a peace-loving nation. Instead, this effort will be dealt with without comment as a procedural matter.

Both power structure and diplomatic norms discourage facing these or most other questions directly and examining or discussing them in depth. Diplomatic norms emphasize seeking and finding accommodation. One’s fortunes inside the United Nations fare better when these norms are honored. It is no surprise that this should be the case; each institution has its own distribution of power; each profession has its norms and virtues. There are important differences among them. Culture clashes occur when persons from different professions attempt to work together. The fact that I came from the University to public life probably explains why I have behaved in somewhat unexpected ways.

The culture of intellectuals is very different than that of diplomats; so are their distinctive virtues. Intellectuals are forever engaged in discovering, probing, discussing, all in an effort to uncover the truth about the object of their attention. Intellectuals reflect on embarrassing questions, investigate troublesome problems and speak and write about them. They must put themselves outside the culture and subcultures in which they live, and question them. That is the intellectual’s distinctive metier. To have the courage and the inclination to examine the conventional is a precondition to being an intellectual. That is also the reason that intellectuals are a nuisance in some settings, raising uncomfortable questions, probing sensitive arrangements, thinking the unthinkable. These routine activities are often unwelcome in political and other institutions. They are even unwelcome in universities, when the university itself becomes an object of scrutiny.

This brings me at last to the French intellectual tradition, which more than most is continuously engaged in probing and analyzing the nature of things. More aspects of reality seem to me to be probed more radically, scrutinized more intensively and comprehensively within the French intellectual dialogue than elsewhere. This means that the French intellectual tradition is itself characterized by an unusually high level of a particular courage—to question the unquestionable, to think the unthinkable and, in the process, to illuminate reality. No other Western intellectual tradition in this century has probed the human condition so deeply, has scrutinized so closely our radical isolation, and has faced in so stark a fashion the terms and conditions of the social bond or of political life—exploring the person in terms of necessity; probing next the limits of contingency, seeing society and all relations as determined, as indeterminate; creating a dialectic in which to include virtually all major questions concerning the condition of Western man in the twentieth century; by example, if not always by precept, affirming the autonomy of the intellectual domain.

I have followed from a distance France’s political dialogue since World War II, and I have been especially impressed by the radical quality of its inquiries and affirmations, and by its self-correcting capacities. France is a pure expression of the West, and is moreover strategically located both geographically and culturally. France’s intellectual life has crucial importance for Western prospects. It seems to me vitally important and enormously optimistic that there has occurred in France in the last decade a major return to the affirmation of the empirical, the rejection of romantic totalitarianism, acceptance of contingency, freedom, responsibility—all from within a debate which has examined all the alternatives. The central role of France’s intellectual life in the West and beyond it gives this development inside the French tradition historic global importance.

The key elements of this affirmation seem to me to be acceptance of three propositions. First, “all historical choice involves the risk of error inseparable from the historical condition,” (I am quoting Raymond Aron here). Second, freedom requires insisting on the total autonomy of “profane” activities from any institution, whether the institution be sacred or secular, church or state. Third, the indeterminacy of means and ends gives means the same irreducible moral quality as ends. These three elements comprise the philosophic foundations of democracy and eliminate the pretensions of its rivals.

To elaborate briefly: The inescapable risk of error is the ultimate argument in favor of both empiricism and democracy. It is the ultimate argument against absolute power—by whatever means. It is the reason policy preferences should never be held as dogma, but always be open to investigation, criticism, opposition, correction—the reason all good political systems are open. But criticism requires inquiry and the autonomy of the intellectual realm.

The indeterminate relations between means and ends eliminate the possibility of choosing bad means to good ends. The moral quality of means defines the moral quality of the enterprise. The state that employs torture not only chooses means, it defines itself as a torture state. The state that suppresses freedom as a “means” is a tyranny. Means are the only acts of which we may be certain. And only democracy, which is a method of consent in the political domain, is willing to define itself as process, and be judged as means.

With its clear reaffirmation of the philosophical foundations of democracy the work of French intellectuals has re-established for our times the centrality of freedom, and the necessity of clarity and courage in the face of all efforts to close our minds and our political systems.

But reaffirming the connections between freedom, inquiry, democracy, and the respect for the human person, this body of work of French democratic theorists has re-established the linkage between the intellectual commitment to evidence and search for truth on the one hand, and political action in favor of democracy on the other. It has illustrated and dramatized the moral dimensions of these commitments and inspires the courage needed to assume responsibility.

2

Risking Power for Freedom: Democratic Elections and Democratic Government

Address presented at the Conference on Free Elections held jointly by the American Enterprise Institute and the United States Department of State, November 4, 1982.

I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the liberty of France until I was informed as to how it had been combined with government, with public force, with discipline, with obedience of armies, with the collection and the effectiveness of a well distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with solidity and manners. All these are good things, too. Without them liberty is of no benefit wilst it lasts and is not likely long to continue.

—Edmund Burke

The reality of political liberty consists in the details and the substance of actual institutions.

—Ernest Barker

Reflections on Government

Democracy is so popular a concept in our times that the name is claimed by partisans of the most diverse causes: “people’s democracies,” “guided democracies,” “one-party democracies” are some among the many names given to systems which seek the propaganda advantages of democracy without incurring its political risks.

In fact, it is not difficult to distinguish between systems which have the distinctive characteristics of democracy and those which do not because democracy is a term with determinate content. As the distinguished commentator on this panel, Giovanni Sartori, has written, “the term democracy is a carrier of historical experience whose meaning is stabilized.”

The historical content of democracy is inextricably bound up with the long struggle against arbitrary power—with the notions of liberty, individual rights, consent, and representation in terms of which that struggle against church, state, guild was carried out. Modern democratic institutions had their origins in the persistent efforts of Englishmen to limit the power and jurisdiction of their kings. These efforts began before a reluctant King John was persuaded to sign the Magna Carta early in the thirteenth century, but even though dramatic progress was registered in the seventeenth century with the Bloodless Revolution, it was not until the eighteenth century that the outlines of modern democracy began to emerge in new doctrines of legitimacy that made just government dependent on the consent of the governed (and suggested thereby that legitimate power flowed only from the “people”); in doctrines of contract that not only attributed natural rights to the people but asserted that the protection of these rights was the very purpose of government; in doctrines of representation that claimed each was entitled to speak for himself about “where the shoe pinches” and how laws affect him.

The organization of offices called democratic government became possible only as the triumph of liberalism established the credibility of claims that individuals had interests and rights distinct from those of any collectively, that legitimate governments must respect these rights and take cognizance of these interests, and that the best way of ensuring this is to make rulers representatives, chosen by and responsible to the citizens. The actual history of democratic governments definitively establishes that the expansion of individual liberty, the rise of popular rule through institutions of representation, and the institutionalization of limits on government’s power occurred together. From the beginning, then, relations among individual liberty, limited government, and popular rule existed in fact as well as in theory, and this existential relation gives the notion of “liberal democracy” a substantive content which is neither arbitrary nor capable of being defined away. All democracy is liberal democracy in the precise sense that it provides not only popular political participation, but popular participation in basic decisions about who should rule and to what broad ends under conditions that provide choice among would-be rulers, freedom to discuss, criticize, organize, and proselytize; protection against the reprisals of government for the exercise of these rights.

These rights—to participate, criticize, organize, and contest—are institutionalized in constitutions, free speech, the rule of law and, above all, in the institutions that comprise, surround and underpin democratic elections.

Elections are the central institution of democracy. All the essential elements of democracy are present in democratic elections.

Of course, there are elections and elections. In some elections there is only one candidate or slate, and no choice; some elections feature several candidates or slates, and no choice; some offer several candidates all of whom are chosen by the incumbents. These are not democratic elections.

Democratic elections are not merely symbolic legitimations or collective affirmations. They are competitive, periodic, inclusive, definitive elections in which the chief decision-makers in a government are selected by citizens who enjoy broad freedom to criticize government, to publish their criticisms, and to present alternatives. These defining characteristics of democratic elections distinguish them from other processes in which persons drop into boxes small pieces of paper bearing the names of living persons. Each of these characteristics has important consequences for the character of the process. Periodic elections limit the tenure of those elected and guarantee that before they or their group can continue in office, they will be required to submit themselves once again to the voters for approval or disapproval. Competitive elections are elections in which opposition and criticism of government and governors are permitted and alternative leaders compete for office, under conditions of free speech, press, and assembly on matters concerning public policy. Inclusive elections are those in which large proportions of adults are authorized to participate. Definitive elections are those whose outcomes largely determine the partisan composition of the resultant government.

Democratic elections operationalize and institutionalize distinctive views of legitimacy, representation, participation, of personal freedom and public power, of private ends and public goals. According to these views, legitimate rulers are those—and only those—selected through periodic, inclusive, competitive elections which feature free speech and assembly, including legal protection of minority rights and opposition. Legitimate government is government whose chief decision-makers are chosen in this fashion and whose decisions respect the limitations on their own power necessary to preserve this system. Legitimate power flows from the people and respects constitutional limits on its exercise.

Democratic elections are expected to produce leaders that are not only legitimate, but representative as well, because the winners of elections— having been chosen by the people and dependent on them for continuation in office—will, it is expected, reflect popular views and values. Not only do elections make rulers dependent for their power on the ruled, but frequent elections will remind officeholders of their dependence on the people and “cannot fail to produce a temporary affection, at best, for their constituents.”

Democratic elections produce representatives chosen by and accountable to the people whom they are to represent. It guarantees that laws should be made not merely in the name of the community but with their consent.

No substitutes are acceptable. The democratic doctrine of representation not only postulates that each citizen is the best judge of his own interests, it insists that no elite, hereditary or self-made, no vanguard however enlightened, is capable of “representing” the view of a people unless chosen by them under appropriate circumstances.

Democratic representation both empowers and constrains rulers—by selecting them to act for their constituents (the people) in some specific (thus limited) context for the performance of some specified and, again therefore limited, functions.

The existence of frequent elections not only provides an opportunity for citizen participation, the freedom necessary to competitive elections distinguishes participation in these processes from participation in non-democratic systems and non-competitive elections. In competitive elections citizens make decisions; in one-party elections people make no choices, they ratify choices made elsewhere.

The choices which people make in democratic elections are real, and they have real consequences. When electors choose one candidate or party and reject another people are not participating in a ritual, they are participating in a decision process that will shape the subsequent decisions of government.

Democratic elections, then, institutionalize the processes of meaningful participation and representation. As Sartori noted, they operationalize “the principle that legitimate power flows only from below.”

Because they constrain as well as empower, limit as well as authorize, they implement the belief not only that legitimate power flows from the people, but that institutionalized restraints are required to protect people from those who govern them. The requirements that rulers endure criticism, permit opposition, submit to defeat, relinquish office, constitute powerful institutionalized protections of the individual from the state.

Democratic elections also ensure...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Documents
• Introduction
• Part I Freedom and Unfreedom
• Part II Human Rights and Democracy
• Part III The United Nations As A Political System
• Part IV Foreign Policy in A Democracy
• APPENDIX