America's Mission

The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy - Expanded Edition

Tony Smith

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780691154923, 9780691037844
• eBook ISBN: 9781400842025
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: 21st Century History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

America's Mission argues that the global strength and prestige of democracy today are due in large part to America's impact on international affairs. Tony Smith documents the extraordinary history of how American foreign policy has been used to try to promote democracy worldwide, an effort that enjoyed its greatest triumphs in the occupations of Japan and Germany but suffered huge setbacks in Latin America, Vietnam, and elsewhere. With new chapters and a new introduction and epilogue, this expanded edition also traces U.S. attempts to spread democracy more recently, under presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and assesses America's role in the Arab Spring.

CHAPTER ONE

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The United States and the Global Struggle for Democracy

Whether the tremendous war so heroically fought and so victoriously ended shall pass into history a miserable failure, barren of permanent results—a scandalous and shocking waste of blood and treasure … of no value to liberty or civilization … must be determined one way or the other. … Slavery, like all other great systems of wrong, founded in the depth of human selfishness and existing for ages, has not neglected its own conservation. … Custom, manners, morals, religion are all on its side everywhere in the South; and when you add the ignorance and servility of the ex-slave to the intelligence and accustomed authority of the master, you have the conditions, not out of which slavery will again grow, but under which it is impossible for the Federal government wholly to destroy it … [unless we] give to every loyal citizen the elective franchise—a right and power which will be ever present, and will form a wall of fire for his protection.

—Frederick Douglass, December 1866

THIS BOOK explores the origins and the consequences of the central ambition of American foreign policy during the twentieth century: in Woodrow Wilson’s words, “to make the world safe for democracy.” The book analyzes the origins of the effort to promote democracy abroad in terms of Washington’s definition of the American national security; it investigates the consequences of the policies pursued with respect to individual countries the United States has sought to reform as well as with respect to the changing character of the international system America has sought to reorder. The book thus tells a triple story, at once about the identity of America’s self-assigned role in the world, the influence of America’s democratizing mission on a selected group of countries, and the effect of America’s ambitions on the international system as a whole. The major countries analyzed are the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Germany, Japan, and Iran (although American influence in Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Greece, South Africa, and Russia is also considered). The chief presidential administrations reviewed in terms of their frameworks for world order are those of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Ronald Reagan. The book’s primary focus is historical, but its account should help contemporary policymakers as they debate what more they might or should do to fulfill Wilson’s famous injunction.

Until the 1990s, American scholarship neglected to investigate with any comparative framework or historical depth the consequences abroad of surely the greatest ambition of United States foreign policy over the past century: to promote democracy abroad as a way of enhancing the national security. Why has this subject not been investigated? The question leads to an exploration of intellectual currents in the American academic establishment, which is included in my appendix, “Notes on the Study of International Origins of Democracy.” The aim of the book is to remedy the oversight, first by providing a historical account and a comparative framework for evaluating American successes and failures, then by assessing this undertaking’s impact on world politics in the twentieth century.

Academic silence on the international origins of democracy abroad does not reflect a failure of American policy. The greatest success has been in Europe after 1945, where the democratization of Germany, the organization of the European Community, and the success of democracy in places like Poland and the Baltic and Czech republics depended in significant measure on American resolve. So, too, British policy has mattered. In Asia today, democracy exists most securely in areas once under British or American domination—India and Japan especially, but also the Philippines and Malaysia. In the Caribbean and Central America, the countries where democracy is most established are those that were once British colonies (with the notable exception of Costa Rica). In Africa, where the future of democracy today remains bleak, the most hopeful signs continue to come from areas formerly under British rule (except, perhaps, for the former French colony of Senegal)—especially in Botswana, Mauritius, the Gambia, and South Africa, and perhaps in due course from Nigeria and Kenya. Even in the many cases where American and British attempts to establish democratic government overseas failed, or where democracy is still fragile— most notably in the Hispanic Caribbean and Central America and in Africa—their respective efforts were nonetheless considerable and there is much to be learned from their inability to succeed.

Of course, the United States and Britain have not been the only actors attempting to promote democracy abroad. While French, Dutch, and Belgian colonialism failed completely in such undertakings (to the extent that it even tried), the consolidation of democracy in Greece, Portugal, and Spain beginning in the mid-1970s was due in substantial measure to the active role played by the European Community. Similarly, in recent years, nongovernmental agencies from Amnesty International to the Roman Catholic Church have played critical roles in the rise of democratic movements in parts of Latin America, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, the principal disseminators historically of democratic institutions at the international level have unquestionably been the United States and Great Britain.

America launched itself upon a mission to promote democracy abroad somewhat accidentally. The Spanish-American War was fought for a variety of reasons, only one of which was to promote what today would be called human rights for Cubans suffering at the hands of the Spanish. Nor did concern for human rights mean Americans expected to see democracy flourish in Cuba once the Spanish left. When the American Congress declared in April 1898 that Cuba had a right to freedom and independence, it did not assume that this would readily translate into democracy for that island, much less for the Philippines.

Nevertheless, after the war, some kind of order had to established by the American occupiers. Annexation to the United States was at least a possibility; Hawaii had been annexed in July 1898, and the United States had by then long experience in granting statehood to peoples who organized themselves in ways compatible with established national practices. But for Cuba and the Philippines, Washington concluded instead that, for such numerous peoples so different from North Americans, eventual self-government was preferable. In these circumstances, trying to establish democratic government locally and then departing was all the Americans knew how to do, even if their way of providing it proved deficient in many respects.

The evident difficulties of fostering democracy in Cuba and the Philippines after 1898 did not dampen the American enthusiasm for such undertakings. When President Woodrow Wilson ordered the occupation of Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914, the intervention in Haiti in 1915, and the takeover of the Dominican Republic in 1916, he justified his actions as part of an effort to bring constitutional democracy to Latin America. In 1917, when the United States declared war on Germany, Wilson declared that America intended “to make the world safe for democracy” and subsequently issued his Fourteen Points dedicated to that end. His ambition at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to create a European order of democratically constituted, nationally self-determining states associated in the League of Nations, was the direct fulfillment of his pledge.

Again, when in the heat of World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asserted American support for “Four Freedoms” and signed the Atlantic Charter with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, he reaffirmed American dedication to the goal of promoting a world order consisting of democratically constituted states. It was thus in keeping with American policy that the United States interpreted Stalin as having aggressive designs on Europe when, in March 1945, he abrogated the “Declaration on Liberated Europe” he had signed a month earlier with Roosevelt and Churchill, promising free elections in Poland. And it was clearly in line with this tradition when, somewhat later in 1945, the administration of President Harry Truman instructed the American occupying authorities of Germany and Japan that their primary duty was to convert these two defeated, militaristic countries into stable democracies.

While the American occupations of Germany and Japan were the most concerted efforts mounted by the United States to promote democracy abroad, American ambitions did not cease with the end of these interventions in the early 1950s. Already the Marshall Plan of 1947 had repeated the American concern to support democracy throughout Europe, a theme heard again with the formation of the Organization of American States in 1948, reiterated toward Western Europe with the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, and announced again by the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower after 1953 with respect to “the captive nations” of East Central Europe. In 1961, President John Kennedy expressed this determination anew with regard to Latin America in the Alliance for Progress. Even Southeast Asia was to be defended not simply to contain communism, but in the hope that these people too would become democratic.

By the mid-1960s, following the setbacks in Indochina and the evident failure of the Alliance for Progress, the voices calling for the promotion of democracy abroad were momentarily stilled. But by 1973, congressional opposition to what many termed the “amorality” of the foreign policy crafted by President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, led to demands that democratization be fostered in a variety of areas, most notably in southern Africa. Subsequently, there were additional initiatives to support democracy abroad: in President Jimmy Carter’s human rights campaign, in the “democratic revolution” repeatedly called for by President Ronald Reagan, and in a variety of measures undertaken by President George Bush toward Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, the Philippines, and Central America beginning in 1989. President Bill Clinton’s pledge to pursue this same goal demonstrates how firmly bipartisan it now has become to see American national security promoted by the expansion of democracy around the globe.

In the mid-1990s, Americans might well ask themselves how much the worldwide demand for democracy is the result of their century-old determination to promote this cause. Certainly the new global enthusiasm for democracy is the closest the United States had ever come to seeing its own traditional foreign policy agenda reflected on an international scale. The American idea of a world order opposed to imperialism and composed of independent, self-determining, preferably democratic states bound together through international organizations dedicated to the peaceful handling of conflicts, free trade, and mutual defense (a package of proposals that may be called “liberal democratic internationalism”) has been with us in mature form since the early 1940s.

Although the ingredients of this worldview had been put in place during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921)—so that “Wilsonianism” is a term synonymous with liberal democratic internationalism—its origins in American history lie even further back. Thus, Thomas Jefferson had been the first to insist that a peaceful world order in which America could fully participate needed to be one constituted by democratic states. Or again, support for the national self-determination of other peoples had its roots in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, affirming an American commitment to an independent Latin America. For its part, the twentieth century call for free trade grew out of a preference for a nondiscriminatory international economic system as old as the Revolution of 1776, with its efforts to break out of British mercantilist control. And anti-militarism was evident in the Founding Fathers’ fear that a standing army might threaten civilian government.¹

The world of the mid-1990s therefore seemed to be asking for much the kind of global order that the United States has been proposing for three-quarters of a century (if not virtually since its Revolution). Throughout Eastern Europe, within much of the former Soviet Union, in most parts of Latin America, and along the Pacific rim of Asia, democracy is on the march, and with it calls for a liberal international economic order and increased cooperation through a multitude of international organizations, whose most important goal is the search not for competitive balance-of-power solutions to keep the peace, but instead inclusive, consensus building mechanisms of collective security. Indeed, the so-called new thinking of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev with respect to world order after 1986 seemed little more than a recognition of verities Wilson had set out seventy years earlier. Whatever his illusions as to the ease with which “right-minded men” might come to agreement, Wilson was the first world leader to respect the power of nationalism and to try to channel its great strength in the direction of democracy and international cooperation, beginning in Central and Eastern Europe but incorporating the rest of the world thereafter.

But this is not a book simply about American foreign policy told from the perspective of American actors. A principal reason that American liberal democratic internationalism had such an effect on world politics takes us from a study of the history of this country’s foreign policy to the study of the evolution of political affairs worldwide. Since the late eighteenth century—beginning with the industrial, American, and French revolutions—a growing demand for popular sovereignty linked to the growth of nationalism has spread around the world. By its very nature, the demand challenged the traditional basis of authoritarian government, necessitating the development of new structures of mass participation through political parties and new modes of organizing power within the government that had never been seen. Correspondingly, the growth of nationalism took on international significance as states beheld the expanding capacities for action of early modernizers and sought to duplicate them, or as political movements within various countries began to recognize a common identity with the values and interests of parties and ideologies abroad.

By the early nineteenth century, this modern political consciousness had moved from Western Europe and North America to Latin America. Well before the end of that century, it had spread to Eastern Europe (including Russia), Turkey, Japan, and China. As it moved, the spirit of nationalism with its demands for popular sovereignty profoundly troubled international as well as domestic political stability.

Seen from this perspective, World War I was not only about how to handle the growth of German power in Europe; it was also about the proper organization of the state in an era of nationalism and the basis for a stable international order in the aftermath of the demise of so many authoritarian monarchies. Traditions of party government were weak to nonexistent in the regions left stateless by the collapse of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires, and a shift in the relative power of states was accompanied during the interwar years by an ideological crisis unprecedented since the Reformation as communists, fascists, and democrats struggled with one another and against authoritarian holdouts to determine the fate of Europe.

Viewed from the vantage point of the international history of the twentieth century, American foreign policy was in keeping with the forces of the times as it sought to promote U.S. national security by encouraging like-minded democratic states to come into existence throughout the world. Nevertheless, much the same dilemma continued after World War II, despite fascism’s defeat, as had occurred after World War I, despite the fall of three empires: class, ethnic, and interstate violence substantially intensified in those parts of the world where a stable modern state had not yet appeared. Now, however, the rising tide of nationalist demands were most evident outside Europe, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where debates over the proper organization of the state took on a new sharpness. In these circumstances, the cold war was not simply a bipolar conflict between Moscow and Washington to be studied strictly in terms of bilateral relations or of the systemic characteristics of such a world order; it was also a contest among nationalists within various countries, rivals holding different conceptions of the proper organization of the state who looked to the superpowers for example and support.

Whatever our collective relief at the end of the cold war, it is abundantly clear that the essential challenge of the century has not also ended. Nationalism and the call for an effective state resting on popular sovereignty remain demands that in many parts of the world are not fulfilled. Indeed, in many cases in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, the end of the cold war has exacerbated nationalist conflicts as the political apparatuses that held states in place, largely by military power and secret police nourished by Washington or Moscow, have weakened or disappeared.

The American agenda calling for a world order of democratic states thus needs to be understood not only as an expression of the American national interest conducted with respect to individual countries, but also in the context of nationalist debates about state building in the twentieth century and American efforts to create a comprehensive framework for world order. Since Wilson’s time, the most consistent tradition in American foreign policy with respect to this global change has been the belief that the nation’s security is best protected by the expansion of democracy worldwide. His doctrine of liberal democratic internationalism has not always been predominant. It was notably absent in the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford years, for example, and it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword to the 2012 Edition
• Preface to the 2012 Edition
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER ONE: The United States and the Global Struggle for Democracy
• PART I: Liberal Democratic Internationalism and American Foreign Policy, 1898-1921
• PART II: Liberal Democratic Internationalism, 1933-1947
• PART III: Liberal Democratic Internationalism and the Cold Wan 1947-1977
• PART IV: Liberal Democratic Internationalism and the Cold Wan 1977-1989
• PART V: Liberal Internationalism after the Cold War, 1989-2012
• EPILOGUE: The Irony of American Liberal Internationalism
• APPENDIX: Notes on the Study of the International Origins of Democracy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index