A 1980 passage by Mihajlo Mihajlov, the Yugoslav dissident, beautifully captures Joshua Muravchik's spirit in Exporting Democracy: "Whole peoples from other countries can say, Our homeland is Germany, Russian, or whatever; only Americans can say, My homeland is freedom." Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, argues that democracy is the key American political idea; and that promoting it worldwide (to quote the subtitle) fulfills America's destiny.
As these points suggest, Exporting Democracy is not a modest book. Economium, polemic, call to arms, it tackles a topic no less than America's place in the world. It succeeds brilliantly. The conviction is intense, the insights dazzling, and the argument compelling. This reviewer found his doubts - that the democratic ideal cannot carry so heavy a load - nearly all refuted.
Interestingly, the author spends little time justifying the superiority of democracy; rather, he asserts it to be the political program most naturally and universally adapted to human nature. He does point to a deep irony: "Other ideologies promise happiness; democracy promises only the freedom to pursue happiness" - yet only the latter consistently delivers. It has other blessings too, including the near-miraculous fact that democracies almost never make war on each other. (The one apparent exception to this rule, Finland's declaration of war on Great Britain in 1941, hardly counts, for the two were dragged in by their German and Soviet allies; further, Finns and Britons did not actually fight each other.)
Actually, Muravchik uses the term democracy to mean something more than honest, open, and competitive elections. He also includes unfettered political discourse in the term; in other words, democracy for him is liberal democracy.
A three-fold assumption lies behind the notion of "exporting democracy": that democracy in some fashion belongs to Americans; that it can be exported; and that other peoples want it. Muravchik convincingly establishes each of these points.
First, democracy does belong to Americans in the sense that virtually every country that democratizes draws extensively on the American experience. Two men who fought in the American War of Independence, the Marquis de Lafayette of France and Thaddeus Kosciuszko of Poland, carried the democratic ideal back to their native countries, with great consequences. William Cobbett brought American ideas to Britain in the 1820s, as did C. M. Falsen to Norway a few years earlier. (Falsen, known as the father of the Norwegian constitution, named his son George Benjamin, after Washington and Franklin.)
Similarly, democrats in Belgium, Switzerland, Hungary, and Germany took their lead from the American experience. In nineteenth-century Latin America, just about every democratic constitution copied parts of the U.S. original. Jumping to the present, Eastern Europeans in 1989 looked to the United States for inspiration. One anecdote, from a general strike in Prague late that year, brings this point home with poignancy: "Soon after the strike began today, Zdeněk Janíček, a brewery worker, rose on a platform in grimy overalls and began to speak. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident," he said, "that all men are created equal ... '"
Second, democracy can be exported. Americans have exported democracy to many countries, including Nicaragua, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Austria, Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Panama. Although not every case was a complete success, the record is spectacular, and completely unmatched by any other occupying power. Creating democracy in Japan was especially noteworthy - "one of history's greatest and most constructive feats of social engineering" - given the advanced condition of the country and the weakness of democratic antecedents. In short, however illogical it sounds, democracy can be imposed at the point of a bayonet. Even more striking, the author concludes from his survey of American intelligence agencies that "covert action has probably more often served to advance democracy than to retard it."
As for others wanting democracy, Muravchik traces its steady expansion from its birth in the United States to the present. When the modern version of democracy first emerged in 1776, less than a million individuals enjoyed its benefits. Today, some two billion individuals partake - or two thousand times as many. (The world population has gone up only six times in this period.) Looked at fifty-year intervals, the picture is consistent: in 1800, there was but one full democracy, the United States; in 1850, it was joined by Belgium and Switzerland; in 1900, England and France rated democratic; in 1950, all of Western Europe but Iberia were democratic, as were Japan, India, Israel, Lebanon, and the former British colonists. Nine years short of 2000, democracy has spread to most of Eastern Europe, Latin America, many Pacific Islands, and much of East Asia. According to Freedom House, some 39 percent of the world's population today lives in democracies, an all-time high.
Muravchik's policy conclusions are not hard to guess. A self-described democratic internationalist, he sees benefit in democracy both for American interests ("What is good for democracy is good for America") and for foreign peoples. Politicians should make promotion of democracy the central theme of U.S. foreign policy. More: the American president "should see himself not merely as custodian of the country, but as the leader of the democratic movement."
The author is an activist: when the opportunity presents itself to build democracy, he hopes Washington will carpe diem. In Iraq and Kuwait, for example, he feels that the U.S. government should have moved in to impose democracy.
The Soviet Union has a special place. Democratic ideas won the Cold War for America and now "the opportunity of a lifetime" exists to take advantage of weakened structures and decayed will in that country to democratize. This he deems "by far the highest goal of U.S. foreign policy." To miss the chance for basic change would be "unforgivable." To achieve it would point to the twenty-first century as the true American century (Muravchik concedes the one just finishing to totalitarians). America's century means not that its power or institutions dominate, but that its ideals have spread across the globe. Of course, implicit to this is the realization that America itself will forfeit its special qualities, becoming just one country among others. To this prospect, Muravchik wisely comments, "Decline should ever be so sweet."
