Foundations of the American Century

by Inderjeet Parmar

  A recent academic study of the Nairobi WSF concludes that WSF operates less like the leading force behind a counterhegemonic project opposed to neoliberalism and more like a source of entertainment—a “court jester” rather than a “postmodern” prince. In developing ever closer links with organizations at the very heart of neoliberal globalization, WSF has been co-opted by the very forces it was established to displace.40 Gramscians argue that the major states, global corporations, philanthropies, and other forces are a “nascent historic bloc” that develop policy and “propagate the ideology of globalization” even within organizations that are promoted as alternatives to it.41

  Attention now turns to the intellectual underpinnings of the political counterpart to corporate globalization—the promotion of market democracies by the United States in the post-Soviet era.

  DEMOCRATIC PEACE THEORY: A NEW RATIONALE FOR AMERICAN POWER

  “Democratic peace” is the underlying theoretical basis of the foreign and national security policies of President Barack Obama (as it was of his defeated Republican rival, Senator John McCain). Democratic president Bill Clinton championed “democratic enlargement” and “democratic engagement” in the 1990s, and promoting freedom and democracy was pivotal to the Bush Doctrine.42

  This section demonstrates the significance of foundation-funded knowledge networks to the rise of DPT from a relatively obscure theory of social science to a broadly accepted basis of national policy. Of course, no claim is made suggesting that foundation networks alone translated such ideas into policy; the intellectual space opened up by the end of the Cold War played a key role, as did 9/11, in such developments. But in an uncertain post–Cold War world, the social-scientific “certainties” promised by DPT proved decisive. The fact that there was support for DPT from across the political spectrum made its adoption more likely. Without DPT—which could operate either unilaterally or multilaterally, peacefully or coercively—U.S. foreign policy might not have a concept that could cohere its identity or supply it a “value-free,” “scientific” post–Soviet era rationale. From the intellectual straitjacket of Cold War containment mentalities, in which almost anything could be justified if it diminished Soviet influence, DPT offered a scientifically proven and easily comprehended “law” of international behavior.

  DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRATIC PEACE THEORY

  Democratic peace theory provides democracy promotion with intellectual legitimacy; it has gained widespread acceptance in the academic community and spawned a productive “research program.”43 Going even further, Jack Levy (in his Carnegie Corporation–funded study) calls DPT the only “empirical law” of international relations.44

  Below are explored the origins, development, and rise to scientific law and established political practice of DPT, initially by the Ford (and, later, MacArthur) Foundation–funded scholar Michael Doyle, in the 1980s, which led to significant theoretical reorientations among liberal internationalist scholars in the American political scientific and international relations (IR) community as well as to the “democratic engagement” orientations of the second Clinton administration (1997–2001). The second, though overlapping, line of development encompasses the work of Larry Diamond, the Hoover Institution scholar closely associated with the Democrats’ Progressive Policy Institute, the “democratic enlargement” agenda of the first Clinton administration, and the Council of the Community of Democracies.

  Though traceable back to Immanuel Kant, it was Michael Doyle in three articles in 1983 and 1986 who placed the issue firmly back on the academic agenda. This was in part done with funding from the Ford Foundation from 1979 to 1982.45 Ford allotted $409,735, for a three-year period, to the overall project, “Support for Research on the Future of the International Economic Order,”46 of which $90,000 was granted to Doyle and Miles Kahler, for a three-year study on global North-South economic relations. The project included an examination of the influence of ideology on international economic relations. Doyle was also interested in testing “a number of theories of foreign policy that posit regular connections between state and society, interest and ideology, tradition and contemporary response, and systemic position and economic strategy.” The project emphasized the increasing levels of economic differentiation among Third World states. When the more developed Third World states—“the Kenyas, Ivory Coasts, and Taiwans”—liberalized, they would begin to form a “party of liberty.”47 The seeds of Doyle’s subsequent work on the “liberal peace” are present in his Ford-funded project. The “party of liberty” on the world stage has reappeared as the Concert of Democracies. Of course, there are other important sources of Doyle’s ideas on DPT and of their subsequent impact. For example, it is vital to recognize that Doyle’s initial overt foray into DPT was “serendipitous”—the need to address a student meeting at short notice. It is also evident, however, that bringing the ideas to publication required space and time, for which Doyle graciously expressed his appreciation to the Ford Foundation. For his later work on the matter, Doyle acknowledges his debt to the MacArthur Foundation.48

  Ahead of Doyle’s 1983 article, however, President Ronald Reagan had declared the inherently “peaceful” character of “liberal foreign policies” in a speech in London in 1982 and, later, established the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to promote democracy. The birth or modern rebirth of “liberal peace theory” in its sophisticated sense was Doyle’s work, yet it also coincided with the Reagan administration’s aggressive anticommunism, providing an ominous warning about the uses of academic theories by policy makers, as Doyle himself had cautioned.49 Of course, Doyle’s DPT contained an appreciation of the “liberal peace” as well as a critique of “liberal imperialism.” Successive American presidents have taken aspects of DPT and used them for purposes unintended by its original authors. Undeniably, however, Doyle’s theory was located within a broadly liberal framework that emphasized the idea that free markets were also sources of world peace, echoing Reagan’s economic liberalism.50

  LARRY DIAMOND AND THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION

  Diamond, a liberal hawk, is a key figure in the migration of DPT from academia to policy makers. An academic at Stanford, he has co-edited NED’s Journal of Democracy since 1990, was closely associated with the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) of the Democratic Party, and contributed an important study on democracy promotion to a Carnegie Commission in 1995. A leading member of the Council of the Community of Democracies, Diamond served the Bush administration in Iraq as a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority (January to April 2004).

  Diamond introduced DPT to the PPI and the Clinton administration. Diamond’s PPI Policy Report, An American Foreign Policy for Democracy, enunciated the basic principles of DPT and extended the peace thesis to argue that democracies are more reliable as trading partners, offer more stable “climates for investment [and] honor international treaties.” Welcoming the end of the Cold War, Diamond urged the United States to seize the opportunity “to reshape the world” and transform attachment to global “order and stability” into openness to reshaping national sovereignty to enable American interventions abroad. Diamond emphasized America’s “scope to shape the political character of the entire world for generations to come.”51 Linking idealism with realism, Diamond claims that America’s own security is protected by democratizing other nations, providing a strategically compelling reason to make democracy America’s mission. Indeed, Diamond argues that democracy promotion offered a viable alternative to President George H. W. Bush’s “New World Order,” which, Diamond argues, was obsessed “with order, stability, and ‘balance of power’—often at the expense of freedom and self-determination.” Finally, Diamond argued that the United States should form a new “association of democratic nations” to mobilize rapid “action on behalf of democracy.”52

  Diamond’s unique contribution was to introduce DPT to Clintonite thinking. The PPI helped harness academic ideas to Clinton, as shown by Clinton’s speech in December 1
991, which paraphrased Diamond’s report. For example, Clinton noted President Bush’s attachment to “political stability… over a coherent policy of promoting freedom, democracy and economic growth.” Democracy does not merely reflect our “deepest values… [it] is vital to our national interests.” But even more than Diamond, Clinton stressed the dangers of the “new security environment” in which to build on “freedom’s victory in the Cold War.”53

  Clinton more sharply “securitized” DPT, dividing the world into democratic and autocratic zones, the latter being a new threat to the former.54 As Buger and Villumsen argue, “creating the certainty of democratic peace… increased the uncertainty about the relations between democratic and non-democratic states… thinking in terms of a zone of democratic peace also created a vision of a ‘zone of turmoil.’”55 Clinton’s national security adviser, Tony Lake, noted in 1993 that Americans should now “visualize our security mission as promoting the enlargement of the ‘blue areas’ [of the world] of market democracies.”56 Lake, who proclaimed Clinton’s foreign policy as “pragmatic neo-Wilsonianism,”57 overtly promoted enlargement as “the successor to a doctrine of containment,” the substitution of a defensive concept for an active and expansionist one.58 In the same securitizing vein, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot noted that America operated in “the new geopolitics: defending democracy in the post–cold war era.”59 To Joseph Kruzel, DPT provided a preemptive strategy for national security, eliminating threats “by turning a country into a democracy.”60

  Note, however, that DPT needed additional ballast if its potential of global transformation was fully to be exploited by U.S. national security managers. As Smith notes,61 democratic transition theory also had a role to play, and Diamond merged the two approaches. The net effect is to argue with “certainty” that not only does democracy guarantee peace but that it is also straightforward for states to transition toward it rapidly. Diamond’s theoretical synthesis is exemplified in his work for Carnegie’s Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. In Promoting Democracy in the 1990s, Diamond suggested that democratic transitions need not be hamstrung by historic or “societal pre-conditions.” He argued that “the precarious balance of political and social forces in many newly democratic and transitional countries” provided “international actors… real scope to influence the course of political development.” Using the language of security, Diamond suggested that democratic states prioritize democratic transitions in countries of “importance… to their own security and to regional and global security,” selecting countries for transition that could “serve as a… ‘beachhead’ for democratic development.”62

  The Clinton administrations worked actively to construct a “Community of Democracies” along the lines indicated in Diamond’s PPI Report. Championed by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a Council for the Community of Democracies (CCD) was founded in 2000, in Warsaw. The CCD’s formation may be viewed as the continuation of a process of dividing the world into zones of democratic peace, of transition/turbulence, and the rest—and of increasingly hardening the boundaries as a precursor to greater pressure on some powers to democratize. The CCD was especially interested in engaging with nations that were in danger of backsliding on democracy during the “turbulent transition” that had been identified by Mansfield and Snyder.63 As a result, CCD developed a number of regional groupings of democracies and a Democracy Caucus at the United Nations. It is very much an American enterprise funded from numerous sources, including the U.S. Department of State and the Rockefeller Foundation.64

  The coincidence of the Cold War’s end with the rise of Bill Clinton’s presidential ambitions presented an opportunity for DPT—via scholar-activists like Diamond—to go straight from opposition platforms to policy-making circles. In its migration from academia to the state, however, DPT became militarized: words like “threat,” “national security,” “zones of peace,” and “zones of turmoil” became increasingly associated with “peace” theory. DPT was transformed into political technology, establishing “certainty” among policy makers looking for fresh orientations and a higher moral purpose for American power.65

  HARVARD AND THE DEMOCRATIC PEACE

  If Diamond was a critical link to the Clinton administration at its formative stage, Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs was crucial to DPT’s “maturation” and legitimacy. Belfer’s policy-oriented journal, International Security, despite (or perhaps in defense of) its realist leanings, played a key role in elaborating DPT by publishing a series of articles, followed by a “reader” in 1996. Specializing in policy-relevant articles,66 Maliniak et al. note that International Security is one of the twelve leading journals in the field and that security-studies specialists are the keenest of IR scholars “to engage the policy community,” with 30 to 60 percent of articles addressing policy issues, in contrast with 10 to 20 percent of such articles in other IR journals. International Security has consistently been among the top five most cited IR journals.67

  The 1996 “reader” was partly funded by support from the Carnegie Corporation,68 and the Belfer Center has long received support from the Ford Foundation.69 Belfer, part of the Kennedy School of Government, funded by the Kennedy family, turned its attention to the “lessons of Vietnam” in the late 1960s, examining the misuses of history and historical analogies by national security managers.70 Belfer continues to enjoy linkages with the major foundations. For instance, David Hamburg, a former president of CC, is a member of Belfer’s International Council. In 1997, the Carnegie Corporation granted $700,000 to the Belfer Center for work on “new concepts of international security and formulating policy recommendations.” CC emphasized the work of the center in identifying the “conditions favorable to the ‘democratic peace’ hypothesis… whether U.S. foreign policy should seek to promote democracy… [and] the hypothesis that many democratizing states undergo a volatile transition in which they tend to be relatively more likely to engage in war.”71 The center’s advisers and fellows also include Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank and former deputy secretary of state; William Perry, Clinton’s secretary of defense; Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board (1979–1987); the historian Niall Ferguson; and General John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command. More recently, Paula Dobriansky, the Bush administration’s undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, joined Belfer as a senior fellow. With over one hundred scholars and practitioners from the worlds of business, government, and the military, Belfer is a university-based think tank; its principal aim is to “advance policy-relevant knowledge.”72

  Promoting democracy occupied a key place in the pages of International Security in the 1990s, especially because President Clinton “was an explicit believer in the democratic peace hypothesis.”73 The complementarity of theory and practice were made clear in Debating the Democratic Peace: “the question of the democratic peace also has practical significance. If democracies never go to war with one another, then the best prescription for international peace may be to encourage the spread of democracy…. The spread of democracy would reduce the likelihood of threats to the United States and expand the democratic zone of peace.” However, the editors warn, the theory, if wrong, could lead the United States into “major wars and years of occupation.”74

  It was also in International Security that Snyder and Mansfield strengthened DPT and dampened the Clinton administration’s ardor for democracy promotion.75 Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott indicated his familiarity with debates in International Security over the democratic peace and specifically of Mansfield and Snyder’s article.76 In their article, Mansfield and Snyder noted that democratizing states are more likely to go to war than mature democracies, especially in the first decade, because old elites mobilize nationalist appeals to compete in the democratic regime, which, in turn, reinforces new elites’ own nationalistic rhetoric, making it even more difficult to control newly mobilized publics. Should the fledgling
democracy collapse, the returned autocracy is likely to wage war. The lack of durable stabilizing institutions in new democracies make it difficult to form stable coalitions and policy coherence. Mansfield and Snyder suggest that the West help promote pluralism through long-term engagement, minimizing the “dangers of the turbulent transition.”77 Their article was originally published in Foreign Affairs (May–June 1995) before its publication in International Security in its summer 1995 issue. This may well have been its principal route to the Clinton administration, which, as we know, switched from democracy promotion to democratic engagement in the late 1990s.

  In a number of subsequent writings, Mansfield and Snyder developed their arguments along the above lines. They published From Voting to Violence in 2000, funded in part by the Ford and Carnegie foundations, and Electing to Fight in 2005, supported by Hoover and Belfer. In these and other works, Mansfield and Snyder argued for concrete steps to encourage the development of the rule of law, a neutral civil service, civil rights, and professional media ahead of the holding of elections in would-be democracies.78 The emphasis had shifted from immediate democracy to the building of the institutional bases of stability. In 2005, criticizing the Bush administration’s crude interpretation of the possibilities of DPT, Mansfield and Snyder implicitly complimented the Clinton administration’s nuanced approach.79 The authors argued that for democracy to succeed, it was necessary that such states go through sequenced development of the preconditional bases of democracy. This is arguably the more nuanced approach pursued by the Obama administration.80 Mansfield and Snyder’s work has not rejected DPT; more accurately, they have developed it along “realist” lines so as to make its implementation more effective.81

  Clearly, DPT became influential only after the Cold War—principally with the Clinton administration—and only after it had been legitimized by policy-oriented elite knowledge institutions. In the process of moving from academic theory to foreign policy, however, the “peace” theory was “securitized.”