Rhetoric or Reality Exporting Democracy to the Middle East

Focuses on the promotion of democracy to the Middle East. Capacity of the U.S. to promote democracy in the Middle East; Discussion on the claim that spreading democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is influenced by rhetorical flourish designed to impress American audiences; Assumption that the American brand of democracy is at a high price. From the EPIIC Symposium at Tufts University, February 2004

The Empire Writes Back (to Michael Ignatieff)

This article critiques the re-legitimisation of empire evident in recent writing by Michael Ignatieff. It begins by locating his work within the larger debate on empire emerging today. Focusing first on Ignatieff's more general comments on empire, it suggests that his defensive case for empire is misleading: it ignores the extent to which the circumstances allegedly necessitating `new' empire are themselves a consequence of older empire, and indeed older US empire. Focusing next on Ignatieff's largely consequentialist case for the 2003 attack on Iraq, it argues that the `success' of the imperial project — to the extent that this requires the cooperation of Iraqis — will depend crucially on the motives of the imperialists. Without engaging directly with Ignatieff's work, the final section addresses some of the questions that the foregoing critique may have raised. In particular, it examines critically the claim that empires are legitimised by the public goods they provide

More than just a Single Market: European integration, peace and security in the 1980s

Economics was central to Europe’s problems in the early 1980s and its successes after 1985. But to view the European Community solely in this manner disregards the enduring importance of the quest for European peace. European leaders used the integration process as a mechanism to influence East–West relations and the Middle East. Peace rhetoric and symbolism sustained the core Franco-German partnership. European integration was crucial to the continent’s ability to peacefully absorb a huge shock in the form of German unification. And the Community’s role in exporting democracy, first to southern Europe, then to Eastern Europe, confirmed that integration was about more than just the Single Market

Back to the future? The limits of neo-Wilsonian ideals of exporting democracy

International state-building has become central to international policy concerns and has marked a clear neo-Wilsonian shift in international thinking, spurred by the leadership of the United States and the European Union. Today's approaches insist on the regulatory role of international institutions and downplay the importance of locally-derived political solutions. This privileging of 'governance' over 'government' is based on the assumption that the political process can be externally influenced through the promotion of institutional changes introduced at the state level and pays less attention to how societal pressures and demands are constitutive of stable and legitimate institutional mechanisms. This article questions this approach and analyses the transformation in the assessment of the importance of the societal sphere. It considers how this shift has been shaped by current understandings of war and conflict, and how the prioritisation of governance has fitted with critical and post-positivist trends in academic thinking in international relations and security studies. The discussion is illustrated with examples drawn largely from the Balkans and the international regime in Bosnia-Herzegovina in particular

Democracy: History of a Crisis Without End

Over the last years it has been increasingly discussed about the crisis of democracy, a process that does not only concern the new realities, but also and perhaps more surprisingly the Western world. This crisis of the Western world seems to be at the root of the weakness of the democratic principle and the principles related to it. In particular, the following three seem to be the events of the new millennium that led to the crisis of democracy, intimately connected to the loss of the cultural supremacy of the West, the cradle of democracy: the globalization; the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; the economic crisis that began in 2008, which further weakened the West to the point of pushing the non-Western countries, all aiming at pursuing a health unprecedented material, to favor new political solutions than the classical liberal democracy. Accepting democracy as a concept semantically always open and, therefore, always in crisis, is the challenge awaiting the community of political scientists

Exporting Ideology: Trade with China and Indices of Democracy

China’s practice of employing business sanctions to silence companies and individuals speaking out in favor of the Hong Kong protests has sparked concern among democracy and free speech advocates. This recent phenomenon, combined with Dwight Eisenhower’s rhetoric of “exporting democracy,” prompts the question: if the USA has engaged in policies aimed towards exporting democracy, could China also export autocracy? This paper uses panel data for 180 countries across 22 years (1996-2018) to examine the effect of a country’s trade with China as a proportion of its total trade on common indices of democratic freedom from the World Bank Group, Transparency International, and the Heritage Foundation. I find that the effects of trade with China are largely insignificant, and if significant are positive, indicating that fears of Chinese autocracy exporting may be somewhat unfounded. My results suggest that ideology exporting may truly be one-way: that is, that trade can make countries more democratic (at differing degrees, depending on starting conditions and the democracy of the trade partner) but not less, and that indices of democracy may be downward sticky

Consolidating empire : the United States in Latin America, 1865-1920

This thesis is a study of the foreign policy of the United States in Latin America from the end of the American Civil War in 1865, until the close of the peace negations to end the First World War. It contends that Woodrow Wilson refined the policies and strategies of his predecessors to maintain and extend American influence in Latin America. Wilson employed both formal methods, such as military interventions, and informal methods, such as treaties and trade agreements, to insure American dominance in the hemisphere. The thesis contends that Wilson’s prime motivation was the spread of constitutional democracy. Wilson’s vision of ideal democratic institutions was informed by his racism. His belief in the inferiority of non-whites allowed him to reconcile his policies of defending and exporting “democracy” when millions of African-Americans and women were denied the franchise and other basic rights in the United States. Wilson’s most important contribution to the foreign policy of the United States was the introduction of the insistence on democratic institutions

Winning the Long Game: Transforming Enemies Into Allies

The complexity of globalization and how it impacts U.S. national security combined with the political need to create policies easy for the general public to understand have caused U.S. politicians to rely heavily on sanctions and the military as instruments of foreign policy. This thesis discusses the negative impacts of these policies, and presents alternatives, using case studies of post-World War II Germany and Japan, post-2003 invasion Iraq, the development of South Korea, and the emergence of China. It applies the lessons learned to Iran and North Korea in an effort to identify a more moderate path to liberal democracy for both countries