There has been talk (encouraged by Josh Marshall’s article in The Hill) about the differences between postwar reconstruction of Germany and Japan and the possibility of rehabilitating Iraq as a democracy. Joseph Nye’s piece in the Globe today, for instance, argues that “conditions in the Middle East today are not like Germany and Japan in 1945. Both of those countries had large middle classes, prior experience with democracy, and a prolonged and largely unopposed American military presence.” A true enough statement as is, but it seems to me to miss a larger point: the lack of middle class is just one index of the Middle East’s lack of previous, substantial experience with industrial capitalism. Even if contemporaries had real doubts that Germany or Japan would ever be functioning de-militarized, democracies, in retrospect it’s clear that they were both able to sublimate political nationalism to economic nationalism. (And did so in no small part because U.S. aid was able to fix the massive gap between economic potential and performance caused by the war’s destruction.) Iraq, on the other hand, still thrives on a combination of low-productivity agricultural exports and reliance on oil. Here I agree with Thomas Friedman: the track record of oil-rich countries in establishing democratic governance is not good. Whereas industrial capitalism (in general) encourages the things we lump under the notion of democracy (integrity of the law, citizens rights, representative government) because, ideology aside, not having these things has a clear economic cost, oil capitalism simply encourages a system in which local elites carve out the spoils of a valuable resource. (It’s worth noting too, the savage disruption and terror even unleashed by diamond and oil profits in Central and West Africa). The situation is a rebuke of some of the left’s analysis - the problem after all is not capitalism proper but a failed capitalism of what Marx calls “primitive accumulation” - at the same time as it’s an indictment of American (and the West’s) neo-imperialist policy that we actively support oil regimes politically and economically because of our need for oil.
All told, I don’t see how the Bush administration is going to set up the economic base necessary for democratic transformation. As conservatives, they can’t have much stomach for central planning and economic engineering, even if they might be more willing to try it in someone else’s country. And I still suspect they will be happy if a geopolitical threat is out of the way and a puppet state is in place. But even if sincere, there’s the larger problem of nation-building. Do we or anyone else even know how to do it? But I’ll have to think about that and tackle it more later.
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