American Foreign Policy
American Exceptionalism and Development
Today: discuss the next two chapters in Fukuyama’s book, and today I hope to have less of me talking, and more of you.
Issue one: American exceptionalism
Americans like to think of themselves as something special. When a candidate says “America is the greatest country on the planet,” many Americans think that is self-evidently true. We value our freedom, our economic prosperity, and way of life. Yet where does that lead?
Benevolent hegemony: Fukuyama is critical of the traditional neo-conservative view of benevolent hegemony. Simply, it rests on two questionable theses: 1) that American interests and the demands of benevolent hegemony are the same; and 2) that the American people are willing to pay the price required for such hegemony.
Note: Johnson would call this American imperialism; Fukuyama even says at the end of the chapter “A deeper problem lies in the fact that Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people.” (A problem for the quest for benevolent hegemony).
Consider: Johnson, Fukuyama and the neo-conservatives are seeing the same thing: an America with global power and global ambitions, with a desire to be hegemonic. Yet they read it very differently. Why?
Possibilities:
1. Views of the task at hand. For Johnson, trying to exert ‘imperial’ control is extremely costly and creates enemies. This will require the US to exert more power to maintain that control, and weaken our republic. For the neo-conservatives such control is not so costly as liberal democracy is proven to be economically superior, and no one can truly challenge American power. Moreover, it also brings about stability in the system which assures continued economic prosperity, strengthening the republic, and preventing it from succumbing to the threats from extremism and terrorism. For Fukuyama, the Republic is more resilient than Johnson thinks (look at the response to the Iraq war), and the neo-conservatives were indeed too naïve in thinking of the scope of the task at hand.
2. View of the reason for using power. For Johnson, large corporate actors and bureaucracies collude to try to expand their power and interests, at the expense of both the American people and foreigners. In short, policy is driven by short term interests of particular groups, not be a rationale to improve the world. For the neo-conservatives, the goal is to expand American values, thereby both stabilizing other parts of the world and bringing them some of the benefits of western society, while helping create a world more conducive to liberal democratic regimes. For Fukuyama, the neo-conservatives are right about their goals (they truly believe this is good), but the analysis of what America actually does and why is more complicated.
3. Views of the threats to the US. We discussed this last time, but Johnson sees no real threat; terrorism is more blowback from past policies than some kind of outside force that simply decided to attack the US. For the neo-conservatives American and western values are being assaulted by either extremists or, as in the case of the Kagan article, authoritarians, and we have to defend our culture and all it has accomplished. For Fukuyama, the threat is real (he doesn’t agree with Johnson), but it gets over-exaggerated, often leading us to actions that undermine our ability to handle the threat.
4. Views of the United States. For Johnson, the American people are being manipulated by politicians and corporations who combine patriotism and fear to create support for policies that undercut the American republic. For the neo-conservatives there seems to be a sense that “Americans like winning” and as long as we can succeed, there will be support. Fukuyama’s perspective seems to be that Americans do have a sense of the national interest, and don’t tolerate much that goes outside of it.
Note as well internal bureaucratic issues: no agreement on what ‘for us or against us’ should mean, no clear doctrine.
One more issue from the chapter: Americanization of globalization (which connects to the next chapter on development). Fukuyama notes the progression:
1. The West, including the US, responded to record economic growth in the fifties and sixties by constructing social welfare systems designed to end poverty and expand the benefits of living in a wealthy society to others.
2. While well-intentioned, this created over-regulation, over-taxation, and inefficiencies. Part of this includes the argument in the development chapter about social engineering. Governments tried to reshape their cultures, and usually cultural change isn’t shaped by governments – or, if they try, the unintended consequences may overcome the desired effects. In any event, by the 70s regulation, increasing labor costs, increasing taxation, and bureaucratic centralization led to economic stagnation.
Note: While I think Fukuyama is mostly right here, note as well the role oil played in bringing this problem to a head. Without the oil crises of 1973-74 and 1979, you might not have gotten the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions.
Great Britain had fallen behind Italy and was in severe disrepair, with a stagnating economy due to heavy regulation high taxes. The government had nationalized numerous industries, creating monopolies that stagnated due to lack of competition. Practices protecting workers kept new technologies out of industries. Thatcher started a privatization campaign, cut taxes, and brought economic liberalization to Great Britain. Two years later Reagan would as well.
This did not cause globalization, though globalization may have helped sustain it. By the mid-eighties new technologies made it easier to communicate, and soon capital was freer than ever. When Mitterrand in France tried to lurch left in 1982, capital flight pushed him to a Thatcher/Reagan style approach. By the end of the eighties, and the end of the cold war, an emphasis on markets, privatization, and if not dismantling, at least reforming/limiting the welfare state created a shift towards what’s now known as neo-liberalism or the Washington Consensus.
For the chapter on exceptionalism: One impact of this is a backlash against the US. As globalization led to borders being less important, American efforts to open markets to investment capital were seen as being an effort to help promote the interests of the American capitalist class. Thus sustenance farming gets replaced by cash crops, sweat shops and malquiladoras arise, NAFTA and ultimately the WTO is created, and the IMF emphasizes conditionality, with a focus on opening markets to outside investment. So when things fall apart as in the Thai and Korean crises, the US is often seen as at fault, and many in the third world start seeing their policies guided by the hand of big money from the US. That is the source of resentment, not just jealousy and certainly not a dislike of our freedoms.
Segue to the chapter on social engineering
Here I think Fukuyama makes one of his strongest arguments about neo-conservatism. They seemed to assume a natural desire for freedom would lead to regime change being the hard part, reconstruction and democratization the easy part.
He correctly notes that this ignores a history of theory about political development. Essentially the problem is this:
1. Certain cultural and political conditions are a necessary precursor to political development/democratization.
Warning light: Mideast the ‘least free,’ across Northern Africa to Iraq, Arab states have a post-Ottoman culture which seems conducive to authoritarianism. That’s a sign that the cultural and political precursors to stable democracy may not be present.
These likely include: a) general societal solidarity and cooperation; b) a willingness to compromise; c) lack of major sectarian and ethnic divides; and d) a relative lack of intense corruption. One thing hurting the Mideast is the curse of resources, that enabled and encouraged existing authoritarians to become corrupt and try to hold on to their gravy train. This stagnated political development.
So Iraq may have been a bad play from the start. But even then:
2. Functional institutions that meet a standard of rule of law and accountability. Institutional development is essential for democratization and even economic development. The thought was that Iraq had some of these, thanks to the Baathist party’s secular nature. But it was less a party state than a Saddam state, and thus the institutional structures were corrupted by their control by the leader.
Outside of Iraq, it’s clear that societies differ in both the cultural and institutional frameworks, and political development is thus hard to achieve.
Historical examples:
1. Has worked better in cases where you have homogeneous societies where economic development has taken place: Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand. The argument: authoritarianism may be useful to get the economic development going, then once they reach a point where the economy is strong, political development can be effective.
Problems: a ) neo-conservatives did not seem to recognize the temporal order here, or else they thought it a result of lack of concern for combating anti-communist authoritarians in the Cold War; and b) There is no clear way to create economic development to get to a level where it can support political development.
2. Horrible results in Africa and the Mideast, where corruption, lack of stable states, and ethnic divisions have undercut institution building, and often do not yield a clear ‘national culture.’ Simply, the Westphalian state hasn’t taken in much of the world, and current notions of both political and economic development require a state to provide the institutional structure to create accountability and rule of law. Instead you get personalized regimes, governments that are ‘kleptocracies’ and aid misused. You can’t buy these states development because their problem isn’t lack of money: oil rich states have avoided true economic and political development despite oil revenues.
So we need to approach development differently. In the past, the Washington Consensus has emphasized the power of markets to do this, but in corrupt places markets themselves are corrupted. The line between ‘big money’ and ‘government’ gets blurred. Thus market approaches simply don’t work, corruption, fraud and waste eats them completely.
So how do we approach development?
Fukuyama notes a few points: a) good governance more important than democracy (even hard core authoritarians talk the democratic talk). Look to build institutions and promote accountability even in non-democratic societies; b) problem solve pragmatically; note how health concerns and the like have had the most progress. These are pragmatic issues, life is better if you don’t have lots of people with guinea worm, or if malaria nets are common. Rather than aiming for massive change, aim to make numerous small differences; and c) use soft power institutions as well as military power.
Note: the notion that democracy and our ideas of freedom is natural is really unpersuasive. It took us a long time and centuries of arguing and fighting in the West to get the imperfect system we have.
Class group discussion:
Question: You are part of a foreign policy elite team designed to give the incoming President advice on how to deal with development. President-elect does not want just a plan to figure out how best to promote third world development, but also wants one that the American people can support. Obviously, that limits a lot of what can be done. The President wants you to distinguish between political and economic development, think critically about the goals and means, and figure out how important this should be in future foreign policy decisions. Go at it!