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Introduction:
From East-West to North-South: US
intervention in the "new world
order"
In any society the dominant groups are the ones with the most to hide
about the way society works. Very often therefore truthful analyses
are bound to have a critical ring, to seem like exposures rather than
objective statements... For all students of human society sympathy
with the victims of historical processes and skepticism about the
victors' claims provide essential safeguards against being taken in by
the dominant mythology. A scholar who tries to be objective needs
these feeling sas part of his working equipment.
--
Barrington Moore [1]
"We have 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its
population ... In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy
and resentment," noted George Kennan in 1948. "Our real task in the
coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will allow
us to maintain this position of disparity," said the then Director of
Policy Planning of the Department of State. "We should cease to talk
about the raising of the living standards, human rights, and
democratization.
The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in
straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic
slogans, the better."2
Kennan's candid statement emphasizes that the strategic objective of
US foreign policy during the Cold War was less battling a "communist
menace" than defending the tremendous privilege and power this
global disparity of wealth brought it as the dominant world power,
and suggests that democracy abroad was not a major consideration for
the United States in the formative years of the post-World War II
order.
In contrast, four decades later, Carl Gershman, the president of the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a new US foreign policy
agency created in 1983,admonished: "In a world of advanced communication
and exploding knowledge, it is no longer possible to rely
solely on force to promote stability and defend the national security.
Persuasion is increasingly important, and the United States must
enhance its capacity to persuade by developing techniques for reaching
people at many different levels." Gershman went on to stress that
"democracy" abroad, should be a major consideration for the United
States, in its effort to "enhance its capacity to persuade" around the
world.3
The East-West prism in which Kennan and his generation had cast
the North-South divide evaporated with the end of the Cold War. Yet,
as Gershman's statement suggests, the fundamental objective of
defense of privilege in an unjust international system did not change·
with the collapse of the Soviet system. What has changed are the
strategies for securing this objective. What I term the "new political
intervention," and the ideological dimensions it entails, has been
developed as an effective instrument of "persuasion," in contrast to (or
more often, alongside) force, to assure "patterns of relationships" that
protect US interests.
The shift from "straight power concepts" to "persuasion" has been
predicated on a new component in US foreign policy: what policymakers
call the "promotion of democracy." The end of the Cold War
has opened up new possibilities. Mass movements striving for
democratization
and social change have proliferated at this time of momentous
political changes, accompanying disruption, restructuring and
even the complete collapse of national and regional economies. From
Nicaragua to the Philippines, from Haiti to Eastern Europe, Southern
Africa, and the Middle East, diverse forces battle to reshape political
and economic structures as a "new world order" emerges. Under the
rubric of "promoting democracy," the United States has intervened in
the crises, transitions and power vacuums resulting from the breakup
of the old order to try to gain influence over their outcome. These
interventions are those newfound "techniques for reaching people at
many different levels" to which Gershman refers.
Origins and scope of this study
This book analyzes "democracy promotion" in relation to hegemony
and the intersection of politics and economics in the emergent global
society and twenty-first-century world order.4 It grew out of an earlier
study of the massive, largely covert US program of intervention in the
1990 Nicaraguan elections.s Several years of investigative research
convinced me that what had taken place in Nicaragua was a blueprint
of worldwide patterns and much broader changes in US foreign policy.
Over the course of the investigation, I turned from the empirical
evidence to theorization, weaving together several bodies of literature
- among them, studies in foreign policy and democratization literature
(mostly from political science), the sociology of development
(particularly,
world-system/ dependency and modernization schools), and the
multidisciplinary field of international relations - and some central
concerns of political sociology, among them, the state, social class,
power, and ideology. The disciplinary tool which underlies and
connects these disparate strands is the application of political economy
to sociological phenomena, and the meta-theoretical framework,
historical
materialism, which remains, in my view, the most fundamental
instrument of social science research, unsurpassed in its explanatory
and predictive powers, in its ability to generate "conceptualleaps" and
to recombine elements of the social universe into a dialectic, holistic,
and coherent picture.
We are living in a time of transition from one major epoch to
another; we stand at a great historic crossroad, the fourth in modem
world history. The first epoch opened in 1492, when the "modern
world, system" was born, along with the division of the globe into
haves and have nots. What was "discovered" in that year was not the
Americas, but universal human history and the world as one totality.
The second was ushered in with the great bourgeois revolutions of the
eighteenth century. The third began with the Soviet revolution of 1917,
which triggered a set of global tensions that dominated much of the
twentieth century. What was defeated with the collapse of the Soviet
system was not socialism as an ideal-type of society, or as a human
aspiration, but one particular model and the first experiment. We are
now at the threshold of a new era. A transition implies that things are
changing fundamentally. Yet the direction of that change, as well as
the outcome of the transition, is still in dispute. And it is certainly
not
"the end of history." The end of the twentieth and the beginning of the
twenty-first century is a particularly strategic moment for humankind;
the profound changes now underway, and the correlation of forces
that emerges in this period, will determine the contours of the
emergent twenty-first-eentury global society.
There are two interrelated, defining features of our epoch: the shift in
the locus of world tensions from East-West to North-South, and the
emergence of a truly global economy. The emergence of a global
economy brings with it the material basis for the emergence of a single
global society, including the transnationalization of civil society and
of
political processes. The old units of analysis - nation-states - are
increasingly inappropriate for understanding the dynamics of our
epoch, not only in terms of economic processes, but also social
relations
and political systems. Much has been written on the global economy,
yet research into the transnationalization of political processes and of
civil society has lagged behind. Among several notable exceptions are
the pathbreaking works of Robert Cox, Stephen Gill and other scholars
who have begun to develop a Gramscian model for analyzing international
relations in the age of globalization, and whose contributions I
have drawn from and build on in this study.
Within this framework, this study has a dual purpose. The first is to
analyze and explain a specific phenomenon - "democracy promotion"
in US foreign policy. The second is to show how this phenomenon is
linked to the process of globalization and to explort>crucial political
dimensions of globalization. I see "democracy promotion" as inextricably
linked to globalization. "Democracy promotion" in US foreign
policy can only be understood as part of a broader process of the
exercise of hegemony within and between countries in the context of
transnationalization. Polyarchy, or what I alternatively refer to as
"low-intensity democracy," is a structural feature of the new world
order: it is a global political system corresponding to a global economy
under the hegemony of a transnational elite which is the agent of
transnational capital. My objective is to document the specific
phenomenon
of "democracy promotion" as a US policy change that emerged
in the 1980s, and to give that change a novel theoretical explanation.
US policymakers have characterized "democracy promotion" as the
new "cornerstone" in foreign policy. As such, this policy merits serious
analytical and theoretical attention by scholars. However, the existing
literature is remarkably inadequate. There is a huge (and still growing)
body of literature on democratization in the Third World, but the focus
here is on endogenous political processes, not US interaction with
those processes. Most of the literature that does exist on the US policy
of "democracy promotion" has come from the policymaking community.
6 A handful of academic volumes have reviewed dimensions of
"democracy promotion" with little, if any, theorization on the nature of
the shift in policy or the actual policy practice. This literature finds
its
implicit theoretical grounding in structural-functionalist models of
pluralism? Much of this literature is value-laden, and steeped in
implicit assumptions. Whether any social science is value-free (I tend
to think not) is open to debate. It is the implicit assumptions that are
unacceptable, and which I attempt to uncover.
Most explanations attribute this new policy to the evolution of
normative or of practical-conjunctural considerations among
policymakers:
US policymakers have gone through a "learning process" in
selecting the most appropriate policies; with the collapse of the old
Soviet bloc, the United States can now afford to implement its policies
with "softer tools"; the "ideal" of liberal capitalism has reached its
apogee (this argument finds its ultimate expression in Fukuyama's
Hegelian "end of history"), and so on.s While these behavioralist
arguments merit attention, none of them link, through theoretical
discourse, the practical-eonjunctural considerations on the part of
policymakers to broader historical processes, social structure, or
political
economy, which inform foreign policy. Events and outcomes in
the social universe cannot be explained by the intentions of individual
actors or decisions taken on the basis of role perception. Policymakers
are not independent actors. As I discuss in chapter 1, US foreign policy
is not e~plained by specific policy views of individuals, much less by
policy pronouncements by political leaders taken at face value.
Besides, US foreign policy is not to be analyzed on the basis of what
policymakers say they do, but on what they actually do.
Ultimately, to analyze or theorize US foreign policy on the basis of
practical-eonjunctural considerations weighed by policymakers is to
assume that social behavior flows from pre-given subjectivities. To be
sure, analysis of what takes place internal to the immediate
policymaking
community within a state apparatus is. important, and I
operate at that level of analysis throughout much of this study.
However, just as individual existence is grounded in sets of social
relations and material conditions, and these in turn drive political
life,
so too, foreign policy flows from the historical and the structural
conditions under which individual policymakers and governments
operate. The whole point of theory, of social science, is to uncover the
forces and processes at work in the social universe which lie beneath -
indeed, epistemologically speaking, out of the range of - sensory
perceptions. This is the starting point of analysis and of theorization
on
"democracy promotion" in US foreign policy. Behavioral changes
transpire within structural contexts which shape behavioral responses.
Behavioral analysis is therefore structurally contingent and must be
grounded in structural analysis. Below I expound on how these
different levels of analysis are applied and on the methodological
framework through which my alternative argument is developed.
First, however, let me summarize that argument.
Summary of the argument
All over the world, the United States is now promoting its version of
"democracy" as a way to relieve pressure from subordinate groups for
more fundamental political, social and economic change. The impulse
to "promote democracy" is the rearrangement of political systems in
the peripheral and semi-peripheral zones of the "world system" so as
to secure the underlying objective of maintaining essentially
undemocratic
societies inserted into an unjust international system. The promotion
of "low-intensity democracy" is aimed not only at mitigating the
social and political tensions produced by elite-based and undemocratic
status quos, but also at suppressing popular and mass aspirations for
more thoroughgoing democratization of social life in the twenty-firstcentury
international order. Polyarchy is a structural feature of the
emergent global society. Just as "client regimes" and right-wing
dictatorships installed into power or supported by the United States
were characteristic of a whole era of US foreign policy and intervention
abroad in the post-World War II period, promoting "low-intensity
democracies" in the Third World is emerging as a cornerstone of a new
era in US foreign policy.
Stated theoretically:
The emergence of a global economy in the past few decades
presupposes, and provides the material basis for, the emergence of a
global civil and political society. The Gramscian concept of hegemony
as "consensual domination" exercised in civil and political society at
the level of the individual nation (or national society) may be
extended/ applied to the emergent global civil and political society. In
the context of asymmetries in the international political economy, the
United States has exercised its domination in the periphery in the post-
World War II years chiefly through coercive domination, or the
promotion of authoritarian arrangements in the Third World. The
emergence of "democracy promotion" as a new instrument and
orientation in US foreign policy in the 1980s represented the beginnings
of a shift - still underway - in the method through which the core
regions of the capitalist world system exercise their domination over
peripheral and semi-peripheral regions, from coercive to consensual
mechanisms, in the context of emergent transnational configurations.
What is emerging is a new political model of North-South relations for
the twenty-first century.
My approach to this issue involves bold claims which run contrary
to conventional wisdom and mainstream thinking. However, in the
pages that follow, my argument is presented theoretically and then
supported empirically (including by reference to hitherto unpublished
US government documentation obtained thr~gh the Freedom of
Information Act). It is my hope that this study not only generates
debate, but also contributes to the current voluminous research into
globalization by providing elements for an ongoing research agenda
on the crucial political dimensions of globalization. In my view,
scholars have yet to recognize the truly systemic nature of the changes
involved in globalization. One of the objectives of this book is to
sound
an alarm on the need to modify all existing paradigms in light of
globalization, to put out a call for imaginative and forward-looking
"new thinking." Indeed, I am arguing that only through such fresh,
imaginative thinking on globalization and its systemic implications can
"democracypromotion" be properly understood.
Organization and methodology
This book's structure reflects its dual objective: a thorough
explanation
of "democracy promotion" in US foreign policy and at the same
time, an open-ended inquiry into larger theoretical issues in which
"democracy promotion". is rooted. The study links five "conceptual
arenas," integrating the empirical, the analytical, and the theoretical,
and proceeding from greater to lesser levels of abstraction: (1) the
world system or world order, as the "meta-theoretical framework" in
which patterned social relations are conceived (2) the global
economy, as the current stage in the world system (3) an emergent
global polity and civil society, as concomitants of the global economy
(4) changes in US foreign policy, as shifts in the modalities of
domination in an asymmetric international order, in concurrence with
the changes in the world system and the emergence of the global
economy (5) the specific processes and mechanisms in which this
shift is unfolding (for instance, "democracy promotion" operations
conducted through new US foreign-policy instruments, debates and
perceptions among policymakers, and so on). Levels of abstraction
1-3 are structural contexts which require structural analysis. Level 4
straddles structural and behavioral analysis, and level 5 is generally
behavioral analysis.
The methodological model is one of multicausality and the variables
brought into the analysis explain the social phenomena under observation
in a highly interactive (rather than additive) way. In terms of
conceptual method, the relationship between the specific phenomenon
of "democracy promotion" and the more general process of globalization
is recursive. There is a "doubling-back" quality between the
phenomenon to be explained ("democracy promotion") and the
process in which it is embedded (globalization), whereby the result of
a process affects the process that caused it. The etiology of "democracy
promotion" is the historic process of globalization, yet at the same
time it is a transnational practice which helps shape and facilitate
globalization, particularly crucial political dimensions of the process,
such as transnational class formation, the externalization of peripheral
states, and new forms of articulation between the political and the
economic in a global environment. It is these political dimensions of
globalization, less recognized than economic globalization, that I wish
to call attention to, and "democracy promotion" is a phenomenon
(one among many) that signals globalization at the level of political
processes. Such a multicausal model is very different from nonrecursive
models, the latter exhibiting clear distinctions between
"dependent" and "independent" variables. Ultimately, my "independent"
variable is economic globalization, or the emergence of the
global economy. But the specific phenomenon of "democracy promotion"
should not be narrowly conceived as the "dependent variable."
In more traditional language, there is a "base-superstructure" relation
at play. The "base" is the world system, which has entered into a
qualitatively new phase, that of the global economy, in which all
national economies are becoming integrated. The "superstructure" is
the transnationalization of political processes and systems, involving
changes in world politics and international relations. "Democracy
promotion" as a new US policy has emerged as one such reflection of
this superstructural movement. However, caution should be taken in
positing base-superstructure models since they can easily lend
themselves
to mechanical analyses which oversimplify complex interactive
relationships among variables.
The book is divided into three sections. The first, chapters 1 and 2,
presents a theoretical exposition of the underpinnings of the new
political intervention and an analytical framework for understanding
how it operates, respectively. Chapter 1 introduces a Gramscian
framework
for analyzing international relations, takes up the general issue of
globalization, shows how "democracy promotion" is linked recursively
to globalization, and then concludes with a novel theoretical
explanation of "democracy promotion." Chapter 2 documents the
emergence of "democracy promotion" in US foreign policy and
focuses on changes in the US state apparatus to conduct "democracy
promotion."
The next section, chapters 3 through 6, comprises individual case
studies on the Philippines, Chile, Nicaragua, and Haiti, which
operationalize
the theoretical propositions and analytical precepts and
show how "democracy promotion" actually works in practice. In each
of these cases, the United States undertook to "promote democracy" in
the context of larger foreign policy operations. The studies show how,
both covertly and overtly, the United States intervened in mass
movements
for democracy and endogenous democratization processes. This
intervention, through a multiplicity of political, economic, military,
diplomatic, and ideological channels, has helped to shape the contours
of the~e processes, to bring them under US influence, and to determine
outcomes. The level of analysis here is largely practical-conjunctural,
although I demonstrate how events in each country are related to the
broader theoretical issues of globalization.
As the text progresses, the analytical and theoretical "density"
increases from one case study to the next. This is an intentional
"building-block" procedure, so to say. I start by testing the most basic
and broadest of the analytical-theoretical propositions in the first
case
study, and progress in subsequent case studies to expand the scope,
exchanging, in effect, the proportion of empirical evidence for
analytical-
theoretical reflection on the central tenets of the study, in what
can be seen as ever-closer approximations. Thus the first case study,
the Philippines, is highly descriptive, whereas that on Haiti is as much
theoretical as empirical in content.
The Haiti case study thus provides the logical stepping-stone to the
concluding chapter, which is the final section. Beyond summing up the
central findings, this chapter offers some comparative conclusions and
discusses implications of this new intervention for social change in the
Third World and for efforts to build a more democratic international
order. I also look briefly at US "democracy promotion" activities in the
former Soviet bloc and South Africa for the purpose of strengthening
generalizing conclusions. With the benefit of the hindsight provided by
the empirical studies, I retake some of the theoretical issues alluded
to
in chapter 1. These include a reexamination of the historical
relationship
between capitalism and democracy and a new theoretical interpretation
of this relationship in light of globalization, the presentation
of a novel Gramscian approach to the issue of "regime transitions,"
discussion of the composition of an emergent transnational hegemonic
configuration, and an examination of the prospects for world order
and for counter-hegemonic blocs in the twenty-first century.
In brief, I have chosen a comparative historical method which is
macro-structural in approach and case study in design. This is a
macro-sociological study, but with a distinct interdisciplinary
character.
I view theory as a heuristic instrument that may best be
utilized in an interdisciplinary setting, and that multidisciplinary,
holistic reconstruction is essential in reaching theoretical conclusions
on such a broad subject as global civil society. However, theoretical
propositions must be verified in concrete events and circumstances
temporally, spatially, and longitudinally, just as all good theory must
be able to move down to concrete application and back to theoretical
abstraction. In this process, there are three levels of analysis at
which
I operate and which I term the structural, the structural-conjunctural,
and the practical-conjunctural. A fuller explanation of these three
levels and how they interact is provided in chapter 1. The point I
wish to emphasize here is that the "macro-structural-historical"
framework introduced at the onset in chapter 1 flows into a
structural-eonjunctural and practical-eonjunctural analysis in
subsequent
sections and chapters, in which structural factors structure a
situation, and conjunctural factors condition the concrete outcomes. I
strive
to avoid the twin traps of structural determinism (a la Althusser)
and of behavioralism, or motivational subjectivism (a la Habermas or
Laclau), and try to focus instead on the dialectical tension between
structure and agency and, whenever possible, to identify mediating
links.
Caveats
Several caveats are in order. First, the critics who may be tempted to
dismiss the arguments in this book with the normative claim that it is
preferable to have "democracy," however so defined by US policy-
makers, than authoritarianism and dictatorship, are missing the point.
Whether "democracy" is preferable, in a normative sense, to
dictatorship,
is not under debate. To place the issue in this light is tantamount
to claiming that the juridical equality which African Americans enjoy
in the late twentieth century is preferable to the juridical
discrimination
of earlier times (it is, of course, preferable), and that this alone is
grounds to dismiss a political or theoretical discussion of contemporary
racism in US society.
Second, this book does not argue that democratization movements
around the world are products of US intervention. To the contrary, I
am arguing that they are endogenous developments springing, on the
one hand, from deep and age-old aspirations of broad majorities, and
on the other hand, from the structural, cultural, and ideological
transformations wrought by the global economy. What I am concerned
with is the new methods developed by the United States to interact
with these movements, methods which form part of new modalities of
domination.
Third, I do not pretend to analyze the complexities and nuances of
democratization movements in each country examined in the book.
Despite the process of globalization, each nation's entry into global
society is predicated on its own national history, and researchers need
to be deeply attuned to the history, culture, idiosyncrasies, and
particular circumstances of each nation and people. I can only claim, to
evoke Weber's phrase slightly out of context, such an "empathetic
understanding" for my own country of origin, the United States, and
for Nicaragua, which has been my home for many years. There is a risk
of simplification of complex phenomena. Relations between indigenous
elites and the United States are multifarious and checkered
with contradictions and conflicts. Also, popular movements operated
under complex internal dynamics, political alignments, and shifting
strategies. I do not attempt to analyze the heterogeneity and
complexities
of the popular and elite forces, or national democratization movements.
My purpose is to examine how US policy intersects with these
in pursuit of an agenda of an emergent transnational elite. Through a
comparative study of several "democracy promotion" operations,
general patterns and tendencies in US conduct become clear.
Fourth, there are issues raised in chapter 1 which beckon elaboration,
and may even appear contradictory. For instance, I simultaneously
analyze "democracy promotion" as a United States policy intended to
secure US interests and argue that this policy responds to an agenda of
a transnational elite. This indeed appears at first blush to be a
contradictory
proposition. My reasoning is that on the eve of the twenty-first
century the United States (more precisely, dominant groups in the
United States) is assuming a leadership role on behalf of a
transnational
hegemonic configuration. Similarly, I argue, contrary to mainstream
notions (particularly among realists and world-system analysts) that
the historical pattern of successive "hegemons" has come to an end,
and that the hegemonic baton will not be passed from the United
States to a new hegemonic nation-state, or even to a "regional bloc."
"Pax Americana" was the "final frontier" of the old nation-state system
and hegemons therein. Instead, the baton will be passed in the
twenty-first
century to a transnational configuration. These issues are mentioned,
but not taken up in any detail, in chapters 1 and 2. This is
intentional; a reflection of the inductive origins of the study and a
consequence of the organizational structure I have chosen. The
purpose of the first two chapters is to layout just enough theoretical
propositions to analyze "democracy promotion" in the context of
globalization. The broader theoretical issues are then retaken in the
concluding chapter as exploratory ideas to be developed more fully in
future research. In other words, there are questions raised but not
fully
answered and certain limits to this study. This leads to a final caveat:
We should remember that we tend to adopt analytical constructs
that best lend themselves to making sense of the social phenomena
under study. But these social phenomena are always, and inevitably,
many times more complex than our explanations. Our analytical
constructs are simplifications of reality that facilitate our cognitive
understanding and guide our social action. Good social science can do
no more.
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