Ignatieff Likes US Foreign Policy, Not its Founding

Michael Ignatieff has a long and not terribly original reflection on how the US is the sole supporter of promoting democracy in foreign lands, while lamenting that the US is becoming increasingly religious and thus out of step with more “cosmopolitan” places like Europe and Canada.

His ambivalence stems from his support for democracy building that only the US supports, while other Western nations are becoming increasingly parochial. But he’s not so sure about the moral foundations of US support.

Consider this statement:

Freedom in Germany was an American imperial imposition, from the cashiering of ex-Nazi officials and the expunging of anti-Semitic nonsense from school textbooks to the drafting of a new federal constitution. Yet Chancellor Gerhard Schroder can still intone that democracy cannot be ”forced upon these societies from the outside.” This is not the only oddity. As Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff of the German weekly Die Zeit points out, the ‘68-ers now in power in Germany all spent their radical youth denouncing American support for tyrannies around the world: ”Across the Atlantic they shouted: Pinochet! Somoza! Mubarak! Shah Pahlevi! King Faisal! Now it seems as though an American president has finally heard their complaints. . . . But what is coming out of Germany? . . . Nothing but deafening silence!”

The deafening silence extends beyond Germany. Like Germany, Canada sat out the war in Iraq. Ask the Canadians why they aren’t joining the American crusade to spread democracy, and you get this from their government’s recent foreign-policy review: ”Canadians hold their values dear, but are not keen to see them imposed on others. This is not the Canadian way.” One reason it is not the Canadian way is that when American presidents speak of liberty as God’s plan for mankind, even God-fearing Canadians wonder when God began disclosing his plan to presidents.

Or this statement:

For a complex set of reasons, American democracy has ceased to be the inspiration it was. This is partly because of the religious turn in American conservatism, which awakens incomprehension in the largely secular politics of America’s democratic allies. It is partly because of the chaos of the contested presidential election in 2000, which left the impression, worldwide, that closure had been achieved at the expense of justice. And partly because of the phenomenal influence of money on American elections.

But the differences between America and its democratic allies run deeper than that. When American policy makers occasionally muse out loud about creating a ”community of democracies” to become a kind of alternative to the United Nations, they forget that America and its democratic friends continue to disagree about what fundamental rights a democracy should protect and the limits to power government should observe. As Europeans and Canadians head leftward on issues like gay marriage, capital punishment and abortion, and as American politics head rightward, the possibility of America leading in the promotion of a common core of beliefs recedes ever further. Hence the paradox of Jefferson’s dream: American liberty as a moral universal seems less and less recognizable to the very democracies once inspired by that dream.

Ignatieff begins his article by noting the paradox that Thomas Jefferson, apostle of freedom, was a slave owner. He seems to think that the paradox of American gap between ideal and practice is now manifest in the fact that it’s conservatives who support democracy. This is a nasty piece of logic, and an appalling reading of the relationship between Enlightenment and Christianity in the founding. For more intelligent readings on that relationship, consider these books: Ellis Sandoz’s Government of Laws, Mark Noll’s America’s God, and Thomas Engeman and Michael Zuckert’s Protestantism and the Founding, all of which document the subtle ways that Christianity and Enlightenment supported and transformed each other.

None of these books support Ignatieff’s Manichaean dichotomy of religion VERSUS reason in the US regime.

Moreover, he doesn’t stop to question whether the secularism of Europe and Canada actually contribute to their parochialism. It’s not for nothing that C.S. Lewis said secularization creates “men without chests.” Can secular people be courageous?

Even so, Ignatieff makes a point worth emphasizing when he discusses the use of force in supporting democracy:

The same discomfort with the American project extends to the nation that, in the splendid form of the Marquis de Lafayette, once joined the American fight for freedom. The French used to talk about exporting Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité, but nowadays they don’t seem to mind standing by and watching Iraqi democrats struggling to keep chaos and anarchy at bay.
…
The problem here is that while no one wants imperialism to win, no one in his right mind can want liberty to fail either. If the American project of encouraging freedom fails, there may be no one else available with the resourcefulness and energy, even the self-deception, necessary for the task. Very few countries can achieve and maintain freedom without outside help. Big imperial allies are often necessary to the establishment of liberty. As the Harvard ethicist Arthur Applbaum likes to put it, ”All foundings are forced.” Just remember how much America itself needed the assistance of France to free itself of the British. Who else is available to sponsor liberty in the Middle East but America? Certainly the Europeans themselves have not done a very distinguished job defending freedom close to home.

Just as the US Founding wouldn’t have succeeded without the help of Lafayette and the French navy, so too do contemporary democratic reform movements need the help of the 101st Airborne.

However, accounts of the US Founding rarely mention the French. So too must American policy-makers remember that however much their help is required, their efforts must be forgotten by those they’re remembering. Take it from someone who lives in Canada: a nation that considers its founding dependent on a foreign power will never think of itself as an independent nation.

Click here for previous posts on Ignatieff’s work (and his relationship with the Liberal Party of Canada).

h/t Civitatensis.

UPDATE: Belmont Club has a post with lots of commentary.