Take it or lieve it

Anatol Lieven - unmasker of 'imperial' agendas behind concern over the slaughter of innocents - has an essay in the Boston Review in which he's pressing upon us a degree of compatibility between realist and progressive approaches to foreign policy. While some of what he has to say is unobjectionable, Lieven certainly has problems with comparative argument and evaluation. Thus, for example, he issues the following caution about the prospect of the spread of democracy:

[I]n the long run at least, the spread of stable, equitable, and prosperous democracy would represent great progress for humanity and for international peace. But how far can the West successfully spread democracy to the rest of the world if its own model looks seriously tarnished at home? In other words, domestic reform and international progress have to go hand in hand. As Kennan observed in 1984, "The power of example is far greater than the power of precept, and... the example offered to the world at this moment by the United States of America is far from being what it could be and ought to be."

Domestic reform is important, the power of a good example is not to be gainsaid, and the power of a better example is even better; but the fact of the matter is that on this score, tarnished as may be, the example of the democracies that already exist is rather impressive when your point of comparison is the assortment of dictatorships, semi-dictatorships and kleptocracies that provide us with alternative models.

But it turns out that the West's own model is worse than tarnished; according to Lieven, it shouldn't even be taken as a model. For this would be 'Western liberal capitalist unipolarity'. It would be assuming with George Bush and Tony Blair 'that "freedom" is understood the same way everywhere'. It would be (in a quote from Hans Morgenthau) 'to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe'. Against that kind of Western arrogance, Lieven is big on 'respect for the opinions and the interests of other nations', on 'a shared appreciation of the critical importance of states, and the nationalisms that underpin states'.

Now, first, one doesn't have to accept a special George Bush-Tony Blair concept of freedom. There are universal standards on these things - freedom, human rights, democratic governance - embodied in international conventions and affirmed by the United Nations. By these standards, the 'tarnished' model of the Western democracies does rather better than some of what Lieven calls upon us to respect.

Second, you can either take universal standards or you can leave them, but you can't just suit yourself and say now yes, and now no. If adopting some universal standard is a 'unipolarist', 'we-govern-the-universe' sin, then the precept of respecting the interests of other nations goes down the drain too, being a principle quite as general as the principle that people are born free and with inalienable rights. Or you can have it the other way, and then to each nation - really - its own. And so the imperialists can do a Robert Mitchum, why not? They can say, 'Dominating others is just our way.'

Finally, a footnote on 'tarnished'. Anatol Lieven again:

Yet today the liberal imperialists and a large part of the progressive or pseudo-progressive camp share a common hostility to states across much of the world. The imperialists dislike specific states - Iran, Syria, China, and Russia - because they oppose their plans for American world domination.

The wonders of the comparative method. Here, amazingly, there is no 'tarnished'. (What China! Syria! - shining examples of respect-worthy nationhood, both.) Here there is only the plan for world domination.