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Stanford Alumni Conference in London: Geopolitics–The United States, Iraq, Europe, and Democracy Panel
March 11, 200
Moderator David Brady Panelists Coit "Chip" Blacker Gerhard Casper |
Brady: My name is David Brady and it's my privilege to both be here and to chair this panel. I'm going to give a little history of this panel, and because I'm a professor in the Business School, I have to show a few PowerPoint slides, otherwise I'd be thrown out.
View Professor Brady's PowerPoint slides
This seminar started about three years ago in a Stanford executive program that includes a large number of Europeans as well as Americans. American foreign policy was not being discussed in the finance and organizational behavior and accounting classes, and this was causing a good deal of tension.
I have three times tried to do this exact panel, twice without it being too successful. The only time it was truly successful was when I had both Professor Blacker and Professor Casper do the program [with me], so I can't tell you how relieved I am that it's the two of them that are with me.
In his article ("Power and Weakness", Policy Review online Details), Robert Kagan's argument is essentially that over the post-World War II period, the last 50 years, the U.S. and the European experience has been quite different, most importantly in regard to the use of force. If you look at the Cold War crisis in 1983 when the United States responded to the Soviet installation of SS20 intermediate range missiles, there was a huge outbreak of protest over the deployment of the missiles. It's a real pleasure to be able to talk to an audience that was actually born by 1983.
As you know, it failed to stop the deployment but there was still widespread disapproval of U.S. military action. Same sort of story in Afghanistan. In 2001, 47 percent of the French believed U.S. military intervention failing, 17 per cent said it was succeeding, and 85 per cent of Germans said the U.S. was not taking allied interests into the war on terror. So it seems in one respect that even if the United States takes appropriate action, European public opinion is somewhat negative if force is used. Another point that's probably even more important is that Europeans sometimes approve of the cause, but disapprove—not even so much of the force, but mainly because of the unilateralism of the United States, and that's one of the issues my colleagues will talk about.
The second point Kagan makes is that even when George Bush is not president, the European-U.S. differences will not go away. Just to show you how popular President Bush is, you can see that he's getting a little over twice as much approval in Germany and France as he is in Pakistan. And actually, not even twice as much compared to Morocco, so you can see the article is pretty accurate that Bush is not very popular in Europe.
And then prior to the 2004 election it was often thought in Europe that this is all just a Bush problem and if he's not there, then… But after the (U.S.) election, people thought: my God, look what they're like, they actually like him. So you see the favorability of Europeans toward the U.S. has fallen dramatically over the period from Afghanistan through Iraq. The percentage drops between 2002 to 2004. Germany stayed reasonably stable, France dropped, we're pretty stable in Turkey, etc.. But the Iraq war has not made Americans more popular in Europe.
The last point that is made in the Kagan article is that Europeans believe more in international institutions than Americans do. One of the results appears to be, and this is as of March of 2005, that more Europeans believe that they should be independent as opposed to this U.S.-European partnership that has been so prevalent in the post-World War II period.
You have the bios of both President Casper and Chip Blacker. I don't want to add a lot to that except to say it is always a privilege for me to be on a panel with them, because I learn from it, I know you will too. So without further ado, let me give you Chip Blacker first.
Blacker: Thank you, Professor, Brady, and thanks to all of you for being here. I'm going to spend a few moments this afternoon talking about my expectations regarding Bush administration foreign policy in its second term. And I'm going to set it up as starkly as I can by outlining two possible choices that the reelected President Bush and his new Secretary of State face.
As I said, broadly, two choices. First, a return to what I'll characterize as traditional, centrist, Republican foreign policy, which entails a sharp focus on alliance maintenance or alliance restoration, depending on the challenge. Cultivation of good, positive, great power relations, managing the process of change, the problem of change through moral suasion and consensus building. Or the continuing pursuit of what I'll characterize as transformational change in the international system.
Today it looks like the former. It looks as though this administration is migrating back to a more traditional concept of foreign policy. Witness here the president's recent good will trip to Europe, the seeming endorsement of the EU initiative vis-à-vis Iran, strong endorsement, in fact, of the continuing development of the European Union, the emphasis on multilateral diplomacy regarding North Korea, etc.
But appearance can be deceiving, and fundamentally this administration believes that its first-term decision to rearrange the pieces on the geostrategic or the geopolitical chessboard was the right one, and that now is no time to retreat from their ambitious agenda to remake international politics. The rhetoric will be—indeed it already is—different from the first four years, and words certainly do matter. But in its essence, Bush foreign policy remains revolutionary in character.
I've selected two questions to guide this brief analysis this afternoon. Stated starkly: What's going on here? What does it mean?
What does it mean for the United States, what does it mean for Europe and what does it mean for the world? What's going on here? The simple answer is the administration's conviction that business as usual in foreign policy is no longer an option.
They argue that the glacial pace of change in key areas of the world poses a great danger, in fact a growing danger to the United States, especially in the greater Middle East and Southwest Asia, where in their view, terrorism feeds on generations of uneven economic development, discontent and resentment, and in many areas of the developing world, where failing and failed states condemn hundreds of millions of people to lives of despair. What's the antidote? In their view, spread democracy and promote economic development, pretty much in that order.
They are prepared to nudge the process of democratization more aggressively than earlier administrations. We know that, we've seen that, and frankly earlier than I think they believed they were ever going to, and with more precision. Up to and including threat and the actual use of force. This is actually a byproduct of the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, both second order objectives. But since 2003 this process, this deep faith in the transformative power of democratization, has moved to the front of the queue.
Why is this the case? Well, it seems to work, or at least that's the lesson that senior policymakers in this administration are drawing. They're also prepared to spend more on developmental assistance through something called the Millennium Challenge Account and on global health, but by reference to a new and more demanding set of standards. They're convinced that clarity with respect to these goals is already bearing fruit. They point to what they characterize as the successful elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, underscoring the point that this is the first time we've ever seen this.
They point with encouragement to the Rose and the Orange Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine. They enthuse over the Palestinian election and the advent of leadership that in their view is prepared to run risks for peace. And they also point to positive stirrings in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and of course now also in Lebanon. The critical point here is that they draw a lesson from this, and it is implied that pressure, selectively applied, works.
Democracy—that is representational politics—equals hope and improves the prospects for growth and development where it takes root. This is a major departure for this administration. This is not what they were writing about and thinking about during the campaign of 2000 or during the first 15 months of this administration. To quote the president, freedom is on the march.
This belief in the liberating power of democracy and freedom deeply influences their posture toward Iran and North Korea, regimes that are, in their view, swimming against the tide of history. Keeping Iran in a box by denying the regime legitimacy and maintaining sanctions will, they argue, eventually lead to a second revolution, this one against the mullahs, which the U.S. can encourage but only indirectly. That is to say U.S. military action against Iran clearly would unite the country and the Iranian diaspora against the United States.
The policy issue for this administration is whether to maintain the existing policy or to press even harder. And this is yet to be decided. This is at odds with the EU strategy, as I'm sure you all know, which seeks to exchange Iran's nuclear program for full entry into the international system. The U.S. may not oppose the EU initiative, but it doesn't support it, or at least not very strongly. And basically they're waiting for the Europeans to get frustrated with Iran and throw in the towel.
On North Korea, the judgment has been made that that horse has already left the barn. Whatever the rhetoric, it's now about managing a nuclear-armed North Korea, one of the so-called rogue regimes, and mitigating the geopolitical consequences. There is no support, or very little support for a military solution to this problem among senior U.S. officials. It's not that in a perfect world they would hesitate to undertake military action, because I think they would. It's simply that the consequences of doing so are horrific to contemplate. So the current posture is to keep the pressure on until the regime unravels and be prepared to help the South Koreans pick up the pieces. Secondarily, U.S. objectives are to reassure Japan that nothing has really changed and therefore head off what would otherwise be a strong temptation on the part of the Japanese to arm themselves with nuclear weapons, and to get the Chinese to help contain the North Koreans.
What does it all mean? It means the intensification of efforts through muscular diplomacy to promote what they regard as positive political change in the areas noted, especially in the next two years before the '06 midterm elections when the president's power begins to fade. They will mount, and indeed they are mounting, a major effort to enlist support of the other great powers, especially the Europeans and Japan, in pursuit of what I again would characterize as a very ambitious agenda, but essentially on U.S. terms.
And therein lies the challenge. Now, Gerhardt (Casper) will have more to say on this, but the recent warming in U.S.-European relations cannot and will not disguise the fact that while our goals may overlap in policy terms, we rely on very different means, which reflect very different understandings of everything from the nature and utility of power to the role of values and ideas in the making and implementation of policy.
I really can't emphasize this enough. As the last decade and a half has revealed, we are at very different points in our respective trajectories as states and as societies, which generate very different outcomes in policy terms, domestic as well as international. I'll just say capital punishment to underscore the point of the domestic policy implications. The U.S. willingness to go it alone in extremis is what sets this administration apart from all others. It's not that they prefer it this way, because they really don't.
They would rather that our closest friends and allies pitch in and help. They're not stupid. But when that isn't possible, when the U.S. cannot proceed multilaterally, they will press ahead as they have done in Iraq, and they'll do so for two reasons above all others. First, the president and those closest to him—including his new Secretary of State—believe that we are in a race against time. That without far-reaching change, especially in those areas of the world where political and economic stagnation breed radicalism of all kinds, including Islamic fundamentalism, the threat to the U.S. and to the West more broadly will only grow.
That's a core conviction. The overarching fear in this context is, to quote the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy Paper, "The Coming Together of Radicalism and Technology," or the prospective use by terrorists of weapons of mass destruction up to and including the possible use of nuclear weapons." As I tell my students, imagine that on the morning of September 11th, 2001, instead of flying airplanes into tall buildings in Lower Manhattan, the terrorists had somehow gotten hold of a relatively low yield nuclear weapon. Not a so-called dirty bomb but a nuclear weapon in the 5-kiloton range or the 10-kiloton range and managed to detonate it in lower Manhattan or in midtown Manhattan. Instead of 3,000 people dying, 30,000, 50,000, 100,000 people could die and the area could be contaminated for generations. That's what keeps them awake at night. It's not a repeat of September 11th, it's the prospective use of weapons of mass destruction by terrorists.
Second, they believe they're right. They believe that events since September 11th have only confirmed the essential correctness of their analysis of the situation we confront globally as well as the strategy they have devised to contend with these challenges. And I see nothing on the horizon that's going to dissuade them from these convictions.
What does it all mean? Well, it means smooth sailing when we, meaning the U.S. our primary European allies and to a lesser extent, Russia and China, are on the same page with respect to a particular policy issue. This will happen once in a while, which is a good thing. But it also means there will be considerable rough sledding the rest of the time when we don't always agree, which among its other consequences is likely to spur the continuing political integration of the European Union. The EU then becomes more and more state-like in its behavior and thus better able to balance the power of the United States, which is a fascinating development that I hope Gerhardt will at least touch on, but it is indeed a whole other topic.
On that note, let me conclude and yield the podium to my friend and colleague, Gerhardt Casper.
Casper: David Brady said that we had done this panel three times before. That is true enough. However, he failed to point out to you that the content's been different every time. Now, I think we all three have the desire to be short, and to pull the audience as much into a discussion, both the Americans in the audience and the Europeans in the audience, and any interlopers in the audience. And to have a serious discussions of these issues. Of course, some of it has no more to do, as we learned in the prior hour, than with the fact that sharing a bathtub with an elephant is an uncomfortable experience, even if the elephant is trying to be nice.
And it is quite clear that the elephant is trying to be nice. I also learned in the prior hour that it is said by many about those who take strong positions that they often may be wrong but they never are in doubt. Indeed, Chip (Blacker) made it clear that there is very little doubt about the future course of American foreign policy in the second Bush administration.
I would like to do the following: I want to provide a little more perspective on a crucial concept that will concern U.S. a lot in the next four years. We also heard at dinner last night that there is no such thing as local business anymore. It's all global. But let me tell you, most politics is still local, and that is very, very important to keep in mind for these purposes. President Bush, in his State of the Union speech and in his recent visit to Europe, has made, as Chip said, democracy and freedom the center points of his foreign policy looking forward.
And of course, those who know some history, even if they were not born at the time of World War I, have seen here a Wilsonian concept. (U.S. President Woodrow) Wilson is often now invoked as an analogy, or Bush as a kind of latter-day Wilson. In reality, and this is the first point of perspective the themes that President Bush is now putting forward and that the world is associating strongly with President Bush are themes that are as old as American history.
I will give you a few examples, but I can give you, for virtually every decade of American history, a formulation of such a broad and sweeping goal as is now put forward. Let us begin with the great seal of the United States. It has in it the words novus ordo seclorum. With the United States begins a new order for the ages. ( The second U.S. President) John Adams, who was viewed as, in many ways, fairly conservative, said: "I always consider the settlement of America as the opening of a grand scheme and design in Providence for the illumination and emancipation of the slave part of mankind all over the world."
John O'Sullivan in 1839, the author of the formulation of manifest destiny of the United States in relation to the Western Hemisphere, said, "The mission of American democracy is to smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, oligarchs, and to carry the glad tidings of peace and good will." Senator Beveridge, friend of Theodore Roosevelt in the Senate said in 1900, "God has marked America as his chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world."
Wilson, in 1917 talked about making the world safe for democracy, and the war to end war. Vice President Wallace in 1949 said, "We can help build a pax democratica which will bless the U.S. and the world for a century to come." And Wald Rosto, with whom I will conclude, said in 1960, "To protect the national interests in the foreseeable future requires that the nation not abandon, but in fact build on its old sense of world mission in respect to the democratic faith."
This is a continuum. This is a continuum that sometimes we treat in American foreign policy and sometimes comes to the foreground, and we have one of those periods now. I'm emphasizing all of this, and mind you, my approach to this is what economists call positive. I'm not making normative judgment, I'm just trying to explain in a positive way some fairly profound differences, and I want the U.S. to be aware for the future of those differences.
Europe, while it embraces democracy and of course shares democratic values, has hardly ever displayed this kind of missionary zeal about it. Think of the ages of imperialism and colonialism when Europe had tremendous opportunities to spread democracy. It really didn't cross the mind of the colonial powers. To be sure the United States, for instance during the Cold War, has compromised its commitment and subordinated its commitment to democracy to other strategic goals.
Yet the gospel remained unchanged. One of the most profound differences, I think, between Europe and the United States, which is very little talked about, lies in the fact that Europe has not only lacked a missionary impulse, but missionary zeal makes it uncomfortable. It worries, as it were, that spreading the faith too vigorously may degenerate into the Inquisition.
For those of you who have had the opportunity to attend the theater in London, the hottest ticket in town is Schiller's Don Carlos. It is of course all about inquisitorial zeal. And I think there are profound historical reactions to the product of the Inquisition, and then of course to the zeal of non-religious forces such as Hitler, that make Europeans just generally very wary of missionary zeal. Now, it is one of the ironies of history that over the last 10 years, the European Union has arguably done more for the spread of democracy than the United States. And I'm referring to the EU enlargement.
How this has come about is actually a fascinating phenomenon. First, you might argue that the American resolve against communism was the sine qua non of all these developments. Second, the introduction of democracy in the new member states has been the choice of the new member states. It was not a choice that was spread from west to east. The model was followed.
But thirdly, and that's the most interesting point in a way, its consolidation comes by means of EU regulatory packaging. If you want membership in the EU, and many want membership in the EU only for economic reasons, you buy the whole of Roman law, no choice about it. We have the law, you have to buy it.
There is very little leeway there. This is a very interesting phenomenon as this has developed over the last 10 years and continues to develop with respect to Romania, Bulgaria, and then of course possibly Turkey. Which takes us to the question of the respective understanding of democracy on the two sides of the Atlantic—a question that will increasingly occupy public attention in the decades to come. And of course, that question is basically a question about what we see as a good democracy.
Stanford has now—at the Institute of International Studies that Chip heads—a center on democracy development and the rule of law that is actually trying in a very down to earth, empirical fashion to deal with some of these issues. There are obviously very different models of a good democracy. The American and European models and the American and European attitudes toward the implementation of democracy differ not insubstantially on a country by country comparison.
Take any European country. For instance, take the fact that on a very fundamental issue of democracy, virtually all of Europe, east and west, now follows the model of parliamentary democracy which means very different approaches to government and very different approaches also to foreign policy. Of course the matter is complicated further by the European Union and the mostly derivative nature of its democracy and indeed of its legitimacy.
And how that works in relation to the member states is very complicated. But I think the net effect will be that it will be the top bureaucrats, the top politicians, the top statesmen, that will be more inclined to rule top-down than bottom-up. And that top-down approach that is already in existence in the EU and that some of you don't particularly care for when it comes to business decisions, is something we will continue to see a lot of.
There may be some modification because the European Parliament, if the constitutional treaty gets enacted, will become more powerful. But I wouldn't hold my breath. I've only touched the surface. We could now spend the whole afternoon and evening just talking about the differences that are referred to when we really take the concept of democracy seriously.
Similar things can be said about the rule of law, an important aspect of democratic governance. For instance, the claims made by the Bush administration to detain terrorist suspects ad infinitum without judicial review would in most European countries be unthinkable at this stage. Recently the debate in the United States is that the executive branch claims the power essentially to ignore the judicial branch. And while that has happened before in American history, it is a very strong claim and there are many Americans who are highly critical of that. But I'm saying these claims put forward in this very naked form are actually more or less unthinkable within the context of the European Union. But they are of course provoked by what Chip talked about, the incredible fear that they one morning wake up with a dirty bomb having exploded in Manhattan.
What I'm suggesting is that the big abstractions—freedom, democracy, rule of law—hide value differences that will continue to be important factors in the U.S.-Europe relationship. So what is actually called for, and this is, thank God, not just an academic enterprise, is a detailed analysis, a kind of inventory of the content of the values we always say we share.
Take it down to the level of contents and see how much we actually share and how much we don't share. And those are very difficult and subtle issues. So, with that I will close.
Brady: We'll now turn to questions.
Q: Thank you, I'm Pierre La Roque, I live in the United States. I have both citizenship of Europe and, actually, France and the U.S. I have a very focused, technical question to Mr. Chip Blacker. I would like to use three words, doctrine of unilateral preemption. So three words, doctrine, unilateral preemption. Isn't that a declaration of war against everybody else, permanently?
Blacker: I think the real issue is less preemption than it is prevention. What I worry about is the way the [Bush] administration in its national security strategy paper stretched the concept of preemption to include what I think most fair people would regard as preventive war. And the distinction is very fine. Even international lawyers would not challenge the right of a country to deflect an attack that we know to be coming. An example that I always give is if on December 6th, 1941, the United States had detected the Japanese imperial fleet 550 miles north of Oahu, would the U.S. have been justified in undertaking preemptive military action?
My judgment is yes, because the Japanese imperial fleet, clearly 500 miles north of Oahu was up to no good. That's preemption. Preventive war is when you make the judgment, as the Japanese imperial staff did in September or October of 1941, that it was better to go to war against the United States now rather than later because the United States was growing ever more powerful and Japan was not. That's preventive war, and that's basically what the administration has endorsed, which I think is dangerous.
It's a slippery slope because if it's okay for the U.S. to say well, the threat isn't imminent but it's a gathering threat or it's an intensifying threat and we simply can't afford to wait to take military action, then what's to keep the Indian leadership from saying the same thing with respect to Pakistan or any other duo you can think of in international politics? I don't think of it as a declaration of war against the world. I think it raises the very real prospect of the introduction of a level of international legal anarchy that I think is dangerous and has the potential to be vastly destabilizing.
Casper: I have a somewhat different take on the question. Clearly, the question of prevention will be the most important overall international law issue to trouble us over the next 10 years. The first thing we have to understand is that prevention actually may be necessary. It would be no good to close one's eyes to the fact that when a country develops means of biological warfare or nuclear warfare and is likely to use them, one may want to engage in preventive, not just preemptive action.
And then comes the question, of course, how do we legitimize decisions about prevention? One means is obviously to go to the United Nations Security Council and point out the dangers and ask for authority to engage in preventive action. Ask primarily that the UN engage in preventive action, ask secondarily for authority to do it.
Now imagine the Security Council doesn't vote or vetoes a preventive action that is considered very important. Well, then the preventive action is likely, if it is the United States and if the United States has the means to engage in it, which is another set of issues we should be debating. We don't have quite as much military prowess as the world seems to believe.
We are paying a high price for Iraq. We cannot really conduct two wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq with ease. So if the United States believed prevention was necessary and if it got no response from the UN, and if the evidence was strong the response would be proportionate and so on, all the usual clauses we lawyers invent in this kind of setting to test matters further, it is very likely that there will be a coalition formed and something will be done.
Now, before we get too critical of the Bush administration in this respect, we should remember that for instance, Europe was all eager to violate the principle of Security Council approval in the case of Kosovo. There was no way the Security Council was ever going to approve action in Kosovo because the Russians would have vetoed it. The very same people, the very same governments that took the Bush administration sharply to task for Iraq very hypocritically and suddenly said the UN Security Council must have the last word on this and if not, then nothing can happen. Well, NATO went into Kosovo not caring one bit about the fact that the UN Security Council was withholding its approval.
Q: Do you think it's part of the social condition that we should have a fear of a dark force like communism or Islam or the devil or hell? Do you think this is a manifestation of that? The previous speaker said that fear is a good substitute for reason.
Blacker: I think it's right and I think it's more pronounced in the American case, which is why I singled out the Americans. It's no accident that many of the selections that Gerhardt offered up about American exceptionalism were tied to this faith in God or manifest destiny. This is a deeply, deeply religious way of conducting our own public affairs. And I am old enough to remember a time when the tenets of secularism in American culture were so powerful that it was inconceivable to most of us.
Just as an example in American public schools in many, many parts of the U.S., not in the city of New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco or Chicago, creationism is taught alongside evolution, as kind of equally valid ways of thinking about the origins of man. I suspect that would not be on the curriculum of most European secondary schools. So I do think there is something to this need to demonize, there is something in politics, most pronouncedly in kind of religiously informed politics to have some devil that you go to war against. This is so deeply embedded in the American case the politicians don't even have to be cynical in order to manipulate it.
I said in my prepared remarks that part of the reason I think this administration's second term will have the character that it's going to have is because they believe they've gotten it right, and there's very little cynicism involved in this. They do believe that they are up against this fundamentally new challenge. They believe that the stakes are as high as I've outlined, and they believe after some hesitation that they've got the formula right for dealing with it.
They've actually been fairly careful, as these guys go, not to demonize Islam. They walk a very fine line here, and talk about global terrorism.
A student asked me what happens if this country sustains another mega-terrorist attack involving the use of nuclear weapons or biological agents. I said well, there are many, many implications but probably the one that I worry about the most would be the willingness on the part of the American people to accept limitations on their civil liberties that are pretty much without precedent. I said something as dramatic as I could conjure up, like a fundamental turning away from the development of human freedom that I associate with the advent of the Enlightenment in the 18th century. But I do think that's the case, and I think those are the stakes.
So I do worry about this, and as I said, I worry about it more in the American context than I do in a kind of broader Western context just because of the deep religiosity of the American people.
Brady: Two comments. One, it may be a slippery slope, but I don't think there's any disagreement with us that clearly communism and its aftermath and the present situation where you marry terrorism and nuclear weapons do constitute sort of a devil. It is a threat, it's real. Now, how you react to it—that of course is up to question. And then one comment that Gerhardt made about the European system being more top-down rather than bottom-up, whereas the United States is bottom-up. That's precisely why in the United States there is creationism taught, because American schools are local, they're very democratic, there's no bureaucracy across the country where elites sit in and say this is obviously not true, we're not going to teach it.
This is one of the fundamental differences that drives American and European divergence.
Q: I just have a practical question. How do you establish democracy in a country whose parties are along ethnic and religious lines? Some of them have been rather successful like Switzerland, but obviously there's a lot longer history behind it. And practically, how do you establish democracy in a country where pretty much the parties are based on religious or ethnic lines, and hatred of each other?
Casper: I'll respond first. Well, it is obviously nearly impossible to accomplish it. I think we will have to see what happens in Iraq. On the other hand, there are lots of people who believe, apparently, that Iran—if it got out of the present regime of the mullahs—could actually be a working democracy. It has only one dominant religious group. I think we do not really know how to do it. Europe and the United States put together don't even have really the knowledge.
Just assume you were given the assignment to write the Iraqi Constitution. Well, certainly the most challenging assignment you would have ever received in your entire life. And you would probably be sitting there for a long time being nothing but baffled, baffled, baffled about how to get the religious factions, the tribes and so on under one common roof, though they may pull it off.
Because my background is that of a law professor, I feel more responsible for the rule of law side. I gave a talk at Stanford about rule of law a couple of years ago at a big meeting, and the former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher was in the room.
When I was finished he said to me, "Well, Gerhardt, you are really putting rule of law first, not democracy," and he meant it as a friendly criticism. I actually do believe that probably the first task and a somewhat more manageable task for a whole complex set of reasons is to try to bring some rule of law that then can strengthen the institutions which a democracy needs.
But I have no conviction that we will get this right and have to have a lot of willingness to live with ambivalence; with ambivalent outcomes, ambivalent results. There will be a lot of declarations by governments, by European governments, American governments. That's why I emphasize democracy as a theme.
Blacker: One of the things that has emerged as a really, really interesting research question, but also something of obvious practical significance in the context of the scholars involved in the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law: how do we create good, strong institutions?
We know them when we see them. It's kind of like the U.S. Supreme Court vis-à-vis obscenity. Don't ask us to define it, we just know it when we see it. We know good, strong institutions when we see them. We have some sense for how they came about in the West. But in terms of reproducibility there are no clear answers here. So the conversation that takes place is quite fascinating because we have economic historians, we have political scientists, we have sociologists, we have folks out of the Business School, folks out of the Law School who then tussle over which comes first.
Is it rule of law? Is it rudimentary democracy? My own view is that you can't have democracy and the rule of law absent a kind of capitalist-based economic order. But these arguments go on and on and on, it's just to underscore the point that Gerhardt made, that we just have to be prepared for a whole range of outcomes. We have to figure out how to talk about these in our public discourse in ways that don't open us up to charges of being foolish and naïve later.
As a student of the former Soviet Union and of Russia's latest experiment with democracy, it still pains me when I hear people who should know better basically saying well, yeah, there have been some setbacks in the Russian case but basically they're continuing their quiet progress in the direction of democracy. They're continuing their quiet progress, but it's not, in my judgment, in the direction of recognizably representational politics.
Brady: There are two broad models of this. One roughly is the Asian model where you have economic freedom and markets, and then of course what happens, as is the case in Korea and Taiwan, you develop out of that actual democracies. And then the Eastern European model where you have democracy first, then hope the economy comes along. And I would include Russia in that. Each side can point to examples of where it works, but the one interesting thing that we do know is it takes a lot of time.
Casper: I just wanted to add one word, and this goes to European-American differences in cooperation. My view is that NATO's days are more or less gone. But that of course doesn't mean that the United States and Europe should not work closely together on a whole range of issues. Now, that of nation-building, institution-building, that whole area is exactly an area where we should be working together.
The United States has developed fairly enlightened views under the so-called Millennium Challenge grant. The United States is throwing more money at this, and the Europeans have had a lot of experience with respect to the new member states, but they have also tried to deal with countries in Africa and other places. And I think it is basically insufferable that we are not establishing a kind of joint commission, joint big, ambitious enterprise that says we will do something and we will try to lay down roadmaps on how to get from here to there, doing that together.
The way we are doing it at present makes no sense. Take for instance Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Europe and the United States are jointly engaged. And of course, it was a great success for both the Europeans and the U.S. But the nation-building part of Afghanistan we have now divided up into international spheres. I don't know whether there's anybody Italian here, but for instance, Italy is in charge of the courts and building up courts and the judiciary. That's a gigantic task to be in charge of all by yourself. Nobody looks critically at whether Italy is actually devoting the kinds of resources to it that need to be devoted and so on. So I think this is an area where we could be cooperating, and where we should be cooperating, and it is also negligent that this has not already happened.
Q: I'd like to ask a question, but also make a comment and maybe question the premise, if not the conclusion of this panel, which says that Europeans and Americans have different values and view the world very differently. I'd like to ask you what you think is the role of the media and information. If the majority of the U.S. population believed that Saddam Hussein had everything to do with 9/11 or that he had weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, well then the conclusion is very different from the one of the Europeans that didn't believe so.
So I'm saying maybe it's not so bad, the values are not so different. In Mr. Brady's chart it seemed to give a message that says no matter what, Europeans anyway will never want to use force. So, there's no point in asking them, you know, let's just do it ourselves. I think the Kosovo example that was given is a good point that says that when there is a belief that action is needed, Europeans were very supportive of that. But that's because there was a belief in doing something they couldn't do themselves. In that case it was Clinton who took action and his ratings were favorable. So I would look at the differences, more based on difference of information and the role of the media, really. I don't know what you think about that. Thank you.
Brady: First, I didn't see that they always reacted. What I said was there's two parts to that slide. The first part, I said is, and I have lots of other evidence that Europeans are much less inclined to use force as a threat or to use it for whatever reasons than Americans are. And the second thing I said is that though Europeans favor the cause, they don't like American unilateralism. The role of the media is of some importance, but it seems to me that what dominates the problem is this:
Basically, the intelligence in Germany, France, and UK thought that the Iraqis had nuclear capabilities. And from the president of the United States' perspective, the question Chip put to me is the most important because I've got news for you: If you take it to the United Nations, if you worry about European public opinion, and there's a nuclear attack and there are 100,000 Americans dead, those same sources are suddenly going to turn on you and say you could have prevented that.
Why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that? I don't have an answer because that is an extremely difficult problem that the president and only the president of the United States has to face. I don't have an answer to that and I suggest that nobody in the audience has an answer. We have opinions, but reasonable people will seem to me to disagree about how far you go in each way. Most of us can afford to disagree because we don't bear the consequences of our actions.
Casper: Perhaps one comment: I was on leave this quarter, and I have spent a fair amount of time in Europe. And when I do that, I read all the newspapers in the languages I can read, and listen a lot to the radio, less so to the television. In January in particular I was really struck by the fact that there is hardly a single item pertaining to the U.S. that had a positive slant. Not one. It was a very depressing experience because the slant obviously takes place by all the media. You cannot even say one country or the other, because let's remember, 48 per cent Americans voted against President Bush. Just a few votes in Ohio the other way could have made a tremendous difference. Then you all would have had to figure out whether you could live with the electoral college, and an electoral college producing a majority for a minority president, the big issue four years ago.
The simple lack of understanding of how institutions work on both sides of the Atlantic has gotten much worse. My field is constitutional law and within constitutional law my sub-field is separation of powers. There is hardly a single European who understands how American separation of powers works, and what the underlying theory is. I'm overstating to make my point. But it is certainly not something that is widely understood.
Europeans complain that Americans know so little European history. Let me tell you, no European schoolchild knows any American history as far as I can figure out, and I have taught them. We all have a long, long way to go to improve the basis of information on which we act.
Q: Change the point of view to times beyond the Bush administration. As yesterday's speaker was saying: during the last 1,000 years, China has been the biggest economy of the world. The United States temporarily passed it in the 1890s, and then he continued that it's only a matter of time until China will retake its place as the world biggest economy. He was asked when this would happen and we got the long, academic answer, and the result was 40 years. Two years ago I asked the same question in Paris of a macroeconomist and the result was 17 years.
Then I had asked this question from Henry Kissinger who said that it wouldn't happen in his lifetime—but he's over 80. And then he continued that it probably wouldn't happen in mine. Everybody seems to keep this inevitable phenomenon that is going to happen. But what effects it's going to have in the balance of power in the world? I think it would dramatically change it.
Brady: Fortunately, there are no economists on this panel. I'm as close as you get to one, and this is a question about power, so I'm turning it to you guys.
Casper: China as a great power will emerge very soon, steadily over the process of the next 10 years. It may already be one. Because everybody in the United States wants to be in business with China, they are already a great power. They are catered to, they are being treated extremely nicely. People like me help them improve their universities. And so I think the great power will come quickly, but China will for decades remain one of the poorest countries in the world.
Yes, there will be Shanghai and so on, but the average per capita income will not reach Western levels for decades. It can't, short of a miracle.
Blacker: It would take 20 years if their economy grew by 20 per cent or so; it would still be 20 years before they would get up to even a full quarter of the gross national products on average of U.S. and European societies. But because of their numbers, they would then still be the largest economy.
Q: Being Italian, I just make one comment about Iraq. I'm glad I didn't have to make the decisions myself.
I have three scenarios I'd like to share with you and have your comments. Number one is information. Democracy lives and exists as long as we have information to draw our own opinions from.
The second has to do with a lack of trust in our leaders. Basically I'm talking about Italy. We don't care, we don't want to get involved. And by doing this, we sort of pull back from democracy ourselves.
And third has to do with citizenship. This morning, and today and tomorrow we're going to discuss how to teach people to be better managers. I don't think we have any school teaching us how to become citizens. Probably you remember the Latin saying si vis pacem, if you want peace, prepare to war. And I think today we must change this. If you want citizenship, democracy, you need to form citizens.
The question: do you think that now society is teaching us how to be citizens we have accomplished democracy?
Casper: I have been teaching a course on citizenship to first quarter freshman for the last four years at Stanford as part of what we call the introduction to the humanities. One of the requirements is that students read primary texts so the first book they read is the Chinese Confucian philosopher Mang-tze, or Menshivus, Mencius in the Latinized version. And then Socrates and Machiavelli and Locke and Rousseau. And then being a law professor, I smuggled some Supreme Court cases into the course. Obviously this was a course about citizenship and very focused.
But generally, that is simply not happening. Quite to the contrary, I think the one concept that is disintegrating more than any other concept in the vocabulary of Western democracy is that of citizenship. I don't want to embarrass you, but I am greatly tempted to ask how many people in this room have dual citizenship. There are probably people with triple citizenship.
And indeed, diversifying your citizenship portfolio seems to be one of the major economic activities of people these days. And one understands it well—because I started out as a German citizen and then became a naturalized American citizen, and I am only a naturalized American citizen. And I arrive at Heathrow and I said to myself, God, it would be nice to have an EU passport.
A couple of years ago, I arrived at Heathrow and there was an endless line for the non-EU citizens, an endless line. It went around and around and around, and as I was approaching one of two immigration officers the government had wisely provided for this enterprise, somebody tapped on my shoulder and said, "There's a message for you," and I took it and it came from somebody at the very end of the line, and it read, "President Casper, this is worse than the Stanford Post Office."
The present eagerness is to let anybody vote wherever, the more the merrier. I think this is something we should look at more critically. Basically, of course I hope people vote, but I hope people vote in countries where they then live with the decisions they made voting.
A good friend of mine was born in Baghdad. She's a U.S. citizen now, she was an Iraqi citizen. She voted in the Iraqi election, the rules permitted that—anybody born in Baghdad had the right to vote in that election. That's not about citizenship, that's about just manipulating. So I actually think you raised an excellent, very important question. A question that deserves much more attention than it has been getting, including in the European Union where now union citizens can vote in local elections in all of the member states, but not in national elections.
And you're talking about from bottom up. I've always thought the single most important set of elections are local elections. It doesn't follow naturally to me that, as has happened in reality, an Englishman living somewhere in France should be able to run for mayor in France. I'm not so sure about it. But I'm not dogmatic either, this is very difficult.
Q: I'm Swiss, and in Switzerland, in some cities we still have the vehicle where people come together for voting by raising their hands. And what one can observe there is the free thinking of those people. I don't think that one can use power to force democracy top-down, what do you think?
Blacker: I think that's right, and it's consistent with what we've been talking about in the sense that the demand for representational politics does have to come from the bottom of the order, if you will, for it to be durable. Now, as Professor Brady said, in an ironic twist here, it is a fact that so much of America's democracy is driven from the lowest possible level. That accounts for some of the policy prescriptions and some of the legislation we come out with.
It's not just in Switzerland, where you go to meetings and watch people argue these things through. If you've ever been to a local school board meeting in the United States, I have to tell you, the school board elections and the school board battles are like local politics in your face. And it's serious, and people vote and they argue and they insult one another. It's just kind of good, rough and tumble politics.
One, that's a good thing. Also, it's a consequence of the federal system, apropos of what Gerhardt was saying about the separation of powers. It's not just Europeans who don't profoundly understand the separation of powers. Most Americans don't either except at a deeply intuitive level because they do what their parents did. That is, if their parents ran for the local school board or the city council or whatever, they will do the same thing. What this administration would say about both Afghanistan and Iraq is that they're not trying to impose a particular political outcome. They're trying to create the conditions, largely stability, that will enable the people of Afghanistan and Iraq to determine their own political future.
I think in the courts, no pun intended, the outcome is still very, very much up in the air. If I were representing the administration, which I'm not, I would say give peace a chance, give politics a chance. These things are dirty, complicated, it's two steps forward, one step back. I don't know what the answer is apropos of what my colleague has said. I know democracy when I see it, and I know shadings on either side of the median. Do I think they're going to make it in Afghanistan? I hope so. Do I think they're going to make it in Iraq? I don't know, I hope so.
But I can't… none of us, as Professor Brady said earlier, we're all filled with opinions, but unfortunately we don't have a whole lot of knowledge to back up what we're talking about yet. I think you were going to do a follow-on, right?
Brady: Yeah, one comment. In the Asian case that I mentioned before, it is sometimes the case that instead of economic freedom, you do come down so that in Japan and Korea and local meetings, you now get some of this form of democracy, not quite like the Swiss kind, but over perhaps a rather long time period, I think you can switch from economic to some or all of the democratic freedoms. But it's not a very well known process. We don't know much about how it occurs.
Q: In foreign policy, would we perhaps be better off without democracy in the sense that with the authoritarian regimes, it's easy to make an accommodation versus with a democratic regime. In a democracy, the government may want to make a deal with you, but they are unable to because they have to respond to intransigent populations.
Blacker: Every now and then my students will ask this, and I always start by saying this: It always brings to mind Winston Churchill's adage, right? That democracy is the worst possible form of government, except when you consider all of the other ones. In its heyday, the Soviet Union ran just the greatest foreign policy you can imagine. The Chinese do a very good job with foreign policy. Why? Because it's not a democracy. You can be very nuanced, you have great continuity over time, you don't have a nettlesome legislature passing all sorts of bills.
When I was on the National Security Council staff during President Clinton's first term, I knew about the legislative role because I had been a legislative assistant in an earlier incarnation to a U.S. Senator. But to be on the receiving end of all of these spitballs from the U.S. Senate saying you can't do this, you can do this, was deeply frustrating. But at the same time, this is kind of the miracle of American politics. It's extremely messy, but at the end of the day we get policy outcomes that are quite durable, quite enduring. And I think it's a consequence of the fact of active contestation.
The most sobering lesson about the attempt to reform the Soviet Union was when Gorbachev went through this kind of epiphany in the late 1980s, and thought okay, we've got one more shot to try to reform this place. And as he sought to rally the troops around him, there were no troops. Why? Because people had withdrawn from the public sphere. They had invested deeply in the private sphere. They didn't care what happened to these public institutions. That manifestly is not the case in the United States.
If anything, people care too passionately or with too much passion and not enough thought about these public institutions. But you're right, it's much easier, it would be much easier, and it has been historically to run foreign policy without democracy. It's just that the outcomes are terrible.
Q: If, as some commentators think, there were to be another major act of terrorism on U.S. soil, do you think the administration would react by saying it was right and renewing its missionary zeal, or perhaps reflecting that it may have been wrong and taking a different approach?
Blacker: Definitely the former, no question. That's my view. The hardest thing for a politician to do, especially one who's moved from the status of politician to head of state is to say: God, I guess we really screwed up here. That's not how it works. What happens is the world gets smaller and smaller and smaller, and it sets up an echo chamber. And I saw this with someone who was as intellectually open and expansive as President Clinton, who was a joy to work with for that reason.
You get in this huddle, and it's like all oxygen is sucked out of the air. So you reinforce whatever is the dominant view. I'm sure they did this when the president got back from Europe, the president said to Condi Rice and to Andy Card and all those guys: "So, how do you think it went?" And I'm sure Condi went, "Homerun, Mr. President," I'm sure Andy Card said, "I just want to second what the secretary said, double homerun, Mr. President. Whatever you did there, keep doing it."
And he says, "Yeah, I guess I did a pretty good job." "Absolutely, sir, you knocked their socks off." That's actually what happens. It's only the spouse, who usually says … "No, this is true."
I saw this repeatedly with Hilary Clinton. President Clinton would be holding forth on something, and just really getting into it and just having a good time, and he turned around to her and she'd roll her eyes at it.