A claim encountered all
too often these days is that the
United States cannot possibly spread
individual freedom and limited
government to another country that
does not have a culture conducive to
these same principles. Opponents to
the current occupation of Iraq use
this argument in an attempt to
persuade the public that American
endeavors there are futile; as soon
as American troops leave, the
critics contend, Iraq will
degenerate into chaos, bloodshed,
and civil war. It is a sad state of
affairs, they admit, but there is
nothing we can do to prevent it.
But those who doubt the
United States’ ability to bring
about freedom abroad are quite
simply wrong. After all, the United
States has an extensive historical
record of instituting free or at
least freer forms of government in
countries that have formerly been
under totalitarian or authoritarian
control – countries that have
hitherto had “warrior cultures” that
resisted commerce and intellectual
liberty while embracing
subordination to rigid hierarchies
of authority.
Most famously, the
United States turned around the
political
and
cultural institutions in
both Germany and Japan after World
War II. Germany used to be the most
aggressive, authoritarian country on
the European continent long before
Hitler. Germany was united in 1871
by the efforts of the ruthless Otto
von Bismarck – who through a series
of deceptive political maneuverings
and successive wars with Denmark,
Austria, and France, brought the
Prussian King Wilhelm I the
necessary political clout and power
to become the first Kaiser. Wilhelm
II’s tremendous military buildups
and aggressive posture toward the
rest of Europe made World War I
possible – and after the war, the
Weimar Republic was closer to a
thinly veiled socialism than
anything resembling a
constitutionally limited government.
It was long held that European
intellectual history was a
centuries-long struggle between two
mutually incompatible sets of
values: the “merchant ethic” of the
English – who tended to favor peace,
commerce, individual liberty, free
trade, cosmopolitanism and an
orientation toward material comfort
– and the “warrior ethic” of the
Germans – who were inclined toward
strict external discipline,
collective action, centralized
control, trade restrictions,
aggressive conquest, asceticism, and
national rivalries.
But less than a decade
after the end of World War II, West
Germany became one of the freest
countries in Europe – and also one
of the most peaceful, tolerant, and
economically prosperous. The United
States and its allies decisively
overturned all vestiges of the
former Nazi and Prussian
authoritarian political structures
and instituted a federal republic
with strong protections for
individual personal and economic
freedoms. Under Chancellor Ludwig
Erhard, a host of economic controls
was lifted, and Germany quickly
achieved astounding material
prosperity. During the 1950s and the
early 1960s, Germany more closely
exhibited the workings of
free-market capitalism than at any
other time in its history.
A similar story can be
told of Japan – with its
centuries-long prior dominance by an
elite warrior class of samurai,
guided by the bushido ethic – which
elevated a warrior’s honor above all
while disdaining trade, comfort, and
upward social mobility. Indeed, the
merchants were the lowest
social class in Tokugawa Japan –
given fewer rights and treated with
greater contempt by the ruling
elites than the poorest of peasants.
During the Meiji Restoration of the
late 19th century, Japan began to
adopt Western technologies, but
bushido continued to dominate its
ethical and political culture.
Indeed, strong new military elite
emerged to transform bushido into a
fanatical nationalistic loyalty to
the Japanese empire. This loyalty
ran so deep that millions of
Japanese were literally prepared to
fight with bamboo sticks if American
forces were ever to land on Japan’s
home islands.
And yet over six brief
years – from 1945 to 1951 – Japanese
culture and politics became the
diametrical opposites of what they
had once been. During that time,
General Douglas MacArthur served as
the de facto ruler of Japan. Under
his direction, a new constitution
was established, relegating the old
authoritarian, militaristic
political order to the dustbin of
history. Women were permitted to
exercise all the economic and
personal freedoms that existed in
the West, a constitutional republic
was established, and the groundwork
for a free-market economy was laid.
Because of these structural reforms,
Japan quickly transitioned from a
warrior culture into a culture of
trade, business, and invention.
Today, Japanese firms continue to
produce some of the best automobiles
and electronic products in the world
while remaining on the cutting edge
in fields such as robotics and
Internet infrastructure. The
aggression of the samurai has
vanished; Japan’s government has
explicitly renounced the policy of
military aggression and uses the
army for defensive purposes only.
Of course, not all
efforts to spread freedom succeed –
but they depend not on the culture
of the country to be liberated, but
on the nature of the liberation
effort itself. Rapid, determined
efforts to discard all vestiges of statism, authoritarianism, and
cultural aversions to liberty have
been demonstrated to work, whereas
half-hearted, slow,
middle-of-the-road approaches have
failed miserably.
Consider, for instance, countries in
the former Soviet Union such as
Belarus – ruled by Alexander
Lukashenko, also known as Europe’s
last dictator – and Vladimir Putin’s
Russia. Both are less free –
economically and politically – than
Gorbachev’s Soviet Union had been in
the mid-1980s.
The
collapse of the Soviet Union gave
Western governments the perfect
opportunity to strongly influence
formerly Communist countries to
quickly implement protections for
both economic and personal
liberties. But instead of striving
to bring about free markets even to
the extent that existed in the West,
most Western advisors insisted on a
“Third Way” approach – a kind of
muddled welfare-state socialism
where the majority of industries
remained under government control
and the legal institutions necessary
for free markets to emerge failed to
be put into place. As a result, both
Russia and Belarus now have
socialism in all but name, and Putin
and Lukashenko are now actively
extending government
control over whatever vestiges of a
private economy remain.
To
institute and keep freedom in Iraq,
the United States occupation must be
handled in a more decisive manner
than it has been thus far. U.S.
policymakers must cease to insist on
“democracy” above liberty; they must
abandon statements like President
Bush’s to the effect that if the
Iraqi people “choose” by majority
vote to have Sharia law, then Sharia
law ought to be imposed in Iraq.
Rather, the United States ought to
unconditionally implement a
Western-style constitution in Iraq,
strictly limiting the power of the
government, guaranteeing individual
rights of free speech, freedom of
religion, and private property,
actively privatizing and
deregulating hitherto
state-controlled industries –
especially oil and utilities, and
opening Iraq to fully free
international trade in oil and other
commodities.
The
problem with the Iraq occupation to
date has not been that United States
has been asking too much. Quite the
contrary, the United States has not
insisted on
enough movement away from
the “warrior cultures” of both the
Islamic fundamentalists and the Baathists that have hitherto
influenced Iraq’s political
institutions. Over the course of a
few years, it will be possible to
turn Iraq into a trader society with
a prospering economy and
considerable individual freedoms –
if only the American occupations of
Germany and Japan are followed as
examples of approaches that work.
Spreading
Freedom: What Works and What Fails