This speech was right on the money. Unlike many Bush speeches which draw, at least in part, on a partisan vision, this one drew on a profound and common sense of history and vision that hasn't really been plumbed since Wilson. And the delivery, which often seems as tense as a hostage tape, was self-assured and confident. But unlike the Wilsonian vision, which had a naivete' that ultimately disillusioned a generation (Hemingway's "lost" generation), this is within the grasp of Americans, and calls upon skills and experience that we have acquired through the 200 years of the republic. It was as though George Bush found a voice that echoes the nation's own sense of purpose and mission. The speech opens with a reference to another President in an earlier struggle:
The roots of our democracy can be traced to England and to its Parliament and so can the roots of this organization. In June of 1982, President Ronald Reagan spoke at Westminster Palace and declared the turning point had arrived in history. He argued that Soviet communism had failed precisely because it did not respect its own people, their creativity, their genius and their rights.President Reagan said that the day of Soviet tyranny was passing, that freedom had a momentum that would not be halted.
He gave this organization its mandate: to add to the momentum of freedom across the world. Your mandate was important 20 years ago. It is equally important today.
One might regard this as partisan, were it not for the fact that Reagan's vision was simple and quintessentially American. Moreover, by linking this current project to the recent anti-totalitarian project that overturned Marxism he establishes a continuity that is all but irresistible for Americans. Whatever our views were of Ronald Reagan at the time the simple truth is that he was right and his opponents wrong (including me). Soviet tyranny passed away so suddenly and dramatically that it even took our intelligence services by surprise. The "mandate to add to the momentum of freedom" is probably more important today than twenty years ago, because we had at least some security in Mutually Assured Destruction then, and there are no such constraints on mass terrorism now.
The great democratic movement President Reagan described was already well under way.In the early 1970s there were about 40 democracies in the world. By the middle of that decade, Portugal and Spain and Greece held free elections. Soon, there were new democracies in Latin America and free institutions were spreading in Korea and Taiwan and in East Asia.
This very week, in 1989, there were protests in East Berlin in Leipzig. By the end of that year, every communist dictatorship in Central America had collapsed.
Within another year, the South African government released Nelson Mandela. Four years later, he was elected president of his country, ascending like Walesa and Havel from prisoner of state to head of state.
As the 20th century ended, there were around 120 democracies in the world, and I can assure you more are on the way.
This isn't idle talk. Samuel Huntington calls this the "Third Wave" of Democratization. It wasn't an unalloyed success, but the momentum was clear, and with a little help most of the Central and Eastern European states became open and Democratic. (Even those that tarry, like Bulgaria, have clear aspirations and are making progress.) But there was a line drawn at the Carpathians that has been unyielding for over a thousand years. And behind that line still lie the most difficult challenges to global democratization. Some are in Central Asia, but the rest are to the south, in the Middle East.
We've witnessed in little over a generation the swiftest advance of freedom in the 2,500-year story of democracy.
This is simply breathtaking, and little understood by the advocates of "little democracy." What Bush is talking about, in no uncertain terms, is Big Democracy. And arguments couched purely for the sake of being contrary simply don't measure up. We can surely tweak our own democracy, squeezing more freedom and accountability from it, but the task now is to set the stage for a world of democratic states. And that involves barring the doors to that old multi-tentacled beast: totalitarianism. It grows weaker, and at the same time more desperate.
This isn't the result of an irresistible "march of history" in the grandiose lexicon of Marxist rhetoric, but the consequence of effort and determination of individuals that we account for in our family albums and in our memories. It isn't an abstract philosophical debate, but a concrete project. And this project began around the time that my grandfather was repairing WWI fighter planes in France, a momento of which I still possess in the form of a button hook made for my grandmother out of salvaged parts from a WWI Spad. I can see him in my mind's eye, still a young man, working on his small personalization of a history he helped launch, and that George W. Bush captures in the sweeping arch "of rescue and liberation on nearly every continent." My grandmother carried that small momento of the "Great War" in her purse long after the shoes for which it was designed had gone out of style. And now, I have it. It hooks me into another era and fastens my concentration on a continuous fixture in history: the dominant fixture in fact, for a century.
And what started in that Great War is still the dominant threat to freedom, peace and security. We have certainly heard of the atrocities visited on the N. Koreans, merely the most recent crop of gulags. But Bush equates that regime with other less well-known tyrannies that are also on the agenda, in Burma and Zimbabwe and Cuba. They are all threats to peace, and all intolerable, with or without oil. Burma is, in fact, every bit as evil as Iraq and N. Korea. It may not be an acute danger, but it's the same disease.
Our focus, however, is on the Middle East now, that part of the world that represents the most acute threat, and has resisted liberalizaton and democratization in favor of a false charismatic vision, whether secular or religious. More than half of the Ummah live in free societies, yet the peoples of Islam are considered ill-prepared for Democracy. It is a patently false assumption. We are not deceived: "A religion that demands individual moral accountability and encourages the encounter of the individual with God is fully compatible with the rights and responsibilities of self-government." There is your challenge, Sayyid Qutb. Not children of a lesser God, no matter how grandiose the claim. On par, but transcending your vision by a boundless margin. Our sister.
Here's how His Majesty [the king of Morocco] explained his reforms to parliament: ``How can society achieve progress while women, who represent half the nation, see their rights violated and suffer as a result of injustice, violence and marginalization, not withstanding the dignity and justice granted to them by our glorious religion?''The king of Morocco is correct: The future of Muslim nations would be better for all with the full participation of women.
The king, as most people in the Middle East know, merely echoes the rhetoric of Kemal Attaturk, the founder of what became the most successful nation in the Muslim sphere. While my grandfather and Attaturk fought on different sides of the same war, they were caught up in the same spirit. And where Attaturk's movement stalled long ago, and the Ummah languished, my grandfather's vision fell victim to a pervasive disillusionment that wasted and waned the Wilsonian generation. Perhaps the energy of Attaturk's movement and my grandfather's disillusionment were victims of the same malfunciton of history.
But finally there are new reforms in the Arab world, in Egypt and elsewhere. And in the non-Arab Muslim world a spirit of unprecedented liberty not only threatens the theocracy, but contributes creatively to our evolving democratic vision in partnerships with the best of the West. There are tens of thousands of new voices, carrying the old message with new and unmistakable inflections, that "instead of directing hatred and resentment against others... appeal to the hopes of their own people."
The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.
But it's a revolution that didn't start in Iraq, nor will it end there. The status quo, that refuge of the fearful, the wishful, and the satiated, is not merely unwise but reckless. The conservative and progressive ideals would meet, but for the fact that they're peering through opposite ends of the telescope. Their visions in the West are at odds, and in one of the most dramatic reversals in history the conservatives have become progressive, and the progressives are casting anchor. They have trained a microscope on the flaws in our western society, but see with less clarity than rank outsiders.
The advance of freedom is the calling of our time. It is the calling of our country. From the 14 Points to the Four Freedoms to the speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle.We believe that liberty is the design of nature. We believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom, the freedom we prize, is not for us alone. It is the right and the capacity of all mankind.
Ossama, you have indeed unleashed a formidable force in the world, but not the one you sought to unleash. "A calling" is not a command to die for a cause, like the punctuation at the end of an otherwise useless and futile life, but an invitation to organize and dedicate the entire arch of ones life in growing potency and constructiveness. It is that "other meaning" of Jihad, that you foolishly dismiss as mundane, but which will be caught on the fly in your homeland. Your movement will grow weaker, imperceptibly at first, but ultimately by the day, and the hour... while the design of nature grows stronger, echoing and amplifying in ways you can't even imagine. Your days, even your hours, are numbered.
Posted by Demosophist at November 6, 2003 08:39 PM | TrackBack