On Promoting Democracy (Essay‪)‬

The first question that we have to ask about promoting democracy is the question of agency: Who are the promoters? Most of the recent arguments have focused on the state, that is, on the already democratic states and, particularly, the United States. Regime change, it is commonly thought, is a state project, and so we need to think about the means that states might use for the sake of this project. Crucially, when can they use force? My own view is that they can never rightly use force to create a democratic regime in someone else's country. The old arguments for "nonintervention," first made by John Stuart Mill, still hold. But once states have used force for some other legitimate purpose, to defeat the Nazis, for example, or (hypothetically, since we did not do it) to stop a massacre in Rwanda, they can continue to use it; they may even be obligated to continue to use it, for political reconstruction. Absent some such overriding purpose, I do not believe that sending an army across the border is a good democratic move; nor is it likely to be an effective way to promote democracy. Even if a morally necessary humanitarian intervention produces a change of regime and opens the way for democratization, we need to be realistic about what kinds of politics are possible after an extended period of ethnic cleansing and mass murder. A devastated country in which the killers and the people they tried to kill (and whose relatives they did kill) live side by side is not a likely setting for democratic deliberation, popular engagement, and nonviolent opposition. Sometimes all that we can demand in replacing a murderous regime is a nonmurderous regime. Democratization will have to wait for the (slow) development of peaceful coexistence and mutual trust. An occupying army may aid that development, but it is not itself, and should not try to be, an agent of political transformation.