Exporting Democracy is a much better book than its oxymoronic title would suggest. It is not as good as it might be, given the talent and enviable track records of its editor and contributors. It is nevertheless a very useful book. In fact, I plan to assign it myself as a supplementary text.
This massive volume, the product of a symposium, draws upon the insights of U. S., British, and Latin American scholars. Editor Abraham Lowenthal notes in the preface that while the notion that the United States can and should export democracy is virtually unchallenged in the Washington policymaking community of the early 1990s, that community seems unaware that such a policy line has a long history. Thus the objective of the symposium and the resulting book has been to analyze when, where, why, how, and with what consequences the United States has sought to promote democracy in Latin America.
In the first section, four contributors focus on periods—from World War I to the Great Depression, the years immediately following World War II, the Alliance for Progress experiment, and the Reagan era—when U.S. administrations professed to be seeking to promote democracy. The second section features U. S. campaigns to promote one or another version of democracy in Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Nicaragua; and two chapters in that section highlight the roles played by U. S. business and labor organizations in such campaigns. In the final section John Sheahan examines the effects of U. S. economic policies on Latin American prospects for democracy. Laurence Whitehead draws lessons from a number of cases, and Lowenthal summarizes and draws conclusions from the findings of his contributors.
The book actually is not about exporting democracy, but rather about failing to export it. Several of the contributors call attention to the dubious utility of promoting democracy through undemocratic means or through backing antidemocratic allies; but is the United States, on balance, even for limited periods, really in the business of exporting democracy? If trying in vain to promote democracy and trying with greater success to extend or maintain hegemony are compatible, then the central weakness of this book is simply one of pulled punches. Lowenthal and his contributors dodge all bullets by allowing “democracy” to mean whatever U. S. officialdom at a given time decides it shall mean; but such terminological user-friendliness seems an awful waste of a language capable of great precision. The problem, of course, is that acceptance of the “official story,” or at least of its premises, is the price of admission to the establishment—the price, that is, of having a forum and of being “taken into account” in the great debate on U. S. foreign policy.
Lowenthal is, as usual, Machiavellian, and his advice is, as usual, sound. But the princes he is talking to (members of Congress, State Department bureaucrats, and presidential advisers) are not likely to read this book. Other scholars will, and they will profit from the great wealth of detail and, in many cases, subtle and insightful analysis. But most of the readers will be students who, unaccustomed to the rules of academic self-censorship and untrained in reading between the lines, may simply be puzzled by the proposition that a hegemonic power might be in the business, however inexpertly, of promoting democracy.
In fact, a hegemonic power simply cannot seek simultaneously to maintain its position and to promote genuine, far-reaching democracy, because the local polity is its ultimate competitor. Whitehead makes partial concession to this point when he notes that the Reagan administration “seems to have defined democracy to require congruence with American interests.” (It might be added that he was speaking of American interests as defined by Reagan.) That administration, White-head notes, was by no means willing to support “democracy-with-sovereignty.” The Reagan administration s attraction to democracy came about because the U. S. Congress, taking a firm stand on both sides of the fence, had made the maintenance of a civilian façade in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala a condition for the ongoing provision of military aid—aid that served to underwrite the dominance of antidemocratic forces. Ultimately, though, the Reagan roughriders learned what more seasoned conservatives had long recognized: that a civilian leader unwilling or unable to act on a popular mandate is a better hedge against social change than is an unbuffered military dictatorship. Perhaps it is time the United States quit trying to export democracy and started thinking about importing some.
