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International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War, by Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, editors
4. Liberalism and the End of the Cold War
Michael W. Doyle
The Cold War is over. President Yeltsin has explicitly declared that he (also the Russians ?) no longer regards the United States as an enemy and no longer targets missiles in our direction. President Bush celebrated the victory--by "the Grace of God"--in the 1992 State of the Union Address in the name of the "G.I. Joes and Janes" and even more nameless U.S. taxpayers to whom he wished to credit the demise of communism, which "died this year." 1 President Clinton embraced the Russian leader at the recent Vancouver Summit and, together with the other members of the Group of Seven industrial democracies, reaffirmed a commitment to the financial backing of Russian democracy.
Graceful as well as graceless political rhetoric aside, we have clearly experienced a revolutionary set of international events in the last half decade. On the heels of the 1980s revival of the Cold War, the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe has collapsed, the Soviet Union itself has dissolved, Germany--long the divided heart of the Cold War--has been permitted to reunite, representative government has made a large advance throughout the region, arms control has forged ahead with (by Cold War standards) dazzling speed, and strategic tensions across the length of the European continent have eased (in some cases, only to be replaced by long-smoldering nationalist strife). Europe, historically the most divided and war torn of continents, is at one and the same time uniting and pacifying as a whole (at the international level) and dissolving and destroying in some parts (at the domestic level).
As in 1789 and 1848 and 1914, history has once again left scholars and commentators in its dust. We lack the information needed to arrive at an understanding of these momentous events; we do not know what Gorbachev, Ulbricht, or Jaruzelski were thinking. And it is simply too soon for us to get a perspective on what has happened. In place of a general assessment, therefore, I would like to focus on how liberalism--one vision of world history--might try to account for the end of the Cold War and thus the beginning of a new era in the international system.
This involves two parts. First, I plan to account for how and why the democratic and liberalizing reforms came about. Here I shall use time and place as crucial devices with which to weed out causal claims. Can our competing explanations account for not only what occurred but also when and where the reforms took place, thus situating them in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s ? 2 And, second, I plan to weigh the widely shared expectation that the consequences of these liberalizing reforms were and are connected to peace. So I explore whether liberalism and peace are part and parcel of the same transformation and together constitute the end of the Cold War.
The connection rests on the growing impression that step by step with the increase in domestic civil rights and popular self-government, the prospects for international peace improve. The spread of popular government and the growth of civil society in Eastern Europe and (with fits and starts) the Soviet Union thus seem to many not only to herald but also to cause the radical reduction of international tensions in Europe and the wider world.
In the popular press, this notion seemed so widespread that the Economist (ever a dasher of cold water on popular optimisms) felt the spirit of the day called for a rebuttal (September 1, 1990). 3 Prominent political leaders have clearly contributed to the perception. For example, in a speech before the British parliament in June 1982, President Reagan proclaimed that governments founded on a respect for individual liberty exercise "restraint" and "peaceful intentions" in their foreign policy. (He then announced a "crusade for freedom" and a "campaign for democratic development.") 4 Similarly, President Bush, in an address before the United Nations General Assembly on October 1, 1990, declared: "Calls for democracy and human rights are being reborn everywhere. And these calls are an expression of support for the values enshrined in the Charter. They encourage our hopes for a more stable, more peaceful, more prosperous world." In the president's next U.N. address he stated equally unequivocally: "As democracy flourishes, so does the opportunity for a third historical breakthrough: international cooperation" (the first two were individual enterprise and international trade). 5 And perhaps most consequentially, the president justified the large cuts in U.S. tactical nuclear forces as the product of the decline in hostility that stemmed from the survival of democratic forces in the ussr after the 1991 coup.
These current political perceptions find roots in classical liberal democratic theory. The American revolutionary, Thomas Paine, in 1791 proclaimed: "Monarchical sovereignty, the enemy of mankind, and the source of misery, is abolished; and sovereignty is restored to its natural and original place, the nation. . . . Were this the case throughout Europe, the cause of war would be taken away." 6 Democratic pacifism, according to Paine and other and later democrats, rests on the view that the aggressive instincts of authoritarian leaders and totalitarian ruling parties make for war. Democratic states, founded on such individual rights as equality before the law, free speech and other civil liberties, private property, and elected representation are fundamentally against war. When the citizens who bear the burdens of war elect their governments, wars become impossible. Furthermore, citizens appreciate that the benefits of trade can be enjoyed only under conditions of peace. Thus the very existence of free market democracies such as the United States, Japan, and our European allies, and now possibly Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and, perhaps, a democratic Soviet Union, makes for peace.
How might the liberals explain liberation ? Is a liberated international system a peaceful one ?
Democratic Liberalization
Liberalism has been identified with an essential principle: the importance of the freedom of the individual. Above all, this is a belief in the importance of moral freedom, of the right to be treated and a duty to treat others as ethical subjects, and not as objects or means only. A commitment to this principle has generated rights and institutions.
A threefold set of rights forms the foundation of liberalism. Liberalism calls for freedom from arbitrary authority, often called "negative freedom," which includes freedom of conscience, a free press and free speech, equality under the law, and the right to hold, and therefore to exchange, property without fear of arbitrary seizure. Liberalism also calls for "positive freedom"--those rights necessary to protect and promote the capacity and opportunity for freedom. Such social and economic rights as equality of opportunity in education and rights to health care and employment, necessary for effective self-expression and participation, are thus among liberal rights. A third liberal right, democratic participation or represen tation, is necessary to guarantee the other two. To ensure that morally autonomous individuals remain free in those areas of social action where public authority is needed, public legislation has to express the will of the citizens making laws for their own community.
Liberalism is thus marked by a shared commitment to four essential institutions. First, citizens possess juridical equality and other fundamental civic rights such as freedom of religion and the press. Second, the effective sovereigns of the state are representative legislatures deriving their authority from the consent of the electorate and exercising their authority free from all restraint apart from the requirement that basic civic rights be preserved. Most pertinently for the impact of liberalism on foreign affairs, the state is subject to neither the external authority of other states nor the internal authority of special prerogatives held, for example, by monarchs or military bureaucracies over foreign policy. Third, the economy rests on a recognition of the rights of private property, including ownership of means of production. Property is justified by individual acquisition (for example, by labor) or by social agreement or social utility. This excludes state socialism or state capitalism, but it need not exclude market socialism or various forms of the mixed economy. Fourth, economic decisions are predominantly shaped by the forces of supply and demand, domestically and internationally, and are free from strict control by bureaucracies.
These principles and institutions have shaped two high roads to liberal governance. 7 In order to protect the opportunity of the citizen to exercise freedom, laissez-faire liberalism has leaned toward a highly constrained role for the state and a much wider role for private property and the market. In order to promote the opportunity of the citizen to exercise freedom, welfare liberalism has expanded the role of the state and constricted the role of the market. Both, nevertheless, accept the four institutional requirements and contrast markedly with the colonies, monarchical regimes, military dictatorships, and communist party dictatorships with which they have shared the political governance of the modern world.
Three major strands of liberalism attempt to account for the four institutions that together establish the modern liberal regime--popular government, civic liberty, private property, and markets.
Liberal Rebellion
For Locke, rebellion is explained, as well as justified, by tyranny. "Politick Society," what we would now call civil society, precedes the existence of the state and is constituted by an explicit or implicit contract among human beings whose natural equality of passion and reason makes their freely exercised choice the determinative secular source of binding authority. The legislature and executive serve to regulate the common life of the people joined together in a civil society dedicated to preservation of life, liberty, and property. Only foreign conquest dissolves a civil society. Governments, however, are dissolved by tyrannical acts: "Whenever the Legislators (or the Supreme Executor) endeavor to take away, and destroy the property of the People, or to reduce them to slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against force and violence." 8
Considered as an explanation for rebellion, the flaw in this thesis is obvious. Tyranny may justify but hardly explains rebellion, as the longevity and prevalence of tyrannical regimes indicates. But the rebellion trope finds a constant echo in the words of those who do rebel. Rebels mix with striking regularity the rhetoric of justification and explanation. Like Locke, they too explain rebellions as responses to "Arbitrary Power." Václav Havel, for example, stresses the exceptional character of the totalitarian regime and the arbitrariness of its power when he tries to explain to Westerners the origins of the Eastern liberations in the oppressive quality of daily life: "At the mercy of the all-powerful bureaucracy, so that for every little thing they have to approach some official or other . . . the gradual destruction of the human spirit, of basic human dignity . . . lives in a state of permanent humiliation." 9
Conditions such as these, together with Locke's faith in the equality of passion and reason, which can make people see themselves as free, explain the spirit of rebellion and the extraordinary reach of the demand for freedom through place and time, even in the least promising circumstances. For what else can unite the aspirations of Wat Tyler, the Levellers, Locke's own Glorious Revolution, the Sans Culottes, Jefferson and Paine, Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the students of Tienanmen Square, and the desperate opposition in Burma today ?
Liberal Modernization
Aspirations can help account for why citizens seek freedom (what a rebellion is for), but they tell us little about either where or when they are realized. A second, and economic, strand of liberalism attempts to account not merely for the aspiration for life, liberty, and property but also for where and when it succeeds and where and when it fails.
Hegel's philosophy of history may be the most important source of an idealist interpretation of liberal modernization. 10 But Joseph Schumpeter more clearly carried forward the tradition, focusing on the material interpretation of capitalist modernization in his essay "Imperialism." Capitalism produces an unwarlike disposition, he said; its populace is "democratized, individualized, rationalized." The people's (daily) energies are daily absorbed in production. The disciplines of industry and the market train people in "economic rationalism"; the instability of industrial life necessitates calculation. Capitalism also "individualizes"; "subjective opportunities" replace the "immutable factors" of traditional, hierarchical society. Rational individuals then demand democratic governance. 11
Francis Fukuyama's striking argument about the "end of history" presents a radical restatement of the liberal modernization theme, bringing together both its materialist and idealist strains. His study envisions the failure of all forms of autocracy, whether in Eastern Europe or elsewhere, and the triumph of consumer capitalism and democracy under the irresistible onslaught of modernization. When he tells us that history (and not just wars--cold or hot) is over, he means not that life will stop and events cease but that the struggle over alternative ways of life, of identity, meaning, or purpose, will come to an end--has come to an end--because it is now clear that there are no viable alternatives to Western liberalism, no credible alternatives paths to the good life. There will be plenty of archaic illiberalism, autocracy, dictatorship, stale socialism left in what used to be the Third World (now, presumably, the Second World"). But no longer can they claim to be the wave of the future. They have given up the struggle. World politics will henceforth, with allowances for the backward areas, be a politics of boredom, of peaceful common marketization. 12
Fukuyama tells us that this extraordinary end has come to pass for two major reasons: First, liberalism, by which he means political democracy and consumer capitalism, has resolved all the contradictions of life for which, throughout the course of history, individuals have been prepared to fight. With democracy, economic productivity, and the vcr, we have satisfied the cravings for both freedom and wealth. Liberalism has achieved a strikingly simultaneous combination of social and psycho-moral stabilization. Second, communism, and all other rival forms of political identity, are finished. They have failed to satisfy either the desire for freedom or the desire for wealth.
First let us examine his claim concerning communism. Communism may well be finished, as Fukuyama claims, and it may no longer offer a viable alternative, and certainly Stalinism, Brezhnevism, Maoism, and their many imitators seem now to have been rejected by the elites, and even more the masses, throughout what was once the communist Second World. Even in China after the Tienanmen crisis, and together with reaffirmations of the supremacy of the party and a continued loyalty to Marxism and Leninism, there continue to be promises of reform, pleas for patience, and programs of partial liberal economic development. It looks like we and directly China's youth are being asked to defer, not to abandon, the hope of freedom. 13
But Fukuyama claims that all democratic and liberalizing reforms that fall short of electoral multiparty democracy and the vcr--that is, of capitalist democracy--are not stable. Communism, indeed socialism itself, is on a slippery slope. The only really stable point is liberalism. The police state is therefore a desperate holding measure.
He provides us with much stimulating argument for this world historical assertion. In the process he insightfully connects and thus accounts for the historical association between capitalism and democracy in many of the Eastern European revolutions. But he also leaves us with a crucial and unanswered question: Is this crisis of established or existing communism or of all socialism ? That is, is it a crisis just of Stalinism and Maoism, or is it a crisis of the potential of a more plural but still socialist China or a democratic socialist third way between capitalism and communism ?
An insightful argument by Ellen Comisso does address the question. 14 Focusing on the work of the great Austrian libertarian economist Ludwig Von Mises, she too suggests that socialism, in all of its forms, is doomed. Neither democratic Leninism nor democratic socialism nor any of the historic forms of Yugoslav self-managed socialism is a stopping point in the forced-march progress of liberal modernization. None is an alternative to the choice between liberalism and stagnation. Socialists of all types want economic equality: some now reject the public ownership of the means of production. They think they can reform socialism through perestroika by having markets for goods, recognizing that markets make for more efficiency and thereby growth.
But reforms in commodity markets, Von Mises said, were not enough to achieve productivity. An economic system also needs real capitalism--a market for capital. An efficient economy needs to ensure that resources (that is, capital) will be taken away from firms that are not profitable and given to firms that are more profitable. If the state centralizes the ownership of capital, industrial managers will have an incentive to mislead the state planner in order to get more resources--more capital. After the centralized state planner invests in firms, both the state planner and the firms acquire a bureaucratic stake in the survival of the other. Since the state cannot go out of business, then neither will the industrial entrepreneurs (until they all go together). Capital will be wasted in inefficient and uncontrollable businesses, and overall national productivity will fall; as a result, Von Mises implies, socialism will not produce the vcrs for which the modern consumer hungers.
But there are good grounds for us to reject economic liberalism as a fully satisfactory explanation of the democratic liberalization of Eastern Europe.
First, we have good grounds to question the confidence in the theory of capitalism that Von Mises and other market capitalists display. On the one hand, we can envision a credible, socialist egalitarian form of the ownership of the means of production that nevertheless relies on capital markets for social efficiency. Pension funds, for example, can compete for the investments of workers and invest them in the productive enterprises of the economy. These pension funds would attempt to maximize the long-term profits of their contributors and would therefore invest in the most efficient firms, taking away funds from those less efficient. Pension funds would thus own the economy but would themselves be owned on an egalitarian basis by the workers and managers whose contributions make up their funds. The great American business guru, Peter Drucker, has described how pension funds might even bring socialism to America. But this vision is not solely American; a whole line of scientists, theorists, and promoters of industrial democracy have envisioned how workers owning (with their managers) 50 percent or so of their firms will be able to rely on external funds such as these pension funds to make up the discretionary capital they lack. 15
Moreover, in practice, communism was not an ineffective mode of production, at least not until the 1980s. Communism, Charles Maier has noted, like other forms of central planning, was an economic success between 1930 and 1970. In an era of large productive units and heavy industry, "communism was the ideology of heavy metal." 16 Eastern and Western European growth rates in the 1950s and 1960s were comparable and both quite good by global standards as both forged ahead, rebuilding and then extending heavy and light industry destroyed by the war (see table 4.1). But in the 1980s the Eastern European economies entered a profound economic crisis (see table 4.2.) In the 1970s and 1980s communist states proved unable (unwilling) to shed industrial workers and miners when their productivity fell; capitalist states of the West were able to disemploy the workforce of heavy industry and reemploy some of them (sometimes only their wives and children) in the growing service sector. The ten-year gap in industrial technology, Maier argues, doomed communism in Eastern Europe.
And we have mounting evidence that free market capitalism may not even be the quintessential capitalist answer to growth under the conditions of late-late capitalism. Instead the most striking rates of growth appear to be achieved by the semiplanned capitalist economies of East Asia--Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan. Capitalist syndicalism--indicative planning, capital rationing by parastatal development banks and ministries of finance, managed trade, incorporated unions--not capitalist libertarianism may better describe the wave of the capitalist future. 17
If we take a more political approach to liberal modernization and examine the effects of economic development on social identities and political mobilization, a somewhat different assessment is warranted. 18 Significant (whether stabilizing or destabilizing) change in political institutions can be a product of social mobilization, itself stimulated by economic development. Political upheavals and transformations should thus tend to correlate with social mobilization, and societies that have experienced extensive economic development and social mobilization should thus either be inclusionary (democratic) or highly repressive (totalitarian, perhaps, rather than merely traditionally autocratic or authoritarian, which, in this view, should characterize less mobilized societies).
Interestingly, this is just the pattern that describes the upheavals in Eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia (together with East Germany, the most developed) was forcibly demobilized from its democratic regime in 1948. East Germany suppressed an upheaval in 1953. Hungary and Poland (the next two most economically developed) rebelled in 1956. Czechoslovakia rebelled again in 1968; Hungary began to adopt "Goulash Communism" in the 1970s; and Poland rebelled again in 1981. And Rumania and Bulgaria, the least economically developed members of the Eastern bloc, did not experience political rebellion until 1989. 19 The year 1989 appeared so striking, another 1848, in part because the earlier rebellions and upheavals were not allowed to play themselves out nationally. Communist totalitarianism appeared permanent to Jeane Kirkpatrick, and others, less because it was different from authoritarianism than because the communist states of Eastern Europe were part of a Soviet empire that controlled their political fates. What made 1989 so striking was that Gorbachev and his associates had arrived at a willingness to abandon the Soviet empire, thus allowing national development to proceed. 20
The democratic politics of modernization, however, are not smooth. We should be concerned about the compatibility between democracy and capitalism that is assumed in much of this literature. A good case can be made that in the long run capitalism provides the dispersal of social power that effective democracy presupposes and that democracy is an especially effective mechanism with which to resolve differences within a society characterized by a pluralistic dispersal of social power. In the shorter run, a certain comfort can be drawn from the observation that the values of democratic participation and toleration of dissent are supported by majorities in some recent polls taken in the former Soviet Union. These same polls indicate that a large majority of Russians are willing to tolerate income differentials provided people are allowed to earn as much as they can." 21 (Is this enough to sustain a full-blown form of capitalist appropriation ?) But in a 1989 Soviet poll concerning the future of the economy, more than 60 percent of the sample said that they preferred the rationing of basic essential commodities to relying upon market pricing. Concerning ownership, many (more than 66 percent) favored private farming, and some (more than 30 percent) would be happy to work for a multinational corporation in a joint venture in the Soviet Union. But more than half of the Soviet public rejected the private ownership of businesses, regarding private enterprise as inherently corrupt and corrupting. 22 Adam Przeworski, reflecting on the results of similar polls taken in Poland, concluded, "The one value that socialist systems have successfully inculcated is equality, and this value may undermine pro-market reforms under conditions of democracy." 23 We do not yet know whether democratic and consumer sovereignty are on the same course in the former communist economies.
Liberal developmentalism of both the economic and political variants adds a vital historical dimension to the account of democratic liberalization: First of all, it explains the overall direction of the liberal progress, the seeming long-run economic superiority of liberalism over various forms of socialism and communism. It also tells us when and where--grosso modo--liberal society found itself selected as the dominant modern type, for, employing Maier's argu ment, we can use industrial selection to date the collapse of communism to the 1980s. And finally it offers an explanation for the underlying pattern of political development--albeit stymied by Soviet imperialism--in Eastern Europe.
Yet the march of progress is not altogether satisfying. Consumerist modernism, we find, did not demonstrate its superiority until the 1970s, and now there are indications that East Asian capitalist syndicalism is winning the 1990s. The 1980s seem to be a thin decade on which to hang the march of world history. And dating the economic crisis of communism to the 1980s, improvement as that is, forgets that communism had already undergone political, international, and indeed imperial crises in Eastern Europe during the very height of its economic triumphs. Assume that Eastern European communism would not have survived the German rebellion of 1953, the Hungarian and Polish revolts of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968, or the Polish Winter of 1981 if the Soviet empire had not propped up or restored its faltering communist clients; the global effect of the revolutions of 1989 might not have been so revolutionary if it had taken place piecemeal between 1953 and 1991. We should not neglect the international dimension of communism or of the Cold War between capitalism and liberalism.
Liberal Internationalism
Liberal internationalism is the third liberal vision of the end of the Cold War. It addresses the interaction of liberal with nonliberal political systems across borders. Beginning with the origins of political liberalism in the late eighteenth century, liberal states have with great success avoided getting into wars with each other. They are as warlike in their relations with nonliberals as any other state is, maybe even more so, and maybe even more prone to getting into imprudent crusades. But among themselves, liberals have established the separate peace Immanuel Kant described; since the 1790s there has been no war among these liberals. 24
This lack of war seems to be based on the factors that Kant identified: the restraint that representative institutions impose on sometimes wayward governments, the respect that liberal societies have for the freedom that each embodies, and the transnational ties of commerce, investment, and tourism that help create mutual understandings and mutual material interests in continuing exchange. But these very same ties--representation, a concern for individual rights, and transnational ties--are the very forces that make for suspicion, a confused foreign policy, and sometimes imprudent aggression in dealing with nonliberals. In foreign relations with nonliberals, a representative state can sometimes represent the aggressions and the fears of the majority. These fears are compounded by a sense that the nonliberal opponent is oppressing its own citizens. If that government oppresses its own citizens what, liberals ask, would it be likely to do to us ? Finally, those transnational ties that serve as lobbies for accommodation among liberals can serve as lobbies for strife in relations with nonliberals. Restricted by fear, those relations become vulnerable to any single flare-up of commercial or investment rivalry. The tensions can color an entire relationship.
Over the centuries, the liberal peace has expanded and contracted as liberal regimes rose and fell. Overall, it now includes the fifty to sixty states that have established governance by democratic government and a respect for individual freedom. Eventually, the theory goes, if all governments become liberal, peace will become global and, perhaps, stable and therefore perpetual--a history of peace, where the politics of force is replaced by the force of politics.
Kant expected the pacific union to expand erratically, with many setbacks. His peace train has two tracks. The first track is transnational. Commerce and other transnational ties and economic developments tend to operate on societies from below. These forces individually mobilize and pluralize the sources of power in a society and thereby put pressure on authoritarian institutions, a pressure whose release lies in political participation in liberal political institutions. 25
The role of global civil society and international civil politics is particularly important here. Tourism, educational exchanges, scientific meetings spread tastes across borders. Contacts with the liberal world seem to have had a liberalizing effect on the many Soviets and Eastern European elites who visited the West during the Cold War, witnessing both Western material successes (where they existed) and regimes that tolerated and even encouraged dissent and popular participation (when they did). 26 The international commitment to human rights, including the Helsinki Watch process, found a reflection in Gorbachev's "universal human values." The Goddess of Liberty erected in Tienanmen Square represented another transnational expression of ideas shared on a global basis.
Trade can have even more powerful effects. In the modern economy, fostering growth has meant at least a minimal engagement with the world economy. Even the ussr in its later days traded for 5 percent of its gnp. 27 The opening of trade can distribute income to domestically abundant factors of production such as labor, capital, or land in ways that put strain on established national distributions of income and power and make it costly for states to maintain monopoly control. These effects can have political consequences that enhance democratic governance if they broaden opportunities for domestic production, as Gourevitch and Rogowski have demonstrated in their studies of the "second image reversed." 28
Kant's second track is the international track of war. The pressure of war and military mobilization creates incentives for authoritarian rulers to grant popular participation as a way of increasing the popular contribution to the power resources of the states. Increased representation for the purpose of increasing taxation thus exerts the pressure to create republican institutions from above.
In all likelihood, the past rate of global progress in the expansion of the pacific union has been a complex and inseparable combination of the effects of both tracks. But if we imagine that progress had been achieved solely by one track or the other, we can deduce the outer limits of the underlying logics of the transnational and international progresses toward peace.
If we rashly assume that the transnational track alone had led to the expansion of the pacific union, and if we repeated the past arithmetic rate of increase (spilling over from country to country), which tripled between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and if the number of states remained fixed at roughly 150 to 200, then global republicanism will be achieved in the early 2100s. On the other hand, if we assume that the future will resemble the late nineteenth century, when there were no great world wars but many small petty wars (having epidemic-like effects), and if the geometric rate of expansion, doubling the pacific union each fifty years, is thus the same, then the union will not become global before 2100 (again).
Both tracks help engender liberal regimes and thus eventually a widening of the peace, but neither the tracks nor the trips are smooth. Transnational ties create incentives for conflict as well as for cooperation, and the international track of war obviously presupposes war in the first place. Moreover, the future portrayed is only an extrapolation of the past, a past with no possibility of nuclear war, technological development that was trade and growth enhancing, and states with limited surveillance capabilities, making them vulnerable to the threat and reality of popular uprisings. To put it mildly, changes in these characteristics could upset Kantian expectations.
Moreover, as social science, the liberal internationalists offer a rather uncertain set of predictions, and thus postdictions, that would allow us to account for the timing of the global transformation and of the transformation of specific countries. Kant saw history as a highly uncertain guide to human choice. All that we can say with theoretical projection (past or forward) is what table 3.3 suggests--the change was bound to have occurred sometime in the early twenty-first century. This is small help in accounting for the revolutions of 1989. Indeed, the internationalist perspective equally predicted transformation in the ussr and China. (Clearly, the liberal modernization perspective with its focus on domestic determinants--levels of economic and political development--offers necessary supplementary factors that must be taken into account to distinguish Chinese from Russian prospects.)
Two-track internationalism helps account for the international process of change, but here, too, it is far from a complete model of democratization. Its attention to transnational forces from below and international forces from above the state parallels explanations of liberalization processes that focus on splits within the governmental elite (as in Hungary 1989) as well as on collapses of the governmental elite in the face of popular mobilization (as in East Germany 1989). 29 These transnational and international forces offer important incentives for democratic liberal reform. They implicitly promise the opportunity to participate more fully in the liberal world market without security restrictions (such as those that bar the export of sensitive technology to enemy states) and with the protection of gatt standards and access to imf programs. They also promise membership in the liberal zone of peace and the consequent reduction in insecurity and thus, possibly, in defense expenditures.
But these transnational and international forces do not capture the strategic element of either popular or governmental choice in the decisions to transform (reforma for Juan Linz), replace (Linz's ruptura), or "transplace" the existing authoritarian regime. 30 Authoritarian (and, we now know, even totalitarian) regimes can choose to lead a transformation, to collapse and suffer a replacement at the hands of a democratic opposition, or to join with a democratic opposition in a mutual transplacement toward liberalization and then democracy. Are the public, collective incentives of liberal internationalism sufficient to motivate an authoritarian elite to start a transformation, to initiate a reform that carries the risk of crushed replacement, or to engage with its opponents in a transplacement?
Although it focuses on the need to account for egoistic incentives to act, the new literature on democratization also suggests that we need more focused collective incentives and perhaps what should be called "misincentives." Would Gorbachev have undertaken liberalization (glasnost and then political perestroika) had he known the outcome today (not to speak of his dangerous incarceration during the 1991 coup) ? Gorbachev, it appears, sought a reformed communism--involving market socialism and a revivified (and politically rewarded) popular democratic communist party, presumably led by himself--not the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party and the current stumble toward Western-style liberal pluralism and imf-dependent capitalism led by his rival Yeltsin. 31 The process of transformation escaped his grasp before, during, and especially after the coup. 32 A second factor affecting the risks that replacers are willing to bear is the simple concatenation of events, what has been called in other contexts the domino effect. The dominoes fell in Eastern Europe in 1989, and these had effects in the ussr, too, stimulating both the coup and some valiant Muscovites to resist it. Actions that seem imprudent from a local perspective appear reasonable when everyone else is doing the same thing. Thus what took ten years in Poland took ten months in Hungary, ten weeks in East Germany, and ten days in Czechoslovakia. Finally, simple lack of information, uncertainty, is conducive to democratic transplacements. When societies know the lines of cleavage and the distribution of social power, all the steps of transformations and transplacements must be negotiated in detail in advance, short-circuiting the open-endedness of liberal democratic contestation. 33 The very lack of knowledge of underlying social geography, after the years of straitjacketed communism, may have made for a willing ness to jump into contestation in Eastern Europe and may have the same effect in Russia and Ukraine today, as elites unable to assess outcomes opt for procedures.
Nonetheless, the liberal internationalist perspective does contribute additional understanding to the transformation of the international system. It highlights possible international sources of change--commerce and war--suggesting to us that democratic liberalization was most likely where war and commerce were most intense. There was little commerce in the Soviet bloc, and none of it free. This proposition does not mean, however, that a strategy of peace through strength--military pressure and arms racing in order to force the collapse of the opposing regime--was a justified liberal strategy. 34 In the short run, outside pressure tends to strengthen regimes, especially those that hold a domestic monopoly on the means of violence. It does mean, however, that over the long run authoritarian regimes prove to be poor mobilizers of national resources, unless they call on representation as a means toward taxation, and the Cold War, together with Soviet domestic ambitions, imposed large burdens on Soviet society. 35
Liberal internationalism also contributes a twofold perspective on change, stressing both the pressures from below mounted by trade unions such as Solidarity and intellectuals and students in Czechoslovakia and the decisions at the top made by Andropov and Gorbachev under the strain of Cold War competition. Finally, in the spread of the pacific union, it holds forth a promise of peace to all those willing to undertake the dangerous course of liberal internationalist reform.
Democratic Peace?
The issue now is whether the consequences of the spread of democracy and freedom will give rise to a secure expectation of peace. Kant's liberal internationalism furnishes good grounds to give peace the benefit of a chance. But let me suggest three reasons to regard peace and democracy as something less than necessary or guaranteed.
First, liberal internationalism offers us hope that if the next hegemonic challenger is liberal, the hegemonic transition might be peaceful, such as the one between Great Britain and the United States in the twentieth century, and we will suffer neither war nor the waste of resources in a cold war. But liberalism can also exacerbate minor differences. Already, this is at work in what we tend to call the Japan problem. Japan is quasidemocratic, like the United States, but it is less purely capitalist than the United States is. And most importantly, culturally it is not yet, and perhaps never will be, as liberal as the United States now is--Japanism always seems more important than liberalism. While the Japanese polity is representative, its economy is (we think) too closely integrated to reflect arms-length competition and a free and flat playing field. Its culture identifies community as something more important than individuality.
Like pre-World War I Germany, though for different reasons, Japan may not be fully liberal. This is partly because of Japan's particular characteristics, but more importantly it is a U.S.-Japan problem, just as the German problem was a Franco-German and Anglo-German problem. Although Wilhelm II of Germany and Bethmann-Hollweg were sometimes idiosyncratic in the formulation of their policy, they were not noticeably more aggressive than the other statesmen of Europe at the time. The problem was that the other governments of Europe, particularly Britain and France, assumed that because Germany was not a fully representative liberal state, it was bound to be dangerous. This lack of trust then made Germany feel insecure and threatened. Naturally, it responded in ways that confirmed the expectations of Britain and France, escalated tensions, and contributed to the onslaught of World War I. Will we enter a similar spiral of escalating tension with Japan?
Second, we should be cautious about assuming that democratic rule guarantees a spirit of peace. Liberal states have frequently engaged in imprudent imperialism, as Kant himself recognized. Yet, recently, John Mueller in his Retreat From the Doomsday has made a serious and provocative case for seeing world politics as not merely changing but transformed before our very unseeing eyes. 36 War, Mueller argues, has become obsolescent. A durable, long peace among the developed industrial powers has changed international relations. The obsolescence of war--the transformation of great-power politics--is, Mueller argues, a function of two developments.
First, the physical costs of war, its very destructiveness, have made it intolerable since as early as the turn of the century, and clearly since World War I. War has become "rationally unthinkable." Second of all, the psychic cost of war has increased. War has become "sub-rationally unthinkable." War is simply ridiculous. Hitler and Mussolini, therefore, were ridiculous aberrations, and they caused World War II. But has war become obsolete, just as dueling did in the nineteenth century ? Until the middle of the last century, dueling was very much required by honor; then, like war now, it became ridiculous. But we have to remember that dueling became a crime before it became ridiculous. At the time it was made illegal, truly harmful libels, slanders, and assaults could be addressed in the courts and punished by the law. Only petty insults and minor bumping and pushing were left to the court of public opinion. In other words, dueling was replaced not merely by a change of public opinion but by a set of effective public institutions with the capacity to enforce the prohibition against murder and manslaughter. International relations lacks such a court and such a mechanism of enforcement that could address the causes of war and thereby make war truly as unthinkable as dueling is today. The causes of war, moreover, are not just injured pride. Wars are also created by competition for scarce goods and by the very fear of war itself. Just as Sparta decided at the origin of the Peloponnesian War to strike before it became even weaker, so other wars could be driven by a form of rationality within the wider scope of irrationality.
My final point is that not all democracies need be the same. Like Kant's constitutional democracy, intense, communal, direct democracies (such as that Rousseau envisaged) can exercise democratic caution in the interest of the majority. But unlike Rousseau's direct democracy, Kant's liberal republics are capable of acting with an appreciation of the cosmopolitan moral equality of all individuals. The Rousseauian citizen, on the other hand, cedes all rights to his or her fellow citizens, retaining only the right to equal consideration. In order to be completely self-determining, Rousseau requires that there be no limit but equality on democratic sovereignty and authority. The resulting communitarianism is intense--every aspect of culture, morality, and social life is subject to the creation and the re-creation of the nation. The tendency to enhance national consciousness through external hostility and what Rousseau calls amour propre would be correspondingly high. Just as individuality disappears into collective consciousness, so too does an appreciation for the international rights of foreign republics. 37 The international rights of republics derive from our ability to reconstruct in our imagination the act of representation of foreign individuals, who are our moral equals. Rousseau's democracy--for the sake of intensifying national identity--limits our identification to fellow citizens.
In addition, for the sake of equality and autonomy, Rousseau's democracy precludes the private ties of commerce and social interaction across borders that lead to both domestic diversity and transnational solidarity. These material ties sustain the transnational, or cosmopolitan, identity of individuals with each other that serves as the foundation of international respect, which in turn is the source of the spirit of international law that requires tolerance and peace among fellow constitutional democracies (while exacerbating conflict between constitutional democracies and all other states).
Rousseau does share with Kant democratic rationality. He excludes, however, both the moral individualism and the social pluralism that provide the foundations for Kant's international and cosmopolitan laws and thereby precludes the liberal peace.
To the extent that these theoretical distinctions tap the actual range of diversity in the development of contemporary democracies, they offer us some useful warnings about the international implications of the current trend toward democratization. 38 While majority rule may be a necessary condition of a state of peace, it is not a sufficient condition. Creative leadership will be required to moderate the autarky and nationalism that can undermine democratic peace. To establish peace among themselves, democracies must also define individual rights in such a way that the cosmopolitan rights of all humankind are entailed in the moral foundations of the rights of domestic citizens. And they must allow the material ties of transnational society to flourish among themselves.
Note 1: George Bush, "State of the Union Address," New York Times, January 29, 1992. Back.
Note 2: I am following the explanatory agenda suggested by Charles Maier in his provocative essay (discussed below). I am grateful for helpful comments from Thomas Risse-Kappen, Ned Lebow, and the members of seminars they organized at Cornell and Columbia universities. Back.
Note 3: The anonymous author of the article directed his spirited attack at what he (incorrectly) thought to be misinterpretations of the republican ideas of Immanuel Kant. Back.
Note 4: Ronald Reagan, "Address to Parliament," New York Times, June 9, 1982. Back.
Note 5: George Bush, "Address to the United Nations General Assembly," New York Times, October 2, 1990; idem, "Pax Universalis," New York Times, September 24, 1991. He earlier announced as a "plain truth: the day of the dictator is over. The people's right to democracy must not be denied" (Department of State Bulletin, June 1989). Back.
Note 6: Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, in Complete Writings, ed. Eric Foner (New York: Citadel, 1945), 1:342. Back.
Note 7: The sources of classic laissez-faire liberalism can be found in Locke, in the Federalist Papers, in Kant, and in Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic, 1974). Expositions of welfare liberalism are in the work of the Fabians and in John Rawls, A Theo ry of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). Amy Gutmann discusses variants of liberal thought in her book Liberal Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Uncomfortably paralleling each of the high roads are low roads that, while achieving certain liberal values, fail to reconcile freedom and order. An overwhelming terror of anarchy and a desire to preserve property can drive laissez-faire liberals to support a law-and-order authoritarian rule that sacrifices democracy. Authoritarianism to preserve order is the argument of Hobbes's Leviathan. It also shapes the argument of right-wing liberals who seek to draw a distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian dictatorships. The justification sometimes advanced by liberals for the former is that they can be temporary and educate the population into an acceptance of property, individual rights, and, eventually, representative government. See Jeane Kirkpatrick, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," Commentary 68 (November 1979): 34-45. Complementarily, when social inequalities are judged to be extreme, the welfare liberal can argue that establishing (or reestablishing) the foundations of liberal society requires a nonliberal method of reform, a second low road of redistributing authoritarianism. Zolberg reports a liberal left sensibility among U.S. scholars of African politics that was sympathetic to progressive autocracies; see Aristide Zolberg, One Party Government in the Ivory Coast (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. vii. Back.
Note 8: John Locke, Second Treatise, ed. Peter Laslett, in Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), para. 222. Back.
Note 9: Quoted in Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure (New York: Scribner's, 1989), p. 111. For an interesting application of Lockean ideas to Eastern Europe, see Zbigniew Rau, "Some Thoughts on Civil Society in Eastern Europe and the Lockian Contractarian Approach," Political Studies 35, no. 4 (1987): 573-92. Back.
Note 10: Francis Fukuyama, following Alexandre Kojeve, makes this controversial suggestion in The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), chap. 5. Although critics have challenged Hegel's liberalism, Hegel's stature as a founder of modernization theory appears to be curiously firm. Back.
Note 11: Joseph Schumpeter, "Imperialism," in Imperialism and Social Classes (Cleveland: World, 1955), p. 68. Back.
Note 12: Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History ?" The National Interest, no. 16 (summer 1989): 3-18. Back.
Note 13: Such was the plea made by Ambassador Han Xu on August 21, 1989, in the New York Times, when he said, after the Tienanmen incident, that the course of progress was not over. Instead, he pleaded for American patience and in return promised progress, pluralism, and a future of cooperation with a growing People's Republic. Back.
Note 14: Back.Ellen Comisso, "Crisis in Socialism or Crisis of Socialism," World Politics 42 (July 1990): 563-96. See also Valerie Bunce, "Rising Above the Past: The Struggle for Liberal Democracy in Eastern Europe," World Policy Journal 7 (summer 1990): 395-430.
Note 15: Back.A discussion of these issues can be found in the summer 1991 issue of Dissent, which is devoted to the subject of market socialism.
Note 16: Charles Maier, Why Did Communism Collapse in 1989 ? Central and Eastern Europe Working Paper Series #7 (Cambridge: Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 1991). Back.
Note 17: Robert Wade effectively makes this case in his review essay, "East Asia's Economic Success," World Politics 44 (October 1992): 290-320. Interestingly, Fukuyama's book also stresses this more complicated perspective on development; his article lends itself to the more libertarian interpretation of economic development. Back.
Note 18: See Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality, 2d ed. (Cambridge: mit. Press, 1966); and Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), chaps. 5 and 6. Back.
Note 19: For valuable accounts of these crises, see Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); and, for the Cold War period, Journalist M., A Year Is Eight Months (New York: Anchor / Doubleday, 1970). For the Polish case at the end of the Cold War, see Alain Touraine, Fran¨ois Dubet, Michel Wieriorka, and Jan Strzelecki, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Back.
Note 20: Jorge Dominguez, in his book Insurrection or Loyalty: The Breakdown of the Spanish American Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980) notes a similar pattern in the collapse of the Spanish empire in the Americas between 1800 and 1825. For an extension of this argument, see Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), chap. 14. Back.
Note 21: ROMIR Poll, December 1991 and January 1992, reported by Ellen Mickiewicz, Findings of Four Major Surveys in the Former Soviet Union (Atlanta, Ga.: Carter Center, Emory University, 1992), p. 8. Back.
Note 22: Poll by National Opinion Research Center, directed by Valery Rutgeier, excerpted in New York Times, November 5, 1989. Back.
Note 23: Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 178. Back.
Note 24: The evidence for the existence and significance of a pacific union is discussed in Michael Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs, Part 1," Philosophy and Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (1983): 205-35. See Clarence Streit, Union Now (New York: Harpers, 1938), pp. 88, 90-92, who seems to have been the first to point out that in contemporary foreign relations democracies demonstrate an empirical tendency to maintain peace among themselves. He made this the foundation of his proposal for a (non-Kantian) federal union of the fifteen leading democracies of the 1930s. See D. V. Babst, "A Force for Peace," Industrial Research 14 (April 1972): 55-58, for a quantitative study of the phenomenon of democratic peace; and Rudolph J. Rummel, "Libertarianism and International Violence," Journal of Conflict Resolution 27 (June 1983): 27-71, for a similar study of libertarianism (in the sense of laissez-faire) focusing on the postwar period. See Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs," for the use of liberal in a wider (Kantian) sense in a discussion of this issue. In that essay, Doyle surveys the period from 1790 to the present and finds no war among liberal states. See Babst, "A Force for Peace," for a preliminary test of the significance of the distribution of alliance partners in World War I. He found that the possibility that the actual distribution of alliance partners could have occurred by chance was less than 1 percent (p. 56). But this assumes that there was an equal possibility that any two nations could have gone to war with each other; and this is a strong assumption. See Rummel, "Libertarianism and International Violence," for a further discussion of statistical significance as it applies to his libertarian thesis. Recent work has extended these arguments into considerations of strategies of international reform (e.g., see James L. Ray, "The Abolition of Slavery and the End of International War," International Organization 43 [ summer 1989 ]: 405-39), patterns of evolution in the international system (see George Modelski, "Is World Politics Evolutionary Learning," International Organization 44 [ winter 1990 ]: 1-24; and Bruce Russett, Controlling the Sword [ Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990 ], and implications for the categorization of contemporary international theory (see Joseph Nye, "Neorealism and Neoliberalism," World Politics 40 (summer 1988): 235-51). Back.
Note 25: See Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); and Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication, for sources of the social mobilization, political participation, institutional change hypothesis. Back.
Note 26: For an excellent survey of these factors, see Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, "The International Sources of Soviet Change," International Security 16 (winter 1991 / 92): 74-118. Back.
Note 27: See Timothy Colton, Dilemmas of Soviet Reform (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1992). Back.
Note 28: Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); and Ronald Rogowski, Commerce and Coalitions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Back.
Note 29: Przeworski, Democracy and the Market, p. 56. Back.
Note 30: Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), p. 114; and Juan Linz, "Crisis, Breakdown, and Re-Equilibration," in The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, ed. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 35. Back.
Note 31: Mikhail Gorbachev, "On Socialist Democracy," in Socialism, Peace, and Democracy (London: Atlantic Highlands, 1987). See also Mar shall Goldman, What Went Wrong with Perestroika (New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 128-71. Back.
Note 32: Theodore Draper, "Who Killed Soviet Communism," New York Review of Books, June 1, 1992, pp. 7-14. Back.
Note 33: Przeworski, Democracy and the Market, p. 88. Back.
Note 34: Thomas Risse-Kappen, "Did 'Peace Through Strength' End the Cold War ?" International Security (summer 1991): 162-88. Back.
Note 35: I think that this is a major assumption of George Kennan's classic strategy for eventual accommodation (not victory) in the Cold War. He relied on the "internal weakness" of Soviet power, supplemented by "international frustration," to dissolve Soviet ambitions and capacities (George Kennan, "Sources of Soviet Conduct," Foreign Affairs 25 [ July 1947 ]: 566-82). Back.
Note 36: John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday (New York: Basic, 1989). Back.
Note 37: Stephen Van Evera, "Primed for Peace: Europe after the Cold War," International Security 15 (winter 1990 / 91): 7-57, reaches a similar conclusion about the dangers of militaristic nationalism, drawing on historical evidence of the early twentieth century. The comparison detailed here, however, suggests an even wider indictment of the danger of nationalism among democracies. Back.
Note 38: I have found the following especially informative: for a criticism of liberalism, John J. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War," International Security 15 (summer 1990): 5-56; for a discussion of policy paths, Jack Snyder, "Averting Anarchy in the New Europe," International Security 14 (spring 1990): 5-41; for advocacy of the prospects for peace, Van Evera, "Primed for Peace"; for a discussion of the role of external pressure in Soviet change, Risse-Kappen, "Did 'Peace Through Strength' End the Cold War ?" See also Charles and Clifford Kupchan's argument for collective security in their work "Concerts, Collective Security, and the Future of Europe," International Security 16 (summer 1991): 114-61; and Deudney and Ikenberry, "International Sources of Soviet Change. Back.
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