World Policy Journal
Volume XVI, No 2, Summer 1999

 

Coda: Voltaire’s Coconuts-and Ours
By James Chace

 

Why can’t the laws that guarantee British liberties be adapted elsewhere? This is Voltaire’s famous query that Ian Buruma explores so arrestingly in his new book, Anglomania. Having been imprisoned in the Bastille for publishing a satirical poem on religious persecution in France, Voltaire traveled to England to find his model of tolerance and liberty. As a universalist and a rationalist, the French philosopher assumed that these virtues could be transplanted elsewhere, and most especially to the France of the ancien régime. But Voltaire was too smart not to anticipate the objections of less astute observers of the human condition. They would say, in Buruma’s paraphrase, that “you might as well ask why coconuts, which bear fruit in India, do not ripen in Rome. His answer? Well, that it took time for those coconuts to ripen in England too. There is no reason, he said, why they shouldn’t do well everywhere, even in Bosnia and Serbia. So let’s start planting them now.”

What Voltaire essentially admired in England was the theory of equality before the law and the separation of legislative and executive powers. But the pessimist-some would say the realist-would ask whether political arrangements in one country can be guaranteed in another in much the same way. Those who tend to take “an organic view of nations, as communities that grow naturally, according to the conditions of climate, blood, and soil, are skeptical.” Nor did Voltaire deny the existence of national character. But, as Buruma points out, Voltaire was surely right in his view that “to be free is to be dependent only on the laws.”

Of course, England was not without its vices-its cruel penal codes, its philistinism, its xenophobia-and, above all, its social and economic inequality. And Voltaire did not confuse liberty with egalitarianism. “All the citizens of the state cannot be equally powerful,” he wrote, “but they may be equally free.”

Today, the United States has replaced England as the predominant world power. Writing in the midst of the Kosovo war, one has to ask if the American model of governance, derived in large part from the Founding Fathers’ reading of John Locke’s views on limited government based on consent, and The Spirit of the Laws by that other great anglophile, Montesquieu, can flourish in alien soil. The rule of law, the separation of powers-these are the coconuts that have to grow if values rooted in liberal institutions are to predominate in the post-Cold War universe.

If the aims of the European powers in the Balkans-and the United States as the commander of NATO is a “European” power-are simply to preserve peace and ensure stability, this can be done by establishing a long-term military protectorate. But if the goal is to establish stability after the departure of the occupying powers, even should that occupation be one of some years, then what is needed is a broader approach. This means not only planting liberal institutions adapted to the soil and climate of the region but tending them with discipline and care. In this issue, David Rieff has called for a latter-day mandate system that would take temporary control over, and then reconstruct, lands that have been laid to waste either through internal conflict or as a result of the actions of outsiders, whether through bombs, missiles, troops, or armor. Rieff underlines the depth of the commitment necessary: “Had the United Nations stayed in Cambodia for a generation, it might indeed have improved that unhappy country’s prospects; by staying two years, it provided little more than a short respite.”

Even to hope to resolve the conflict in South-Central Europe will require not halfway measures, such as bombing without ground troops and “peacekeepers” rather than peace enforcers, but a commitment to go beyond free elections (which Fareed Zakaria has elsewhere warned may bring about “illiberal democracy”) and to instill the liberal institutions that, in the long run, tend to produce an enduring stability. It is surely the job of the occupying powers to establish enlightened institutions enshrined in a constitution that guarantees personal liberties, as was done in Japan and Germany after the Second World War. This is not a plea for a return to Wilsonian universalism, but to the realism of a Franklin Roosevelt, who called for the Western democracies to promote freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of worship, and freedom of speech.