CIAO DATE: 12/03

Rise Up, Return, Rebuild

Radek Sikorski

On The Issues

May 2003

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

The recent democratization of Central Europe helps show how Iraq can shed its autocratic Ba'ath party legacy. The dismantling of the old Iraqi regime's supporting social structure, remembrance of that regime's crimes, and a return of Iraqi expatriates who have experience with democratic life are necessary to establish a liberal democratic order.

Saddam Hussein's regime is history. Major population centers are under control and basic services are being restored. But whether Iraq becomes an example to the rest of the region will depend less on the material improvements of Iraqi infrastructure and more on how quickly and thoroughly Iraq sheds its Ba'ath party legacy. Soon, a number of Iraqis will be cooperating in creating a new government. At that point it is important to ask which people, institutions, and laws must be uprooted and which accommodated if Iraq is to become a liberal democracy.

Fortunately, we have recent experience in replacing autocracies with democratic rule: Less than fifteen years ago, communist regimes ruled all of Russia and Central Europe. Today, all but a few of those nations have the fundamentals of free society: elections, a press that enjoys at least a moderate degree of liberty, and private economic activity. In Central Europe in particular, the people saw communism as a system imposed on them by outsiders. Nationalism thus worked in favor of democratic and free-market tendencies. Arab societies are different, of course, but parallels exist: Serbia is a rather close European approximation of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. There too, a ruthless dictator justified his tyranny with nationalist appeals, invaded neighboring countries, and ultimately fell as a result of Western military intervention. Today, a relatively democratic government runs the country.

 

Acting on Three Major Lessons

Three major lessons emerge from the Central European experience. For regime change to result in liberal democratic order, a nation must remove the old regime from power, remember its crimes, and dismantle the social infrastructure that supported it. Those tasks will be hard for the citizens of Iraq, but not impossible.

First and, perhaps, most obviously, a liberated Iraq will not only require the removal of Saddam Hussein from power, but also the removal of the people who supported his regime. The transition from dictatorship to democracy in Central Europe has worked in many cases, and its success—in terms of vitality and stability of the democratic order—has been greater the more thoroughly the communists were kicked out of government. Democracy is now least reversible in the former East Germany, not only because that country has been integrated into the Federal Republic of Germany and the European Union, but also because the East German civil service, police force, and army were thoroughly cleansed of former communist officials.

Most countries in Central Europe have helped to create this new order by remembering the crimes of their previous communist governments. In Hungary, a House of Terror museum now has its home in the building where the communists tortured their political opponents. In Poland, the Institute of National Memory prosecutes communist-era crimes, and the law forces informers for the communist secret police to declare themselves if they want to run for parliament or be appointed to public office. In the Czech Republic, employers can easily verify whether employees worked for the secret police. In Lithuania, the former KGB office houses a museum to Soviet-era persecution.

Thanks to such actions, former communists are forced to flee from their records. They serve as heads of state and government in many parts of Central Europe, but they won elections there by convincing voters that they had changed. Throughout the region, one would be hard-pressed today to find anyone who would admit to having been a believing communist. I once asked a member of Mikhail Gorbachev's politburo, a former head of the Ideology Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, whether his loss of faith in the system was gradual or if a specific event made him tip. "Do you take me for a fool?" he replied. "I never believed in any of that garbage." In a few more years, some will have us believe that anticommunists ran the Evil Empire.

But things get worse the further east one travels. In Russia, symbols of the old regime, such as the Lenin mausoleum in Red Square, have been left standing and, correspondingly, most of the media toe the authorities' line. More than a decade after communism's demise, there is a country in Europe—Belarus—where the former KGB is still proud to call itself the KGB, with "comrades" and death squads to match. In the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, the same hacks who oppressed their people during the cold war do it with even more gusto, now that the Soviet Party Control Commission no longer threatens them with surprise inspections.

Building a liberal society on the ashes of a totalitarian dictatorship does not involve simply removing officials and remembering what they did, but also dismantling the social infrastructure that supported them. The threat to democracy in Central Europe today comes not from the average ex-communist, but from the old-boy network yearning for its past glory days. When former members of the Communist Youth League dominate the commanding heights of the economy as well as the judiciary, army, and police, a country can have every outward manifestation of a democratic order and very little genuine political competition. The corruption scandals that now shake Poland show how difficult it is to make democracy work when the people who are supposed to run the system of checks and balances have greater loyalty to their old "comrades" than to the institutions they nominally serve. When businessmen see that more money can be made by bribing members of parliament than by inventing a new product, they spend more time cultivating their political connections than running their businesses. And the sight of former communists prospering politically and financially is deeply demoralizing to those who staked their lives on resisting those very people.

Justice does not have to work perfectly for society to operate smoothly, but it needs to prevail most of the time. For civic virtues to flourish, public life must reward the good rather than the ruthless. Iraq could follow one of many paths. Fifteen years hence it could be like East Germany-decisively, if not perfectly, integrated into democratic institutions. Or it could continue along the same lines as Uzbekistan: A ranking member of Saddam Hussein's army or security apparatus could take over and continue things much as they have been going for the past thirty years.

 

Call the Expatriates Back Home

In a country where democratic traditions are weaker than in Central Europe, in which the ruling party is indistinguishable from a criminal racket, it would be a mistake to expect liberty to blossom as soon as the tyrant falls. Iraq needs democratic colonization on the East German model. Fortunately, there is a group of people who can fulfill the role of the West German civil servants and businessmen who took the new states under their wing when the Honecker regime gave up the ghost in the East: the expatriates.

The Iraqi diaspora, spread all over the world, is the only group of Iraqis who have experience with democratic life, who know the rules of the globalized economy, and who are largely untainted by collaboration with Saddam and his thugs. Bringing back expatriates to rebuild the country is working in Afghanistan; it should be tried in Iraq. The returning emigres will not be liked—East Germans do not like the Wessis, the citizens of West Germany, very much-but they are the only group that can foster a cultural and political transformation. In the months to come, we should judge the success or failure of Iraqi democracy by the number of Iraqis who vote with their feet to return to their country to take important roles in reconstructing it as a peaceful, liberal, and democratic society.

 

Radek Sikorski is a resident fellow at AEI and is executive director of AEI's New Atlantic Initiative.