For Democracy to Take Root, It Must Be the Work of Many Hands

The biggest problem with President Bush’s inaugural address last week was not that he set too broad a goal, but that he offered too narrow a vision of how to achieve it.

Applied with a proper sense of humility and limits, Bush’s goal of spreading liberty is an appropriate, and even traditional, lodestar for U.S. foreign policy. But expanding freedom does not need to be an entirely, or even principally, American mission, as Bush’s speech implied.

Indeed, Bush can advance his goal of extending freedom probably only to the extent that the cause is not seen as an American crusade. Only by broadening his approach to more clearly include others -- to make the spread of democracy the work of all of the world’s democracies -- can Bush move from aspiration to achievement.

The ardor and unqualified sweep of Bush’s language might have surprised previous presidents, but his cause would not. The first president to argue that America would be more secure in a world with more democracies was Thomas Jefferson. Over the last century, from Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, “no theme has figured more prominently in

Every president has balanced that ideal against conflicting priorities and practical constraints. During the Cold War, the U.S. routinely supported (and sometimes installed) autocratic anti-communists. Conversely, even the most fervently anti-communist presidents accepted Soviet domination of Eastern Europe as a fact that America could not reverse at an acceptable cost.

Bush surely understands that he faces limits too, as his aides quickly told reporters after the speech. The White House made clear that Bush recognizes the U.S. cannot impose democracy everywhere or reorder its relationships with countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia solely around the principle of promoting freedom.

Those qualifications were important to reassure the world that Bush had not committed himself to an unending, unbounded conflict. But the White House caveats left open the question of what the United States practically can do to move forward Bush’s “great objective of ending tyranny.”

For any president, the options for spreading democracy range from rhetorical exhortation to military intervention.

In the right circumstance, words can promote change more powerfully than guns. If Bush’s words last week encourage the heroes who labor to open closed societies, as Kennedy’s and Reagan’s did, he will have done the world a service. Unambiguous American support for democracy can also help tip the balance in societies already edging toward it, as in Ukraine last year.

But history shows that exhortation alone can’t transform societies where democracy remains distant -- a condition that describes the Middle Eastern countries where the absence of freedom most threatens the world. Right now, military force doesn’t look like a very effective strategy for transforming that region either.

The United States did forcibly remake Japan and Germany into democracies after World War II. But Iraq, with its unrelenting violence, seems destined to demonstrate the limits of that approach in the Middle East. The war has exacted such painful financial and human costs that Bush would face enormous resistance at home if he tried to invade another country.

Bush hopes that elections in Iraq will create a domino-like pressure for change throughout the region. But the chaos engulfing Iraq makes it unlikely that many in the Middle East will see it as a model any time soon. A senior Saudi official last week cited Iraq’s turmoil as a justification for avoiding full-scale national elections.

More important, the Iraq invasion has hurt the image in the region not only of the United States, but also of democracy itself -- which Arab critics increasingly see as a code word either for domestic disorder or for “U.S. regional domination,” as two leading students of Arab reform wrote recently.

The failure to acknowledge this backlash may have been the most important flaw in Bush’s speech. Bush declared freedom a universal right; yet apart from a passing reference to allies, he spoke of its spread as an American mission.

But the resistance to American preeminence, especially in the Muslim world, means that democracy has a better chance of taking root precisely if it is not seen as an American transplant. That means the first step toward enlarging the world’s democracies should be to enlist the existing democracies in the cause of expansion.

“The credibility of a [pro-democracy] movement can only be based on support from broader communities than Bush represents,” says Tom Bentley, director of Demos, a London think tank close to the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Other democracies can offer Bush not only credibility but also a strategy for encouraging change. The European Union helped spread freedom through Eastern Europe, and to the doorstep of the Muslim world in Turkey, by requiring countries seeking the benefits of membership to provide free elections and to protect individual rights.

It’s probably impractical to offer EU membership as an inducement for democracy to Middle Eastern nations like Egypt or Syria (though after Turkey, who knows?). But it is worth considering whether the EU model could be applied to some new international system that rewards steps toward democracy.

Bush’s effort to link more U.S. foreign aid to economic and political change shows that he understands this principle. But his speech yet again signaled that he sees the spread of democracy as a uniquely American responsibility. He would do better to build a club of democracies that tangibly rewards nations on the path to freedom. America doesn’t need to do this job alone. More importantly, it can’t.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past columns on The Times’ website at latimes.com/brownstein.