by

P. Edward Haley

Will capitalism spread democracy to other countries, and with it peace? This version of Voltaire’s coconuts—and an emphatic "Yes!" from Republicans and Democrats alike—dominated the foreign policy debate of the 1990s. Throughout the decade it was plainly an idea whose time had come. Its appeal was so great that it tended to overpower public discussion of the basic purposes of American foreign policy and the variety of approaches to those ends. A closer look at the idea and a more profound consideration of the bases of American foreign policy are long overdue.

Although showing signs of wear (the China trade debate was especially hard on it), the idea that capitalism makes democracy continues to appeal to a wide assortment of political leaders, scholars, and journalists. Some use it to win backing for an internationalist foreign policy in a world without clear threats to national security. Others beat their opponents with it: "If we believe in capitalism and democracy why are/aren’t we trading with China/ North Korea/ Cuba/ Iraq/ Iran?" Still others like its monism, the notion that there is a single truth, globalism, valid for all people everywhere and discoverable by reason. In this last version the idea is important for philosophical as well as policy reasons.

Foreign policy requires Americans to deal constantly with non-Western, non-Christian, non-democratic, non-capitalist societies vastly different from our own. This raises the issue of objective truth in an especially awkward way. To the extent that democracy makes capitalism it promises the disappearance of this awkwardness. If the entire world becomes capitalist and democratic, the monists in effect "win" the argument, as the West won the Cold War, and the monism/pluralism debate disappears.

This essay attempts to shed light on the multiple attractions of the capitalism/democracy idea through an examination of 19^th century European history, another time of stunning economic and technological change, rapid democratization, and extreme nationalism. Politically, Europe’s experience of the 19^th century suggests that capitalism does not make democracy or peace. The Old Regimes generally succeeded in suppressing and delaying social and political change until they were swept away by World War I. Democratic reformers lost hope. Many immigrated to the United States and England or turned to a variety of modernist outlooks, from romanticism to Wagnerian escapism and revolutionary Marxism. Intellectually, pluralism and, for some, relativism prevailed over the belief that there are, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, ". . .universal, timeless, objective unalterable laws which rational investigation could discover." Confronted with capitalism and democracy in the 19^th century, as most of the world is confronted today, Europeans rejected both, and were, instead, dominated by a "craving for fraternity and self-expression, and disbelief in the capacity of reason to determine values."

It is not new to say that 19^th century European philosophy moved from Romanticism to nihilism, that the Old Regimes in Germany, Austria and Russia were oppressive and anti-democratic, or that artists of the time generally hated capitalism and democracy and, in abandoning objective representation, turned their backs on the entire European cultural tradition. It is new, or at any rate not heard often and loudly enough, to say that this kind of wildly complex, fascinating and, in the end, self-destructive European response to capitalism and democracy is at least as likely to repeat itself in the 21^st century as the far more benign Anglo-American version. Perhaps it is more likely. During his years in exile, the Russian socialist writer, Alexander Herzen, wondered about the paradox he had noticed between the political freedom and intellectual and social dullness in England and the centralized tyranny and cultural and social excitement on the continent of Europe. Perhaps, he thought, only those countries could be democratic whose peoples are "incapable of inner freedom" and are "inhibited conformists," slaves to fashion and public opinion.

These insights will not settle the argument between monists and pluralists. Indeed, they cannot. They do show beyond question that even in the cradle of Western civilization not one but many roads were followed toward modernization. Time after time in country after country everyone from brilliant thinkers and artists to reactionary aristocrats and bourgeois traditionalists adamantly and repeatedly turned away from capitalism and democracy. For all these reasons, these insights are full of significance for American foreign policy in the 21^st century.

Rejecting Capitalism and Democracy: The Political Response

During the 19^th century, most of Europe, and particularly the societies east of the Elbe, failed to make the transition from états policés to états civilisés. The bridge to a civil society was begun but never finished. Although industrial capitalism swept into central and eastern Europe in the 19^th century, democracy failed to take root. Ruthless repression by the Old Regimes in Russia, Austria, and Germany blocked reform. Many would-be democrats either fled to England or the United States or committed themselves to philosophical, political, and artistic movements that rejected capitalism. Caught between Old Regime repression and intellectual defection democracy had little chance of finding a home.

Initially in Europe an état policé and an état civilisé were roughly the same thing. In Martin Malia words ". . . . la police signified enlightened governance, that is, the promotion of civil order in the state, the rational regulation of the law and the economy, and the fostering of refined social norms." Most Europeans believed it was the responsibility of the state to bring about civilized order in their societies, which was regarded as more important than individual freedom. That is the situation in today’s world everywhere outside Western Europe, North America, and a handful of other countries. Gradually, what it meant to be civilized broadened to include "restrained and humane norms of conduct" associated with the moeurs douces of the aristocracy and, later, the Enlightenment ideals of human betterment and progress. It was this step that the rulers of the societies east of the Elbe dared not take and that today’s authoritarians may find is beyond them. Appalled by the French Revolution, disgusted by individualism and democracy, fearful of losing everything, the Old Regimes used repression to keep their peoples in line.

In the Europe of the Old Regimes, absolute, hereditary, aristocratic, grossly inegalitarian rule was justified by divine right and what was seen as a natural hierarchy of ranks from top to bottom of society. At the same time, a kind of pluralism based on the privileges of the "orders" of society—those who fight, pray, and work—kept European absolutism from falling into despotism. In France and England, the clash between the claims of the orders and the sovereign led gradually to the emergence of a civil society, and it was this that created the bridge between an état policé and an état civilisé.

Martin Malia argues that a cultural gradient existed in Europe in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, running from West to East, from civilized states to policed states. A similar cultural gradient exists today around the world. It was precisely in those European states east of the Elbe that were least advanced along the cultural gradient that the reaction against reason, individualism, and capitalism was strongest. It resulted in what Malia calls the marriage of idealism with "nationalism, historicism, romanticism, and a return to religion." In other words, the same kinds of anti-Western (anti-American) reactions to modernity so prevalent around the world today occurred long ago in Europe at the dawn of capitalism and democracy.

The success of Liberalism (capitalism and limited parliamentary government) and the appeal of reason and universal values embodied in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution were seen as a mortal threat by the defenders of the Old Regimes east of the Elbe. Their reaction was to suppress and postpone the emergence of civil society as long and as thoroughly as possible. The middle class in Germany was broken and cowed. Tens of thousands fled to North America in the middle of the century, thinning the ranks of democrats and depriving Germany of some of its brightest and most enterprising spirits. Those who remained behind fell more and more under the spell of the apolitical, romantic, supernaturalism that was commonplace among German intellectuals. Repression in Russia was more severe and far-reaching. Tsar Nicholas took a personal interest in sentencing dissidents to prison or exile. Many in the lower ranks of the nobility and the small coterie of educated Russians moved predictably from an infatuation with German romanticism to an unyielding maximalism opposed to all forms of compromise and reform, typified by the career of Alexander Herzen. A semblance of a middle class did emerge, and the beginnings of a rechstaat were established, more successfully in Germany than in Russia. However, the "rule of law" east of the Elbe possessed neither the anchor in natural law that protected individual rights in England and the United States nor the limitations imposed by the broader conception of human rights left over in France after the revolution.

The modern advocates of the transforming effects of capitalism have a point. There was political change, much of it caused by the market. The societies became more diverse and the competing claims of different socio-economic groups found at least partial expression. But they miss another point, and it is a crucial one. Repression "works." Beneath the surface, little had changed, and those who ought to have been the leaders of gradual, humane reform movements—the middle class and lower nobility—were muzzled, intimidated, exiled, imprisoned, alienated, maximalist. As a result, Germany and Russia had no flexibility, their reserves of stability and legitimacy were exhausted, and they retained precious little margin for error. Narrow and rigid, when subjected to the slaughter and heartbreak of World War I and the Great Depression, they shattered. Though grievously wounded, the less rigid, less narrowly based societies in France and Britain bent before the storm and survived, with their citizens’ liberties safe and opportunities for change still open.

Rejecting Capitalism and Democracy: The Intellectual Response

The idea of a cultural gradient—Malia’s fifty-year cultural lag between Germany and Russia—depends on putting Russia and Germany on the same slope as Britain and France, with the implication that all that separates them is time. Certainly all four countries developed groups, middle class entrepreneurs, intellectuals, labor movements, that demanded political representation and social status. However, in Central Europe and Russia the members of these groups were denied a meaningful place in society by the Old Regimes’ repression. That the repression was gradually ameliorated meant that later generations east of the Elbe were freer than anyone ever had been in the previous centuries. This was as true of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the 19^th century as it is true (and constantly repeated!) of China today. However, repression profoundly distorted the outlook of the next generations of intellectual and political leaders. Many, especially those who might have led democratic reform movements, retreated into an intellectual and spiritual realm where reality became increasingly distorted; they became apolitical then radical and maximalist. Repression bewildered them, isolated them and left them with nothing to do but build fantasy worlds that ignored thousands of years of political and cultural wisdom. Malia refers to this as a state of "practical impotence and intellectual superachievement." In this sense it is as "natural" or "reasonable" or "unavoidable" for human beings to believe in Germany’s Sonderweg or Alexander Herzen’s revolutionary socialism as it is to embrace individualism, reason, and market economics. The followers of Falun Gong in China and other religious and spiritual refugees from modernization under repression may end up following the path of intellectuals in Russia and Germany and move from religion to romantic idealism and rebellion.

The ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder appealed to many in the Eastern countries who were repelled by universal laws and utilitarianism, by individualism and parliamentary democracy. Herder celebrated the unique and the particular. He believed, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, "not merely in the multiplicity, but in the incommensurability, of the values of different culture and societies, and, in addition, the incompatibility of equally valid ideals, together with the implied revolutionary corollary that the classical notions of an ideal man and an ideal society are intrinsically incoherent and meaningless." This special uniqueness was best revealed in the early language and beliefs of a people. In Germany’s case this was Gothic, feudal Christianity.

Romanticism in art, exemplified by the works of Beethoven and Victor Hugo, celebrated freedom and lyricism. Unlike those who followed him, Herder was not a nationalist. He despised all forms of conquest, all attempts to impose the values of one people on another. But in the hands of writers such as Sir Walter Scott, the Grimm brothers, and Adam Mickiewicz, the lyrical, free, and anti-imperial quickly became nationalist and populist. The idea that every people is unique appealed enormously to European societies, such as Germany, Poland, and Italy, whose national independence had long been denied. It appeals today to those whose experience of Western colonialism and imperialism remains alive. And it constitutes part of the rationale for the rejection of "globalization," the World Trade Organization, and McDonald’s.

Ironically, Immanuel Kant, who set out to reconcile religion and reason, ended by strengthening Romanticism because in the eyes of many of his successors he had made all knowledge subjective. To Kant, it was impossible to know "things in themselves," but only those a priori "categories of the understanding" such as mathematics that human beings had created to gain understanding of the external world. Hegel solved the paradox of being able to know universal things but not things in themselves by endowing everything with reason, human beings, their societies, Nature itself. In Hegel’s view history itself is rational. Over the centuries conflicts occur again and again that gradually narrow the gap between humanity and the Absolute. M.H. Abrams refers to this as "natural supernaturalism," an attempt to use reason to preserve the comforts and beauty of art and religion at a time when science and reason are dominant.

After the failure of the revolutions of 1848 the aesthetic idealism of Friedrich von Schiller and the natural supernaturalism of Hegel gave way to "realism" in political philosophy and the arts, an attempt to see society and the human beings in it as "they really are." As Malia points out, to budding socialists such as Alexander Herzen, realism was in fact, a kind of positivism and left-wing Hegelianism. The assault on 18^th and 19^th century German philosophy and Christianity was led by Ludwig Feuerbach and carried to completion by Nietzsche. History loses all direction. God disappears. Human beings are isolated and without eternal values. In politics, this is accompanied by anarchism and revolutionary socialism. In the realm of culture, art replaces religion and philosophy as man’s spiritual realm. In 1870-71 Nietzsche, always the great phrase-maker, says in the Birth of Tragedy: "Art, rather than ethics, constitutes the essential metaphysical activity."

Alfred North Whitehead observed that to describe the history of thought without discussing mathematics may not be the same as leaving Hamlet out of Shakespeare’s play, but it is comparable to leaving out Ophelia, someone like mathematics, who is both essential and a little crazy. In the 19^th century the newest discoveries in mathematics and the sciences, especially physics, introduced previously unsuspected levels of ambiguity and uncertainty into the universe, and artists reacted strongly.

Poets such as Arthur Rimbaud or Jules Laforgue pushed their reaction beyond uncertainty to an assault on reason itself. "I’m dreaming," Laforgue wrote in July 1882, "of a kind of poetry that says nothing, that is made up of bits of dreaming, without coherence." Expressionist painters, such as Vassily Kandinsky in Munich in 1911, hoped that their shapes and colors would allow them to communicate directly with the souls of viewers just as composers did. In the process, the object and objective reality simply disappeared. Later, Kandinsky recalled that he had first realized the potential of color and shape in the early 1890s when he had seen Claude Monet’s "Haystacks," at an exhibition of impressionist paintings. Admitting that he found it hard to make any sense of the painting, he added: "What was, however, quite clear to me was the unsuspected power of the palette, previously concealed from me, which exceeded all my dreams. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendor. And albeit unconsciously, objects were discredited as an essential element within the picture."

Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler composed under the influence of Nietzsche’s writings. Arnold Schoenberg wrote "pantonal" music and produced a sound so dissonant and strange that listeners disrupted his concerts. In November 1901, August Strindberg finished A Dream Play, in which, in his words: "Everything can happen; everything is possible and likely. Time and space do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality, the imagination spins and weaves new patterns; a blending of memories, experiences, free inventions, absurdities, and improvisations."

Rejection of the external world could also turn into escapism. Blocked by the failure of the revolution of 1848 and their disappointments in 1866 and 1879 the German middle class lost themselves in Wagnerian opera and Karl May’s shallow potboilers. Wagner invented mythical worlds filled with heroes and drama and enjoyed phenomenal success. May wrote about meaningless adventures in exotic places and his books sold wildly: 1.6 million copies in print at his death in 1912, four times that many by 1938. Toward the end of the 19^th century the dark sides of Romanticism and modernism became more and more apparent. Thomas Mann warned of "a dark powerfulness and piety . . . irrational and demonic powers of life . . . a pessimism of honesty that holds with being, with the fundamental, and with history against criticism and meliorism, in short, with power against the spirit."

The views of the radical artists and their political and philosophical counterparts were certainly not the only possible way to think about 19^th century reality. Until World War I validated their apocalyptic visions, many of the radicals were ostracized, forced out of the mainstream, driven into exile, imprisoned, or executed. Outside the narrow avant garde circles in which they moved life had clearly improved for great masses of people. The fruits of industrial capitalism helped improve the overall standard of living, particularly in northern Europe. Important reforms were carried out in virtually every European state, broadening the suffrage, abolishing serfdom, instituting social welfare measures. These developments should not keep us from recognizing that the Romantics and Modernists offered a clearer sense of the destruction and suffering latent in European civilization by the turn of the century than any of their mainstream counterparts. Too few understood their paintings and poems as a picture of the emptiness and confusion at the heart of European life, as prescient visions of future dictatorships and mass murder. Not until it was too late.

Everywhere romantic idealism gave way to "realism" and modernism, with their deprecation of all things bourgeois and conventional. Britain, France, and the United States, societies that had safely made the transition to états civilisés before the onset of world war and global economic collapse, were not immune, but there were also not swept away by the influence of the modernists. In Europe east of the Elbe, those who still dreamed of a safe escape from the restraints of an état policé, soon found their worlds overturned and pitiless radicals in charge.

Concluding Observations

From the 1850s through the outbreak of World War I some of the most interesting thinkers, reformers, and artists in Germany and Russia left democracy’s camp and would never return. So what? The inevitable question. Repression did not prevent capitalism from starting to transform German and Russian society. Granted, but repression so distorted the minds of those who ought to have been reformers that even if they had come to power a decade or two before 1914 it is far from clear that a "healthy" democracy would have been possible. The foundations of civil society were not in place, and these societies were swept off their moorings to disaster by the cataclysms of the early 20^th century. The tragedies that tormented Europe in 1914-1918 and again after 1929 not only discredited mainstream politicians, philosophers, and artists, but cut them adrift in a world where their strengths of reasonable compromise were useless. Martin Malia points out that the early 19^th century generation of fathers were tolerant idealists and romantics interested in art for art’s sake; the sons were bitter utilitarians and materialists who regarded art as propaganda in the cause of social reform. But the grandsons! They were adept and experienced in the politics of making a revolution. What they lacked was opportunity, and this was supplied in galling abundance by the failures of world war and economic collapse.

That the excesses of the French Revolution caused reason and reform to lose ground was understandable if not entirely logical. In an article generally devoted to a defense of reason, Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen points out the error in blaming the Enlightenment for the atrocities of modern left-wing dictators, such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot: "It seems a little unfair to put the blame for the blind beliefs of dictators on the Enlightenment tradition, since so many writers associated with theEnglihtenment insisted that reasoned choice was superior to any reliance on blind belief." Sen adds, "The possibility of reasoning is a source of hope and confidence in a world darkened by horrrible deeds." While Sen makes a good case, there is no denying that the general reaction went against reason. If Joseph de Maistre and other reactionaries, aristocrats, and monarchs crowed "I told you so," many more ordinary citizens were frightened by war and revolution and turned away from reform. Romanticism and its successors gained in appeal, and the rationale for the Old Regimes appeared more and more plausible. In other words, the depth of the attachment to reason and reform in Russia, China, and elsewhere will be truly tested only during times of major economic and political failure, and not while the current global wave of prosperity endures.

These insights suggest the need for a much more varied and complex appreciation of social change. They also weaken the case for putting the spread of democracy at the heart of American foreign policy. Indeed, it seems that the Old Regimes reacted more fiercely the harder they were pushed. Then, when they wanted to relax, they could not, because their repression had hardened the successor generations against them and turned them into irreconcilable maximalists. This suggests that American pressure to accelerate the transformation to capitalism and to intensify human rights reforms may actually boomerang and produce exactly the opposite result.

During the past decade, the debate about American foreign policy has usually been limited to two broad choices: intervention and abstention. Some interventionists would base foreign policy on the imperative to spread democracy, either immediately by human rights enforcement, or gradually by insisting on market reforms through bilateral and multilateral diplomacy. Other interventionists believe the national interest or the balance of power should drive foreign policy. Abstentionists prefer to limit the U.S. to bilateral interaction with the outside world, refusing to take part in any alliances or international political or trade organizations.

If it is easy for interventionists of both schools to discredit the abstentionists, the advocates of the national interest simply shift the problem of definition. Instead of equating the national interest with the spread of democracy and market economics they exalt geopolitics and the balance of power. But the balance of power has many meanings and offers at best an equivocal guide to successful foreign policy. And it is hard to find an interventionist strategy that will at once be effective and command wide support at home. These difficulties explain the growing interest in the cautious geopolitical concerns of George Kennan. Kennan appeals to conservatives because his approach minimizes the likelihood of the United States taking on more and more responsibilities in areas that are not of prime importance to a narrowly defined national security. He appeals to liberals because of his distrust of the use of military power.

However, both liberals and conservatives have forgotten two things about Kennan. He was wrong repeatedly about matters of vital security significance, wrong about the menace of fascism in Central Europe in the 1930s, wrong in advocating the neutralization of Germany and Japan after World War II, wrong, too, about the failure of nuclear deterrence. His "method," based on a marriage of 18^th century concepts of the balance of power to early 20^th century psychology, carries no guarantee of wisdom. Conservatives also forget a bit too conveniently that Kennan believed it should be possible for governments with fundamentally different social and political systems to have normal diplomatic relations. Kennan was confident of this, even as it pertained to Stalin’s Soviet Union, provided foreign policy was left in the hands of a few experts and national objectives limited to assuring the independence of the important centers of power outside the Soviet bloc. Linking democracy to capitalism when predicting the future relieves Americans of the need to think of how to get along with others who aren’t like us. If the preceding analysis is correct and many societies adopt capitalism but few adopt democracy, getting along with countries with different systems will be the most difficult challenge of the coming century.

Another recommendation of Kennan’s is often forgotten. While advocating a cautious, firm containment of the Soviet Union, Kennan argued that the greatest influence for good that the United States could exercise in the world lay in the perfection of its own democracy. Here, perhaps, is the key to the role of democracy in American foreign policy in the 21^st century.

Notes