*Topicality/Definitions Democracy Promotion Includes Military Intervention
Democracy Promotion Discourse Masks Coercion
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Democracy Promotion Discourse Masks CoercionUS DEMOCRACY PROMOTION USES ABSTRACT NARRATIVES GROUNDED IN EXCEPTIONALISM TO MASK ITS COERCIVE ASPECTS Dionysis Markakis, Center for International and Regional Studies- Georgetown University, 2016, US Democracy Promotion in the Middle East: The Pursuit of Hegemony, p. 30-1 With regards to the strategy of democracy promotion, the belief in American exceptionalism manifests itself in two main forms. The first, exemplarism, maintains that the US should passively promote liberal democratic values through example. As Walter Russel Mead argues, the US can “better serve the cause of universal democracy by setting an example rather than by imposing a model.” The second, vindicationism, holds that the US should actively promote democracy, using “its power to ‘vindicate the right’ in an otherwise illiberal world.” Vindicationism is evinced in the mission impulse of US democracy promotion, as first exemplified by the Wilson administration. Jonathan Monten observes: “Both exemplarism and vindicationism follow from a foreign policy nationalism that regards the United States as an instrument of democratic change in the international system…At stake between them are a series of normative and causal claims about the nature of international politics and the capacity of US power to produce major social and political change abroad; they are in effect competing theories of democracy promotion.” While both reflect an idealized conception of the US and its role in the international system, the doctrine of American exceptionalism has been espoused by most administrations. President Regan famously described America as a “shining city upon a hill.” He claimed: “After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true to the granite ridge, and her glow has held no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.” Such ethereal references have become a staple feature of most American administrations’ rhetoric, regardless of their political hue. They reflect the central role that the concept of democracy assumes in the American national identity, abstract narratives such as the above have helped color the prisms through which American society, and more importantly its policy-makers, view the international system and subsequently rationalize the US’s role within it. As former US Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick argued: “no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances.” And while to varying degrees most states incorporate the language of exceptionalism, it is the US’s dominant position in the international system that ultimately ascribes its ideology such significance.
Daniela Huber, Senior Fellow Instituto Affari Internazionali, Rome, 2015, Democracy Promotion and Foreign Policy: Identity and Interests in US, EU, and Non-Western Democracies, p. 36-7 Identity is a vague concept and diversely defined. Alexander Wendt has introduced a typology of identities in which corporate identity relates to the material base of an identity such as the body in the case of the person or the territory in the case of states; type identity to the regime type of a collective; role identity to the perception of the self through the eyes of the other; and collective identity to the identification between the self and the other. In IR theory, identity has usually been conceptualized as role identity to account for social interaction among states. The paradigmatic definition of Jepperson, Wendt, and Katzenstein, for example, maintains that the identity “comes from social psychology, where it refers to the images of individuality and distinctiveness (“selfhood”) held and projected by an actor and formed (and modified over time) through relations with significant “others.” Thus the term (by convention) references mutually constructed and evolving images of self and other.” Democracy promotion fits into this picture par excellence. Promoting democracy abroad constructs an image of the self as democratic and the other as undemocratic and continuously projects and enforces these images on the self and the other, as well as on the broader international community. Through promoting democracy Western democracies lay international claim on the prerogative to interpret what and who a democracy is. This explains why democracies would promote democracy abroad, but why then do democracies not always promote democracy abroad? To answer this question, one needs to dig deeper into the roots of a democratic role identity, that is, an identity that is constituted by democracy being a shared foreign policy purpose that defines a community’s relations with the ‘undemocratic other.’ This identity is highly complex and Janus-faced; it stands at the interface of the domestic and the international level; it is always internally and externally oriented. Thus, this section will now debate the role that an internal democratic type identity, international norms, and interaction with the other play in the evolution and activation of a democratic role identity in foreign policy. It will also discuss under what conditions threat perceptions – which have been identified above as a central factor that constrains democracies to use democracy promotion in foreign policy – can/cannot hinder the translation of a democratic role identity into concrete foreign policies.
Mark Duffield, Professor of Development Politics-University of Bristol, UK, 2010, Challenging the Aid Paradigm: Western Currents and Asian Alternatives, ed. J. S. Sorensen, p. 29 Racism underpins liberalism’s acceptance of a global dispensation that assigns freedom and representation to “us” while declaring illiberal government as a characteristic of “their” existence. There is a both chronological and ontological connection between the civilizational division of humankind into politico-cultural stages and, alternatively, its hierarchical ordering into biological determined races. Following the abolition of slavery, which created the possibility of a universal humanity, both cultural and biological schemata emerged ruing the first half of the nineteenth century as ways of re-dividing humankind, thus nullifying this possibility. While the turn towards an outwardly biological or so-called scientific racism has attracted wide attention, any attempt to divide the human species according to different modalities and potentialities for existence, including political existence, is ultimately biological in essence. Although cultural and biological approaches to the ordering of humankind are outwardly different they share the same biopolitical foundation and together constitute an interconnected racist dynamic. While forming separate and often opposed conclusions, both approaches agree that nations and peoples are inherently different, either culturally or biologically. Where a cultural coding informs a liberal developmental logic, a biological one is linked to an exterminatory impulse. Sharing the same foundation, moreover, they interconnect and move in and out of each other. Although Mill, for example, held that the politico-cultural differences between peoples and actions were mutable and thus open to change through developmental means, that is, through education and guidance (and in so doing he opposed an outwardly biological determinism), he still found it necessary to describe these differences through such dichotomies as civilized/barbarian, advanced/backward, active/passive, industrious/sensuous and so on, while assigning the former terms to “all the English and Germans and the latter terms to the Irish, French, Southern Europeans, and the ‘Orientals’ (more and more so as one moved south and east)”. “DEMOCRACY” IS CONSIDERED THE NORMATIVE RULE FOR GOVERNANCE Bradley Levinson, Anthropology Professor-Indiana University, 2008, Advancing Democracy Through Education: US influence abroad and domestic practices, eds. E. Stevic & B. Levinson, p. ix Democracy is king. It has become apparent that, over the last 30 years or so, the discourse of democracy has grown ascendant. Globally, societies that existed for long periods under authoritarian regimes struggle in their “transition” to democracy, while consolidated democracies suffer from citizen apathy and a “democracy deficit.” At the national, regional, and local levels, in government and throughout civil society, democracy is now the watchword. Despite its varied and contested meanings, few would dispute that some version of democracy is the normative rule by which political practice is constantly measured and assessed. Directory: assets assets -> Northern territory of australia assets -> Number: caveat in the [Will/Will and Codicil/Estate of] assets -> Invitation for Bid Calact/mbta for Standard Floor and Low Floor Rural Duty Vehicles ifb no. 12-03 November 14, 2012 assets -> 12 Step Retreats For Everyone in Twelve Step Recovery Ratner Fellowship assets -> 12 Step Retreats For Everyone in Twelve Step Recovery Ratner Fellowship assets -> Sigaccess annual Report assets -> Central Government is expected to ask the seventh pay commission to consider merging 50% dearness allowance assets -> List of accessible executive records assets -> Emergency telephone numbers Call toll-free from anywhere in France Download 2.51 Mb. Share with your friends:
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