Democracy Building Is Back in Fashion
Posted on Jul 5, 2011By William Pfaff
ATHENS, Greece—At a seminar last week at Costa Navarino in the Greek Peloponnese, I heard a brilliant young Harvard scholar, who has also been influential in the Obama administration’s strategic planning, explain that the future of successful American action in Central Asia lies in a “surge” of civilian political and developmental action to rescue the people of the region from their present backwardness and from state failure, the conditions upon which radical and reactionary forces currently prey, and which have opened them to renewed aggression and exploitation by the major Asian rival states in the region.
I was at the same time reading, for review, a book titled “The Origins of Political Order” by noted American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, which is already exercising a significant influence in Washington and some American universities (actually, it is the first volume in a two-part sequence yet to be completed). It proposes a purportedly new historical understanding of the evolution of political institutions, implying a new approach to institution-building and political development in our modern industrial and postindustrial era, when economic growth and social mobilization progress with vastly greater speed and consequence than in the past.
I strongly disagree with the book (which is another matter, for another occasion), but it is likely to lend support to a contemporary American foreign policy strategy of democracy-building that was initially and comprehensively set out by George W. Bush’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, in a Foreign Affairs article in the late summer of 2008. Rice said that “a uniquely American realism” demands that the United States recognize its responsibility “to change the world, and in its own image. ... Our long-standing partnerships in the Persian Gulf provide a solid geostrategic foundation for the generational work ahead.”
Three years later, under another secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the State Department has published a Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review called “Leading Through Civilian Power,” which elaborates with enthusiasm on the “surge” of civilian officials who in coming months and years will produce miracles of political and social development in the non-Western world, strategically invaluable to Washington. One important critic, David Rieff, has (in the February 2011 issue of National Interest) described this document as a “geostrategic fairy tale,” a judgment with which I entirely agree.
Origins Of Democracy - News
I was at the same time reading, for review, a book titled “The Origins of Political Order” by noted American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, which is already exercising a significant influence in Washington and some American universities
History proves privatisation has been very healthy, helpful and successful in helping many countries transform to democracy”. Scobey seems to have seen and heard nothing during her three-year posting: the press reports daily that the Egyptians have
They are the products of the two centuries of thought on the origins and purposes of government which began with Thomas Hobbes and continued through John Locke, David Hume, William Blackstone, and many others (the “liberal tradition”).
The effect he focused on was the likely long-term victory of liberal democracy across the globe. In his new book, The Origins of Political Order, Fukuyama has returned to the kind of questions he raised 22 years ago. Whether he has substantially
The main reason is that the philosophies behind the ROC's origins are directly related to the US. Freedom, human rights, democracy, and rule of law are all shared values between our two countries. That bond [forms a basis] for much of our relations.
HOW DO ELITISTS TAKEOVER DEMOCRACIES – CONVERTING THEM TO ...
4. Elitists use increased dependency on technical change and globalization to weaken democratic labor parties that KEPT A MAJORITY DEMOCRACY! Elitists drive to Destroy labor unions to increase the redistribution of wealth to the RICH. Elitists destroy organized labor around the world using elitists’ conservative politicians to become even more powerful and less fair – destroying majority rule insuring wealth redistributive UPWARDS.
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RT : Cedric Robinson (1995) "Slavery and the Platonic Origins of Anti-Democracy," RT : Someone define what democracy is.Origins Of Democracy - Bookshelf
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