American Democracy Promotion: Impulses, Strategies, and Impacts

In an era characterized by humanitarian intervention and the employment of “good governance” as a criterion for foreign assistance, an examination of the promotion of democracy by the most powerful actor in the international system is a timely and useful reminder of what may, and what may not, be achieved in altering the ways that a people governs itself. Most of these diverse studies argue that what the United States has promoted is a version of liberalism rather than democracy as such, distinguishing the two much in the manner of Fareed Zakaria in his 1997 Foreign Affairs article. Zakaria would find this conclusion reassuring, but a number of the contributors do not, seeing in “low-intensity democracy” a more faithful protector of a favorable environment for American economic and strategic interests than of the well-being of peoples abroad. Yet the authors represented here are also at one in agreeing that the promotion of democracy is instrumental—something inevitably undertaken not for its own sake, but because it aids the national interests of the promoting country or because it contributes to peace and therefore stability, a congenial objective for a power interested in preserving the status quo. They therefore largely demonstrate the point made by Reinhold Niebuhr that the limit of what a wise statecraft can do is to find the meeting point between the “parochial and the general interest, between the national and the international common good.”