(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2016)
At least since the Second World War American elites, as successors to and in concert with their Western European comrades, have sought to control the conversation about democracy, democratic legitimacy, and the appropriate forms within which states might structure their internal governance, especially when it relates to the ease with which Euro-American elites might penetrate these subordinate states. Though media outlets that by turn pander to and are the means through which well pedigreed elites manage these conversations internally (to set the tone for and the boundaries of permissive conversations) and externally (to control the interpretive community through which terms like democracy, rule of law, transparency, and the like are understood and applied) these elites determine what passes for legitimate and illegitimate approaches to those norms within national and international communities.
And all the better when elites can play holier than thou when speaking down to their "pupils"--those states (and their elites) that must be overseen to ensure that they apply the "right" kind of democratic structures to their own states and political orders. And there is advantage when such elites chastise their pupils publicly, lovingly and out of great concern, when they stray. That public chastisement serves as a warning to other depedents that might be considering similar "misbehavior". And these inferior though eager-to-learn dependent states
must be disciplined whenever they seek to protect their own interests in ways that interfere with those ideals that American elites would like to project outwards.
But what does all of this mean in plain speak--the language that can be understood (or at least better tolerated now) among those who still read?
This post considers an example of this tendency and points to some reasons why these exercises are sadly hypocritical (hardly a criticism in politics) but also inconsistent with policy and theory that stands at the core of U.S. policy. What it suggests is that theory applies on a two track model. What is permitted to the most powerful states is denied their dependent "partners" and that miscellaneous group of states that are dependent either on the most developed states directly or indirectly through international financial institutional arrangements. It gives further evidence to a suggestion made several years ago about the shape of globalized political orders emerging from out of the structures of economic globalization which is itself now almost a generation old (see
here).
I start with the catalyst for this, a recent editorial authored by the editors of the Washington Post (
A Danger to Israeli Democracy (January 2, 2015)), consider the Israeli version, and then place that within traditional normative principles of sovereignty, state equality and transparency. In each case, the criticism fails, and indeed advances only the weakening of sovereign power to protect the integrity of its political order against foreign states which seek to leverage influence through NGOs. Though the criticism of strengthening transparency ought to fail--there is a large space still open for criticism of its implementation. That valuable criticism gets lost in the general shaming, the overwrought language of democratic legitimacy and the all too obvious sub text that this move thwarts European and American efforts to influence Israeli politics from the inside in ways that might otherwise cause a bit of a furor were the tables turned, even in a context in which there was no question of transparency (see e.g.,
here, and
here). I suggest the extent of the difficulty of such criticism from the United States by a reminder of the scope and objectives of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, as amended, 22 U.S.C. § 611 et seq.
