March 22, 2013
Don’t laugh—but maybe Joe McCarthy was on to something. And the
problem might be even more serious than he realized. Stepping back from
contemporary policy debates reveals that Marx’s materialist view of
history and Lenin’s voluntarism have been the ideological basis for many
of our imperial misadventures from the Balkans to the Mideast to
Central Asia.
Actual commies are probably not crawling Washington’s hallowed halls.
But a very Marxist-Leninist understanding of human nature and
historical change has nevertheless had a significant impact on U.S.
foreign-policy making in recent decades. Some forty years ago, Walker
Connor, one of the deans of the study of ethnic nationalism, had already
observed (and decried) the ”propensity on the part of American
statesmen and scholars of the post-World War II era to assume that
economic considerations represent the determining force in human
affairs.” This “unwarranted exaggeration of the influence of material
factors” on the world is of course a direct outgrowth of Marx’s belief
that existence determines consciousness.
Lenin, in turn, supplemented Marx's materialism with a voluntaristic
view of history, believing that his elite, enlightened Bolshevik
vanguard could accelerate historical change to bring about the communist
utopia.
The consequences of such worldviews are profound. In Marxist
materialism and one of its latter-day intellectual heirs, liberal
internationalism, things such as ethnicity, culture, and religion become
mere epiphenomena of what are “really” economic problems, problems we
can solve given enough money. Thus, centuries-old loyalties and
identities can, according to this school of thought, be erased with IMF
loans, increasing incomes and international donor conferences. And if
the locals don't see the folly of their ways, a few cruise missiles or a
quick military intervention should do the trick.
The functional contemporary equivalent of Lenin's Bolshevik elite is
what Samuel Huntington and Peter Berger have variously described as
“Davos Man” and “Davos Culture”—the multilingual, globe-trotting,
advanced-degree holding, CNN-watching, Hilton Hotel-staying,
international organization-employed cadres who go from trouble spot to
trouble spot imposing the neoliberal state- and nation-building agenda
on recalcitrant and often ungrateful natives.
In this latter-day version of proletarian internationalism, the
missionaries of Davos Culture believe that with an adequate budget and
within the short space of their secondments (or at least between
American presidential cycles) they can impose on other countries and
societies the political cultures, processes and institutions that took
decades and centuries to develop in the West. As Michael Ignatieff once
noted,
“The activists, experts, and bureaucrats who do the work of promoting
democracy talk sometimes as if democracy were just a piece of
technology, like a water pump, that needs only the right installation to
work in foreign climes.” The most extreme and tragic example of this
mindset, of course, was the belief of many of the
Trotskyites-turned-neocons that we could invade Iraq, turn it into a
flourishing democracy, and then begin the democratic transformation of
the entire Arab world.
Thus, over the past two decades our interventions have only grown
bigger, costlier, and more tragic. They have put at risk tens of
thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars
to test various social-science hypotheses about nation building and
identity construction, all for relatively negligible results.
Bosnia received more money per capita than any country in Europe
under the Marshall Plan and an international administration with
dictatorial powers Erich Honecker would have envied, yet the country's
various ethnic groups still argue over the same constitutional
arrangements they were arguing over before we even got there. Kosovo at
one point had received twenty-five times more international aid than
Afghanistan, yet a recent EU report suggests that precious little has
been achieved there in terms of establishing an independent judiciary
and the rule of law. The U.S. inspector general for Iraq
reconstruction’s
final report
claimed that the $60 billion spent had had only ”limited positive
effects,” and much of it had simply been wasted due to corruption.
Moreover, wasting money and effort is only half the problem. Many of
our attempts to transform far-flung countries often resemble the efforts
of the Soviet Politburo rather than those of democratic societies. A
couple of strokes of the pen in Iraq in 2003 arbitrarily abolished the
only two institutions, the Baathist party and the Iraqi military
(however distasteful they may have been), that had any capacity to
maintain order in the country. The result was a military insurrection
against U.S. troops and a ten-year civil war. In Bosnia, various
blue-ribbon international commissions and reports have found that
international administration ”has outlived its usefulness” and makes
Bosnia ”the worst in class,” yet just like so many East European
communists circa 1989, the foreign overseers refuse to admit that the
gig is up.
Remarkably, in surveying the various foreign-policy challenges
confronting the country around the world, the Davos crowd’s
unacknowledged, unrecognized acceptance of Marxist-Leninist tenets
impels them towards arguing for more of the same: spend more money,
more time, and ultimately more American blood in places most Americans
can't even find on a map, all to mold them into our image of what we
think they should be. Some even argue that we should create a new
federal agency or cabinet position devoted to nation building. The
alternative, as President Obama said in a speech to the nation in June
2011, is for America “to focus on nation building here at home.” Let’s
hope intelligence and common sense win this policy debate.
Gordon N. Bardos is a Balkan politics and security specialist based in New York.