Fear's Empire by Benjamin R. Barber

Author:Benjamin R. Barber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

Lex Humana;

or,

Preventive Democracy

6

Preventive Democracy

The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices. God gives us a capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace.”

—President Jimmy Carter, 20031

Nestling in the illicit logic of American exceptionalism, sustained by a belief in the righteousness of Pax Americana and the efficacy of fear, preventive war doctrine entails not just an “America First!” notion unsuited to achieving security in an interdependent world but an “Only America!” approach that vests in the United States prerogatives no other sovereign nation is permitted to enjoy. An alternative doctrine that addresses terrorism must allow the United States the right of any sovereign nation to determine the conditions of its own security but must do so in ways consistent with America’s own liberal traditions and the imperatives of international law (which are in fact the same thing).

An effective national security strategy must secure America against terrorism without destroying the liberty in whose name its struggle is waged, and it must overcome terror without paying a price in fear. It must propound a strategy that can be a model for any sovereign nation wishing to guarantee its own safety. It must be grounded in realism, not idealism. A high-minded policy that is moral and in accord with law but fails as a prophylactic against terrorist attacks is little better than one that prevents terror but destroys the values in whose name the struggle against it is waged. The strategic doctrine that meets these standards I dub preventive democracy.

Preventive democracy assumes that the sole long-term defense for the United States (as well as other nations around the world) against anarchy, terrorism, and violence is democracy itself: democracy within nations and democracy in the conventions, institutions, and regulations that govern relations among, between and across nations. What democracy means is, of course, contentious, and as I will argue at length below, it means far more that elections and majority rule, and requires a long, painstaking process to be established.

It is a truism that democracies rarely make war on one another. The corollary to that old saw is that democracies rarely produce international terrorism and international violence. Sectarian violence on behalf of ethnic identity or subnational aspirations to independence may nurture violence within democracies—as happened with the IRA in Northern Ireland and the ETA in the Basque region of Spain or with “militia” activities within the United States. And radical ideologies like those that animated Germany’s Baeder-Meinhof gang or Italy’s Red Brigades can trouble the domestic politics of otherwise stable democracies. But the great preponderance of organizations on the State Department’s terrorist organization list either operate within undemocratic regimes or are sponsored and supported by undemocratic regimes. They generally operate against democratic regimes, in part because democratic regimes represent supporters of tyranny or occupation, and in part because such open societies are far more hospitable to free and anonymous movement and hence far more vulnerable to terrorist activities than the police states that have often inspired their rage.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.