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Democracy's Hour
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19672 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1991 |
2,330 Words |
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Georgie Anne Geyer
Georgie Anne Geyer is a syndicated columnist whose columns on
international affairs appear in more than a hundred newspapers
in the United States and Latin America. Her most recent book
is Guerrilla Prince, a biography of Fidel Castro. |
EXPORTING DEMOCRACY
Fulfilling America's Destiny
Joshua Muravchik
Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1991
265 pp., $24.25
The ancient word democracy has, since the beginning of Gorbachev's reforms in 1985, become the leitmotif of the transformation of the Eastern bloc and, indeed, much of the putatively Marxist Third World. Socialism and repression died in spasms in the next six years; the world could only be "saved" by the new duality of democracy and free-market economies, with the United States the busy midwife to the new age.
But what exactly did this mean? Were all these peoples, used to living under patriarchal or tribal societies and accustomed to the dull routine of the socialist order, ready to leap into these long-evolving and far more sophisticated forms of human political existence? Perhaps most puzzling and important of all, was the United States really capable of directing the transformation?
These questions are not ponderously theoretical or amusingly diverting. Over the last six years, they have become compellingly real. The fates of peoples and the futures of nations, perhaps even the peace and physical viability of the world, hang upon the working out of these questions in practice.
Now, finally, we have an orderly kind of blueprint, not only for what is really happening in the spreading of democracy but for the crucial U.S. role in the entire historic process. Scholar Joshua Muravchik, who does not deal in popular stereotypes or intellectual shibboleths, has written the book about what really underlies the whole struggle for world democracy. And, while he is basically an optimist--"The twenty-first will be the true American century," he says--he does not fall into the popular trap of making it sound either easy or inevitable.
Definitions of democracy
First, Muravchik talks about what democracy is, and the definitions he chooses are as provocative as his arguments. "Democracy is not a blueprint, not a set of results," he says in the opening. "It is only a principle about how disparate or conflicting human goals should be reconciled." A little later, he writes that "democracy is at bottom an ethical system, in which the citizens
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