(9789004232310 - Regime Change) Regime Change

Regime Change
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

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Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0
Regime Change
From Democratic Peace Theories to Forcible

Regime Change
By
Rein Müllerson
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2013
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mullerson, R. A.
Regime change : from democratic peace theories to forcible regime change / by Rein Mullerson.
pages cm. -- (Nijhoff law specials ; v. 84)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-90-04-23230-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Regime change. 2. Democratization. I. Title.
JC489.M85 2013
321.09--dc23
2012046836
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Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

To the memory of my mother Erna Müllerson and to the future of
Irina, Jan and George
I am most grateful to George Müllerson for his valuable
comments and suggestions
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0
CONTENTS
Introduction��1
I From an African Village to a Global Village�� 13

1. Ex Uno Plures in the Evolution of Humankind�� 15
2. Is E Pluribus Unum Replacing Ex Uno Plures?�� 21
3. Homogenisation of the World and Heterogenisation
of Individual Societies�� 27
4. ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and Never the
Twain shall Meet, Till Earth and Sky Stand Presently
at God’s great Judgment Seat’?�� 29
II Whither goest thou, the World?�� 33

1. Universal History and Historical Determinism�� 33
2. Current Regime Changes: Socioeconomic and
Political Problems�� 41
3. Problems of Liberal Democracy and Democratic
Capitalism�� 56
4. Limits of Social Democratic Choice in a Globalised
World�� 72
5. Any Viable Alternatives?�� 75
III O
n the Futility and Danger of External Attempts
to ‘Democratise’ China�� 85
1. China’s Rise and the Changing Balance of Power�� 86
2. Modernising China – a Democratic China?�� 88
3. A Small Diversion to Illustrate the Point: The Kyrgyz
Tragedy of 2010�� 93
4. Back to China: Reforms, not Revolution�� 97
5. The World’s Reaction to China’s rise��104
6. From Westernisation to Sinification?��113
IV R
egime Changes in Russia: Gorbachev, Yeltsin
and Putin��119
1. Understanding Russia or Believing in Russia��119
2. Collapse of the USSR and the Emergence of Yeltsin’s
Russia��125
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

viii Contents
3. On Putin’s Authoritarianism��134
4. Russia – Not Lost to Democracy��138
5. Russia – Too Big to Practice Bandwaggoning��140
6. Russia and its Close Neighbours...��..148
7. Russia – Part of Europe?...��...153
V Democratic Peace Theories and Regime change��161

1. Theory and Politics of Democratic Peace��161
2. Problems with Democratic Peace Theories��164
3. Immanuel Kant and the XXI Century World��173
4. On the War-Proneness of Some Democratising States��175
VI H
umanitarian Intervention, Civil Wars and
Regime Change��179
1. Use of Force and Humanitarian Concerns in ‘Modern’
and ‘Post-Modern’ International Societies��179
2. The Kosovo Case Revisited��187
3. .Recognition of Kosovo, Abkhazia and South Ossetia��192
4. The Libya Case��194
5. The Syria Tragedy��199
6. Humanitarian Intervention and Regime Change: Some
Generalisations��207
7. From Humanitarian Intervention to R2P or ‘Old Wine in
New Bottles’?��212
8. Intervention in Civil Wars or Internal Disturbances
and Regime Change��223
9. Determinants of Success of External Interference:
Efforts of Interveners or Characteristics of the
Target Society?��225
Conclusions��233
Index��237
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

Introduction 1
INTRODUCTION
The current series of regime changes in different parts of the world

started with the transformation and collapse of the Soviet Union as
the manifestation and guardian of communist ideology and totali-
tarian practices. This, in turn, released a chain of transformations in
Eastern and Central Europe. These events and developments were
seen as a triumph of liberal democracy over communist ideology
and practices; and in a way it was exactly that, though the declara-
tions concerning the ‘end of history’ or ‘mission accomplished’ were
not only premature, but as it soon became clear, dead wrong. An
aftershock, or rather series of after-tremors, to this epochal change,
which can be justifiably defined as a world-wide social revolution,
came slightly more than a decade later in several of the former Soviet
republics (Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan) in the form of the so-called
‘colour revolutions’ that combined in different degrees, depending
on the specific country (sic!), expressions of popular discontent,
external meddling, and opportunistic struggle for power; these were
rather coup d’états than social revolutions.
Then, less than a decade later, came the ‘Arab Spring’ or the ‘Arab
Awakening’, as it is also called, whose directions and meaning for
these countries as well as for the world at large is still difficult to
gauge. While these events have some common roots and similar fea-
tures, as well as significant differences, often the former are exagger-
ated, and sometimes ignored. On the one hand, these events are all
entwined by a general context, which is that of a globalising world
with an almost instant flow of information. They are also a part of
the general tendencies of different peoples, ethnicities, religions and
other groups, which had hitherto been marginalised and disenfran-
chised, now demanding their say in deciding how to live, with whom
to live and even where to live. In the eyes of many in the West, this is
an accelerating run towards the ‘end of history’, a realisation of the
idea of universal history. At the same time, the developments in all
these societies, notwithstanding their quite obvious (often obvious
because they are on the surface, i.e. relatively superficial), similari-
ties are also very different. Even if the discontent of the Arab peoples
has some significant common causes (repressive regimes that were
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

2 Introduction
mainly concerned with staying in power and enriching themselves,

and more often than not serving the interests of foreign elites rather
than their own people), their ethnic and religious compositions,
demographic characteristics, levels of economic development, pres-
ence or absence of the ‘oil curse’, as well as their strategic alliances
differ hugely. Equally, corruption, mismanagement and inter-ethnic
tensions in the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Ukraine and
Kyrgyzstan may have had many similar features and even causes, but
there is no single uniform solution, their common history within the
Czarist Empire and the Soviet Union notwithstanding. Happy coun-
tries, paraphrasing Tolstoy, may indeed look alike, but every unhappy
country is unhappy very much in its own way. If this observation is
correct, and below we will try to prove that it is, then countries that
become happier, i.e. more prosperous, peaceful and free, will even-
tually indeed become in some important respects more similar to
one another, though never, of course, becoming the same. However,
as unhappy countries are all different, remedies that would make
them happier are also different. Moreover, Tolstoy, though undoubt-
edly a brilliant writer, was not as great a philosopher as he wanted or
even pretended to be, or as Isaiah Berlin put it, he was a fox who
longed to be a hedgehog.1 Today the world has too many aspiring
hedgehogs in power, who – often sincerely – believe that the big pic-
ture of the world they hold is true for everybody. Foxes, in their view,
are like those blind men who grope different parts of the elephant,
and depending on the part they touch, imagine it either as a pillar or
a tree or a rope. However, differently from the elephant – an organic
integral system, where all parts are subordinated to and serve the
system as a whole, the world is a much less integrated system and
therefore foxes studying details, i.e. specific societies or issues, are
after all not so blind. Even happy countries are not exactly the same,
though there are some general features or principles, and ignoring
them is problematic, if not impossible, in achieving happiness
(peace, justice, prosperity and freedom). Yet, these are only the gen-
eral features and principles that have to be adapted to cement con-
ditions in any specific society. We, as individual human beings, are
1 I. Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, Ivan R
Dee, 1993.
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

Introduction 3
indeed quite the same. Even families (at least within the same civili-
zation and culture) are quite similar. However, the bigger a social
group, the more they differ from each other. China will never resem-
ble Nauru, Sweden Iraq and the United States and Estonia will never
be the same. History, culture, religion, geography and size – all mat-
ter even if, say, Iraq’s per capita GDP were one day to surpass that of
Sweden. So, a certain homogenisation of the world, whose impor-
tant, controversial and topical aspect is the heterogenisation of indi-
vidual societies, is a long-term tendency (which, like parallels in
non-Euclidian geometry meet only in abstract theory or in cosmic
practice, but in the tangible stay quite separate).
In this book it is argued that regime changes, which mark the turn
of both the century and the millennium, take place in the general
context of a globalising world that is characterised by a transforma-
tion of the balance of power and a crisis of dominant political and
economic institutions. The still dominant West tries to channel jus-
tified popular discontent in many non-Western societies toward
Western political and economic models that, however, are them-
selves in a state of crisis and in need of serious reforms. An ironic
feature of the collapse of the communist system and the triumph of
the West is the conclusion that these epochal events also revealed,
though not immediately, the internal as well as external contradic-
tions of the dominant and triumphant social, economic and politi-
cal system, i.e. capitalist liberal democracy. It turned out to be only
relatively triumphant, i.e. vis-à-vis its nemesis – the Soviet style com-
munist system.
In the effort to channel the current social and political processes
that are taking place in many countries towards one definitive model
there are at least two dangers. First, most of these non-Western soci-
eties are not able to successfully and sustainably transform them-
selves into societies resembling Western models. In any case, even if
they were to succeed, it would be in the long run and at the end of
the day. Immediately, instead of democracy, there is a realistic poten-
tial of the emergence of anarchy à la Kyrgyzstan, of which more
later, and instead of a market economy based on the rule of law,
there would be a wild winner-takes-all type of capitalism à la Yeltsin’s
Russia, not to mention Afghanistan and Iraq which do not even
remotely resemble the blueprints that were drawn up for these
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

4 Introduction
societies in Washington or Brussels. Secondly, even if some societies

for various reasons may be able to implement Western models, this
does not necessarily mean that they are following models that are
the most appropriate for today’s or even more appropriately for
tomorrow’s world. Current transformations concern not only socie-
ties that indeed were, so to say, on the ‘wrong side of history’, i.e. the
former communist bloc countries. Their failure unleashed processes
that revealed fundamental shortcomings in the triumphant – the
Western liberal democracy – system. Today the whole world is grop-
ing the elephant in an attempt to make sense of a runaway world.
Regimes, whose changes we will analyse in this book, are of course
political regimes. In following chapters (especially in the Chapter
Current Regime Changes: Socioeconomic and Political Problems) we
will discuss in detail different political regimes and, in particular,
their interactions with other layers of society. We do not think that
for our purposes it is necessary to go into the analysis of different
definitions of the concept of ‘political regime’. Nevertheless, it is
preferable to have a working definition of the concept from the
onset. There are some rather good ones, which we may, in principle,
agree to accept. Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, for
example, write that by political regime they ‘mean the ensemble of
patterns, explicit or not, that determines the forms and channels of
access to principal governmental positions, the characteristics of the
actors who are admitted and excluded from such access, and the
resources or strategies that they can use to gain access. This neces-
sarily involves institutionalization, i.e., to be relevant, the patterns
defining a given regime must be habitually known, practiced, and
accepted.’2 A shorter, and therefore more analogous to the law of
parsimony or Occam’s razor was given by Laurence Whitehead: ‘The
term “political regime” denotes a defined set of institutions and
“rules of the game” that regulate access to, and the uses of, positions
of public authority in a given society.’3 For the purposes of this book,
2 G. O’Donnell, P. Schmitter. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative

Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1986, p. 73.
3 L. Whitehead, ‘Prospects for a ‘Transition’ from Authoritarian Rule in Mexico’
in The Politics of Economic Restructuring in Mexico: State-Society Relations and
Regime Change in Mexico (Maria Lorena Cook, Kevin Middlebrook, and Juan
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

Introduction 5
using the wisdom of Plato, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Robert Dahl

and many others, to whom references are made in appropriate
places, we use the term political regime as a combination of rules,
means, methods, techniques and forms of exercising political power
in a given society. It obviously includes, and even starts from, formal
constitutional institutional and territorial arrangements, but goes
beyond them to include political ideology and most importantly
practical, often informal and nowhere legally fixed, means and
methods of the exercise of political power. As current regime
changes take place in a world that is in the process of radical trans-
formations and changing balances of power, it is necessary to ana-
lyse these regime changes in the context of these transformations,
characterised by reflexivity and uncertainty.
In this book it is argued that notwithstanding globalisation and
certain homogenisations within the world, the future of the human-
kind will be multipolar and diverse. The bigger a social system, the
less uniform and more diverse it is. International society or the inter-
national system, encompassing all societies, is the widest possible
social system and therefore it is, by definition, the most heterogene-
ous social system. Large empires, differently from so-called nation-
states, as a rule let different parts of imperial space live their own
lives, provided they comply with certain key requirements from the
imperial centre – usually serving the security interests of the empire
or paying tribute to it. Empires would not have survived had they
tried to homogenize all of whole imperial space culturally, reli-
giously or otherwise. These have been nation-states that have strived
for ethnic, cultural or religious uniformity and homogenisation. It
seems to us that one of the accelerators of the dissolution of some
empires, e.g., of the Russian Empire, was their desire and attempts at
the age of the formation of nation-states to become more like the
nation-state. The policies of so-called ‘Russification’ within the
Czarist Empire at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of
the twentieth century, not only did not prevent the dissolution
of the Empire (though in a way, it continued in the form of the Soviet
Molinar Horcasitas, eds.), La Jolla, CA: Center for US-Mexican Studies/University of

California, San Diego, 1994, p. 327.
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

6 Introduction
Union; however, the latter could be called an empire, if the term is

used in a rather loose way) but contributed to its demise. Once an
empire, one cannot develop into a nation-state without losing or
shedding off its imperial possessions.
Two chapters in the book are devoted to the processes of radical
social, political and economic transformations in the two former
communist giants – the People’s Republic of China, the former USSR
and the latter’s continuation in today’s Russia. We compare the
reforms unleashed by Deng Xiaoping in China and by Michael
Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, and their implications for these
countries as well as for the world as a whole. More than thirty years
after the initiation of reforms by Deng Xiaoping, and twenty five
years since the start of Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost policies,
we may definitely conclude that China is doing much better than the
USSR, which has ceased to exist, or its successor in the form of the
Russian Federation. In these chapters we will try to give some
answers to the question of why these two radical reform processes
have led to such different outcomes. Even more importantly, we will
try to discover whether there are any lessons to be learnt by others
from the comparison of these two far-reaching transformations. We
will also try to show that though Gorbachev’s reforms, as they were
intended to unfold (there really were not any thoroughly thought
through blueprints of these reforms besides ‘it is impossible to go on
like that anymore’) failed, Deng’s version of the reforms that have
succeeded in China and that have made of it the second biggest
economy in the world, would not have worked in the case of the
Soviet Union, though with hindsight we may conclude that
Gorbachev could have done many things differently.4 This compari-
son, among other things, shows that what may well work in one case,
4 For example, Gorbachev and his advisers, and the author of this book among
them, greatly underestimated and completely neglected the potential for inter-
ethnic tension and the rise of suppressed nationalistic sentiments; erroneously
believed that Swedish style socialism was closer to the Soviet style communism
than wild west capitalism and naively thought that the short phase of the
Gorbymania in the West would transform into a sustained era of the West, led by
Washington, helping its former nemesis rise like Germany and Japan after the
Second World War.
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

Introduction 7
does not do so well, or is simply impossible, in a different situation.

Often it may even lead to serious disasters.
Today, the liberal West, like the former communist giant – the
Soviet Union, which believed in its mission to eventually make the
whole world communist, is not content with non-western states
simply following the Western lead – they have to also adopt the only
correct way of doing things. Non-western societies have to become
similar to Western societies, i.e. they have to become politically lib-
eral democracies with a society-dominant free market economy.
This is an expression of the Enlightenment’s methodological legacy,
common to both Marxism and liberal democracy, the expression of
the idea of universal history working its way towards some specific
end. In this book we will try to show that such a deterministic read-
ing of history combined with voluntaristic attempts to accelerate
historical processes towards certain goals determined either by ‘laws
of history’, as Marxists used to put it, or by ‘being on the right side of
history’, as liberal imperialists put it, not only causes conflicts and
increases human suffering, but may also serve as an impediment for
achieving progress in a gradual increase in global justice, freedom,
democracy and prosperity. It is also contrary to the liberal principle
of ‘live and let live’ in international relations.
In this book we will analyse the correlation between three layers
of different societies – the economic system, the political system
and civil society in the widest sense, including the history, traditions,
religions and other societal institutions. We intend to show not only
that they are interrelated and interdependent but also that the
sequencing of the evolution of these layers and their institutions in
Western Europe was unique and very different from the processes
today taking place in many parts of the non-western world. Ignoring
the interdependence between different societal layers as well as the
experience of historical sequencing of reforms in the West that were
quite unique, is not helpful when some non-western societies, either
on their own volition and initiative or being prompted by external
advisers, take up reforms.
As not all regime changes occur peacefully, and conceding that in
many of them external factors play significant roles, we will analyse
the respective roles of internal and external factors in social change,
issues concerning the use of force for humanitarian purposes, and
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

8 Introduction
different forms of intervention in internal conflicts either on the

side of the government or opposition. Of course, we analyse these
phenomena only to the extent that they are related to problems of
regime change. In this context we also critically analyse the so-called
theories of democratic peace (DPT), not rejecting them entirely but
showing their limits, contingencies and even the dangers stemming
from unconditional reliance on them, or rather from their abuse.
DPT may be considered as a part or aspect of a worldview that sees
the world moving towards a certain uniform – liberal democratic
and peaceful – end. These theories, even if academically quite rigor-
ous, are open to doubt as to what extent they correspond to and
reflect the complexities of the real world.
In comparing these theories, for example, with Realist theories of
IR (international relations), it is possible to conclude that no inter-
nally coherent and non-controversial theory can comprehensively
explain controversial and incoherent phenomena of international
politics. As Bertrand Russell insightfully observed, ‘No one has yet
succeeded in inventing a philosophy at once credible and self-
consistent. Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense
of consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the oppo-
site. A philosophy that is not self-consistent cannot be wholly true,
but a philosophy, which is self-consistent, can very well be wholly
false. The most fruitful philosophies have contained glaring incon-
sistencies, but for that very reason have been partially true’.5 The
same is true for the theories of international relations and law. That
is why the study of international law and politics needs various theo-
ries, and there can hardly be a single grand theory attempting to
explain equally well all the aspects of the phenomena under study.
Rather, like a world-class tennis player, who combines a strong serve
with excellent returns and uses, depending on circumstances, with
equal skill both backhand and forehand, an international lawyer or
a IR specialist (both as a practitioner and academic) ideally has to be
ready to use, depending on the subject-matter and concrete tasks,
5 B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy and its Connection with Political and
Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, George Allen and
Unwin Ltd., 1946, p. 637.
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

Introduction 9
different intellectual tools, that is to say, different theories and theo-

retical approaches. This, however, is rarely the case.
Inis Claude has aptly, albeit somewhat exaggeratedly, observed
that ‘most people are addicted to the overstatement of their favour-
ite propositions, the exaggeration of the scope of their generalisa-
tions. We say “always” when we mean “sometimes”, and “certainly”
when we mean “perhaps”; we tend to convert conditional thoughts
into absolute standards’.6 Profound theorists are often men or
women who passionately believe in the truthfulness of one big idea
(they are hedgehogs, to use the famous comparison by Isaiah Berlin
of hedgehogs and foxes). Such a passionate belief helps them to
deepen their theories, to make them as detailed and rigorous as pos-
sible. Doubts in the truthfulness of one’s views would hardly stimu-
late further development of these views. Without the belief (usually
a passionate one) that their theory is not only the best theory but
also the only true one, it would be difficult to develop profound and
detailed theories. That is why theories that concentrate on only one
aspect of a phenomenon under study (from the point of view of such
a theorist, this may not be an aspect at all but the very essence of the
phenomenon) are often more parsimonious, rigorous and logically
less controversial than more comprehensive theories. Howard
Williams, David Sullivan and Gwynn Matthews have observed that
[I]n their view of history Marx and Engels are both monists and dog-
matists. They are monists in that they believe that one principle can
be seen as underlying human history, namely, material production,
and they are dogmatists in believing that they solely give the correct
outline of that principle. Marx’s genius led him to an intellectual arro-
gance, an arrogance that he shared with Hegel. Neither is prepared to
see their point of view as one possible interpretation of the world.7
John Ruggie has incisively observed that ‘the strength of each
approach is also the source of its major weakness’.8 However, the
converse may often also be true. Without some one-sidedness a
6 I. Claude, ‘The Tension between Principle and Pragmatism’, 19 Review of

International Studies (1993), p. 219.
7 H. Williams, D. Sullivan, G. Matthews, Francis Fukuyama and the End of History,
University of Wales Press, 1997, p. 55.
8 J. Ruggie, Construing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization,
Routledge, 1998, p. 36.
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

10 Introduction
genius is usually not a genius. Marx would not have been Marx had
he not passionately believed in the truthfulness of his theory (e.g.
that material production is the engine of progress and that social
phenomena can be at the end of the day explained on the basis of
class struggle). Not only the weakness, but more importantly, the
strength of his theory lies in its, at least relative, one-sidedness.
Limited (i.e. one-sided) theories, if those who use them understand
their limits, may have more explanatory power than more compre-
hensive but looser and less rigorous theories. However, in such case
they have to be complemented by theories that go deep into other
aspects of the same phenomenon.
Different theories of international law and politics are like the
petals of a flower, each one explains some aspects of the analysed
reality, while in the centre of the flower there is not a grand ‘theory
of everything’ (T.O.E.), but a relatively thin capitulum on which most
theories or theoretical approaches can agree upon, thereby securing
a necessary unity of research. At the same time, theories pretending
to be general, and attempting to find a single most important factor
that determines the outcome of certain wide and significant pro-
cesses, like where the world is moving now, or what makes some
societies rich and others poor, or will democracy flourish in the
Middle East, may contain deep insights that are due, but one may be
surprised at their one-sidedness. We believe that no single philoso-
phy or theory can do justice to such multifaceted phenomena as
world politics, economics or law. Every theoretical approach, quite
naturally, strives to become internally more and more coherent,
non-controversial and complete, that is to say, it strives to become
academically more and more rigorous. This, in turn, tends to lead to
the loss of the capacity to reflect reality, which is often controversial
and volatile (i.e. non-rigorous), comprehensively. As Douglass North,
a Nobel Prize winner in economics, has said, ‘the price you pay for
precision is inability to deal with real world questions’.9
The contemporary international system is certainly not a ‘tradi-
tional’ Westphalian international system where state sovereignty
was considered absolute (of course it was more or less absolute only
for those states that were strong enough to face challenges from
9 Wall Street Journal, 29 July 1994, p. 1.
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

Introduction 11
other states, i.e. it was near absolute for the European absolute mon-
archies) and whatever they did within their territory was no one
else’s concern. Today the principle of non-interference in internal
affairs and even that of the non-use of force have to be balanced
with the international law principle of respect for and observance of
human rights and fundamental freedoms. However, it is not for the
sake of dictators or authoritarian regimes that these traditional prin-
ciples of international law prohibiting interference in internal affairs
and use of force retain their validity, as some radical authors believe.
These principles preserve their importance for various reasons;
including the rationale that external interference in foreign coun-
tries, for even benevolent purposes is often incompetent, counter-
productive and sometimes may amount to no more than to an
expression of self-righteousness. This applies to different forms of
interference, but most importantly it applies to military interven-
tions. Moreover, the use of military force for the sake of justice is too
blunt an instrument, and therefore should be used with extreme
caution, though, as we will argue in this book, in extreme circum-
stances such as genocide or massive crimes against humanity it may
be morally necessary and legally justifiable. And always, it is nec
essary to deconstruct lofty words and slogans, especially when
expressed by the political leaders of powerful states. In that respect,
democratically elected leaders are not in a different category from
autocrats; sometimes politicians in democracies have even more
reason than autocrats to conceal their real interests behind value-
loaded slogans. In any case, it is always best to verify and not take at
face value the declarations of political or military leaders. Words, be
they concepts, doctrines or laws, may indeed reflect values that are
universal, or which, at least in principle, may be universalisable, but
they may also be used, either deliberately or mistakenly, to pass
parochial ideas as universal values. Already in the 1920’s, German
philosopher and legal theoretician Carl Schmitt incisively wrote:
‘When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity,
it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a par
ticular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military
opponent. … The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideo-
logical instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-
humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.
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12 Introduction
Here one can be reminded of a somewhat modified expression of

Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat’.10 Schmitt’s
controversial political affiliations and the fact that they were written
almost a century ago do not diminish the topicality of his insights.
If this all sounds too Machiavellian, it is only due to the subject
matter – politics, especially in its international dimension. Methods
of study have to be chosen depending on the subject matter and the
choice of theory depends on the problem that is being researched.
As Alexander Wendt writes, ‘the framing of problems and research
strategies should be question-driven rather than method-driven’.11
In world politics, Machiavellian questions and answers are prefera-
ble to Pollyannaish recipes because of the nature of the phenomena
we are dealing with. It is difficult to disagree with Amitai Etzioni’s
analysis that the world, with some significant exceptions, is even
today ‘in a Hobbesian state and is not ready for a Lockean one.’12
Pragmatism enlightened by idealism (or idealism moderated by
pragmatism), which sees through hypocrisy and naivety, is the best
tool for understanding our imperfect but somewhat perfectible
world.
Finally, at the end of the book we return to where we started from
and based on the preceding analysis sum up our understanding of
where the world as a whole and various parts of it may be going.
Of course, there is no preordained destiny and many possibilities
(as well as impossibilities) exist. There are, paraphrasing the famous
American military thinker Donald Rumsfeld, quite a few known
unknowns and even many more unknown unknowns. The most
plausible, most peaceful and most able to release human potential,
as we try to explain, future would be multipolar and diverse.
Attempts to make the world uniform – Western-centric, Sino-centric
or Islamo-centric – are not only doomed to fail but they are also
wrought with the danger of bloody conflicts.
10 C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 54.
11 A. Wendt, ‘Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of
Power Politics’, 46 International Organisation (1992), p. 423.
12 A. Etzioni, From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International
Relations, Palgrave, 2004, p. 116.
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From an African Village to a Global Village 13
Chapter One
FROM AN AFRICAN VILLAGE TO A GLOBAL VILLAGE
The dominant trend in western social and political philosophy, from

Emmanuel Kant to John Rawls and many others both in-between
and after, has been what one may call abstract (not necessarily in the
negative meaning, though in a somewhat limited sense) philoso-
phizing or theorizing, i.e. from some very general intuitive premises
or axioms toward more concrete ideas and policy recommenda-
tions. What such an approach, notwithstanding the great insights of
many original thinkers, lacks are historical and comparative analy-
ses. Therefore, one may be tempted to agree with Raymond Geuss
when he writes that ‘… political philosophy must be realist. That
means, roughly speaking, that it must start from and be concerned
in the first instance not how people ought to ideally (or ought
“rationally”) act, what they ought to desire, or value, the kind of peo-
ple they ought to be, etc., but, rather, with the way social, economic,
political, etc., institutions actually operate in some society at some
given time, and what really moves human beings to act in given cir-
cumstances’.1 Or as Francis Fukuyama writes: ‘Putting the theory
after the history constitutes what I regard as the correct approach to
analysis: theories ought to be inferred from facts, and not the other
way around. Of course, there is no such thing as pure confrontation
with facts, devoid of prior theoretical constructs. Those who think
they are empirical in that fashion are deluding themselves. But all
too often social science begins with an elegant theory and then
searches for facts that will confirm it’.2 As most of these theories
have been elaborated upon by Western thinkers, it is not at all sur-
prising that practically all of them support, or have been used to sup-
port, some version of political arrangements based on western
liberal democratic values.3 Theoretical differences so far have been
1 R. Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, Princeton University Press, 2008.

2 F. Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order From Prehuman Times to the
French Revolution, Profile Books, 2011, p. 24.
3 Critique of ahistorical political theorizing see, e.g., Raymond Geuss, Philosophy
and Real Politics, Princeton University Press, 2008 and Political Philosophy versus
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14 Chapter One
mainly differences within the same, Western worldview (in a way,

even the main twentieth century ideological contradiction between
liberal-democratic and communist worldviews was an intra-
Western ideological clash into which other peoples were dragged;
this being not very dissimilar to the genesis of the two world wars),
which has either ignored other worldviews or treated them with a
certain condescension and dealt with the classics of Chinese, Indian
and Islamic thought as only historically relevant. In order to avoid
such theorizing without studying concrete societies which had pre-
viously existed or exist today, without the analysis of why some of
them had become slave-owning societies while others had evolved
into liberal-democracies, why somewhere a Idi Amin or a Saddam
Hussein or another notorious strongman has ruled or still rules,
while in different places democratically elected liberals fail to find
solutions to today’s challenges, it is necessary to take historical and
comparative approaches to all these questions. Such approaches are
even more necessary today at the turn of the XXI century, which
seems to mark a turning point in the history of humankind. Among
economic, political and other tangible factors bearing witness to
this, of which more shall be discussed later in the book, is the increas-
ing quantity (and often quality) of voluminous books that take the
long historical view on today’s and tomorrow’s events, developments
and perspectives. Ian Morris’Why the West Rules – for Now (going
back about 14,000 years), Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political
Order from Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (going back
about more or less the same time-span), Steven Pinker’s The Better
Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes
(10,000 years of history of violence) and some other similar works
witness this tendency. Why do these and many other authors feel the
need to take such a long run up to the discussion of today’s prob-
lems? None of them is a professional historian; none of them spe-
cializes in ancient history. The most plausible answer seems to be
that when history is drastically changing course – today’s, and even
more so tomorrow’s problems and questions can only be answered
when one looks at current tendencies through a longer historical
History: Contextualism and Real Politics in the Contemporary Political Thought (eds.
J. Floyd, M. Stears), Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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perspective. As famous Russian poet Sergei Yessenin wrote: ‘When

face to face/We cannot see the face/We should step back/ For better
observation’. That is why we have chosen to carry out our study of
the current regime changes in the context of a longer historical per-
spective. One of the problems of today’s world (which, as we will
discuss in detail in various parts of this book, should be taken
account of when analysing current regime changes in different parts
of the world) is the shifting balance between universalising or
homogenising trends in the world on the one hand, and remaining
and sometimes even increasing social diversity, on the other.
1. EX UNO PLURES IN THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANKIND
The issue of social diversity is a part of the problem of universal ver-

sus particular, which is not only a philosophical problem; it is also an
important political and legal question concerning the world as a
whole as well as many individual societies. In today’s world, the
Enlightenment’s emphasis of universality based on the glorification
of reason, and belief in science and progress as the most important
common characteristics of humanity, is vying with the post-modern
(and sometimes also pre-modern) emphasis on cultural relativism.
For example, in the domain of human rights this contention is play-
ing out in the form of a rivalry between the idea of the universality of
all human rights (somewhat naively and/or hypocritically enshrined
in a series of United Nations human rights documents) and the
attempts of cultural relativists to prove (often self-servingly) the
relative and contingent nature of all human rights. In order to better
understand the current interplay of diversity and unity of human-
kind and existing contradictory trends in this interplay, it would be
useful to look back at where we, i.e., the human race, started from
and how we got from there to where we are now. How and why have
we become so diverse while nonetheless retaining our fundamental
unity as members of the same human species? A short historical
excurse will serve as a necessary context for the following study of
more concrete issues and tendencies of their evolution.
The motto E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one), enshrined in
the Great Seal of the United States and written on the dollar bill,
originally suggesting that out of many colonies or states emerges a
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16 Chapter One
single nation, has come to imply that out of many peoples, races,
religions and ancestries has emerged a single people or nation—
illustrating the melting pot concept of nation-building as in the
United States of America. However, much earlier, when no one
would have thought of using any Latin or hardly any other human
language at all, there took place a process that one could call Ex Uno
Plures (out of one, many). We have in mind not the Big Bang that
around 13.7 billion years ago allegedly created our Universe, but
the much more recent, though still ancient, process of the evolu-
tion of humankind during the previous tens of thousands of
years, when somewhere in the East African Rift Valley region some
members of either a single or a few communities of Homo sapiens—
communities that were probably rather homogeneous—started to
go their separate ways. In this process they acquired traits, both
physical and cultural, that made these spreading and separating
communities quite different from one another. Out of few emerged
many; from a relatively homogeneous community emerged more
and more diverse communities.
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza observes that ‘[M]odern humans appear
first in Africa, then move to Asia, and from this big continent they
settled its three appendices: Oceania, Europe and America’.4 In
accordance with some estimates, he continues, ‘the date of the
human–chimps separations was estimated about five million years
ago, and the separation of Africans from non-Africans gave a date of
143,000 years ago using mtDNA results’,5 while ‘a number of recent
independent genetic dates place the beginning of expansion from
Africa close to 50,000 years ago.’6 And though ‘much remains to be
learned about human evolution, but for now it is fairly widely agreed
that modern humans evolved in Africa and that 60,000 years ago
there was an expansion out of Africa of an initially small group of
people. They may have spoken a single fully modern human lan-
guage, which, together with technological advances, led to further
population expansion and gradually more rapid migrations’.7 Be that
4 L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples and Languages, Allen Lane, 2000, p. 81.
5 Ibid., 131.
6 Ibid.
7 L. Stone, P. Lurquin and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Culture, and Human
Evolution: A Synthesis (Blackwell, 2007), p. 163.
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as it may, for the purposes of our study it is sufficient to know that

Homo sapiens moved out of Africa, out of either a single or few com-
munities and gradually, over many millennia, a group or several
groups of our ancestors, who looked very much the same and
behaved in the same manner, spread all over the world, creating
various social groups, tribes and communities, some of which for
many centuries or even millennia became completely isolated from
other groups. In the process of this proliferation, these social groups
started to differ more and more from one another. The colour
of their skin, the slant of their eyes and other physical parame-
ters changed depending on the climate, other environmental and
natural factors; they started not only to hunt for and domesticate
different animals and beasts, but also began to sing dissimilar songs,
pray to different gods and acquire differing marriage practices.
Humankind was not born that diverse: we became so different dur-
ing this long process of conquering the world. As Mark Pagel writes:
The modern-human occupation of the world was now complete, all
within a few tens of thousands of years after leaving Africa; and most
of this within the first 20,000. It was an occupation that had begun
back in Africa when as few as several hundred to several thousand
people left that ancestral continent, so that today, remarkably, and in
such a short period of time, all of us on Earth trace our ancestry back
to this small and intrepid band. By the end of the Polynesian expan-
sion, humans now inhabited deserts, savannah, prairies, marches, rain
forests, and ice. … They spoke thousands of distinct and mutually
incomprehensible languages. They had evolved a variety of different
mating practices such that sometimes men had more than one wife,
other times women had more than one husband, and in other socie-
ties people practiced monogamy.8
Today, for an expanding world population of over 7 billion, all of the
Planet Earth may have become smaller than eastern Africa was for
the first groups of Homo sapiens; today, there are no hospitable, or
even inhospitable, spaces and places without human traces.
Although in the process of this journey from Africa to all over the
world the human race became gradually more and more diverse, it
nevertheless remained the same human race, and its members have
8 M. Pagel, Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Cooperation, Allen
Lane, 2012 (Kindle version), loc., 608.
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18 Chapter One
retained characteristics that are common to all humans; even the

expanding human communities retained traits that are familiar to
all societies. Most of the social groups that have ever existed in the
world have, for long periods, been closely knit traditional communi-
ties and only recently have some of them, particularly in the West,
become so individualistic that concerns have been raised over the
weakening of societal bonds holding communities together.9 This
indicates that for long periods of human evolution communitarian
ways of living have been, and for many societies still are, much more
natural than the ways based on individualism, on rights and liberties
of the individual vis-à-vis the community where they live. For mil-
lennia, Homo sapiens did not differentiate themselves as individuals,
as personalities separate from social groups whose integral parts
they were. Alexis de Tocqueville was right that ‘the word “individual-
ism”, which we have coined for our own requirements, was unknown
to our ancestors, for the good reason that in their days every indi-
vidual necessarily belonged to a group and no one could regard him-
self as an isolated unit’.10
Universalists, i.e. proponents of a universal history of humankind –
be they Marxists or liberal democrats, tend to underestimate, as we
will discuss at length later, differences acquired in this process of the
journey out of an African village. At the same time, cultural relativ-
ists, emphasizing the differences among societies (and they may be
more or less right about the differences), fail to appreciate the com-
monalities that have existed in all or most of human communities,
and that in a globalising world have the tendency to grow in impor-
tance. If differences are readily evident and immediately strike one’s
eye (for example, the colour of one’s skin, the slant of one’s eyes or
how people are clad), commonalities more often than not have to
be discovered in a process of close contact and communication.
Our common humanity seems to be deeper, but therefore also more
hidden than our differences, which are usually on the surface and
therefore immediately visible. Marcel Granet, for example, wrote
that ‘attempts to express ancient Chinese thinking with English as
9 See, for example, D. Selbourne, The Principle of Duty: An Essay on the

Foundations of the Civic Order (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000).
10 A. de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856) (trans-
lated by Stewart Gilbert), Anchor Books, 1955, p. 96.
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an instrument would be worth making, even if they did no more

than demonstrate the disaccord between the two methods of
thought and language’.11 Adda Bozeman, equally, was of the opinion
that ‘[I]deas, even under the best of auspices, are not transferable in
their authenticity, and that reliable intercultural accords are there-
fore difficult to reach’ and that ‘in the final analysis cultures are dif-
ferent because they are associated with different modes of thought’.12
The fact that most of us concentrate on differences, often exaggerat-
ing their significance, seems to indicate that we are still relatively
primitive creatures, that we are unable to see below the surface to
discover our common humanity.
Professional translators, as well as those who speak several lan-
guages, know well how difficult it is to convey in another language
the exact meaning of the original, to say nothing of the translation of
metaphoric utterances, humorous jokes or poetry. However, these
difficulties should not be so surprising if we keep in mind that over
thousands of years many languages and cultures developed in rela-
tive or sometimes even in complete isolation. What is really surpris-
ing is that languages that have for millennia evolved independently
from each other have nevertheless so much in common that their
bearers, if they make necessary efforts to learn languages of others,
can communicate with each other. Therefore, it seems to be true, as
Steven Pinker writes, that ‘universal mental mechanisms can under-
lie superficial variations across cultures’, and that ‘all human lan-
guages can convey the same kinds of ideas’.13 Anthropologists’ latest
research has shown that there are many traits in common between
different cultures, even if these cultures have never had any signifi-
cant post-African contacts with each other. Allow me to quote a
lengthy passage from Steven Pinker:
Some anthropologists have returned to an ethnographic record that
used to trumpet differences among cultures and have found an aston-
ishingly detailed set of aptitudes and tastes that all cultures have in
common. This shared way of thinking, feeling and living makes us
look like a single tribe, which the anthropologist Donald Brown has
11 M. Granet, La pensé Chinoise, Paris, Editions Albin Michel,1934, p. 9.

12 A. Bozeman, The Future of Law in a Multicultural World, Princeton University
Press, 1971, p. 14.
13 S. Pinker, The Blank Slate, Penguin Books, 2002, p. 37.
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20 Chapter One
called the Universal People, after Chomsky’s Universal Grammar.

Hundreds of traits, from fear of snakes to logical operations, from
romantic love to humorous insults, from poetry to food taboos, from
exchange of goods to mourning the dead, can be found in every soci-
ety ever documented. It’s not that every universal behaviour directly
reflects a universal component of human nature—many arise from
the interplay between universal properties of the mind, universal
properties of the body, and universal properties of the world.
Nonetheless, the sheer richness and detail in the rendering of the
Universal People comes as a shock to any intuition that the mind is a
blank slate or that cultures can vary without limit, and that there is
something on the list to refute almost any theory growing out of those
intuitions.14
In the appendix to his book (pp. 435–439), Pinker reproduces Donald
Brown’s list (five pages) of human universals that can be found in all
cultures, even if these cultures have not had any interactions. To
name but a few: dance, cooking, coyness, death rituals, distinguish-
ing right and wrong, envy, fears, gossip, music, preference for own
children and next of kin, taboos, conflicts, conflict resolution, etc.
Since these are not simply groups of different species but rather
human communities, there is much in common between various
communities, even if contacts between them have been only spo-
radic or completely absent. As wolves remain wolves and wolf packs
remain wolf packs notwithstanding whether they inhabit the Asian
steppes or Alaskan mountains (having, of course, depending on the
climate, landscape and available food, different hunting habits and
even different sizes and fur colours15), humans remain humans
and human communities remain human communities notwith-
standing where they live and what different characteristics—genetic
or cultural—they may have acquired in the process of their adapta-
tion to the environment, or simply by chance. Differences between
humans across various communal divides, especially if we exclude
visible physical features such as the colour of the skin or the
slant of the eyes, are rather superficial and insignificant. However,
14 Ibid., 55.
15 L. Stone and P. Lurquin observe that among the humans, “genetic variation
inside a given population is greater than that between two distinct populations”
and that diversity between wolf packs is considerably higher than between any two
human populations (Stone, Lurquin, p. 145).
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communities tend to impose their specific values, ethical norms and

other cultural traits on their members who, as humans, as individu-
als, do not differ much from members of other communities. As
Michael Walzer has aptly observed, ‘[E]very human society is uni-
versal because it is human, particular because it is a society.’16 While
our common humanity pulls us closer to each other, assures that our
main needs and desires are very much the same notwithstanding
where we live and how we look like, the traditions of our societies,
acquired over millennia, often push us apart.
2. IS E PLURIBUS UNUM REPLACING EX UNO PLURES?
Tens of thousands of years long process of conquering the planet

was paralleled by the process of dissimilation, i.e. we as individuals
as well as human societies gradually became more and more differ-
ent from one another. Therefore, this process of the expansion of
Homo sapiens all over the world may also be called a process of dis-
similation. If as individual human beings we became more or less
superficially different, as members of distinct societies, our cultures,
religions and ways of life in the widest sense have become much
more substantially different. Today, when the world has virtually
become a global village, a reverse process, though slow and painful
(yet obviously not as slow as the processes of expansion and dissimi-
lation), has set in, and may be called the process of contraction par-
alleled with a controversial process of assimilation.
Although we, the humans, retain most of the differences that we
have acquired during this long process of spreading all over the
world, in a new emerging global village practically all peoples inter-
act closely, and in this process of interaction they exchange not only
goods and technological know-how but also views and ideas, both
the best and the worst of them. We see all over the world—wherever
societies develop and do not stagnate—that people, besides trying
to be innovative, also use the experiences of other countries by
creatively (or sometimes not so creatively) copying what has
worked in other societies. First of all, this applies to scientific and
16 M. Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, University of
Notre Dame Press, 1994, p. 8.
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22 Chapter One
technological innovations, but foreign experiences in the fields of

social, economic and political relations have also served many socie-
ties well; indeed, often scientific-technological innovations cannot
be successfully introduced without appropriate socio-economic
changes. As Niall Ferguson writes, ‘[T]he Dutch Republic prevailed
over the Habsburg Empire because having the world’s first modern
stock market was financially preferable to having the world’s biggest
silver mine.’17 Today all respectable states have modern stock mar-
kets. Frances Fukuyama emphasizes that ‘[T]he process of economic
rationalisation and development is an extremely powerful social
force that compels societies to modernise along certain uniform
lines’.18 ‘In this respect’, he continues, ‘there is clearly such a thing
as “History” in the Marxist–Hegelian sense that homogenizes dispa-
rate cultures and pushes them in the direction of “modernity”’.19
We remain unconvinced about the inevitable linear progress of
humanity in either the Marxist–Hegelian or any other sense, and we
are much more sceptical about the speed of the processes of homog-
enization, but borrowing from more successful societies is certainly
not a new phenomenon and certain homogenization is without
doubt taking place. Although cultural exchanges are, of course,
slower than the spread of technological, economic or political novel-
ties, cultures are not immutable either. Steven Pinker observes that
Preserving cultural diversity is considered a supreme virtue today, but
the members of diverse cultures don’t always see it that way. People
have wants and needs, and when cultures rub shoulders, people in
one culture are bound to notice when their neighbours are satisfying
those desires better than they are. When they do notice, history tells
us, they shamelessly borrow whatever works best. Far from being self-
preserving monoliths, cultures are porous and constantly in flux.20
Although the human world has been diverse for millennia, it has
never before been so close and interconnected, and this is one of the
most important novelties creating both opportunities and problems.
17 N. Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Allen Lane,
2008, p. 3.
18 F. Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues of the Creation of Prosperity, Hamish
Hamilton, 1995, p. 351.
19 Ibid., 351–352.
20 S. Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 66.
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Today, post-industrial (or, as they are often called, ‘post-modern’)

and feudal or semi-feudal (or ‘pre-modern’) societies co-exist on the
same planet, and they not only closely interact and influence each
other, but they even interpenetrate. If centuries ago Europeans
moved out to colonise (or civilise, as they believed) indigenous
peoples, today communities from former colonies are already well
established in many European societies. This inevitably creates
strains and even conflicts: on the one hand, there is a trend towards
greater homogeneity (especially in the economic and technological
spheres) and interpenetration between different cultures but, on the
other hand, we face a continuing, and in some cases even widening
hiatus between the levels of development of different societies, or
even communities within the same society. The interpenetration of
cultures also leads, as a counter-reaction, to an even stronger search
for identity in one’s historical, cultural or religious roots (not in our
common African past but in our more recent separate histories) and
creates resistance to what is perceived as alien cultural penetration
or challenge. This situation is a major challenge for many societies,
for their traditions, and for human rights and international law as
well. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture, President Barak
Obama said:
As the world grows smaller, you might think it would be easier for
human beings to recognize how similar we are; to understand that
we’re all basically seeking the same things; that we all hope for the
chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness and fulfil-
ment for ourselves and our families. And yet somehow, given the diz-
zying pace of globalization, the cultural levelling of modernity, it
perhaps comes as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they
cherish in their particular identities – their race, their tribe, and per-
haps most powerfully their religion. In some places, this fear has led to
conflict. At times, it even feels like we’re moving backwards. We see it
in the Middle East, as the conflict between Arabs and Jews seems to
harden. We see it in nations that are torn asunder by tribal lines.21
President Obama’s thoughts reflects the two sides of the same
coin—on the one hand, there is the need to recognise, not
withstanding all our religious, cultural, developmental and other
21 The transcript of President Obama’s speech at the Nobel Peace Prize cere-
mony in Oslo, The International Herald Tribune (10 December 2009).
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24 Chapter One
differences, our commonality as humans, increasingly living in a

smaller and smaller world, and on the other hand, the counter-
tendency of hanging on to our past, glorifying and improving our
history to serve particular ends.
Homo sapiens are not only a rational, but also a passionate and
often quite illogical species; not always does reason succeed even at
the end of the day. Therefore, a failure of some societies, or even
humanity as a whole, cannot be completely ruled out. However, to
avoid such failures, societies that are less successful in resolving
their problems have to look at, and borrow from their neighbours
those features, ideas and practices that have made the latter more
successful. One need not be a social Darwinist to recognize that
those who are healthier, wealthier and better educated do better
than those who are sick, poor and illiterate. This means that a cer-
tain homogenization of humankind will probably be inevitable and
even necessary if we want to become more prosperous, healthier
and more peaceful, and if we do not want to exterminate each other
over our differences. The important question, as we will discuss
below, will be in which way, how fast, to what extent and how far this
process will go. One of the main ideas developed in this book is the
warning that an artificial acceleration of the processes of homogeni-
zation may be as dangerous as attempts to forestall them.
Human societies, in sharing and borrowing, have improved the
quality of life for their members. Because of such interactions
humankind has achieved a certain progress not only in the natural
sciences, technology and wealth-creation but, we dare to say, in the
domain of morals as well. Nicholas Wade observes:
The vocabulary of evolutionary biology does not include the word
progress, for evolution has no goal toward which progress might be
made. But in the case of human evolution, this exclusion may not be
entirely justified. People, after all, make choices. If these choices
shape a society for generation after generation, and if they permit
individuals of a certain character to have more children and propa-
gate their genes, then the overall nature of society may come to be
shaped, in part, by human choice. If the character in question is a ten-
dency to cooperate with others, then such a society would become
more cohesive internally and more conciliatory in its relations with
neighbours. Other societies might become more aggressive in charac-
ter, or more paranoid, or more adventurous. Yanomamo society, given
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that the unokais [those who have undergone a special ritual having
killed somebody; they have on average 2.5 times as many wives as men
who have not killed] have more children, has surely positioned to
become more aggressive. But overall, despite many setbacks and
reversions, human societies have made vast gains in peacefulness,
complexity and cohesion in the last 15,000 years.22
Steven Pinker, in his The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of
Violence in History and its Causes,23 shows how human societies,
notwithstanding occasional lapses into barbarity, have in general
curbed violence within as well as between societies.
The process of overcoming some of our differences does not nec-
essarily mean that humankind will evolve towards any kind of uni-
formity; it means that human societies have to, and probably the
more successful of them will, get rid of those elements in their ways
of life, in their cultures, that either become hindrances for their
development and competition with other societies, or cause con-
flicts between and within society; it means that alongside remaining
cultural differences that enrich humankind there are also emerging
more and more elements of common culture. Closeness and inter-
penetration of societies—a process which today is usually called
globalisation—means not only that one can have Chinese noodles,
McDonald’s burgers or Scotch in most countries of the world; these
processes also create a pull towards the universalisation of cultural
features such as various normative values, including human rights,
basic liberties and democratic procedures. In a world where some
countries (and today, quite a lot) are mature and successful democ-
racies with developed market economies, the ideas of democracy
and human rights have become infectious. It was not so difficult for
medieval kings and princes to rule with an iron fist, use torture as a
legitimate and the surest way of extracting confessions, which could
be used in courts of law, and bequeath their thrones to their off-
spring using the accepted rule of primogeniture. There were no legal
or moral rules that would have required that things had to be done
22 N. Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, The
Penguin Press, 2007, pp. 177 –178.
23 S. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History
and its Causes, Allen Lane, 2011.
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26 Chapter One
differently. Moreover, there were no examples of societies where

things would have been done much differently. As Barry Buzan and
Gerald Segal wrote, ‘because the Europeans were the first to put
together this mix of inventions and ideas, they had the unique privi-
lege of finding their own path to modernity at a time when their
dominance meant that they suffered little interference from the rest
of the world—however much they interfered with each other’.24
Today, prosperous and poor, free and authoritarian societies live side
by side; they see, hear and take notice of each other. In such a world
the absence of political and personal freedoms, corruption and a
lack of economic reforms and opportunities in some societies, while
other societies prosper, are among the factors that create conditions
in which discontent, which cannot be channelled through legiti-
mate institutions, may take violent forms. Immigration flows from
less prosperous and more troubled regions to more prosperous and
liberal societies have become a constant and probably permanent
feature of globalisation. Today, some Western cities with their racial,
linguistic and social mixes look like microcosms of the world as a
whole. Equally, the widening gap between prosperous nations and
poor nations25 is also reproduced internally in many countries.
Sure, a new global village, even if the people living there were to
shed some of the differences that cause inter- and intra-societal con-
flicts, cannot be a homogeneous entity such as the one in Africa,
from where many millennia ago our ancestors started their exodus.
Therefore, one of the important features that all communities ought
to have in common is the acceptance of the inevitability of social
diversity. We may call it universalisation of the need to recognise
and respect diversity both in the world at large and even more
importantly (since it is more difficult) within our own societies.
Toleration, acceptance and even the welcoming of those differences
that enrich humankind, while striving to get rid of those features
24 B. Buzan and G. Segal, Anticipating the Future: Twenty Millennia of Human

Progress (Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 22.
25 Although it is true that some of the formerly poor nations, such as China,
India or Brazil, are today rapidly moving into the category of prosperous countries,
and an important thing to note is that in this rapid process of change they are taking
over quite a few things from more prosperous countries.
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that cause conflicts or are obstacles for development, may indeed

become a conditio sine qua non of the survival of human species.
Today there are some societies which, to an extent, have developed
such a capacity (in that respect I would single out the United States,
though, as we will discuss further, in America the tolerance for
diversity at home is not matched by a tolerance of diversity in the
world), though none is close to an ideal, while others have not yet
taken any steps in that direction.
3. HOMOGENISATION OF THE WORLD AND

HETEROGENISATION OF INDIVIDUAL SOCIETIES
There are two contradictory, competing and sometimes in a way

even cancelling each other out processes going on in today’s world:
the world as a whole is slowly becoming more and more homogene-
ous while most individual societies are increasingly becoming more
heterogeneous. The very process of globalisation, especially some
of its manifestations such as the increasing assimilation (homoge
nisation) of the world as a whole and increasing dissimilation
(heterogenisation) of individual societies as well as the purposeful
promotion of western-style liberal democracy and market economy,
raise the question not only of the universality (unidirecionality) of
humankind’s history, but also that of values as professed as common
for the whole humankind.
The relative homogenization of the world is not something com-
pletely new. Empires, both ancient and modern, contributed to this
process, though they did not strive, as we have argued, to homoge-
nise their imperial space as nation-states have tried to do. The end of
the bi-polar international system, collapse of the USSR as a counter-
balance to Western economic and political systems, and the opening
up of China mark a new accelerating homogenization of the world.
In many ways it is a spontaneous process. Interacting and interpen-
etrating societies borrow from each other what they believe works
best; the flow of goods, ideas and practices across state boundaries
make interacting societies in some important, as well as in some not
so important respects more similar to one another.
The current migration waves, which are an aspect and result
of the globalisation process, contribute to both of these – the
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28 Chapter One
assimilation of the world and the dissimilation of individual

societies – tendencies. Until recently most migration waves have
had predominantly economic explanations (through both push and
pull factors), and armed conflicts that created refugee flows from
conflict zones, as their main cause. However, we already see that
environmental factors are starting to play a role in this too. Ian
Morris warns that ‘[G]lobal warming threatens to make even the
most lurid fears of anti-immigrant activists come true by the 2020s.
Tens of millions of the world’s hungriest, angriest, and most desper-
ate people may be fleeing the Muslim world for Europe, and Latin
America for the United States. The population movements could
dwarf anything in history, reviving the kind of problems that the
steppe highway [on which the hordes of Alexander the Great,
the Huns, Chingiz Han, and others moved either to the West or to
the East RM] used to present’.26 Globalisation, and especially migra-
tion waves as one of its manifestations (being a source of homog
enisation) leads to the heterogenisation of individual societies.
In most societies all over the world, there are increasingly more
goods, ideas, practices and people of foreign origin. If foreign
material goods are, as a rule, accepted rather benevolently (though
even here there are exceptions), foreign ideas, practices and espe-
cially the carriers of those ideas and practices tend to cause resist-
ance from significant segments of the indigenous populations.
These controversial parallel processes of homogenization and
heterogenisation have already created some serious problems. The
world has become virtually one, interconnected, but also unman-
ageable. Everything is related to everything else, and more often
than not our conscious and planned actions have unforeseen and
unintended consequences. Negative events in one part of the world
have an immediate impact on other parts. Economic and finan
cial crises, terrorist attacks, environmental pollution and uncon
trollable immigration waves are major negative consequences of
globalization.
Although the democratization of Western European societies
went in parallel with their homogenization and the latter supported
26 I. Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They
Reveal about Future, Profile Books, 2011, p. 603.
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the former, attempts at ethnic, cultural or religious homogenization

are wrought with serious dangers, besides the obvious fact that
today some techniques of homogenization that were practiced cen-
turies ago are considered to be genocide, crimes against humanity or
ethnic cleansing. An important point to note is also that, historically,
it was not, say, the exclusion of ethnic or religious minorities or the
expulsion of Jews or Huguenots that made some societies prosper-
ous and dominant; on the contrary it was tolerance (often such tol-
erance was strategic, not humanitarian or humanistic) which helped
societies such as the Empires of Rome or Genghis Khan, later the
Dutch and the British Empires, and in the twentieth century the
United States to prevail over other societies. Amy Chua has persua-
sively shown that “throughout history, no society based on racial
purity, religious zealotry, or ethnic cleansing has ever become a
world-dominant power”.27 If striving for ethnic or racial purity may
lead to genetic diseases, the search for intellectual or ideological
purity may be a cause of social schizophrenia. In any case, today in
contradistinction to the Western Europe of the period of the forma-
tion of nation-states, the dominant tendency in most societies is the
rise of diversity. Therefore, policies of ethnic, religious, cultural or
linguistic homogenization will inevitably clash with this dominant
trend and therefore will eventually fail, though before their failure
becomes clear they will create trouble for societies that try to follow
out-dated recipes, and cause pain on those individuals and groups
who are the objects of this homogenization.
4. ‘OH, EAST IS EAST, AND WEST IS WEST, AND NEVER THE

TWAIN SHALL MEET, TILL EARTH AND SKY STAND
PRESENTLY AT GOD’S GREAT JUDGMENT SEAT’?
In the West it is usually accepted that the East (or the South, for that
matter), in order to succeed, has to copy many things from the West
(starting with the principles of market economy and finishing with
human rights and IT technology) and become more similar to the
27 A.Chua, Day of Empire. How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance – and Why
They Fall (Doubleday, 2007), p. XXV.
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30 Chapter One
West. Barry Buzan and Gerald Segal, rejecting such views as simplis-
tic, nevertheless write of the emergence of a ‘Westernistic’ era
that, in contradistinction to the prevailing Western domination, is
‘defined by the interplay between the spread of Western ideas
around the globe on the one hand, and the reassertion of non-
Western cultures on the other’.28 There is some truth to this, but it
is certainly not the whole truth. There is a lot in the East that the
West can ignore only to its own detriment, and it is not only in
the past that the West benefited by borrowing quite heavily from the
East. The compass, papermaking, gunpowder, printing and many
other discoveries originated in China. However, even today, for
example, the Eastern emphasis on the importance of societal bonds
and discipline may be among the features that the West could learn
from the East. Buzan and Segal themselves recognise that ‘[T]he old
West may well have to re-learn from Asia some of its ideas about
how to sustain a community rather than just a collection of indi
viduals’.29 The non-adversarial approach to conflict resolution as a
characteristic of many Eastern societies also stands quite favourably
in comparison with the individualistic, litigation-ridden Western,
and especially American, social practices. The Confucian preference
for mediation instead of litigation means not only that the rule of
law in China will always be different from that in the United States
or in Western Europe, but it may also mean that the West may learn
from the East in that respect as well. The West is justifiably proud of
its regular free elections. However, constant electoral processes have
led, in many Western countries, to political and economic ‘short-
termism’. Martin Jacques, speaking of East Asian States, notes that
their leaders ‘are not hemmed in and constrained in the same man-
ner as Western leaders. In some ways East Asian political leaders are
also more accessible and more approachable because they view
their accountability to society in a more holistic way and people take
a similar attitude towards them. Their greater all-round authority,
rooted in the symbiotic relationship between paternalism and
dependency, can also enable them to take a longer-term attitude
28 B. Buzan and G. Segal, Anticipating the Future: Twenty Millennia of Human

Progress (Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. XIV.
29 Ibid., 186.
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towards society and its needs’.30 Finally, nobody could deny that
Easterners can not only cook and heal well, but their cars and TV sets
are among the best in the world.
Kishore Mahbubani, in writing about the rise of Asia in today’s
world, insightfully observes that the rapid progress in many Asian
countries, especially in China and India, is to a great extent due to
their pragmatic, non-ideological use of the best created and tested
in the West, though the latter is not celebrating this triumph of its
achievements in non-Western countries. Why, asks Mahbubani,
does the West not ‘celebrate the clear presence of Western values in
the rise of Asia?’31 His answer is: because the use of these borrowed
practices has led to a relative loss in another key area—power. Is not
this one of the reasons why many in the West see only the problems
with China and Russia, while ignoring their potential and progress?
If an open-minded observer were to compare today’s China not with
a twenty-first century Sweden or Germany, but with a China, say,
thirty years back, they would see huge progress, not only in the
material well-being of the majority of Chinese people, which is natu-
rally the most tangible achievement for any society (especially for
poorer societies), they would also see progress in terms of personal
freedoms that the Chinese people enjoy today. Daniel Deudney and
John Ikenberry are right that ‘[C]ompared to where these countries
[China and Russia] were several decades ago, they have made
remarkable progress in throwing off centuries of accumulated
economic and political backwardness, and by the yardstick of world
historical change, they have moved and are moving in directions
consistent with the liberal modernization narrative. China and Russia
are not liberal democracies, but they are much more liberal and dem
ocratic than they have ever been – and many of the crucial founda-
tions for sustainable liberal democracy are emerging’.32 There is no
way of knowing whether the Western liberal-democratic model, or
any other socio-political model, will triumph at the end of the day
30 M. Jacques, When China Rules the World. The Rise of the Middle Kingdom
and the End of the Western World (Allen Lane, 2009), p. 186.
31 K. Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power
to the East (Public Affairs, 2008), p. 102.
32 D. Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, ‘The Myth of the Autocratic Revival. Why
Liberal Democracy Will Prevail’, Foreign Affairs, January– February 2009, p. 57.
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32 Chapter One
(one thing seems to be clear: there will not be any final destinations
or ends for history). We cannot be certain even about short- or
medium-term predictions. However, borrowing from each other,
and as a result a certain convergence of different societies, which are
using each other’s ‘best practices’, seems to be a common trend.
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Whither Goest Thou, the World? 33
Chapter Two
WHITHER GOEST THOU, THE WORLD?
1. UNIVERSAL HISTORY AND HISTORICAL DETERMINISM
Besides a spontaneous homogenization of the world, there have

been many conscious attempts to make it more homogeneous.
Monotheistic religions such as Christianity and Islam have both,
either through conquest or missionary activities, tried to make the
world the same in terms of faith. The ideas of the Enlightenment,
based on a belief in the universality of reason and its eventual tri-
umph over emotions, spontaneity and irrationality, have been a
powerful source of attempts to remake the world in accordance with
elaborate blueprints. The Enlightenment’s legacy, whose main ele-
ments are individual autonomy, reason and universality,1 is on the
basis of human progress, and as we showed above, this progress is
not restricted to the field of natural sciences. It is difficult to tell what
have been more in negative effects (or rather side-effects) of some of
the emancipatory ideals of the Enlightenment: were they abuses of
those ideals, their distortions, or perhaps it is simply that all great
ideas contain not only a potential for good but for evil as well. For
example, the current process of the promotion of democracy has,
like its predecessor – the mission civilisatrice or the white man’s bur-
den of the nineteenth century, though in different degrees and
forms, two aspects – idealistic and humanitarian on the one hand,
and hypocritical and domineering on the other. Both of these aspects
have their roots in the Enlightenment’s dual legacy: a desire for
freedom and a tendency for domination. On the European conti-
nent, Enlightenment ideas served, to a great extent, a liberating pur-
pose, while at the same time creating conditions, material as well as
intellectual and psychological, for colonial domination outside
Europe. Dan Hind observes that
1 See, e.g., T. Todorov, In Defence of the Enlightenment, Atlantic Books, 2009,

pp. 4–5.
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34 Chapter Two
[W]e can certainly trace one history of Enlightenment from Bacon to

the British Empire and to the modern global administration. The
insurgent European powers of the period after 1700 depended heavily
on the “enlightened” institutions for a technological base that in turn
empowered global domination. The desire for total knowledge, in the
service of total power, which we find in the Department of Defence
and the Ministry of Defence is an expression of Enlightenment. But
this history must ignore the sense of Enlightenment as freedom of
inquiry and freedom to publish. For the Enlightenment could not be
contained within those institutions and their equivalents in Soviet
Russia and Nazi Germany. Enlightenment informed the movements
of national and social liberation within and outside Europe as surely
as it informed the colonial powers’ war-making technology.2
Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist observes that ‘if the Enlightenment
has rational and hard face, which is the belief in reason and empiri-
cism within mathematics, physics and astronomy, it has also a soft
face, which is the Enlightenment as freedom of thought, tolerance
and liberty’.3 This ‘hard face’, which is morally neutral, has indeed
been used not only for the liberation of men and women from politi-
cal oppression, economic hardships and from a dependence on the
blind forces of nature, but also for the purposes of domination of
other individuals and societies.
Marxism was certainly the most prominent emanation of the
Enlightenment that planned to consciously redesign the world
according to ‘societal laws’ that Karl Marx and Marxists had, alleg-
edly, scientifically discovered. In this endeavour, historical deter-
minism and voluntarism joined forces. Having discovered ‘iron laws’
that would inevitably and through identical stages lead all societies
towards the full emancipation of humankind in a communist forma-
tion, Marxists’ task was to facilitate the birth pangs of this new world,
to play the role of midwife. Erik Olin Wright is right in claiming that
‘Marx proposed a highly deterministic theory of the demise of capi-
talism’.4 However, what is more intriguing is that, as he adds, Marx
also offered ‘a relatively voluntaristic theory of the construction of
its [capitalism’s] alternative’.5 It is even more important to note that
2 D. Hind, The Threat to Reason, Verso, 2007, p. 104.

3 P.O. Enqwist, The Visit of the Royal Physician, Vintage, 2004, p. 92.
4 E.O. Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, Verso, 2010, p.98.
5 Ibid.
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it is not only Marxism that is guilty of such a confusion of these phe-

nomena (historical determinism and voluntarism) which at first
glance are complete opposites and seem to offer contradictory and
irreconcilable explanations of social processes; both of these ‘irrec-
oncilable reconcilables’, if we may say so, have their roots in the
Judeo-Christian worldview and Enlightenment’s legacy.
The dominant liberal democratic vision of the world is methodo-
logically close to, and almost indistinguishable from, Marxist
‘scientific’ revelations, though ontologically they point at opposite
directions. It should not be surprising since they both are heirs of
the Enlightenment, and they are both also based upon linear visions
of a historical evolution of human societies. Like Marxism, the lib-
eral democratic mental picture of the world’s evolution is also a
combination of deterministic and voluntaristic elements. Being cer-
tain that eventually all societies necessarily evolve towards free mar-
ket liberal democracy, many liberal-democrats also believe that it is
their duty to help those societies that are not yet liberal democracies
to quicker reach their final destiny. This belief, and acting upon it,
has been especially strong among Anglo-Saxon societies. Walter
Russell Mead speaks of it as ‘…the “Whig” narrative – a theory of his-
tory that sees the slow and gradual march of progress in a free soci-
ety as the dominant force not only in Anglo-American history but in
the wider world as well’.6 He observes that first Great Britain and
later the United States, as sea powers, having established the liberal
maritime international order, use ‘the strategic flexibility of an off-
shore power, protected to some degree from the rivalries and hostili-
ties of land powers surrounded by powerful neighbours, to build
power strategies that other countries cannot counter. It means using
command of the seas to plant colonies whose wealth and success
reinforce the mother country. It involves developing a global system
that is relatively easy to establish and which, once developed, proves
extremely difficult to dislodge’.7 The gist of such a view is that the
world is almost inevitably not only dominated and led by the Anglo-
Saxon countries, but for other societies not to be thrown, using the
6 W. Russell Mead, God and Gold. Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern
World, Atlantic Books, 2007, p. 15
7 Ibid., p. 95.
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36 Chapter Two
Marxist lexicon, into the dustbin of history, they have to become

volens nolens more and more similar to Anglo-Saxon countries. At
the same time, the Anglo-Saxon societies, together with those who
are already converted to their ways, using, inter alia, their strategic
position as offshore powers, help other societies, by force if neces-
sary, join this progressive march of history. This is, quite obviously, a
deterministic interpretation of history.
John Gray, for example, explains that former British Prime
Minister Tony Blair’s vision of the world was a simplistic unilinear
vision, where the world was moving towards a specific final destina-
tion since he ‘never doubted that globalisation was creating a world-
wide market economy that must eventually be complemented by
global democracy’.8 Therefore, Blair also believed in the ability of
military force to ensure the triumph of good.9 Gray is right when he
warns against the dangers of utopian visionaries who have acquired
political power. The Bush-Blair axis did indeed lead to some disas-
ters, among which the Iraqi invasion of 2003 and its consequences
should stand as a warning for future generations. However, Gray, like
his great predecessor at the London School of Economics and
Political Science (LSE) Karl Popper, who introduced the concept of
‘piecemeal engineering’ into the philosophy of politics, is himself
too absolutist when he denies any positive role for social utopias and
visionary policies and politicians. Gray is also overly harsh towards
the Enlightenment’s legacy, seeing it as a monolithic whole, and
mostly in a negative light. However, as an example, the so-called ‘war
on terror’ has not been so much a war of reason (i.e. Enlightenment’s
concept) against religiously justified violence (i.e. an irrational and
therefore non-Enlightenment, pre-modern, concept) as it is a war of
one faith against another. It is the unconditional faith in the suprem-
acy of Western values, including free market, globalisation and
democracy, against the faith in the ability of Islam to bring justice
and wellbeing to all of mankind. Both are, in a sense, religious faiths
as far as faith is a religious concept. As Alastair Crooke observes, the
Islamist faith is ‘no more the savagery of “divine violence” than the
8 J. Gray, Black Mass. Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Allen Lane,
2007, p. 97.
9 Ibid.
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systemic violence, practiced as “legitimate force”, that has been

embraced by the West in pursuit of its articles of faith: both have
roots in religious insights.’10 It is not by chance that Tony Blair was
one of the most, if not the most, religious British Prime Ministers for
many decades, and former President George W. Bush was not only a
born again Christian; he was also very close to American religious
conservatives, many of whom believe in a literal interpretation of
the Bible. In his second inaugural address, President Bush stated
that ‘America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one ….
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth
of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and cul-
ture’.11 One may have ample reasons for believing that the Western
style of liberal democracy is preferable to an Islamic Caliphate, if not
for any philosophical or theoretical reason then at least, as Richard
Rorty wrote, because ‘it is theocracies who lose refugees to us, and
not vice versa’.12 And though you or I may well agree with Rorty, this
does not mean that everybody everywhere is of the same opinion, or
that those peoples who are not organised as in Western societies are
able and willing to transform themselves into liberal democracies.
Many of those who have promoted liberal democracy or are doing
so today also believe, while not usually openly recognizing it, that in
their evolution all societies move in the same direction, and it is only
due to the unreasonable and selfish leaders of some states who pre-
vent their peoples from reaching the Promised Land, that there is
not yet world-wide liberal democracy. For example, already a cen-
tury ago, American Baptists, desirous to civilize Russia before the
Bolshevik revolution of 1917, believed that ‘for Russia, sooner or later,
there will be Runnymede and a Magna Charta, if not a Bunker Hill
and Yorktown’.13 Hence, they foresaw for Russia if not the American
way of development, then at least the British one, i.e. the same lin-
ear, Anglo-Saxon, historical path. Things haven’t changed much
10 A. Crooke, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, Pluto Press, 2009,
p. 238.
11 George W. Bush, “President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address”, January 20,
2005, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story-php?storyID=4460172.
12 S. Blackburn, ‘Portrait: Richard Rorty’, 85 Prospect Magazine (2003).
13 D.S. Foglesong, The American Mission and the ‘Evil Empire’, Cambridge
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38 Chapter Two
since. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man may
be seen today as a bit of a caricature of liberal democratic triumphal-
ist visions of the future, but more moderate and therefore less prom-
inent versions of the same vision are as influential as ever. In their
otherwise interesting, balanced and forward-looking article Daniel
Deudney and G. John Ikenberry observe that ‘[J]ust as the Nazis
envisioned a “new order” for Europe and the Soviet Union designed
an interstate economic and political order, so, too, did the liberal
West’. This is a correct observation. However, using the same method
that Marxists had used, these two American professors come to the
optimistic conclusion that ‘[T]he foreign policy of the liberal states
should continue to be based on the broad assumption that there is
ultimately one path to modernity [emphasis added RM]– and that it
is essentially liberal in character’ and that ‘[L]iberal states should
not assume that history has ended, but they can still be certain that
it is on their side’.14 This is only a slightly modified and moderated
version of the deterministic, unilinear explanation of history. Even
Fukuyama, at the end of the 1980s, did not believe that history had
ended in a literal sense. He also thought that history was on the side
of liberal democracy and therefore, sooner or later, all societies
would eventually arrive in the Promised Land.
And here, once again, voluntarism, feeding on its opposite –
determinism, steps in. It is human agents, who are on the ‘right side
of history’, who realize humankind’s destiny. Political regimes, as
well as economic systems that are on the ‘wrong side of history’, have
to go, and better sooner rather than later. Therefore, Slavoj Žižek is
right when observing that ‘it is easy to make fun of Fukuyama’s
notion of the “End of History”, but most people today are Fukuya
mean, accepting liberal-democratic capitalism as the finally found
formula of the best possible society, such that all one can do is to try
to make it more just, more tolerant, and so on’.15
Such triumphant historical unidirecionality is not only simplistic
and wrong, as is any social theory based on historical determinism;
acting upon it may be also extremely dangerous. The thousands of
Liberal Democracy Will Prevail’, Foreign Affairs, January-February 2009.
15 S. Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Verso, 2009, p. 88.
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years history of humankind testifies that there is no final form of

social, political or economic arrangement of societies, and that no
domination is eternal. Therefore, Žižek is right that ‘we should thus
ruthlessly abandon the prejudice that the linear time of evolution is
“on our side”, that History is “working for us”.16 It becomes known ex
post facto, and usually long after the fact, where history is leading us.
We, the contemporaries, can only make educated short-term and
medium-term conjectures that we should be ready to constantly
revise.
If many liberal democrats, who sincerely believe in the ultimate
triumph of their ideology and practices in all societies, consider that
the best way to promote liberal democracy is by way of example and
in assisting those societies that have chosen to follow the example of
liberal democracies, there are also liberal interventionists who
believe in the necessity of actively enlarging the circle of liberal
democracies (liberal preachers and liberal warriors). In the United
States, liberal interventionists such as Samantha Power and Anne-
Marie Slaughter have joined forces with neo-conservatives like Paul
Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan or Randy Scheunemann, though the rea-
sons for their coming together on similar policy conclusions are
quite different. Richard Burt and Dimitri Simes make an interesting
observation: ‘Strangely, it is precisely in this area that the two lead-
ing foreign-policy schools—liberal interventionism and neocon-
servative unilateralism—converge. For example, Princeton professor
Anne-Marie Slaughter and Washington Post columnist Charles
Krauthammer often agree on the need for U.S. intervention abroad.
And anyone who follows the media closely knows that when these
two groups align, America is headed for an unnecessary war—or at
least for serious trouble’.17
If for neo-conservatives interventionist policies are primarily dic-
tated by pragmatic American interests (oil, gas, strategic benefits),
though wrapped in declarations about universal values, liberal inter-
ventionists seem to sincerely believe in their mission to make the
world a better place for all the peoples (though in many cases these
16 Ibid., p. 149.
17 R. Burt, D. Simes, ‘Morality Play Instead of Policy’, The National Interest,
22 August 2012.
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40 Chapter Two
two mutually exclusive political motivations may peacefully coexist

in the mind of the same person). Most people tend to sincerely
believe in the universal acceptability of their views as dictated by
their particular interests. In such a case, those particular interests
become expressed and justified as universal values.
It is obvious that history is not an impersonal perpetuum mobile
but is made by men (and today also by women). Using Marx’s words,
‘[M]en make their own history, but they do not make it as they
please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but
under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from
the past’.18 Or as Ian Morris, having carried out a comparative study
of social development both the East and West during the last 14,000
years, concludes, ‘[S]ocial development is not a gift or curse laid on
humanity …; it is something we make ourselves, just not in ways of
our own choosing’.19 What studies taking a longer historical perspec-
tive show is that it is necessary to plan for the future, and that past
and present trends are of some assistance in this endeavour.
However, our plans will never be realised exactly as intended and
therefore we have to be ready to constantly correct them. Most
importantly, history doesn’t move to any specific end. History seems
to be a combination or confluence of three categories of factors:
deterministic (not everything is possible and some things are really
impossible, at least for the time being); voluntaristic (quite a few
things indeed depend on our purposeful choices and efforts) and
chance (many things just happen and they depend neither on our
rational or irrational choices nor are they predetermined by any dis-
cernable pre-existing causes). Cambridge Professor Philip Allott has
given the best, in our opinion, answer to the dilemma of voluntarism
versus determinism in social spheres, and therefore allow us to quote
him in some length:
It is as if an ingenious and inquisitive Creator had chosen to conduct
an experiment in one small corner of the universe – an experiment in
which a piece of matter would be given a certain measure of control
over its changing States, a living organism would be given a special
kind of choice over its own life. But two possibilities of control and
18 K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Arc Manor, 2008, p. 15.
19 I. Morris, op.cit., p. 194.
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choice would be withheld – the possibility of simply submitting

entirely to the necessary order of the physical universe and the possi-
bility of acting entirely independently of the necessary order of the
physical universe.20
As the freedom of choice is relative, so are the constraints both of
the physical universe and of the existing social order. People are
able, but only to an extent, and sometimes with catastrophic side
effects (e.g., environmental disasters), to change the order of the
physical universe. People are also able to transform the existing
social order, but have many constraints that they neglect, as we will
discuss in this book, at their own peril.
2. CURRENT REGIME CHANGES: SOCIOECONOMIC AND

POLITICAL PROBLEMS
Contemporary societies are practically all organized in the form of

so-called nation-states (today, it would be more accurate to call
them simply de jure sovereign states), consisting of three main inter-
connected layers: the political system, economic system and civil
society. The latter includes not only civil society organizations
or NGOs (non-governmental organizations) as it is sometimes
assumed. It also comprises of historical traditions, religious norms
and organizations, culture, family structures and similar institu-
tions. Jürgen Habermas, explaining his theory of communicative
action and deliberative democracy, writes of the lifeworld, i.e. the
world in which life is experienced by individuals individually and
collectively, as the ‘background’ environment of competences, prac-
tices, and attitudes represented in terms of one’s cognitive horizon.
Habermas explains: ‘The lifeworld is constituted from a network of
communicative actions that branch out through social space and
historical time, and these live off sources of cultural tradition
and legitimate orders no less than they depend on the identities
of socialized individuals’.21 Speaking of the role of law in society,
he adds: ‘But the legal code not only keeps one foot in the medium
of ordinary language, through which everyday communication
20 P. Allott, Eunomia, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 55.

21 J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Polity Press, 2004, p. 80.
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42 Chapter Two
achieves social integration in the lifeworld; it also accepts messages

that originate there and puts these into a form comprehensible to
the special codes of the power-steering administration and the
money-steering economy’.22 So, according to Jürgen Habermas,
there is the lifeworld, consisting of its societal component, including
law as experienced by people as individuals and collectively, culture
and personality structures, as well as the power-steered administra-
tion and money-steered economy, i.e. there are the same three layers
of society. These layers are interlinked, interdependent and integral
parts of society as a whole.
The relative interconnectedness, interdependence and impact of
these three layers on each other differ from society to society. Ideally,
none of them should dominate the other two. In dictatorships, such
as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Colonel Gadaffi’s Libya, or like in the
former USSR or today’s North Korea and Turkmenistan, civil society
has been virtually absent. In democracies with neo-liberal tenden-
cies, especially in the United States, the free market economic sys-
tem enjoys the commanding position. There, the call for a ‘smaller
state’ is central to such a vision and practice. However, such a call is
not aimed at increasing the role of civil society, enlarging democracy
or individual liberties; its main purpose is to further unbridle market
forces. Tariq Ramadan, who is right in asserting that it is impossible
to analyse and ‘evaluate the uprisings that together make up the
Arab awakening without taking time to develop a critical analysis of
the state of contemporary democracies’,23 continues: ‘First, it must
be acknowledged that today’s states and democratically elected
governments find themselves, structurally, in a position of virtual
subservience to the economic sphere, which possesses it own
imperatives, its institutions and multinationals where egalitarian,
democratic and/or transparent administrative practices are not
enforced. The doctrine of free markets appears to be assuming
the form of a new religion in the very heart of the secularized
order,’ and that ‘the economy, finance and media, which wield such
power – and on occasion new authority – over state entities that
22 Ibid., p. 81.
23 T. Ramadan, The Arab Awakening: Islam and the New Middle East, Allen Lane,
2012, p. 119.
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they threaten to undermine the very foundations of democracy that

they need and claim to defend’.24 Certainly, those who struggle for
more democracy in fledgling democracies, aspire or fight for democ-
racy under authoritarian regimes do not want to lose their gains to
unbridled market forces. It would be to change the direct and more
visible domination by authoritarian state apparatus for the less
direct and therefore also less visible domination by uncontrolled
(uncontrolled by democratically elected governments) markets,
which mostly benefit the upper 1% of the population.25
There is nowhere in the world a society where the civil society
layer would dominate the other two; therefore the increase of its
relative role would probably be one of the indicators of that society’s
progressive development. In a case where the political system, i.e.
first of all the state, either actually dominates or has a tendency to
increase its control over the other two societal layers, we either have
a full-fledged dictatorship or the threat of the emergence of an
authoritarian political regime, while in the case of the economic sys-
tem’s domination there is a danger that society may move towards a
winner-takes-all kind of neo-liberal entity, or is already there. And
though in practice there is nowhere in the world a civil-society-
dominant country, it may happen that in underdeveloped countries,
attempts to weaken the role of the state and a simultaneous encour-
agement of the development of a free market economy and civil
society may, instead of increasing the liberties of individuals and
contributing to their well-being, lead to anarchy and chaos. In
advanced liberal-democracies this would not necessarily increase
the role of civil society; instead, market forces using state apparatus
would increase their supremacy over civil society.
The central aspect of any political system is the state, while politi-
cal parties, other political movements and lobby groups serve as
conveyer belts relating the state to other layers of society. According
to traditional Marxist social theory, society’s political system was
considered to be a part of the superstructure while its basis,
which eventually determined the nature of the superstructure, was
society’s economic structure, i.e. its ‘productive relations’. Although
24 Ibid.
25 J. Stiglitz, ‘Of the 1 %, by the 1%, for the 1%’, Vanity Fair, May 2011.
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44 Chapter Two
critics of Marx have often oversimplified Karl Marx’s views when

accusing him of economic determinism, there is no doubt that Marx
and Engels, and even more so the so-called ‘official’ Marxism, though
not denying the relative autonomy of the superstructure, believed
that economic relations, at least at the end of the day, constituted a
determinative effect on the other two layers of society. Although it
may sound ironic today, and primarily in the liberal democratic
West, this Marxist proposition is increasingly becoming true; capi-
talism is indeed a social arrangement where the market tends to
dominate and uses the state for that purpose.
It is often reiterated by many experts that as the Chinese economy
develops, China’s political system will either change in order to cor-
respond to the needs of the economy, or in case it doesn’t change
(i.e. if it doesn’t become more like the Western liberal-democratic
system), China’s political system will increasingly serve as a brake on
the country’s economic development. For example, Time Magazine
in a study devoted to China emphasises: ‘Excessive state control is
creating potentially lethal distortions in the economy. … State firms
are crowding out the entrepreneurial private sector. The hard truth
is that China needs a new growth model, driven more by the market
than the state and more balanced, open and fair. Otherwise the
consequences would be severe’.26 This is an interesting comment
in several respects. First, as a general proposition this statement is
true in the sense that it expresses the view that there has to be some
congruence between the different layers of a society; in this case
between its economic and political systems. Secondly, the statement
is true in the sense that China obviously needs indeed less state con-
trol over and interference with the economy; in China the political
system still dominates the economic system. And thirdly, by revers-
ing the accents of this statement, it would be possible to say that
markets in some Western societies and the global financial market
have run out of any control, which has led (and not potentially but
actually) to lethal distortions, with severe consequences for many
societies and millions of individuals.
However, for the purposes of our study, there is the question of
the extent to which political and economic systems, as well as civil
26 M. Schuman, ʻWhy China Must Push Resetʼ, Time, 18 June 2012, p. 36.
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society are dependent on each other, have to correspond to each

other and whether it is possible to radically change the political sys-
tem, i.e. to carry out a regime change, without transforming the
other two layers of society. Finally, it is also about sequencing the
transformation of these layers. In that respect, the third layer, civil
society, is not less important than the other two. Often it is even
more vital in the sense that in comparison with the first two layers,
civil society layer is the most conservative and less amenable to
change. But without changing it, transformations in the political
and economic layers become either impossible or distorted or
unsustainable.
Current attempts at regime changes in Asia, Northern Africa and
the Middle East are often attempts to export Western political (lib-
eral democracy) and economic (free market capitalism) systems to
societies where civil society have been absent, severely suppressed
or very different from those existing in the West. That is why such
exports very often end up in chaos and anarchy instead of democ-
racy; instead of Western style capitalist markets based on the princi-
ples of the rule of law, feudal markets evolve, where all lucrative
businesses are controlled by central and local strongmen. These
examples demonstrate that the three societal layers are closely
interrelated and interdependent. They also show that while it is rela-
tively easy to implant the formal features of Western political (e.g.,
elections) and economic (e.g., privatisation and deregulation) sys-
tems in non-Western societies, these implants acquire, in the
absence of adequately responsive civil societies, distorted forms.
The study of history and sequence of evolution in the Western
world of institutions belonging to these three societal layers high-
lights the problem that the borrowed or exported Western models of
development in the non-Western world often do not work as
intended because there, the proverbial cart is in front of the horse.
Francis Fukuyama, for example, makes an important point observ-
ing that ‘[T]he sequencing of political development in Western
Europe was highly unusual when compared to other parts of the
world. Individualism on a social level appeared centuries before the
rise of either modern states or capitalism; the rule of law existed
before political power was concentrated in the hands of centralized
governments; and institutions of accountability arouse because
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46 Chapter Two
modern, centralized states were unable to completely defeat of

eliminate ancient feudal institutions like representative assem-
blies’,27 and that the extreme fragmentation of power in Europe ‘led
to an unusual situation in which rule of law became imbedded in
European society even before the advent not just of democracy and
accountable government but also the modern state-building process
itself’.28 This observation, mentioned also by some other authors, is
true. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, for example, describe
how in England in 1724, a certain John Huntridge, a local resident,
while outside a deer park belonging to then Secretary of State (Prime
Minister) Sir Robert Walpole, was accused of aiding deer stealers
and abetting so-called Blacks, who stole and destroyed the property
of the rich, while painting their faces black. Both crimes were pun-
ishable by hanging. Walpole took the keenest interest in the trial
both for personal as well as political reasons. The conviction of John
Huntridge ought to have been a foregone conclusion. However, after
eight or nine hours of trial the jury acquitted the man, partly on pro-
cedural grounds.29 This example well illustrates that in England,
already by the first half of the eighteenth century, certain personal
rights were rather well guaranteed and protected, even while democ-
racy was still in its infancy. The rule of law and certain personal liber-
ties, like the habeas corpus rule and elements of fair trial, had evolved
well ahead of the development of democracy. As we will discuss
below, proponents of democratic peace theory do not count the 1812
war between Britain and the United States as a war between two
democracies, since they do not consider the Britain of 1812 as
democracy.30 Although they may have excluded the Britain of 1812
from the camp of democracies mainly for the self-serving reason of
trying to prove that democracies do not fight each other, there is cer-
tainly some truth in their observation. Britain was a democracy by
few and for a few; at the same time it had already become a ‘rule of
27 F. Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order. From Prehuman Times to the French
Revolution, Profile Books, 2011, p. 22.
28 Ibid., p. 288.
29 D. Acemoglu, J. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity
and Poverty, Profile Books, 2012, p. 305.
30 See, e.g., B. Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold
War World, Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 16.
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law’ state for many. Acemoglu and Robinson appropriately entitle

the chapter, following the discussion of this and other similar cases
that had taken place in the first half of the eighteenth century and
that testify to the existence at that time of the rule of law in Britain,
The Slow March of Democracy.31 Even the 1832 reforms in Great
Britain, doubling the voting franchise from eight percent to sixteen
percent, included only the adult male (sic!) population. ‘What is
more’, emphasise Acemoglu and Robinson, ‘the principle of the rule
of law opens the door for greater participation in the political pro-
cess and greater inclusivity, as it powerfully introduces the idea that
people should be equal not only before the law but also in the politi-
cal system. This was one of the principles that made it difficult for
the British political system to resist the forceful calls for greater
democracy throughout the nineteenth century, opening the way to
the gradual extension of the franchise to all adults’.32 What we see
today in many countries is that the immediate introduction of a gen-
eral franchise to the adult population does not lead to the emer-
gence, immediate or otherwise, of the rule of law; there is no slow
march from democracy towards a ‘rule of law’ state. The problem is
not only in sequencing, though it certainly plays a role, but more in
the truth that while democracy is a relatively more formal institu-
tion, more tangible and therefore easier to establish and laud (and
therefore also easier to lose), the rule of law is a more fundamental
institution, much closer to and more strongly rooted in the fabric of
society, and more dependent on its history and traditions. Therefore,
once established, it is also more sustainable and able to guarantee
the slow march towards a genuinely inclusive political system.
Therefore, it is amazing that notwithstanding Fukuyama’s correct
statement that ‘the sequencing of political development in Western
Europe was highly unusual when compared to other parts of the
world’, and the fact that the whole of Fukuyama’s book The Origins of
Political Order. From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution shows
that, depending on differing cultures and traditions, the political
histories of societies have taken different forms, he writes that ‘one
of the great mistakes of early modernization theory, beyond the
31 Acemoglu, Robinson, Op. Cit., p. 309.

32 Ibid., p. 333.
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48 Chapter Two
error in thinking that politics, economics, and culture had to be con-

gruent with one another, was to think that transitions between the
“stages” of history were clean and irreversible’.33 It is easy to agree
with Fukuyama’s point on the transitions between the ‘stages’ of his-
tory that indeed are rarely, if ever, clean and irreversible, but his own
analysis of the political history of many countries over long periods
(from pre-human times until the French revolution, as the title and
the content of the book say) pays tribute to the view that a certain
congruence between, and sequencing of, the evolution of economic
and political systems as well as civil society are historical facts. An
important difference between the evolution of the Western and non-
Western world is also in the fact that while the former evolved on
their own, without much, if any, interference or impact from the out-
side, using the trial and error method, other societies have felt in
their evolution the heavy impact of Western civilization. In their
evolution this natural congruence and sequencing, which emerged
in the West through trial and error and in that respect, we may say,
more naturally, has been absent in many other parts of the world.
And this has created serious problems, especially but not only for,
the former colonies of European empires. As Ian Morris observes:
When we look at reactions to Western rule within a longer time frame,
we in fact see two striking correlations. The first is that those regions
that had relatively high social development before the Western rule,
like the Eastern core, tended to industrialize themselves faster than
those that had relatively low development scores; the second, that
those regions that avoided direct European colonization tended to
industrialize faster than those that did become colonies. Japan had
high social development before 1853 and was not colonized; its mod-
ernization took off in the 1870s. China had high development and was
partly colonized; its modernization took off in the 1950s. India had
moderate development and was fully colonized; its modernization
did not take off until the 1990s. Sub-Saharan Africa had low develop-
ment and full colonization, and is only now starting to catch up.34
Besides their deterministic-voluntaristic unidirectional approach to
history, there is one more common methodological element between
the Soviet brand of Marxism and contemporary liberal democracies.
33 Ibid., p. 77–78.
34 I. Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now. The Patterns of History and What They
Reveal about the Future, Profile Books, 2011, p. 522.
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During the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was vying with the
United States over control of the world, trying to extend its sway over
the so-called Third World countries, and prompt them to choose the
only true – i.e. Soviet style socialist – way of development, Soviet
experts invented a peculiar version of ‘the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat’. In accordance with Marxist orthodoxy, for a society to reach
in its evolution the stage of socialism, it was necessary first to pass
through the stage of developed capitalism, which would generate
not only material preconditions for a successful and sustainable
socialist revolution, but would also create and strengthen the prole-
tariat – the ‘gravedigger of capitalism’, which, later, through the exer
cise of its dictatorship, would lead society, via socialism, to communism.
According to this orthodox Marxist theory, countries such as Mongo
lia, Vietnam or Cuba, which in their evolution had not yet gone
through the capitalist stage,35 could not become socialist. Obviously,
such an interpretation of Marx would not have been in the interests
of or liking to the Soviet leaders, since this would have meant, inter
alia, that those countries would have fallen, at least for the time
being, into Washington’s and not Moscow’s sphere of influence. To
avoid such a theoretical obstacle with its negative consequences in
the practical struggle over global domination, a theory was invented,
which asserted that in the absence of a proletariat at home the world
socialist system, i.e. Moscow, could play the role of ‘proletariat’s dic-
tatorship’. Thus, the absence of internal conditions for socialism
could have been compensated for by external assistance and support.
Today various theories for the promotion of democracy are using,
mutatis mutandi, similar lines of reasoning. If there are no internal
conditions for the emergence of liberal democracy, and especially
for its sustainability in a specific country, the European Union, the
Organisation on the Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE),
NATO or Washington either alone or together with a ‘coalition of
willing’ can serve the role of ‘Big Brother’, who would shore up and
guide new regimes towards liberal democracy. I do not want to
35 Of course, Russia herself in 1917 had only rather feeble shoots of capitalism
which made, first, the Bolshevik coup possible, secondly its practice especially
bloody, and thirdly its eventual failure inevitable. Lenin wrote in 1912: ‘Russia is
undoubtedly … one of the most benighted, medieval and shamefully backward
Asian countries’ (Lenin, ‘Democracy and Narodism in China’, www.marxists.org/
archive/lenin/works/1912/jul/15.htm).
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50 Chapter Two
equate, of course, Soviet attempts to spread its totalitarian ideology

with all the efforts, even if sometimes misguided and hypocritical, to
widen the circle of democracies. If a society indeed becomes pros-
perous and democratic due, inter alia, to external efforts, even if out-
siders are not exclusively or primarily motivated by noble and
altruistic concerns, so be it. Moreover, there are indeed governments,
international organisations and other bodies that carry out rather
painstaking and usually unappreciated work helping other societies
gradually democratise and modernise. My point is about the limits
of external efforts in the absence of internal factors that are neces-
sary for democratisation. It is also about wishful thinking in the
elaboration of theories that correspond to one’s interests, be they
altruistic or self-serving.
Thomas Friedman once put forward one of the most pertinent
questions concerning the democratization of some societies, though
he himself did not give any answers to it. He asked: ‘[W]as Iraq the
way Iraq was because Saddam was the way Saddam was, or was
Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq was the way Iraq was?’36
A general answer probably has to be that Iraq was ready for Saddam
and a person like Saddam Hussein could not have come to power,
and even less likely would have ruled there for decades, in a soci-
ety that would have been very different from Iraq. Rulers deserve
their societies and societies as a rule too deserve their rulers, though
some dictators turn out to be too bloody, brutal and mad even for
the societies that have created them; Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Saddam
Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi excelled even in their own class.
Similarly, it was nothing but the personality characteristics of the
first president of independent Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Nijazov
(the Turkmenbashi – the father of the Turkmen) that made Turk
menistan outstanding even amongst Central Asian authoritarian-
isms. Often chance plays a significant role in history of individual
societies, and sometimes even in world history, more than any
‘rule’ of social development.37 The fall of such leaders is therefore
36 T.L. Friedman, ‘The big question’, The International Herald Tribune, 4–5 March
2006, p. 6.
37 See, R. Müllerson, Central Asia: A Chessboard and Player in the New Great
Game, London, Kegan Paul, Columbia University Press, 2007; the paperback edition
of the same book was published by Routledge in 2012.
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welcome on humanitarian grounds, though it may not signify that a

society in liberating itself, sometimes with significant outside assis-
tance, from such a tyrant will necessarily undergo genuine social
revolution leading to freedom and prosperity. It would not even
always be correct to call overthrows of bloody tyrants revolutions,
since the new regime very often soon falls back on old habits. It is
not atypical that new authorities, having come to power through
external support, use, at least for a while, rhetoric that pleases the
ears of their external supporters. However, when in power, they
would often continue with policies that differ very little from those
of their predecessors. And it is not that they all are necessarily hypo-
crites when promising to carry out democratic reforms. Very often
liberal democratic minorities that genuinely promise reforms are as
alienated from their own people as are the autocrats who rule.
One of the latest waves of regime changes, after the so-called ‘col-
our revolutions’ in some territories of the former Soviet Union, has
been dubbed the ‘Arab spring’. Like the ‘colour revolutions’, they too
had internal causes as their main engines, though in some cases
external factors played a significant role. One of the most important
lessons of the ‘Arab spring’ should be, in my opinion, the reiteration
of the strategic rule that external interference usually makes things
worse, not better. This rule applies in two different scenarios: first,
when for tactical purposes it is believed that incumbents deserve to
be propped up; secondly, in cases when, on the contrary, outsiders
for whatever reasons believe that it is necessary to support opposi-
tion forces. The rule of the thumb should be: don’t support dictators
but don’t undermine them either. Often anti-Western, and especially
anti-American, attitudes in some developing countries are counter-
reactions to Western policies aimed at supporting pro-Western gov-
ernments in power. The Castros’ Cuba and the Ayatollahs’ Iran are
both reactions to Washington’s support of the regimes of Fulgencio
Batista in Cuba and of Shah Reza Pahlavi in Iran. Equally, one
shouldn’t be certain that the people of Iraq or Afghanistan would
warmly remember those who liberated them from Saddam Hussein
or the Taliban. The situation in both countries is far from optimistic.
For example, according to a classified coalition report on Afghanistan
obtained by The New York Times, ‘American and other coalition
forces here are being killed in increasing numbers by the very Afghan
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52 Chapter Two
soldiers they fight alongside and train, in attacks motivated by deep-

seated animosity between the supposedly allied forces’.38 The same
day when parts of that report were leaked, The International Herald
Tribune reported that four French troops had been killed in northern
Afghanistan and sixteen more were wounded when a soldier from
the Afghan National Army whom the French were training, opened
fire.39 In August 2012 The New York Times once again noted the
increase of attacks by Afghan solders on NATO troops as well as on
their own colleagues.40 The aggressive external involvement in the
formation, evolution of and support for the Karzai Government in
Afghanistan has done little good either for Afghanistan or for those
who have been involved in the country. Not only are the Taliban
and their Pakistani supporters, but also Afghan society as a whole,
bracing themselves for the time when the Americans and its NATO
allies leave the country. As the leaked February 2012 NATO report
observes, ‘Afghans frequently prefer Taliban governance over the
Afghan [Karzai] government, usually as a result of government cor-
ruption’.41 One of the most prominent British military commanders
of the past, General Frederick Roberts, who for decades had served
in Asia, and who intimately knew the region (he took part in the
second British Afghan war of 1878–80) felt sure that ‘the less the
Afghans see us the less they will dislike us’.42 This observation is no
less true today than it was more than a century ago.
It may well be that in today’s turmoil in the Arab world, as well as
in certain disturbing developments in some other third world
nations, we see a kind of return in these societies to their roots, so to
say. For Islamists, whether so-called moderates or radicals, obtaining
power in Muslim countries may be more natural than Arab socialists
à la Gamal Abdel Nasser or Western oriented secular autocrats à la
Anwar Sadat or Hosni Mubarak. In a way, and especially from the
38 The International Herald Tribune, 20 January 2012.

39 Ibid.
40 R. Oppel, G. Bowley, ‘Attacks on Afghan Troops by Colleagues Are Rising,
Allies Say’, The New York Times, 23 August 2012.
41 Ben Farmer, ‘Taliban intact and getting Pakistan backing, NATO report reveals’,
The Telegraph, 1 February, 2012.
42 A. Forbes, Afghan Wars, 1839–42 and 1879–80, London, Seeley, 1892, p. 325.
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Western perceptive (and also from the perspective of many people

in those societies as well), this can be seen as a return to the dark
ages since, for example, the status of women may quite predictably
suffer even more, and so would some other limited freedoms and
modest achievements. However, taking a few steps back, these socie-
ties may, hopefully, be able, starting from that set point, to build
their own institutions, ones more adequate to the characteristics of
their own societies, while also borrowing from other countries (not
necessarily only from the West but also, say, from China) that which
would help them become more prosperous and free.
The current Islamisation of some Middle Eastern countries, as a
result of the ‘Arab spring’, is both inevitable and, in the long run,
probably beneficial not only for the peoples of the region but for
their neighbours as well. It is inevitable because these are traditional
Muslim societies on whom alien models had been imposed for long
periods, be it by Atatürk in Turkey or the secular autocrats of many
Arab nations. It is beneficial in the long run because even if in some
of these countries some categories of people may see their status, at
least for the time being, worsening (e.g. women or religious minori-
ties because of the introduction of the Sharia law), it is better to start
the long and painful process of evolution towards a more free soci-
ety earlier rather than later. The Soviet experience both in Soviet
Central Asia and later in Soviet occupied Afghanistan shows that
imposed personal freedoms (e.g., the improvement of the status of
women), even if rather limited, are easily reversible realities.
Quite a few people in the West, and especially in Israel, are
extremely worried about the prospect of the Islamisation of the
Middle East. However, it may well be that when the West ceases to
tell the East how to live, and also helps, through impartial media-
tion, resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (which many in the
region regard as a litmus test for the East-West relations in the
Middle East), then Western and Muslim countries may indeed
develop good-neighbourly relations as equals, even despite having
different cultures and interests. Nikolas Gvosdev and Ray Takeyh, in
writing about the US policy towards the ‘Arab spring’ and especially
about NATO’s intervention in Libya, observe that ‘there has been
a real shift in American attitudes, a willingness to take the risks
of losing short-term security advantages in favour of encouraging
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54 Chapter Two
long-term societal change’.43 Such a shift would be indeed welcome,

not in the sense of the military intervention in Libya, but because of
the withdrawal of support from friendly autocrats, who had for far
too long represented American interests, contrary to the interests
and values of their own people, in the Middle East. After the first
round of Egyptian parliamentary elections Bobby Ghosh made an
interesting comment: ‘The Islamists, it turned out, understand
democracy much better than the liberal do.’44 Indeed, in a country
without liberal traditions democracy will never bring liberals to
power. We see that Turkey can combine political Islam and democ-
racy; why not Egypt or some other Muslim states? In the Middle East
such a combination will certainly have better prospects than liberal
democracy. Moreover, as Charles Kupchan writes, ‘observers and
policy makers should stop operating under the illusion that the
spread of democracy in the Middle East also means the spread of
Western values’.45
Amitai Etzioni in his book Security First: For a Muscular, Moral
Foreign Policy maps some non-traditional fault-lines in the non-
Western world. They are drawn not so much between different reli-
gions or cultures, as between what he calls ‘Warriors’ and ‘Illiberal
Moderates’.46 The majority of people in non-Western, and specifi-
cally in the Muslim, world are not ‘Warriors’ ready to use violence
for the promotion of their values; however, neither are they western-
style liberal-democrats. They are, as Etzioni writes, ‘Illiberal Mod
erates’, i.e. ‘those who disavow violence (in most circumstances) but
who do not necessarily favor a liberal-democratic regime or the full
program of human rights’.47 As in many countries they constitute
the absolute majority of the population, it is necessary to work with
43 N.K. Gvosdev, R. Takeyh, ‘Triumph of the New Wilsonianism’, The National

Interest, 4 January 2012 (http://nationalinterest.org/articledecline-western-realism
-6274).
44 B. Ghosh, ‘Why the Islamists are Better Democrats’, The Time Magazine, 19
December 2011 (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2101903,00.
html).
45 C. Kupchan, ‘Diversity Wins’, Russia in Global Affairs, 29 December 2011
(http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/number/Diversity-Wins-15426).
46 Amitai Etzioni, Security First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy, Yale
University Press, 2007.
47 Ibid., p. 86.
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them, and to rely mainly on them and not on a thin layer of liberals
who usually lack domestic support and legitimacy. ‘This [establish-
ing good relations between Western and such non-Western coun-
tries] will work only as long as the West seeks a safe and peaceful
world, not one in which all regime types are identical or in which the
moral cultures are universally secular.’48 Trying to convert ‘Illiberal
Moderates’ into liberal-democrats would be not only futile; it would
be also counter-productive. In that respect a remark is due. Etzioni
writes that ‘we should refrain from sending Special Forces or cruise
missiles to transform others into supporters of the particular
beliefs we champion’.49 True. However, we would caution also against
excessive preaching, missionarism and assertive democracy promo-
tion, even without the help of Special Forces and missiles. Not only
aren’t all human rights equally important, but there are rights that
aren’t universal and some that may not (even in principle) be univer-
salisable. Moreover, in some societies proselytizing may cause seri-
ous social unrests and conflicts; what is needed are conversations
across cultural boundaries, and not the preaching of one’s values as
superior or the only true ones.
Nicholas Gvosdev, advocating nation cultivation instead of nation
building, believes that ‘[N]ation building is an inherently revolution-
ary proposition that believes it is both possible and desirable to
sweep away the past and install new institutions by fiat. Nation cul-
tivation, in contrast, rests on the observations of Edmund Burke that
sustainable, evolutionary change is possible only by working within
the existing frameworks bequeathed by tradition and experience’.50
He rightly observes that ‘[M]any nation-building failures of the last
two decades—Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan—resulted
from the hasty and rapid importation of institutions that had no way
to take root in the local society … In retrospect, a nation cultivator
might have supported the restoration of the monarchy in Afghanistan
as a first step toward recreating a central authority capable of pro-
viding some degree of national unity and identity, rather than set-
tling on elections as the source of sovereignty. After all, to have a
48 Ibid., p. 163.
49 Ibid., p. 92.
50 N. Gvosdev, ‘The Era of Nation Cultivation’, The National Interest, 25 May, 2012.
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56 Chapter Two
democracy, one must have a “demos”—a people’.51 Of course, nation

cultivation may be preferable to aggressive nation building, but it
should also be demand-induced, not supply-stimulated.
3. PROBLEMS OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND

DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM
The most important shortcoming of a proactive and voluntaristic

promotion of liberal democracy stems from the simplistic and deter-
ministic belief in the linear and unidirectional evolution of the
world. Although it is true, as we have illustrated, that the more glo-
balised the world becomes, the more homogeneous it turns out to
be, this process is very slow, it is driven by fits and starts and never
ends. Moreover, globalisation has its dangers as well as its limits. It
may well be that at least in certain areas, in order to meet new
challenges (e.g., run-away financial markets, uncontrolled migration
flows, traffic in drugs and terrorism), societies would find it neces-
sary to curb certain aspects and consequences of globalisation. As
Dani Rodrik observes, ‘we cannot have hyperglobalization, democ-
racy, and national self-determination all at once. If we want hyper-
globalization and democracy, we need to give up on the nation state.
If we must keep the nation state and want hyperglobalization too,
then we must forget about democracy. And if we want to combine
democracy with the nation state, then it is bye-bye deep globaliza-
tion’.52 Although it has been the West that has been the engine of
globalisation and homogenisation in the world, and at least until
recently also its main beneficiary, it will not stay like that forever. In
human history there has not been any political or economic system,
empire or great power, whose dominance has not come to an end,
whose ways of doing things, even if widely copied by others, have
not at some point become out-dated. Taking into account that glo-
balisation has accelerated changes and developments in many parts
of the world, the rise and fall of great powers will also happen faster
51 Ibid.
52 D. Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Why Global Markets, States and
Democracy Can’t Coexist, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 200.
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than ever before in human history.53 Even if it weren’t for the current
financial and economic crisis in the West, there is no doubt that the
East, and first of all China, using inter alia Western scientific and
even social achievements and combining them with its own tradi-
tions and inventions, will change the balance of power in the world.
Trying to impose, even for benign ends, one’s own model on other
societies would put an end to social development, since it is not only
through borrowing from others, but also through social experimen-
tation and competition that humankind has progressively evolved.54
Charles Kupchan writes that the ‘crisis of governability within the
Western world comes at a particularly inopportune moment. The
international system is in the midst of tectonic change due to the
diffusion of wealth and power to new quarters. Globalization was
supposed to have played to the advantage of liberal societies, which
were presumably best suited to capitalize on the fast and fluid nature
of the global marketplace. But instead, mass publics in the advanced
democracies of North America, Europe, and East Asia have been
particularly hard hit – precisely because their countries’ economies
are both mature and open to the world’.55 Moreover, it is not at all
certain that existing and dominant social arrangements are well
suited to facing new and unforeseen challenges.
53 Although Niall Ferguson’s warning that imperial demise (and the US in his
opinion is an empire and should openly recognize itself to be one) is not necessarily
a centuries long process and can take place rather abruptly, may be overstated
(N. Ferguson, ‘Complexity and Collapse. Empires on the Edge of Chaos’, Foreign
Affairs, March-April, 2010), there is no doubt that the acceleration of social changes
that is a result of and a part of globalisation means that changes in the balance of
power in the world also happen much more quickly than centuries ago. Arvind
Subramanian is less alarmist but he also observes that ‘[A]ccording to the projec-
tions, between 2010 and 2030 emerging markets and developing economies will
increase their share of world GDP (at market-based exchange rates) by a whopping
19 percentage points and by 15 percentage points at PPP exchange rates. China’s
share of the world GDP (in PPP dollars) will increase from 17 percent in 2010 to 24
percent in 2030, and India’s share will increase from 5 to 10 percent. China’s econ-
omy (in PPP dollars) will be more than twice that of the United States by 2030’
(A. Subramanian, Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance,
Peterson Institute, 2011 (Kindle editions), Loc., 2239).
54 See, e.g., D. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Why Some Are So Rich
and Some So Poor, Little, Brown and Company, 1998, p. 38–39.
55 C. Kupchan, ‘The Democratic Malaise. Globalization and the Threat to the
West’, Foreign Affairs, January-February, 2012.
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58 Chapter Two
In the opinion of Francis Fukuyama, ‘[L]iberal democracy is the

default ideology around much of the world today in part because it
responds to and is facilitated by certain socioeconomic structures.
Changes in those structures may have ideological consequences,
just as ideological consequences may have socioeconomic conse-
quences’.56 Globalisation and the development of technology have
indeed had a serious impact on these socioeconomic structures;
most importantly, they have eroded the relative strength of the mid-
dle class – the main pillar of liberal democracy – in the Western
world. Societies are becoming more and more unequal and polar-
ised. As Joseph Stiglitz wrote in 2011, ‘[T]he upper 1 percent of
Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of nation’s income
every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent
control 40 percent. Their lot of life has improved considerably.
Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and
33 percent’.57 A similar trend, though not always as obvious, is taking
place in most Western or Westernising societies. In Fukuyama’s view,
such a tendency undermines the very structure on which liberal
democratic ideology and practices are based. It is difficult to disa-
gree with him. If, say, Great Britain will continue losing its industrial
and manufacturing base (which in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries made possible its dominant global position) and contrib-
uted to the relatively even spread of wealth in society, and carries on
relying on the financial services sector of the City of London as the
main source of its revenue, it may indeed guarantee GDP growth for
some time, but society will become ever more unequal, and the mid-
dle class smaller and weaker. Dan Hind has even written that ‘on any
conventional measure, the financial sector has been a disaster for
the majority of the country [the UK]. The amounts devoted to saving
the banks when the credit crisis began are so enormous that it is
hard to grasp their significance – and we still don’t know what the
final reckoning will be’.58
56 F. Fukuyama, ‘The Future of History. Can Liberal Democracy Survive the

Decline of the Middle Class?’, Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2012.
58 D. Hind, ‘The Last Province of the Empire’, Al Jazeera, 21 July 2012 (http://www
.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/07/201271972132896868.html).
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It would be imprudent to remain content with Churchill’s words,

which for too many have become a mantra repeated ad nauseam,
that ‘democracy is the worst form of government except all those
other forms that have been tried from time to time’ (Winston
Churchill is reported of having also said that ‘the best argument
against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average
voter’). Moreover, is it not necessary to seriously reflect on the first
part of Churchill’s statement (‘democracy is the worst from of gov-
ernment’) and not see it only as a defence (as such, it would be rather
sharp but nevertheless superficial) of democracy but also as its cri-
tique? There are several shortcomings of liberal democracy that
have become increasingly evident, as the world has become more
and more globalised. First, modern democracy emerged in parallel
with, evolved within, and its thriving was dependent on the nation-
state, i.e., relatively homogenous, closed and self-sufficient entities.
Today the trinity – democracy, the nation-state and hyperglo
balization – are not possible all at the same time, as Dani Rodrik has
shown. Today, even the nation-state in its traditional form, and
democracy are not easily compatible. Historically, there has been a
positive correlation between democracy and nationalism. Not
anymore.
John Stuart Mill, one of the greatest liberal thinkers, argued that
democracy could only flourish where ‘the boundaries of govern-
ment coincide in the main with those of nationality.’59 His argument
in support of this contention was based on an analysis of the neces-
sary conditions for a flourishing democracy: ‘Among a people with-
out fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different
languages, the united public opinion necessary to the workings of
representative institutions cannot exist’.60 Much later, in 1969, Leo
Kuper wrote in the same vein asserting that: ‘[C]ultural diversity or
pluralism automatically imposes the strictest necessity for domina-
tion by one of the cultural sections. It excludes the possibility of con-
sensus, or of institutional integration, or structural balance between
the different sections, and necessitates non-democratic regulation
59 J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism. On Liberty, Considerations of Representative

Government, Basil and Blackwell, 1993, p. 394.
60 Ibid., p. 392.
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60 Chapter Two
of group relations’.61 We see that historically the emergence and

development of democracy was, if not conditioned, then at least
facilitated by the homogenous nature of societies, and if they were
not homogenous enough they had to be made such. As the Italian
novelist and politician Massimo Taparellid’Azeglio famously put it
in 1861: ‘We have created Italy. Now all we have to do is to create
Italians’.62 To put it otherwise, without necessary homogeneity,
d’Azeglio believed, the country would not even stay together, to say
nothing about developing representative institutions. Today, how-
ever, most societies have become multicultural, and are increasingly
becoming more and more multi-ethnic and multi-religious. In such
a condition, nationalism has ceased to play any positive emancipa-
tory role; its impact is increasingly becoming negative. Today, as we
have already emphasised, it is the recognition and tolerance of
diversity, the respect of the rights of minorities, be they ethnic, reli-
gious or sexual, which are essential in practically all societies. Of
course, these values, which were alien for European societies at the
age of the creation of the nation-states, are not at all opposite to the
democracy of the twenty first century. But this democracy cannot
aim, like the democracy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
at constructing societies that are homogeneous in terms of lan-
guages read or spoken, religions professed or not professed; one of
the important tasks of practically all societies, and not only the
fledgling but also mature democracies, is the formation of fellow-
feeling between diverse people and groups. However, in many socie-
ties, including some rich countries, nationalism is rearing its ugly
head; yet, in the twenty first century the methods used to homoge-
nise a country and create a nation within which representative insti-
tutions could flourish are unacceptable or even criminal (at least
under international law), like ethnic or religious cleansing. Therefore,
societies must find ways to create truly multicultural democracies,
where different people and groups possess fellow-feeling based on
common values and interests. This may be even more difficult than
61 L. Kuper, ‘Plural Societies: Perspectives and Problems’ in L. Kuper, A. Smith

(eds.) Pluralism in Africa, University of California Press, 1969, p. 14.
62 S. Tharoor, ‘E Pluribus, India: Is Indian Modernity Working?’ Foreign Affairs,
1998, vol. 77, No. 1, p. 128.
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the parallel processes of democratisation and homogenisation of

the nineteenth century, but there is no other way if human beings
want to live in both democracy and in peace.
Equally damaging is the positive (or negative, depending on how
one sees it) correlation, especially in the United States, between
money and democracy. If in some so-called developing countries or
emerging market economies one has to enjoy political power in
order to become a billionaire, in the citadel of liberal democracy
in order to be elected to a high political post one needs, if not him-
self to be a billionaire, then at least to be supported by and work for
them. As Jeffrey Sachs writes, ‘[C]orporate wealth translates into
political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying,
and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry’,63
and he claims that America is becoming a ‘corporatocracy, a political
system in which powerful corporate interest groups dominate the
policy agenda’.64 Another shortcoming of liberal democracy is an
institution at the very core of democracy – periodic elections. They
are causing short-termism in the policy-making of practically all
Western liberal democracies. ‘All these problems of short-termism
are compounded by an antiplanning mentality’,65 observes Jeffrey
Sachs. The inability to take necessary measures in the face of current
financial and economic crises is only one of the signs of democratic
short-termism. As Fukuyama observes, ‘[M]any people currently
admire the Chinese system not just for its economic record but also
because it can make large, complex decisions quickly, compared
with the agonizing policy paralysis that has struck both the United
States and Europe in the past few years’.66
Even more serious are the external problems of democracy in the
globalised world. Institutions of modern democracy, having emerged
within and adapted for the frame of the nation-state, and showing
strains in the multicultural societies of today, are not appropriate
and suitable for international relations, and do not work well at all
63 J. Sachs, The Price of Civilization. Economics and Ethics After the Fall, The
Bodley Head, 2011, p. 116.
64 Ibid., p. 106.
65 Ibid., p. 242.
66 Fukuyama, ‘The Future of History. Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline
of the Middle Class’, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2012.
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62 Chapter Two
when the earlier clear divisions between external and domestic

affairs become blurred. Would democracy in international relations
mean ‘one state, one vote’? In that case a vote from Nauru and a vote
from China would have the same weight, which from the point of
view of a ‘one man, one vote’ system looks not only unfair but even
ridiculous. Would it mean that democratic states should have
stronger voices than non-democratic states, like a kind of weighted
voting in international financial institutions where the weight of
one’s vote depends on the money one contributes to the organisa-
tion? In that case who would allocate such votes? Ideas of so-called
cosmopolitan democracy67 transcending state boundaries are able
to address at best some of the concerns of a democracy deficit in
the globalising world. Even within Europe most populations of the
European Union member-states constantly grumble about the
alienation of the EU institutions from the European voters, about a
democracy deficit within the Union. And this is within a group of
states whose histories, traditions and levels of development are rela-
tively similar. There is even a positive (or negative, depending on
how one looks at the problem) correlation between the power and
effectiveness of international bodies on the one hand, and their
‘democratic’ credentials, on the other. The more ‘democratic’ an
international body, the less power or authority it enjoys. Within the
United Nations it is its Security Council, and especially its 5 perma-
nent members, which is the most powerful and effective organ.
Neither are more ‘democratic’ different informal groupings, such as
G7, G8, G20 or G2. Or rather, one may justifiably conclude that this
concept has very little room in the field of international relations.
Today, if the concept of democracy has any relevance in an interna-
tional society, which has been and remains in essence an interstate
society, then it may be related to the development of a multipolar
and diverse world consisting of several centres of power and thereby
avoiding the emergence of one hegemonic centre. In that respect
the relative decline of US power and strengthening of China, Brazil,
Russia, Turkey and some other countries which are not following,
in all matters, Washington’s lead, may be seen as a step towards
67 D. Archibugi, The Global Common Wealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan

Democracy, Princeton, 2008.
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the ‘democratisation’ of international relations. Of course, such a

‘democratisation’ of international relations raises as many questions
as it solves. First, this means, and even more so than in domestic
affairs (the natural embodiment of democracy), that democracy in
international relations is messy. Secondly, these centres of power,
forced to cooperate and compromise among themselves, exercise a
dominant influence over smaller nations that may have little say on
big issues. This may not be such a serious practical issue (though it is
a serious problem of social psychology for smaller but proud nations)
since an aggregate of compromises between the powers of such a
‘concert’ may be generally preferable for smaller actors than the
dominance of one single power centre. Thirdly, there is a tendency
of emerging or developing power centres turning into regional
hegemonic powers. Although there will not be any global hegem-
onic power, there will be various regional hegemons with their zones
of ‘privileged interests’, with their own ‘Monroe’ or analogous doc-
trines. To counter such a tendency, it would be necessary to also have
regional ‘concerts’ that would balance the development of a single
regional hegemon. Be that as it may, it seems that democracy in
international relations would look more like a balance of powers
than a ‘one man one vote’ system, though Hugh White, advocating
the creation of a regional concert of great powers in Asia that would
accommodate China’s rise and balance it with the continuing
American presence (though not the continuing domination) in the
Asia-Pacific region, may be right that ‘[A] balance of power is that
what emerges naturally if the great powers in a system fail to agree
on a concert, and it is what happens if a concert collapses, as it hap-
pened in the years before 1914. By contrast, a concert is an agreement
to minimise the risk of war that is inherent in the balance of power
system’.68
Besides the crisis of liberal democracy there is also a crisis of capi-
talism. It seems that free market (capitalism) and liberal democracy,
phenomena that on the one hand have presumed each other, are
also increasingly in a state of constant rivalry or competition. The
freer a market, the greater the economic inequality; the greater the
68 H. White, The China Choice: Why America should Share Power, Black Inc.,
2012, (Kindle version), loc. 1785.
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64 Chapter Two
inequality, the less would there be democracy, and vice versa.

Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang even writes that ‘[F]ree mar-
ket and democracy are not natural partners’,69 though it has to be
emphasised that Professor Chang is not speaking of ‘market econ-
omy’, but of ‘free market’ or rather ‘unbridled markets’, as advocated,
for instance, by Milton Friedman and his followers. One of the most
persistent market-friendly advocates of political freedoms, Karl
Popper, already half a century ago incisively wrote that: ‘Even if the
state protects its citizens from being bullied by physical violence (as
it does in principle, under the system of unrestrained capitalism), it
may defeat our ends by its failure to protect them from the misuse of
economic power. In such a state, the economically strong is still free
to bully one who is economically weak, and to rob of his freedom.
Under these circumstances, unlimited economic freedom can be
just as self-defeating as unlimited physical freedom, and economic
power may be nearly as dangerous as physical violence.’70 As it was
so more than half a century ago when Popper wrote these words, it
is even more so today.
Economic inequality de facto and inevitably also increases politi-
cal inequality, while political equality puts brakes on widening eco-
nomic inequality. Strong democracy attained by curbing inequality
almost inevitably also bridles market freedoms. Democracy tries to
make a society more equal, while unbridled markets increase ine-
quality. The result of such constant balancing is that in Western
European liberal democracies (social democracies), these two
spheres – political and economic – while supporting each other,
have also constantly softened each other’s negative impacts. The
United States, in that respect too, differs considerably from Europe.
Cambridge Professor John Dunn writes that ‘America today remains
a society uncomfortable with every surviving vestige of explicit priv-
ilege, but remarkably blithe in face of the most vertiginous of eco-
nomic gulfs, and comprehensively reconciled to the most obtrusive
privileges of wealth as such. Behind this outcome lies the continuing
69 H.-J. Chang, Bad Samaritans. Rich Nations, Poor Policies & the Threat to the
Developing World, Random House Business Books, 2007, p. 18.
70 K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume 2. Hegel & Marx,
Routledge, 1996, p. 124.
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vitality of its economy, the real source of the victory of the partisans
of “distinction, or the English school of economists”’.71 Or as Joseph
Stiglitz has put it, ‘instead of government tempering the excesses of
the market, in America today the two have been working together to
increase income and wealth disparities’.72 There the market has pre-
vailed over democracy while, say, in Sweden, governed for long peri-
ods by social democrats, there has been less room, as Dunn puts it,
for ‘distinctions and opulence’,73 i.e. democracy has exercised greater
constraints on the market. Today, when there are serious doubts
about ‘the continuing vitality’ of the American economy one may
start questioning whether equality of opportunity without much
effect on the equality of the outcome is not too narrow a concept.
Moreover, as Stiglitz has well shown in his latest book,74 ‘the
American dream’, ‘the land of equal opportunity’ has become a com-
plete myth and social, both upward as well as downward, mobility
has all but stopped working. Without equal opportunity, however,
‘equal rights’ also becomes an empty slogan instead of an enforcea-
ble right. This has had a nefarious effect also on the political sphere
where the ‘current system seems to operate on a “one dollar” one
vote instead of “one person one vote” basis’.75 Paul Krugman put it
forcefully when he wrote: ‘Extreme concentration of income is
incompatible with real democracy. Can anyone seriously deny that
our political system is being warped by the influence of big money,
and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows
ever larger?’76
John Dunn also observes that within the liberal democratic move-
ment ‘the partisans of the order of egoism’, i.e. capitalists, have
defeated ‘the partisans of equality’,77 i.e. democrats. One of the
important causes of equality’s defeat at the hands of economic
71 J. Dunn, Setting the People Free. The Story of Democracy, Atlantic Books, 2005,
p. 127.
72 J. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our
Future, W.W. Norton & Company, 2012, p. 38.
73 J. Dunn, Setting the People Free, p. 130.
74 J. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, pp. 17–20.
75 Ibid., p. 119.
76 P. Krugman, ‘Oligarchy, American Style’, The New York Times, 4 November, 2011
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/opinion/oligarchy-american-style.html).
77 J. Dunn, Setting the People Free, p. 134.
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66 Chapter Two
egoism has been that in the long run the uncompromising instru-
ments for attempting to realize equality, and the rigidities inherent
in its pursuit, have blunted equality’s appeal as a goal.78 Both the
1789 French and especially the 1917 Russian revolutions, where con-
trary to the American revolution of the eighteenth century, the aim
was not so much, as Hannah Arendt had put it, ‘freedom from
oppression’ as ‘freedom from want’, and one of the main require-
ments therefore was égalité (equality), have contributed to the exist-
ing balance (or imbalance) within today’s understanding of the
correlation between democracy and liberty. Arendt wrote that ‘the
inescapable fact was that liberation from tyranny spelled freedom
only for the few and was hardly felt by the many who remained
loaded down by their misery. These had to be liberated once more,
and compared to this liberation from the yoke of necessity, the origi-
nal liberation from tyranny must have looked like child’s play’.79
The fact that radical attempts of liberation from ‘the yoke of
necessity’ and the creation of more equal societies have so far led to
tyranny, should in no way compromise the values of equality and
freedom from want in the eyes of thoughtful individuals. It is possi-
ble to abuse all values and norms but this doesn’t mean that we
should therefore reject them. What is needed is a critical mind able
to distinguish between a value and its abuse. Today, advanced liberal
democracies have, in principle, got rid of the ‘yoke of tyranny’ and
have alleviated the ‘yoke of necessity’ for most of their people, but
one cannot be complacent since not only are there too many poor
people even in rich European societies, but the ‘war on terror’ is
attempting to bring back the ‘yoke of tyranny’. For many other socie-
ties both tasks still constitute formidable challenges, and even
mature democracies have to constantly find new balances between
freedom and equality. Wolfgang Streeck, writing of ‘the crises of
democratic capitalism’, whose heydays, in his opinion, were between
the end of WWII and the end of the 1960s, observes that ‘more than
ever, economic power seems today to have become political power,
while citizens appear to be almost entirely stripped of their demo-
cratic defences and their capacity to impress upon the political
78 Ibid., p. 129.
79 H. Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin Books, 1965, p. 74.
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economy interests and demands that are incommensurable with

those of capital owners’.80 After the collapse of communism, the
conflictual aspect of the correlation ‘capitalism – democracy’ is
becoming more and more visible. Therefore one may be justified in
asking whether the ‘sell-by date’ of at least some of the Western style
political and economic institutions that the West is trying to export
to other countries has not already passed.
Even if we answer this question in the positive – and there are
serious grounds for such a conclusion – this would not yet mean that
democracy has no future. However, Wang Hui, who believes that ‘we
need to rethink the parochial [i.e. Western] notion of democracy’81
emphasises that:
If constitutionally defined political rights cannot effectively pave the
way for democratic participation by citizens; if these political rights
cannot check the inequalities that exist with respect to race, gender
and class; if these democratic rights cannot restrict monopolies,
power and domination; if they cannot limit the increasingly market-
like behaviour of political power or the growth in the authority of the
market, then we must consider a broader and more complete concept
of democracy.82
This conclusion of the Chinese scholar, who is critical of today’s
Chinese realities, carries considerable weight: China needs both
political and economic reforms, but not the copying of the West,
which itself is in dire need of political and economic reforms.
American philosopher Daniel Dennett, who writes that his sacred
values are obvious and quite ecumenical, lists them in alphabetical
order as ‘democracy, justice, life, love, and truth’.83 Is democracy
really ecumenical and sacred? Does it have any intrinsic value at
all or is its value wholly instrumental? David Held has written that
‘[W]ithin democratic thinking, a clear divide exists between those
who value political participation for its own sake and understand it
80 W. Streeck, ‘The Crises of Democratic Capitalism’, New Left Review, 71,

September-October, 2011.
81 Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity, Verso,
2011, p. 103.
82 Ibid.
83 D. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon, Penguin
Books, 2007, p. 23.
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68 Chapter Two
as a fundamental mode of self-realisation, and those who take a

more instrumental view and understand democratic politics as a
means of protecting citizens from arbitrary rule and expressing (via
mechanisms of aggregation) their preferences. … According to this
position, democracy is a means not an end’.84 Therefore, if democ-
racy does not deliver what people need (economic growth, stability,
personal and societal security) its fate may be even more fragile than
that of autocratic regimes. Amitai Etzoni observes that ‘[F]rom the
extensive literature written on the question of what caused the fall
of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich, it is reason-
able to conclude that liberal democracy lost legitimacy because it
failed to address peoples’ need to physical and economic security’.85
However, notwithstanding that people cannot be satisfied with a
democracy that does not deliver, the concept, in our opinion, has
not only instrumental but also some intrinsic value (though we
would not call it sacred, since often even those who most ardently
strive for democracy do not know what to do with it once they have
received it as a sudden ‘gift’; sometimes they even start missing the
certainties of a stable autocracy). The gist of democracy’s intrinsic
value is that humans (at least most of us and we believe, in principle,
at least all adult and mentally non-handicapped persons), when
their immediate needs for survival are met, are not content and
happy if it is somebody else who decides what is good for them,
what they are allowed to do and what they should not do.86 There
have always been those who have not been satisfied with only mate-
rial well-being. However, Dennett himself observes that ‘[B]iology
insists on delving beneath the surface of “intrinsic” values and
asking why they exist, and any answer that is supported by the
facts has the effect of showing that the value in question is – or
84 D. Held, Models of Democracy (3d edition), Polity Press, 2006, p. 231.

85 A. Etzioni, Security First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy, Yale University
Press, 2007, p. 8.
86 However, one should not underestimate the human desire for emotional
comfort, which is provided often by relieving people from the need to constantly
take difficult decisions and make their own choices. Some people often prefer that
somebody else – the parents, a party, the government, God represented by the
clergy – takes over the burden. Many feel comfortable only amongst their co-
religionists or in the military (See, e.g., Jean-Francois Revel, La Tentation Totalitaire,
Editions Robert Laffont, Paris, 1976).
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once was – really instrumental, not intrinsic, even if we don’t see it

that way’.87 Although democracy has this intrinsic value because
only under democracy – as if by definition – human beings obtain
their adulthood, become citizens instead of subjects, its primary
value is instrumental – it has to contribute, and often indeed con-
tributes, to the realisation of other values such as material prosper-
ity, social stability, personal freedoms and security and scientific or
artistic creativity. However, this is not what always happens, since
even good intentions may pave the road to hell. Moreover, if we
speak of those who are involved in democracy promotion in differ-
ent parts of the world, we have to remember that according to the
Bible, a Good Samaritan is the exception rather than the rule.
There are logical arguments favouring democracy over other
forms of governance, such as ‘a human being can be fully human
only when he or she fully participates in the political life of his or her
country’, that democracy is ‘a fundamental mode of self-realisation’,
or even that ‘only democratic governance can put an end to famines’.
These and other similar arguments are put forward by thinkers such
as Jürgen Habermas and Amartya Sen.88 However, such reasoning
cannot persuade those who prefer pragmatic or emotional argu-
ments to logical or rational reasoning, as many people do. One of
such arguments in favour of democracy is best expressed by the
Richard Rorty, the greatest pragmatist philosopher who passed away
in 2007: ‘[F]ollowers of Dewey like myself would like to praise parlia-
mentary democracy and the welfare state as very good things, but
only on the basis of invidious comparison with suggested con-
crete alternatives, not on the basis of claims that these institutions
are truer to human nature, or more rational, or in better accord
with the universal moral law, than feudalism or totalitarianism’.89
87 D. Dennett, op.cit, p. 69.

88 Nobel economics prize winner Amartya Sen writes that ‘famines are easy to
prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing
elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, can-
not help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have
famines under British rule right up to independence (the last famine, which I wit-
nessed as a child, was in 1943, four years before independence), they disappeared
suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press’
(A. Sen, ‘Democracy as Universal Value’, Journal of Democracy, 1999, No 3, p. 8).
89 R. Rorty, Philosophical Papers, Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 2007,
p. 211.
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70 Chapter Two
As Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn writes, Rorty ‘opposes

the tradition which descends from Locke or Kant to recent writers
such as Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, which seeks to prove that
a democratic and liberal state is the only rational mode of social
organisation. For such writers, someone who chose to live in an illib-
eral or undemocratic state would be trampling on his own reason. It
is irrational to sell yourself into the mental servitude that a theo-
cratic state demands. But for Rorty, this Enlightenment attitude with
its talk of irrationality is useless. The right pragmatist observation is
that theocratic states seem not to work very well, by comparison
with liberal democracies – it is theocracies who lose refugees to us,
and not vice versa. We can cope, and theocracies cannot’.90 There
are certainly some strong points in Rorty’s arguments, though most
of those millions who leave their war-torn and poverty-ridden coun-
tries behind do not at all seek democracy and liberalism in the West.
Often they bring with them highly undemocratic and illiberal habits
and traditions, and even try to spread them in countries that have
given them refuge. Of course, it is possible to argue that Western
societies are prosperous because they are democratic, though it may
well be the other way round – it could be prosperity that leads to
democracy. The truth is, probably, somewhere in-between, and
where there is the chicken and where there is the egg depends on
concrete circumstances.
I personally enjoy living in a liberal-democratic country and
I believe that notwithstanding all its imperfections it is best for me
and for my family. However, it would be a mistake to make from this
personal observation the following extrapolations. The first such
invalid extrapolation would be the belief that everybody is like me.
I would call it the ‘Bush fallacy’ since it has been President George W.
Bush the Junior, who has the most clearly and the most frequently
expressed the belief that what truths are self-evident for the
Americans are true for all and everywhere.91 Such a worldview is
deeply engraved in American consciousness. So, President Bush the
90 S. Blackburn, ‘Portrait: Richard Rorty’, Prospect Magazine, Issue 85, April,

2003.
91 President G.W. Bush, Commencement Address to the United States Coast
Guard Academy (21 May 2003).
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Senior, urging Deng Xiaoping to understand popular outrage in

America as a reaction to the 1989 Tiananmen tragedy, wrote to
China’s paramount leader: ‘It is not a reaction of arrogance or of a
desire to force others to our beliefs but a simple faith in the enduring
value of those principles and their universal applicability’.92 If such
a belief and acting upon it do not reflect some kind of arrogance
(alloyed with a portion of naivety) then what is arrogance?
The second extrapolation is that even if democracy, especially lib-
eral democracy, is in principle good for everybody (of which, having
studied the issue in some depth, I am not so sure anymore) the prob-
lem is when and how to get there. One of the greatest contemporary
philosophers Jürgen Habermas insightfully observes that it is neces-
sary to ‘relativize one’s own views to the interpretive perspectives of
equally situated and equally entitled others’, and that the “reason” of
modern rational law does not consist of universal “values” that one
can own like goods, and distribute and export throughout the world.
“Values” – including those that have a chance of winning global rec-
ognition – don’t come from thin air. They gain their binding force
only within normative orders and practices of particular forms of
cultural life.’93 Therefore, ‘whenever an attempt has been made to
impose a Western model of development on non-Western countries
it has involved mass terror’.94 Alastair Crooke, comparing Islamic
and Western societies observes that
[I]t is this clash of two views of human being: one view – the western
one –privileges “individuality”, and defines this “individuality” as the
appropriate organising principle around which society should be
shaped. The other view – the Islamist vision – see the human to be
integral to wider existence; intractably linked, and not separated, as
“an individual”, from others and the world that surrounds him or her;
which sees the human as a multi-dimensional creature – larger than
the sum of his or her desires and appetites, whose ability to access
innate moral values, as the basis of his or her responsibility to the
92 H. Kissinger, On China, The Penguin Books, 2011, p. 417.

93 J. Habermas, ‘Interpreting the Fall of the Monument’, in Empire’s Law. The
American Imperial Project and the ‘War to Remake the World’ (A. Bartholomew ed.),
Pluto Press, 2006, p. 51.
94 J. Gray, Black Mass. Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Allen Lane,
2007, p. 147.
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72 Chapter Two
community, becomes the organisational principle of economics, soci-

ety and politics.95
Therefore, democracy in the Middle East, or in the Far East for that
matter, cannot be like that in the West; though in the long run (and
only in the long run and without forcible pushing from outside, as
we constantly emphasise in this book), different societies may
become, in certain important respects, more similar to each other.
While Muslim and other non-Western societies may start paying
more attention to individual liberties, at least some Western (espe-
cially Anglo-Saxon) societies will have to tame their excessive indi-
vidualism and borrow some communitarian ideas and practices
either from the East or from their own past. This means that, at least
in some way, though not necessarily in different ways, the concept of
truth is relative and contingent; so is the truth about the advantages
and disadvantages of democracy.
4. LIMITS OF SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC CHOICE IN A

GLOBALIZED WORLD
After WWII many Western European states found a remedy to the

excesses of wild capitalism (as well as to the challenges of the com-
munist ideas) in social-democratic policies and in the so-called wel-
fare state, which seemed to be able to find a satisfactory balance
between liberté, egalité and at that time even fraternité. However,
today the nation-state and the national market economy – these cra-
dles of human rights and democracy – are both in the process of
radical change. The world market is not any more the sum-total of
national markets; it is becoming more and more a real common
market. The state has lost not only its ability to control world finan-
cial flows, but also its ability to protect its own population from the
negative effects of fluctuations in global markets, especially the
financial markets. The unfettered global market tends to drag down
the protection of economic and social rights to the level of the low-
est common denominator (e.g. cheap labour and longer working
95 A. Crooke, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, Pluto Press, 2009,
pp. 29–30.
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hours in many Asian societies are certainly affecting employment

and social protection in all OECD countries). Jack Donnelly has writ-
ten that: ‘[T]he globalisation of production is weakening state-
centric schemes for implementing economic, social and cultural
rights, most dramatically in the wealthier countries of the Northern
Hemisphere. It does not, however, seem to be creating viable alter-
native mechanisms’.96 Donnelly correctly also emphasises that eco-
nomic growth that had come about due to globalisation, and the
new division of labour should not be confused with the growth of
economic and social rights since ‘human rights are about assuring
minimum distributions of goods, services and opportunities to all,
something that is by no means assured by economic growth’.97
Sometimes rapid economic growth has been achieved in circum-
stances when economic and social rights, usually together with civil
and political rights, like in Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s and 80s, have
been severely curbed.
The process of globalisation negatively affects not only economic
and social rights, but also civil and political rights. The inability of
democratically elected governments to protect their constituencies
from the negative global effects (e.g. the crash of financial markets
or the effect of cheap child labour from some Asian countries)
means that democracy has become less effective, and political rights
less important. The dilemma which globalisation has posed for
social democrats has been well summarized by Dominique Strauss-
Kahn, a leading French socialist, a former minister in the Mitterrand
and Jospin governments and the former chief of the IMF: ‘[T]he suc-
cess of post-war democracy rests on the equilibrium between
production and redistribution, regulated by the state. With globaliza
tion, this equilibrium is broken. Capital has become mobile: produc-
tion has moved beyond national borders, and thus outside the remit
of state redistribution …. Growth would oppose redistribution; the
virtuous circle would become the vicious circle.98
96 J. Donnelly, ‘Social Construction of International Human Rights’, in T. Dunne,

N.J. Wheeler (eds.), Human Rights in Global Politics, Cambridge University Press,
1999, p. 94.
97 Ibid. p. 95.
98 D. Strauss-Kahn, ‘What is a Just Society?’ in Where now for European Social
Democracy?, Policy Network, 2004, p. 14.
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74 Chapter Two
The creation in the aftermath of WWI of the International Labour

Organisation (ILO) was the world’s (this was when only the Western
world mattered) response to two problems: the workers movements
for their rights, in which many saw ‘the spectre of communism’
haunting the Western world, and the need to level the playing field
for competing national capitals. The ILO is the only specialised
agency of the UN that was created before WWII, i.e. before the crea-
tion of the United Nations Organisation, and before human rights
would become an international issue (this happened together with
the creation of the UN in 1945). Moreover, the mandate of the ILO
has been the promotion of social and economic rights, which are
considered to be the second-generation rights (if human rights at
all) vis-à-vis the first generation (civil and political) rights. This is all
very interesting and significant because it indicates that it was not so
much human rights, but other interests that guided the founders of
the ILO. International concern for workers’ rights was not so much
due to the unease about the welfare of the workers, though they
naturally benefited from it. The ILO was established primarily for
the sake of the survival of capitalism, and in order to mitigate rivalry
between employers from different Western capitalist countries by
creating for them more or less equal labour costs (approximately the
same working hours and conditions, minimal paid holidays, etc.).
Such an arrangement, however, was realistically possible and worked
relatively well between a limited number of countries that were
approximately at the same level of economic and social develop-
ment. Can this experience be repeated worldwide today?
Of course, the ILO is an organisation with universal membership,
but it is no secret that working conditions, worker pay and other
labour factors between countries and regions differ hugely, and
therefore the effectiveness of ILO’s efforts is rather limited. Today, it
is not only European societies or societies of European extraction
that are competing with each other, as it was after WWI. Today, it is
societies at very different levels of economic, social and political
development. It would be impossible to demand that their labour
costs and conditions were even approximately the same. In a global
world, capital benefits from a ‘race to the bottom’, i.e. it moves to
places where the costs of labour are lower, thereby dragging down
the social safety nets of richer countries. The same effect is seen
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from increased migration from the poorer regions to the richer ones.
Therefore, when social democratic or socialist parties come to power
in some European countries, they are unable to continue with the
traditional policies of the welfare state. As the right and right-of-
centre policies, which until recently were trumpeted as the panacea
for all the socioeconomic ills (‘no more bust and boom, only boom’
was the slogan constantly repeated by Gordon Brown, the former
Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister of the United
Kingdom), have bankrupted the Western world, the left and left-of-
centre parties have not offered any plausible answers to today’s
challenges.
The capitalist system, in competing with the economically inef-
fective, politically oppressive and ideologically utopian communist
system, turned out to be much more effective, freer, as well as more
pragmatic than its nemesis; however, it was in comparison with the
communist system of the Cold War era. The triumph of capitalism
over a failed social experiment should not make us complacent and
closed to the search for remedies, reforms, and if need be, revolu-
tionary alternatives to an existing dominant system that is clearly in
crisis. Jeffrey Sachs writes that today ‘America’s weaknesses are
warning signs for the rest of the world’ and that ‘the society that led
the world in financial liberalization, round-the-clock media satura-
tion, television based election campaigns, is now revealing the down-
side of a society that has let market institutions run wild over politics
and public values’99 (emphasis added, RM).
5. ANY VIABLE ALTERNATIVES?
It would be wrong, in our opinion, to even ask: where is the world

going to? The very fact of posing such a general question would
imply that we might be all moving in the same direction, that we
accept a unidirectional, linear evolution of the world towards some
singular end. This would also imply a teleological approach to
history. The world, though interconnected, is going in different
99 J. Sachs, The Price of Civilization: Economics and Ethics after the Fall, The
Bodley Head, 2011, p. xi.
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76 Chapter Two
directions and one should not become too despondent about that.
What is required is to learn to live with it and collectively manage it.
Not many would disagree with the statement that ‘[T]he shift in
power and wealth from West to East in the twenty-first century is
probably as inevitable as the shift from East to West that happened
in the nineteenth century’.100 The rapid rise of China, and also the
increasing potential of Brazil, India, Russia, Turkey, Vietnam and the
earlier economic miracles of authoritarian Asian tigers (South
Korea, Taiwan), have led some authors to write, often with appre-
hension, about authoritarian capitalism as one of the potential
models for the future. For example, Russian analyst Sergei Karaganov,
observes that there is another aspect of the emerging New Epoch of
Confrontation (NEC), ‘namely, the emerging struggle between two
models of development – liberal-democratic capitalism of the tradi-
tional West, and “authoritarian capitalism” led by the Asian “tigers”
and “dragons”’.101 Israeli strategist Azar Gat, similarly, observes that
‘authoritarian capitalist states, today exemplified by China and
Russia, may present a viable alternative path to modernity, which in
turn suggests that there is nothing inevitable about liberal democ-
racy’s ultimate victory – or future dominance’.102 One of the most
eloquent critics of all forms of capitalism Slavoj Žižek warns that
‘the virus of this authoritarian [Lee Kuan Yew’s and Deng Xiaoping’s]
capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe’.103
Whether it is China and Russia that are showing or will show us a
possible future model, we really do not know, but there is indeed
‘nothing inevitable about liberal democracy’s ultimate victory – or
future dominance’. That much has to be made absolutely clear.
Joshua Cooper Ramos even writes that believing, for instance, that
‘the triumph of democracy and capitalism is inevitable should dis-
qualify you immediately from a serious position in foreign policy.’104
100 I. Morris, op. cit., p. 615.

101 S. Karaganov, ‘A New Epoch of Confrontation’, Russia in Global Affairs, No 4,
2007.
102 A. Gat, ‘A Return of Authoritarian Great Powers’, Foreign Affairs, July/August,
2007, p. 60.
103 S. Žižek, op. cit, p. 130.
104 J. Cooper Ramos, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder
Constantly Surprises Us and What We can Do About It, Little, Brown and Company,
2009, p. 37.
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One may also add that the belief in the eventual triumph of any par-
ticular economic, social or political arrangement should have
the same disqualifying effect. However, unfortunately this is not the
case. On the contrary, in the West only a faithful following of the idea
of supremacy and inevitable triumph of liberal democracy seems to
guarantee a high position in foreign as well as domestic policy (it
goes without saying that in autocracies this is an iron rule of social,
political and even economic advancement). Such a mindset sup-
ports the status quo. If in the halcyon days of liberal democratic
capitalism such an attitude could have indeed strengthened the
domestic and international arrangements that worked relatively
well, in the troubled days of radical transformations, such a mindset
becomes counterproductive and dangerous. It is reminiscent of the
Soviet Union in the final years before its demise, when continuing as
usual paved the road to its collapse (though the reform attempts
only precipitated the inevitable). Therefore our advice to the
Western political elites would be: love your own nonconformists
instead of concentrating your love on Russian or Chinese dissidents
or Syrian ‘activists’. Most of Western non-conformists wish good for
their country, and some of them may well have ideas whose realisa-
tion could show a way out of the current economic, political and
social crises in the Western world.
For some societies, like China, Vietnam or even Russia, it may
indeed be that some form of authoritarian capitalism will be, at least
for some time, their model of development, while, say, European
nations may continue experimenting with various forms of liberal-
democratic market economy. The choice of different models will
depend on various factors among which history, religion, size, geog-
raphy and demography may all be significant contributing factors.
Sometimes chance may play a crucial role. However, it is important
to note that the relatively small Asian authoritarian tigers gradually
became less authoritarian and more democratic, and big ones are
not so averse to the pull of democratic ideals either. As Kishore
Mahbubani observes, though China remains a ‘politically closed
society’, it is ‘in social and intellectual terms an increasingly open
society’.105 Moreover, China is also experimenting with political
105 K. Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere. The Irresistible Shift of Global
Power to the East, Public Affairs, 2008, p. 139.
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78 Chapter Two
reforms, though slowly and cautiously, and rightly so. Azar Gat, who
with apprehension writes of the possibility of authoritarian capital-
ism as an alternative to liberal democratic capitalism, observes at
the same time that ‘institutionally, the regime in China is continu-
ously broadening its base, co-opting the business elites into the
party, democratizing the party itself, and experimenting with vari-
ous forms of popular participation, including village and some town
elections, public opinion surveys, and focus group polling – all of
which are intended to ensure that the government does not lose the
public’s pulse’.106 Naturally, as we have already said, such a poten-
tially positive correlation between economic development and
democracy does not get realised automatically; economic develop-
ment is only one of the important facilitators of the evolution of
democratic institutions. This means that China is shedding some of
its authoritarian traits while acquiring some democratic ones. This
is an important and positive trend, from which first of all China
would benefit. It may, in various ways, be beneficial also for the West,
though the latter may also find that some of the policies of a more
democratic China may be contrary to what the West would expect.
Democracy in China is for the Chinese people. What is important is
that this process goes at its own pace without being hastened from
the outside. A more democratic China will not necessarily be more
amenable to Western or American interests (a more democratic
China may well be more nationalistic too). Equally, Chinese democ-
racy will certainly be one with ‘Chinese characteristics’.
Turkey’s evolution under the government of Recep Tayyip
Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party may well show the way for
some other Muslim countries. There, market economy, i.e. capital-
ism, is pooled with Islam and democracy. This combination may be
quite different from Western liberal democracies, which Turkey
has tried to emulate (at least until recently) in its aspiration to join
the European Union. However, already some years ago Samuel Hun
tington insightfully predicted that ‘at some point Turkey could be
ready to give up its frustrating and humiliating role as a beggar
pleading for membership in the West and to resume its much more
106 Gat, op. cit., p. 74.
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impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic inter-

locutor and antagonist of the West’.107 It seems that this time may
have arrived. Although Walter Russell Mead’s comment in a newspa-
per article that ‘[E]urope looks less and less to the Turks like a model
to imitate and more and more like a fate to avoid’,108 seems to be
slightly exaggerated, or at least premature, there is certainly some
truth in it. Turkey has become not only economically more success-
ful and politically more assertive, but also more authentic. Ted Galen
Carpenter writes of Turkey: ‘Turkish leaders chafe at being expected
to follow Washington’s lead on every issue. Deferring to the United
States may have made sense in the bipolar strategic environment of
the Cold War, when Soviet power and intentions appeared to pose a
serious threat to Turkey’s security and the United States was the only
country that could provide effective protection. But the situation in
the twenty-first century is much different. The possible threats are
both less serious and more diffuse. Therefore, blindly following
Washington’s policy lead is not only unnecessary; it could be coun-
terproductive to Turkey’s interests’.109 And Washington should not
be frustrated with an ally that, instead of always replying ‘Yes, Sir’,
sometimes dares to express its own opinion. The world cannot be
ruled from one centre, be it Washington, Brussels, Beijing or Moscow.
Of course, it should be welcome when individuals or societies
strive to become better and more successful, if necessary through
borrowing, inter alia, from the experiences of others. However, if in
their strivings they have to give up their identity, many of them
become torn, whether they are individuals or societies. Therefore
Turkey, in following an authentic path that may differ from those
pursued by other, and primarily Western, countries, should not be
deplored. Each society has to find its own combination of character-
istics specific to its own history, traditions, interests, as well as prin-
ciples and patterns of behaviour that are common to all successful
societies. There are more and more of those, both among Muslim
107 S. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of world Order,
Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 178.
108 W.R. Mead, ‘The Euro’s Global Security Fallout’, The Wall Street Journal,
18 June 2012.
109 T. Galen Carpenter, ‘The End of the U.S-Turkey Alliance?’, The National
Interest, 20 January 2012.
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80 Chapter Two
and Western authors, who see Atatürk’s reforms and secularization

(Westernization) of Turkish society not so much as an example of
the progressive march of history, but as a continuation of Western
colonialism by other means and through indigenous autocrats.110
Tariq Ramadan, for example, writes: ‘But except for an elite, a tiny
minority of intellectuals frequenting the corridors of power, most
people in Muslim-majority societies, particularly Turkey and the
Arab countries, generally understand “secularization” as models of
dictatorial, anti-Islamic regimes than have been imported from the
West, a fact that any debate over the place of religion and the state
must take into account, instead of falling into sterile and counter-
productive terminological dispute’.111 This is an appropriate warning
to be taken heed of by all those who promote democracy, seculariza-
tion and modernity in that part of the world.
Why cannot the world consist, for instance, of a social-democratic
Europe, a libertarian capitalist America (probably joined by some
other Anglo-Saxon societies), state-capitalist China and even Russia?
A serious problem with such a scenario for the future is that all these
forms have already revealed their deficiencies and limits. We have
already discussed the serious problems facing liberal democratic
capitalism and social democracy. Authoritarian or state capitalism
may indeed be more efficient in responding to some new challenges,
but its main problem, especially in the longer term, is that every
authoritarianism limits human freedom, and the latter is not only an
important value in and of itself and one that starts to be increasingly
demanded when bread and butter problems become less acute,112
110 See, e.g., T. Ramadan, The Arab Awakening: Islam and the New Middle East,
Allen Lane, 2012, pp. 81–86; A. Crooke, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist
Revolution, Pluto Press, 2009, pp. 53–4, 56, 59.
111 T. Ramadan, The Arab Awakening, pp. 85–6.
112 Richard Rorty writes that in order to extend equal respect for all the people
we do not need to become more rational or reasonable. Rational or reasonable peo-
ple can well be racists, rapists or thieves. We need, as Rorty writes, security and
sympathy. He writes: ‘By “security” I mean conditions of life sufficiently risk-free ….
By “sympathy” I mean the sort of reaction … that white Americans had more of after
reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin than before, the sort that we have more of after watching
TV programs about the genocide in Bosnia. Security and sympathy go together, for
the same reason as peace and economic productivity go together. The tougher
things are, the more you have to afraid of, the more dangerous your situation, the
less you can afford the time or effort to think about what things might be like for
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but also a vehicle for economic development.113 At the same time, it

is impossible to deny that at least in China, as well as in some other
Asian countries, state capitalism has achieved impressive results in
terms of economic growth as well as poverty reduction. Therefore,
quite a few people in the West, both politicians and experts, per-
ceive, in the existence and success of state capitalism, a threat to
Western values and ways of life. However, in reality they fear that the
success of state capitalism may undermine Western dominance. Ian
Bremmer, for example, writes of state capitalism as ‘a form of bureau-
cratically engineered capitalism particular to each government that
practices it. It’s a system in which the state dominates markets pri-
marily for political gain’114 and that the world may be ‘on the verge of
a new global struggle – one that pits free-market capitalists and state
capitalists in a battle to win over countries that might still tip either
way’.115 Although it may be true that governments in state capitalist
countries use the economic system for political gain (as if the use of
the political system for economic dominance would be preferable),
this is not inevitably the case. Even if the main political aim of the
government is to stay in power (this applies equally to both demo-
cratic and authoritarian governments, though the methods of secur-
ing that aim differ), this aim can be sustainably secured only if the
economic system delivers, i.e. if from it benefits not only a narrow
elite but also the majority. In a case where the economic system fails,
the political power would also be in danger. Furthermore, if in a
peaceful rivalry state capitalism prevails over free market capitalism,
so be it. This would mean that the more adequate, in concrete cir-
cumstances of time and space, system prevails. That the real worry
of Bremmer is not at all the fate of the world but only of the American
people with whom you do not immediately identify. Sentimental education only
works on people who can relax long enough to listen’ (R. Rorty, ‘Human Rights,
Rationality, and Sentimentality’, in On Human Rights. The Oxford Amnesty Lectures
1993 (S. Shute, S. Hurley eds.), Basic Books, 1993, p. 128). Similarly, economic devel-
opment and security are, if not sufficient then at least necessary, preconditions and
facilitators of the development of democracy.
113 A. Sen, Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, 1999. In my opinion,
the title of the book may have also been ‘Freedom as Development’.
114 I. Bremmer, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War between States and
Corporations? Portfolio, 2010, (Kindle version), Loc. 365.
115 Ibid., Loc. 377.
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82 Chapter Two
dominance of it, can be seen from the following excerpt from his
book:
As the world recovers from the global recession and investors regain
their appetite for risk, what if we discover that state-capitalist govern-
ments mean what they say about diversifying away from the dollar to
diminish its status as the world’s reserve currency? In other word,
what if they slowly reduce their willingness to finance America’s debt
by buying U.S. Treasury bills?116
This statement hardly needs comments except one: the main threat
for the United States of state capitalism becoming a dominant
arrangement is that it may end almost an absurd situation where
those who are dominated are forced to finance those who dominate
them.
Ian Bremmer writes that ‘state capitalists see markets primarily as
a tool that serves national interests, or at least those of ruling elites,
rather than as an engine of opportunity for the individual’.117 This
observation seems to be true, but does its truth not express, at least
partially, the underlining characteristics of differing societies? While
Anglo-Saxon societies are at the individualistic end of the spectrum,
societies like China and Russia are closer to the collectivistic or com-
munitarian end. Therefore, while state capitalism may be quite
alien, even unacceptable, in the United States, it may be much more
natural for China or even Russia.118 Thus, free market capitalism and
state capitalism are not simply two different economic models for
an abstract society; rather, they correspond to two (and probably
more) different historically evolved types of society. The problem, if
this can be considered at all a problem, with state or authoritarian
capitalism and with its possible domination, especially in the long
run, is different. As we have seen, successful authoritarianisms tend
116 Ibid., Loc. 2482.

117 Ibid., Loc., 783.
118 This observation to an extent may explain also the relative ease with which
utopian communist ideology was accepted and became practiced in countries like
Russia and China and not in societies where they originated, i.e. in Western socie-
ties. In Eastern societies Western collectivistic ideas superimposed on Eastern com-
munitarian traditions and practices that explains equally the initial ‘success’ of
these ideas and also the eventual failure of these experiments. Obviously, Eastern
societies need more individualism, not more Western communitarian ideas, while
Western societies need more collectivism.
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in their evolution to become more liberal and more democratic. One

should, of course, welcome this trend. Naturally, there are many pit-
falls on the road to a realisation of this trend, and even if the trend
succeeds and, say, China and Russia become considerably more
democratic, they will not be Western style liberal democracies; and
even if they would, this would not mean that they would accept
guidance from Washington.
Today we see at least three competing and struggling forms of
capitalism: the liberal-democratic capitalism of the Anglo-Saxon
variety; the social-democratic capitalism of Scandinavia (practiced
also in Germany and some other Western European countries); and
state capitalism as exemplified primarily by China and Russia. The
most plausible and positive outcome could be a kind of peaceful
competition between them, in the process of which all models
would be ready to borrow from each other that which works best.
One thing is certain, that the West does not have, and should not
even pretend to have, a monopoly on truth. As Charles Kupchan
writes,
[C]learing the way for a more inclusive global order entails recogniz-
ing that there is no single form of responsible government; the West
does not have a monopoly on the political institutions and practices
that enable countries to promote the welfare of their citizens. As long
as other countries adhere to reasonable standards of responsible gov-
ernance, the West should respect the political choices as a matter of
national discretion and as a reflection of the intrinsic diversity of
political life.119
It may well be that while the East could gradually become more
democratic and liberal (while not becoming a Western style liberal
democracy), the West, in order to regain some governance lost to
market forces (especially those of the financial markets), would have
to increase the role of the state both domestically as well as interna-
tionally. Sergei Karaganov may be at least partially right when he
writes that ‘[T]he existing model of Western capitalism based on a
society of almost universal affluence and advanced democracy can-
not withstand a new competition. Not only will the authoritarian
119 C. Kupchan, No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global
Turn, Oxford University Press (Kindle version) Loc. 3322.
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84 Chapter Two
regimes have to drift towards greater democracy in the medium

term. Western democracies, too, will have to drift towards more
authoritarianism. This will be a retreat, a post-modern theory of
convergence’.120 Cum grano salis, there seems to be some truth to
such a statement. However, if the Eastern drift towards greater lib-
erty and democracy is well within the overall long-term tendency of
the evolution of humankind, a widespread and sustainable drift
towards more authoritarianism goes against the general long-term
trend of transformations that have taken place in the world. There
fore, the term ‘more authoritarianism’ may not accurately reflect
what the West needs in order to compete with the rising East. Rather,
one may think of more collectivism in the West instead of glorifying
rampant individualism à la Ayn Rand; individual liberties balanced
with social responsibilities; a greater role for the state, though not so
much as a redistributor of wealth as the main protector of people
from the negative effects of markets; and the acceptance of the truth
that that there is no single true socioeconomic and political arrange-
ment suitable for all. Charles Kupchan’s prediction that ‘it is more
likely that emerging powers will follow their own unique paths to
modernity as they rise, ensuring that the next world will not just be
multipolar, but also politically diverse’ and that therefore ‘the emerg-
ing world is poised to consist of a multiplicity of different kinds of
regimes; considerable political diversity, not political homogeneity
among Western lines, lies ahead’,121 seems to characterise current
trends better than simplistic ‘end of history’ or ‘history is on our side’
blueprints. Even such a free-market enthusiast as Niall Ferguson has
recently published an article entitled We’re All State Capitalists Now
where he writes that ‘… the question today is not whether the state
or the market should be in charge. The real question is which coun-
tries’ laws and institutions are best, not only at achieving rapid eco-
nomic growth but also, equally importantly, at distributing the fruits
of growth in a way that citizens deem to be just’.122 Who could argue
with that?
120 S. Karaganov, ‘A Revolutionary Chaos of the New World’, Russia in Global

Affairs, 28 December, 2011.
121 C. Kupchan, ‘Diversity Wins’, Russia in Global Affairs, 29 December 2011,
http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/number/Diversity-Wins-15426.
122 N. Ferguson, ‘We’re All State Capitalists Now’, Foreign Policy, 9 February, 2012.
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Attempts to ‘Democratise’ China 85
Chapter Three
ON THE FUTILITY AND DANGER OF EXTERNAL

ATTEMPTS TO ‘DEMOCRATISE’ CHINA
Although active and forceful policies of regime change are usually

practiced vis-à-vis smaller countries in the periphery of the non-
liberal-democratic world, the idea of changing the political regime
in the world’s most populous country is not a rare one. Political sci-
entist Aaron Friedberg, for example, writes that ‘a liberal democratic
China will have little cause to fear its democratic counterparts, still
less to use force against them’. Therefore, he opines: ‘Stripped of dip-
lomatic niceties, the ultimate aim of the American strategy [should
be] to hasten a revolution, albeit a peaceful one, that will sweep
away China’s one-party authoritarian state and leave a liberal
democracy in its place.’1 However, in Henry Kissinger’s much more
realistic view, such policies would almost inevitably lead to a con-
frontation between the two most powerful states in today’s world –
the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China. He
warns American elites of the dangers of such a strategy vis-à-vis of
the Asian giant: ‘U.S. strategic concerns are magnified by ideological
predispositions to battle with the entire nondemocratic world.
Authoritarian regimes, some argue, are inherently brittle, impelled
to rally domestic support by nationalist and expansionist rhetoric
and practice. In these theories – versions of which are embraced in
segments of both the American left and the American right –
tension and conflict with China grow out of China’s domestic struc-
ture. Universal peace will come, it is asserted, from the global tri-
umph of democracy rather than from appeals for cooperation’.2 So,
the American (Western) dilemma seems to be: to deal with China as
it is, or to try to change its fundamental characteristics.
In this chapter we would analyse China’s democratic potential,
what would be the role of external factors in democratising China,
1 H. Kissinger, ‘The Future 7/of U.S.-Chinese Relations: Conflict Is a Choice, Not

a Necessity’, Foreign Affairs, March-April 2012.
2 Ibid.
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86 Chapter Three
and what a more democratic China would mean for its own people
as well as for the wider world.
1. CHINA’S RISE AND THE CHANGING BALANCE OF POWER
It was pragmatic Deng Xiaoping who, after the Tiananmen tragedy

of 1989, where hundreds of people died and when China was ostra-
cized by the West, called his countrymen to ‘observe developments
soberly, maintain our position, meet challenges calmly, hide our
capacities and bide our time, remain free of ambition, never claim
leadership’.3 Although only slightly more than two decades have
passed since 1989, the world of 2012, when this book was mainly
written, belongs not only to a new century and millennium; today
we also live in a different political epoch in comparison with 1989.
The balance of power in the world has since then radically changed
at least twice – from the Cold War bi-polar system, through a unipo-
lar moment, to a new balance of power where China is already/still
second, but rising fast. Is Deng Xiaoping’s advice still valid? Is this a
moment for the crouching tiger or will the dragon continue to
remain hidden?
Goldman Sachs has predicted that China’s economy will become
the world’s largest by approximately 2027, and by 2050 the three larg-
est economies in the world will be China, followed by a closely
matched United States and India, and trailed by Brazil, Mexico,
Russia and Indonesia.4 The following graphs show Goldman Sachs’
predictions of world economic power in both fifteen and forty years.
Due to such analysis it is not surprising that the US National
Intelligence Council Report of November 2008 foresaw the emer-
gence by 2025 of a ‘multipolar world without multilateralism’5 where
‘the wealth is moving not just from West to East but is concentrating
more under state control’,6 where ‘we are unlikely to see an overarch-
ing, comprehensive, unitary approach to global governance’, where
3 W. Hutton, The Writing on the Wall: China in the 21st Century, Little, Brown,
2006, p. 220.
4 D. Wilson, A. Stupnytska, ‘The N-11: More than an Acronym’, Goldman Sachs
Global Economic Papers, 153, 28 March 2007, pp. 8–9.
5 Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, NIC Report, November 2008, pp. 81.
6 Ibid., 8.
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GDP 2006 US$ bn The World in 2025
25,000
20,000
15,000
10,000
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GDP 2006 US$ bn The World in 2050

80,000
70,000
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The graphs show Goldman Sachs’ predictions of world economic power in

both fifteen and forty years. (Reproduced from D. Wilson, A. Stupnytska,
‘The N-11: More than an Acronym’, Goldman Sachs Global Economic Papers,
153, 28 March 2007, pp. 8–9.)
‘strategic rivalries are likely to revolve around trade, investment,

technology innovation, and acquisition’, where ‘increasing worries
about resources – such as energy and water – could easily put the
focus back on territorial disputes or unresolved border issues’.7 This
Report was written just before the current world economic and
7 Ibid., pp. 81–2.
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88 Chapter Three
financial crisis began to bite. The crisis has only accelerated some of
these trends.
This new world would be quite different from the bi-polar and
powder keg like stability of the Cold War (i.e. stability until the
explosion, which thankfully did not occur); it would also considera-
bly differ from the short post-Cold War period of unilateral American
dominance. Due to the number and variety of actors in the world,
the emergence of new centres of power, and the exacerbation of
existing problems (terrorism, poverty, environment, food and energy
shortages), and the surfacing of new still unknown challenges, this
would certainly be one of the most complex international systems
that has ever existed. Besides formal institutions such as the United
Nations, EU, AU, NATO, OSCE and many others, there are informal
but potentially more influential bodies like the G20, BRICS or even
the G2 emerging. However, Ian Bremmer may well be right that the
future world belongs to the G-0, i.e. to a world where no state or even
group of states governs the world.8 Be this as it may, in all the pre-
dictable scenarios of the future world China’s role is indispensable
and prominent. What may such transformation mean for China and
for the world?
2. MODERNIZING CHINA – A DEMOCRATIC CHINA?
As China is becoming economically stronger and stronger, experts

argue whether the world’s most populous country will (or even have
to) become also more democratic and liberal, more like contempo-
rary developed Western societies, or whether it will modernize by
borrowing from the West only those features that suit Beijing while
retaining and developing its specific Asian or Chinese characteris-
tics. The first scenario was some years ago bluntly expressed by
Will Hutton: ‘The general argument … is that if the next century is
going to be Chinese, it will be only because China embraces the eco-
nomic and political pluralism of the West in general, and our
Enlightenment institutions in particular modified, of course, for the
8 I. Bremmer, Every Nation for Itself. Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World,
Portfolio Penguin (Kindle version), 2012.
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Chinese experience’9 and that ‘eventually the Communist leader-

ship will have to accept that China must become a pluralist repre-
sentative democracy’.10 Kishore Mahbubani, on the contrary, writes
that ‘the West had actually triumphed [in the Cold War with the
Soviet Union] because of the strength of its economic system – free
market economics – and not because of its political system … In
contrast to Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping well understood the real
sources of Western strength and power. He had no illusion that
Western values were responsible for Western successes’.11 Israeli
strategist Azar Gat is of the opinion that ‘a possible ideology for
China would emphasize Chinese ways, incorporate Confucian val-
ues of meritocratic-technocratic hierarchy, public service, social har-
mony, and be presented as a contrast to liberal divisiveness and
individual irresponsibility’.12
Then, as some experts correctly note,13 to discuss democracy’s
achievements and perspectives in China, it is necessary to compare
today’s China not with today’s Sweden or Finland, but with yester-
day’s China. Mahbubani rightly observes many Western commenta-
tors ‘cannot see beyond the lack of a democratic political system.
They miss the massive democratization of the human spirit that is
taking place in China’.14 My own experience of communicating with
Chinese students, professors as well as state or even communist
party officials in China testifies to the effect that today’s China is
hugely different, say, from the former Soviet Union (I don’t have
a personal experience of Mao’s China) in terms of not only its
2006, p. X.
10 Ibid., p. 34.
11 K. Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere. The Irresistible Shift of Global Power
to the East, Public Affairs, 2008, p.44.
12 A. Gat, Victorious and Vulnerable: Why Democracy Won in the 20th Century and
How it is Still Imperiled, Rowman& Littlefield Publishers, 2010, p. 73.
13 E.g. Daniel Deudney and John Ikenburry, though from my point of view some-
what too optimistically, or rather seeing the world in too deterministic terms as
moving towards an inevitable goal, argue that though ‘China and Russia are not
liberal democracies, they are much more liberal and democratic than they have
ever been – and many of the crucial foundations for sustainable liberal democracy
are emerging’ (D. Deudney, G.J. Ikenburry, ‘The Myth of Autocratic Revival’, Foreign
Affairs, January-February, 2009).
14 Mahbubani, op. cit., p. 18.
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90 Chapter Three
economic effectiveness, but also of its intellectual openness and

critical analysis of existing challenges. These debates may not (yet)
be at the level of the intellectual diversity and sophistication of
views expressed at academic gatherings, say, at the London School
of Economics (LSE) or King’s College, London (chosen because of
my long personal experience), but they certify that China is not a
closed society anymore.
The truth about China’s evolution is probably (as it often, though
not always, is) somewhere in between Hutton’s and Mahbubani’s
predictions. Yang Yao observes that ‘ultimately, there is no alterna-
tive to greater democratization if the CCP [the Chinese Communist
Party] wishes to encourage economic growth and maintain social
stability’.15 But it may be indeed so only ultimately, and it should be
a gradual progression (‘crossing the river by touching the stones’, in
Deng Xiaoping words) rather than in one go through some variation
of ‘shock therapy’. First of all, liberal democracy, or rather its absence
in China, is not what worries the majority of the Chinese people day
to day, and secondly, the danger of possible (or even probable) insta-
bility and chaos as would be consequenced by such a shock experi-
ment is too great a risk. Randall Peerenboom is not wrong when he
writes that ‘not everyone assigns the same value to civil and political
freedoms relative to social order. Social order ranks much higher in
the normative hierarchy of most Chinese than it does in the norma-
tive hierarchy of many Westerners, in part because stability is pre-
carious in China. The consequences of instability for China, the
region, and the world would be severe. Adopting this measure virtu-
ally assures a wide margin of deference to restrictions in the name of
public order.’16 There is no doubt that China’s democracy, if and
when it eventually unfolds, will be quite different from Western style
liberal democracy, though obviously there have to be some general
common principles and features that would allow us to call it
democracy, whether it be with American, European or Chinese
characteristics.
15 Yang Yao, ‘The End of the Beijing Consensus’, Foreign Affairs, 2 February, 2010.
16 R. Peerenboom, China Modernises. Threat to the West or Model for the Rest,
OUP, 2007, pp. 124–25.
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We believe that China will gradually become more open not only
economically but also politically. Firstly, there is indeed a correla-
tion, mostly positive though quite controversial,17 and in some cir-
cumstances even negative, between economic development and
market freedoms on the one hand, and personal and political liber-
ties on the other. However, in this correlation it is more prosperity
that contributes to the evolution towards democracy than democ-
racy contributing to prosperity. Yet, such a positive correlation is a
long-term tendency, and it would be wrong and dangerous to hasten
this process. In the shorter term, it may even be that for the sake of
economic development and social stability some restrictions of per-
sonal and political liberties would be, if not necessary then at least,
unavoidable. American human rights expert Jack Donnelly, in ana-
lysing the experience of Brazil and South Korea, finds that ‘some
repression is likely to be “required” (or at least extraordinarily diffi-
cult to avoid) in pursuit of what can be called the structural task of
removing institutional and sociocultural barriers to the develop-
ment and the political task of assuring conformity with development
plans’.18 The former mayor (1995–2001) of Shanghai Xu Kuangdi has
been reported arguing that this is all part of the plan: ‘Let’s look at
our neighbouring Asian countries,’ he said. ‘South Korea: its peak
developing speed was reached using military rule…. Indonesia was
successful during the reign of Suharto but recently it has faced stale-
mate and difficulties’. The reason that democracy is an obstacle to
economic progress, Mr Xu continued, is that ‘the poor people want
to divide the property of the rich people…. If we Chinese copied the
directly elected situation today, people will say, “I want everyone to
have a good job.” Someone will say, “I will divide the property of the
rich people to poor people”, and he will be elected. It is useless: par-
ity will not solve the problem of economic development. That is why
we are taking a gradual and step-by-step approach in reform. As
Mr Deng said, we will cross the river by touching the stones. We will
17 On dialectical relationship between market economy and democracy see

more in R. Müllerson, Democracy – A Destiny of Humankind? A Qualified, Contingent
and Contextual Case for Democracy Promotion, NovaPublishers, 2009.
18 J. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, Cornell University
Press, 1989, p. 187.
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92 Chapter Three
not get ourselves drowned, and we will cross the river.’19 Of course,
this was said by a former high official in the Chinese Communist
Party hierarchy and it all sounds, and to an extent it certainly is, self-
serving. However, this does not necessarily mean that it is all wrong,
or that the man and those of his ilk are all hypocrites. Moreover,
perceptions matter, and the perceptions of Chinese officials matter
more on matters Chinese than those of outsiders.
In this respect it is important to note that it was not so much the
shoots of Chinese democracy, though they certainly were too, that
were suppressed in Tiananmen Square in 1989. One of the most
prominent current Chinese intellectuals, Wang Hui, observes that
‘as a movement for social self-preservation, the 1989 social move-
ment was inherently a spontaneous protest against the proliferating
inequalities spawned by market expansion, and a critique of the
state’s handling of the process of reform; as a movement of social
protest, however, it also pursued a critique of authoritarianism and
the methods of authoritarian rule’20 and that ‘… the state-led neolib-
eral economic policies led to the social upheaval, while the post-
upheaval stabilization became the proof of the social expansion of
the legitimacy of state power’.21 There seems to have indeed been a
crucial choice between a political ‘shock therapy’ had the authori-
ties attempted to meet various demands of protesters, which could
have ended with the country in turmoil and freefall on the one hand,
and the continuation of market oriented economic reforms that
were quite painful for many Chinese on the other. It would have
been impossible to carry out such radical reforms using democratic
means. Therefore, we may say that in 1989, in Tiananmen Square, it
was capitalism that prevailed over democracy. Mr Xu Kuangdi is
right that the people would not have voted for those reforms that
have made China the number two economy in the world. Some of
the incidents and developments of 2012, though much less dramatic
than those of 1989, have similarities with the events that took place
19 C. Hayes, ‘The Great Leap’, The Nation, 11 January, 2010.

2011, p. 30.
21 Ibid., p. 34.
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twenty-three years earlier. Wang Hui, in writing about the dismissal

in spring 2012 of Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai, for example, observes
that
The aim of the current manoeuvres is to clamp down on political free-
doms in order to make it easier to drive through deeply unpopular
neoliberal measures. In the late 1980s, after some failed attempts to
push through “price reforms” on many basic commodities, the death
of the former party leader Hu Yaobang – deposed several years before
partly because of his leniency over student demonstrations – inspired
the discontent that manifested itself in Tiananmen Square and else-
where. After the students had been repressed, the price reforms were
pushed through without further protest. It is a pity that during the
current celebrations of the 20th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s
“southern tour” and his call for the speeding up of reforms, nobody is
mentioning that the precondition for the accelerating marketisation
of 1992 was the crackdown of 1989.22
In a way, the situation in 1989 may have been comparable to what
General Pinochet embarked on in Chile in the 1970s with the encour-
agement and help of Washington. A simultaneous introduction
of political (democracy) and economic (market) reforms may work
only in small countries, and even there, favourable internal and
external conditions and facilitators are needed. How things can
go terribly wrong, when in a weak, unstable and ethnically divided
country market oriented economic and democracy-oriented politi-
cal reforms are introduced simultaneously, can be seen in the case of
certain developments in a small Central Asian country – Kyrgyzstan.
3. A SMALL DIVERSION TO ILLUSTRATE THE POINT – THE

KYRGYZ TRAGEDY OF 2010
To illustrate this point, let us make a small diversion and look into
the attempts of a simultaneous introduction of democratic and mar-
ket reforms in a small neighbour of China – Kyrgyzstan. In the
summer of 2010, a simmering interethnic conflict in Southern
Kyrgyzstan – a former Soviet republic in Central Asia which
22 Wang Hui, ‘The Rumour Machine: The Dismissal of Bo Xilai’, London Review of
Books, 10 May 2012.
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94 Chapter Three
had recently undergone one of those ‘colour’ revolutions, a Tulip

one –exploded in violence. The author of this book was a member of
The Independent International Inquiry Commission (Kyrgyz Inquiry
Commission or KIC), which looked into the causes of the conflict,
how it played out in June 2010, who may have been responsible and
also recommended measures aimed at healing the wounds and pre-
venting such bloody conflicts occurring in future.23
In some ethnically mixed societies, and Kyrgyzstan is a fine exam-
ple of such a society, the parallel introduction of market reforms and
democratization may contribute to the potential for inter-ethnic
conflicts. Unfortunately, there is no irony in an assertion that the
simultaneous introduction of two generally necessary and positive
reforms may not only cancel each other out, but may have disastrous
outcomes; or, to put it otherwise, in social life, in contrast to arith-
metic, one plus one may result in minus two. Amy Chua has mapped
the negative effects of processes of globalisation in societies charac-
terized by the presence of so-called market-dominant minorities (e.g.
Indians in east Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Ibo in Nigeria, Tutsi
in Rwanda, Chinese in several Southeast Asian countries and Jews in
many societies). She even argues that, ‘the global spread of free mar-
ket democracy has […] been a principal, aggravating cause of ethnic
instability and violence throughout the non-western world’.24 This
pessimistic conclusion is grounded in the reality that in some devel-
oping and post-communist countries there are minorities—perhaps
better educated and more entrepreneurial than the majority
population—who may also own more land or may otherwise be in a
better position to benefit than the rest of the population, i.e. more
than the majority, from the liberalisation of markets. The simultane-
ous introduction of democracy, which almost inevitably gives politi-
cal power to the economically non-dominant majority (i.e. the
poorer part of the population), can release suppressed discontent
that creates a combustible mixture ready to explode in xenophobia,
23 Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry into the Events

in Southern Kyrgyzstan in June 2010. Helsinki, May 2011 (http://www.cmi.fi/
black-sea-and-central-asia/kyrgyzstan-inquiry-commission.html).
24 A. Chua, World of Fire, Arrow, 2004, p. 187.
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ethnic cleansing or even in acts of genocide. In such cases, of course,

there is neither market nor democracy. Amy Chua concludes that
‘the United States should not be exporting markets in the unre-
strained, laissez-faire form that the west itself has repudiated, just as
it should not be promoting unrestrained, overnight majority rule—a
form of democracy that the west has repudiated.’25 Although in the
West majority rule came not overnight, but only through sometimes
centuries-long processes of trial and error, Amy Chua’s warning
must be taken seriously.
In southern Kyrgyzstan, the differences in lifestyles between the
historically sedentary Uzbeks and nomadic Kyrgyz, which had
existed for centuries, resulted in a situation where the Uzbeks
were generally economically better off than the Kyrgyz. Centuries,
or even as recently as decades, ago this did not matter much because
these two communities did not mix a great deal (the Kyrgyz primar-
ily lived in the countryside, while the Uzbeks were mainly city
dwellers, and hence their ways of making a living were also differ-
ent), and in addition, Soviet (before Russian) dominance did
not allow for any discontent to explode. However, the migration
wave of Kyrgyz to the newly industrialized southern cities, which
had commenced as recently as the 1960s, increased rapidly when
Gorbachev initiated his glasnost and perestroika reforms, and was
further boosted at the end of 1991 by the establishment of an inde-
pendent Kyrgyzstan. To simplify a bit, while the Uzbeks benefited
more from the perestroika (economic liberalization), the Kyrgyz
benefited more from glasnost (political opening). Therefore, by the
1990s, inter-ethnic clashes in southern Kyrgyzstan had, as a contrib-
uting factor, the combined effect of a simultaneous introduction of
elements of market economy and democracy under Gorbachev.
Uzbeks were better positioned to benefit from economic reforms;
they had better entrepreneurial skills and, having some starting
capital (albeit rather meagre by Western standards), they had a head
start in regards to economic benefits as well. On the contrary, at the
political level, the majority Kyrgyz had the upper hand. Through
25 Ibid., p. 17.
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96 Chapter Three
more or less democratic processes, they secured for themselves an

overwhelming majority in legislative bodies at all levels, as well as in
all important executive posts, and started to dominate the judiciary,
law enforcement and military. Using their political, administrative
as well as simply numerical power, they not only denied the Uzbeks
effective access to higher administrative posts, law enforcement and
the judiciary, but they also used these posts as leverage to force
Uzbek businessmen to pay up. What is the point in having political
power, they argued, if one cannot convert it into an economic ben-
efit and wellbeing? The practice of using (abusing) political power
for economic ends became especially widespread under Bakiyev’s
presidency (Kurmanbek Bakiyev became the President of Kyrgyzstan
in 2005 as a result of the so-called ‘Tulip revolution’ that overthrew
the first President of the independent Kyrgyzstan – Askar Akayev),
and unfortunately it continues even today. The KIC Report empha-
sizes: ‘[R]acketeering had an ethnic dimension, as the membership
of criminal networks was primarily Kyrgyz whereas southern busi-
nessmen were mainly Uzbek. Small and medium entrepreneurs in
particular were in a vulnerable position. Café owners and car repair
shopkeepers suffered the most. The money they were required to
pay to criminal groups rose constantly and threatened to make the
businesses unviable. “Raiding”, the forced sale of a profitable busi-
ness for a token sum, was also widespread’ (paragraph 116 of the
Report). If during Akayev’s reign there were certain limits to such
extortion, under Bakiyev, this all took the form of almost official
racketeering. Such a situation could not last indefinitely, and when
all the other components for the explosion came together, it was a
relatively minor incident and rumours (by the way, exaggerated, dis-
torted and spread over social media, which seems to be widespread
practice in various conflictual situations) that triggered a bloody
inter-ethnic clash. As a result, during three days of clashes more
than 400 people, mostly ethnic Uzbeks, were killed and thousands of
houses burnt, other property destroyed or looted. Having studied all
the evidence and the Kyrgyz Inquiry Commission considered that
‘if the evidence of the acts identified above committed during of
the attacks on the mahallas [a traditional Uzbek neighbourhood]
were proven beyond reasonable doubt in front of a competent court
of law that court would conclude that they constituted crimes
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against humanity. Therefore the KIC is of the opinion that these acts
would qualify as crimes against humanity’.26
This sad example is especially important as a warning since
Kyrgyzstan has been often touted as an example to be followed by
other Central Asian countries in terms of democratisation and indi-
vidual liberties. It had also undergone one of those ‘pro-democracy’
‘colour revolutions’ welcomed and supported by the West. However,
like in many other situations, it was not shoots of democracy, but
that of anarchy and chaos, that prevailed. Notwithstanding post-
crisis constitutional referendum, the end of 2010 Parliamentary and
2011 Presidential elections, the situation in Kyrgyzstan remains
potentially explosive since none of the underlying factors that led to
the June 2010 bloody tragedy have been seriously addressed.27 An
International Crisis Group (ICG) report of March 2012 that speaks of
widening ethnic divisions in Kyrgyzstan’s South found that ‘while a
superficial quiet has settled on the city [Osh], neither the Kyrgyz nor
Uzbek community feels it can hold.’28
4. BACK TO CHINA: REFORMS NOT REVOLUTION
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson write: ‘There was a real sense
in 1989 that the Tiananmen Square demonstrations would lead to
greater opening and perhaps even the collapse of the communist
regime’.29 However, they do not even reflect on what would have
replaced the communist regime in China. What would have been
the chance that the collapse ‘the communist regime’ would have
resulted in, or at least would have been followed by, some kind of
movement towards liberal democracy, which would have continued
market reforms? Anybody who has some knowledge of Chinese
26 Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry into the Events

in Southern Kyrgyzstan in June 2010. Helsinki, May 2011, para. 266 (http://www.cmi
.fi/black-sea-and-central-asia/kyrgyzstan-inquiry-commission.html).
27 See, e.g., I. Greenberg, ‘Cenral Asia’s simmering instability’, The National
Interest, 9 August, 2012.
28 ICG Asia Report No. 222, Kyrgyzstan: Widening Ethnic Divisions in the South,
29 March 2012.
29 D. Acemoglu, J. Robinson, Why Nations Fails: The Origins of Power, Prosperity
and Poverty, p. 440.
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98 Chapter Three
history and today’s problems and challenges, should be shivering,

when soberly reflecting on the state of today’s world, and not only of
China, had the Chinese leaders allowed American advisors, as
President Yeltsin of Russia did, to experiment on their country. Not
only the United States, but the world community as whole, even
without the current financial and economic crisis, would not have
been able to cope with the turmoil that could have realistically
engulfed China if the authorities were to have suddenly lost control.
As we will discuss below, external assistance in carrying out political
and economic reforms, even in relatively small countries that have
had their regime changes, has its limits. If reforms go astray in a
country like China, the whole world community would be helpless.
In today’s world, instability in even a small African country may have
effects that are not limited only to that country or region. That is why
in the 1990s, not only the ECOWAS (the Economic Community of
Western African States) but the West too chose to intervene in the
civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Instability in China would
shock the world and no outside intervention could prevent an insta-
bility that would negatively affect not only China and its neighbours,
but the whole world.
Acemoglu and Robinson, correctly emphasising the character
and role of political and economic institutions in making a society
either prosperous or poor, differentiate between extractive and
inclusive institutions.30 If the former cater for the governing minor-
ity and reflect their interests, the latter represent the population as
whole, and it is they that take account of the interests of various
groups in society. Such institutions are usually paired: extractive
economic institutions correspond to extractive political institutions,
and vice versa, inclusive economic and political institutions also as a
rule go hand in hand, though there may be, usually only temporary,
discord between them. For example, today’s China, as Acemoglu and
Robinson explain, has relatively inclusive economic institutions that
coexist with wholly extractive political institutions. While extractive
institutions make societies poor, inclusive ones form the basis of
success. However, as with practically all even profound and eloquent
30 Acemoglu, Robinson, op. cit, p. 439.
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(sometimes especially with the profound and eloquent, as we dis-

cussed above) studies that try to single out one factor or a single phe-
nomenon that, at the end of the day, makes all the difference
between success and failure, they too seem to considerably simplify
reality in order to keep their theory profound and eloquent. For
example, they recognise that while Chinese economic institutions
have become relatively inclusive, extractive political institutions
severely limit the role of economic institutions and put brakes on
Chinese economic development. Theoretically, or abstractly if you
like, this is correct. But the devil is not only, as it is usually said, in the
details, but also in the concrete circumstances of time and place.
Not all political institutions that are neither democratic nor inclu-
sive, in terms of Acemoglu’s and Robinson’s definition, are entirely
extractive either (i.e. the authorities do not necessarily exploit the
people for the purpose of grabbing for themselves and their retain-
ers as much as possible). Although as a general principle, the idea of
extractive and inclusive institutions and the correspondence
between them is interesting and even useful, it is only if it is not
absolutised and relied upon as the ultimate explanation for the suc-
cess and failure of all societies - there a quite a few examples show-
ing that what the authors call extractive political institutions, but
what would be more accurately defined as authoritarian or semi-
authoritarian, may co-exist with and even be beneficial for inclu
sive economic institutions, at least for a while. Moreover, let us
take some liberal democracies (say, the United States), whose
institutions – both political and economic – should all be, as if by
definition, inclusive, i.e. not extractive. But can we indeed honestly
say that they are all entirely inclusive? A careful reading of the latest
works of some serious American economists31 testifies that at
least some American economic institutions are rather extractive,
i.e. they benefit more the upper 1% of the population than the rest.
As Joseph Stiglitz writes (not about China, but about the United
States), ‘[W]hen the wealthiest use their political power to benefit
31 See, e.g., J. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society
Endangers Our Future, W.W. Norton & Company, 2012; J. Sachs, The Price of
Civilization. Economics and Ethics after the Fall, The Bodley Head, 2011.
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100 Chapter Three
excessively the corporations they control, much needed revenues

are diverted into the pockets of a few instead of benefiting society at
large’.32 And this is a comment that also applies to political institu-
tions, not only economic ones. It is the former that allow the latter to
be used in an extractive manner.
An article by B. Bueno de Mesquita, G.W. Downs, probably inad-
vertently, reveals the sensitivity and delicacy of Western human
rights diplomacy and the promotion of democracy in non-Western
countries. These American authors are right in observing that today
there are some autocrats who open up the economies of their coun-
tries, carry out successful market-oriented reforms, but suppress
civil and political rights.33 Indeed, there are. However, there is noth-
ing new in this. Chile under General Pinochet, South Korea under
military rule and Taiwan until relatively recently have all had such
autocrats in power. The authors of the article, however, lament that
today’s autocrats, while granting their populations so-called ‘stand-
ard public goods’, such as public transportation, primary and sec-
ondary education and public health, all which contribute to
economic growth, restrict so-called ‘coordination goods’, such as
civil and political rights. The reason for such policies is quite obvi-
ous. As the authors themselves state, ‘… the suppression of coordina-
tion goods keeps autocrats in power. An autocrat who permits both
freedom of the press and civil liberties reduces the chances that he
will survive for another year by about 15 to 20 percent’. Asking what
the West or international bodies have to do about it, the authors
answer: ‘…the United States, the European Union, aid agencies and
other donors must keep exerting pressure to change’.34 To put it oth-
erwise, they call on such regimes to voluntarily opt for regime
change, since by opening up their societies to civil and political
rights autocrats shorten their life expectancy (at least in political
terms, though in some countries in physiological as well), as the
authors rather convincingly prove. If the regimes do not voluntarily
32 Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, p. 83.

33 B. Bueno de Mesquita, G.W. Downs, ‘An open economy, a closed society’,
International Herald Tribune, 17 August, 2005.
34 Ibid.
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shorten their rule, the West must keep exercising pressure until
they go.
Does this mean that the West should have pressured, for example,
Mohamad Mahathir of Malaysia or Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore out
of office because they secured to their people only ‘standard public
goods’? We do not think so. Limitation on some civil and political
rights, such as the freedoms of expression or association, though
deplorable, should not be cause for exercising pressure on the lead-
ership with the aim of getting them out of office, especially if the
population itself does not actively demand such change and the
leadership indeed secures ‘standard public goods’. The problem is
that only very few authoritarian rulers secure ‘standard public goods’,
while some dictators (such as General Pinochet of Chile or the mili-
tary rulers of Argentina, supported by Washington) become too
bloody and start using repression to quell popular discontent. Then
even successful market reforms should not save autocrats from pres-
sure that may indeed get them out of office. But until autocrats
deliver, and do not turn bloody (like General Pinochet), there is no
reason for undermining them, since one may instead have non-
delivering autocrats in power.
Acemoglu and Robinson write that ‘first, growth under authori-
tarian, extractive political institutions in China, though likely to con-
tinue for a while, yet will not translate into sustained growth,
supported by truly inclusive economic institutions and creative
destruction. Second, contrary to the claims of modernization theory,
we should not count on authoritarian growth leading to democracy
or inclusive political institutions’.35 Both of these thoughts also ring
true, and the authors illustrate their point by showing how in vari-
ous countries the attempts of economic reforms under autocratic
regimes have failed.36 However, are we not here in a kind of catch-22
situation? Under extractive political institutions inclusive economic
institutions either do not materialize or even if they do emerge, they
would not be sustainable; and in any case, relatively inclusive eco-
nomic institutions, like those in today’s China, do not necessarily
35 Acemoglu, Robinson, op. cit., p. 445.

36 Ibid., pp. 446–448.
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102 Chapter Three
lead to inclusive political institutions or democracy. It is true that

inclusive economic institutions do not automatically lead to democ-
racy or inclusive political institutions, but they certainly support
and facilitate the emergence and development of the latter. But for
this tendency to materialise those, whose interests would be realised
by inclusive political institutions (usually the majority of the peo-
ple), should work and sometimes even fight hard. As the experience
of several countries (e.g., South Korea, Taiwan) testifies, relatively
inclusive economic institutions form a basis for sustainable political
reforms and democratisation. If we compare the two biggest end-of-
the-twentieth-century social, political and economic reforms in
China under Deng Xiaoping and in the Soviet Union under
Gorbachev – I would put my money on the Chinese experiment,
where changes were started by gradual, localised and calibrated eco-
nomic reforms. At the same time, we don’t believe that, due to vari-
ous reasons, such a blueprint of reforms would have been possible in
the Soviet Union, but this is a different matter and there is more
about that in the chapter on regime changes in Russia. For the USSR
under Gorbachev, the Chinese model of reforms would have been all
but impossible.
One of the differences between Deng Xiaoping’s and Gorbachev’s
reforms, as correctly observed by some experts,37 was that while
Deng started with reforming the economy (first rural, and only later
urban) leaving the political regime intact, Gorbachev pursued politi-
cal and economic reforms simultaneously. However, Gorbachev
could not start any serious economic reforms without first getting
rid of his Politburo colleagues, for whom the colour of the cat was
more important than its mice-catching abilities. This, combined
with the multi-ethnic character of the USSR, which in itself was a
legacy of the Czarist Empire, inevitably led to the collapse of this
multi-ethnic Leviathan.
By now it should be clear that China’s model of modernization
has been successful while Russia’s way of introducing simultaneous
political and economic ‘shock therapies’ was quite disastrous. Dmitri
37 See, e.g., A.C. Lynch, ‘Deng’s and Gorbachev’s Reform Strategies Compared’,
Russia in Global Affairs, 24 June 2012.
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Trenin writes: ‘In 1990, Russia’s GDP had been roughly the size
of China’s. Two decades later, China’s was four times as large as
Russia’s’.38 Since 1990 the number of people in poverty in China has
fallen by more than 300 million, which is a great contribution to
global progress toward the implementation of the UN Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs).39 In fact, it should be clear by now that
without China’s reduction of poverty (plus India’s smaller but still
significant contribution), it would be impossible for humankind to
achieve the MDG target of halving the share of the population living
in poverty by 2015. Since 1978 more than 600 million Chinese people
have been lifted out of poverty, an achievement of staggering pro-
portions. And the significant role of the Chinese state in these trans-
formations has to be emphasised. Wang Hui, who is often critical of
the Chinese state (and of other states as well), in underlining the
important, and even increasing role of the state in the world, writes
on the reasons for the successful transformations in China:
Next, the role of the state is undergoing transformation not only
within the realm of global relations but in domestic relations as well.
Simple descriptions of the role of the Chinese state as “totalitarian”
often confuse the positive with the negative aspects of the role of the
state. China did not undergo “shock therapy” in its period of reform, as
did Russia but was significantly more skilled at economic regulation
than the latter country. That the Chinese financial system has shown
itself to be relatively stable is due to the fact China has not entirely
pursued the neoliberal path, and this is the product of conscious pol-
icy planning rather than the limitations imposed by social move-
ments, social contradictions and the socialist tradition.40
Fantasising for a moment and assuming that eventually most of the
countries in the world, including the major powers such as China
and Russia, will all be democracies, let us ask: will such a world be
free of major tensions and conflicts? We do not think so, and the
38 D. Trenin, Post-Imperium: The Dynamics of Former Soviet Eurasia, Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace, 2011 (Kindle version), loc. 1903.
39 China’s Progress Towards the Millennium Development Goals 2008. Report:
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China – the United Nations
System in China, p. 4.
2011, p. xxvii.
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104 Chapter Three
reason is not only that the rivalry over energy resources, food and
water and many other scarcities will remain; there would also
remains the question: who will lay down the law in such a ‘demo-
cratic paradise’. Is the United States ready to follow the lead of a
democratic People’s Republic of China, accept Chinese recipes for
the solution of Middle Eastern conflicts and put its military under
Chinese command in certain world troublespots? Hardly. As Trenin
writes, ‘[T]he question is over the direction of China’s foreign policy,
should more nationalistic trends prevail in Beijing, either as a result
of hardening of the stance of the subsequent Communist Party lead-
ership or as a result of the fall of the communist dynasty and the emer-
gence of a more democratic, nationalistic, and warlike China. This
may be the horizon of 2025–2030’.41 Like in the case of the current
changes in the Arab world, more democratic does not at all equal
more Western oriented. Therefore the future of the world will
depend on, among many other factors, (1) what would be the reac-
tion of the rest of the world, especially that of Washington and its
allies, to China’s rise and (2) how will Beijing use its increasing
strength?
5. THE WORLD’S REACTION TO CHINA’S RISE
Since the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms started
China has witnessed accelerating economic development, and even
the world financial and economic crisis of 2007–2009 only slowed
down GDP growth to a level that for most world economies would
have been a blessing. China’s military expenditure, though in abso-
lute terms well below that of the United States, in percentage to
GDP, is one of the world’s highest. Never, since the fifteenth century
Ming dynasty’s admiral Zheng He’s navigations to far-away places,
has Beijing been so active, not only in Asia but also on other conti-
nents.42 And although China has mainly been interested in the
41 Trenin, op. cit., loc. 1935.

42 See, e.g., C. Aleden, Zhang Chun, B. Mariani, S. Large, ‘China’s Growing Role in
African Post-Conflict Reconstruction’, Global Review (SIIS), 2012, No. 1;
R.Baker, Zhixing Zhang, ‘The Paradox of China’s Naval Strategy’, Stratfor, 17 July 2012.
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mineral and energy resources of those far-away places, Beijing is also

participating in post-conflict reconstruction in African countries,
helping them build infrastructure objects as well as special trade
and economic cooperation zones, and China’s terms of loans tend
to be better than those from Western companies.43 As Deborah
Brautigam concludes, while ‘Westerners support government and
democracy, the Chinese build roads and dams’.44 Zambian econo-
mist and writer Dambisa Moyo observes that ‘[I]n 2009, China
became Africa’s largest trading partner. Chinese foreign direct
investment (FDI) is also steadily increasing. In 2010, China’s FDI in
Zambia topped $1bn, creating 15,000 jobs, and estimates for 2011
have the figure above $2,4bn. In exchange for copper and other
resources, China is providing Zambia with much needed capital
investment, jobs, and infrastructure’.45 Dr Moyo emphasises her
first-hand experience of the positive impact that Chinese invest-
ment has had on her country, and she is astonished that Chinese
investments in Africa have garnered so much criticism in Western
media. As she points out, Chinese investments in Africa stand
favourably against the Washington led invasions of other resource
rich countries, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, in a bid to gain domin-
ion over scarce resources.46 In his speech to the gathering of
African leaders on 19th July 2012 in Beijing, President Hu Jintao
pledged to lend $20 billion to African governments for infrastructure
and agriculture in the next three years.47 Nevertheless, an article
in the New York Times that informed the readership about this fact
did not, however, fail to make the traditional Western comments
about China’s relations with African countries: Beijing is offering
its aid ‘without conditioning it on human rights performance or
governance’ (i.e. without interfering in the internal affairs of
African states), its projects — roads, pipelines and ports — have
43 D. Brautigam, ‘Africa’s Eastern Promise’, Foreign Affairs online, 5 January, 2010.

44 Ibid.
45 D. Moyo, ‘If I Ruled the World: We need a global framework that follows
China’s lead’, Prospect, 12 July 2012, p. 6.
46 Ibid.
47 J. Perlez, ‘With $20 Billion Loan Pledge, China Strengthens Its Ties to African
Nations’, New York Times, 19 July 2012.
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106 Chapter Three
focused on benefiting China’s extractive industries, not the African

people, and China uses its own workers to carry out most of these
projects.
Beijing has also activated, as Joshua Kurlantzick calls it, its ‘charm-
offensive’. He observes that ‘polls show that people in Africa and
Latin America have more positive feelings toward China than toward
the United States’48 and a 2005 BBC poll carried out in twenty two
countries across several continents found that a majority believed
China plays a more positive role in the world than the United
States.49 This has set alarm-bells ringing in Western capitals, and
raised concerns among some of China’s neighbours, such as Russia,
Kazakhstan, Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. American histo-
rian Arthur Herman, though pouring vitriol more on the American
Democratic Administration in the United States than China, sounds
quite hysterical: ‘By their carelessness Congress and the Obama
administration are steadily handing over control of America’s eco-
nomic and financial future to a handful of Chinese officials and gen-
erals in Beijing’.50 Another Asian rising star – India, which has had
strained relations with its North-Eastern neighbour, is also worried
since ‘as China’s and India’s economies continue to grow, the two
countries will vie for greater influence, competing for both markets
and resources’.51 China’s rise is met with as much enthusiasm as fear.
Neighbours may be alarmed by its growing might, but there is greater
support from other continents. However, even those who dislike
China, or are afraid or envious of the rising Middle Kingdom should
wish it well, since without China the current crisis would have been
much more serious, and longer term economic perspectives would
be rather bleak.
How will Washington and Beijing behave in the process of a
change in their relative powers? One positive factor may be that
China and America are economically and financially so interlocked
and interdependent that one cannot seriously hurt the other
48 J. Kurlantzick, Charm Offensive. How China’s Soft Power is Transforming the

World, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 9.
49 Ibid.
50 A. Herman, ‘China’s Debt Bomb’, The Washington Post, 8 February, 2010.
51 B. Peer, ‘Clash of the Tigers’, Foreign Affairs online, 6 January, 2010.
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without suffering itself; they are locked in a so-called ‘mutually

assured economic destruction’ (MAED instead of the Cold War
period MAD between the US and the USSR). However, Arthur
Herman, in his desire to attack both President Obama and China, is
more alarmist and not as certain of such a linkage working: ‘Today,
some experts argue that rational self-interest will prevent China
from waging this kind of economic warfare, because crippling the
U.S. would also severely wound its own economy. However, on an
issue like Taiwan or Japan, rational judgment can take a backseat to
national pride, and the desire to reverse old humiliations’.52 Once
again, there is almost a visceral assumption that it is only Beijing,
not Washington, which may act irrationally, even contrary to its own
rational self-interest (still, as defined in Washington). It is not clear
why Herman refers to Japan, but it seems pretty certain that a
stronger China will react even more forcefully to any attempts to test
Beijing’s position on issues that the country’s leadership, and also
importantly the Chinese people, consider as ‘non-negotiables’:
Taiwan, Tibet and Xingjian as integral parts of China. On these issues
any serious challenge will indeed result in a strong reaction from
Beijing. Moreover, as American experts Graham Fuller and Frederick
Starr write, ‘it would be unrealistic to rule out categorically American
willingness to play the “Uighur card” as a means of exerting pressure
on China in the event of some future crisis or confrontation’.53
Charles Horner also believes that ‘China’s problems in Xingjian can-
not but become a temptation for the United States if a future dete-
rioration in Sino-American relations focuses attention on China’s
most deeply-seated structural weaknesses’.54 The same considera-
tions apply to Tibet as well. This must indeed be on Chinese minds,
and who could blame them for that. Then, there are of course the
maritime delimitation disputes in the South China Sea between
China, Brunei, Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam, in which the
52 A. Herman, op.cit.
53 Graham E. Fuller and S. Frederick Starr, The Xingjian Problem, Central Asia-
Caucasus Institute, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The
Johns Hopkins University, 2006, p. 46.
54 C. Horner, ‘The Other Orientalisms: China’s Islamist Problem’, The National
Interest, No. 67, Spring, 2002, p. 45.
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108 Chapter Three
United States takes a keen interest,55 and which may trigger conflicts
if not handled cautiously.56
Many in Washington see America’s trade deficit and dependence
on Chinese credit as a national security problem, rather than merely
an economic predicament. China, which emerged fairly unscathed
from the global recession, clearly considers itself to be on a roll. One
(unnamed) Chinese official was reported to have told the Financial
Times: “We used to see the U.S. as our teacher but now we realize
that our teacher keeps making mistakes and we’ve decided to quit
the class. Market capitalism is so yesterday, state capitalism so now.
A new role model for the developing world: state, authoritarian capi-
talism.’57 Even before the world financial and economic crisis of
2007–2009 (and still continuing at the time of writing) some experts
had argued that so-called authoritarian capitalism might be a work-
able substitute model of the development for liberal-democracy.
The current crisis, which started in the liberal-democratic West and
spread all over the world (affecting China less than most countries)
gives additional weight to the understanding that not only are there
other models of modernisation and development besides liberal
democracy and liberal markets, but also that liberal democracies, in
order to continue prospering may have to learn several things from
China. So, British journalist and economist Anatole Kaletsky in an
article with the intriguing title of ‘We need new capitalism to take on
China’ writes: ‘As a leading US diplomat told me: “Since the crisis,
developing countries have lost interest in the old Washington con-
sensus that promoted democracy and liberal economics. Wherever I
go in the world, governments and business leaders talk about the
new Beijing consensus—the Chinese route to prosperity and power.
The West must come up with a new model of capitalism that’s con-
sistent with our political values. Either we reinvent ourselves or we
55 See, e.g., Cooperation from Strength: The United States, China and the South
China Sea, Center for a New American Security, January, 2012.
56 See, e.g., a special issue of the Italian journal of international relations The
International Spectator, No 2 of June 2012 ‘A Rising China and Its Strategic Impact’
and especially Michael Yahuda’s ‘China’s Recent Relations with Maritime
Neighbours’ in the same issue (pp. 30–44).
57 I. Stelzer, ‘China v. world as a trade war comes closer’, The Sunday Times,
February 14, 2010.
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will lose.”58 And Kaletsky concludes that ‘if the West isn’t to slide into
irrelevance, governments must be much more active in taking con-
trol of the economy’.
The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union
were followed by the emergence of dozens of small or medium sized
new states, many of which almost by default chose Western style lib-
eral democracy and free markets. Politically they exercised band-
wagonning, i.e. joining the stronger and victorious side. Their choice
was dictated not only by strategic calculations, but also for ideologi-
cal reasons; having shed off Moscow’s domination, which empha-
sised collective values, they naturally opted for Western institutions
and values. This may have given additional grounds to the belief that
eventually the whole world would become westernized, i.e. the
liberal-democratic free market model was seen as triumphant.
However, this was not to be the case. Countries such as China, Russia
as well as many others could not, and in the case of China even did
not attempt, to join this victorious club. If Yeltsin’s Russia attempted
to follow the Western lead and failed miserably, China never tried to
do it at all. Moreover, Beijing, having seen what had happened to the
Soviet Union and Russia, has become even firmer in its resolve not to
repeat the Soviet or Russian experience.
John Ikenberry takes a relatively optimistic view on China’s rise.
However, his vision is to a great extent premised on the assumption
that differently from all earlier international systems, which were
dominated by a leading power that had always been eventually
forced to give up its leadership to a new power, the United States, as
a leading state, has purposefully worked on the creation of an inter-
national system of liberal-democratic capitalist states of universal
appeal that is ‘hard to overturn and easy to join’.59 This is a Hegelian,
Marxist or Fukuyamean ‘the-end-of-history-and-the-last-man’ type
vision of the evolution of the world towards a final universal model.
All such projects, envision they a worldwide Christendom, Islamic
Caliphate, communist paradise or liberal-democratic free-market
58 The Times, February 4, 2010.

59 G.J. Ikenberry, ‘The rise of China and the future of the West: Can the Liberal
System Survive?’, Foreign Affairs, 2008, vol. 87, No. 1, p. 28.
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110 Chapter Three
capitalism are doomed. The world is simply too big, too complicated
and too diverse to be governed or led from one centre, to evolve in
the same direction and to the same final destination. Although at
the end of the process of our journey from an African village to a
global megalopolis, Homo sapiens, although competing, cooperat-
ing and borrowing from each other, will in some important respects
indeed, as we believe, become a bit more similar to one another,
the world will never become uniform, be it Christian, Muslim, com-
munist or liberal-democratic. Moreover, the absence of competing
models of development will inevitably lead to stagnation. Chris
topher Hayes believes that ‘we tend to view China as posing an alter-
native and threatening model for the future, one that’s by turns
seductive and repulsive, the source of envy and contempt. But after
a while I wondered if we aren’t in some way converging with our sup-
posed rival. China has managed the transition from a repressive,
authoritarian, impoverished country to an industrial, corporatist oli-
garchy by allowing a loud and raucous debate while also holding
tightly onto power. Perhaps we are moving toward the same end
from a democratic direction, the roiling public debate and political
polarization obscuring the fact that power and money continue to
collect and pool among an elite that increasingly views itself as
besieged on all sides by a restive and ungrateful populace’.60 Martin
Jacques, placing emphasis on the cultural differences between
Western and East Asian societies, recognizes nevertheless that
‘indeed, an important characteristic of all Asian modernities, includ-
ing Japan’s, is their hybrid nature, the combination of different ele-
ments, indigenous and foreign’61 and that ‘we have moved from the
era of either/or to one characterized by hybridity’.62 David Brooks is
of the opinion that ‘if Asia’s success reopens the debate between
individualism and collectivism (which seemed closed after the cold
war), then it’s unlikely that the forces of individualism will sweep
the field or even gain an edge’ and that ‘the rise of China isn’t only
an economic event. It’s a cultural one. The ideal of a harmonious
60 C. Hayes, ‘The Great Leap’, The Nation, 11 January, 2010.

61 M. Jacques, When China Rules the World. The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and
the End of the Western World, Allen Lane, 2009, p. 137.
62 Ibid., p. 415.
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collective may turn out to be as attractive as the ideal of the

American Dream’.63 Professor Barry Buzan from the London School
of Economics observes that ‘within China an effort is emerging to
promote some of the principles from the Confucian order as a more
collectivist, harmonious alternative to the conflictual individualism
of most Western international relations thinking’.64
It is not only that liberal democracy is not as universal a model for
the world as is believed by many in the West. It is also that in
world politics size matters. The economic success of authoritarian
Singapore, South Korea or Taiwan did not undermine the belief in
the eventual triumph of liberal democracy not only because these
countries indeed borrowed heavily from the West; they were also too
small to serve as examples to follow. China is in a different category.
Lord Peter Mandelson is, of course, right in observing that ‘Europe
and the U.S. need to recognize that China will not simply accept a
model of global governance or multilateralism that it played no part
in designing, or which it feels does not reflect the imperative of its
growth and stability’.65 Therefore, the calls that often come from the
West that a stronger China will have to take on more responsibilities
and behave like ‘a responsible stakeholder’, paraphrasing the then
US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick,66 sound a bit disin-
genuous, since a strong China will inevitably have its own, and often,
though not necessarily always, different from Western, understand-
ings of the concept of ‘a responsible stakeholder’. Hugh White
is right that ‘we should not mistake China’s reluctance to shoulder
the burdens of leadership, as they are defined by Washington, for
reluctance to exercise power in pursuit of its own agenda. From
Beijing’s perspective, Washington’s definition of the responsibilities
63 D. Brooks, ‘Harmony and the Dream’, International Herald Tribune, 11 August,

2008.
64 B. Buzan, ‘China in International Society: Is “Peaceful Rise” Possible?’, The
Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2010, vol. 3, p. 8.
65 P. Mandelson, ‘We Want China to Lead’, International Herald Tribune, 11
February 2010.
66 China’s Role in the World: Is China a Responsible Stakeholder? Statement by
Thomas J. Christensen, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific
Affairs before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, August 3,
2006.
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112 Chapter Three
of leadership reflects American interests, not necessarily China’s.

China will not shoulder the burden of protecting the US-led interna-
tional order where that does not suit its interests, but it will happily
use its power to serve its own interests where it can. The Chinese are
quite ready for prime-time, but they will sing their own song’.67
Stephanie T. Kleine-Ahlbrandt of the International Crisis Group
(ICG), for example, produced a list of the requests Washington
imposed on China regarding foreign policy issues such as adapting
the Western approach to Iran’s nuclear programme, to North Korea,
to Afghanistan and to a host of other issues where American and
Chinese interests overlap only partly (e.g., Beijing, like the rest of the
world, doesn’t want to see Iran as a nuclear-weapon power, but
China has considerable economic interests in Iran, and for various
reasons it ‘lacks the West’s sense of urgency about the Iran nuclear
issue’68). Kleine-Ahlbrandt, however, writes that ‘Beijing remains
highly reluctant to take on more burdens – whether economic, polit-
ical, or military – preferring to free-ride’.69 But what about a possible
Chinese list of requests to the United States’ foreign policy that may
include, for example, Washington’s assistance towards a peaceful
reintegration of Taiwan with China, or giving up on talking about
China’s human rights record, persuading the Dalai Lama to come
closer to Beijing’s vision of the future of Tibet, or inviting Beijing to
become actively involved in the Middle East where China has con-
siderable energy interests, or instead of increasing its military pres-
ence in the Far East withdrawing from the region? For many in the
West such requests may sound preposterous, but so do some
American requests, if looked at from Beijing. Politicians as well as
peoples have to learn to see the world not only from their own per-
spective; they have to try to step as much as possible into the shoes
of the Other. Dominique Moἵsi makes a valid point in writing that
the Americans will have to start to take into account the views of
67 H. White, The China Choice: Why America should Share Power, Black Inc.,
2012, (Kindle version), loc. 648.
68 International Crisis Group. Asia Briefing No. 100, The Iran Nuclear Issue: The
View from Beijing, 17 February 2010, p. 16.
69 S. Kleine-Ahlbrandt, ‘Beijing, Global Free Rider’, Foreign Policy, 12 November
2009.
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those who are becoming their equals, and that they will have to learn
to understand and recognize other cultures.70 So far, Washington
has responded to a rising China by changing its strategic priorities.
In November 2011 President Obama declared the Asia-Pacific region
to be ‘a top priority’ of the US security policy. In June 2012, Leon
Panetta, the American Secretary of defence, announced that by 2020
60% of the US navy, which would include six aircraft carriers, the
majority of American cruisers, destroyers, combat ships and subma-
rines, would be concentrated in that region.71 Naturally, Beijing
sees these moves as aimed at China, and who could believe that they
are not. As Dr Yang Jiemian, the President of the Shanghai Institutes
for International Studies, explained to me during our meeting on
20th July 2012, current Washington’s ‘pivot’ to Asia is a delayed reac-
tion to China’s rise. Delayed, first, by 9/11 and the resulting wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, and then by the world financial and economic
crisis, which started in the United States. If politically and economi-
cally Washington had already earlier (both under the G.W. Bush and
Obama administrations) turned its attention to the Asia-Pacific
region, in 2011–2012 also a military component followed.
The West, and especially Washington, needs a lot of wisdom and
ironically Chinese-style patience to respond to China’s ‘peaceful
rise’. Of course, equally important is the other side of the equation:
whether the rising Dragon will always remain hidden, and keep a
cool head, as Deng Xiaoping advised.
6. FROM WESTERNIZATION TO SINIFICATION?
Although Deng Xiaoping advised his countrymen to keep a cool

head, maintain a low profile and to never take the lead while the
same time aiming to do something big, it is doubtful that a country,
which is increasingly becoming powerful both in absolute as well as
in relative terms, will forever keep a low profile and refuse to take the
lead. It is also doubtful that a strong and self-confident China will
always keep a low profile. If the United States is a status quo power in
70 D. Moἵsi, The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and

Hope Are Reshaping the World, Doubleday Books, 2009 p. 185.
71 www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18305750 (last visited 5 June 2012).
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114 Chapter Three
the sense that it seeks to maintain and consolidate its dominant

position in the world (notwithstanding that by trying to export
‘democracy’, to, say, post-Soviet space or the Middle East, Washington
is seeking to change these areas, but even these policies are aimed at
consolidating American domination in these regions, i.e. their pur-
pose is a purpose of a status quo power), China in that respect may
indeed be seen as a revisionist power.72 Of interest in this respect is
an article by Chinese scholar Feng Yongping entitled The Peaceful
Transition of Power from the UK to the US, who ends his historical
study with the unmistakable conclusion: ‘[F]rom the perspective of
China, which can be considered in a similar state to the United
States at that time [i.e. when Washington at the end of the nine-
teenth century-beginning of the twentieth century peacefully took
over from London the reins of world politics], the example of
successful transition undoubtedly holds deep implications and
provides a source for inspiration’.73 One can be sure that such an
idea does not inspire people in Washington. That is why, among
other issues such as Taiwan, Tibet, Xingjian and the trade imbalance,
references to China’s democracy deficit and human rights violations
may be used as an instrument to stop or slow down any potential
transition of power in the world. In the balance of power world, a
peaceful transfer of power has indeed been the exception. Moreover,
the most recent U.S. national security strategies are based on the
72 Barry Buzan, calling China a ‘reformist revisionist’ power, writes that

‘[A] reformist revisionist accepts some of the institutions of international society
for a mixture of calculated and instrumental reasons. But it resists, and wants to
reform, others, and possibly also wants to change its status. This sounds like the best
description of China’s positioning in contemporary international society’ (Buzan,
op. cit., p. 18). It is possible to agree with such characterisation of China’s position in
today’s world, which certainly contains seeds of serious conflicts with Western pow-
ers whose interests and values have moulded the current international society.
However, these potential conflicts become inevitable and unavoidable only if the
West or China insist in full and uncompromising realization of their respective
visions of the future of the world. Therefore compromises and acceptance of differ-
ences between societies as well as within societies are necessary for the avoidance
of conflicts (see more about that in R. Müllerson, Processes of Dissimilation and
Assimilation in Humankind’s Evolution: Will E Pluribus Unum Replace Ex Uno
Plures?, The Chinese Journal of International Law, 2010, Vol. 9, No. 2).
73 Feng Yongping, ‘The Peaceful Transition of Power from the UK to the US’, The
Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2006, No. 1, pp. 83–108.
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assumption of continuing American economic and military superi-

ority, and aim to help Washington shape the world and not to be
shaped by it; no strategic competitor is allowed to rise.74 If the US
cannot find a way of accommodating China’s rise (this doesn’t mean
that the America must inevitably accept ‘the Beijing’s consensus’,
but it cannot demand that China behaves according to ‘the Wash
ington consensus’ either) then serious conflicts will be inevitable.
Hugh White’s recommendation that of the three options available
for the United States in Asia (resisting China’s challenge and trying
to preserve Washington’s dominant role in Asia, stepping back from
its dominant role and leaving China attempting to establish its
hegemony in Asia instead of the American one, remaining in Asia on
a new basis allowing China a larger role but also maintaining a
strong presence of its own), ‘the best way for America to respond
to China’s growing power is to agree with China to share the leader-
ship of Asia’.75 And though, in White’s opinion, such an arrange-
ment would be very difficult to achieve, and even more difficult to
maintain, he believes that this is the only way ‘to avoid both the dan-
gers of Chinese domination and the risks of rivalry’ that is wrought
with possible military conflict. ‘The hope that America can maintain
uncontested leadership in Asia is therefore as illusory as the fear that
China will be able to dominate Asia in its place’,76 writes Hugh White.
For the first time in a long while, it is not primarily the Western
democracies, which are set to define the future of our Planet.
Dominique Moἵsi believes that we may soon find that centralized
non-democratic regimes like China are better prepared for eco-
nomic crises than American style democracies.77 However, taking
into account the complex character of the current international
system, and the fact that today it extends around the whole globe
and is composed of too many actors – both governmental and
non-governmental, it is doubtful that in contrast to previous inter-
national systems (like, say, the dual-hegemonic Cold War bi-polar
74 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, March 2006,
p. 43.
75 H. White, op.cit, loc. 1689.
76 Ibid., loc. 127.
77 D. Moἵsi, op. cit., p. 8.
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116 Chapter Three
system dominated by the US and the USSR respectively) there will

be any single centre, be it in the East or in the West, that could domi-
nate the whole international system.
In some respects Beijing’s behaviour as a leading state may even
differ positively from the conduct of previous dominant powers.
Firstly, there will be no return to colonialism, and therefore there
will not be a new Chinese empire, like there have been British,
Dutch, French or Russian. Secondly, Confucianism, in contradistinc-
tion to Christianity (or Islam for that matter) is not a proselytizing
religion (if it can be considered at all as a religion). Western univer-
salism and its attempts to turn all nations into liberal democracies
are intellectually and emotionally, as we attempted to show above,
based on Christianity’s universal call and the European Enlighten
ment’s legacy. A dominant China, even if forcefully advancing its
interests, may not necessarily try to convert its neighbours, and
especially Western liberal democracies, into Confucian autocracies.
As Barry Buzan believes, ‘[U]nlike the universalist pretensions of
American liberalism, “Chinese characteristics” points to a culturally
unique way of doing things that is not necessarily relevant to those
outside Chinese culture’.78 China’s history does provide us with a
reasonable basis for optimism. The former Prime Minister of
Australia (2010–2012) Kevin Rudd – a China specialist – has written
that ‘[T]he China that I have studied over the decades is one that has
not been in the business of invading other countries for more than
2,000 years. Nor has China sought to establish colonies around the
world, even though its navigational skills and naval capabilities dur-
ing the Ming Dynasty were considerably more advanced than those
of countries in the west’.79 This of course does not mean that the
‘Chinese ways of doing things’ will not influence other societies,
especially those who are culturally and geographically close to the
Middle Kingdom, but it seems reasonable to predict that China will
not be obsessed with the idea of regime change in order to make the
whole world look more like China.
There are grounds for believing that China will gradually become
more open not only economically and socially but also politically,
78 B. Buzan, op. cit., p. 21.

79 K. Rudd, ‘The west isn’t ready for the rise of China’, New Statesman, 11 July, 2012.
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i.e. China will grow more democratic. There are two arguments in
favour of such a view. Firstly, today’s China is already very different
from Mao’s China, and secondly, as we have seen in the case of some
East Asian and other countries (Chile, South Korea, Taiwan), eco-
nomic modernisation does indeed has a tendency to lead to political
reforms. However, some qualifications may be necessary. First, polit-
ical change in China will come about not due to external pressure,
which sometimes may even be counterproductive, but because of
domestic reasons and impulses (bottom up public demands as well
as top down reforms). Secondly, such reforms have to be cautious
and gradual; any political ‘shock therapy’ will be disastrous not only
for China but highly damaging for the rest of the world also. Thirdly,
even if China becomes more politically open, it will be quite differ-
ent from Western liberal-democracies. In contradistinction to its
smaller East Asian neighbours, which in the process of modernisa-
tion have adapted from the West not only technological, financial
and economic know-how, but also (often under pressure and in the
case of Japan through decades of occupation) quite a few political
institutions, China, due to its size, strength, successful reforms as
well as pride in its glorious history, will go at its own pace, and will be
less prone to borrowing from the West. Fourthly, a more open and
democratic China will not necessarily be more accommodating
towards the West; on the contrary, on some issues, especially on
those ‘non-negotiables’ (Taiwan, Xingjian and Tibet being integral
parts of China and probably also maritime delimitation disputes in
the South China Sea) a more democratic China may well be even
more assertive and less accommodative. It should not be taken for
granted that the Chinese people, when given free choice, would
decide on most issues as the American people do any more than the
Chinese authorities would decide like the American government.
Fifthly, a stronger China will mean that the so-called ‘Beijing con-
sensus’ will have greater impact in different parts of the world than
the ‘Washington consensus’ (due to the financial and economic cri-
ses this is already happening) and it would be more and more diffi-
cult to assert that a liberal-democratic future of the world will be
preordained. Finally, there is nothing gloomy in this picture, and it
does not at all mean that under Chinese pressure America, Great
Britain, France or Estonia will have to introduce Politburos and start
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118 Chapter Three
censuring the Internet. It has been the West, which due to its univer-
salising Christian religion and the Enlightenment’s legacy, as well as
more recent colonial and post-colonial dominance, that has had a
strong tendency and urge to westernise the whole world.80 China’s
history and religion have not shown tendency or strive for making
the rest of the world Confucian. But who knows?
80 After the collapse of communism, only liberal democratic and Islamic

extremists still have an ambition of creating a uniform world either in the form of
world-wide liberal democratic system or building an Islamic Caliphate.
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Regime Changes in Russia 119
Chapter Four
REGIME CHANGES IN RUSSIA: GORBACHEV,

YELTSIN AND PUTIN
1. UNDERSTANDING RUSSIA OR BELIEVING IN RUSSIA
For me, having lived, studied and worked for many years in Moscow,
it is sometimes amazing how little Westerners, and I include here
quite a few specialists and not only the man on the Clapham omni-
bus, as they put it in London, understand Russia. Usually everyone
remembers Winston Churchill’s characterisation of this big Eurasian
empire as ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’.1 Those
who are familiar with Russian culture, especially with her sublime
poetry, may quote one of the nineteenth century greatest poets
Fyodor Tyutchev, who wrote: ‘One cannot understand Russia by
reason,/ Cannot measure her by common measure,/ She is under a
special dispensation – / One can only believe in Russia’. However,
not all, who quote Churchill or even know Tyutchev’s poetry, remem-
ber that the great old man of British politics did not stop with the
words usually quoted. He continued and thought that perhaps at the
end of the day there may have been a key to solving this riddle, and
that key could well have been ‘Russian national interests’.
Churchill’s observations on Russia’s national interests, as the key
to understanding Russia’s behaviour in her external relations, has
to be taken seriously, though this observation necessitates an expli-
catory commentary: it was made, in my opinion, either too late
or too early; at a time when Russia’s continuity was interrupted
by the Bolshevik’s experiment, when there existed neither the
Russian Empire nor the current Russian Federation, but the com-
munist Soviet Union. The latter had rather peculiar understanding
of national interests, if they at all could be called national interests.
Let us explain what we have in mind.
1 Winston Churchill, first lord of the admiralty, radio broadcast, London, October 1,
1939.—Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963,ed. Robert Rhodes
James, vol. 6, p. 6161 (1974).
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120 Chapter Four
Some Western scholars have argued that, in contrast to Western

colonialism and expansionism, economic considerations did not
play a major role in Russian colonialism or expansionism; specifi-
cally, they have claimed that any economic motivation was practi-
cally absent in the Russian expansion into Central Asia.2 However,
for the foreign policy of Czarist Russia, economic factors certainly
played a significant role, even if they were not always of immediate
concern. Seymour Becker is right when he observes that Russia’s
aims, for example in the mid-nineteenth century Central Asia, were
both political and economic.3 Naturally, the same holds true for
British interests in that region and elsewhere. It was not only that
London was apprehensive lest it lose India to the Russians, who
indeed were toying with the idea of moving much further south than
the then limits of the Russian Empire4 (which, in Central Asia, were
finally established by the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907), but
London and Calcutta also tried to expand the markets for their goods
as far northward as possible, and to restrict the southward penetra-
tion of Russian merchants to areas too close to the British Raj. Like
London’s foreign policy, Washington’s foreign economic interests,
i.e. the interests of American capital and businesses, have always
played a determinative role. Stephen Kinzer makes the most valid
point observing that ‘spreading democracy, Christianising heathen
nations, building a strong navy, establishing military bases around
the world, and bringing foreign governments under American con-
trol were never ends in themselves. They were ways for the United
States to assure itself access to the markets, resources, and invest-
ment potential of distant lands.’5 Today we may also observe
that Washington’s ultimate aims, when promoting democracy in
2 See, e.g., W.C. Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia 1600–1914, The Free Press,
1992, p. 290.
3 S. Becker, Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865–1924,
Harvard University Press, 1968, p. 13.
4 Although today we may conclude that due to impenetrable Afghanistan inter-
posing between the Russians descending from the north and the British advancing
from the south neither could the Cossacks wash their boots in the Indian Ocean,
nor could Sepoys water their horses in the Siberian rivers.
5 S. Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq,
Time Books, 2006, p. 34.
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different parts of the world and effecting regime changes, are pri-
marily economic. But in contradistinction to the United States, or to
Czarist Russia for that matter, Soviet foreign policy did not, and even
was not meant to serve economic interests; on the contrary, more
often than not, Soviet foreign policy was a significant burden on its
economy. Soviet expansionism was motivated primarily by political,
military-strategic, and most importantly by ideological, considera-
tions. Eastern European countries of ‘peoples’ democracy’, which
were firmly under Soviet control, and especially so-called ‘countries
of socialist orientation’ (e.g., Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Mongolia
and Vietnam), with their Soviet imposed artificial, ineffective
planned economies, were much more a burden on the Soviet econ-
omy than a source of any profit. However, for the Kremlin it was not
profit, but the spread of socialist ideology and Soviet political influ-
ence that was the primary motivations of its foreign policy. Such dif-
fering accents between the foreign policies of the United States and
the Soviet Union may be explained by differences in their socioeco-
nomic systems – the former was, and is, a capitalist, market-oriented
system; the latter was a totalitarian, ideologically and politically ori-
ented system. Simplifying slightly, we may say that if the first makes
money using all available means, including political and military
tools, the second spends money in order to gain long-term political
and ideological influence. After the collapse of the Soviet Union,
with its utopian and warped ideology that believed in its mission to
make, at the end of the day, the whole world communist and there-
fore often acted counterproductively to its real material interests by
imposing its own ineffective political and economic systems on its
client regimes in Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa,
whom Moscow supported and maintained while throwing away bil-
lions of dollars, Russia seems to have learned the lesson. Today she
more or less tries to act in accordance with her genuine national
interests (as they are understood by the Kremlin, of course), and it is
more often the United States, together with its allies, who are carried
by the ideological zeal of remaking the world (though if you scratch
ideological slogans deep enough you will always discover tangible
economic interests). However a small caveat may be necessary.
Russia, as a country of state capitalism, sometimes subordinates the
interests of her private capital to the interests of the capitalist state
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122 Chapter Four
as a whole, as they are understood and defined by those in the

Kremlin. If in Russia, grosso modo and with some exceptions, the
Kremlin dominates Russian capitalists (what is good for the Kremlin,
is good for Russia), in America, it is big business and financial capital
that controls the White House and the Capitol Hill (what is good for
Ford is good for America). As one of the profoundest thinkers of the
past century John Kenneth Galbraith famously put it: ‘Under capital-
ism man exploits man: under communism, it is just the opposite.’6
However there is nowhere in today’s world, with the exception of
North Korea, actual experimentation of putting into practice dis-
torted communism ideals. Today Galbraith’s witticism characterises
more accurately the differences, or their absence thereof in any
important respect, between free market capitalism and state capital-
ism. Of course, here we only compare the accents and emphases of
two aspects or facets of the national interests of different countries.
Security, and primarily guaranteeing the physical security of the
state from outside attacks, as well as subversions or other kinds of
interferences, is intrinsically the number one foreign policy priority
of any state. Without guaranteeing these values, economic interests
cannot be secured either.
The attitude of Westerners towards Russia usually vacillates
between admiration and deep suspicion and fear, though the latter
usually prevails and the former, if we exclude classical Russian litera-
ture, music and ballet, is reserved for the policies of Presidents
Gorbachev and Yeltsin. If Gorbachev’s policies led to the dissolution
of the Soviet Union – the nemesis of the United States and the West
(for the Soviet people and the East and Central European nations
this was, of course, liberation from a totalitarian system), Yeltsin’s
policies resulted in robber capitalism, the oligarchisation of Russia’s
economy and politics as well as a weakening of Russia’s international
positions.
Of course, there are quite a few Western experts who know and
understand Russia well, and in this book we rely, inter alia, on their
knowledge and wisdom. For example, Daniel Treisman, in his well
6 Quoted from H.-J. Chang, Bad Samaritans. Rich Nations, Poor Policies & the
Threat to the Developing World, Random House Business Books, 2007, p. 103.
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researched and balanced book on Russia The Return: Russia’s Journey

from Gorbachev to Medvedev,7 emphasises that he had consciously
done his best ‘to avoid two familiar styles of writing about the coun-
try’ that seem to obscure more than they reveal about Russia. If one
approach focuses on the darker side of the country and presents
‘Russia as a land of deformity’, the second approach ‘is to turn mysti-
cal whenever Russia is mentioned’.8 Treisman’s book confirms that it
is possible to understand even Russia, provided there is enough
effort made and goodwill shown.
A prime, though a somewhat caricatural, example of the first cat-
egory of works on Russia as mentioned by Treisman, is Edward
Lucas’ book The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia
and the West (Bloomsbury, 2007). I can understand why many
Russian leaders in the rich tapestry of Russian history, where there is
indeed too much red (though even in this respect Russia is not so
unique at all), want to emphasise only the glorious victories, and see
only the wrongs committed against Russia and not by her; being
brought up in a closed society and brainwashed more than those
who were lucky enough to be born into freer societies, their narrow
viewpoints may be explained if not justified. Moreover, for politi-
cians, and even more so for military leaders, an attempt to assess
problems from all possible angles, and have a more sophisticated
view of the world, may lead to political or military-strategic paraly-
sis. Besides, while politicians are prisoners to their slogans, sound
bites and pre-election promises to the electorate and lobby groups,
military men are often overly instilled to the language of simple
commands. Hence, there emerges a black and white picture of the
world, and a vision based on the principle: ‘those who are not with
us are always against us’. However, I cannot comprehend how some-
body who, like Edward Lucas, was educated at the London School of
Economics and Political Science (LSE), cannot be more sophisti-
cated and open-minded. Why a writer, journalist and academic,
whose task should be to come as close to the truth as possible, while
never hoping of course to reach it, would straighten one’s narrative,
7 D. Treisman, The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev, Simon

Spotlight Entertainment, 2010.
8 Ibid., p. 2.
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124 Chapter Four
make it so mono-dimensional. Such views may be caused, in our

opinion, by a combination of what can be called the three D’s: Dis
like, Disappointment and Dread. Dislike, because Russia has indeed
all too often behaved like a big bully (though she is not the only, and
certainly not the first, in this category); Disappointment, since not-
withstanding ‘the 1990s promises’, she still refuses to become a ‘nor-
mal’ country and toe the line drawn up in Washington or Brussels;
and Dread, because suddenly this ‘abnormal’ entity is once again,
like the Phoenix, rising from the ashes and becoming more and
more assertive in protecting her interests, as she understands them.
Such an attitude towards Russia has not helped this big country
become more liberal and democratic domestically, and especially
not in showing her friendlier face externally. On the contrary, due to
such an attitude and expectations, Russia has become more prickly
externally, and prone to overreaction. Fear and hatred are not the
most reliable political guides, since they tend to subordinate facts to
preconceived ideas, i.e. to ideology. This was also noted by Barack
Obama, who – when still a senator – wrote that while ‘values are
faithfully applied to facts before us, ideology overrides whatever
facts call theory into question.’9 In that respect, the advice of Daniel
Deudney and G John Ikenberry is wise and pertinent: ‘The demo-
cratic states should orient themselves to pragmatically address real
and shared problems rather than focusing on ideological differences.
Looking for alignments based on interests rather than regime type
will further foreclose the unlikely coalescence of an antiliberal auto-
cratic bloc.’10 Unfortunately, this has not always been the case. On
the contrary, as we are trying to show, while the two former commu-
nist giants – China and Russia – have started to carry out rather prag-
matic policies globally, today it is the liberal democratic West, and
especially Washington, whose foreign policy is increasingly guided
by an ideology that overrides facts whenever they differ from pre-
conceived ideas.
9 B. Obama, The Audacity of Hope. Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream,

Canongate, 2006, p. 59.
Liberal Democracy Will Prevail’, Foreign Affairs, January-February 2009.
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2. COLLAPSE OF THE USSR AND THE EMERGENCE OF

YELTSIN’S RUSSIA
The Soviet Union – a stable totalitarian state with some imperial

characteristics – in 1991 disintegrated rapidly and rather unexpect-
edly. At the end of the 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms,
expressed in the policies of glasnost and perestroika, had opened up
the country both internally and externally, many people in the West
as well as in the former USSR, believed (now, with hindsight, we may
say rather naively) that it would be possible to, relatively quickly and
painlessly, transform this closed totalitarian society into an open,
democratic, market oriented country. Although in contradistinction
to some other societies, including those which are currently under-
going regime changes, the Soviet Union as a whole had a highly edu-
cated population, including women, with almost 100% literacy,
world class natural sciences, traditions of European high culture in
literature, music, dance etc., as well as some other factors that are
usually acknowledged as facilitators of democratic transformations.
Unfortunately, this was not to be the case. The Soviet Union’s disin-
tegration was not only inevitable; for many it was quite a positive
development, and not at all ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe
of the twentieth century’, as President Vladimir Putin put it.11 The
Soviet Union was a doubly artificial entity: it was not only its ideol-
ogy that was utopian, its geographic and ethnic composition, which
was inherited more or less intact from the Russian Empire, had by
the end of the twentieth century also become anachronistic.
Gorbachev’s reforms were enthusiastically welcomed by many
Soviets who felt let down with an order which had its roots in the
ideology of Leninism–Stalinism, and which had brought immense
suffering to the people. These were intellectuals who most enthusi-
astically welcomed Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (openness, trans-
parency), and for whom it was like a gulp of fresh air in a stifling
prison cell. I remember well how the population of Moscow in
March 1989, in the elections for the Congress of People’s Deputies
(the highest legislative body, which under Gorbachev turned from a
11 MSNNews, 25 April 2005 (http://msnbc.com/id/7632957, visited 16 June 2005).
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126 Chapter Four
rubber stamp into a discussion club), voted for Boris Yeltsin (around
ninety per cent of the Muscovites cast their vote for him). This amaz-
ing result was a protest vote, because at that time Yeltsin was being
harassed by Gorbachev – himself a reformer, but for whom Yeltsin
was becoming a rival who, moreover, was starting to rock the boat
captained by Gorbachev – and was vilified in that part of the mass
media that supported Gorbachev. People were fed up with being
told who to respect and who to denounce, and therefore voted
for Boris Yeltsin. In the Soviet Mission to the United Nations in
New York where, as a member of the UN Human Rights Committee,
I cast my vote, the result was over ninety-five per cent for Yeltsin; this
notwithstanding – or rather due to – the fact that the Soviet diplo-
mats who worked in the mission, were told in no uncertain terms to
guarantee an anti-Yeltsin result. However, this was a vote for free-
dom against an order that had prevailed for too many decades.
Yet, during an almost decade of rule (or non-rule) under Yeltsin,
the situation changed dramatically. Unprepared, not thought through
and poorly administered liberal economic and political reforms not
only destabilized the country, but also discredited the very ideas of
democracy, human rights and free markets – ideas so enthusiasti-
cally accepted at the end of the 1980s. When Boris Yeltsin, as advised
by the World Bank, IMF, Washington and other experts, exercised
‘shock therapy’ on Russia, his anti-democratic behaviour (rule by
decree instead of law, declaration of a state of emergency, rigging of
the 1996 Presidential elections, by-passing, dismissing and finally
shelling of the Parliament etc.) was if not exactly welcomed, then at
least not frowned upon either by Washington. Serious people there
well understood (as Pinochet’s repression in Chile and other experi-
ences in Latin America had proven) that economic ‘shock therapy’
and democracy are opposites; they cancel each other out; they both
cannot simultaneously succeed. The harshest ‘rebuke’ came from
Warren Christopher, the then Secretary of State in the Clinton
Administration who stated that: ‘[T]he United States does not easily
support the suspension of parliaments. But these are extraordinary
times’.12 Wang Hui, comparing the West’s response to the Tiananmen
12 N. Klein, The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Allen Lane, 2007,
p. 229.
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tragedy and also to the West’s reaction to Beijing’s application in

1993 to host in China the 2000 Olympics with Boris Yeltsin’s shelling
of the Russian Parliament observes:
This blatant enmity was shocking for Chinese society. It was also in
October of that same year [1993] that the President of Russia, Boris
Yeltsin, ordered a military attack and suppression of the legally elected
Duma. This violent and anti-constitutional behaviour, undertaken by
someone who had staked his reputation on rhetorical opposition to
communism, not only exposed the grave crisis of Russian reforms –
and particularly of the “spontaneous privatization process” promoted
by American and other Western advisers – but also reflected the deep
contradictions within Western, and particularly American, policies
toward democracy and human rights, among other things, thus bely-
ing the extreme selfishness and anti-democratic character that lay at
their core. American support for this violence was immediately com-
pared to the American response to the Chinese violence of 1989.13
Today, the ‘extraordinary times’ are in the Middle East. The SCAF
(Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) dissolved a democratically
elected Parliament in Egypt, where the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood
had a majority, and there was no criticism whatsoever either from
Washington or Brussels. Indeed, when one deals with hard matters
like oil, gas or the dismantling of one’s strategic competitor – the
‘evil empire’, one cannot be stymied by considerations of ‘soft’ issues
like democracy.14 On a more theoretical note, it has to be empha-
sised that Western support for Yeltsin’s attack on Parliament was a
betrayal of some of the most fundamental liberal democratic princi-
ples for the sake of achieving that what was deemed to be good.
Yeltsin was good because he was dismantling, or helping the West to
dismantle, an evil system, while communist dominated Parliament
was seen as bad since it was believed to cling to the old ways.
Therefore, it was not only admissible but even necessary to set aside
the procedural principles of democracy and fairness; it was accept-
able, though regrettable, to use military force in order to guarantee
the continuation of Yeltsin’s pro-Western policies.
2011, p. 51.
14 If I am ironical or cynical here, then only a bit; what I really do not like is
hypocrisy, since its purpose is to fool everybody, often including the hypocrites
themselves, since deception often starts with self-deception.
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128 Chapter Four
The famous Soviet dissident, who later became an Israeli Govern

ment Minister, Anatoly Sharansky, whose book The Case for Democ
racy, The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror was
allegedly read and admired by President George W. Bush, claims that
‘[W]hen freedom’s sceptics argue today that freedom cannot be
“imposed” from outside, or that the free world has no role to play in
spreading democracy around the world, I cannot but be amazed.
Less than one generation has passed since the West found the
Achilles heel of the Soviet Union by pursuing an activist policy that
linked the rights of the Soviet people to the USSR’s international
standing’.15 Sharansky, in my opinion, makes serious mistakes in this
assertion; Western efforts, and especially the attempts to promote
democracy and human rights in the USSR played, if not a minor then
at least a secondary role in the collapse of the Soviet Union (a some-
what greater effect may have had the intensified arms race forced
upon the USSR by the Reagan Administration). Anatoly Sharansky
may understandably exaggerate the effect of Western pressure on
the Soviet Union on these matters, since he himself was freed from a
labour camp and allowed to immigrate to Israel due to such pres-
sure. One should not neglect this either. But for the country as a
whole, the effect of this pressure was only cosmetic, and it benefited
only a few individuals (for whom this may have been one hundred
percent good). However, as the veteran Soviet Ambassador to
Washington Anatoly Dobrynin (he served as Soviet Ambassador to
Washington during the terms of six US presidents from 1962 until
1986) observes in his memoirs, Jewish emigration was sharply
reduced in 1980 ‘mainly because of Carter’s attack on human rights
in the USSR’ and that the Carter Administration’s human rights
policy ‘did more harm than good’ to human rights in the USSR.16
This opinion, of a person who was intimate to the processes that led
to the reform attempts of the communist system and finally to the
collapse of the Soviet Union, should be given due weight. It has also
been noted by some American authors that ‘the most important
15 N. Sharansky with R. Dermer, The Case for Democracy, The Power of Freedom to
Overcome Tyranny and Terror, Public Affairs, 2004, p. 145.
16 A. Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War
Presidents, New York, 1995, pp. 460, 389.
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exaggeration of the US impact has been the belief that the Reagan
administration’s military build-up, support for anti-communist
insurgencies, and confrontational rhetoric caused the Kremlin to
retreat and reform.’17 On the contrary, it was ‘Gorbachev’s gradual
realization that Reagan would not use force to compel the Soviet
Union to alter its system [that] helped him to overcome the climate
of fear and take the risk of launching a destabilizing restructuring of
the Soviet system’.18 In this sense, it was not so much Reagan’s mis-
sionary drive as much as his acceptance of the need for the United
States and the Soviet Union to coexist, after Gorbachev had con-
veyed to the outside world his intention to reform the Soviet domes-
tic system and change the Soviet Union’s confrontational foreign
policy, that facilitated the steps that Gorbachev undertook, and
which finally led to the unravelling of the Soviet empire.
There is another topical point to be made about Anatoly
Sharansky’s views on matters of democracy and peace between
Israel and the Palestinians. Sharansky writes that there cannot be
any peace with the Palestinians until the Palestinian entity is not
democratic. Therefore he is highly critical of two prominent Israeli
politicians: Simon Peres and Yossi Beilin. The current Israeli
President Peres had said on the matter that: ‘I do not believe that
democracy can be imposed artificially on another society’.19 Beilin
had similarly stated that ‘if we wait until [the Palestinians] become
democratic, then peace will wait for our great-grandchildren, not
ourselves … My first priority is to make peace with the Palestinians,
I do not believe that it is up to me to educate them’.20 Sharansky is a
hawk, and believes chiefly in force, while Peres and Beilin, as Israeli
politicians, are more or less dovish. The fact that the hawk seems to
care more about democracy among the Palestinians than the doves
leads me to suspect that any purity is suspect in the hawk’s approach
to democracy. Is he naïve, or is he opposed to any concessions to the
Palestinians? He can hardly be a great believer in a democratic
17 D.S. Foglesong, The American Mission and the ‘Evil Empire’, Cambridge
18 Ibid.
19 N. Sharansky with R. Dermer, op. cit., p. 154.
20 Ibid., p. 183.
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130 Chapter Four
Palestine. Moreover, as the current developments in the Arab world

indicate, the more democratic an Arab state, the tougher is its posi-
tion on peace with Israel.
Alas, some states can exist only as autocracies, since when they
liberalise they tend to disintegrate, and attempts by the world com-
munity or regional alliances to keep them together may only prolong
the agony of the regime and increase the suffering of the people.
This of course does not mean that the world community or regional
alliances should encourage or contribute to the disintegration of
states, as was the case with the manipulative international adminis-
tration in Kosovo leading to its de facto independence from Serbia.
The fate of the USSR, and maybe also the SFRY (the former
Yugoslavia) testifies to this effect; today Iraq (a multiethnic society
held together by a uni-ethnic state21) may well be on its way either to
a more or less stable dictatorship, or to its disintegration into sepa-
rate entities with equally questionable democratic credentials.
Because of its historical baggage, the transformation of the Soviet
Union’s successor states was certain to be a difficult and painful
process; they had to radically change not only their economic and
political systems, but also to dismantle an ideological basis, which in
many cases left deep voids that became filled with nationalistic or
religious ideas, often in their extreme forms. In some parts of the
former USSR, for example the Baltic countries, due to a series of fac-
tors, among them their brief encounters with democratic ideas and
practices between the two world wars, their relatively small size, and
their proximity to the European Union (wrong are those who claim
that in world politics geography does not matter; it certainly matters
a lot, but as Ian Morris22 and Robert Kaplan23 have recently well
shown, it matters differently at different periods of history and in
different parts of the world), have witnessed relatively fast and pain-
less democratic and market-oriented evolutions. However, if your
neighbours are not Finland or Sweden, but are for example, states
more akin to Afghanistan, the reform processes – be they political,
21 J. Kurth, ‘Coming to Order’, The American Interest, 2007, vol. II, No. 6 , p. 60.
22 I. Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They
Reveal about Future, Profile Books, 2011.
23 R. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming
Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, Random House, 2012.
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economic and social – are much more difficult. Therefore, slightly

paraphrasing an old proverb, we may say that ‘tell me who are your
neighbours and I will tell you who you are’.
These factors, together with their common historical heritage –
both pre-Soviet and Soviet – have to be taken into account when one
is assessing the process of reforms – their speed, success or failure –
in different parts of the former Soviet Union.
Those who, from the outside, push for quick democratic reforms
in societies that are not able to carry them through, i.e. in societies
which do not have the economic, political and social capacities to
rapidly implement such reforms, or whose historical baggage does
not contain any seeds of liberalism, are either incompetent, or they
are consciously trying to weaken states whose governments refuse to
toe the line. Remarking specifically on Russia under President
Yeltsin, Michael Cox, John Ikenberry and Takashi Inoguchi, for
example, wrote that ‘[T]he causes of the failed transition [of Russia
to democracy] are many. But the West cannot escape its fair share of
the blame. It was especially foolish to demand the impossible and to
believe one could construct a viable capitalism and American-style
democracy together – the so-called “market democracy paradigm”
– on the fragments left behind by Soviet communism. This was “pan-
glossian complacency” of the highest order and was bound to end in
tears. Put bluntly, Russia simply could not bear the weight that the
West placed on it’.24 However, in our view, it was not only ‘panglos-
sian complacency’ (although for many both in the West and in
Russia it certainly was) that contributed to the failure of Russian
reforms. For some it was the conscious desire to enfeeble Russia, to
turn it into a state that would toe the line and follow Washington’s
lead without questioning its wisdom, without attempting to pursue
its own national interests, especially when the latter differ from
interests of Western countries (particularly from those of the United
States). Jeffrey Sachs has, with hindsight, recognised that at the begin-
ning of the 1990s, when Russia’s economy was undergoing ‘shock
therapy’, ‘many of Washington’s power brokers were still fighting
the Cold War. They saw Russia’s economic collapse as geopolitical
24 M. Cox, G.J. Ikenburry, Takachi Inoguchi (eds), American Democracy

Promotion, OUP, 2000, p. 15.
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132 Chapter Four
victory, a decisive one that ensured U.S. supremacy’.25 That was cer-
tainly so. Dick Cheney, who at the beginning of the 1990s was the
United States Secretary of Defence, for example, openly encouraged
the break-up of the Soviet Union, arguing that ‘if democracy fails,
we’re better off if they are small’.26 Therefore, as Daniel Treisman
concludes, taking account of the humanitarian assistance that the
West extended to Russia in the 1990s, as well as the loaned interest
payments by Russia to Western countries, including the debts of the
former Soviet Union, what Russia got from the West was minuscule.
In his opinion, the amount of Western investments into Russia for the
support of democracy was less that the cost of three B2 bombers.27
As Gorbachev’s policies unwittingly led to the dismantling of the
Soviet Union (for which the world and the peoples of many former
Soviet republics should be thankful), this is the main reason of his
unpopularity in Russia. With hindsight, it is possible to conclude
that Gorbachev, as a leader of a superpower, and especially if we
compare him with Deng Xiaoping, was a rather naive politician.
Allen Lynch is right that ‘Deng also understood China much better
than Gorbachev did the Soviet Union’.28 We would add that Deng
also understood the world much better than Gorbachev, who
believed that the West would embrace the reformist Soviet Union,
help it integrate into the world community as one of the guarantors
of a new world order based on the supremacy of international law
where common values would prevail over narrow national interests,
and all nations, in their external relations, would live in accordance
with international law, and their domestic arrangements would con-
form to the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Gorbachev did not understand that for leaders of powerful states,
universal values are more often than not particular interests clad in
lofty words (though they may sometimes sincerely believe in them,
and feel genuinely offended if somebody doubts their sincerity).
One of the important differences between China’s and the Soviet
Union’s reforms, and factors for their respective success and failure
25 N. Klein, op.cit., p. 250.

26 D.S. Foglesong, op.cit., p. 205.
27 D. Treisman, op.cit., p. 297.
28 A.C. Lynch, ‘Deng’s and Gorbachev’s Reform Strategies Compared’, Russia in
Global Affairs, 24 June 2012.
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that Allen Lynch analysis29 was that the Soviet Union as a whole and
its biggest part – Russia – was a European country and its intellectu-
als, i.e. its opinion makers, were essentially European in their out-
look, and therefore they would not have supported a politically
authoritarian model of economic modernisation. In China, on the
contrary, intellectuals as a whole were supportive of Deng Xiaoping’s
model of economic modernisation under the Chinese Communist
Party’s leadership. At the end of his insightful article on the compari-
son of Deng’s and Gorby’s reforms, Lynch proposes an interesting,
and in our opinion, useful counterfactual thought experiment that
may be of more general interest.30 What would have happened had
Yuri Andropov, a former long-time KGB chief who became the
Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party after Brezhnev’s
death in 1982, been in better health and hadn’t died in less than two
years in office (Lynch is probably right that had Deng died soon after
he started his reforms, China today wouldn’t have been today’s
China) Lynch correctly, in our opinion, assumes that Andropov
would not have relinquished the leading role of the Communist
Party, and would not have initialised political liberalisation of Soviet
society (not in his lifetime). Lynch is also right that Andropov gar-
nered more authority not only among the political and military elite,
but also among Soviet society at large (the clear exception being the
Soviet intelligencia) than Gorbachev. And Andropov certainly was
enough of a realist; having been at the head of the KGB for a long
time, he certainly knew the real situation in the country better than
most of the Soviet leadership, and most world leaders. Therefore, it
is quite possible that Andropov’s economic reforms would have
borne fruit, and the Soviet Union would have existed for much
longer than it did under Gorbachev. However, I doubt that the Soviet
Union under Andropov would have been the same success story as
China under Deng and his successors has been; the reasons for such
a conclusion lie in the differences between the Chinese and Soviet
societies (the USSR – a European society, China – an Asian nation;
China - a more or less homogeneous society, the USSR – a multieth-
nic, multi-religious country; the USSR – an urbanised, industrially
29 A.C. Lynch, op. cit.

30 Ibid.
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134 Chapter Four
developed society, China at the end of the 1970s – basically a rural,

agricultural society etc.) as well as the differences between the per-
sonalities of the two men. If Deng was a visionary pragmatist who
well understood his people, Yuri Andropov was an ideologue, though
cleverer, more knowledgeable and personally less corrupt than most
of his colleagues, but nevertheless an ideologue who believed in the
eventual superiority of the communist system, and whose world-
view was not shaken but strengthened as a result of the Soviet sup-
pression of the Hungarian revolt against communist rule and Soviet
domination in 1956, when Andropov was the Soviet Ambassador to
Budapest.
Yeltsin, in August of 1991, standing firm against the putschists,
later used all the proper lexicon necessary to be liked by many in the
West, but it was not as much democracy that emerged under Yeltsin
(though elements of it were of course present) as the oligarchisation
of society, and a process of plundering Russia’s wealth.31 That is why
what is described in the West as a backlash against democracy under
President Putin has to be seen in the context of what happened in
Russia under Yeltsin, and to a great extent as a reaction to these pro-
cesses. Adi Ignatius, the former Wall Street Journal bureau chief in
Moscow, reminisced at the end of 2007 about Yeltsin’s Russia of
the 1990s in the following way: ʻI retain three indelible images from
that time. The first: the legions of Ivy League – and other Western –
educated “experts” who roamed the halls of the Kremlin and the
government, offering advice, all ultimately ineffective on everything
from conducting free elections to using “shock therapy” to juice the
31 The process of the pillaging of Russia has been well documented in Pavel
Khlebnikov’s book Godfather of the Kremlin and the History of Pillage of Russia,
which in English translation carries the title Godfather of the Kremlin: The Decline of
Russia in the Age of Gangster Capitalism (Harvest Books, 2001). In this book he
showed how Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch who now lives in the United
Kingdom, made his first millions, and then used them, bribing and buying state
officials to make his billions. Khlebnikov – an American journalist of Russian origin,
who was the Russian Editor of Forbes – was gunned down in Moscow in July 2004 in
what seemed to be a contract killing. In his articles and books he may have offended
many influential people, including some oligarchs as well as Chechen militants. In
2003, he published a book, Conversation with a Barbarian (Moscow, Detective Press,
2003), in which he depicted in the most negative light one of the Chechen field
commanders, Hozh-Ahmed Nukhayev, harshly criticized Chechen militants gener-
ally and made slighting remarks on Islam. In May 2006, a jury in Moscow acquitted
the three Chechens who were accused of having murdered Khlebnikov.
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economy to privatizing state-owned assets’.32 As Time Magazine

concluded in 2007, it is easy to see why the Russians today are look-
ing for greatness and supporting Vladimir Putin ‘after the humilia-
tions of the 1990s, when Harvard M.B.A.s flooded Russia, preaching
Western style democracy, only to let a small cabal of criminals bleed
the country dry.33
The sudden and unprepared introduction of liberal reforms in
Russia under Boris Yeltsin led to a chaos that resulted in nostalgia for
order (poryadok in Russian and ordnung in German have been the
words used to tighten the screws). Such nostalgia for past stability
could be observed in many, if not in most (the Baltic countries being
the only clear exceptions) post-Soviet states. Therefore, when
President Putin, after the Beslan tragedy of 2004 where Chechen ter-
rorists attacked a school in this Northern Ossetia’s town, introduced
a series of anti-democratic and anti-liberal political reforms, which
moreover had nothing to do with anti-terrorist measures but were
meant to construct a so-called ‘vertical of power’, the critical com-
ments by Russian liberals, including the Russian Human Rights
Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, sounded very much like lone voices
crying out in the wilderness. By then, Russians had generally had
enough of Yeltsin era ‘democracy’ and experiments in free market
‘shock therapy’.
3. ON PUTIN’S AUTHORITARIANISM
Anatol Lieven, a long-time Russian observer from the New America

Foundation, now a Professor at King’s College, London, who seems to
comprehend Russia much better than most of his fellow citizens,
has astutely observed, in writing about the prospects of democracy
in Russia that:
This [prospects of democracy in Russia] is indeed a problematic issue
because the Russian president [Putin during his second term as
President of Russia] has grown increasingly authoritarian. But U.S.
expectations in this area are unrealistic. After all, the “democracy”
that Putin has allegedly overthrown was, in fact, not a real democracy
32 A. Ignatius, ‘A Tsar is Born’, Time Magazine, December 3, 2007- January 7, 2008,

p. 42.
33 Ibid., p. 60.
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136 Chapter Four
at all but a pseudo-democracy ruled over by corrupt and brutal oligar-

chical clans. During the 1990s, the administration of Boris N. Yeltsin,
under the sway of the oligarchs and the liberal elites, rigged elections,
repressed the opposition and launched a bloody and unnecessary war
in Chechnya – all with the support of Washington.34
Therefore, when Putin came to power in 2000, most people in Russia
initially supported Putin’s steps of ‘strengthening the vertical of
power’, which of course was not a step towards democracy, but one
whose purpose was in increasing stability, and at least at the begin-
ning, and for a while after, contributed to the economic growth and
well-being of the people (though the role of the high oil prices played
a larger role than Putin’s policies in raising the living standards of
the Russian people). Richard Sakwa observes that ‘while there are
numerous points over which one may take issue with Putin’s admin-
istration, the relentless negativity in which every action was per-
ceived to be yet another brick in the edifice of an authoritarian order
under construction in Russia is fundamentally mistaken. Russia’s
highly complex and undoubtedly contradictory process of re-estab-
lishing the authority of the state and the rudimentary notion of
order was reduced to a single narrative of authoritarian restoration,
and prepared the way for what many considered to be a reprise of
Cold War confrontation.’35 This misunderstanding of Russia’s prob-
lems and predicaments, and a failure to understand that there is
no fast track to democracy without backlashes (at best, two steps
forward, one step back, paraphrasing Lenin), as mentioned by
Professor Sakwa, alienated many in Russia, and made them sceptical
of Western values and the sincerity of Western experts, the latter
having advised Yeltsin and his ministers.
As a result of the transformations under President Yeltsin, in
which the role of Western advisers was quite significant, Russia
became weak, and not many Russians are thankful of that. That is
why Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who
limited democracy (if there was any democracy to limit in the first
place; or as many Russians thought at that time, introduced some
34 A. Lieven, ‘Why are we trying to reheat the Cold War?’ The Los Angeles Times,
19 March 2006.
35 R. Sakwa, ‘New Cold War’ or twenty years of crisis? Russia and international
politics’, International Affairs, 2008, vol. 84, p. 249.
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order into anarchy and chaos) during his first two terms as President
of Russia (2000–2008) was genuinely popular in Russia. As two
Russians wrote in the middle of Putin’s second term as President in
the International Herald Tribune: ‘[T]he United States finds much
fewer supporters in Russia today than it did 15 years ago. Russian
perceptions have changed dramatically, for domestic discourse,
political stability and order have greater value than democracy.
Democracy is often associated with the chaos, the collapse of
the state and the material gains of the very few that occurred in
the ‘90s’.36
The post-Soviet history of Russia moves in a circular fashion, or
rather like a pendulum and there is certain logic to it. The following
graph illustrates well a problem that is not idiosyncratic to Russia
alone. This is a so-called J-Curve, a graphic tool applied in political
sciences to illustrate the hazards of transformation of regimes from
Stabilityy
Openness
Representation of J-Curve.
36 I. Zevelev, K. Glebov, ‘If you want democracy, don’t push Putin’, The Inter
national Herald Tribune, 13 March 2006.
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138 Chapter Four
authoritarianism or totalitarianism towards democracy.37 The con-

cept of J-Curve explains the nature and causes of the difficulties
and pitfalls inherent in the process of a transition from closed into
open societies. Some of them may not even survive such a transition
(like the USSR and the former Yugoslavia, for example), but all mul-
tiethnic or multi-religious countries are especially prone to such a
danger.
The vertical axis of the graph measures stability; the higher a
country is on this axis, the more stable it is. On the horizontal axis,
there is the measure of openness. The further to the right, the more
open, free and democratic is a society. According to Ian Bremmer,
‘movement from left to right along the J-Curve demonstrates that a
country that is stable because it is closed must go through a period
of dangerous instability as it opens to the outside world’.38 Of course,
it is not only the opening up of a country to the outside world that is
wrought with potential of instability; internal liberalisation, like
Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika in the former USSR,
are even more, and not less hazardous. Putin’s response to the insta-
bility and economic decline of Yeltsin’s Russia was in accordance
with the theory of J-Curve. In order to stop the economic downfall,
put an end to disintegrative tendencies and restore stability, the
authorities chose to climb up on the left side of the vertical axis, i.e.
they tightened the screws and quite predictably also overreacted.
Measures to prevent the fall into the bottom of the J-Curve may
involve measures that curb individual liberties and even repressions.
Therefore, it is preferable to move step by step to the right on the
horizontal axis, i.e. not resorting to shock therapy. The simultaneous
use of economic and political shock therapies would be especially
dangerous; they seldom succeed.
4. RUSSIA – NOT LOST TO DEMOCRACY
Today Russia is not at all lost to democracy, though the mistakes of

the 1990s, coupled with purposeful attempts to weaken the country
37 I. Bremmer, J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall,
Simon & Schuster, 2006.
38 Ibid., p. 5.
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and require it to follow Washington’s lead have made Russia’s path to

democracy even more tortuous than it would have otherwise been.
Of course the Kremlin has not been able to rise to the level of the
challenges that the country faces. Ruslan Khestanov, the Deputy
Editor-in-Chief of Russky Reporter has pointed out that ‘[I]n the for-
mal terms of electoral procedures, a rollback from democracy would
seem a reasonable enough statement. Competitive transfer of power
is a reasonable distinguishing mark for democracy. On the other
hand, a little knowledge of Russia’s recent experiences would sug-
gest otherwise. With such knowledge, there is little doubt that the
chances of a stable democratic regime being established in Russia
are much higher today than, say, at any time during the Yeltsin presi-
dency’.39 This view seems to indicate that the few steps backward
after Yeltsin’s chaos period may have been necessary in order to con-
tinue moving towards a more liberal and democratic order. It may
indeed be so, though as the 2011–2012 protest movements indicated,
democracy does not come about from above by fiat; it has to be
actively demanded by the people. More than a decade of rule by
Putin, first as President, then as Prime Minister and his third reincar-
nation as President of Russia in 2012, as well as four years of Dmitry
Medvedev’s warming of the throne, has forced many Russians to
reconsider their scepticism towards democracy and freedoms. Sergei
Karaganov, one of the proponents of state capitalism for certain
societies, has expressed the view that ‘there is not yet any definitive
answers to the question whether “authoritarian capitalism” will be
the final model of development for Russian or is it a step towards
a more liberal model’.40 In his opinion, the second option is plausi-
ble. However, do not expect Russian democracy to be a ‘Western
style democracy’. Whether it will be called ‘sovereign’, ‘directed’ or
‘managed’ or better simply democracy, it would be in any case differ-
ent from the democracy that exists, say, in Western Europe; it will
contain specific characteristics corresponding to the history, tradi-
tions, culture and even size of Russia. And it is especially important
39 R. Khestanov, ‘The path to democracy, Russian style’, Russky Reporter,

27 February, 2008.
40 S. Karaganov (ed.), Russia and the World. A New Epoch of 12 Years that May
Change Everything (in Russian), Olymp, 2008, p. 55.
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140 Chapter Four
not to forget that it is left to the Russian people to decide what kind
of democracy they want.
Today’s Western concerns over democracy in Russia have an inter-
esting angle, one that is present in Western policies vis-à-vis some
other non-Western countries as well. Jonathan Dimbleby, for exam-
ple, writes that ‘for all their great virtues, the Russian people are not
sleep-walking into this brave new world [he calls it Putin’s crypto-
fascism] but positively embracing it. So far from having democracy
stolen from them, they consciously seek to give it away.’41 If it were
indeed so, if Russians indeed do not care at all about democracy,
then would it be not only futile but unintelligent, arrogant and even
undemocratic to wish for them what they do not want for them-
selves! The truth seems rather to be that many, and probably the
majority of Russians increasingly care about democracy, but they do
not necessarily understand democracy as most Westerners do, and
more importantly, due to their history – both ancient and recent –
they value stability, economic development and certain freedoms
(e.g., the freedom to travel abroad, the freedom of information)
which they now possess, but never enjoyed under the Soviet regime,
higher than democracy. Dimbleby wrote that he returned from his
journey to Russia ‘more aware than ever before that the Russian peo-
ple are not like “us”. In a fundamental way they neither belong to
the West nor share Western values.’42 My conclusion, having trav-
elled and lived not only in Russia but in also in many much more
‘exotic’ countries, is that people, in most cases are very much like ‘us’.
Such a conclusion requires, of course, that the concluder can, as a
minimum, speak the language of the people he judges, shares their
food, music and in general partakes in and understands their cul-
ture. Human beings are all quite similar. It is societies, due to their
histories, traditions, political institutions and levels of economic
development that are rather different.
There is no doubt that Russia needs to become more democratic,
and one may well hope that the authorities, and foremost Presi
dent Vladimir Putin, have received and understood the message
41 J. Dimbleby, ‘Seduced by a Smile’, The Sunday Times (News Review),

24 February 2008, p. 2.
42 Ibid., p. 1.
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sent by the 2011–2012 protests, which were engendered by the rigged

Parliamentary elections of December 2011, where the pro-Putin
United Russia party won just under 50% of the vote (down from 64%
in 2007) and the Presidential elections of March 2012. Democracy is
demanded by, and necessary for the people of Russia. If before the
anti-Putin demonstrations of 2011–2012 there may have been an
impression that the majority of the Russian people may have indeed
been content with ‘authoritarianism with the consent of the gov-
erned’,43 as the system was sometimes called, since then the mood in
the country has changed.
5. RUSSIA – TOO BIG TO PRACTICE BANDWAGGONING
It seems that the objectives of Washington’s policy of advancing

democracy and supporting ‘colour revolutions’ and different ‘awak-
enings’ and ‘springs’ in strategically or resourcefully important
regions are twofold: if democracy, due to American efforts, takes
root in said countries, they would hopefully become allies of
Washington, if not for any other reason than being grateful for the
support they have received from the US; however, if a country fails to
build a sustainable democracy and even ends up in turmoil, it
becomes a weak entity that does not threaten American or wider
Western interests. Naturally, the first scenario is preferable but the
second, from the point of view of US interests, is not a complete fail-
ure either (though weak or failed states may become hotspots of ter-
rorism). This point was made by Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman
who observed that ‘among neoconservatives and liberal hawks, the
desire to spread democracy can also take a form that is explicitly
dedicated to the weakening or even destruction of other states, even
when these are by no means full-fledged enemies of America’.44
They added that ‘too many American Democratists (i.e. those who
believe in what the US National Security Strategies of 2002, 2006 and
2010 say about the export of democracy) base their approach to the
world on the assumption that they know how best to run countries
43 Trenin, op.cit., loc. 301.

44 A. Lieven, J. Hulsman, Ethical Realism. A Vision for America’s Role in the World,
Pantheon Books, 2006, p. 104.
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142 Chapter Four
of which they know nothing and whose languages they don’t speak –
countries that quite often they have never even visited’.45
Sometimes there does indeed remains the impression that the
West, and especially Washington, prefers to deal with weak or even
unstable entities rather than face stable and strong but uncomfort-
able states that pursue their own interests (like the US itself natu-
rally does), and do not always act according to the ‘Washington
consensus’ (WC not only in the narrow economic-financial sense,
but also in the wider philosophic-political sense) but prefer to
adhere to, say, the ‘Beijing consensus’ (BC) or have their own paro-
chial (no offence meant) understanding of their national interests.
This does not mean that there is nothing good to the WC or that the
BC is preferable to the WC; the point is that in today’s globalising
world there should be some consensus between the WC and BC, and
a realisation that neither of them can be imposed on others. Nations,
like individuals (and especially the young) tend to reject ideas and
practices that they perceive as imposed on them, even if they are
ultimately for their own good. The adage that the road to hell is
paved with good intentions is truer in international relations than
in any other field of human activity – far too many people assume
that other societies are like us and have the same value systems.
As Graham Greene’s Thomas Fowler says about Alden Pyle, the
quiet American: ‘He was impregnably armoured by his good inten-
tions and his ignorance.’ Furthermore, Fowler had never known
‘a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused’. Most
dangerous of all may be the desire, often even a missionary zeal, to
make those who are different from us more like us. It is one of the
characteristics of so-called ‘soft power’ that something has to be not
only accepted voluntarily, but also has to be perceived as accepted
voluntarily.
All the changes in both Russia’s domestic and especially in its
foreign policy (which has certainly become more assertive and
independent), and Western reactions to these policies, has created a
perception in Russia that the West, and especially Washington,
indeed prefers to deal with a weak Russia which follows the Western
lead. This inability to understand and accept that Russia has its own
45 Ibid., p. 109.
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interests and perceptions, and that they may differ from those of
Washington or Brussels, is counterproductive to the development of
mutually beneficial relations between Russia and the West. One
would indeed be naïve, or believe others to be naïve, to imagine that
Russia would not use its vast energy resources in order to promote
its foreign policy aims. It would be like expecting the US to ignore its
superior economic and military power in conducting its foreign rela-
tions. It would be like Madeleine K. Albright’s questioning of Colin
Powell: ‘What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always
talking about if we can’t use it?’46 No state, especially if it belongs
or believes itself to belong to the category of great powers, and has
possessed such leverages, has ever failed to use them to its own
advantage.
An old friend of mine from my Moscow days, whom I have not
seen for at least a decade, but who has meanwhile become Foreign
Minister of Russia, Sergei Lavrov, has written that ‘those who study
Russia professionally (and not just Soviet studies), and are working
out policy toward it, must understand that it would be naive to
expect from us readiness to be content in the world with the role of
one being led’,47 and that, ‘Russia has acquired freedom to behave in
accordance with its historical mission, that is, to be itself, and hence
to make its full contribution to the common cause of maintaining
international stability and harmony between civilizations at the
critical stage of the formation of a new architecture of international
relations’.48 Although in these statements there are some unrealistic
observations dictated, probably, by nostalgia for past glory, there
are also grains of truth. Some countries, due to their history, size
and potential as well as their perception of the world based on these
factors, cannot be subject of bandwaggoning, following the lead of a
hegemonic actor.
In the case of smaller countries, and depending on whether a
country possesses the necessary preconditions for building sustain-
able democratic institutions, outside efforts may bear fruit, but in
46 M. Dobbs, ‘With Albright, Clinton Accepts New U.S. Role’, The Washington
Post, 8 December, 1996.
47 Moskovskiye Novosti, ‘Russia in Global Politics’, Moscow News, 3 March 2006.
48 ‘Sixty Years after Fulton: Lessons of the Cold War and Our Time’, Rossiiskaya
Gazeta, 6 March 2006.
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144 Chapter Four
the absence of such necessary preconditions a country may end up,

if not as a failed state, then at least as a failed experiment in democ-
ratisation. In the cases of China, as well as Russia, such attempts
inevitably lead to confrontation. In his pre-election article on
Russia’s foreign policy in winter 2012, the then presidential candi-
date Putin wrote: ‘We cannot be isolated, and we do not want to be
isolated… … At the same time, everything we do will be based on our
own interests and goals, not on decisions other countries impose on
us’.49 This may be put too bluntly and undiplomatically, in a style
typical of Putin, but the truth of the matter is that Russia is indeed
too big to be led. This has to be understood; otherwise there would
be misperceptions and conflicts. British expert Richard Sakwa wrote
already some years ago: ‘The international system today does not
have a mechanism for integrating rising great powers. This applies to
China, as well as to Russia and some other countries’.50 We believe
there is a deep truth in this short remark, which is not limited to
countries as big as Russia or China. As Putin continued in his pre-
election article, ‘Russia has practically always had the privilege of
pursuing an independent foreign policy and this is how it will be in
the future’.51 First, this is a response to Yeltsin’s failed attempts to
have Russia accepted by Washington as an equal, independent
player who may have its own interests, different from those of the
United States, but who nevertheless may be a partner of, and on
good terms with, Washington. Secondly, this remark expresses the
truth that nations react differently to attempts to ‘civilise’ them, to
induce them to correspond to the dominant trend. Quite a few hap-
pily follow the lead, others do it grudgingly, while some become
prickly, and rushing them becomes even more counter-productive.
Thirdly, and from the Kremlin’s perspective, attempts to always carry
out independent foreign policy in an interdependent world are
counter-productive. One of the shortcomings of Moscow’s foreign
policy has been its lack of flexibility, its inability to recognise that in
a world where even Washington increasingly cannot always have its
49 V. Putin, ‘Russia and the Changing World’, Moscow News, 27 February, 2012.
50 R. Sakwa, ‘New Cold War’ or twenty years’ crisis?, International Affairs 2008 v.
84, No 2, p. 255.
51 V. Putin, op. cit.
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way, ambitions that are not backed up by sufficient material and

ideological resources, i.e. sufficient ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power, do more
harm than good to a country’s interests.
In previous chapters we discussed how, in the eyes of many
American politicians and experts, the world has to follow, as if by
default, the road trotted by the Anglo-American nations – first by
Great Britain, and then by the United States. Fyodor Lukyanov,
responding to the question by a journalist, of why Russia had not
followed Washington’s lead, as Germany and Japan, for example, had
done after they had been defeated in World War II, said that not only
was Russia not defeated in a war, but that in the 1990s the West did
not even attempt to use vis-à-vis Russia any policies akin to Marshall
plan to integrate the country to the West. Now, in 2012, continued
Lukyanov, ‘we cannot follow the Anglo-Saxon policies since today
nobody can be certain that they lead somewhere’.52
External pressure on Russia through Western support of and
financial aid for Russian non-governmental organizations may also
have been sometimes counter-productive. There is a bizarre situa-
tion in Russia – although tens, and in rare cases even hundreds, of
thousands of people protested in various cities across Russia, nota-
bly in Moscow and St Petersburg against the policies of the Kremlin
and called for more democracy and fairer elections, most of the
leaders of these protest movements are considerably less popular in
Russia than President Vladimir Putin or even Prime Minister Dmitry
Medvedev. These leaders lack an internal domestic legitimacy that
cannot be compensated for by external support and popularity. The
latter may even do more harm than good. Robert W. Merry’s astute
analysis of the reaction in the Arab world, as well as in Russia and
China, to the democracy-promoting efforts of American, or
American funded, NGOs such as the National Democratic Institute
(NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), shows that in
many cases their pushy and insensitive interference to promote
change has been counterproductive.53 He writes: ‘But the arrogance
of many of these people is almost guaranteed to be incendiary in
target countries. Consider the words of Michael McFaul, once the
52 Interview with F. Lukyanov, 13 March 2012, Argumenty i Facty, 8 June 2012.

53 R. Merry, ‘American NGOs Abroad’, The National Interest, 2 April 2012.
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146 Chapter Four
NDI’s representative in Russia. “We are not going to get into the busi-
ness of dictating [Russia’s] path [to democracy]”, he said. “We are
just going to support what we like to call ‘universal values’ – not
American values, universal values’.54 Further, Merry puts a most per-
tinent question: ‘Who, one might ask, is the arbiter of such universal
values, and how does one get appointed as crusader in their behalf’.55
It does not help either that now Michael McFaul is the United States
Ambassador to Moscow, appointed by President Obama. Robert
Merry explains: ‘For anyone trying to understand why this anger is
welling up in those countries, it might be helpful to contemplate
how Americans would feel if similar organizations from China or
Russia or India were to pop up in Washington, with hundreds of mil-
lions of dollars given to them by those governments, bent to influ-
encing our politics’.56 This is not to say that many human rights
NGOs, such as Amnesty International or Medicine sans Frontier or
many others – both local and international, have not done and are
not doing important work in improving the human rights situations
in many parts of the world. I have worked with many of them and
I admire their dedication and good will. However, for such work to
be effective, not counterproductive, it has to be carried out with a
profound understanding of the character of the target society, a
knowledge of the balance of political forces in the country, its poten-
tial and limitations, and most importantly has to not be seen as
arrogantly preaching to local people and governments to accept ‘uni
versal values’ that are not only ‘American values’ (I sometimes won-
der whether there can be any universal values that are not American
values). Laurence Jarvik, in writing on developments in Central Asia
that however have relevance for Russia as well, observes: ‘Thus, tra-
ditional elites had an advantage over the Western-sponsored NGOs:
they knew their society organically and were masters of how to bal-
ance different elements—whether clan-related, geographical, eth-
nic, business, political, or international’.57 A recent adoption in
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 L. Jarvik,‘NGOs: A ‘New Class’ in International Relations’, Orbis: Journal of
World Affairs, 2007, Vol. 51, No.2, p. 224.
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Russia of the new law that regulates the activities of NGOs,58 which
obligate those NGOs who receive funding from abroad to register as
‘foreign agents’, with a requirement to publish biannual reports on
their activities and have themselves submitted to annual financial
audits is indeed, as it is often called, controversial. On the one hand,
it gives the authorities an instrument to harass those organisations,
especially human rights NGOs, which are critical of the authorities,
and judging by earlier experience, the authorities will hardly fail to
use (abuse) this law against such NGOs. On the other hand, knowing
full well that there aren’t any free lunches, and those who pay the
piper also call the tune, and also judging by previous experience, one
should not hold any doubts that those who pay (and often it is
Western, especially American, taxpayer money) do attempt to
change domestic and foreign policy in Russia (and as an ultimate
aim – to effect regime change), i.e. to do what in the language of
international law is called ‘interference in internal affairs’. Of course,
such an almost even-handed critique of those who are on the supply
end and those who are on the receiving end does not help mobilise
the masses against or for any cause. However, this is not our aim.
There are too many who do exactly that. Our aim is to deconstruct
lofty words to reveal the underlying interests of various players.
Western diplomats in non-Western countries, and often even
NGOs, typically have contacts with leading elites, whom they as a
rule do not respect, and sometimes even hate and despise,59 as well
as with those who are in radical opposition to the authorities, whom
they usually like and support. In countries where there is a democ-
racy deficit, or where elements of democracy are completely lacking,
both of these categories of people are rarely representative of the
majority of the population. Julia Sweig of the US Council on Foreign
Relations has identified what she calls the ‘80/20 problem’,60 mean-
ing that the United States, in its dealing with a particular country,
58 Russian Parliament Approves NGO ‘Foreign Agents’ Law, RIA Novosti, 6 July
2012, en.rian.ru/Russia/20120706/174436993.html.
59 See, e.g., Craig Murray’s Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador’s
Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror (Mainstream Publishing,
2006).
60 J. Sweig, Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American
Century, New York, Public Affairs, 2006.
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148 Chapter Four
mostly relies on the English speaking elite – usually not more than
20 percent of the population (in my opinion, a very optimistic esti-
mate that may be true in some former British colonies or in Europe
but certainly not, say, in Russia or Central Asia where Russian in still
the lingua franca). To better understand a country, it is absolutely
necessary to communicate with representatives of the remaining
80 percent of its population – not only because of its numerical
weight, but even more for the reason that this majority is more rep-
resentative of the country than the 20 percent of governing or oppos-
ing elites. To understand a country and its problems, talking to people
in the marketplace, to a taxi driver, to a barber or to those who work
out with you in a local gym (and not to those who swim with you in
the swimming pool of a five star hotel), often helps more than spend-
ing hours with government officials or members of a radical opposi-
tion though, naturally, one cannot and should not ignore them.
Outside influence on these matters, though never great or deci-
sive, will have the desired effect if outsiders are not seen as giving
unsolicited advice. The paradox of the process of promoting human
rights and democracy abroad is that often, though not always, the
less one outright talks about human rights and democracy, espe-
cially in countries like Russia or China, the more one may achieve in
these fields; though in any case, in the absence of favourable internal
conditions an outsider can achieve very little since external factors
are usually secondary, though in certain circumstances they may
play the role of that proverbial straw that ‘breaks the camel’s back’.
This, of course, does not mean that one should not criticise Russia’s,
or China’s for that matter, human rights records. However, if one
wants to help achieve practical positive results, and not satisfy one’s
sense of self-righteousness or hope to promote regime-change, one
should find ways doing that without antagonizing the authorities
and the people. More often than not those whom Western organisa-
tions, especially those that are supported by or linked to Western
(especially American) governments, actively prop up, enjoy little
internal support. Western media attention on them (some of them
especially like to provoke the authorities into arrests before Western
TV cameras) may make them well known abroad, but at home their
popularity may even decline because of it. Instead, drawing atten-
tion to the plight of those genuine human rights activists who are
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persecuted by the authorities is the right way to proceed. This of

course means that one has to know the country well, as well as
knowing who is who and what they stand for.
6. RUSSIA AND ITS CLOSE NEIGHBOURS
Vladimir Putin began his third presidency’s foreign policy by empha-

sising the importance of Moscow’s relations with its neighbours.61
Although it is natural that Putin puts Russia’s interest (as he and
those who support him understand them), in its foreign policy gen-
erally, as well as in its relations with Russia’s neighbours, first, the
Kremlin is not going to revive the Soviet Union in any form, as some
of Russia’s neighbours assume (whether they seriously believe it or
use such rhetoric to annoy Russia is another matter). Dmitri Trenin
is right when he, after an extensive study of the foreign policy of
post-Soviet Russia, concludes that ‘Russia has abandoned the age-
old pattern of territorial growth’62 and that ‘Abkhazia and South
Ossetia were turned into military buffers, but only in extremis’.63 The
Kremlin’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as de jure inde-
pendent states, though contrary to international law (notwithstand-
ing that it was Georgia who initiated the military conflict in August
2008) and politically unwise (it alienated some of Russia’s influential
friends, like China or India, who otherwise would have welcomed
Russia’s tough response to Georgia), was Moscow’s overreaction
to Georgia’s attack. The Russian leadership saw Saakashvili as an
American proxy who was acting on behalf, and with the knowledge
and encouragement, of Washington. They did not believe that it
was Saakashvili – a bit of a loose cannon, who, having used his own
initiative, decided to regain lost territories. This, combined with
NATO’s unwise and certainly prematurely eager responses to
Saakashvili’s and Yuschenko’s (the then President of Ukraine) frantic
efforts to join the Atlantic Alliance, caused Russia to create such
buffer zones in the Caucasus, de facto controlling these two territo-
ries. Trenin continues:
61 V. Putin, ‘Russia and the Changing World’, Moscow News, 27 February, 2012;
S. Markedonov, ‘Putin’s Eurasian Aspirations’, The National Interest, 29 May, 2012.
62 D. Trenin, op.cit., loc. 2011.
63 Ibid.
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150 Chapter Four
Russia, however, is not the only post-imperial state in the former

Soviet Union. In an ironic way, all the new states that have emerged
from the USSR are also afflicted with elements of post-imperial, or in
some cases, post-colonial, syndrome. This can be described as seeking
to distance themselves from the former hegemon, attempting to cre-
ate new national myths and write new suitable histories of their
nations, and yet exhibiting many of the features usually associated
with the Soviet Union, among them doublespeak, lack of serious
debate, and intolerance.64
This is true. Too often the policies of some of Russia’s neighbours in
their hostility towards the former hegemon mirror, sometimes even
in an exaggerated manner, the Kremlin’s own policies towards these
states. Therefore, one of the obstacles to a closer integration between
the European Union and Russia (or Russia and the West as a whole)
is the negative historical baggage that has become a bone of conten-
tion between Russia and some of those Central and Eastern European
states that until recently were either parts of the USSR (e.g., Estonia,
Latvia or Lithuania), or being de jure independent states, were tightly
controlled from the Kremlin. On the one hand, Russia is reluctant to
recognise the wrongs committed in the past against these peoples or
denies any responsibility for Stalin’s crimes, often claiming that the
Russian people did not suffer less than other Soviet peoples (which
is true but does not justify the policies of the state, whose successor
Russia claims to be). On the other hand, these newly independent
states – members of the European Union – often use every appropri-
ate, and even inappropriate opportunity to pick on Russia, and are
always ready to take steps that would annoy Moscow, be it education
in the Russian language in Estonia or Latvia where sizable Russian
minorities live, the attitude towards the building of a North Stream
gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, Georgia’s and Ukraine’s NATO mem-
bership, NATO’s construction of a missile shield without Russia’s
participation, or even worse, justifying and honouring as freedom-
fighters those who together with the Nazis and often in SS uniform
fought against the Soviets in World War II. Whenever there is more
than one policy option available and one of them is not to Russia’s
liking, the default policy of some of these states is to render their
support to this option.
64 Ibid., loc. 348.
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It seems that, for example, Poland has recently become much

more grown up, mature, responsible and free from default policy
positions dictated by a historical past. And this notwithstanding
that it has historically been Poland that has particularly suffered
from Russia (though since 2005 Russia celebrates 4th November as a
‘Day of People’s Unity’ that is meant to commemorate, inter alia, the
eviction of Poles from Muscovy in 1612). At the same time Moscow
responds in kind, either using economic ‘sanctions’ against goods
from these countries or failing to recognise the Soviet Union’s
wrongs against these peoples, and still maintains, contrary to over-
whelming evidence, that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania voluntarily
adhered to the Soviet Union. This certainly does not make these
countries more trustful of Russia.
Western European nations, or so-called ‘old Europe’, in the sense
of the term used in 2003 by the then US Secretary of Defence Donald
Rumsfeld, and France and Germany in particular, have failed to
strike a balance and distinguish between a support for the justified
grievances of these states and their unjustified prickliness towards
Russia, and in some cases have even rather passively followed the
lead of these countries in determining the European Union’s policies
towards Russia. Instead of trying to find something positive in the
negative (e.g., the significant number of native Russian speakers in
Estonia and Latvia and a knowledge of Russia, the Russian language
and culture among ethnic Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians are
assets that could be utilised to the benefit of these countries)
and act as a bridge between Western Europe and Russia, these
countries have so far served more as roadblocks on the way to closer
integration between Brussels and Moscow and contributed to the
alienation of Russia from Europe.
Edward Lucas, as we wrote above, though extremely and mostly
unjustifiably critical of all the aspects of the domestic and foreign
policies of Russia, nevertheless writes of some of Russia’s neighbours
that ‘the paradox is that these ill-governed, tetchy and intolerant
countries are the front line that the West is trying to defend.’65
However, as he believes, defending them is a crucial task, and
65 E. Lucas, The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the
West, Bloomsbury, 2007, p. 209.
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152 Chapter Four
whenever these ‘ill-governed, tetchy and intolerant’ governments

have disagreements with Moscow, it is always the latter that is in the
wrong, as if Russia by definition can do nothing right.
Let us take the reaction of the West towards the August 2008 mili-
tary conflict between Georgia and Russia, which we have already
mentioned above. The initial, almost as if default, reaction of the
political elites of most Western countries to this conflict well illus-
trates how ideology blinds the perception of reality. Practically all
big Western mass media outlets declared that it had been Russia
that had committed an unprovoked and naked act of aggression
against small, defenceless and democratic Georgia. The presidents
of Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Poland and the Prime Minister
of Latvia immediately flew to Tbilisi to express their support to
Saakashvili. However, soon drops of doubt started to filter in. Even
before the Independent Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in
Georgia, established by the European Union and chaired by Swiss
diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, published its Report, it had become
recognised by some independent observers in the West that, in
truth, it had been Tbilisi that had initiated the war.66 Tagliavini’s
well-balanced Report correctly emphasised that all parties involved
had contributed to the escalation of tension leading up to the war,
and all of them had breached international law before, as well as
during, the conflict. However, finding that ‘the use of force by
Georgia in South Ossetia, beginning with the shelling of Tskinvhali
during the night of 7/8 August’ was unjustifiable under interna
tional law,67 it laid the blame for the initiation of a military conflict
squarely on Saakashvili’s doorstep. Had Russia’s military response
66 See, e.g., D. Bandow, ‘Tbilisi’s Baggage’, The National Interest Online, 12.31.2008;
The German Spiegel wrote already in November 2008: ‘One thing was already clear
to the officers at NATO headquarters in Brussels: They thought that the Georgians
had started the conflict and that their actions were more calculated than pure self-
defense or a response to Russian provocation. In fact, the NATO officers believed
that the Georgian attack was a calculated offensive against South Ossetian positions
to create the facts on the ground, and they coolly treated the exchanges of fire in the
preceding days as minor events. Even more clearly, NATO officials believed, looking
back, that by no means could these skirmishes be seen as justification for Georgian
war preparations’ (‘Did Saakashvili Lie? The West Begins to Doubt Georgian Leader’,
Spiegel International Online, 09. 15. 2008).
67 Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia,
Report, Vol.I, September 2009, p. 22.
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been proportionate to the initial attack (which it was not), and

within the rules of international humanitarian law (which it was not
either), it would have been lawful. However, even almost half a dec-
ade later there are those who are unable to see the complexity of the
conflict, and almost as if by default continue to speak of Russian
aggression against Georgia in August 2008.68 This is not an innocu-
ous bias. Daniel Treisman is right in that the biased anti-Russian
reaction in the West to the Georgia-Russia 2008 war, which was initi-
ated by the regime of Saakashvili, in Russia forced even the oppo-
nents and critics of Vladimir Putin to support Russia’s response to
the Georgian attack, and to develop serious doubts about the objec-
tivity of the Western media and the sincerity of Western leaders. So,
Mikhail Gorbachev, who has been rather vocal opponent and critic
of Putin’s governance of Russia, found that ‘Russia had to respond.
Accusing Russia of having committed an act of aggression against a
“small and defenceless Georgia” is not only a masterpiece of hypoc-
risy; it is also an act of inhumanity’.69 Such a confrontational
approach towards Russia, reminiscent of the Cold War period when
the allies were always right while opponents were wrong as if by
definition, does not help these Russian neighbours become less
tetchy, better governed and more tolerant. On the contrary, it would
entrench them in their mistaken policies, and it may indeed be a
step, if not towards a new cold war (which seems to be impossible),70
then at least towards a cold peace that is in the interest of neither
Russia nor Europe.
7. RUSSIA – PART OF EUROPE?
Russia is a European country, and the Russians are Europeans

that have greatly contributed to European culture; even in Russia’s
68 A. Cohen, R. Hamilton, ‘The Russian Military and the Georgia War: Lessons
and Implications’, United States Army War College. Strategic Studies Institute.
Georgia Russia war, June 2011.
69 D. Treisman, op.cit., p. 150.
70 Fyodor Lukyanov correctly notes that ‘Russia will never play a role of the
Soviet Union and, as a consequence, a new Cold War is not possible’ (F. Lukyanov,
Interview to the Russian newspaper ArgumentyiFacty, Argumenty i Facty, 8 June
2012.
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154 Chapter Four
experimentation with communism there is something that can be

traced back to the European Enlightenment’s heritage. One of the
most insightful Russian foreign policy analysts, the Editor-in-Chief
of Russia in Global Affairs, Fyodor Lukyanov, has written that ‘Russia
simply has no alternative to the West. Culturally, psychologically and
historically it has always been part of the Western world, despite its
many unique features. Nobody in Asia thinks of Russia as an Asian
power, even though three quarters of its territory are located in Asia
(but three quarters of Russia’s population live in its European part).’71
Russia has indeed had long and close links with the rest of Europe.
Putin is right when he opines that ‘Russia is an inalienable and
organic part of Greater Europe and European civilization. Our
citizens think of themselves as Europeans.’72 It is encouraging both
for Russia as well as for Europe that the Russian President empha-
sises this point. At the same time, due to its size, history as well as
religion –Russian Orthodoxy – she presents a special case.
Nikolay Spasskiy, a Russian diplomat and historian, well articu-
lates the prevalent attitude of Russia’s political and business elites
on the ‘Europeanness’ of Russia: ‘In whatever way we may posi-
tion ourselves as a centre of power in its own right – which is quite
fair – Russia will be an integral part of greater Europe. However spe-
cial our national history, including the key fact that the Renaissance,
the Reformation and the Enlightenment barely scratched its surface,
Russia took shape within the mainstream of the pan-Western and
pan-Christian historical process. In their perception of the world
Russians are Europeans. It’s not worth trying to deceive ourselves. As
we laugh at the current turmoil in Western Europe, in fact we laugh
at ourselves’.73 However, the two additional comments to this main
thesis are equally significant. First, as Spasskiy writes, ‘[A]t the cur-
rent historical stage neither Russia nor other key international play-
ers are prepared to consider an option that would assign to Russia
the role of a junior partner of another, stronger state – like the role of
71 F. Lukyanov, ‘Uncertain World: Will Russia become part of the West?’, RIA
Novosti, 31 May, 2012 (http://en.rian.ru/columnists/20120531/173771631.html).
72 Ibid.
73 N. Spasskiy, ‘The Decline of Europe and Russia’s Future: Why we Need Lee
Kuam Yee Style of State’, Russia in Global Affairs, 23 June 2012.
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Austria-Hungary in alliance with the German Empire, or Britain in

alliance with the United States’.74 Secondly, he opines: ‘Cutting the
long story short, we need a Lee Kuan Yew style of state – with inevi-
table adjustments, because we are not Chinese. A strong, robust and
honest state. A wise one. And tough, if need be. The rest will come’.75
If we now cut this long story short it would read something like this:
Russia is a European nation, though with her own idiosyncratic his-
tory; she is too big and ambitious to practice bandwaggoning; more
than anything else, Russia at this moment needs a strong state à la
Lee Kuan Yee while the rest (e.g., democracy) can wait.
In some ways, Russians, as representatives of a former super-
power, which is, once again, attempting to regain its lost ‘greatness’,
are indeed closer to Americans than to the Western Europeans. This
means that in many ways Russian society is rather different from
other European societies, and this has to be taken into account when
we speak of the prospects and nature of democracy in Russia, or her
closer integration with European institutions. Consequently, Russia’s
integration into the wider Europe presents some real difficulties
that, nevertheless, are not insurmountable in a case where all sides
fully understand the potential benefits of closer cooperation and
integration and try to leave history for historians. For that to become
reality, both Russia and Europe have to change their policies, though
the greater changes should be expected from Russia since they con-
cern not only her foreign policy, but her domestic politics as well.
Until Russia decisively curbs corruption and indeed becomes more
democratic (I don’t see any contradiction in my argument that
Russia has to become more democratic for the sake of the Russian
people as well as for the sake of its closer integration with the rest of
Europe, and my claim that Western criticism of Russia’s internal
institutions is often insensitive, harking back to the past and there-
fore sometimes even counterproductive), its closer integration into
Europe is difficult. And Russia, in contradistinction to many other
countries that the West has attempted to democratise and liberalise
(e.g., Afghanistan, Iraq and some other Middle Eastern countries),
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid.
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156 Chapter Four
has indeed the potential to become, in some important respects,

more like Western European countries, but would maintain an iden-
tity that would always make her different from most other European
societies. At the same time, until the West changes its perceptions of
Russia, the reality of relations between Europe and Russia does not
change either. Dmitri Simes and Paul Saunders write: ‘[W]ith all the
uncertainty about Russia, it may be helpful to focus on what the
country is not. First and foremost, Russia is not a country governed
by a messianic ideology and is neither intrinsically antidemocratic
nor anti-Western. Secondly, however, Russia is not a nation of altru-
istic do-gooders upon whose support the United States can rely
when its interests and priorities differ from Washington’s.’76
Today’s economic, political as well as military strategic realities
are such that Europe and Russia need each other, though many
political leaders, both in Europe as well as in Russia, have not yet
been able to recognise this need. Notwithstanding declarations from
both sides that the Cold War has ended and that NATO and Russia
are no longer enemies, the behaviour of both parties too often bears
witness to the contrary. Or rather, though both NATO and Russia (at
least their most reasonable representatives) seem to genuinely
understand that the other side does not present either an imminent
or even realistically foreseeable military threat (though there are
some Russian generals, as well as political and military leaders in
some NATO countries, in particular the US and some Eastern and
Central European states, who think, speak and act differently), some
of their practical policies testify to the effect that they have serious
doubts as to whether such a state of affairs is sustainable. Therefore,
both sides seem to be preparing for worst-case scenarios and thereby,
if not hastening the realization of such scenarios, then at least creat-
ing an ambience of a lack of confidence between the West and
Russia. For example, if NATO’s nuclear shield in Europe is indeed
only meant to protect the American European allies from missiles
launched by rogue states or terrorist groups, both today as well as in
the foreseeable future, and is in no way even potentially directed
76 D. Simes and P. Saunders, ‘The Kremlin Begs to Differ’, The National Interest,
November/December 2009.
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against Russia, then NATO has failed to persuade more actors than
just Russia that this is the case. Many independent and impartial
observers have remained unconvinced by the lack of concrete
proofs. Can NATO guarantee that these systems can never be used
against Russian missiles? Of course not! Russia, in turn, reacts nerv-
ously (and often, as in the case of the Georgian attack on South
Ossetia in August 2008, it overreacts) when NATO moves closer to
the Russian border (as with the possibility of Georgia’s and Ukraine’s
NATO membership), and her behaviour often expresses mistrust
and hostility towards NATO, and especially towards the United
States. Russia threatens to undertake steps, like deploying Iskander
missiles in the Kaliningrad exclave in response to NATO’s missile
shield, which make Russia’s neighbours nervous. Dmitri Trenin
writes that Russia’s ‘strategic bombers and ships practicing off
Venezuela were designed to put the U.S. government in an uncom-
fortable position of watching the foreign power play in its backyard.
Even though this “toy” show of force did not impress many people in
the United States and won Moscow no friends, from the Kremlin
perspective, it was worth it; an important point had been made’.77
However, there was hardly anything positive in the point made by
the Kremlin; it was clearly an awkward attempt to punch above one’s
weight. Then, Putin did not attend the May 2012 G-8 meeting in the
United States, sent Prime Minister Medvedev in his stead, and
ignored the opening of the London Olympics, despite being a keen
athlete himself. Indeed, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin attended the
opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, though his
stay was cut short by the Georgian attack on its runaway territory of
South Ossetia. Dispatching Medvedev in his stead to London is not a
step that would improve relations with these important Western
democracies (though later Putin attending judo competitions
together with the British Prime Minister David Cameron).
Fyodor Lukyanov writes:
The current difficulties in Russian-U.S. relations are hard to formulate:
Putin has to understand that Obama is not George W. Bush. The world
sees Obama as the polar opposite to Bush, but this is not so obvious to
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158 Chapter Four
the new Russian president. Putin does not trust the United States as a
matter of principle, but not because of his Soviet background or KGB
training. The reason is more to do with his relations with Bush during
his first two presidential terms. According to Putin, who was ini-
tially pro-American, instead of gratitude, the Bush administration
responded to his moves toward rapprochement with the United States
in 2000–2002 by launching an aggressive expansion into the post-
Soviet space, withdrawing from the 1972 ABM Treaty, announcing
plans to deploy BMD [ballistic missile defence] elements near Russia’s
border, and setting a course for global hegemony.78
After 9/11, Putin indeed made a serious bid for an ‘alliance with the
Alliance’, using the expression coined by the then US Ambassador
to Moscow, now Deputy Secretary General of NATO Alexander
Vershbow.79 Immediately after the attack on the United States Putin
offered his full support to the United States, and Russia worked
closely with Washington on political, logistical and intelligence mat-
ters. And the Kremlin still continues to cooperate with the United
States and NATO on Afghanistan. For example since 2009, Russia has
allowed Afghan-bound NATO transport through its territory as an
alternative to convoys through Pakistan, which were subject to mili-
tant attacks, and in 2012 it allowed its airport facilities in Ulyanovsk
(Vladimir Lenin’s birthplace in the Volga river) to be used as a transit
point for shipments of non-lethal supplies to and from Afghanistan
by air, rail and road.80
What are these important factors that necessitate a much closer
cooperation and even integration between Europe and Russia than
we have hitherto seen? First of all, it is Russia’s need of Western
European know-how, experience and investments that will all have
a beneficial impact on the corruption-ridden economic life of Russia,
while Europe needs access to Russia’s markets and natural resources,
especially energy. Secondly, as Washington turns its attention more
and more, and understandably so, to the Pacific region, Europe
needs ever more than before a friendly Russia, closely integrated, on
78 F. Lukyanov, Putin and Washington: Is Conflict Inevitable? Russia in Global

Affairs, 10 May, 2012.
80 G. Briansky, ‘Putin signals support for NATO Afghan supply hub’, 11 April 2012,
Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/11/us-russia-putin-nato
-idUSBRE83A0WO20120411).
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its doorstep. European nations can only lose from having unfriendly
relations with Russia. Although Europe and Russia are no longer
enemies and do not threaten one another, they have both failed to
properly and convincingly communicate this to each other. Such a
rapprochement between Europe and Russia must not be, and need
not be, carried out on account of, or as a counter-balance against,
any other centre of power, especially against Washington and Bei
jing. Russia certainly needs stable and sustainable good-neighbourly
relations with China, and Washington and its European allies will
continue closely cooperating, including within NATO (though, not-
withstanding all the statements of Alliance’s leadership, it is becom-
ing increasingly obvious that NATO has not found a proper role in
the post-bi-polar world). Yet, to move towards such cooperative
arrangements, Europe, NATO and the United States, on the one hand,
and Russia, on the other, will have to come to an understanding that
they are not only foes at the present, but that they need not be
potential enemies in the foreseeable future. This, notwithstanding
many declarations to the contrary, is not yet perceived by the
parties.
Relations between the West and Russia need not be as edgy and
confrontational as they are today. Although there is no cold war, a
kind of ‘cold peace’ that does not allow the realisation of the poten-
tial for cooperation (I would emphasise, in many areas, including
international security, such cooperation is a must and not at all
impossible) between the West and Russia has the potential for a dete
rioration of relations between them. Such a state of affairs between
the West and Russia is mainly due to the perceptions, stemming from
a past that both sides cling to, and that have a strong impact on pre-
sent day realities. If one perceives the other side as a strategic rival,
or even a foe or a potential enemy and acts upon such perception,
then of course we have a case for a self-fulfilling prophecy. For exam-
ple, Mitt Romney, the then Republican American Presidential candi-
date, commenting on the outcome of the meeting of the American
and Russian presidents in Seoul in March 2012, said: ‘[R]ussia, this is,
without question, our number one geopolitical foe’.81 Although this
81 http://www.acus.org/new_atlanticist/americas-number-one-geostrategic
-threat.
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160 Chapter Four
was said in the heat of a presidential electoral campaign, such irre-

sponsible statements and visions harking back to the past, if not
determine, then at least have a negative impact on, the future rela-
tions between these two countries. Another, more general reason
that we discussed in many parts of this book, is the West’s desire and
attempts to make non-Western societies more like themselves.
Reading and watching Western media, one may conclude that not
being a Western style liberal democrat is a kind of moral disability,
which, like homosexuality in quite a few Muslim countries, has to
be, if not punished, then at least cured. For example, in July 2007 The
Economist wrote: ‘Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russia’s Ambassador to
Ukraine, is no Western style democrat. Nor does this (now wealthy)
founder of Gazprom and ex-prime minister pretend to be’.82 In this
assertion, there seems to be the assumption that not being a Western
style democrat, or not even pretending to be or trying to become one
is something abnormal and reproachable.
So, there is both the need and potential for closer cooperation
between the West and Russia, and for the closer integration of Russia
within European structures. Whether this need is met and potential
realised depends on both sides. However, as Fyodor Lukyanov
insightfully observes:
But these are all assumptions based on the expectation that political
players will follow rational considerations and act expediently.
However, modern politics is full of examples of leading players mak-
ing colossal blunders – either out of arrogance, complexes, dogma or
misunderstanding one’s own interests. The unpredictable, rapid
changes that characterize global politics in the 21st century are accom-
panied by the unexpected reawakening of instincts from a distant
past, in which relations between countries can backslide into old-
fashioned realpolitik and considerations of prestige can override all
else. The defining characteristic of the transitional period in which we
live is uncertainty. We know not where we are headed – forward, to a
new political morality, or backward, to ossified principles enforced by
high-tech weapons. Anything is possible at this point.83
82 The Economist, July 7th-13th 2007, p. 39.

83 F. Lukyanov, ‘Uncertain World: Will Russia become part of the West?’, RIA
Novosti, 31 May, 2012 ( http://en.rian.ru/columnists/20120531/173771631.html).
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Democratic Peace Theories 161
Chapter Five
DEMOCRATIC PEACE THEORIES AND

REGIME CHANGE
1. THEORY AND POLITICS OF DEMOCRATIC PEACE
Current regime changes (the so-called Arab Spring and Colour

Revolutions in some of the former Soviet republics) raise interre-
lated issues of international relations (IR) theory and international
law. Among these issues are democratic peace theory (DPT) and its
role in supporting or justifying policies which are guided mainly by
economic and strategic interests, external assistance or encourage-
ment of regime change, and the use of force for humanitarian pur-
poses [i.e. humanitarian intervention or responsibility to protect
(R2P)] as well as interference, militarily or otherwise, in internal
conflicts on behalf of either governments or opposition.
One of the arguments in favour of the promotion of liberal democ-
racy all over the world is the belief in so-called ‘democratic peace
theories’, which have their philosophical groundings in Immanuel
Kant’s 1795 essay Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Study. In 1964
American sociologist Dean Babst published an article Elective
Governments – a Force for Peace,1 where he, using Quincy Wright’s
classical work A Study of War, in which Wright had analysed major
wars since 1480 to 1941, concluded that the existence of independent
states with elective governments, i.e. democracies, greatly enhances
the chances of maintaining peace.2 Until the end of the Cold War
Kant’s philosophical treatise was treated as a masterpiece of abstract
philosophy that had little to do with the real world, while very few
remembered or referred to Babst’s article.
There was some revival of interest in the topic in the 1980s, when
several authors claimed that the absence of wars between democra-
cies or liberal states is both a fact in international relations and
1 D. Babst, ‘Elective Governments – a Force for Peace’, The Wisconsin Sociologist,

1964, No. 3, pp. 9–14.
2 Ibid., p. 14.
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162 Chapter Five
empirical law of IR theory. So, Rudolf Rummel concluded his article

on the topic with the statement that ‘violence will occur between
states only if at least one is non-libertarian’.3 Jack Levy even wrote
that ‘the absence of war between democracies comes as close as any-
thing we have to an empirical law in international relations’.4 The
1990s, marked by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and a new wave
of democratisation in Eastern and Central Europe, saw an exponen-
tial increase of interest in the ideas expressed in those works. A new
IR theory (theories) emerged – that of Democratic Peace Theory
(DPT). The gist of this theory is the assertion that as democracies do
not wage wars against one another, the more democracies there
are in the world, the less there is the chance of a military conflict
breaking out.5 Or as President Clinton put it at the level of practi-
cal politics: ‘Ultimately the best strategy to insure our security and
to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy
elsewhere’.6
DP theories are part of liberal IR theories, which, in contradistinc-
tion to Realist theories, which believe that conflicts, and especially
military conflicts, between states are inherent in and stem from the
anarchical nature of international society and do not depend (or
depend little) on internal characteristics of states, pay close atten-
tion to the nature of states, to their domestic features.7 Christopher
Layne, an adherent to Realist IR theory, writes that DP theories and
Realism part company on a crucial point: ‘[T]he former holds that
changes within states can transform the nature of international
politics. Realism takes the view that even if states change internally,
the structure of the international political system remains the same.
As systemic structure is the primary determinant of international
political outcomes, structural constraints mean that similarly placed
3 R.J. Rummel, ‘Libertarianism and International Violence’, Journal of Conflict

Resolution, 1983, Vol. 27, No. 1, p. 29.
4 J.S. Levy, ‘Domestic Politics and War’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1988,
Vol. 18, No. 4, p. 662.
5 see, e.g., B. Russsett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for Post-Cold War
World, Princeton University Press, 1994; M. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace. New York:
W.W. Norton, 1997.
6 President Clinton’s State of the Union Message, January 1994 http://www
.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=50409#axzz1ss6W8zdb.
7 R. Cooper, The Post-Modern State and the World Order, Demos, 1996.
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states will act similarly, regardless of their domestic political

systems’.8
Usually it is the following explanations that are given to statistical
studies that, in the opinion of adherents of DPT, prove their theories.
Firstly, as democratically elected governments are accountable to
their electorate and as it is the people who bear the brunt of all wars,
democracies are naturally more peace-loving than non-democra-
cies. Secondly, as democracies resolve their domestic problems and
disputes not by means of arms, but through discussion and compro-
mise, they extrapolate these procedures to their external relations.
Sometimes these two interrelated, but nevertheless different, expla-
nations are called (1) the role of institutional constraints, i.e. the
checks and balances embedded in democratic institutions and the
constraining role of public opinion as the factors making democra-
cies more peaceful and (2) the role of normative effects meaning
that democratic norms and cultures applicable domestically are
externalised to also cover relations between states. Finally, it has
been argued by some that as democracies are wealthier, they have
more to lose from wars than those who are less well-off.
Dyadic DP theory, supported by most adherents of DPT, suggests
that democracies don’t fight each other, while monadic DP theory,
which has fewer adherents, supposes that democracies are generally
more peace-loving. Dyadic DP theories explain that as democracies
are open and trust each other, they see other democracies as follow-
ing the same logic; their external contradictions are resolved like
domestic disagreements – through discussions, compromises and
concessions. As non-democracies are opaque, as internal discontent
in such societies is either suppressed or explodes in violent revolts, it
is not possible to trust non-democratic regimes; like methods of
domestic politics in democracies, their ways of doing politics at
home are also externalised. Although all these explanations should
be usable, in principle, to also support monistic theories of DP, i.e.
theories which claim that democracies not only don’t wage wars
against each other, but that they rarely wage wars also against non-
democracies (or at least, if they fight non-democracies, they do not
8 C. Layne, Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace, International

Security, (1994), 19:2, 12.
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164 Chapter Five
initiate those conflicts), monistic theories have fewer supporters

since they so obviously contradict reality. Even mature liberal
democracies have waged wars against non-democracies, and not
always has the initiative of such conflicts come from the part of
non-democracies.
2. PROBLEMS WITH DEMOCRATIC PEACE THEORIES
Intuitively, and after comparing the European continent of today

with its relatively recent past, one may indeed give credence to DP
theories. European history is as bloody as the history of any other
continent, and due to its dominant role in the twentieth century,
twice in that century have European wars dragged other peoples in,
transforming its internal conflicts into two world wars. Since 1945,
however, the Western part of Europe has indeed enjoyed peace.
Although the democratic nature of today’s France and Germany, for
example, may not be the only factor that makes a military conflict
between them virtually unimaginable and even absurd, it seems to
definitely be a contributing factor to the solid peace between these
erstwhile enemies. The same applies to many other pairs of European
states.
There are, however, several serious problems with DP theories,
even within the European context. First, statistical data used to
prove DP theories relates to a relatively short period of time; the very
phenomenon of the democratic state is fairly recent. Democracy is a
relative latecomer to the world, especially if we limit democracies to
so-called mature or liberal democracies and do not go as far back as
to Ancient Greece. James Lee Ray observes that ‘the majority of
democratic states that have ever existed have emerged during the
Cold War’ and because this ‘historic epoch may prove idiosyncratic
with respect to relationships among democratic states; only time
will tell whether the large number of democratic states that have
emerged in recent years will fight wars against each other in the
absence of a serious threat from the Soviet Union’.9
9 J.L. Ray, ‘Does Democracy Cause Peace?’, Annual Review of Political Science
(N.W. Polsby ed.), CA Annual Review Inc., 1998, pp. 37–38.
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It is indeed true that most democracies emerged or matured dur-

ing the Cold War. They all belonged to the same – Western – camp of
the bi-polar world and felt threatened by their communist rival (the
presence of several liberal democracies, like Austria and Finland,
that did not belong either to NATO or the EEC does not change the
overall picture). This, naturally, made conflictual potential of intra-
camp relations secondary and not vital to their interests, compared
to the main threat, i.e. the military as well as ideological threat from
its rival – Eastern – bloc. Related to this factor, or even part of it, is
the role of a unique single overwhelmingly powerful leader in the
Western bloc – the United States of America. Washington played
the role of a Big Brother that not only guaranteed the security of the
smaller members of the Western bloc from outside threats, but also
kept order within the camp, though it is necessary to emphasise that
the ‘smaller brothers’ succumbed to Washington’s leadership much
more voluntarily than their Eastern bloc contemporaries yielded to
Moscow’s authority and control. However, Tony Smith is right when
he writes that ‘[I]n conceptual terms, the chief failure of DPT is that
it does not acknowledge the role of a hegemonic leader in creating,
protecting and expanding the zone of democratic peace’.10 Indeed,
there was a uni-polar and hegemonic peace within one of the parts
of the bi-polar world. The presence of a totalitarian adversary, whose
threat was not only military but also ideological, certainly played a
role in liberal democracies’ submission to the will of a protector,
who acted as a kind of Leviathan for that part of the world – the so-
called first world. The domestically democratic United States has
been and remains internationally hegemonic. This factor, on the one
hand, contributed to the democratic peace practice within the camp
of mature democracies during the Cold War period, but on the other,
the same factor explains why Washington as a hegemonic power
behaved, and continues to behave, quite aggressively in its external
relations towards those beyond the camp of mature liberal democra-
cies following Washington’s lead. Even today the ‘hard face’ of the
Enlightenment’s legacy, which is morally neutral and whose purpose
may not only be liberation but also domination, has a tendency that
10 T. Smith, ‘Democratic Peace Theory: From Promising Theory to Dangerous

Practice’, International Relations, 2011, Vol. 25, No. 2, p. 154.
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166 Chapter Five
Martti Koskenniemi has defined as a ‘hegemonic struggle to make

one’s partial view seem like the universal preference’.11
Robert Cooper, who distinguishes between pre-modern, modern
and post-modern states, believes that the United States, whose
domestic structures and processes are relatively similar to those of
European post-modern states, conducts itself externally as a modern
state which behaves like states that follow Machiavellian principles
and raison d’état have always behaved.12 Observing that outside
Europe, it is Canada (one could probably add Australia and New
Zealand) that corresponds to the criteria of a post-modern state,
Cooper writes: ‘[T]he USA is the more doubtful case since it is
not clear that the US government or Congress accepts either the
necessity and desirability of interdependence, or its corollaries of
openness, mutual surveillance and mutual interference to the same
extent as most European governments now do’.13 Such a dissimilar-
ity between the United states and other liberal democracies is
explained by the global role Washington plays, which Cooper politely
calls ‘the knowledge that the defence of the civilised world rests ulti-
mately on its shoulders’,14 but which a more impartial or critically
minded observer may consider as the role of a hegemonic power act-
ing in the belief that its values are universal and its interests may
clash with the interests of other nations only when the latter are
non-democracies guided by narrow self-interest. However, the prob-
lem with this logic is, as Robert Cooper himself states, that ‘hegem-
ony is no longer acceptable in a liberal world that values human
rights and self-determination’.15 This was written in the 1990s, when
China and other non-Western nations were not as strong and asser-
tive as they are today in the second decade of the twenty first cen-
tury, and when financial and economic crisis did not loom on the
horizon. Any hegemony is even less acceptable in a contemporary
world that is moving further towards multipolarity and diversity
11 M. Koskenniemi, ‘International Law in Europe: Between Tradition and

Renewal’, The European Journal of International Law (2005), vol. 16, No 1, p. 119.
12 R. Cooper, ‘The Post-Modern State’, in Reordering the World: The Long-Term
Implications of September 11, The Foreign Policy Centre, 2002, p. 12.
13 Ibid., p. 29.
14 Ibid.
15 R. Cooper, The Post-Modern State and the World Order, Demos, 1996.
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within political regimes and economic models. A globalised world is

simply too big to be governed from one hegemonic centre.
Today’s Europe consists of mature liberal democracies, and
indeed, the potential for armed conflict between them is not very
realistic. Although the democratic nature of European states seems
to be, at least intuitively, one of the factors that exclude the use of
force or even the threat of force between them, there are other fac-
tors as well. The most important among them is the fact that not
only are European states post-modern states, but that the European
state-system is, what Robert Cooper calls, a post-modern state sys-
tem.16 This international system, to which Western and now also
Central and Eastern European states belong, is characterised, in
Cooper’s words, by the breakdown of distinctions between domestic
and foreign affairs; mutual interference in (traditionally) domestic
affairs; not only a formal rejection of the use of force for resolv-
ing disputes among themselves, but the impossibility of foreseeing
realistic scenarios for such use of force; the growing irrelevance of
borders; security based on transparency, openness and interdepend-
ence.17 European liberal democracies not only have similar domestic
political and economic systems as well as grosso modo shared his-
tory (mostly bloody), but they have also created a unique interna-
tional system where Realist principles (anarchy, concerns for relative
power, prisoners’ dilemma etc.) either do not apply at all, or play
only a secondary and subordinate role. Here, the structure of
the international political system, of which Layne speaks, hasn’t
remained the same; it is not any more anarchic, or at least as anar-
chic as the whole international system or other regional interna-
tional systems. The European international system has radically
changed; indeed, we may say that instead of remaining Hobbesian, it
has become rather Kantian. However, this does not mean that
democracies, even vis-à-vis other democracies, act in a similar fash-
ion outside such an international system. Moreover, the European
international system could hardly be replicated globally, at least in
the foreseeable future. Can anyone be sure that even if a rapidly ris-
ing China were to become more and more democratic it would also
16 Ibid., p. 42.
17 Ibid.
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168 Chapter Five
increasingly have relations with the United States akin to those

between France and Germany or Holland and Spain? There is more
than one reason why it is authoritarian rulers rather than democrati-
cally elected governments who can more easily resolve certain con-
flictual situations peacefully (e.g., through bribery, by means of
dynastic marriages, or a weaker party retreating fearing inevitable
defeat). Of course, this does not mean that a world of authoritarian
states would be more peaceful than a world of democracies; cer-
tainly not. However, it means that even if a world of democracies
were possible, it may not necessarily be more peaceful. Moreover,
proponents of DPT understand democracy as a Western style liberal
democracy that is, as we discussed above, a rather limited vision of
possible future political arrangements. There is something signifi-
cant in Ido Oren’s statement that ‘the democratic peace claim is not
about democracies per se as much as it is about countries that are
“America like” or of “our kind”. The apparently objective coding rules
by which democracy is defined in fact represent current American
values’.18
That there is a hegemonic struggle going on in the world is obvi-
ous and beyond any doubt. Globally, there is still only one hegem-
onic power – the United States; acting sometimes unilaterally, often
together with its allies. One of President G.W. Bush’s aids explained
to Ron Suskind how reality is created in today’s world: ‘We’re an
empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while
you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again,
creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how
things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will
be left to just study what we do.’19 This statement is not only arrogant
but also illusionary, since Washington’s ability to control and guide
events is increasingly diminishing, and may have characterised the
rather short unipolar moment20 that followed the demise of the
18 I. Oren, ‘The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace: Changing U.S. Perceptions

of Imperial Germany’, International Security, 1995, Vol. 20, No. 2, p. 1.
19 R. Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush”, The
New York Times Magazine, 17 October, 2004.
20 C. Krauthhammer, ‘The Unipolar Moment’, Foreign Affairs, 1990/1991, Vol. 70,
No. 1, pp. 23–33.
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Soviet Union. Though the manner in which Bush’s aid put it is an

expression of extreme arrogance combined with some ignorance
and naivety, many intelligent and knowledgeable Americans think
quite similarly. In summer 2012, for example, in International Herald
Tribune a piece by Yale law professor John Fabian Witt, The Legal Fog
between War and Peace, where the author among many interesting
and rather knowledgeable comments on the use of unmanned
drones also writes: ‘Inside the United States Government lawyers
like Jeh C. Johnson in the Pentagon and Harold Koh in the State
Department, along with hundreds of other lawyers in the Justice
Department, the White House and elsewhere, are creating new sys-
tems for regulating the targeting process’.21 I personally know well
and hold in great esteem Professor Harold Hongju Koh – the current
State Department Legal Adviser, who – I am sure – does not think
that he, even if together with his colleagues from the State, Defence
and Justice Departments of the United States, are creating interna-
tional legal rules for targeting (and Professor Witt’s article is about
international law). Harold is too clever and professional for that. But
if Professor Witt does not mean by ‘and elsewhere’ the foreign,
defence and justice ministries of China, Russia, France, Germany,
Brazil and many other countries, which have not delegated to the
United States government the onerous task of producing interna-
tional law for the whole world, his comment – in substance, though
not in tone – differs little from what President G. Bush’s aid had told
Ron Suskind. Such a mindset is not harmless and though it may
sometimes indeed help create new realities, they often have nothing
in common even with what Washington intends to create.
Yet, when some regional powers such as China in the South China
Sea or Russia in the Caucasus claim to have their own special spheres
of interest close to their borders, the global hegemon immediately
cries wolf: in today’s world there should not be any place for spheres
of interest; there are only universal values and interests, and their
content (free market, democracy, secularism etc.) is defined by the
West. However, there is also a serious problem with this soft and
21 J.F. Witt, ‘The Legal Fog between War and Peace’, International Herald Tribune,
10 June 2012.
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170 Chapter Five
humane facet of the Enlightenment’s legacy when used as an export

item. Though there are more than just a handful of Western edu-
cated or influenced people in many non-Western countries who cry
out for liberties and democracy, in practice their sought revolutions
often end in chaos, frustration, reversals to dictatorships or the
emergence of failed states. Why so?
Even if Western values are, in principle, universalisable, not all
societies are ready for an immediate introduction to them. Some
times such medicine is too strong, and instead of curing the patient
it may kill them. How things end up depends on many variables.
Samuel Huntington has identified the following conditions that are
favourable for the consolidation of emerging democracies: 1) the
experience of a previous effort at democratisation, even if it had
failed; 2) relatively high levels of economic development; 3) a favour-
able international political environment, with outside assistance;
4) early timing of the transition to democracy, relative to a world-
wide “wave,” indicating that the drive to democracy derived primar-
ily from indigenous rather than outside influences; and 5) the
experience of a relatively peaceful rather than violent transition.22
Thomas Carothers does not consider such, or other, factors as pre-
conditions but rather as core ‘facilitators or nonfacilitators’ that
would make democratisation ‘harder or easier’.23 It would be possi-
ble to agree with such an approach if one were to add that some
combinations of such ‘nonfacilitators’ make democratisation impos-
sible, at least for the time being. It is important to note that demo-
cratic reforms in societies that have not had any, or have had little
previous experience with democracy are a most serious business
and cannot be approached slightly. Democratic institutions, if intro-
duced from the outside without being called for domestically, as
Jϋrgen Habermas observes, ‘disintegrate without the initiatives of a
population accustomed to freedom’.24 In the export-import business
22 S. Huntington, The Third Wave. Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century,

University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.
23 T. Carothers, ‘The “Sequence” Fallacy’, Journal of Democracy, 2007, vol. 18.,
No. 1, p. 24.
24 J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Contributions to a Discourse Theory of
Law and Democracy, Polity Press, 1996, p. 130.
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of democracy it is necessary to bear in mind that democratisation

has to be demand-induced, not supply-stimulated. Only if there is a
strong desire among a people to build democratic institutions as
well as at least a minimum of material and cultural preconditions
can the supply side play a positive role. Otherwise its role will be
destructive, and in contradistinction to what Joseph Schumpeter’s
theory of ‘creative destruction’25 predicts, there is little creative in
such destruction.
Further, if we exclude the Cold War period due to its ‘idiosyn-
cratic’ nature, the statistical picture of DPT becomes much more
confusing. As there is no consensus on the criteria for democracy, for
some authors certain wars were fought between democracies, while
other theorists discount them. For example, Bruce Russett did not
consider the 1812 war between Britain and the United States as a war
between two democracies since Britain, in his opinion, did not
become a democracy until the Reform Bill of 1832.26 Christopher
Layne, in analysing four case studies of ‘near misses’ where democ-
racies almost went to war against each other (Britain and the United
States in 1861 over the Trent incident; Britain and the United States
in 1895–1896 over the Venezuela–Great Britain border dispute; the
British-French struggle to control the Upper Nile and the Fashoda
incident of 1898; and the Franco-German Ruhr crisis of 1923), finds
that the reasons why none of these crises, (where the pairs of democ-
racies were ready to resort to arms), exploded in an armed conflict,
are much better explained, not by arguments of DP theory, but by
the conclusions of Realist theory: the weaker party always suc-
cumbed, thereby shunning an imminent military conflict.27 Chris
topher Layne also makes an important point, observing that ‘[T]he
greater the external threat a state faces (or believes it does), the
more “autocratic” its foreign policymaking process will be and
the more centralized its political structures will be’.28 To formulate
25 J. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (3d edition), Harper

Perennial, 1984.
26 Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, p. 16.
27 C. Layne, ‘Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace’, International
Security, 1994, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 5–49.
28 Layne, op. cit., p. 45.
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172 Chapter Five
this observation as a principle, we may say that it is not democracy

(or not primarily democracy) that leads to peace, but that peace is,
in the longer run, conducive to the emergence and sustainability of
democracy. Moreover, foreign policy-making, even in liberal democ-
racies, is less open and less subjected to parliamentary control than
domestic policy-making. It was so a hundred years ago, i.e. in the run
up to the First World War, when, say, ‘even in democratic France, the
executive enjoyed unfettered power in the realm of foreign policy’,29
and when ‘[I]n the realm of foreign policy, France and Britain were
no more and no less democratic than the Second Reich’.30 It is so
today, even in mature democracies and especially in the United
States, where the use of the political questions doctrine and other
mechanisms make certain that foreign affairs are less prone to legis-
lative and judicial supervision than domestic affairs. Recent devel-
opments such as the drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and other
places, as well as acts of cyber warfare in the form of Olympic Games
or Stuxnet31 have raised issues of executive powers vis-à-vis the legis-
lative branch. As Malou Innocent writes, ‘[B]ased on a broad theory
of executive power, President Obama, and possibly his successor,
has the authority to target people for death – including American
citizens – without a semblance of transparency, accountability or
congressional consent’.32 This accurate remark, due to a tiny but sig-
nificant detail, deserves a small diversion. This is a reference to
‘American citizens’, who together with non-American citizens are
the targets of assassination. There seems to be visceral, almost
subconscious, assumption that while it may be OK to target non-
Americans, American citizens deserve special, enhanced, protec-
tion. Such an attitude, if not directly contrary to international law
(the principle of non-discrimination), is in a sure way leading to its
breaches in concrete circumstances. Moreover, it does not enhance
29 Ibid., p. 42.
30 Ibid., p. 43.
31 D.E. Sanger, ‘Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran’,
International Herald Tribune, 1 June 2012; D.E. Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s
Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, Crown, 2012.
32 M. Innocent, ‘Yemen, Drones and the Imperial Presidency’, The National
Interest, 4 June 2012.
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American ‘soft power’; one may be tempted to argue that Washington

may target its own citizens but has to leave citizens of other coun-
tries alone.
In addition, democratic governments are as skilful as non-democ-
racies in manipulating public opinion to prepare it for the use of
force if initiated by them. As we will discuss in detail in the next
Chapter, whenever there is an intensive as well as sustained media
attention on a conflict with special emphasis on the crimes commit-
ted by one side, there are usually two possible reasons. First, it may
indeed be one of those rare cases when there is only one villain in
town with a few cynical self-interested manipulators supporting
him. Secondly, and this happens quite often when a ‘regime change’
is in preparation, sustained attention to a conflict and the singling
out of one main culprit while others are depicted either as innocent
victims or even freedom-fighters, usually means a prelude and prep-
aration for the use of ‘all necessary means’ for a regime change.
Moreover, the argument that democracies do not easily go to war
because in democracies it is the people, i.e. the electorate who bear
the burden of military conflicts with their pockets and even with
their lives, is only partly true. Below we will discuss problems with
financing war efforts. Here, it is necessary to underline that Western
democracies, especially the United States, which are military-tech-
nologically far more advanced than both their potential and actual
foes, and often use against them only airpower (and even in that
case, increasingly use unmanned drones), have tens or even hun-
dreds of times less casualties than their enemy’s combatants, and
even civilians.
3. IMMANUEL KANT AND THE XXI CENTURY WORLD
In his essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’ Immanuel Kant laid out six prelimi-
nary steps (conditions) towards perpetual peace. None of them have
lost their relevance, though some of them may be quite unrealistic
taking into account the political realities of both Kant’s and today’s
world. One of these was that governments should not borrow to
finance wars. This preliminary condition indeed colludes, in a sig-
nificant way, with ideas of democracy and peace. Taxation, which
most people may not be especially fond of, is one of the cornerstones
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174 Chapter Five
of democracy. The slogan ‘no taxation without representation’ may

be reversed to ‘no representation without taxation’. Take, for exam-
ple, Saudi Arabia or other energy rich autocracies. The absence of
taxation or very low taxes serve as a kind bribery that the authorities
use to keep the population, which does not have much or any say in
the affairs of the state, content. Such oil or gas rich kingdoms in the
Middle East or other autocrats such as those in Turkmenistan, who
do not tax their citizens, instead bribe the population using profits
from plentiful natural resources.
In this context, one interesting and peculiar development were
the George W. Bush era tax cuts, enacted at a time when the United
States became almost simultaneously engaged in two serious wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan. Earlier American administrations had used
taxation to finance wars. During the Second World War a ‘highly
progressive tax system’ was enacted in the United States.33 It was
observed by the Urban Institute in the US that ‘like the events of
December 7, 1941, the attacks of September 11 triggered a strong “rally
round the flag effect” as Americans readied themselves for the sacri-
fices of war. Unlike Pearl Harbour, however, there was virtually no
talk in the wake of the September 11 attacks of a need to increase
taxes in order to mobilize for war. Just as earlier leaders appealed
to Americans’ sense of patriotism to raise taxes, some politicians
used the same tack to argue for cutting them during the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. One commentator wrote in an April 2003
op-ed: “by keeping tax rates too high and ‘sacrificing’ economic
growth, we don’t help the war effort, we hinder it; we don’t get more
revenue, we get less.” Earlier generations may have witnessed debates
over the right form and magnitude of tax increases for fighting wars
abroad, but so solid a rejection of the increases, the authors con-
clude, is truly unprecedented in American history’.34 By borrowing,
instead of taxing, the Bush administration not only passed the eco-
nomic burden of war from this generation to further generations,
but also secured the consent to its war efforts from the current gen-
eration. It was a kind of bribery to the current generation at the
33 J. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, p. 4.

34 Urban Institute: Bush-Era Tax Cuts Depart From History of America War
Finance, http://www.urban.org/publications/901162.html (visited 17 March 2012).
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expense of future generations. And it goes without saying that such

financing of wars is contrary to Kant’s preconditions for perpetual
peace. It also contradicts one of the tenets of democracy – the finan-
cial burden of today’s wars, especially if these are wars of choice, not
wars of necessity, should not be passed on to future generations.
Moreover, as the greatest American judge Oliver Wendell Holmes
put it, ‘[T]axes are the price we pay for civilization’.35
4. ON THE WAR-PRONENESS OF SOME DEMOCRATISING

STATES
In the context of studying current regime changes in different parts

of the world, DP theories have to face some other challenges as well.
First, several experts have argued that though it may be true that
mature liberal democracies have not fought wars against one
another (recalling that, as we saw, the phenomenon of mature lib-
eral democracy is a recent occurrence), authoritarian or totalitarian
states usually go through a dangerous transition to democracy, and
historical evidence from the last 200 years has shown that in this
phase countries become more war-prone, not less, and they do fight
wars with other democratic or democratising states. Partly, this is
due to the fact that democratisation is often accompanied by a rise
in nationalism, sometimes in its extreme forms.36 Will Hutton is
wrong when he believes that ‘democratizing countries are less vul-
nerable to both internal and external conflicts’.37 The truth is usually
just the opposite. Only mature democracies are intrinsically more
stable; democratising countries very often have to transverse the
dangerous J-Curve, as we discussed in the Chapter on the difficulties
of a democratic transition in Russia.
Secondly, the fact that mature liberal democracies have not fought
wars against one another does not at all mean that they do not act
bellicosely vis-à-vis non-democracies or fledgling democracies. It
35 http://www.quotes.net/quote/4027.
36 see, e.g., E. Mansfield, J, Snyder, ‘Democratization and War’, Foreign Affairs,
May/June 1995; J. Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and National
Conflict, W W Norton & Co. Ltd., 2001.
2006, p. 185.
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176 Chapter Five
has been emphasized by some authors that democratic peace theory

has its ‘dark side’ – the propensity for democracies to be more
aggressive towards non-democracies or fledgling democracies.38
Washington’s military adventures against democratic Iran under
Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, the democratic Chile of Salvador
Allende in the 1970s and in a host of other situations shows that it is
not so much democracy or its absence that determines whether
peace or war prevails, as whether a particular state behaves as
expected by its more powerful neighbour; or if we extrapolate this to
global affairs, whether its behaviour is in accordance with Wash
ington’s expectations or more generally, with the expectations of
those who belong to the Euro-Atlantic alliance. Finally, even if we
were to assume, against all the doubts and odds, that all societies
would eventually become liberal democracies, rivalries over limited
resources, over who will lead and who will have to follow, as well as
a host of other potential sources of conflict will remain. This is not
only because democratising states may constitute serious security
threats, but also because attempts to democratise that which is not
democratisable (and it is not important whether this be in princi-
ple or only for the time being) is an even bigger threat. Besides the
ambiguities and pitfalls in relying on actual policies in democratic
peace theories, the proactive promotion of liberal democracy, espe-
cially by means of military force, has several other dangers. Christo
pher Hobson has made an extremely pertinent observation: ‘Any
early celebrations were distinctly premature, however, as ideas
related to DP soon emerged as a central justification – and potential
motivation – in the “freedom agenda” of the Bush administration,
which manifested itself most explicitly in the coercive democratiza-
tion of Iraq. Rather than being a “force for peace”, DPT scholarship
became implicated in a deeply divisive and costly war’.39 Indeed,
attempts to impose DPT may well lead to wars whose results have
nothing to do with democracy.
38 A. Geis, L. Brock, H. Miller (eds.), Democratic Wars: Looking at the Dark Side of
Democratic Peace, Palgrave, 2006.
39 C. Hobson, ‘Roundtable: Between the Theory and Practice of Democratic
Peace. Introduction’, International Relations, 2011, Vol. 25, No. 2, p. 147.
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Our ability to predict the future trends in social development is

rather limited. Every big social plan has turned out to be a kind of
utopia. All historical attempts to radically alter societies have
resulted in more significant unexpected and unwanted conse-
quences than foreseen and desired ones. One of the most scathing
criticisms of the Bush’s administration’s efforts to spread democracy
in the wider Middle East came from the neo-conservative author
Andrew Sullivan, who had earlier supported the 2003 war against
Iraq: ‘The final error was not taking culture seriously enough. There
is a large discrepancy between neo-conservatism’s scepticism of
government’s ability to change culture at home and its naiveté when
it comes to complex, tribal, sectarian cultures abroad’.40 It is indeed
amazing how quickly and with how little doubt the American politi-
cal elite embark on radical transformations of foreign societies,
especially if we compare all this with ineptitude and sluggishness of
the same elite in resolving a host of urgent domestic issues, such as
reforming the ineffective and unjust healthcare system, or effec-
tively responding to the banking crises. For example, Joseph Stiglitz
observes that ‘[E]conomists marvel at our health care sector and its
ability to deliver less for more: health outcomes are worse in the
United States than in almost all other advanced industrial countries,
and yet the United States spends absolutely more per capita, and
more as a percentage of GDP, by a considerable amount. We’ve been
spending more than one-sixth of GDP on health care, while France
has been spending less than an eighth. Per capita spending in the
United States has been two and a half times higher than the average
of the advanced industrial countries’.41 In comparison with the near
impossibility of resolving health care problems at home, the democ-
ratisation of Afghanistan, Iraq and the wider Middle East seems to
be a much easier task. Is it really so? Such a rhetorical question
hardly needs an answer.
Those who rely on DPT to promote democracy in the world have
to remember that Kant’s philosophy is permeated with the idea of
not using war as a means to promote historical change. He wrote:
40 A. Sullivan, ‘What I Got Wrong about the War’, Time, 5 March 2006.
41 J. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, p. 97.
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178 Chapter Five
‘No attempt should be made, however, to realize this idea precipi-

tously through revolutionary methods, that is, by violent overthrow
of a previously existing imperfect and corrupt government …
Instead, the idea should be attempted and carried out through grad-
ual reform according to fixed principles’.42
DPT theories have contributed to justifications of several foreign
interventions. In their book The War over Iraq Lawrence Kaplan and
William Kristol, starting from the premise that ‘democracies rarely, if
ever, wage war against one another’, conclude that ‘the more demo-
cratic the world becomes, the more likely it is to be congenial
to America’.43 Such a conclusion cannot be justified theoretically
because of its intellectual fallacy; equally, practice also testifies that
in some cases the counter argument may be truer: the more demo-
cratic an entity becomes, the less it may be ready to follow an
American lead.
42 I. Kant, Metaphysical Elements of Justice (Rechtslehre from Metaphysics of

Morals), Macmillan Library of Liberal Arts, 1965, p. 129.
43 L. Kaplan, W. Kristol, The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s
Mission, Encounter Books, 2003, p. 104–5.
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Humanitarian Intervention, Civil Wars 179
Chapter Six
HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION, CIVIL WARS AND

REGIME CHANGE
1. USE OF FORCE AND HUMANITARIAN CONCERNS

IN ‘MODERN’ AND ‘POST-MODERN’ INTERNATIONAL
SOCIETIES
It is, of course, possible to argue over whether it is democracy that

brings about peace, or vice versa that it is peace that is conducive to
the progress of democracy, but the general correlation between
these phenomena is indeed positive, i.e. one usually reinforces
the other. However, as we have seen above, sometimes attempts
to expand the circle of democracies not only lead to the breaches
of peace, but even endanger the very phenomenon they are meant
to promote, i.e. democracy. As a result, there is neither democracy
nor peace. Therefore, as well as for a host of other reasons, inter
national law, and rightly so, prohibits both the use and threat
of military force even if its aim is the promotion of democracy.
The prohibition of the use of force is one of the few imperative
(jus cogens) norms of international law, from which states cannot
derogate even with mutual consent. Although it may be surprising,
it is nevertheless true that the prohibition of the use of force in inter
national relations became a legally binding norm relatively recently.
As a legal principle it started its evolution after World War I and
matured as a result of World War II; it was enshrined in the United
Nations Charter and its importance has not diminished since, not
withstanding its overly frequent breaches. As the International
Court of Justice put it in the Nicaragua case, ‘[I]f a State acts in a
way prima facie incompatible with a recognized rule, but defends
its conduct by appealing to exceptions or justifications contained
within the rule itself, then whether or not the State’s conduct is in
fact justifiable on that basis, the significance of that attitude is to
confirm rather than to weaken the rule’.1 Although some academics
1 Case concerning military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua

(Nicaragua v. United States of America), ICJ Decision of 27 June 1986, para. 186.
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180 Chapter Six
have claimed that due to the inefficiency of the UN collective

security system the Charter prohibition of the use of force has
become redundant,2 no state has made such a claim. While justify
ing their own transgressions states are usually ‘appealing to excep
tions or justifications within the rule’, and when condemning the
use of force by others, they confirm their own adherence to the
principle.
The problem is, however, that the principles of sovereign equality
between states, the non-use of force and non-intervention in domes
tic affairs (as they are enshrined in the United Nations Charter, in
respective UN General Assembly resolutions and numerous other
documents), and the principle of respect for and protection of
human rights as it has developed since 1945, partly reflect values of
different international societies. The Charter principles prohibiting
the use of force in international relations and especially non-inter
ference in domestic affairs are the crown jewels in the progressive
development of the Westphalian or modern international society,
while the principle of respect for and protection of human rights,
including the right of peoples to self-determination and minority
rights, in a way rocks the very foundations of that society. I would
like to emphasise that I have used the word partly when writing
about the distinctions in the values of different international socie
ties and I have used the words in a way when referring to possible
conflicts between the norms governing these different international
societies – the traditional Westphalian and today’s post-Westphalian
or post-modern international society. These principles may indeed
clash in their interpretation and application, but they all aim
at the protection of real and important values and interests. Louis
Henkin, for example, wrote that ‘Article 2(4) is the most important
norm of international law, the distillation and embodiment of
the primary value of the inter-state system, the defence of state
2 See, e.g., T. Franck, ‘Who Killed Article 2(4) or Changing Norms Governing the
Use of Force by States’, The American Journal of International Law, 1970, Vol. 64; but
see also L. Henkin, ‘The Reports of the Death of Article 2(4) Are Greatly Exaggerated’,
The American Journal of International Law, 1971, Vol. 65. Unfortunately, both of these
two great American international lawyers – good friends and colleagues of mine –
are not with us anymore.
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independence and state autonomy’.3 However, later he admits that

‘international human rights law reflects a major derogation by the
international system from its commitment to basic state values–
autonomy and impermeability’.4
The principles prohibiting the use of force and interference in
domestic affairs have been among the main legal guarantors of the
sovereignty of states and the inviolability of their territorial integrity.
This means that they have emphasised the sanctity of two out of
three elements of statehood5–authority and territory–while neglect
ing the third one – population (i.e. human beings). However, the
evolving law regulating the use of force cannot ignore the develop
ment of the international law of human rights, including the right of
peoples to self-determination and the rights of ethnic and religious
minorities. The international law of 2013 cannot be the same as the
international law of 1945. The interpretation of the Charter norms
on use of force has to correspond to the changes in international
society as well as in international law. Kofi Annan, the then UN
Secretary-General, in emphasising that ‘the central message of
the UN Charter “with its call for justice and promise for peace, is
as strong as ever”, at the same time, also warned: ‘clearly we cannot
meet challenges of the new millennium with an instrument designed
for different circumstances of the middle of the twentieth century’.6
It is interesting to point out that in his Annual Report to the General
Assembly on 20th September 1999, Kofi Annan emphasised that ‘the
Charter is a living document’ and ‘nothing in the Charter precludes
recognition that there are rights beyond borders’.7
3 L. Henkin, International Law: Politics and Values, MartinusNijhoff Publishers,

1995, p. 113.
4 Ibid. p. 203.
5 The Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States of 1933 in its
Article 1 stipulates: ‘The state as a person of international law should possess
the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory;
(c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states’. This
Article of the Convention that never entered into force is usually quoted as reflect
ing customary international law requirements for statehood.
6 Address to the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, 22 April 1997 (SG/
SM/6218).
7 Press Release SG/SM/7136, 20 September 1999.
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182 Chapter Six
After the Second World War and to a great extent due to the atroc
ities committed before and during the war, the international human
rights movement gained momentum. What states do within their
borders and how they treat their people are no longer their internal
affairs. An episode in the history of the League of Nations, described,
inter alia, by René Cassin,8 well illustrates the extent to which inter
national society has changed since the 1930s. In September 1930
Mr Franz Bernheim, a Jew from Upper Silesia, appeared before the
Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva complaining of the
persecution of Jews by the Nazis. He accused the Nazis of having
committed, inter alia, the crimes of arson, rape, massacre and the
profanation of synagogues and Jewish tombs. These acts, outrageous
and condemnable in any situation, had, moreover, taken place in
the context of the existence of the German-Polish Convention of
1922 on the protection of minorities in Upper Silesia. The response
by the representative of Germany, the Minister of Propaganda and
Information Joseph Goebbels, to the question of the plight of minor
ities in Upper Silesia was as follows: ‘We are a sovereign nation and
therefore all said by this person is none of your business. We treat
our socialists, our pacifists, and our Jews as we consider it necessary
and we are not subject to any control by mankind or the League of
Nations’.9 The Nazis got away with this arrogant and overt challenge
to the competence of the League. The League of Nations in its reso
lution avoided any condemnation of Germany and only reminded in
polite terms that states are expected to treat their minorities better.
Since then, things have changed considerably. Human rights have
ceased to be an internal affair of the state. In the first half of the
1990s the two ad hoc international criminal tribunals were set up to
try those who were accused of having committed war crimes, crimes
against humanity, and acts of genocide in the former Yugoslavia
and Rwanda (The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
8 R. Cassin, ‘L’Homme sujet de droit international et la protection des droit de

l’homme dans la societé universelle’, Etudes an l’honneur de George Scelle, Paris,
1950; see also M. Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950’, The
Historical Journal, 2004, vol. 47, No. 2.
9 Quoted from M. Bettati, Le droit d’ingerérence, Odile Jacob, 1996, p. 18 (my
translation from French).
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Yugoslavia – ICTY and the International Criminal Tribunal for

Rwanda – ICTR). In the summer of 1998 the Statute of a permanent
International Criminal Court (ICC) was opened for signature in
Rome and on the 14th March 2012 the Court found its first defendant,
Thomas Lubanga Dyilo of the Democratic Republic of Congo guilty
of war crimes.10 Although these trends are still quite fragile (and
they may even be reversible), they certainly do not fit well into the
traditional framework of Westphalian international society, within
which the League of Nations dealt with minority issues.
In November 1998 the Law Lords of the British House of Lords
found in the Pinochet case, using the words of Lord Nicolls, that
‘international law has made plain that certain types of conduct,
including torture and hostage taking, are not acceptable conduct on
the part of anyone. This applies as much to heads of state, or even
more so, as it does to everyone else; the contrary conclusion would
make a mockery of international law’.11 The Law Lords found that
General Pinochet, as a former head of state, was not immune from
criminal prosecution in the United Kingdom’s courts. International
law no longer recognises that acts such as torture, murder and hos
tage taking are acts that can be performed ‘in the official capacity of
head of state’.12
Some governments treat their people, either as a whole or often
some subset of them, in such a way that the population rises in revo
lution to overthrow it, or sometimes a repressed and discriminated
against segment of the population seek secession, i.e. separation,
from the whole. It would not only be morally wrong but also politi
cally reckless for the world community not to take any interest in
such situations, and international law should provide for extreme
responses to extreme situations. In the aftermath of the Cold War
and in response to the increasing number of internal conflicts
10 ICC-01/04-01/06, The Prosecutor v. Thomas Lubanga Dyilo.

11 Regina v. Bartle and Commissioner of Police for Metropolis and others ex parte
Pinochet (on appeal from a Divisional Court of the Queen’s Bench Division,
26 November 1998.
12 Regina v. Bartle and Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis and others ex
parte Pinochet and Regina v. Evans and another and the Commissioner of Police for
the Metropolis and others ex parte Pinochet, Judgement of the House of Lords,
24 March 1999.
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184 Chapter Six
(Somalia, Haiti, the former Yugoslavia etc.), the UN Security Council

started considering a number of such conflicts as threats to interna
tional peace and security (sometimes correctly, in other cases
stretching the concept almost to a breaking point as, for example, in
Haiti in the 1990s), since otherwise the main security body of the
United Nations would not have jurisdiction over humanitarian
catastrophes. In a few cases, the Security Council not only made a
finding based on Article 39 of the Chapter (that a situation, which
was created by or which involved massive human rights violations,
constituted a threat to international peace and security) but also
authorised states ‘to take all necessary means’ (a euphemism author
ising the use of military force) to put an end to such threats and to
the humanitarian crises that had caused the Security Council to act.
However, in other cases, having confirmed that a situation repre
sented a threat to international peace and security, the Security
Council stopped short of such authorisation [e.g., Resolution 688
(1991) on Northern Iraq and 1199 (1998), 1203 (1998) on Kosovo].
Then, what became known as ‘coalitions of the willing’ took the ini
tiative and used military force to allegedly enforce such resolutions.
There have been various justifications for such uses of force, both
legal and moral. So, the Independent International Commission
headed by Judge Richard Goldstone called the 1999 NATO operation
against Serbia ‘illegal but legitimate’.13 Although the Commission
was the first to phrase it in such a way, the approach in itself was not
completely new. Previously in 1973, in the aftermath of the Indian
intervention in Eastern Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Thomas Franck
and Nigel Rodley took more or less the same stance in writing that:
‘[U]ndeniably, there are circumstances in which the unilateral use of
force to overthrow injustice begins to seem less wrong than to turn
aside. Like civil disobedience, however, this sense of superior “neces
sity” belongs in the realm of not law but of moral choice, which
nations, like individuals, must sometimes make weighing the costs
and benefits to their cause, to social fabric, and to themselves’.14
13 See, Richard Goldstone et al., The Kosovo Report: Conflict, International

Response, Lessons Learned, Independent International Commission on Kosovo
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
14 T. Franck, N. Rodley, ‘After Bangladesh: the Law of Humanitarian Intervention
by Military Force’, 67 American Journal of International Law (1973), p. 304.
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Professor Franck made a similar comment more than a quarter

of a century later in an article entitled Break It, Do Not Fake It, observ
ing that ‘NATO’s action in Kosovo is not the first time illegal
steps have been taken to prevent something palpably worse. Law
gives those taking such illegal but necessary action several well-
established strategies’.15 In his view, the best strategy would be ‘to
proffer the most expiating of the special circumstances that ordained
their moral choice’.16 Bruno Simma, analysing the Kosovo conflict,
believes in the same vein that sometimes ‘imperative political and
moral considerations may appear to leave no choice but to act out
side law’17 since ‘legal issues presented by the Kosovo crisis are par
ticularly impressive proof that hard cases make bad law’.18
However, some international lawyers are of the view that in cer
tain situations, when the UN Security Council has certified the exist
ence of a humanitarian crisis as threatening international peace and
security, the use of military force to protect human rights, i.e.
humanitarian intervention, may be not only legitimate but also law
ful. Sean Murphy, for example, wrote regarding the creation of no-fly
zones and ‘safe havens’ for Kurds in Northern Iraq – Operation
Provide Comfort:
The lack of global condemnation of the interventions was most likely
not based on a perception that states have a unilateral right to inter
vene for humanitarian purposes. Rather, it was based on a perception
that authority to intervene for those purposes emanated in some fash
ion from Security Council authorisation. … On the other hand, it
could be attributable to an acceptance of humanitarian intervention
by a state or states acting on their own initiative subsequent to a
Security Council identification of a threat to peace and security from
a widespread deprivation of human rights, even where the Security
Council does not expressly authorise intervention.19
Such an interpretation is like a halfway house towards the recogni
tion of the right of states to humanitarian intervention. There is a
15 T. Franck, ‘Break It, Do Not Fake It’, 78 Foreign Affairs (July/August 1999), p. 118.
16 Ibid.
17 B. Simma, ‘Nato, The UN and the Use of Force: Legal Aspects’, 10 European
Journal of International Law (1999), No. 1, p. 22.
18 Ibid., p. 14.
19 S. Murphy, Humanitarian Intervention, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996,
p. 195.
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186 Chapter Six
Security Council confirmation of threats to international peace and

security stemming from a severe humanitarian crisis, and willing
states can act, either individually or better yet collectively, to put an
end to the crisis even without express Security Council authoriza
tion. Still, there are also those who consider that states can act
militarily in cases of severe humanitarian crises even without any
Security Council involvement. So, Tony Aust, at the time a Legal
Counsellor to the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth
Office, informed the Foreign Affairs Committee of the British House
of Commons in December 1992 that: ‘Resolution 688 recognised that
there was a severe human rights and humanitarian situation in Iraq
and, in particular, in northern Iraq; but the intervention in northern
Iraq “Provide Comfort” was in fact, not specially mandated by the
United Nations, but the states taking action in northern Iraq did
so in exercise of customary international law principle of humanitar-
ian intervention’ [emphasise added RM].20 In answering questions
about the legality of humanitarian intervention under international
law Mr Aust said: ‘There is no agreement in the sense of rules which
have been laid down by any international body, but the practice of
states does show over a long period that it is generally accepted that
in extreme circumstances a state can intervene in another state for
humanitarian reasons. … International law in this field develops to
meet new situations and that is what we are seeing now in the case
of Iraq’.21
Often NATO’s bombardment of Serbia over Kosovo in 1999,
code-named Operation Allied Force (or Operation Nobel Anvil, as
code-named by the US), has been cited as an example of a successful
military operation whose aim was the protection of human rights.
The British Labour party leader, Ed Miliband, speaking in a debate
on British military intervention in Libya, told the House of Com
mons on 21 March 2011 that ‘by taking action in Kosovo we saved the
lives of tens of thousands of people.’22 In his 22 April 1999 speech
20 The Expanding Role of the United Nations and its Implications for the UK Policy:
Minutes of Evidence,Hearing Before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of
Commons, Sess. 1992–93, 2 December, 1992, p. 84.
21 Ibid., p. 92.
22 www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm110321/
debtext/110321-0001.htm.
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in Chicago,23 when NATO’s Operation Allied Force was in full swing,

the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair put forward five require
ments to be met in order for an intervention on humanitarian
ground be justified: First, are we sure of our case? War is an imper
fect instrument for righting humanitarian distress; but armed force
is sometimes the only means of dealing with dictators. Second, have
we exhausted all diplomatic options? We should always give peace
every chance, as we have in the case of Kosovo. Third, on the basis of
a practical assessment of the situation, are there military operations
we can sensibly and prudently undertake? Fourth, are we prepared
for the long term? In the past we talked too much of exit strategies.
But having made a commitment we cannot simply walk away once
the fight is over; better to stay with a moderate numbers of troops
than return for later with larger numbers. And finally, do we have
national interests involved? The mass expulsion of ethnic Albanians
from Kosovo demanded the notice of the rest of the world. But it
does make a difference that this is taking place in such a combusti
ble part of Europe.
There is no reference to international law or the role of the
Security Council among these requirements, though Blair is a lawyer
by education and had even worked for a while as a barrister. As
NATO’s 1999 Kosovo operation too often serves as an example and
justification for other operations, including the 2011 NATO operation
against Qaddafi in Libya (though the Libya operation had the bless
ing of the Security Council), it is deserving of closer scrutiny.
2. THE KOSOVO CASE REVISITED
For the beginning I must admit that I myself cautiously supported

the NATO Operation Allied Force against the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia over Kosovo, and presented legal justifications for it.24
However, since then there have been some revelations and further
23 Tony Blair’s speech, ‘Doctrine of the international community’, delivered at

the Economic Club, Chicago, 22 April 1999, http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/
Page1297.asp, accessed 6 Sept. 2005.
24 See, e.g., R. Müllerson, Ordering Anarchy: International Law in International
Society, MartinusNijhoff Publishers, 2000.
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188 Chapter Six
developments that have undermined the alleged humanitarian

purity of NATO’s Kosovo operation. And this is unfortunate since, as
we will try to show below, there are situations when military inter
vention to protect people from their own government (or from the
absence of any effective government) may be necessary even in the
absence of Security Council authorisation, and, as we will discuss in
this Chapter, there have indeed been interventions not authorised
by the Security Council that have put an end to severe humanitarian
crises. So, what was wrong with NATO’s operation against the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia (President Slobodan Milošević) over Kosovo?
What should be avoided so as not to discredit this extreme concept
(extreme in the sense that it can be used only in extreme circum
stances, and even then as an extraordinary measure), which may
nevertheless sometimes be needed?
First, it was the propaganda campaign to demonise one party and
the victimisation and sometimes even glorification of the other
party. NATO’s spokesperson Jamie Shea particularly excelled in this
respect, as someone who became known as NATO’s ‘spin doctor’.25
While the atrocities of the Serbian side were all meticulously
reported (and there no doubt were such atrocities), sometimes even
exaggerated, and any doubts as to the who and the how were ignored,
the parallel acts of the Kosovo Albanians, especially the KLA fight
ers, which often mirrored and sometimes even exceeded the Serbian
atrocities, were usually downgraded or received only limited cover
age in mass media. And this was done notwithstanding that shortly
prior to the operation President Bill Clinton’s special envoy to the
Balkans, Robert Gelbard, had described the KLA as, ‘without any
questions, a terrorist group’.26 The KLA had long been engaged in
‘tit-for-tat attacks with Serbian nationalists in Kosovo, using repris
als against ethnic Albanians who “collaborated” with the Serbian
government, and bombing police stations and cafes known to be fre
quented by Serb officials, killing innocent civilians in the process.
Most of its activities were funded by drug running, though its ties to
25 See, e.g., L. Cooper, M. Pal, ‘Lectures from Spin Doctor: A NATO strategist’s
position at a top British university’, Open Democracy, 30 June 2011.
26 Council on Foreign Relations. Terrorist Groups and Political Legitimacy
(http://www.cfr.org/terrorism/terrorist-groups-political-legitimacy/p10159).
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community groups and Albanian exiles gave it local popularity’.27

The then UK Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told the House of
Commons on 18th January 1999, i.e. only a couple of months before
the NATO operation: ‘On its part, the Kosovo Liberation Army has
committed more breaches of the ceasefire, and until this weekend
was responsible for more deaths than the security forces. It must
stop undermining the ceasefire and blocking political dialogue.’28
Later it was revealed by Gabriel Keller, a deputy head of the Kosovo
Verification Mission (KVM), that: ‘… every pullback by the Yugoslav
army or the Serbian police was followed by a movement forward by
[KLA] forces […] OSCE’s presence compelled Serbian government
forces to a certain restraint […] and UCK [i.e. KLA] took advantage
of this to consolidate its positions everywhere, continuing to smug
gle arms from Albania, abducting and killing both civilians and
military personnel, Albanians and Serbs alike.’29 However, such rev
elations from people who knew what was going on on the ground
were drowned by a sea of information (misinformation), in many
cases true but oftentimes exaggerated, aimed at discrediting the
Serbian side.
The second factor that undermines the purity of the humanitari
anism at the heart of NATO’s Kosovo operation is the so-called
‘Rambouillet Agreement’, presented in February 1999 to Belgrade
and to a delegation of Kosovo Albanians in the Chateau Rambouillet
in France. The latter expressed their consent with the text of the
Agreement while Belgrade rejected it. This rejection was a crucial
step leading to the war. However, could anyone have realistically
expected Belgrade, or any other sovereign state for that matter, to
accept such an agreement? Appendix B of the Agreement, being an
integral part of it, provided, inter alia, that ‘NATO personnel shall
enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment,
free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the
FRY (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that at that time comprised of
27 Ibid.
28 www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199899/cmhansrd/vo990118/
debtext/90118-06.htm.
29 Masters of the Universe?: NATO’s Balkan Crusade (Tariq Ali ed.), Verso Books,
2000, p. 163.
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190 Chapter Six
Serbia and Montenegro) including associated airspace and territo

rial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of biv
ouac, manoeuvre, billet, and utilization of any areas or facilities as
required for support, training, and operations’. Furthermore, the
authorities in the FRY were obligated to ‘facilitate, on a priority basis
and with all appropriate means, all movement of personnel, vehi
cles, vessels, aircraft, equipment, or supplies, through or in the air
space, ports, airports, or roads used’.30 It was an ultimatum requesting
unconditional surrender, something that no state that was not
defeated in a war would have accepted. In a commentary released to
the press, the former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
declared that: ‘The Rambouillet text, which called on Serbia to admit
NATO troops throughout Yugoslavia, was a provocation, an excuse to
start bombing. Rambouillet is not a document that an angelic Serb
could have accepted. It was a terrible diplomatic document that
should never have been presented in that form’.31 Lord Gilbert stated
in the House of Lord of the British Parliament: ‘I think the terms put
to Milošević at Rambouillet were absolutely intolerable; how could
he possibly accept them? It was quite deliberate’.32 One can only
conclude that it was not as much the humanitarian concerns as the
wider intransigence of President Milošević of Yugoslavia that was
the main cause of NATO’s bombardment of the FRY in 1999. As John
Norris, Strobe Talbott’s Director of Communications during the
Kosovo crisis, wrote, ‘it was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader
trends of political and economic reform – not the plight of Kosovar
Albanians – that best explains NATO’s war. Milošević had been a
burr in the side of the transatlantic community for so long that the
United States felt that he would only respond to military pressure’.33
Therefore Kosovo was not an operation with singularly humanitar
ian objectives, but as a regime change operation with geopolitical
purposes and implications.
30 US Department of State.Rambouillet Agreement (Interim Agreement for

Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo), http://www.state.gov/www/regions/eur/
ksvo_rambouillet_text.html.
31 Daily Telegraph, 28 June 1999.
32 Select Committee on Defence. Minutes of Evidence, June 2000.http://www
.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmdfence/347/0062005.htm.
33 J. Norris, Collision Course. NATO, Russia, and Kosovo (Foreword by Strobe
Talbott), Praeger, 2005, p. xxiii.
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NATO’s Kosovo operation, which many Western politicians and

experts refer to as an example to be followed in order to save lives in,
for example, Libya or Syria may, however, serve also as a different,
mush more negative, precedent. German journalist Alexander Rar
writes that in the aftermath, in Russia NATO lost prestige even
among many liberally minded people, and they started to profess
doubts in democracy as a form of political regime.34 Even more dis
turbing may be another effect of NATO’s operation, exposed by Rar:
‘Many Russians suddenly lost their antipathy towards use of force by
their own country. They sincerely started to believe that if the civi
lized West is not averse to violence, then Russia with her existential
problems simply has to do the same’.35 Later, in this Chapter, we
will see how Russia used arguments related to the concept of R2P
(responsibility to protect) that is a slightly modified, though wider
and not necessarily linked to the use of military force, version of
humanitarian intervention.
Finally, an additional fly in Kosovo’s anointment was what hap
pened later, after the years of manipulative administration of Kosovo
by the international community, including the United Nations and
the European Union. The recognition of the independence of Kosovo
by the majority of Western states, notwithstanding a clause in all
Security Council resolutions on Kosovo both before NATO’s invasion
[Res. 1199 (23 September 1998), Res. 1203 (24 October 1998)] as well as
after the invasion [Res. 1244 (10 June 1999)], emphasised the impor
tance of guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia. For
example, Resolution 1244 reaffirmed ‘the commitment of all Member
States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia and the other States of the region, as set out
in the Helsinki Final Act and annex 2’. Notwithstanding all these
clauses most NATO and EU member states recognised the declara
tion of independence of Kosovo, which, in turn, made for the
Kremlin easier to recognize the two Georgian break-away prov
inces as independent states. This, together with other such gung ho
approaches to international law, contributed to the undermining of
34 A. Rar, Vladimir Putin – The Best German in the Kremlin, Moscow, Algoritm,
2012 (Russian translation from German), p. 174.
35 Ibid., p. 175.
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192 Chapter Six
the foundations of the latter. The Advisory Opinion delivered by the

International Court of Justice on 22nd July 2010 stating that Kosovo’s
declaration of independence ‘did not violate general international
law’, though formally correct, is anodyne in content, and potentially
explosive in its consequences. Even if I were to declare my house
with its small plot of land in Tallinn independent from Estonia,
I would not be in breach of general international law since interna
tional law simply does not deal with such matters. However, if a
neighbouring state were to recognise my extravagant declaration, it
would certainly violate general international law; this would be a
clear-cut interference in the internal affairs of my country.
3. RECOGNITION OF KOSOVO, ABKHAZIA AND

SOUTH OSSETIA
One recent contentious issue discussed by politicians, diplomats as

well as academics has been the attitude towards the independence
of Kosovo on the one hand, and South Ossetia and Abkhazia on the
other. Quite a few international lawyers, condemning the recogni
tion of independence of the Georgian break-away territories
(Abkhazia and South Ossetia) by Russia, as well as several of other
states, have at the same time welcomed Kosovo’s independence
from Serbia, and vice versa, those welcoming the independence of
Abkhazia and South Ossetia deny that Kosovo has any right to inde
pendence, oblivious of any irony in their attitude.
There is no doubt that there are a lot of factual differences
between what happened and what is going on today in these two
mountainous regions – the Balkans and the Caucasus. In many
respects, all cases are unique. Lawyers know all too well the saying
that ‘hard cases make bad law’ and one may well want to add to that
that unique cases do not make any law at all. However, in interna
tional relations, all cases of any significance are hard cases, and it is
only the hard cases that can produce law for hard cases. Moreover,
in the domain where international law functions, where no more
than 200 states, hugely differing as to their size, power, political
regimes and other characteristics, operate, all situations are also
markedly more unique than those taking place in relations between
individuals and legal persons within a particular state; that is why in
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international society most situations are relatively more unique

than cases covered by domestic law. Therefore, in international soci
ety just a few cases tend to serve as precedents that may make,
undermine, change or modify legal norms. If all the more or less
significant developments and situations in interstate relations were
seen as unique, having nothing in common, international law would
become not only a theoretical but also a practical impossibility.
However, states, especially the more powerful ones, more and
more frequently, by referring to the uniqueness of circumstances
they are acting upon as well as to the purity of their own motives,
incomparable with the self-serving intentions of their opponents,
consider that their behaviour vis-à-vis certain situations or certain
states should not serve as a precedent. For example, Condoleezza
Rice, the then US Secretary of State, claimed that situations in the
Balkans and the Caucasus had nothing in common: ‘I don’t want to
try to judge the motives, but we’ve been very clear that Kosovo is sui
generis and that that is because of the special circumstances out of
which the breakup of Yugoslavia came’.36 However, her Russian
counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in justifying the recognition of South
Ossetia and Abkhazia by Kremlin as independent states, was equally
clear. Although not referring to Kosovo’s recognition as a precedent,
he may well have had Kosovo in mind when he talked about the
legality of recognising the breakaway Georgian territories. Yet,
the Russian Foreign Minister, like Condoleezza Rice, claimed that
‘the recognition by Russia of Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia
as independent states does not set a precedent for other post-Soviet
break-away regions …. There can be no parallels here.’37 The main
problem with Rice’s as well as Lavrov’s certainties that there are no
parallels between these and other cases, and that neither case can
serve as a precedent for other situations is how to persuade, for
example, the Transdniestrians, Armenians of Nagorno-Karabach
and the host of other separatist movements that Kosovo, Abkhazia
36 6 March 2008, Briefing by Secretary Rice en route to Brussels, Belgium (www

.usembassy.org.uk/ forpo1244/html).
37 Abkhazia, S. Ossetia no precedents for other rebel regions – Lavrov”, RIA
Novosti, 18 September 2008 (en.rian.ru).
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194 Chapter Six
and South Ossetia are so unique, so sui generis that they cannot
serve as precedents for others.
Differences, or parallels for that matter, are often only in the eye
of the beholder. Whether certain situations, facts or acts can serve as
precedents depends to a great extent on whether one is interested in
seeing them as such. Too many people too often act upon their ide
ologies, beliefs and prejudices, not upon facts; or rather, the latter
are interpreted in the light of preconceived ideas. All these seces
sionist conflicts and situations, notwithstanding their many differ
ences, have something quite essential in common: there is always a
group of people who, being part of a bigger political entity but dis
tinguishing themselves from the whole, want to secede from the rest
in order to form an independent state or become a part of another
political entity. In this essential respect, say, Quebec in Canada,
Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan and Abkhazia or South Ossetia in
Georgia are all in the same boat, and if they refer to their unique
ness, it is only to show that they deserve independence more than
anybody else. When the Quebecois claim their right to independ
ence, they refer to the fact that their distinct culture and language
are flourishing, that they have effective democratic governmen
tal institutions and other positive achievements, which, in their
view, serve as a basis for Quebec’s independence. Other secessionist
movements, on the contrary, emphasize the lack of such achieve
ments and believe that only through secession can they achieve
those characteristics that, as they suppose, are denied to them by
oppressive alien regimes.
4. THE LIBYA CASE
Already in 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking in

Cairo, commented that ‘for sixty years, my country, the United States,
pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in
the Middle East—and we achieved neither.’38 The meaning of these
words was that it was time to set new priorities; instead of a stability
that had hitherto worked but was reaching a tipping point, it was
38 N.K. Gvosdev, R. Takeyh, ‘Triumph of the New Wilsonism’, The National Interest,
January-February 2012.
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better to harmonize with the emerging trend and support democ

racy movements in the Middle East. Nevertheless, in 2007, the late
Tom Lantos, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee,
argued: ‘I am very proud of America’s success in convincing Qaddafi
to become a decent citizen of global community. … Our engagement
with Qaddafi and the prosperity it has brought to Libya serves as a
model to countries currently sponsoring terror or compiling weap
ons of mass destruction. They should know that they, too, can come
in from the cold’.39 What had changed since 2007, and why less than
five years later did the United States support the overthrow of
Gaddafi notwithstanding that he had just ‘become a decent citizen
of global community’? As always in complicated cases, there is more
than one answer to this question. However, the main reason behind
the change of heart by Washington lies in its coming to the under
standing that the Middle East had reached a tipping point after
which it would become impossible to rely on autocrats, who had
hitherto served America’s interests well, notwithstanding all the
uncertainties and apprehensions that Islamic democracy could
bring. Of course, there was also the rather naive belief that
Washington would be able to ride the tiger i.e. that following the
developments, Washington and its allies could channel the emerg
ing trends in direction favourable for American strategic and eco
nomic interests. That is why Western capitals found it safer to
abandon their old (in the case of Qaddafi, newly found) friends.
However, it is important to note that even before the coming of the
Arab Spring, the United States and some other Western countries
were acting as hedge funds do, i.e. they were hedging their bets.
While these governments were working with and relying on Middle
Eastern dictators, various Western organizations, including govern
ment funded ones, groomed bloggers and activists from Arab coun
tries in, for example, Serbia and the United States.40
If the wars in Iraq (the 2003 invasion or the so-called ‘second
Gulf War’) and Afghanistan were, if not inspired then at least partly
39 Quoted from N.K. Gvosdev, R. Takeyh, ‘Triumph of the New Wilsonism’,

The National Interest, 2012, January 4.
40 http://www.wikileaks.ch/cable/2010/01/10CAIRO99.html; T. Ramadan, The
Arab Awakening: Islam and the New Middle East, Allen Lane, 2012, pp. 7, 22.
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196 Chapter Six
justified by the arguments of DP theories, NATO Operation Uni

fied Protector in Libya in 2011 had the hallmarks of humanitarian
intervention. In his 28th March 2011 speech at George Washington
University on NATO’s military operation against Gaddafi’s Libya,
President Barak Obama declared that America had a responsibility
to stop the looming genocide in the Libyan city of Benghazi.41 The
2011 NATO Libya operation, in contradistinction to the Kosovo oper
ation, had the blessing of the UN Security Council and therefore was
arguably lawful.42 We use the word ‘arguably’ since like in several
other UN Security Council sanctioned interventions, the practicali
ties and consequences of intervention went beyond what was man
dated in the Council’s resolution. An operation justified by the
protection of civilians turned into a war against the regime of
Colonel Gaddafi, leading to its overthrow. James Pattison, for exam
ple, writes: ‘Indeed, the rhetoric of several of the coalition leaders,
who in various speeches have argued that Qaddafi must step down,
suggest that the perceived success of the intervention will be meas
ured primarily by whether Qaddafi’s reign is ended.’43 This means
that the primary aim was not humanitarian but regime change.
Later, not only the ‘usual suspects’ China and Russia, but also the
Arab League, which had requested the establishment of no-fly
zones to protect the civilians, criticised NATO’s actions, which had
gone beyond what the League had requested.44 Amr Moussa, the
then Secretary General of the Arab League declared in March 2011,
when NATO’s Operation United Protector was in full swing: ‘What
is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly
41 http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/libya-president-obama-makes-case-
intervention/story?id=13244178#.TwlNfW9MsVc.
42 The Security Council Resolution 1973 authorized ‘Member States that have
notified the Secretary-General, acting nationally or through regional organizations
or arrangements’, to take ‘all necessary measures … to protect civilians’ and for that
end to establish no-fly zones (S/RES/1973 (2011).
43 J. Pattison, ‘The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention in Libya’, Ethics &
International Affairs, 25, No. 3 (2011), p. 274.
44 ‘La Ligue arab, la Russie et la Chine critiquent l’intervention’, Le Monde,
20 March 2011 (http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2011/03/20/la-ligue-arabe-la
-russie-et-la-chine-critiquent-l-intervention_1495991_3212.html); ‘Arab League Con
demns Broad Western Bombing Campaigns in Libya’, Washington Post, 20 March
2011 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/arab-league-condemns-broad
-bombing-campaign-in-libya/2011/03/20/AB1pSg1_story.html).
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zone … what we want is the protection of civilians and not the shell
ing of more civilians’.45
Even if the regime had consented to carrying out reforms and
stopping repressions, this would not have been enough, either for
the opposition in Libya or for their external supporters. Such an atti
tude from their external supporters made the opposition even more
intransigent and uncompromising. Their aim was no longer to
achieve reforms or to end the looming humanitarian crisis, but
power. Like in the run-up to the 1999 Kosovo operation by NATO, in
the case of Libya, as Tariq Ramadan observes, ‘Western media were
quick to propagate sombre account of the repression in Libya and a
sanitized version of the opposition (emphasis added R. M.)’,46 while
Amnesty International commented: ‘Western media coverage from
the outset presented a very one-sided view of events, portraying the
protest movement as entirely peaceful and repeatedly suggesting
that the regime’s security forces were unaccountably massacring
unarmed demonstrators who presented no security challenge’.47
Once again we see that the demonization of the one side and the
victimization or heroization of the opposing side should be treated,
if not as a prima facie evidence that preparations for interference are
underway, then at least it should cast doubt on the sincerity of calls
that something has to be done.
In societies not used to democracy and not having any liberal
traditions, political processes usually follow a winner-takes-all
structure. Neither the authorities, nor the opposition are used to
compromise. If the opposition feels that their uncompromising,
maximalistic demands have found external support, they become
even more intransigent, even more uncompromising. The authori
ties, at the same time, know well that if they lose power, they will
lose also their wealth, liberty and possibly even lives. They know and
understand well opposition’s potential for revenge and its ‘prudent’
policies of eliminating any potential threat to their power once they
45 Ibid.
2012, p. 35.
47 ‘Amnesty Questions Claim that Gaddafi Ordered Rape as Weapon of War’,
The Independent, 24 June 2011.
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198 Chapter Six
attain it, since more often than not opponents of the regime, when
in power, use the same methods as the authorities they have over
thrown. Aaron David Miller’s comment that ‘the Arabs are much
better at acquiring and fighting over power than they are at sharing
it’48 may be generalised; it is applicable to many societies beyond the
Arab world.
In his 2000 Millennium report Kofi Annan, the then Secretary
General of the United Nations, noted that the concept of humanitar
ian intervention ‘might encourage secessionist movements deliber
ately to provoke governments into committing cross violations of
human rights in order to trigger external interventions that would
aid their cause’.49 This comment applies not only to secessionist
movements. Alan Kuperman has called this a ‘problem of moral haz
ard’, meaning that protection against a risk encourages risk-taking.50
As Kuperman shows, the threats of force against Serbia over Kosovo
emboldened the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) fighters and encour
aged them to use even greater violence against ethnic Serbian civil
ians in Kosovo in order to provoke the Serbs to overreact, thereby
forcing the West to use force to protect Kosovo Albanians. This was
what eventually happened. And it is not only secessionist move
ments that may find encouragement in the threats of outside actors
to use force against regimes that misbehave. Equally, opponents of
dictators like Gaddafi in Libya and al-Assad in Syria have used the
same tactics.
However, even if we agree that NATO’s mission in Libya was a
mission creep and that it went beyond the Security Council’s man
date leading to a externally assisted change of regime, an important
question remains: is it at all possible to protect a population from
repressive governments without overthrowing or helping remove
such governments from power? Perhaps they even deserve to be
overthrown? David Rieff, a journalist who specialises in humanitar
ian issues, wrote in the New York Times Magazine: ‘Use any euphe
mism you wish, but in the end these interventions have to be about
48 A.D. Miller, ‘The Stalled Arab Spring’, The National Interest, 8 June 2012.
49 K. Annan, ‘We the peoples’: the role of the United Nations in the twenty-first
century, A/54/ 2000, 27 March 2000, para. 216.
50 A. Kuperman, ‘The Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lessons
from the Balkans’, International Studies Quarterly, 2008, Vol. 52, Issue 1, pp. 49–80.
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regime change if they are to have any chance of accomplishing their

stated goal.’51 It may well be so that in some of these rare situations,
when an intervention on humanitarian grounds may be justified,
regime change is inevitable. But it seems that all too often, for the
intervening states it is more important to get rid of the incumbent
ruler than to protect human lives. So, Jon Western and Joshua
Goldstein wrote about NATO’s Libya operation: ‘No sooner had
NATO launched its first air strike in Libya than the mission was
thrown into controversy – and with it, the more general notion of
humanitarian intervention. Days after the UN Security Council
authorized international forces to protect civilians and establish a
no-fly zone, NATO seemed to go beyond its mandate as several of its
members explicitly demanded that Libyan leader Muammar al-
Qaddafi step down’.52 Although regime change may occur, be inevi
table or even necessary for a successful and sustainable military
interference on humanitarian grounds, there are circumstances in
which uncompromising insistence on a regime change intensifies
the conflict, and leads to an even greater loss of life. That the main
aim was regime change, not the protection of people, was even
clearer in the case of Syria than in the case of Libya.
5. THE SYRIA TRAGEDY
Comparisons of mass media reports from Syria in 2012 with reports

of western media from Kosovo in 1998–1999 and from Libya in 2011
are quite obvious and disturbing. Regime change efforts are usually
accompanied by attempts of demonization of the target regime and
‘angelization’ of opponents of the regime. Paul Pillar in his article
‘Wiping Out’ published in The National Interest writes how President
Sarkozy of France accusing President Bashar al-Assad of Syria of
wanting ‘wipe Homs from the map like Gaddafi wanted to wipe
Benghazi from the map’53 had distorted statements used by those
dictators. Neither Gaddafi, notwithstanding all his eccentricity and
51 D. Rieff, ‘Humanitarian Vanities’, The New York Times Magazine, 1 June, 2008.
52 J. Western, J.S. Goldstein, Humanitarian Intervention Comes of Age, Foreign
Affairs, 2011, November/December.
53 P.R. Pillar, ‘Wiping Out’, The National Interest, 22 April, 2012.
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200 Chapter Six
bloodthirstiness, nor Bashar al-Assad had promised to ‘wipe out’

anybody.
In Syria, the repressive Government was using force, sometimes
targeted, often indiscriminate, against its own people. That much
was clear and very few, besides the al-Assad regime, would deny
that. TV channels and newspapers in the whole world concentrated
for months their attention on regime’s atrocities. Almost everyone
who watched TV or read the news felt that something had to be done
to put an end to the violence committed by the Government of Syria.
However, moral outrage, caused by the atrocities committed and
channelled by the media, even if justified and just, also blinds. Not
only are the important details lost. Even more importantly, instead
of putting an end to the humanitarian catastrophe, such outrage
may help fuel the conflict. And as in every war, it is the truth that is
the first victim.
There is no doubt that, like in other Arab countries, the revolt
against the Assad regime was a response to the decades of repres
sion. However, it is not only that. The devil is not only in the details
but it is also in the context. So is it with Syria and here the analysis of
the political context and answers to the question cui prodest help if
not better target the moral outrage then at least find immediate as
well as long-term solutions to the crisis. Such an analysis also reveals
that Alexander the Great’s method of untying the Gordian knot
works much better in the physical than in the human world. These
are human beings that are tied in a knot that has to be disentangled
and therefore threats to use military force only enflame the conflict,
to say nothing about loss of lives in case of an actual external
intervention.
Syria is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country where the
Alawi Shia minority has ruled for decades over a society with Sunni
Muslim majority. I addition, there is a significant Christian minority
comprising of Armenians, as well as Arabs. Ethnically the country
is even more colourful: Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Circassians and
others. In all the neighbouring Arab countries (with the exception of
Iraq), on the contrary, these are Sunni majorities that rule over, inter
alia, Shia minorities. And then, of course, there is the elephant in the
room – a big ambitious Shia Iran, whose ally or client the Assad
regime certainly is. In the context of the geo-political rivalry in the
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Middle East and from the point of view of conservative Arab monar
chies, the second best to the ‘cutting off the head of the snake’ (a
Saudi euphemism for attacking Iran) would be the biting off its tail
(performing a regime change in Syria). Does this not indicate that in
the Syrian context the Arab Awakening has been highjacked by geo-
political games? Isn’t it rather strange that together with the United
States and European democracies, these are the Gulf’s autocracies
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar that are the most vocal critics of
Assad regime’s atrocities (and no doubt atrocities there were com
mitted)? Wasn’t it Saudi Arabia, that less than a year before the crisis
erupted in Syria, helped to put down the popular revolt in Bahrain,
where the Sunni minority regime rules over the majority Shia popu
lation? Is there indeed anybody who would believe, even discount
ing the Saudi anti-human rights intervention in Bahrain, that the
Saudi Kingdom is concerned about human rights and democracy in
another Arab country? As Bahrain is the base for the US Fifth fleet,
Washington remained silent about its ally’s misbehaviour. Moreover,
the rebels were mostly Shia Muslims, i.e. Iran’s co-religionists, and
their success may have further strengthened the position of Iran in
the region. This, after the folly of the Western invasion in Iraq in
2003, which at the end of the day benefited Iran, would have been
too much to bear for those who fear and hate Iran. So, it seems that
for several regional players the talk about human rights violations in
Syria has been a cover for the Sunni-Shia or the Arab-Iranian rivalry
in the Middle East. Then, there is no love lost between Israel and
Assad’s regime, though the former should be apprehensive lest any
post-Assad regime turn out to be even more anti-Israeli than the
regime of the current secular autocrat. Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-
Zawahri, in a video recording posted on the Internet, urged Muslims
around the region to help Syrian rebels.54 Ban Ki-moon, the UN
Secretary General, believed that the 10 May 2012 terrorist attack in
Damascus that killed at least 55 people and wounded hundreds
must have had al-Qaeda behind it.55
54 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9151413/
Syria-funerals-held-for-Damascus-bomb-victims.html.
55 UN chief blames al-Qaeda for Syria bombing, Aljazeera, 18 May, 2012 http://
www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/05/201251827299973.html.
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202 Chapter Six
This is a geo-political context to the genuine humanitarian catas

trophe in Syria and this has to be kept in mind when deciding how to
end the bloodshed. What about military-strategic and legal issues of
the Syria conundrum? The Syrian Army has been using heavy weap
onry by either directly targeting civilians and civilian objects in
rebellious cities or by using indiscriminate force against the oppo
nents, both armed and unarmed. In legal terms such acts, whatever
the intent and depending on the context, are either war crimes or
crimes against humanity. The precise legal qualification depends on
what may be called legal niceties, i.e. whether there is an internal
armed conflict (civil war) or ‘simply’ a situation of internal distur
bances, riots or rebellion. On 15 July 2012, the International Com
mittee of the Red Cross (ICRC) declared that there is a civil war going
on in Syria. Although such a conclusion by the ICRC, or any other
body for that matter, would hardly have an effect on the situation on
the ground, it may have significant legal consequences. First, this
means that for the purposes of possible prosecution of those, who
perpetrated atrocities in such a conflict, international humanitarian
law applies. This is in terms of jus in bello. Secondly, as we will dis
cuss in detail later, it is prohibited for third states to give military
assistance to any party in a situation of an internal armed conflict,
i.e. civil war. Hence, it would be in breach of international law not
only to supply arms to the rebels (e.g., to the Free Syrian Army), but
also to the al-Assad regime. This is in terms of jus ad bellum. UN
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon acted in accordance with interna
tional law when he ‘reiterated his opposition to the further militari
zation of the conflict [in Syria] and called on all states to stop
supplying arms to all sides in Syria’56 [emphasis added].
The al-Assad regime has prima facie committed war crimes and
crimes against humanity. However, the opposition seems to be guilty
of the same categories of crimes. For example, one should ask: why
didn’t the Syrian Army simply march into these rebellious areas to
suppress the peaceful resistance to the regime, arrest the leaders of
the opposition and do whatever dictators usually do? Why were
56 http://www.silobreaker.com/un-chief-urges-end-of-arms-supplies-to
-syria-5_2265940386843197711; RIA Novosti, 30 August 2012.
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heavy artillery and tanks used to advance into Homs and other
cities, and to fight in Damascus or Aleppo? Obviously, because there
was somebody, who was fighting back from these civilian quarters.
Because there was a so-called Free Syrian Army, and it was acting not
out of the deserts and mountains of the countryside, but from those
rebellious neighbourhoods. They operated amongst the civilians
and civilian objects; from there they were fighting the advancing
Syrian Army. However, shouldn’t they know that a regime like al-
Assad’s doesn’t care about the lives of innocent civilians caught in
the crossfire, or that by positioning themselves in the vicinity of
civilians and civilian objects they were also committing war crimes
(if we assume that there was an internal armed conflict)? Fighting in
the close vicinity of civilian objects and civilian population, as they
were, whatever their intention, and actually using the latter as a
human shield, is indeed a war crime. Certainly, it is not the first time
that a weaker opponent utilized the foreseeable bloody response of
a ruthless regime in order to generate sympathy for its cause, to
demonize and delegitimize the regime, with the ultimate aim of
bringing into being an external intervention on its behalf.
For those who care more about innocent lives than geo-political
games and regime-change (and there is no doubt that sooner rather
than later there will be one in Syria too) it would have been neces
sary to call for all armed groups to cease using force. Condemning
only the Government and calling for a regime change has shown the
opposition that they need not make any compromises; this has
made them even more intransigent. Professor Flynt Leverett of Penn
State University was right that ‘Annan’s efforts [the former UN
Secretary General acted as the UN-Arab League peace envoy to
Syria] were undermined by the US … and to some degree he under
mined himself by buying into the argument that you should stipu
late at the outset that President Assad needed to go, which meant
that there couldn’t really be a serious political process’.57
Acting upon hopes for absolute power makes the opposition
uncompromising that, in turn, may lead to more civilian casualties
and the spiral of violence would go on and on. One would be naive
57 ‘Has Syria become the UN’s proxy battlefield?’ Inside Story, Al Jazeera,
3 August 2012.
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204 Chapter Six
in believing that even if the UN Security Council would unanimously

call Bashar al-Assad to go, that he would do exactly that. Especially,
knowing well how Colonel Qaddafi of Libya ended his days. Al-Assad
could not quit even if he personally wanted to go since his fate is
closely tied to that of his retainers. At the same time, any interven
tion on behalf of the opposition, and even ‘simply’ arming them
would not only have been counterproductive (remember that it was
Saudi Arabia that in the 1980s armed the Mujahidin’s in Afghanistan,
including Osama bin Laden, to ‘kick Soviet’s ass’), but it would have
also clearly been in violation of international law (about military
interventions in cases of riots and civil unrests at the invitation of
governments and the prohibition of intervention in civil wars see
further in this Chapter). Some may think that these are outdated
norms that put state sovereignty and non-interference above
humanitarian concerns. In some situations, like the one in Rwanda
in 1994, humanitarian concerns would surely outweigh imperatives
of state sovereignty. Yet, in order to decide what kind of situation we
are in, we shouldn’t let moral outrage blind our vision. On the other
hand, Russia’s continuing supply of arms to a Government in a civil
war situation in Syria was equally unlawful, notwithstanding previ
ous agreements between Russia and Syria on the trade in weapons.
Hence, Moscow’s claims that it was only interested in upholding
international law also rang hollow. As Dr Yang Jiemian, the President
of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, during our
21 July conversation in Shanghai explained it to me, it was only China
that had acted on principle, when vetoing the three Security Council
draft resolutions on Syria supported by Western powers. China, dif
ferently from Russia and other involved states, does not have any
special interests in Syria. On the contrary, China has significant eco
nomic interests in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries,
which all support the opposition to al-Assad’s regime. Hence,
Beijing’s opportunistic interest would be, as Dr Yang opined, to align
itself with those states, which call for the regime change in Syria.
However, China puts adherence to the principle of non-interference
in internal affairs above such opportunistic concerns. Whether one
takes or leaves such an explanation depends on one’s worldview
(also dictated, at least partly, by one’s interest), but one should not
brush it simply aside.
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Those who fight bad guys are not necessarily good guys. As the
Dean of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
Vali R. Nasr put it, ‘[Th]e fight is much more about the implications
for redistribution of power between communities in Syria than it is
about constitutionalism and democracy’.58 What is going on in Syria
is not struggle for democracy but the fight for power. Of course,
without simplifications, without demonization of one side and the
heroization of another, and a black and white vision of a conflict, the
mobilizing effect of the picture would be seriously weakened. This
may be one of the reasons why those who advocate or contemplate
invasion (or the regime and its few allies defending its uncompro
mising stance) feel the need to present such black and white picture.
However, if history teaches us something it is that such simplifica
tions and acting upon black and white visions later return to haunt
us. If this all sounds too cynical, one has to remember that we are
dealing with regional and global power politics where the hypocrisy
of both local actors (the government as well as opposition) and
major players is all-pervasive. Whenever one speaks on behalf of
humanity, it is always safer to double-check: aren’t there behind the
moral indignation, lofty words and calls for action hidden motives,
other less inclusive interests at play? And if after such a double-
check we indeed find that, for example, the Saudi monarchy together
with its Gulf allies as well as other major players have nothing but
the rights and interests of the Syrian people – Sunni and Shia,
Muslims and Christians, Armenians and Circassians – in mind and
that the Assad regime, notwithstanding all the efforts of domestic
opponents and external actors to find a political solution to the con
flict, is not able and willing to stop the bloodshed, then the world
community may indeed use all necessary means to topple the only
bad guy and his retainers in Syria. However, without openly discuss
ing the particular interests of various Syrian factions as well as those
of external players, it would be difficult to implement the most
urgent tasks: putting an end to the bloodshed, securing access to
58 B. Gwertzman, ‘What Syria’s Power Struggle Means’, interview with Vali R.

Nasr, Council for Foreign Relations (http://www.cfr.org/syria/syrias-power-struggle
-means/p28432).
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206 Chapter Six
humanitarian assistance for those in need, and starting a political

process where all sides should be ready for compromises.
Then, once again, like in the cases of Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya,
Western political leaders and supporting them journalists and aca
demics are speaking of a future democratic, even liberal Syria. Those
who know and love tennis would want to address such leaders with
the famous words American tennis star John McEnroe usually
reserved for umpires: ‘You cannot be serious, man’. Joshua Landis
correctly observes that ‘if anyone tell you they are going to build
democracy in Syria, don’t buy it’.59 Among factors that make any
democracy building efforts in Syria even more difficult than in some
other Arab countries, besides the level of economic development of
the country, traditions or the lack of them, and the ethnic and reli
gious divides in the country, Landis also mentions the median age of
the population (21 years in Syria). He refers to the research by
Richard Cincotta of the Stimson Centre in Washington DC, who hav
ing studied social and political revolutions in various countries
between 1972 and 1989 and focusing on the age structure of coun
tries, had found that countries with a median age of 30 or just under
or over (if the median age is over 35 there aren’t any revolutionary
situations) have good chances for sustaining their democratic
achievements.60 The lower the median age, the more difficult would
it be to have a successful and sustainable democratic regime change.
In the Arab Spring, like in many other significant developments,
local, regional and global factors become intractably interlinked and
concentrating only on one of them gives a limited and wrong pic
ture. So far, we have emphasised the importance of local differences
since they are often neglected when Western, especially American,
observes look at the world. However, it would be equally wrong to
lose sight of the bigger picture. Therefore, the events in the Middle
East have to be seen also in the light of the changing balance of
power in the world as a whole. During the Cold War era, the Middle
East was an important region where Washington and Moscow vied
59 J. Landis, ‘Stay out of Syria’, The Foreign Policy, 5 June 2012.

60 S. Reardon, ‘Egypt: Arab Spring could be wasted in youthful nations’, New
Scientist, 17 May 2012 (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428653.800-egypt
-arab-spring-could-be-wasted-in-youthful-nations.html).
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for primacy in terms of their respective economic, strategic and ide

ological interests. Now the elephant (or rather the dragon), though
still hidden behind the talk about democracy, human rights or war
on terror (from the Western perspective) as well as Deng Xiaoping’s
advise for his successors to remain free of ambition and never claim
leadership (from the Chinese perspective), is China and its increas
ing presence also in the Middle East. Tariq Ramadan is right that
‘[F]ar removed from celebration of democratic values, a genuine
economic and ideological war is being waged throughout the Arab
world, in Africa and Asia’ and that ‘the rise of strong, multifaceted
competition has put the markets of the Western multinationals in
danger’.61 This is the context in which the Arab Awakening, notwith
standing its regional and local causes and idiosyncratic determi
nants of success and failure, is taking place; not taking this context
into account would indeed be like groping a trunk of the elephant
without seeing the rest of the animal.
6. HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION AND REGIME

CHANGE: SOME GENERALISATIONS
For the protection of a population against genocide or crimes against

humanity to be effective and sustainable, there usually has to be a
change of the government that ordered the acts of genocide to be
committed, condoned them, or was unable to stop them. However,
one of the problems is that in many cases when the Western or the
world communities insisted on regime change, there was no geno
cidal situation where the authorities slaughtered innocent civilians
but there was rather an internal conflict in which all the parties car
ried out atrocities, and the scale and seriousness of these atrocities
depended not on who was more and who was less vicious, but on
who was stronger and better equipped. At the same time, in the
clearest case of governmental genocide – Rwanda of 1994 – it was
not the world community that put an end to the genocide carried
out on behalf of the Hutu led Government, but the fighters of the
2012, p. 61.
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208 Chapter Six
Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) – the armed wing of the Patriotic

Front of Rwanda (RPF) led by Paul Kagame.
There have been three significant, relatively large-scale and suc
cessful foreign invasions that have put an end to massive human
rights violations which may be characterised either as genocide,
crimes against humanity or war crimes, though quite interestingly
and even understandably, none of the invading states referred to
humanitarian concerns as the only or main reason or justification
for their actions. The overthrow of the regimes of Idi Amin in Uganda
in 1979, the ousting of Pol Pot in the same year in the so-called
Democratic Kampuchea, and the Indian 1971–72 intervention in
Eastern Pakistan, which all put an end to massive crimes against the
civilian populations, all also ended up with a change of the regimes
that had committed those atrocities (in the case of the Indian inter
vention it led to the breakup of Pakistan and the creation of a new
state in Eastern Pakistan – Bangladesh). None of these interventions
was sanctioned by the United Nations and the intervening states
preferred to refer to self-defence as the justification instead of ‘purely
humanitarian concerns’.62 Naturally, in all these cases, besides the
humanitarian issues, there were other concerns and interests pre
sent, if not dominant, though none of these military operations
could be qualified as actions of self-defence. There is something sig
nificant in the fact that these three large-scale, successful foreign
military interventions, which were responses to genuine humanitar
ian catastrophes (even if not justified by references to them) and put
an end to those catastrophes, were carried out by non-Western
nations. One of the reasons for their success in the sense of the
sustainability of the main results of their interventions (the end of
mass atrocities and not democracy building) may have been in
that after overthrowing bloody dictators (Idi Amin and Pol Pot) and
putting an end to Islamabad’s repressions in Eastern Pakistan, the
intervening states did not attempt to put in place pro-Western or
62 In December 1971, immediately after the Indian intervention had started, the
Indian Ambassador to the UN declared: ‘[W]e have on this particular occasion
absolutely nothing but the purest of intentions: to rescue the people of East Bengal
from what they are suffering’ (UN Doc. S/PV.1606, 4 December 1971, p. 86). Soon,
however, the Indian Government denounced this statement of its Ambassador and
referred to the right of self-defence instead.
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Western-sounding and Western-looking governments, and did not

carry out nation building exercises with the aim of widening the cir
cle of liberal democracies in the world.
This observation seems to corroborate the point that generally
people deserve the governments they have, though no nation, obvi
ously, deserves a government that commits genocide or crimes
against humanity. It would not be necessary, in that respect, to dis
tinguish between genocide and crimes against humanity since the
distinction between these two most serious international crimes is
not in their relative gravity or scale but rather in legal definitions
(the crime of genocide requires a special intent to destroy, in whole
or in part, a specific national, ethnic, racial or religious group).
Therefore, it may be difficult to qualify the crimes of non-discrimi
natory bloody dictators such as Stalin or Pol Pot as genocide, which
in no way diminishes their gravity.
However, several warnings are necessary. Foreign meddling may
lead to the formation of a government (political system or regime)
that does not correspond to the characteristics of society and is not
therefore sustainable. External actors usually use their own yard
sticks to measure the suitability of political elites to govern target
countries: the more Western they look and sound, the better.
However, in most non-Western countries such leaders are usually
the least suitable to govern their people; the absence of domestic
legitimacy cannot be compensated by external support. Ahmad
Chalabi, whose efforts and lies contributed to the March 2003
American led invasion of Iraq, did not even get a chance to lead the
country, the support he enjoyed among some influential American
politicians notwithstanding, while Hamid Karzai has been a disaster
for Afghanistan. Therefore, the acceptance of Christopher Layne’s
recommendation that ‘[T]he United States must avoid future large-
scale nation-building exercises like those in Iraq and Afghanistan
and refrain from fighting wars for the purpose of attaining regime
change’,63 though made to serve the interests of the United States,
would also benefit countries like Afghanistan or Iraq.
63 Ch. Layne, ‘The (Almost) Triumph of Offshore Balancing’, The National

Interest, 2012, 27 January.
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210 Chapter Six
Most governments, be they liberal democratic or authoritarian,

do not constitute threats to their neighbours, and even less so for far
away nations. The character of the regime is in most cases secondary
to its potential to be a threat to international peace and security. For
example, the potentially explosive situation between Armenia and
Azerbaijan does not stem from the nature of the governments in
power in these states; nor is it in any way determined by the national
characteristics of Armenians or Azeris (though many Armenians are
convinced that if the Azeris were more civilised they would under
stand the Armenian arguments, and many Azeris believe that if
only the Armenians were more humane there would be peace in
the region). The issues, which has already led to bloodshed and
may once again explode in an all-out war in the Southern Caucasus,
belong to the category of unresolved territorial disputes, to different
interpretations of the right of peoples to self-determination and
respect for territorial integrity (these differing interpretations are
not due to any intellectual or emotional differences between the
Armenians and the Azeris; they reflect concrete practical interests of
the parties).
Although there is some truth to the saying that domestic repres
sion and external aggressiveness are the two sides of the same coin,
it is not true in all cases. Taken without qualification this would be a
Nazi-centric interpretation of history. In Nazi Germany, internal
repression and external aggression indeed not only occurred at the
same time but fed on each other. The creation of the universal,
United Nations based, human rights protection systems as well as
the European human rights mechanisms were responses to the Nazi
atrocities both in Germany and beyond. Even today we see that
North Korea and Iran, both led by repressive regimes (in the case of
North Korea much more so), the first through its nuclear weapons
tests and aggressive policies in the region; the second by not being
transparent and honest enough with the IAEA and whose leaders
make unacceptable statements about Israel, as well as their shared
support of organizations that utilise terror tactics, also constitute
threats to international peace and security. However, the intransi
gence of Washington and Israel vis-à-vis Iran, and their position of
not being content with simply having a non-nuclear weapons Iran,
but attempting to humiliate Teheran and eventually generating
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regime change in the country, have also been counterproductive.

American nuclear physicist Yousaf Butt has written that ‘the sanc
tions are not about Iran’s nuclear program. They are aimed at regime
change … Conditions for lifting sanctions go way beyond anything
having to do with Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. No mat
ter what Iran does with its nuclear program, they will remain in
place. The situation may – intentionally or not – become a prelude
to war’.64
Yet, there have been xenophobic dictatorships that have closed
themselves to the outside world and haven’t caused much trouble
abroad. Sometimes, these are democratic governments that may be
quite tolerant at home, which in their missionary zeal have disrup
tive influences on international relations. Their efforts to ‘enlighten’
other nations and bring them freedoms that they believe to be
universal may destabilise not only the target countries but also
endanger regional peace and security.
There are at least two reasons why some democracies may also
have an unsettling impact on other states specifically and on inter
national relations generally. Firstly, the United States – the most
powerful liberal democracy (and there is no doubt that the US is
democracy whatever its faults) – and its closest allies have had quite
a disruptive effect through their misconceived and incompetent
attempts to promote democratic values in regions where there were
no fertile grounds for such values to take root. The disastrous results
of such policies can be most vividly seen in Afghanistan and Iraq,
but they also spectacularly failed when applied to 1990s Russia. Nor
have they been unalloyed blessings in the cases of the ‘colour revolu
tions’. Secondly, and sometimes entwined with the first reason, is the
fact that democratic governments are answerable to their elector
ates, which by itself is, of course, a very positive phenomenon.
However the interests of those electorates, and especially the most
influential segments of them, which through lobbying and financial
contributions to politicians determine foreign policy options, often
differ considerably from the interests of other nations, be they dem
ocratic or not. Economic and security interests have played and con
tinue to play decisive roles in international relations. The bigger and
64 Y. Butt, ‘Are Sanctions a Fatwa on Iran?’, The National Interest, 13 January 2012.
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212 Chapter Six
the more powerful a state, the further it casts its shadow. As the bal
ance of power in the world as a whole and in specific regions changes
from time to time, conflicts become almost inevitable. The issue is
how to resolve them – through compromise and accommodation, or
through coercion and violence.
7. FROM HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION TO R2P OR ‘OLD

WINE IN NEW BOTTLES’?
The twenty first century started with an attempt to reformulate

and rephrase the concept of humanitarian intervention in terms
of responsibility to protect (R2P). First, the International Commis
sion on Intervention and State Sovereignty elaborated this idea in
its report in 2001 The Responsibility to Protect.65 Then the idea was
developed by the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
in its report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility66 in
2004. Further, there came the report of the United Nations Secretary
General in Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and
Human Rights for All,67 and finally, the concept found its expression
in the UN General Assembly 2005 Outcome Document.68
Firstly, it is necessary to underline that none of these documents
creates legally binding rights and obligations. Secondly, though
using different terminology and emphasising different aspects of the
problem, in substance they did not add much to what was already
known. Neither did they clarify the most controversial issues on
which discussions had been, and continue to be held. For example,
there was not, and there still is not, any doubt that every state is
responsible for the protection of the rights of its citizens (this obliga
tion stems from numerous universal and regional human rights
65 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, the

Responsibility to Protect, available at <http://www.iciss.ca/report-en.asp>.
66 A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Report of the High-Level
Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, UN Doc. A/59/565, at 56–57, para. 2
01 (2004), available at <http:ll//www.un.org/secureworld/report. pdf>.
67 In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for
A ll, Report of the Secretary-General, U N Doc. A/59/2005, paras.1 6–22 (2005), avail
able at <http://www.un.org/largerfreedom/contents.htm>.
68 2005 World Summit Outcome, GA Res. 60/1, paras. 1 38–39 (Oct. 24, 2005).
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documents as well as from customary norms of international law)

and that if a state commits acts of genocide, war crimes, ethnic
cleansing or crimes against humanity it bears responsibility for
these acts under international law. Moreover, those individuals, be
they heads of states or governments or the highest military officers,
who are personally responsible for such acts, bear criminal liability
under international law. What is not clear, and what none of these
documents clarifies, is the question: is it lawful for individual states
or international organisations to use military force in order to pro
tect the nationals of foreign countries in the territory of a foreign
country, if their own government commits acts of genocide, crimes
against humanity, ethnic cleansing or war crimes against its own
people or is unable or unwilling to protect its people in cases of such
crimes committed on its territory by any other party?
It was the Commission on State Sovereignty and Intervention
that in 2001 attempted to go furthest in allowing the use of military
force in certain circumstances, even without the Security Council’s
authorisation. The Commission developed five criteria of legitimacy
for intervention (just cause, right intention, last resort, proportion
ality of means, and reasonable prospect of success69) applicable
both to the Security Council and states. In these criteria we see a
kind of revival of the old idea of ‘just wars’ that was prevalent when
natural law concepts reigned in international legal literature, before
positivist approaches started to prevail and the use of military force
became outlawed in international law. The furthest the Commission
went on the road towards legitimising use of military force without
the Security Council’s authorisation is in the following two para
graphs of the Report:
6.39 The first message is that if the Security Council fails to discharge
its responsibility in conscience-shocking situations crying out for
action, then it is unrealistic to expect that concerned states will rule
out other means and forms of action to meet the gravity and urgency
of these situations. If collective organizations will not authorize col
lective intervention against regimes that flout the most elementary
norms of legitimate governmental behaviour, then the pressures for
69 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The

Responsibility to Protect, paras. 4.18, 4.32–48.
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214 Chapter Six
intervention by ad hoc coalitions or individual states will surely inten

sify. And there is a risk then that such interventions, without the disci
pline and constraints of UN authorization, will not be conducted for
the right reasons or with the right commitment to the necessary pre
cautionary principles.
6.40 The second message is that if, following the failure of the Council
to act, a military intervention is undertaken by an ad hoc coalition
or individual state which does fully observe and respect all the crite
ria we have identified, and if that intervention is carried through
successfully – and is seen by world public opinion to have been
carried through successfully – then this may have enduringly serious
consequences for the stature and credibility of the UN itself.70
These propositions are not and are not meant to be legally binding
norms, but rather warnings to the Security Council that if it does not
act, others may react and the Council may lose its exceptional posi
tion and authority under international law.
Addressing the UN Human Rights Commission in April 1999, the
then Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan empha
sised: ‘Emerging slowly, but I believe surely is an international norm
against the violent repression of minorities that will and must take
precedence over concerns of State sovereignty’.71 Later, when speak
ing of Kosovo in Stockholm, he said: ‘There is emerging international
law that countries cannot hide behind sovereignty and abuse people
without expecting the rest of the world to do something about it’.72
Speaking in The Hague on the occasion of the centennial of the
first Hague Peace Conference, the Secretary-General, once again,
stressed the need to act through the Security Council. At the same
time, he expressed his belief that ‘unless the Security Council can
unite around the aim of confronting massive human rights viola
tions and crimes against humanity on the scale of Kosovo, then we
will betray the very ideals that inspired the founding of the United
Nations’.73 In autumn of the same year, in his article in The Economist
Kofi Annan wrote that ‘in cases where forceful intervention does
become necessary, the Security Council–the body charged with
70 Ibid, paras. 6,39; 6,40.

71 Press Release SG/SM 6949, 7 April 1999.
72 Financial Times, 26 May 1999, p. 2.
73 Press Release, SG/SM/6997.
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authorising the use of force under international law–must be able

to rise to the challenge [emphasis added]’.74 Two days later, in his
address to the General Assembly, the Secretary General warned:
‘The Charter requires the Council to be defender of common inter
est, and unless it is seen to be so–in the era of human rights, interde
pendence, and globalisation–there is a danger that others could
seek to take its place’.75
It seems to be possible to draw the following three conclusions
from these statements of the former Secretary-General: (1) Although
the United Nations has to be ‘respectful of the sovereignty of States’,
in cases of massive human rights violations and crimes against
humanity, humanitarian concerns must prevail over state sover
eignty; (2) The role of the Security Council, and the United Nations
as a whole, should be central in dealing with extreme humanitar
ian catastrophes threatening international peace and security;
(3) However, the Security Council, and especially its permanent
members, have to act responsibly and ‘unite behind the principle
that massive and systematic violations of human rights conducted
against an entire people cannot be allowed to stand’.76 The world
community has to rely on the Security Council on issues involving
the use of force, but it can do so only if the Council and its perma
nent members act with the utmost sense of responsibility. If the
Council neglects its responsibility, other institutions may have to fill
the void.
However, notwithstanding the report of the Commission on State
Sovereignty and Intervention, the cautious statements of Kofi Annan
and other documents mentioned above that were adopted later
foreclose any interventions on humanitarian grounds unauthorised
by the United Nations Security Council. Alex Bellamy’s conclusion
that ‘as agreed by world leaders in 2005, R2P does not countenance
non-consensual military force without the authorization of the
Security Council and does not set out criteria for the use of force
beyond the four threshold crimes [i.e. genocide, crimes against
74 The Economist, 18 September 1999.

75 SG/SM/7136, 20 September 1999.
76 Ibid.
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216 Chapter Six
humanity, ethnic cleansing and war crimes] and the idea that the
Council should assume responsibility in cases where the host state is
“manifestly failing” to protect’.77 Therefore, Carsten Stahn is justified
in calling R2P partly ‘Old Wine in New Bottles’.78
How relying on various interpretations of R2P may backfire can
be seen in the situation Gareth Evans found himself. Being an ardent
supporter of the concept of R2P as well as a co-chair of the Interna
tional Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, Evans –
the former Foreign Minister of Australia – encountered difficulties
in explaining why Russia was wrong in August 2008 when invoking
the R2P concept as justification for the Kremlin’s response to the
Georgian attack on Tskinvhali, the capital of South Ossetia.79 He was
forced to admit that ‘in the absence of UN Security Council approval,
there is no legal authority for an R2P-based military intervention’.
And he added: ‘The 2005 General Assembly Outcome Document
makes it clear that any country or group of countries seeking to
apply forceful means to address an R2P situation – where another
country is manifestly failing to protect its people and peaceful
means are inadequate – must take that action through the Secu
rity Council’.80 And Evans is certainly right that ‘the sense of moral
outrage at reports of civilians being killed and ethnically cleansed
can have an unintended effect of clouding judgement as to what is
the best response, which is another reason to channel action collec
tively through the United Nations’.81 The point is not whether Russia
correctly invoked the R2P concept (in any case, it was only second
ary in the Kremlin’s justifications of its military response), and as
Gareth Evans correctly points out, Russia’s response was ‘manifestly
excessive’, i.e. disproportionate to the Georgian attack. The point is
that depending on political, economic and strategic interests as well
as ideological proclivities, states use various concepts in their own
77 A.J. Bellamy, ‘The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military inter
vention’, International Affairs, 2008, Vol. 84, No. 4, p. 638.
78 C. Stahn, ‘Responsibility to Protect: Political Rhetoric or Emerging Legal
Norm?’,The American Journal of International Law, 2007, Vol. 101, p. 111.
79 G. Evans, ‘Russia, Georgia and the Responsibility to Protect’, Amsterdam Law
Forum, 2009, Vol. 1, No. 2.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid.
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self-interest. Moreover, as Alex de Waal comments on Gareth Evans’

and Samantha Power’s enthusiastic support of the concepts of R2P
and humanitarian intervention, ‘[I]n the face of “evil”, the idealists
tend to turn righteous and forget to ask important questions about
what they want to achieve and how’.82 More often than not less
sharp instruments than military intervention or a dogged insistence
on regime change save more lives. However, they may hurt the ideal
ists’ sense of self-righteousness and also prevent or delay the achieve
ment of other goals such as the ‘democratisation of the wider Middle
East’ or securing control over energy resources.
In that respect parallels with the recognition of the independence
of Kosovo, which we considered above, are appropriate. It is not
unusual at all that wobbly and self-serving interpretations of various
concepts of international law later come to haunt the authors of
such interpretations. Even if made in good faith, and having at heart
only altruistic and noble aims (which in world politics are always
suspicious), it is better to study in detail all possible uses and abuses
of one’s preferred concepts. Sergei Karaganov writes: ‘In interna
tional affairs, the old geopolitics and Realpolitik based on sheer
interest and a balance of power are verbally rejected. The supremacy
of human rights and human values and a renunciation of the spheres
of influence are proclaimed. But practical policymaking appears to
be in sharp contrast to what is being said. A fight for the spheres
of influence, slightly disguised in the parables about democracy,
is clearly underway’.83 This comment, certainly applies not only to
countries with which Russia has problems, but also to the Russian
policies in the Caucasus and elsewhere.
Russia’s overreaction to Georgia’s attack in August 2008 in South
Ossetia should be seen not as something idiosyncratic, but as a fea
ture common to great powers generally. Their responses are often
meant to not only adequately and proportionally react to the wrongs
done, or perceived to be done, against them; rather, since they feel
that their prestige and pride have been hurt, they have to send an
82 A. de Waal, ‘How to End Mass Atrocities’, The New York Times, 9 March, 2009.
83 S. Karaganov, ‘Revolutionary Chaos of the New World’, Russia in Global Affairs,
28 December 2011 (http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/pubcol/A-revolutionary-chaos-of-the
-new-world-15415).
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218 Chapter Six
ʻunmistakable message’, as they put it, to their opponents. Today,

such messages are often sent in the form of missiles, drones attacks
or aerial bombardments. As Dean Acheson, a distinguished Ameri
can diplomat and lawyer, put it after the Cuban missile crisis: ‘The
power, position and prestige of the United States had been chal
lenged by another state; and law simply does not deal with such
questions of ultimate power–power that comes close to sources of
sovereignty’.84 Certainly, politics plays an immense, even central
role in most international issues. Not only is international law always
made in the cauldron of political processes, but in many areas its
content is also highly political. However, this does not mean that
there should not be or that there cannot be any laws governing such
sensitive issues.
I understand that the impression my lines of argument have so far
offered is that the use of military force for humanitarian purposes is
basically counterproductive, and in the absence of the Security
Council’s authorisation it is also unlawful. This is indeed what I have
intended to convey. And as a general proposition, this corresponds
to political realities, existing legal norms, and maybe most impor
tantly, it is even morally sound, notwithstanding a noble aim in the
use of force – the protection of human rights in cases of their mas
sive violation. The important point to be made is that any use of
military force, even one genuinely carried out for the sake of saving
human lives, contains in itself a significant potential for an even
greater loss of life, the infliction of grievous bodily harm on a mas
sive scale, the loss of property and the infringement of other values,
which are protected as fundamental human rights.
Of course, the same may be said about the use of force in exercis
ing one’s inherent right to self-defence ‘if an armed attack occurs’, as
confirmed in Article 51 of the UN Charter. However, wars of self-
defence (though this right is often abused) are by their very nature
wars of necessity – they are never wars of choice if we discount sur
rendering as an acceptable moral choice (it may also be a choice but
then there is no use of force). Yet, the use of force by state A with
humanitarian purposes against state B, in a case where B does not
threaten A’s security, can never be a war of necessity in the same
84 Proceedings of the American Society of International Law, 1963, p. 14.
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sense (both in a physical and moral sense) as wars of self-defence are

(though a humanitarian crisis in neighbouring country C may con
stitute a security threat for A due, for instance, to refugee flows, but
this is a different issue to be addressed separately). However, one
may ask: can there not be any circumstances in which the use of
force by state A in the territory of and against state B, in case of a
severe humanitarian crisis in the latter, even if the crisis does not
constitute a security threat to A, may be considered a ‘war of neces
sity’, if not in the physical sense (in that respect there is always a
choice: intervene militarily or not) as wars of self-defence are, but in
a moral sense, which wars of self-defence also are? We believe that
in certain circumstances it would be possible to give a positive
answer to this question. In situations where the use of military force
is the only means of preventing or stopping massive human rights
violations such as genocide or crimes against humanity, the absolute
prohibition to use force would deprive these prohibitions of their
enforceability even in principle, and in such a case these prohibi
tions cannot be considered as valid human rights norms. Therefore
the use of military force in certain extreme circumstances may have
the characteristics of a ‘war of necessity’ – a war of moral necessity.
For example, both the world community of states and individual
states that had the necessary capacities, first to prevent and then
stop genocide in Rwanda (this would have clearly been a lesser evil
than allowing the foreseeable and preventable genocide to happen
and once started to stop it), failed in their duty both collectively and
individually. Their’s was a moral surrender similar to the behaviour
of those nations who surrender without even attempting to fight
when attacked by an enemy, resisting whom is not foreseeably a lost
cause.
Moral justification for the use of military force for the sake of the
protection of human rights in a foreign country can be best based
on ideas developed by British political and legal philosopher Lord
Raymond Plant. As human rights are real only in the case of their
enforceability (at least in principle though not always in practice,
but this is another, though no less important, matter which belongs
more to the realm of practical politics and law than moral philoso
phy), their unenforceability, even in principle, deprives them of
their quality as human rights. Lord Plant writes:
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220 Chapter Six
Our responsibility for the rights of others is therefore not confined to

non-interference in those rights, but also has to involve responsibility
for doing what we can to secure those enforceability conditions, just
because these are part of having a right and therefore must be involved
in what respecting rights means. This seems to me to be the best way
of linking a concern for rights and the possibility of intervention in a
particular country, which may not be securing the enforcement
conditions.85
If there are circumstances when the use of military force is the only
means of protecting rights, and the resort to such an extreme meas
ure, which in itself is wrought with the danger of massive violations
of most fundamental human rights, is proportionate to the serious
ness of the human rights violations (genocide, crimes against
humanity and systemic massive violations of international humani
tarian law), then the use of military force may be morally justified as
a necessary condition of these rights being rights. The most impor
tant general guiding principle in such a situation should be that
extreme human suffering, which one attempts to stop or prevent,
has to be significantly and foreseeably higher than the human suffer
ing that inevitably results from the use of force to end the suffering.
And always, the objective should be to stop or prevent extreme
human suffering and not to effect regime change, though this
might occur as an inevitable or even necessary corollary of the
intervention.
From these arguments of moral philosophy it is possible to move
to the legal justification of the use of military force for the sake of the
protection of human rights.
The UN Security Council’s authorization would make interven
tions on humanitarian grounds both lawful under international law
and legitimate in the eyes of most people, and though even they
may, in principle, do more harm than good, in such cases there is
less chance that hasty decisions, dictated by narrow self-interest
and facilitated by an ignorance of the risks that any military opera
tion involves, are made. However, in extreme circumstances, we
believe there may not only be a moral-philosophical, but also a legal
justification (therefore, there would not be any need to put it in the
85 R. Plant, ‘Rights, Rules and World Order’ in Global Governance: Ethics and
Economics of the World Order (M. Desai, P. Redfern eds.), Pinter, 1995, p. 207.
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form: ‘illegal but legitimate’) for intervention on humanitarian

grounds, even without the Security Council’s authorisation. We
would emphasise, first, the importance of the words ‘in extreme cir
cumstances’ since any use of military force, as we have just dis
cussed, inevitably leads to a serious loss of life, i.e. it always creates
circumstances conducive to massive violations of the right to life –
the most basic human right without which the enjoyment of all
other rights becomes meaningless and impossible. Nevertheless,
there may be circumstances when the use of military force may be
justified not only on moral but also on legal grounds.
First, let us deal with a preliminary point. It is often said that if
there were a right to use military force, states would constantly
abuse it. It may well be the case, and in some military interventions
allegedly carried out for humanitarian purposes, such justifications
have been used to conceal other aims. However, so far states have
more often referred to the right to self-defence when using force
aggressively, i.e. they abuse this inherent right. Moreover, the fact
that the use of military force with the purported aim of protecting
human rights in cases of their gross and massive violation is often
abused, should not in itself serve as an absolute obstacle on the road
to human rights protection even by means of force, if other means
have proven to be, or would clearly be, inadequate, and it is also one
of those rare situations when the use of force foreseeably does less
harm than its abstention. Almost every right, almost every good may
be open to abuse. As the former President of the International Court
of Justice Dame Rosalyn Higgins has written, ‘we must face the real
ity that we live in a decentralised international legal order, where
claims may be made either in good faith or abusively’.86 The fact that
claims over some values or rights are made abusively should not
mean that these values or rights thereby become less valuable.
Humans have enough intelligence and flexibility to not only confuse
and mislead, but also to differentiate between use and abuse, sincer
ity and deception.87
86 R. Higgins, Problems and Process: International Law and How We Use It,
Clarendon Press, 1944, p. 247.
87 Nicholas Wade opines that religion coevolved with the emergence of lan
guage as a safeguard against deception that came possible through the use of
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222 Chapter Six
Now, there comes the main, in our opinion, argument in favour

of both the legality and legitimacy of the use of force for humanitar
ian purposes. There is no doubt, as we have discussed above, that
the principle of the prohibition of the use of force is one of the
fundamental principles of international law. The United Nations
International Law Commission, in its various reports dealing with
the issue of peremptory norms in international law (jus cogens
norms), from which states cannot deviate or derogate even with the
consent of other states, has always given as an example of such
norms the norm prohibiting the use of military force.88 As we saw
above, this norm has not lost its fundamental importance notwith
standing its all too frequent violation. On the contrary, its signifi
cance is only enhanced by such breaches; the reason being that if a
norm protects something that people continue to value highly
(peace in this case) then violations of such a norm indicate that it is
necessary to strengthen the norm instead of discarding it. In legal
terms, we may say that in such cases strong opinio juris compensates
for a less than perfect observance of the norm in practice. However,
the prohibition of the use of force is not the only fundamental prin
ciple of international law. The principle of respect for and protection
of human rights has acquired the same status. In its Draft Articles on
Responsibility of States the International Law Commission empha
sises not only the importance of the non-use of force principle as a
peremptory norm of international law but also the same character
of certain human rights norms, such as the prohibition of genocide,
slavery and torture.89
In cases of gross and massive violation of such a fundamental
human right as the right to life, which are always accompanied by
egregious violations of many other rights, the prohibition of the use
of military force may yield to the obligation to respect and protect
human rights. In such cases we have two equally important and
language: ‘With the advent of language, freeloaders gained a great weapon, the
power to deceive. Religion could have evolved as a means of defence against free
loading’ (N. Wade, Before the Dawn. Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors,
The Penguin Press, 2007, p. 165).
88 See, e.g., Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful
Acts, with commentaries, 2001, Yearbook of the International Law Commission,
2001, vol. II, Part Two, p. 112.
89 Ibid., pp. 112–113.
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weighty principles of international law that cannot be observed

at the same time and in the same context; one has to give way.
Such potential for collision is enshrined in the very nature of the
principles of international law. As one of the greatest twentieth cen
tury international lawyers, Oscar Schachter, wrote, ‘principles, in
contrast [to rules], lack the element of definiteness, they are “open-
textured”, leaving room for various interpretations’.90 And he empha
sises that ‘particular situations are covered by more than one
principle. … They point to different legal conclusions. Indeed, it has
often been observed that principles like proverbs can be paired off
into opposites’.91 In particular situations the prohibition to commit
acts of genocide or crimes against humanity, and even more impor
tantly, the obligation to prevent such acts being committed,92 may
outweigh the prohibition to use military force. In such extreme situ
ations the use of force for humanitarian purposes, even without
the Security Council’s authorisation, may be both legitimate and
lawful.
8. INTERVENTION IN CIVIL WARS AND INTERNAL

DISTURBANCES AND REGIME CHANGE
International law has traditionally allowed so-called ‘interven

tions by invitation’, which the Institut de Droit International in
its 2011 resolution has more correctly characterised as ‘military
assistance on request’,93 in ‘situations of internal disturbances and
tensions, such as riots, isolated and sporadic acts of violence and
90 O. Schachter, International Law in Theory and Practice. General Course in

Public International Law, Recueille des Cours de l’Academie de Droit International,
1982, vol. V, p. 43.
91 Ibid.
92 Article 1 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide provides that ‘The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether
committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law
which they undertake to prevent and to punish’. (http://www2.ohchr.org/english/
law/genocide.htm). As we emphasised above and it is not superfluous to reiterate
this here, crimes against humanity and systemic war crimes are often not less grave
than acts of genocide. Crimes against humanity are, by definition, ‘widespread and
systematic’, while war crimes, if not individual excesses, but state policy (or policy
of other organised groups), are always massive and heinous.
93 http://www.idi-iil.org/idiE/resolutionsE/2011_rhodes_10_C_en.pdf.
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224 Chapter Six
other acts of similar nature, including acts of terrorism’. Such an

invitation has to come from the lawful government. However, the
Institut, when confirming the right of foreign military assistance
at the request of governments, didn’t review its 1975 Resolution
‘The principle of non-interference in civil wars’94 thereby explicitly
excluding from the scope of permitted military assistance on request
situations of non-international armed conflicts, i.e. in civil wars.
This means that there should not be any intervention in civil wars
even if the legitimate government gives its consent or asks for help.
The reason for this is that interventions on the side of the govern
ment (it goes without saying that any military intervention on the
invitation of the opposition is illegal) in civil war situations may
undermine peoples’ right to self-determination, as well as lead to
other breaches of fundamental human rights. Of course, even in
cases of internal disturbances and tensions, where military assis
tance to the incumbent government by its request is permitted, may
enter into conflict with the principle of self-determination of peo
ple. For example, Saudi Arabia’s military assistance at the request of
Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa in March 2011 to put down a
popular revolt against the Monarchy is clearly the case;95 similarly,
in the case of the conflict in Syria, if arming rebels is clearly illegal
under international law, Russia’s continued sending of weapons to
the Assad government, even if in implementation of previous agree
ments, was also illegal, first, because these weapons were used, inter
alia, against a civilian population, and secondly, because arming one
side of the conflict violates the principle of self-determination of
peoples. Therefore the Institut’s Resolution of 2011 prohibits direct
military assistance to foreign governments by the sending of armed
forces in cases where such assistance violates the right of peoples to
self-determination or ‘generally accepted standards of human rights
and in particular when its object is to support an established govern
ment against its own population’.
If intervention in civil war situations which may well end up
in humanitarian catastrophes may be necessary on humanitarian
94 http://www.idi-iil.org/idiE/resolutionsE/1975_wies_03_en.pdf.
95 E. Bronner, M. Slackman, ‘Saudi Troops Enter Bahrain to Help Put Down
Unrest’, The International Herald Tribune, 14 March, 2011.
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grounds, the Security Council’s authorisation is needed. In such

cases, if the targets of a UN sanctioned intervention are governmen
tal forces, which are in the process of suppressing a popular revolt,
regime change may indeed result. However, it should never be the
raison d’être of the intervention. Which government will govern after
the intervention has ended has to be decided by the people without
any external interference. It seems that external assistance to domes
tically initiated regime change should be welcome in situations
when the means and methods used by the government to govern, to
stay in power and to put down rebellions against it grossly violate
basic human rights. In extreme circumstances, when crimes against
humanity or acts of genocide are committed in a country, and when
the seriousness of such human rights violations outweighs the pro
hibition to use military force (a Rwanda 1994 type situation), even a
non-Security Council sanctioned intervention may be justified.
However, any intervention in civil wars, even if authorised by the
Security Council is wrought with many dangers, and one of them is
that the intervener may be forced to take sides and fight alongside
one of the parties in an internal conflict. This is what has often hap
pened. However, as we continue to reiterate, any changes to existing
political regimes, economic structures and civil society institutions,
if necessary, should be the matter left for the people themselves to
resolve.
9. DETERMINANTS OF SUCCESS OF EXTERNAL

INTERFERENCE: EFFORTS OF INTERVENERS OR
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TARGET SOCIETY?
Rory Stewart and Klaus Knaus make a succinct, precise, to the point
and profound observation in writing that ‘people who cannot name
four cities in Libya can deploy four arguments against or for an inter
vention there. These are the same arguments that crippled our
response to Bosnia and Rwanda, emboldened us in Kosovo, and drew
us deeper into the indignities of Iraq and Afghanistan’.96 The gist of
96 R. Stewart, G. Knaus, Can Intervention Work?, Amnesty International Global

Ethic Series, W.W. Norton & Company, 2011 (Kindle version), loc. 86.
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226 Chapter Six
this observation by these two persons who intimately knew the

countries where foreign interventions took place (Afghanistan and
Bosnia-Herzegovina), is that those who make decisions as to whether
to intervene or not are usually high level politicians in Washington
or sometimes in other Western capitals who know only their own
country, judge other nations on the basis of that knowledge, and
often do not even consider it necessary to understand other peoples.
They extrapolate their knowledge of their own country, their own
interests and values to other societies. Such a fallacy is characteristic
not only of politicians but also of quite a few experts. James Dobbins
at RAND, for example, concluded that the single most important
variable to the success of nation-building efforts in foreign countries
‘is the level of efforts the United States and the international com
munity put into their democratic transformations. … The higher
level of input accounts in significant measure for the higher level of
output measured in the development of democratic institutions and
economic growth’.97 James Pattison, similarly, makes the mistake all
too common for many US politicians and experts; they believe that
the success of external intervention, military or otherwise, depends
mainly on the efforts of interveners, not the characteristics of the
society intervened. Writing about factors central to intervention’s
success, he, for example, observes: ‘These factors include the mili
tary and non-military resources of the interveners, a suitable strat
egy on their part, their commitment to stay the course, local and
global support for the intervention (sic! local support should be con
sidered as the most crucial single factor in the success of any inter
vention), and the intervener’s fidelity to the principles of jus in
bello’.98 However, less abstract and more detailed studies show that
it is not so much the nature of external efforts, but the various char
acteristics of the target society that determine the success or failure
of interventions, including those of the expansion of democracy or
nation building. Stewart and Knaus argue that ‘… foreigners who
comprise “the international community” are usually much weaker
97 J. Dobbins et al., America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq,

RAND, 2003, xix.
98 J. Pattison, ‘The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention in Libya’, Ethics &
International Affairs, 2011, Vol. 25, No. 3, p. 275.
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than they imagine. They are inevitably isolated from local society,
ignorant of local culture and context, and prey to misleading abstract
theories’.99 The United States Secretary of Defence during the
Vietnam War, Robert McNamara, drawing lessons from that war,
wrote later: ‘We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in
terms of our own experience. We do not have the God-given right to
shape every nation in our own image or as we choose. We did not
recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient.
We exaggerated the dangers to the United States’.100 There is some
thing significant in the fact that politicians or military leaders often
happen to be wiser when in retirement. It seems that they become
free of the herd mentality that affects their thought and action when
in office. Gerald Knaus well summarises the main problem with
interventions by Western nations in far-away countries:
The red thread that runs through these recent policy debates on inter
vention is the reassuring notion that all fundamental problems have
solutions. It is the belief that lessons learned in one place can be
transferred to any other, and that what works in one intervention is
likely to work elsewhere. It is the conviction that in the end everything
depends mainly on good management, resources (troops, money),
and political will, and that the key to success lies with the intervener (my
emphasis RM): with the nature of the domestic political debate in the
West and with the wisdom of military and civilian leadership.101
This excerpt deserves to be hanged on the walls of some world capi
tals. Such an attitude, even worldview, has its roots, as we discussed
earlier, in the Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment’s belief in univer
sal history and a progress leading towards some final end, as well as
a mixture of determinism and voluntarism. Both the West’s achieve
ments and failures rest on this worldview. The greatest wisdom
would probably be the ability to recognise when one’s worldview is
apt and when it may pave the way to disaster, though this may be too
much to ask. At the same time, the less philosophical, more routine
roots of a belief in the ability of an intervener to radically change the
99 Stewart, Knaus, loc. 265.

100 R. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, Random
House, 1995, p. 353.
101 Stewart, Knaus, Can Intervention Work, loc. 2187.
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228 Chapter Six
fundamentals of foreign societies lie in the ignorance of the com

plexities and diversity of the world.
Those Western experts who are intimately familiar with the non-
Western world, where interventions usually take place, emphasise
the importance of the characteristics of societies as the main deter
minants of the success or failure of such missions. So, Alexander
Downes and Jonathan Monten write: ‘We find that states that are
relatively wealthy or ethnically homogeneous experience significant
democratic gains after experiencing a FIRC (foreign-imposed regime
change) by a democratic intervener, whereas states that are rela
tively poor or heterogeneous become less democratic (sic!)’.102
However, there may be a different danger. Sometimes those who
know the country of potential intervention quite well and may have
even been born and brought up there, may be the strongest advo
cates of intervention. This is what may be called the ‘Chalabi phe
nomenon’ after Ahmad Chalabi,103 an Iraqi politician in exile in the
US and a fierce opponent of Saddam Hussein, whose obsession with
ousting of Saddam, personal political ambitions and outright lies
contributed to the decision of the Bush Administration to invade
Iraq in March 2003. Although even without Ahmad Chalabi’s efforts
the 2003 intervention would have taken place, since the Bush’s
Administration’s foreign policy was guided by an interventionist ide
ology of remaking the wider Middle East in accordance with a lib
eral democratic blueprint. Therefore the Administration as a whole
(the only prominent exception being the then Secretary of State
Colin Powell) was only happy to be misled.
Sometimes the democratisations of Germany and Japan after
World War II are given as examples of successful efforts to externally
enforce democratisation. So, President George W. Bush stated in
February 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq and the ousting of
Saddam Hussein (this being one of the justifications of invasion):
‘America has made and kept this kind of commitment before – in
102 A.B. Downes, J. Monten, ‘FIRCed to be Free: Foreign-Imposed Regime Change

and Democratization’, http://www.duke.edu/~downes/FIRCed%20TO%20BE%20
FREE_MAY28.pdf.
103 A. Roston, The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life,
Adventures, And Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi, Nation Books, 2008.
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the peace that followed the world war. After defeating enemies, we
did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and
parliaments. … In societies that once bred fascism and militarism,
liberty found a permanent home. There was a time when many said
that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining
democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq
today. They are mistaken’.104
Germany certainly is not and never was comparable to, for exam
ple, Afghanistan. Although German society possessed seeds that
helped grow German militarism and led to the First World War and
the fascism that caused WW II and the Holocaust (such seeds were,
of course, also present in other European societies), before and after
WW I, and until Hitler came to power, Germany was not much dif
ferent from other European countries. It was wealthy, industrially
highly developed, stable, relatively homogeneous country with a
highly educated population. If it were not for the onerous retribu
tions imposed on Germany after it had lost the war it had started in
1914, and the 1929–1933 world economic crisis, it could well have
been that Hitler and his NSDAP (the National Socialist German
Workers’ Party) would have never come to power in Germany. In
that case, there would not have been any need for FIRC (foreign-
imposed regime change) at all in that country. One of the important
differences, besides other significant factors such as levels of eco
nomic development and historical and cultural traditions between
Germany and Japan on the one hand, and Afghanistan, Iraq and
many other countries where externally induced or supported regime
changes are taking place on the other, was the relatively high level of
religious and ethnic homogeneity of Germany and Japan. And as we
emphasised above, the median age of the population is also a factor
that either facilitates or hinders democratic changes.
What the defeats, occupations and following democratisations of
Germany and Japan show is that even after the use of military force,
democratisation may be possible (but never forget at what cost in
human lives, suffering as well as in material devastations). What the
104 G.W. Bush, ‘President Discusses Future of Iraq’, White House Press Release,
February 26, 2003, D 10.
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230 Chapter Six
cases of Germany and Japan confirm is that the success or failure of

externally imposed democratisation depends less on what the exter
nal actors do and much more on the characteristics of the target
society.
Stewart and Knaus conclude:
Finally – and this is the most difficult truth for the international pol
icy-makers to accept – intervention cannot always offer an end to suf
fering. A modern intervener does not have the power, the knowledge,
or the legitimacy to “eliminate all the root causes of conflict”, let alone
fundamentally reshape the structures and cultural identity of a for
eign land. Instead, intervention should aim to provide protection and
relief at a specific time and place. And even such limited ambitions
can often be defeated by a situation, which is intrinsically unpredict
able. No crisis is fixed or permanent. But there are crises that
“the international community” cannot address. Failure – however
horrible – will always be a possibility: an option.105
The last point – failure may be an option – needs to be emphasised,
since all too often politicians and military leaders use the mantra
that failure is not an option until said failure has materialised, in the
process sacrificing more lives and resources.
Today’s attempts at regime change manifest a new tendency
which, depending on where one stands, maybe seen either as prom
ising or as worrying. With the emergence of politics and statehood,
and up to the emergence of the possibility of a peaceful transition of
governments through the ballot-box (sic!), there have always been
those who have revolted against the authorities, be they slaves in the
Ancient Rome, peasants in China, Russia and medieval Europe or
the American, French and Russian revolutions. There isn’t anything
hitherto unheard of in outside assistance either for governments’
efforts to quell rebellions (e.g., Vladimir Lenin called Czarist Russia
‘the gendarme of Europe’ for its military assistance to conservative
European governments in the middle of the nineteenth century) or
of giving a helping hand to rebels (as France did when the British
colonies in America rebelled against the Brits). However, post-UN
Charter international law prohibits interference in the internal
affairs of states, and therefore any assistance to rebels would be in
105 Stewart, Knaus, loc. 339.
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breach of international law. Today even assistance to governments

to help them quell rebellions may be contrary to international law,
to its principle of self-determination of peoples. At the same time,
the further development of international law has led to the emer
gence and rapid evolution of international human rights law, com
bined with the international criminalisation of not only war crimes
but also acts of genocide and crimes against humanity, and the
revival of the concept of humanitarian intervention.
In the context of current regime change attempts, we face a series
of problems related to these tendencies. Peoples rise up against
unrepresentative and oppressive governments, especially when the
latter don’t deliver; and more often than not they don’t. In a glo
balised world, such rebellions have become contagious; they come
in the form of chain reactions. One of the serious problems with
such chains is that their links are very different, or rather, often not
real at all; they are virtual, existing only on the level of Facebook or
Twitter. If in one country rebels may relatively easily and with rela
tively small casualties succeed, in a different country the authorities
may be able to suppress revolts against them. Every case is specific.
The success or failure of rebellions depends on too many variables,
the most important of which are endogenous, not exogenous.
Outcomes stretch from virtually bloodless coups without any signifi
cant foreign involvement (Tunisia), to relatively short but bloody
conflicts where only foreign intervention tips the scales in favour of
the rebels (Libya). Often there is the potential for protracted bloody
civil wars with an uncertain result (Syria). What is new is that out
side assistance to rebels in one country encourages rebels or poten
tial rebels in other countries. However, the problem is that outsiders
are unable to assist all rebels, and even more importantly, as domes
tic circumstances differ from country to country, what works in one
case may completely fail in another. At the same time, rebels, being
encouraged by an outside support that is not strong enough to tip
the scales in their favour, don’t compromise, even when the authori
ties are ready for concessions. Their demands are uncompromising –
nothing less that the change of the incumbent regime and the
prosecution or murder of its leaders and their supporters would sat
isfy them. Sometimes it may work, in different circumstances it leads
to protracted civil wars and more bloodshed.
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232 Chapter Six
In 1979, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the US Ambassador to the United

Nations during the Reagan Administration, published her most
famous article, one that deserves to be studied not so much in order
to agree with what she wrote, but as to reflect upon various policies
and their unintended consequences. She wrote:
In each of these countries [in China before the fall of Chiang Kaishek,
in Cuba before the triumph of Castro, in certain crucial periods of the
Vietnamese war, and, more recently, in Angola] the American effort to
impose liberalization and democratization on a government con
fronted with violent internal opposition not only failed, but actually
assisted the coming to power of new regimes in which ordinary peo
ple enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal security than under the
previous autocracy–regimes, moreover, hostile to American interests
and policies.106
Of course, these were times quite different from todays, and Jeane
Kirkpatrick advocated relying on authoritarian governments, allied
to the United States in its rivalry with the Soviet Union and its allies.
Today even this reason for buttressing dictators has gone. But
Kirkpatrick’s conclusion that undermining dictators or overthrow
ing them may lead to unintended consequences, and that under
new regimes people may enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal
security than under the previous autocracies, that new regimes may
be more hostile to American interests and policies, rings true also
today.
106 J.J. Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships & Double Standards, Commentary, November

1979.
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Conclusions 233
CONCLUSIONS
Let us finish with where we started: the world as a whole is slowly

becoming more homogeneous, while most individual societies are
becoming, though not as slowly, more heterogeneous. Professor
Amitai Etzioni’s comment that ‘the world actually is moving towards
a new synthesis between the West’s great respects for individual
rights and choices and the East’s respect for social obligations (in a
variety of ways, of course); between the West’s preoccupation with
autonomy and the East’s preoccupation with social order; between
Western legal and political egalitarianism and Eastern authoritari-
anism’,1 is well within this panorama and gives additional support to
it. However, in most cases it would be counter-productive and dan-
gerous to try to artificially accelerate a move towards greater homo-
geneity (be it a world of liberal democracies, an Islamic Caliphate or
a Sino-centric international system). Equally, it would be unwise
and almost impossible to try to stop these changes. What we, human-
kind, represented by states, international organisations, civil society
groups, business leaders and individuals, can do is to manage these
processes.
Today, it is not Orwell’s 1984 and a Big Brother or Leviathan that,
at least for the Western world, is the most realistic and immediate
danger; in many parts of the world, as we are seeing today, it is the
failure or total collapse of states, not their strength and stability, that
has been the main cause of massive human suffering. The clear and
present danger is, rather, the unfettered global (especially financial)
market without any democratic control. It is becoming a ‘big brother’
whose interference with individual liberties, though more anony-
mous and less direct than that of the state, may prove equally or
even more nefarious. One of the most important tasks of the state
should be the management of global problems such as the globalised
economy and finances, the prevention of environmental degrada-
tion, the maintenance of national and international security, and
qualified, contingent and contextual promotion of democracy and
1 A. Etzioni, From Empire to Community. A New Approach to International

Relations, Palgrave, 2004, pp. 14–15.
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234 Conclusions
human rights.2 It is sometimes said that states are too big for small
things and too small for big things. However, if there are entities
ready to take over some of the smaller things, there is nothing yet
available to resolve big things. The rise of China and other Asian
countries, where the role of the state has been instrumental in guar-
anteeing this rise, is further evidence that it is too early to send the
state into the dustbin of history, as Marxists dream of, or cut it down
to the size of a mere ‘night watchman’ as libertarians or neo-liberals
would like. Wang Hui is right when he observes that ‘[S]ome people
have linked globalization to the decline of the nation-state, but
I don’t think that is necessarily accurate. Instead, what has occurred
is a transformation of its function, not its decline – parts of it are in
decline but others are also on the rise’.3 Speaking, for example, of the
changing role of the Chinese state, he writes that ‘[T]he Chinese gov-
ernment will correspondingly be required to shift from a develop-
ment-oriented government to a social service oriented one, which
will also transform the Chinese economy from being reliant on
exports to being led by domestic needs’.4 It may well be that some
Western governments will have to start pursuing opposing economic
policies, but the important point is that markets and economies are
not self-contained, self-regulating phenomena that function on
their own without governmental (or inter-governmental) interfer-
ence in various forms. Neither markets nor globalisation work on
their own, automatically. Without governments there would be
chaos and anarchy. Joseph Stiglitz writes that ‘[T]he interconnected-
ness of peoples, countries, and economies around the globe is a
development that can be used as effectively to promote prosperity
as to spread greed and misery. The same is true of market economy:
the power of market is enormous, but they have no inherent moral
character. We have to decide how to manage them’.5 So far, as Stiglitz
2 See, R. Müllerson, Democracy – a Destiny of Humankind? A Qualified, Contingent

and Contextual Case for Democracy Promotion, New York, NovaSciencePublishers,
2009.
2011, p. 87.
4 Ibid., p. xxviii.
5 J. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our
Future, W.W. Norton & Company, 2012, p. xii.
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Conclusions 235
puts it, most governments, including liberal democratic ones, have

managed them for the sake of the top 1% of the population.6 As the
slave-owning democracy of Ancient Greece could not be a model of
democracy for the twentieth century, democracy ‘by 1% and for 1%’
should not be a model of democracy for the twenty first century.
As often is the case in various domains, there is a positive side in
negative tendencies or developments and vice versa. Moreover, what
is positive in negative and negative in positive usually depends on
where one stands, and the latter is dependent on where one sits. In
the age of empires, be it Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire,
the empires of Chingiz Khan or Tamerlane, the strong did not care,
and didn’t feel the need to be seen to care, about the wellbeing of
those over whom they exercised their domination. However, already
by the times of Western European colonialism, colonial powers felt a
need to use a veil of mission civilisatrice in order to dominate the rest
of the world. Colonial domination should not to be seen as exclu-
sively benefiting the strong. It had to also be seen to as being carried
out for the sake of the weak, as a mission of bringing the fruits of
civilization to uncivilized nations. Though there was a lot of hypoc-
risy and naivety in colonial expansion, the need to show that one
was acting not only for the sake of one’s particular interest, but also
for the common interest of humankind, was in itself a sign of pro-
gressive evolution.
In the contemporary world, American dominance, without any
doubt serving particular American interests as they are understood
by the political and economic elites of the country, is even more
clearly passed off as a common good, as something that is benefiting
the whole world. Sometimes this may well be so. America’s potential
for good is great, and time and time again it has been used for the
benefit of humankind. However, too often too many Americans
believe that other peoples not only have the right, but even the
obligation to enjoy the same political and personal liberties as
the Americans do, and in a similar vein the benefits of free mar-
kets. And Washington is ready to assist those peoples, sometimes
without even consulting them. The only condition is that they
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236 Conclusions
shouldn’t disobey; they must not insist on their ‘incorrect’ ideologies

and put their particular interests above the common interests of
humankind, as defined by Washington (sometimes with consulta-
tion with allies). One is allowed to exercise, and is even aided in exer-
cising freedoms so far as such exercise doesn’t contradict the vital
interests of the dominant power.
British diplomat and scholar Adam Watson, after studying vari-
ous international systems over the past 2,500 years observed: ‘Powers
that find themselves able to lay down the law in a system in practice
do so’.7 This feature indeed seems to be one of the most constant
imperatives of international relations. It has not depended on the
internal characteristics of dominant states but on their relative
power, be it economic, political or most importantly military.
However, even this invariable is not immutable in its application.
For the first time in history, there is a global world system and no
single power is able to dominate the entire system. Attempts to do so
lead to imperial overstretch and increasingly shorten relative domi-
nance. Therefore, Anatol Lieven’s prediction that ‘rather than a
future in which Chinese hegemony will replace that of the United
States we seem to be rapidly entering a world in which no country
will exercise anything resembling true world leadership,8 seems to
be rather insightful.
7 A. Watson, The Evolution of International Society, Routledge, 1992, p. 291.

8 A. Lieven, ‘The Cold War and the Post-Cold War World. Reflections about
World Leadership’, Russia in Global Affairs, 29 December 2011.
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Index 237
INDEX
Abkhazia Berlin, Isaiah 2, 9

recognition of 192–194 Blackburn, Simon 70
Acemoglu, Daron 46–47, 97–101 Blair, Tony 36–37, 187
Acheson, Dean 218 Bozemann, Adda 19
Afghanistan Brautigan, Deborah 105
Afghan soldiers, Western troops Bremmer, Ian 81–82, 88, 138
killed by 52 Brown, Donald 20
liberal democracies, effect of Brown, Gordon 75
policies of 211 Burt, Richard 39
liberation of 51 Bush, George H. 71
Africa Bush, George W. 37, 70,
post-conflict reconstruction, 168, 228
participation in 104–105 Butt, Yousaf 211
Allott, Philip 40 Buzan, Barry 26, 30, 116
Andropov, Yuri 133
Annan, Kofi 181, 198, 214–215 Canada
Arab Spring post-modern state, as 166
discontent, causes of 1–2 Capitalism
external interference in 51–52 authoritarian 76–77
internal causes 51 competing forms of 83
local, regional and global crisis of 63
factors 206 democratic, problems of
onset of 1 56–72
regime change dubbed 51 effectiveness of 75
US policy towards 53–54 excesses, remedy to 72
Arendt, Hannah 66 free market 82
Armenia state compared 122
Azerbaijan, situation with 210 liberal-democratic 76
Asia robber 122
regional concert of great powers, state 81–82
advocacy of 63 Western model of 83
rise of 31, 234 Carpenter, Ted Galen 79
al-Assad, President Bashar 199, 204 Cassin, René 182
Aust, Tony 186 Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca 16
Autocracy, states operating as 130 Central Europe
Autocrats in power 100–101 transformations in 1
Azerbaijan Chalabi, Ahmad
Armenia, situation with 210 209, 228
China
Babst, Dean 161 African countries, participation in
Bahrain reconstruction in 104–105
revolt in 201, 224 American strategy 85
Bakiyev, Kurmanbek 96 Asia, leadership of 115
Ban Ki-Moon 201 authoritarian capitalism 76–77
Becker, Seymour 120 changing balance of power
Beilin, Yossi 129 86–88
Bellamy, Alex 215 characteristics 116
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238 Index
charm offensive 106 world’s largest economy,
complex decisions, ability to becoming 86
make 61 world’s reaction to rise of 104–113
democratic traits, acquiring 78
economic development, Christopher, Warren 126
accelerating 104 Chua, Amy 29, 94, 95
economic institutions 98 Churchill, Winston 59, 119
Empire, no return to 116 Cincotta, Richard 206
extractive and inclusive Civil society
institutions 98–99 dictatorships, in 42
foreign direct investment 105 interdependence 45
foreign policy issues, requests from Civil war
Washington 112 intervention in 223–225
GDP 103 Syria, in 202
historical comparison of 31 Claude, Inis 9
human rights record 112, 148 Colour revolutions
human spirit, democratization of 89 combination of 1
instability, consequences of 90 former Soviet Union territories,
military expenditure 104 in 51
modernization, model of 102 Cook, Robin 189
modernizing 88–93 Cooper, Robert 166–167
open, becoming 116–117 Crimes against humanity
people, issues decided by 117 government committing, no nation
political and economic reforms 102 deserving 209
political institutions 98–99, 101 humanitarian concerns prevailing
political reforms 77–78 over state sovereignty 215
political system, changes in 44 international law, responsibility
politically open, becoming 91 under 213
power relative to United States, massive human rights violations,
reaction to change in 106 as 208
reforms in 6, 97–104 protection of population
regional power, as 169 against 207
revisionist power, as 114 Syria, in 202–203
rise of 86–88 Crooke, Alastair 36, 71
role of state 234 Cultures
social movement 92 common traits 19–20, 23–24
society, compared with USSR 133 human universals, list of 20
Soviet Union’s reforms interpenetration of 23
compared 132–133 universalization of 25
state capitalism, results of 81 Czarist Empire
states as integral parts of 107 dissolution of 5
successful transition, example of 114 history of countries in 2
Syria, no special interests in 204 Russification 5
Taiwan, integration of 112
Tiananmen Square, events in d’Azeglio, Massimo Taparelli
92, 97 60
today’s and yesterday’s compared de Waal, Alex 217
89 Democracy
US, foreign policy, requests as to Britain as 46
112 Churchill’s view of 59
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Index 239
Cold War, emergence or maturation liberal international relations
in 165 theories, as part of 162
demand-induced, to be 171 politics of 161–164
Eastern drift to 84 problems with 164–173
emergence and development of 60 reliance on 177
external problems of 61–62 statistical picture, confusion of 171
free market, effect of global spread statistical studies proving 163
of 94 war, absence of 161
free markets, and 64 Deng Xiaoping 6, 71, 89, 102, 104, 113,
future of 67 132–134, 207
globalized world, limits of choice reforms, Gorbachev’s reforms
in 72–75 compared 102
intrinsic value of 69 Dennett, Daniel 67–68
liberty, and 66 Determinism
means, not an end, as 68 voluntarism, versus 40
Middle East, movements in 194 Deudney, Daniel 31, 38
Middle or Far East, in 72 Development
Mill’s view of 59 models of 76
money, correlation with 61 Dictators
multicultural 60 overthrow of 208
nation-state, and 59 undermining or overthrowing,
non-Western countries, promotion unintended consequences of 232
in 99–100 Dictatorships
organisations guiding regimes civil society in 42
to 49–50 countries ready for 50
other forms of government, leaders, fall of 50–51
arguments favouring over 69 xenophobic 211
peace as conducive to 172, 179 Dimbleby, Jonathan 140
personal rights, protection of 46 Diversity
political participation 67 cultural 59
promotion abroad 147 social, acceptance of 26
promotion, theories for 49 Dobrynin, Anatoly 128
public opinion, manipulation of 173 Domestic affairs, interference in
societies, construction of 60 prohibition 180–181
United States as protector of 165 Donnelly, Jack 73, 91
war against each other, near Dunn, John 64–65
misses 171
war-proneness of states 175–178 East Asian states
Washington’s policy of political leadership 30
advancing 141 Eastern Europe
Democratic peace theories transformations in 1
belief in 161 Egypt
dark side 176 democratically elected Parliament,
dyadic 163 dissolution of 127
emergence of 162 Enlightenment
European context, in 164 history of 34
foreign interventions, justification legacy of 33, 36
of 178 liberating ideas 33
hegemonic leader, role of soft and hard faces of 34
165–170 Enquist, Per Olov 34
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240 Index
Equality Gelbard, Robert 188
value and abuse of 66 Genocide
Erdogan, Recep Tayyip 78 government committing, no nation
Estonia deserving 209
Russia, attitude to 149–150 international law, responsibility
Russian speakers in 151 under 213
Ethnic cleansing massive human rights violations,
international law, responsibility as 208
under 213 protection of population
response to 216 against 207
Etzioni, Amitai 12, 54–55, 68, 233 Rwanda, in 207
Europe Georgia
international system 167–168 Russia, military conflict with 149, 151
liberal democracies in 167 South Ossetia, attack on 216–218
Russia as part of 153–160 Germany
European Union democratisation 228–230
democracy deficit 62 retributions imposed on 229
Europeans Geuss, Raymond 13
modernity, path to 26 Ghosh, Bobby 54
Evans, Gareth 216–217 Global market
Executive powers danger of 233
issues of 172 Globalisation
civil and political rights,
Feng Yongping 114 negativing 73
Ferguson, Niall 22, 84 dangers of 56–57
Force, use of economic and social rights,
abuse of right 221 negativing 73
circumstances for allowing 213–215 economic growth due to 73
justifications for 184 effect of 36
legality and legitimacy of for process of 25
humanitarian reasons 222 socioeconomic structures, impact
massive human rights violations, to on 58
prevent or stop 219 Goldstein, Joshua 199
prohibition in international Gorbachev, Mikhail 6
relations 179–180 naivety 132
protection of human rights, policies, admiration of 122
for 219–223 reforms,
Security Council, authorisation Deng’s reforms compared 102
by 214–215, 218, 220–221 opening up of Russia by 125
self-defence, in 218–219, 221 unpopularity in Russia 132
Free markets Granet, Marcel 18
democracy, and 64 Gray, John 36
doctrine of 42 Gvosdev, Nikolas 53, 55
Friedberg, Aaron 85
Friedman, Thomas 50 Ha-Joon Chang 64
Fukuyama, Francis 13–14, 22, 38, 45, Habermas, Jürgen 41–42, 69, 71, 170
47–48, 58, 61 Healthcare
Fuller, Graham 107 spending on 177
Held, David 67
Galbraith, John Kenneth 122 Herman, Arthur 106
Gat, Azar 76, 78, 89 Higgins, Rosalyn 221
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Index 241
Hind, Dan 33, 58 internal disturbances, in
History 223–225
categories of factors, combination regime change, and 198–199,
of 40 207–212, 223–225
historical determination 33–41 responsibility to protect,
impersonal perpetuum mobile, and 212–223
not 40 secessionist movements,
stages, transitions between 48 encouraging 198
teleological approach to 75 Security Council, authorisation
today’s problems, related to 14 by 214–215, 218, 220–221
universal 33–41 successful, determinants of 225–232
Horner, Charles 107 use of force, and 179–187
Hulsman, John 141 Humanity
Human rights concept of 11
head of state, violations by 183 linear progress 22
internal affair of state, ceasing to Humankind
be 182 common characteristics 18
international law, development dissimilation 21
of 181 diversity 17
international movement, East African Rift Valley, emergence
post-WWII 182 from 16
life, right to 222 ex uno plures
massive violations 208, 215, 219 e pluribus unum, replacement
promotion abroad 147 by 21–27
respect for and protection of, evolution, in 15–21
principle of 222 homogenization 24, 27–29
universality of 15 interaction 21
use of force for protection movement from Africa 17
of 219–220 social groups, changes in 17
Human societies universal history of 18
Eastern and Western 29–32 Huntington, Samuel 78
Eastern, inventions originating in 30 Hussein, Saddam 50
elements eliminated from 25 Hutton, Will 88
heterogenisation of 27–29
improvement of quality of life 24 Ignatius, Adi 134
layers of 41–43 Ikenberry, John 31, 38, 109
nation-states, organisation into 41 Indonesia
post-industrial, co-existence of 23 development of 91
social, political or economic Inequality
arrangements, no final form of 39 economic and political 64
tolerance in 29 Innocent, Majou 172
violence, curbing 25 Innovations
Western European, democratization copying 21–22
of 28–29 Internal affairs
Humanitarian intervention non-interference, principle of 11
advocates of 228 Internal conflict
characteristics of societies, government intervention in 8
importance of 228 International Criminal Court
civil war, in 223–225 establishment of 183
criteria of legitimacy for 213 International criminal tribunals
decisions as to, persons making 226 establishment of 182–183
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242 Index
International humanitarian law Keller, Gabriel 189
conflict, application in 202 Khestanov, Ruslan 139
International Labour Organisation Kinzer, Stephen 120
creation 74 Kirkpatrick, Jeane 232
effectiveness of 74 Kleine-Ahlbrandt, Stephanie T. 112
mandate 74 Knaus, Klaus 225–227, 230
International law Koh, Harold Hongju 169
different theories of 10 Kosovo 188–189
extreme responses to extreme Albanians, acts of 188–189
situations, provision for 183 independence, recognition
head of state, dealing with atrocities of 191–194
by 183 international community,
human rights, of 181 manipulative administration
International peace and security by 191
conflicts threatening 184 Kosovo Liberation Army, acts
humanitarian crisis, threat of 188–189, 198
stemming from 186 NATO action in 184–192
International politics Rambouillet Agreement 189–190
different theories of 10 Serbian side, reports of atrocities
study, methods of 12 of 188
International relations Krauthammer, Charles 39
democratisation of 63 Kristol, William 178
Realist theories of 8 Krugman, Paul 65
regime change, issues with 161 Kupchan, Charles 54, 57, 83
International society Kuper, Leo 59
social system of 5 Kuperman, Alan 198
International system Kyrgyzstan
contemporary, nature of 10 colour revolution in 94
Iraq conflict in 93–97
Kurds, safe havens for 185 market reforms and
liberal democracies, effect of democratization, introduction
policies of 211 of 94
severe humanitarian crisis in 186 racketeering in 96
stable dictatorship in 130 southern, inter-ethnic clashes 95
Uzbeks and Kyrgyz, differences in
J-Curve 137–138 lifestyle 95
Jacques, Martin 30, 110
Japan Landis, Joshua 206
democratisation 228–230 Language
Jarvik, Laurence 146 independent evolution of 19
Jews translation, difficulty of 19
Nazi persecution, complaint before Lantos, Tom 195
League of Nations 182 Latvia
Russia, attitude to 150
Kagan, Robert 39 Russian speakers in 151
Kaletsky, Anatole 108, 109 Lavrov, Sergei 143, 193
Kant, Immanuel 161, 173–175, 177–178 Law
Kaplan, Lawrence 178 role in society 41
Kaplan, Robert 130 Layne, Christopher 162, 167, 171,
Karaganov, Sergei 76, 83, 139, 217 209
Karzai, Hamid 209 League of Nations
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Index 243
competence, challenge by Nazis Mead, Walter Russell 35, 79
to 182 Mediation
Leverett, Flynn 203 Eastern preference for 30
Levy, Jack 162 Medvedev, Dmitry 145, 157
Liberal democracy Merry. Robert W. 145–146
Europe, in 167 Middle Eastern countries
foreign policy 38 Islamisation 53
imperfections 70 women, restrictions on freedom
periodic elections, shortcoming of 53
of 61 Migration
problems of 56–72 current 27–28
promoters of 37, 39 Miliband, Ed 186
promotion, arguments for 161 Mill, John Stuart 59
shortcomings of 59 Miller, Aaron David 198
universal model, not 109 Minorities
war-proneness of states 175–178 repression, international norm
West, following in 76 against 214
whether good for everyone 71 rights of 60
Whig narrative 35 Moïsi, Dominique 115
world, view of 35 Morris, Ian 28, 40, 48, 130
Liberty Moyo, Dambisa 105
democracy, and 66 Murphy, Sean 185
Libya Muslim countries
foreign intervention, impact of 231 Islamists, power obtained by 52–53
intervention in, arguments for 225 women, restrictions on freedom
NATO Operation Unified of 53
Protector 196–199
one-sided view of events in 197 Nasr, Vali R. 205
opposition, aim of 197 Nation-state
Lieven, Anatol 135, 141, 236 democracy, and 59
Lithuania organisation into 41
Russia, attitude to 150 Nationalism
Russian speakers in 151 role of 60
Litigation Nations
Western preference for 30 cultivation 55
Lucas, Edward 123, 151 Nazis
Lukin, Vladimir 135 competence of League of Nations,
Lukyanov, Fyodor 145, 153, 154, 157, 160 challenge to 182
Lynch, Allen 132–133 domestic repression and external
aggressiveness 210
Mahbubani, Kishore 31, 89 Neo-conservatives
Mandelson, Peter 111 interventionist policies 39
Markets Non-Western societies
world and national 72 non-traditional fault-lines in 54–55
Marxism Western model of development
critics of 44 imposed on 71
Enlightenment, as emanation of 34 Western societies, transformation
redesign of world, plan of 34 to 3, 7
socialist development 49 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
McFaul, Michael 145 (NATO)
McNamara, Robert 227 Kosovo, action in 184–192
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244 Index
Libya, operation in 196–199 Reagan, Ronald 128–129
Russia, relations with 157–159 Rebellion
Serbia, operation against 184–192 assistance to quell, legality of 231
Regime change
O’Donnell, Guillerme 4 colour revolutions 51
Obama, Barack 23, 123, 172 general context of 3
international relations, issues
Pagel, Mark 17 with 161
Palestine intervention in 223–225
democracy, lack of 129 non-peaceful 7
Pattison, James 226 parties, media views of 173
Peace problems of 231
democracy, as conducive to 172, 179 social and political processes 3
democratic theories. See Democratic today’s attempts at 230
peace theories current attempts, nature of 45
perpetual, conditions for 173–175 current, socioeconomic and political
Peerenboom, Randall 90 problems 41–56
Peres, Simon 129 Western political and economic
Philosophy systems, import of 45
self-consistency 8 Religion
western social and political, monotheistic 33
dominant trend in 13–14 Responsibility to protect
Physical universe humanitarian intervention in terms
changing order of 41 of 212–223
Pillar, Paul 199 interpretations of 216–217
Pinker, Steven 19–20, 22, 25 Rice, Condaleezza 193–194
Poland Rieff, David 198
Russia, suffering from 151 Roberts, General Frederick 52
Political regime Robinson, James 46–47,
definitions of 4–5 97–101
Political system Rodrik, Dani 56, 59
central aspect of 43 Romney, Mitt 159
Popper, Karl 36, 64 Rorty, Richard 37, 69–70
Power, Samantha 39 Rudd, Kevin 116
Putin, Vladimir 125, 153 Rule of law
authoritarianism 135–138 Britain, in 46–47
internal domestic legitimacy, Rummel, Rudolf 162
lacking 145 Rumsfeld, Donald 12, 151
isolation, not wanting 144 Russell, Bertrand 8
London Olympics opening, not Russett, Bruce 171
attending 156–157 Russia
Moscow’s relations with neighbours, Abkhazia, recognition of 149
emphasising importance of 149 Anglo-Saxon development, image
political reforms 135 of 37
popularity of 137 authoritarian capitalism 76–77
vertical of power, strengthening 136 bandwaggoning, practice of 141–149
al-Qaddafi, Muammar believing in 119–124
overthrow of 195–196, 199 capitalists, Kremlin dominating 122
Caucasus, buffer zones in 149
Ramadan, Tariq 42, 80, 197, 207 close neighbours, relations
Ramos, Joshua Cooper 76 with 149–153
Rar, Alexander 191 colonialism, considerations 120
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Index 245
deformity, land of 123 Self-defence
democracy, use of force in 218–219, 221
not lost to 138–141 Sen, Amartya 69
prospects of 135 Serbia
desire to enfeeble 131 NATO operation against 184–192
disappointment in 123 Sharansky, Anatoly 128–129
dislike of 123 Shea, Jamie 188
domestic and foreign policy, changes Simes, Dimitri 39, 156
in 142–143 Slaughter, Anne-Marie 39
dread of 123 Smith, Tony 165
expansionism, considerations 120 Social development
foreign policy, comparative study of 40
economy, and 121 future trends, predicting 177
independent 144 Social diversity
GDP 102 issue of 15
geopolitical foe of America, Social groups
described as 159 differences in 3
Georgia, military conflict with 149, Societies
152–153 failure of 24
human rights record 148 South Korea
liberal reforms, introduction of 135 military rule 91
national interests, acting in South Ossetia
accordance with 121–122 Georgian attack on 216–218
NATO, relations with 156–159 recognition of 149, 192–194
NATO transport going though 158 Sovereign equality
non-governmental organizations, principle of 180
Western support for 145–146 Soviet Union
part of Europe, as 153–160 alteration of system, use of force
political and economic shock for 129
therapies 102 China’s reforms compared 132
post-Soviet history, circular collapse of 1, 125–135
movement of 137 emergence of small states on 109
regional power, as 169 dissolution of 122
South Ossetia, recognition of 149 doubly artificial entity, as 125
Syria, supply of arms to 204 educated population of 125
understanding 119–124 empire, as 6
weakening of 136 former republics, corruption,
Westerners’ attitude to 122 mis-management and inter-
wider Europe, integration into 155 ethnic tensions 2
wrongs committed against 123 socialist development
Rwanda 49
governmental genocide in 207 society, compared with
China 132–133
Sachs, Jeffrey 61 successor states, transformation
Sakwa, Richard 144 of 130
Sarkozy, President 199 Spasskiy, Nikolay 154
Saunders, Paul 156 Stahn, Carsten 216
Schacter, Oscar 223 Starr, Frederick 107
Scheunemann, Randy 39 State sovereignty
Schmitt, Carl 11 Commission 213
Schmitter, Philippe 4 repressions and violations prevailing
Segal, Gerald 26, 30 over 214–215
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246 Index
Stewart, Rory 225–227, 230 industrial and manufacturing base,
Stiglitz, Joseph 58, 65, 99, 177, 234–235 loss of 58
Strauss-Kahn, Dominique 73 United Nations
Streeck, Wolfgang 66 Charter prohibitions 179–181
Sullivan, Andrew 177 humanitarian catastrophes,
Sweig, Julia 147 jurisdiction over 184
Syria Millennium Development
arms, supply of 204 Goals 102–103
army, use of heavy weaponry by 202 Security Council
civil war, declaration of 202 authorisation of use of force
critics of regime 201 by 214–215, 218, 220–221
future democracy 206 power of 62
humanitarian catastrophe, United States
geo-political context of 202 Asia-Pacific region as priority of
intervention in 204 security policy 113
mass media reports from 199 Beijing consensus 142
median age of population 206 China’s rise, accommodation of
multi-ethnic and multi-religious 115
country, as 200 Chinese credit, dependence on 108
people, rights and interests of 205 democracies, as protector of
protected civil war, potential for 231 165
redistribution of power in 205 dominance of 235–236
regime change 201 dominance of 81
calls for 203 economic and financial future,
repressive government, use of force control of 106
by 200 English speaking elite, dealing
revolt against regime 200 with 148
war crimes and crimes against foreign affairs, legislative and
humanity in 202–203 judicial supervision of 172
hegemonic power, as 168
Tagliavini, Heidi 152 money and democracy, correlation
Taiwan between 61
integration with China 112 motto 15
Takeyh, Ray 53 nation-building 16
Taxation other states, unsettling impact
perpetual peace, as step to 173–174 on 211
wars, financing 174–175 power relative to China, reaction to
Terror, war on 66 change in 106
Theories of democratic peace 8 promotion of democracy, aims 120
Treisman, Daniel 122–123 Washington consensus 142
Trenin, Dmitri 103, 104, 149, 157 Universality
Tunisia emphasis on 15
bloodless soup in 231 human rights, of 15
Turkey human society, of 21
market development in 78–80 humankind, of 18
Tyranny
yoke of 66 Voluntarism
Tyutchev, Fyodor 119 determinism, versus 40
United Kingdom Wade, Nicholas 24

financial sector 58 Walpole, Robert 46
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Index 247
Walzer, Michael 21 World economic power
Wang Hui 67, 92, 93, 103, 126–134, 234 Goldman Sachs predictions 86–87
War Wright, Erik Olin 34
jus ad bellum 202 Wright, Quincy 161
jus in bello 202
War crimes Xu Kuangdi 91–92
international law, responsibility
under 213 Yang Jiemian 113, 204
massive human rights violations, Yang Yao 90
as 208 Yeltsin, Boris
Syria, in 202–203 liberal reforms, introduction of
Watson, Adam 236 134
Western, Jon 199 oligarchisation of society under 134
White, Hugh 63, 111 policies, suspicion of 122
Whitehead, Laurence 4 Russian Parliament, shelling 127
Witt, John Fabian 169 shock therapy, exercise of 126, 134
Wolfowitz, Paul 39 voting in 126
Women Yessenin, Sergei 15
freedom, restrictions on 53
Working conditions Zizek, Slavoj 38–39, 76
variations in 74 Zoellick, Robert 111
Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0


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Regime Change

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The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/nlsp

From Democratic Peace Theories to Forcible

Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

I From an African Village to a Global Village���������������������������������� 13

II Whither goest thou, the World?������������������������������������������������������� 33

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

V Democratic Peace Theories and Regime change�����������������������161

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

The current series of regime changes in different parts of the world

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

mainly concerned with staying in power and enriching themselves,

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

societies in Washington or Brussels. Secondly, even if some societies

2 G. O’Donnell, P. Schmitter. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

using the wisdom of Plato, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Robert Dahl

Molinar Horcasitas, eds.), La Jolla, CA: Center for US-Mexican Studies/University of

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

Union; however, the latter could be called an empire, if the term is

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

does not do so well, or is simply impossible, in a different situation.

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

different forms of intervention in internal conflicts either on the

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

different intellectual tools, that is to say, different theories and theo-

6 I. Claude, ‘The Tension between Principle and Pragmatism’, 19 Review of

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

9 Wall Street Journal, 29 July 1994, p. 1.

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Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

Here one can be reminded of a somewhat modified expression of

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

FROM AN AFRICAN VILLAGE TO A GLOBAL VILLAGE

The dominant trend in western social and political philosophy, from

1 R. Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, Princeton University Press, 2008.

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

mainly differences within the same, Western worldview (in a way,

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

perspective. As famous Russian poet Sergei Yessenin wrote: ‘When

1. EX UNO PLURES IN THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANKIND

The issue of social diversity is a part of the problem of universal ver-

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

as it may, for the purposes of our study it is sufficient to know that

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

retained characteristics that are common to all humans; even the

9 See, for example, D. Selbourne, The Principle of Duty: An Essay on the

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

an instrument would be worth making, even if they did no more

11 M. Granet, La pensé Chinoise, Paris, Editions Albin Michel,1934, p. 9.

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

called the Universal People, after Chomsky’s Universal Grammar.

Rein Müllerson - 978-90-04-23231-0

I From an African Village to a Global Village�� 13

II Whither goest thou, the World?�� 33

V Democratic Peace Theories and Regime change��161