Yglesias picks up an interesting quote from French President Sarkozy:
It isn’t just in Europe that there’s a longing for freedom; it’s all over the world. We have all — and, in her history, like others, France has — had to deal with great disillusionment when we forgot that freedom was for everyone.
Yglesias’s notes that “under the administration of George W. Bush it became commonplace to argue that to support an international agenda aimed at “freedom” actually required the United States to espouse the coercive military domination of foreign countries.”
The issue here is one of individual freedom versus collective freedom. That is to say human rights versus self-determination. The two run together but they’re not the same thing. Pluralistic empires often do undermine social arrangements contrary to an individualistic concept of human rights such as tribal, racial, or religious distinctions. Minorities will often be privileged as their past mistreatment will mean that they’re willing to work with the empire. That said, when racial divisions privilege those at the heart of the empire, they will likely be maintained. Similarly, the minority privileging or even creating ways of empire will often sow seeds of strife that are at the basis of post-colonial conflict.
I think the American hubris is a bit different than Sarkozy’s quote. Specifically, we forget that people define freedom on their terms rather than our terms. This is often stated as a critique of universalistic human rights, but that’s not what I mean. Colonized people are not unusual in wanting things on their terms, the same is certainly true of us. That said, on issues like freedom of religion and women’s rights, local self-determination seems to be at odds with human rights. This conflict makes it all too easy to discount the views of those who don’t approve of the job the intervener is doing.
In any event, this gets to why I’m a big fan of electoral democracy in occupation situations. Yes, elections can actually exacerbate existing tensions. However, self-determination ultimately requires a local government willing to stand up to occupiers. Boycotts can screw up this process but in the Iraqi case at least, the boycotters don’t seem to have repeated that mistake in the most recent set of elections.
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