Timothy Garton Ash: A little democracy is a dangerous thing - so let's have more of it

A central claim of the Bush administration's foreign policy is that the spread of democracy in the Middle East is the cure for terrorism. So what do you do when you get a democratically elected terrorist organisation? Ignore the contradiction. Pretend it doesn't exist.

In the past few weeks there has been something utterly surreal about the US continuing to allow the Israeli military to pummel Hizbullah, and kill women and children along the way, while insisting that Washington's purpose is to strengthen the legitimate, democratic government of Lebanon. Meanwhile, the Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, has been calling desperately for the one thing that the US and Israel have refused: an immediate ceasefire. And Hizbullah, which the US and Britain characterise as a terrorist organisation, is itself an important part of that democratically elected government.

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So we must do everything for that democratically elected government except what it asks. We know best what is good for them. Whoever said democracy meant letting the people themselves decide? As Lebanon's special envoy, Tarek Mitri, told PBS, America's publicly funded broadcaster, on Tuesday: "You can't support a government while you're allowing its country to be ruined." Meanwhile, Hamas is not allowed to operate as the democratically elected government of the Palestinians. The Palestinian people spoke. But they got it wrong. They must have been misinformed. They must think again.

Of course there's a real dilemma here. Just because Hamas and Hizbullah competed and did well in elections, that doesn't mean you must accept everything they stand for. Both are Janus-faced movements, as was IRA/Sinn Féin. Engaging with Hizbullah-as-Sinn Féin or Hamas-as-Sinn Féin doesn't mean tolerating the terrorist activities of Hizbullah-as-IRA or Hamas-as-IRA. Up to a point, you can fight the terrorist side while encouraging the political side. In fact, the name of the game is precisely to shift their calculus of self-interest towards peaceful politics, by increasing both the costs of violence and the benefits of participation.

But transitions from the politics of violence to democratic compromise are always messy. They involve negotiating with terrorists, letting some past wrongs go unpunished and accepting that a movement's militant rhetoric may lag behind the more pragmatic reality of its position. Everything, in fact, that the US practised in its relations with the Kosovo Liberation Army, which it initially characterised - with reason - as "without any questions, a terrorist group".

Two diametrically opposite conclusions may be drawn from these first strange fruits of democratisation in the Middle East. One is to say that the whole Bush agenda of supporting democratisation in the Arab and Islamic world was misguided from the start - the product of a naive, missionary-cowboy approach to international politics. It destabilises. It brings terrorists and extremists to power. The cure is worse than the disease. So let's get back to seasoned old "realism". Let's not try to transform these countries or expect them to be more like us, but take them as they are. Let's pursue our national interests - security, trade, energy - with whatever allies we can find. Stability comes first. Your friendly local despot may be a sonofabitch, but at least he'll be our sonofabitch. Or so we fondly imagine.

This is the default position of much European diplomacy. It's the wisdom of Jacques Chirac. Curiously enough, it's also where some of the European left ends up - taken there by its opposition to "war for democracy" à la Bush and Blair, or simply by the kneejerk "If Bush is for it, we must be against it". But following the American debate closely over the past weeks, I find that opposition to the democratisation agenda is also growing inside the US.

There has always been a Republican "realist" position, associated with figures such as Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to Bush Sr. After Iraq, and this latest imbroglio, it could regain the upper hand in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. It could win out on the other side of American politics too. If one looks at the foreign-policy debate among Democrats, one finds a strong strain of such "realism" - though tagged with "progressive". The argument that the US should pull back from this poisonous world, look to its own economic interests and find allies wherever it can appeals to a significant part of the Democratic electorate. For many Democrats, the fact that the current president has identified himself so strongly with the promotion of democracy is another reason for being sceptical about the promotion of democracy. If democratising the Middle East means Iraq, Hizbullah and Hamas, better not try it.

I believe this is precisely the wrong conclusion to draw. In the long run, the growth of liberal democracies is the best hope for the wider Middle East. It's the best hope of modernisation, which the Arab world desperately needs; of addressing the root causes of Islamist terrorism, inasmuch as they lie in those countries rather than among Muslims living in the west; and of enabling Arabs, Israelis, Iranians, Kurds and Turks to live side by side without war. But it will be a long march.

We know from elsewhere that the intermediate period of transition to democracy can be a dangerous time, that it can actually increase the danger of violence, especially in countries divided along ethnic and religious lines, and where you rush to the party-political competition for power without first having a functioning state with well-defined borders, a near-monopoly of force, the rule of law, independent media and a strong civil society. That's what happened in the former Yugoslavia. That's what's been happening, in different ways, in Palestine, in Lebanon and in Iraq. Full, liberal democracy contributes to peace; partial, half-baked democratisation can increase the danger of war.

What we in the community of established liberal democracies should do is not abandon the pursuit of democratisation but refine it. Recognise that only in exceptional circumstances (such as postwar Germany and Japan) do democracies grow from under military occupation, and that the purpose of building democracy does not justify military intervention. Accept that, as the Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji wrote in the New York Times, it's better for people to find their own paths to freedom, and our job is to support them. Learn from experience that well-defined borders, the rule of law and independent media are as important as an election - and may need to precede it. That along the way you have to negotiate with nasty people and regimes, such as Syria and Iran. And that, in this dirty, complicated world, advocates of armed struggle - terrorists, if you will - can become democratic leaders. Like Menachem Begin. Like Gerry Adams. Like Nelson Mandela.

So let's not throw out the democratisation baby with the Bush bathwater. There's a seriously good idea there. It just needs to be a lot better executed, and with patience for the long haul. The right conclusion is strange but true: a little democracy is a dangerous thing - so let's have more of it.

Thursday August 3, 2006

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Timothy Garton Ash: We Europeans must never forget that we created the Middle East conflict

When and where did this war begin? Shortly after 9am local time on Wednesday July 12, when Hizbullah militants seized Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev - Israeli reservists on the last day of their tour of duty - in a cross-border raid into northern Israel? Friday June 9, when Israeli shells killed at least seven Palestinian civilians on a beach in the Gaza strip? January this year, when Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, in a backhanded triumph for an American policy of supporting democratisation? 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon? 1979, with the Islamic revolution in Iran? 1948, with the creation of the state of Israel? Or how about Russia in the spring of 1881?

Simple questions require such complicated answers. Even if the basic facts are agreed, every term is disputed: militants, soldiers or terrorists? Seized, captured or kidnapped? Every selection of facts implies an interpretation. And in tortured histories like this, every horror will be explained or justified by reference back to some antecedent horror:

From tyranny to tyranny to war

From dynasty to dynasty to hate

From villainy to villainy to death

From policy to policy to grave...

"The song is yours. Arrange it as you will," writes the poet James Fenton, in his Ballad of the Imam and the Shah.

Yet observing European responses to the current conflict, I want to insist on Europe's own strong claim to be among the earliest causes. The Russian pogroms of 1881; the French mob chanting "à bas les juifs" as Captain Dreyfus was stripped of his epaulettes at the École Militaire; the festering anti-semitism of Austria around 1900, shaping the young Adolf Hitler; all the way to the Holocaust of European Jewry and the waves of anti-semitism that convulsed parts of Europe in its immediate aftermath. It was that history of increasingly radical European rejection, from the 1880s to the 1940s, that produced the driving force for political Zionism, Jewish emigration to Palestine and eventually the creation of the state of Israel.

"What made me a Zionist was the Dreyfus trial," said Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism. If Europe decided that each nation should have its own state, would not accept even emancipated Jews as fully members of the French or German nation, and eventually became the scene of the attempted extermination of all Jewry, then the Jews must have their own national home somewhere else. Home - in a definition beloved of Isaiah Berlin - is the place where, if you have to go there, they have to take you in. And never again would Jews go as lambs to the slaughter. As Israelis, they would fight for the life of every single fellow Jew. The 19th-century stereotypes of German Helden and Jewish Händler have been reversed. The Germans, and with them most of today's bourgeois Europeans, have become the eternal traders; the Jews, in Israel, the eternal warriors.

Of course, this is only one thread in perhaps the world's most complicated political tapestry; but it's a very important one. I don't think any European should speak or write about today's conflict in the Middle East without displaying some consciousness of our own historical responsibility. I'm afraid that some Europeans today do so speak and write; and I don't just mean the German rightwing extremists who marched through the town of Verden in Lower Saxony last Saturday, waving Iranian flags and chanting "Israel - international genocide centre". I also mean thinking people on the left, contributors to discussion threads on Guardian blogs and the like. Even as we criticise the way the Israeli military are killing Lebanese civilians and UN monitors in the name of recovering Ehud Goldwasser (and destroying the military infrastructure of Hizbullah), we must remember that all of this would almost certainly not be happening if some Europeans had not attempted, a few decades back, to remove everyone called Goldwasser from the face of Europe - if not the earth.

Let me be very clear what I mean. It does not follow from this terrible European history that Europeans must display uncritical solidarity with whatever the current government of Israel chooses to do, however violent or ill-advised. On the contrary, the true friend is the one who speaks up when you're making a mistake. It does not follow that we should sign up to the latest dangerous simplifications about a "third world war" against "an Iran-Syrian-Hizbullah-Hamas terrorist alliance" (according to the US Republican Newt Gingrich) or a "seamless totalitarian movement" of political Islamism (according to the Conservative MP and journalist Michael Gove).

It does not follow that every European who criticises Israel is a covert anti-semite, as some commentators in the United States tend to imply. And it certainly does not follow that we should be any less alert to the suffering of the Arabs, including the Palestinian Arabs who fled or were driven out of their homes at the founding of the state of Israel, and their descendants who grew up in refugee camps. The life of every single Lebanese killed or wounded by Israeli bombing is worth exactly as much as that of every Israeli killed or wounded by Hizbullah rocket attacks.

Does it follow that Europeans have a special obligation to get involved in trying to secure a peace settlement in which the state of Israel can live in secure frontiers next to a viable Palestinian state? I think it does. To be sure, since Europeans have one way or another affected almost every corner of the earth, such an argument from history could in theory take us everywhere - the legacy of European imperialism providing a universal moral excuse for European neo-imperialism. But the story of the Jews driven from their European homelands, and in their turn driving Palestinian Arabs from their homeland, is unique. Even if you don't accept this argument from historical and moral responsibility, Europe's vital interests are plainly at stake: oil, nuclear proliferation and the potential reaction among our alienated Muslim minorities, to name but three.

It's less clear what that involvement should be. One proposal is for European forces to participate in a multinational peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, but that only makes sense if realistic parameters are established for a clear, feasible and finite mission. Those are not yet in sight. Even a ceasefire is not yet in sight. The Rome summit concluded yesterday afternoon barely papering over a clear difference between the United States and Israel, on the one side, and most of the rest of the world, including the EU and the UN, on the other, about how a ceasefire should be achieved. The truth is that now, more than ever, the diplomatic key lies in the full engagement of the United States, using its unique influence with Israel and negotiating as directly as possible with all partners to the conflict, however unsavoury. Until that happens, Europe alone can do little.

Yet the issue here is not just changing the realities on the ground in the Middle East. How Europeans speak and write about the position of the Jews in the region to which Europeans drove them is also a matter of our own self-definition. We should weigh every word.

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