Yesterday, I was enjoying my usual lazy morning routine: sipping Starbucks coffee with some ghirardelli chocolate on the side while reading the Wall Street Journal (there is almost nothing I enjoy more). That simple pleasure was rudely interrupted by a shocking quote in the middle of an article discussing Angela Merkel’s problems articulating a consistent foreign policy. See if you can spot the portion that so affected me (hint: I italicized it)
Angela Merkel is tougherning her country’s approach to authoritarian regimes in China, Russia and Iran, but the switch hasn’t delivered the kinds of policy changes that might help reign them in.
Her views, including strong backing for Israel and suspicion of Iran, have moved Germany closer to the U.S. on some of the West’s most important foreign-policy challenges.
“Quiet diplomacy doesn’t work if you’re not prepared to stand up for your beliefs in public,” says Eckart von Klaeden, foreign -affirs spokesman for Ms. Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats. He wrote the party’s new Asia strategy, which said Germany should assert its democratic values more strongly.
That view worries many German foreign-policy specialists… “The idea that Western democracies can write the rules for successful autocracies is fanciful,” says Eberhand Sandschneider, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations.
After almost choking on my semi-dissolved chocolate square, I continued to read the remainder of the article–causing what had once been a perfect morning to become a worse-than-average sick day.
What, If I may ask, is WRONG about Germany–or any other democracy for that matter–”asserting” it’s values? What kind of sick, fatalistic, insecure, impolitic person thinks that the qualities of freedom, tolerance, justice, are values to be concealed, withheld from the gambit of topics available to be discussed in the international arena? Why should the West be mute on the very idea responsible for it’s greatness? Did he really just say this?
Furthermore, the concept that a fundamental quality of an autocracy is its un-questionable Perpetuality (*if I may coin a phrase*) is at best an ignorant opinion, at worst a dangerously revisionist version of history. Phrased differently, where is it written that autocracies are destined to continuous inevitability? The simple answer is that this is pure BS.
History is not lacking in examples of formerly-totalitarian regimes that have either become democratic (or are beginning to move in that direction. Here are just a few exmples off the top of my head (in no particular order):
- East Germany (Post WWII)
- South Korea (with U.S. help)
- Italy (cerca 1948)
- France (post-revolution)
- Britian
- Japan (Post WWII under the Marshall plan)
- China (to a degree)
- Spain
- Venesuela (with the latest political defeat of Chavez)
- India
- Niger
- Kenya
- (If I have forgotten any major ones, please add to the comments)
As these examples make clear, it is Mr. Sandschneider’s distorted history (and distorted understanding of human nature) that is “fanciful” — not Ms. Merkel’s foreign policy.
And to make a broader point; this kind of reasoning happens all too often in both Democrat and Republican circles (and, to be fair, in Libertarian circles as well). The concept that “those people” , “over there” do not want freedom or cannot handle freedom should we give it to them is dangerously nationalistic and perhaps even anti-ethnic to a degree. Can anyone having fully known oneself, having tasted of the freedoms Democracy provides then assume that people living under oppression WANT to remain in such a state? Is this assumption not based on the idea that these unfortunate souls are not as “enlightened” as we are in the West, that they are the product of a backwards culture and therefore doomed to stupidity? If this is not the case, then please explain how one can conclude differently.
To underestimate the human desire for freedom is to be ignorant of ones-self. Let us not fall victim to this distorted way of thinking.