Burkean Nation Building

One of the more notable aspects of the United States’s recent adventures in nation-building is the enthusiastic, ome might say hubristic, rhetoric of the so-called neoconservatives. Hussein Indawai and John Thompson of National Review wrote in April, “There can be little doubt: Given a fair chance at it, if the Iraqis win democracy this time, they will hold on to it with all their force and defend it with their lives.” Michael Ledeen encouraged invasions of Iran, Syria, and lots of other countries in part to improve the lot of their peoples. Accomplishing these types of tasks will no doubt be very difficult and will demand a combination of wisdom, cultural sensitivity, deliberateness, an understanding of force, and diplomatic skill. While some neocons have gone so far as William Kristol, for example, to make the ”liberal case for war.” I think that liberalism has built-in to itself certain habits and assumptions that will prove counterproductive in achieving its own goals. I instead make the case for Burkean nation-building.

Edmund Burke was a late 18th Century English British MP and political thinker. His most significant work criticized the extremes of the French Revolution. He also criticized the extremes of Warren Hastings in India and mounted qualified defenses of the American Revolution and the rights of Irish Catholics. The thread that runs through all of these seemingly disparate projects is Burke’s belief in justice, a skepticism of change, an appreciation for the tie between traditional life and a nation’s political health, and a respect for the ways different peoples can survive and thrive with divergent political institutions. Within this framework, Burke acknowledged the need for societies to undertake healthful, organic change: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.” But the manner and goal of change is equally important as the fact of change itself. Burke’s respect for religion, tradition, and his flexible assessment of democracy are all needed during the present project in Iraq.

One of the chief defects of the neocon approach is the identification of good-government with democracy. When this value is raised to too great heights, enemies of the U.S. and its goals can criticize delays in elections, constitutional limits on the popular will to impose sharia, and other necessary limits of democratic control in Iraq. Total democracy has been as harmful in history as has its absence; consider the Weimar Republic, the Allende regime, or the current disaster in Venezuela under the demagogue Hugo Chavez. All these regimes lacked liberal controls on government. Burke wrote, presciently, “But where popular authority is absolute and unrestrained, the people have an infinitely greater, because a far better founded, confidence in their own power. They are themselves, in a great measure, their own instruments. They are nearer to their objects. Besides, they are less under responsibility to one of the greatest controlling powers on the earth, the sense of fame and estimation. . . . A perfect democracy is, therefore, the most shameless thing in the world. As it is the most shameless, it is also the most fearless.”

The frequent, neoconservative rhetoric about democracy does not help this matter. This rhetoric misidentifies the genius of western systems and sets up Iraq for disaster. The genius of America is not democracy; it´s a mixed system of government controlled by a constitution. This was the same genius of the widely admired British constitutional monarchy of the 18th Century. As commonly said at the time of the U.S. Founding, “ours is a government of laws not men.” Burke severely criticized the French abandonment of the constitutional system of three estates (for the people, aristocracy, and the clergy) and the substitution of an unrestrained popular control in its place:

Have these gentlemen never heard, in the whole circle of the worlds of theory and practice, of anything between the despotism of the monarch and the despotism of the multitude? Have they never heard of a monarchy directed by laws, controlled and balanced by the great hereditary wealth and hereditary dignity of a nation, and both again controlled by a judicious check from the reason and feeling of the people at large acting by a suitable and permanent organ? Is it then impossible that a man may be found who, without criminal ill intention or pitiable absurdity, shall prefer such a mixed and tempered government to either of the extremes, and who may repute that nation to be destitute of all wisdom and of all virtue which, having in its choice to obtain such a government with ease, or rather to confirm it when actually possessed, thought proper to commit a thousand crimes and to subject their country to a thousand evils in order to avoid it? Is it then a truth so universally acknowledged that a pure democracy is the only tolerable form into which human society can be thrown, that a man is not permitted to hesitate about its merits without the suspicion of being a friend to tyranny, that is, of being a foe to mankind?

Iraq and the world in general will benefit from U.S. tutelage in the role of laws and constitutions and divided government. U.S. power makes the U.S. case inherently more persuasive than it would otherwise be. An Iraqi system must restrain the popular majority at the same time as it gives it a role. Some possible approaches could involve a tripartite national legislature with each of the three major ethnic constituencies represented, or a Senate made up of tribal leaders, or some role for Islamic clerics. I can’t say precisely what form this should take, as I´m not sufficiently familiar with the particular dynamics of Iraqi society. But undoubtedly some limit on direct majority rule is necessary.

Iraq´s trust in the U.S. and the likelihood of success in the U.S. mission will benefit greatly from reminding the Iraqis that its version of liberal constitutional government does not need to mimic in all particulars the U.S. model. Iraqi freedom does not depend upon the legality of pornography or the banishment of prayer from public schools or other unnecessary–and in some cases undesirable–aspects of U.S. society.

This leads to the second of Burke´s insights, which is that change should be organic and proceed from what is natural and useful in a particular culture. Burke wrote, pace the democratic partisans of his day that:

The legislators who framed the ancient republics knew that their business was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphysics of an undergraduate, and the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman. They had to do with men, and they were obliged to study human nature. They had to do with citizens, and they were obliged to study the effects of those habits which are communicated by the circumstances of civil life. They were sensible that the operation of this second nature on the first produced a new combination; and thence arose many diversities amongst men, according to their birth, their education, their professions, the periods of their lives, their residence in towns or in the country, their several ways of acquiring and of fixing property, and according to the quality of the property itself- all which rendered them as it were so many different species of animals.

The notion that Iraq should adopt an off-the-shelf regime of procedural democracy is particularly unwise. There are numerous acceptable paths for the Iraqi nation, and the most stable of these will do their best to respect Iraqi culture. This respect should quickly be distinguished from working through high-level Ba´athists. There is much to be said for cleaning house of the upper-level agents of Saddam´s terror. But Iraq preexisted Saddam and there are currents in its culture and language and religion and history that should be given expression in the new liberal Iraqi society that we wish to help construct. The precise final outcome will have to be at least in part a choice of the Iraqi people.

America went to Iraq to serve its own national self-defense, and the new Iraqi system should reassure America and Iraq´s neighbors that the new order will be stable and peaceful. In other words, folks that say Iraqi democracy should be allowed to kick the U.S. out tomorrow are profoundly unrealistic. Any new system in Iraqi must avoid the defects of the Ba´athist regime that led it to threaten the U.S. But aside from that limited goal, this does not mean that the new Iraq needs a McDonald´s on every corner, American-style elections, or the banishment of religion from public life. These are the ephemera of western and American life.

The final thing Burkean conservatives bring to the table is a decent respect for religion. Liberty and religion, including a religion sanctioned by and approved by the state, can coexist. Whether presently in France or Germany, or less dramatically in Greece or Russia, the choice nations face is rarely between Iranian-style theocracy and American-style secularism. American liberals and neoconservatives alike indulge this false dichotomy. Neoconservatives are not altogether comfortable with religion in the U.S.. Liberals are even less comfortable. The latter speak in horror of prayer in public schools and with fear of religious Christians. (Think Andrew Sullivan). But this is rooted in a false, propagandistic history of the West and America. Free, stable, and prosperous societies have existed alongside a state-acknowledged religion. The peculiarly American practice of non-establishment has not even long meant the sharp cleavage that Americans currently experience; in the early Republic many states had established churches. Many states retain “blue laws.” And prayer in public schools was only recent undone by judicial fiat. Would the liberals and neocons say America was not free until the 1950s? Or that Europe of the 19th Century was indistinguishable from Ba’athist Iraq?

Some obeisance of the new Iraqi constitution towards Islam would do much to take the wind out of the sails of would-be theocrats. Iraqis, like people everywhere, are more defensive when they reasonably feel the need to be. Burke notes:

I should, therefore, suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with the solidity of property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too, and without them liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long.

I am sensible that an Islamic constitutional republic has not existed before in history. But prior to the 1940s, neither had a Hindu or Buddhist or Latin American system either. Islamic society was not always in the degraded condition it currently suffers under. The Ummayad regime in Spain was noted for its tolerance and cultural exchange. Islamic scholars retained much of classical learning during the early middle ages. It may be that the Islamic system is too complete and too severe to permit liberal institutions to flourish. Islam says, famously, “That there is no Caesar but Allah.” But presenting Iraqis with a false either/or of liberalism and religion surely does more to prevent liberal institutions from taking root than anything else America is doing.

America has accumulated a great deal of political capital in Iraq, first by removing Saddam from power, and second by its day-to-day interactions with Iraqi soldiers, policemen, and government officials. A collaborative effort guided by respect for the unique features of Iraqi society, with liberal goals, but without the historical hubris and Procrusteanism of most liberals, will be much more successful than the alternatingly pie-in-the sky democracy of neocons, coupled with a deep confusion about the ways an Iraqi liberal society must differ from our own.