Liberal Democracy Threatened from Within and Without

Brad Stollery

Twenty-five years ago Francis Fukuyama famously wrote that having found the best form of governance available to our imaginations in liberal democracy, we had reached the “end of history.” A quarter of a century later it is difficult to be as optimistic. The events and tumultuous aftermath of September 11, 2001, along with the increasing popularity and competitiveness of illiberal democracies force us to reexamine Fukuyama's proclamation.

Liberal democracy may very well hold the greatest potential for serving humanity since it is the political system that “most fully . . . satisfies the most basic human longings.”i It nonetheless faces challenges today. Not only does illiberal democracy threaten to discredit its liberal counterpart,ii but liberal democracy is beginning to buckle under its own weight. In an effort to apprehend suspected terrorists and ultimately preserve liberal democratic values, the United States and others have ended up jeopardizing the very principles they set out to protect. This internal paradox raises a new and pressing question: Is liberal democracy capable of surviving its own hypocrisy?

When the Bush neoconservatives embarked on their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the accompanying story line was predictably one of defending freedom and spreading democracy to oppressed peoples. Human and civil rights abuses accompanying the War on Terror were justified by Bush's administration as necessary measures to protect the American way of life.

Obama's election as president altered the appearance and language of the wars but preserved theidea of their importance for upholding national security. His has been the era of mass surveillance and extrajudicial “targeted killing”. In 2012 Homeland Security advisor John Brennan defended the use of drone strikes as an integral part of the president's counterterrorism doctrine. He boldly spoke of the “surgical” and “laser-like” precision that drones offer in limiting harm done to non-combatants, going so far as to state that “one could argue that never before has there been a weapon that allows us to distinguish more effectively between an al-Qa’ida terrorist and innocent civilians.”iii The narrative of drone warfare's ethics and efficiency has been a common one ever since the Obama administration proliferated their usage in 2009. The reality, as has long been suspected however, is just the opposite.

Recently it was revealed that, based on new data available to the public, the collateral damage inflicted by drone strikes has in fact been enormous. In the process of attempting to assassinate 41 different targets since the program began back in 2006, at least 1147 people have been killed.iv Troubling statistics like these should come as no surprise though. As long as the US has been praising drones' effectiveness, growing ire in the places where drone strikes have caused the most human destruction – like Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – has reflected the gap between the neat and tidy narrative and the devastating reality on the ground. Public outrage at the drone war's indiscrimination,v combined with anger at factors like the continued occupation of the Palestinians and the American presence in Saudi Arabia has fueled the expansion of terrorist groups like the Islamic State which stakeholders in the region cannot afford to dismiss.

Our strategy for the Middle East must change, however. If Western foreign policy in the next decade resembles that of the last, it will mean that we have learned nothing from our mistakes. The military response to terrorism is also the facile one, and has proven to be extremely costly in both bloodand treasure. Considering the Islamic State's talent for adding new recruits, the Third Gulf War threatens to be at least as ominous as the Second. If we are to avoid a repeated failure we must look to ways that have not already been tried. The assumption that hunting potential terrorists works to our benefit should be abandoned, and replaced by the understanding that with each innocent life extinguished by an airstrike or bullet, the damage incurred by the West's public image hinders our position in the crucial battle for hearts and minds.vi

Meanwhile, our liberal values are being strained. Hardline, patriotic approaches to foreign policy have encouraged xenophobia in our society. Assassinations abroad and the securitized exceptions made to fundamental civil liberties at home are eroding liberal democracy from the inside. Even if we in the West do not feel threatened by our own double standards, those who shudder at the sight of a predator drone flying overhead certainly do. How can we promote liberal democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere if most people in those regions have grown up fearing and hating the bombsour liberal democracies drop? If this blinding contradiction has not muddied our conscience, it should at least force us to reconsider our logic.

Over one hundred years ago Friedrich Nietzsche observed that “If you gaze long enough into the abyss, eventually the abyss begins to gaze back into you.”vii If we do not internalize his wisdom in conducting our political affairs, liberal democracy will eventually fade into obsolescence if it does not devour itself first.

i Fukuyama, Francis. 1995. “The End of History, Five Years Later.” History and Theory. 34:2, p. 29.

Fukuyama goes on to explain that since liberal democracy satisfies fundamental human needs and desires better than any other political system devised so far, it “can be expected to be more durable than other . . . principles of political organization.” From a normative standpoint the “end of history”was reached at the end of the 18th century when liberal principles were formalized during the French Revolution. According to Fukuyama the fall of the Berlin Wall merely signified liberal democracy's dominance empirically as Soviet communism crumbled, but strictly speaking had no bearing on its normative superiority.

ii Zakaria, Fareed. 1997. “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy.” Foreign Affairs. 76:6, p. 42.

Zakaria draws attention to the fact that the “tyranny of the majority” can in some cases be just as brutal as life under a dictatorship, and so democracy on its own is insufficient. Constitutional liberalism is necessary to establish a set of laws that protect basic liberal principles – and thus minorities – from disenfranchisement and oppression within a democracy. Democracies that do not include constitutional liberalism threaten to defame all forms of democracy. Zakaria endorses Fukuyama's thesis in the normative sense when he says that “There are no longer respectable alternatives to democracy . . . Thus the problems of the 21st century will likely be problems within democracy.” Zakaria's criticism of the “end of history” rests on empirical observations.

iii Brennan, John. “The Ethics and Efficacy of the President's Counterterrorism Strategy” (speech, Washington, DC, April 30, 2012), Lawfare, http://www.lawfareblog.com/2012/04/brennanspeech/.

iv Ackerman, Spencer. 2014. “41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: US drone strikes – the facts on the ground.” The Guardian, November 24. Accessed November 26, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147.

v Guerin, Orla. 2012. “US drone war in Pakistan prompts fear and anger.” BBC News, October 5. Accessed December 6, 2014. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-19842410.

In his effort to rebrand the fight against terrorism and distance himself and his presidency's legacy fromthe Bush doctrine, Obama intentionally abandoned the “War on Terror” vocabulary and pulled most American ground forces out of Iraq. Drone strikes offer an attractive alternative for keeping Islamic terrorists under pressure on their own soil by targeting their training camps and forcing them to risk death if they travel in the open. Drone strikes are far more discrete and far less expensive than traditional military forces, but as this BBC article observes, the collateral damage caused by drone strikes is encouraging jihadist terrorism, not dissuading it. Although drones seem prima facie to be a useful tool for killing terrorists – and are certainly valuable for conducting reconnaissance – they do more harm than good. Usama bin Laden being the exception, extrajudicial international assassinations are not easily justified, and when they are collateral damage needs to be kept to a minimum. Drones make carrying out assassinations easier but make civilian deaths far more likely.

vi Dreyfuss, Robert. 2012. “Why Drone Strikes Cede 'Hearts and Minds' to Taliban.” The Diplomat, September 6. Accessed December 7, 2014. http://thediplomat.com/2012/09/why-drone-strikes-cede-hearts-and-minds-to-taliban/1/.

The blowback caused by accidentally killing civilians renders drone strikes counterproductive in the overall scheme of things. According to Stephen Biddle, accumulated civilian casualties in

Afghanistan have severely damaged the prospects of bringing the war to a successful conclusion. The resentment generated by the deaths of non-combatants makes Afghans more susceptible to the Taliban's message of jihad and resistance against coalition forces, and grants the Taliban more leverage if and when the US tries to negotiate any sort of deal.

vii Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Marion Faber. 1998. Aphorism 146 in “Beyond Good and Evil : Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (accessed December 4, 2014).