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Moral Overstretch: Provoking Resistance to the American Hegemonic Order?
From: Columbia University
| By:
Jack Snyder |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
America and other Western states, in their zeal to impose a global version of Western liberalism, may provoke dictatorships in other nations who do not share Western values of democratization and human rights. Jack Snyder, a political scientist at Columbia University and an expert on international affairs, examines the problem he calls "moral overstretch" and offers some prescriptions to avoid the backlash. |
 ost-Cold War America, like other would-be hegemonic powers throughout history, has been striving to create a world order in its own image. Historian Paul Kennedy's widely read 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, illustrated the danger of what he called imperial "overstretch"--when the costs of expansion outrun the hegemonic state's material capabilities. Nowadays, moral overstretch is the more likely misstep. American policy, if it goes too far in trying to impose a global version of American liberalism, might provoke a self-defeating backlash on the America-led moral empire. |
 The United States now occupies an almost unprecedented position of global material power. At the same time, it has a highly attractive set of political, economic and cultural arrangements that gives it what the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye has called "soft power," the power to get others to want what it wants them to want. Reinforcing this is the democratic peace among the wealthy, powerful, established democratic states, which share a basic value orientation in foreign affairs. The heightened salience of human-rights issues in public opinion and the rise of activist non-governmental organizations are exerting unprecedented pressure on these states to act on their underlying moral consensus. Together, these factors are tempting the United States to try to impose a moral hegemony in international affairs. |
In addition to these "supply-side" factors pushing for the creation of a world order based on democracy and human rights, the pull on the demand side is also fairly strong. Although the post-Cold War wave of democratization has slackened and even reversed itself somewhat since the formative period of the early 1990s, many developing countries remain potential candidates for democratization. Slovakia and Taiwan have probably moved into the ranks of irreversible democratic consolidations. Croatia seems to be headed in that direction. Indian democracy seems to have survived the rise of the BJP and the decentralization of the party system. South Africa and Turkey have witnessed promising developments. Even in countries like Peru, Guatemala, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia and Serbia, where democracy remains mainly a sham or at best intermittent, the exercise of authority depends at least partly on maintaining a plausible link to the ballot box. In all of these settings, local political opportunists may tactically jump on the bandwagon of the democratic-world-order project, and thus add to its impulse. Consequently, both supply and demand for the kind of world order that the United States has to offer are creating a strong universalizing thrust, impelling the further promotion of democracy and human rights.
However, in some quarters, America's impulse toward moral hegemony risks provoking a backlash. Democratization and strict adherence to international standards of human rights constitute a threat to powerful dictators, warlords, human-rights abusers and elites whose ability to extract economic rents depends on coercion. For reasons that are sometimes tactical and sometimes sincere, proponents of non-Western national traditions, "Asian values," religious "fundamentalist" nationalism and local cultural particularism may exploit the universalizing liberal, legalistic format of the Western powers' aspiring global moral order as a foil for the purpose of mobilizing popular nationalist support. |
 However, in some quarters, America's impulse toward moral hegemony risks provoking a backlash. Democratization and strict adherence to international standards of human rights constitute a threat to powerful dictators, warlords, human-rights abusers and elites whose ability to extract economic rents depends on coercion. For reasons that are sometimes tactical and sometimes sincere, proponents of non-Western national traditions, "Asian values," religious "fundamentalist" nationalism and local cultural particularism may exploit the universalizing liberal, legalistic format of the Western powers' aspiring global moral order as a foil for the purpose of mobilizing popular nationalist support. |
Perhaps more important than this kind of direct backlash against liberal universalism is the complex and potentially divisive impact of these liberal agendas on institutionally underdeveloped transitional societies. Where a society lacks basic citizen skills, independent media and the minimal institutional infrastructure needed to establish a rule-of-law state, clamoring for democracy and justice is sometimes just populist rhetorical cover for a change from one elite kleptocracy to another. As in Liberia under Charles Taylor, the people may vote overwhelmingly for the most menacing human-rights-abusing protection racketeer, since his ability to cause trouble is less if he's in power than if he's in the bush. In ethnically divided societies, which include almost the entire developing world, the concept of democracy is all too easily turned into an occasion for divisive calls for national self-determination or zero-sum ethnic mobilization to pillage state revenues. Thus, the impetus to universalize democracy and human-rights norms may sharpen contradictions and conundrums posed by a recalcitrant reality. |
Piecemeal resistance to liberal US hegemony
In these conditions, the most likely format of a coalition to resist American moral hegemony is not a tightly coordinating alliance. America's project of universal democracy and human rights is likely to face not a unified bloc of resistance, bound together by a common agenda, but, rather, a plethora of resistant particularisms--resistant either because local elite interests are threatened by the universal moral formula or because local conditions of lawlessness and poverty make it impossible to implement universal legalistic rules. In this situation, the further the United States and its allies try to push the universal agenda, the more they will provoke resistance from a variety of independent political actors that cannot be won over, locked up, bought off or pacified. |
Any overly ambitious hegemony, even one that promotes worthy moral principles, can encircle itself with opponents by pushing too hard for universal domination. Many Europeans found Napoleon's political principles more attractive than those of the reactionary regimes he was fighting against. Nonetheless, Napoleon's opponents carried the day because his ambitions overreached the extent of his moral appeal and his military might. Napoleon confronted too many foes at the same time and failed to consolidate a strong moral consensus behind his hegemony in Central Europe before pushing for further advances in Europe's periphery. As a result, Napoleon's conservative opponents were able to muster a powerful coalition to roll back his imperial gains. |
 Today, the forces ranged against liberal hegemony look less cohesive ideologically than most of these contenders have in the past. Among the great powers, only China and Russia stand outside the consensus of liberal, democratic human-rights ideology. But what ideology these powers do stand for is blurred. Russia is poorly positioned to lead an illiberal ideological coalition. Not only is it materially weakened, but it is also run by elites who must give lip service to the outward forms of democratic capitalism in order to maintain their rent-extracting positions in the international and domestic political economy. They will resist US attempts to over-universalize its principles, but they have no incentive to mobilize a mass movement either in Russia or outside it around any alternative set of principles. |
China, likewise, stands for no clear set of principles, apart from the amassing of national power and wealth. It serves as a model for no other country, since places like Korea, Taiwan and Singapore have already surpassed it in political, social and economic development. China, like Russia, will resist American doctrines of human-rights universalism and interventionism against abusive authoritarian nationalists, but China will remain in a nay-saying role. Even as China drifts more explicitly toward a capitalist nationalist basis of legitimation, it is hard to see how that could serve as more than an opportunistic and intermittent basis for coalescing with other opponents of liberal American hegemony. |
Turning to the medium-sized powers, many important states are poorly integrated with the liberal-democratic human-rights hegemonic consensus, even in cases like India and Iran, whose political systems include significant democratic components. Yet the nationalism of these medium powers doesn't add up to any potential for a unified nationalist front against universalistic American liberalism. Their religious nationalism are at odds with each other, as in the Hindu and Muslim variants (India as opposed to Pakistan and Iran), and they are vying for domination of their own societies with secular nationalism (as in Egypt and Turkey). None of these societies are liberal, and they have the ability to resist direct American human-rights coercion in their internal affairs, but they lack an ideological basis for making common cause. |
 Finally, the list of potential opponents of the liberal hegemonic project includes the numerous but lesser tin-pot dictators, ruthless warlords, bigoted ethnopolitical movements, war criminals and pariah states that still abound in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and elsewhere. Insofar as any of these have an ideology, it is a very narrowly particularistic form of ethnic nationalism, which is so self-absorbed that it has little potential to serve as the basis for a pan-nationalist movement of nationalisms. |
All of these potential foes of the liberal world order are organized at the national or subnational level. Notwithstanding Samuel Huntington's famous argument about the "class of civilizations," which predicts that in future conflicts Western civilization as a whole will be pitted against the Islamic and Asian civilizations, these potential opponents of the liberal hegemonic project are not "civilizational." Still less are they contenders for the creation of a rival coalition with universal appeal. The only thing that they have in common is that they are illiberal. Even the democracies or quasi democracies among them are for the most part illiberal democracies. |
Consequently, the main form of coalition among this set of heterogeneous, particularistic actors is likely to be de facto. However, if liberal America becomes simultaneously embroiled in numerous interventions in ethnic conflicts and human-rights policing efforts, this will de facto constitute the same kind of multiple-front struggle that would exist if these actors were explicitly aligned. |
Prescriptions
 In the 1990s, the US fought substantial wars in the Persian Gulf and in Kosovo, and made substantial military commitments in Somalia and Bosnia, which serve to define the material and moral purposes for which it is prepared to exercise its post-Cold War hegemony. Yet the US has also backed away from other conceivable interventions, such as in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, which could have easily been justified by the emerging liberal doctrine of human-rights interventionism. Sensibly, we have fought only one big world-order war at a time. Moreover, despite Chinese human-rights abuses, those human-rights proponents who take the long view that trade will foster democracy joined with US commercial interests in passing permanent "most favored nation" status for China. Thus, world-order ideology has so far been tempered by domestic political common sense and by Realpolitik prudence. |
However, the tensions between world-order rhetoric and pragmatic action remain acute and seem to be growing in some arenas. Calls for criminalizing endemic misbehavior in the rough-and-tumble politics of lawless countries are sharply increasing. How can these tensions be managed without either succumbing to moral overstretch on the one hand or discrediting liberal world-order principles through empty lip service on the other? |
A powerful state exercising leadership in international affairs cannot give up on a moral basis for its authority. The trick is to find formulas that will show a clear commitment to a defensible social purpose while also avoiding moral overstretch. In the moral domain, the US and its allies need to differentiate between a zone of law--where polities that have the social and institutional potential to become stable democracies are held accountable to the hegemonic standard of civic and human rights--and a zone of politics, where the logic of pragmatic bargaining should prevail in US policymaking over the urge to give lip service to irrelevant moral principles. |
 One way to begin to think about this is to distinguish ideologically and pragmatically between a zone of law and a zone of pragmatism, with a zone of transition bridging the two. All of the consolidated and near-consolidated democracies, including such cases as Slovakia and Estonia, constitute the zone of law, where standards of behavior in the recognition of civic and human rights are expected to be met at world-order levels, and where security and economic benefits of participation in the liberal hegemonic system should be granted. (This does not mean that countries like Estonia and Taiwan should automatically be given formal alliance commitments by the US, since that would be seen as a provocation by Russia and China, powerful states that lie outside the "zone of law" and democracy. However, it does mean that the US should, within the constraints of prudence, exert its influence to promote the security of democratic, human-rights-observing states.) |
Beyond the pale is the zone of pragmatism, toward which calculations should be consequentialist, not rule-governed. The liberal hegemonic coalition may and should pursue humanitarian and transformative objectives in this zone, which includes the Sierra Leones, the Congos, the Afghanistans, the East Timors and the Chechnyas. Preventing genocides, averting starvation, deterring wars, trying war criminals, sequentially laying the groundwork for democracy and giving women the levers to fight back against abuses are all appropriate goals in this zone of politics. However, these goals must be pursued with pragmatism in a zone that is ruled (or misruled) by ruthless pragmatism. We can't afford to apply absolute principles rigidly, regardless of consequences, in settings that lack the institutional and material basis to sustain rule-governed political relations. "Always have an election," "always promote multicultural integration" and "always try war criminals, never pardon them" are rules that may be appropriate in the zone of law but may be a reckless self-indulgence if applied indiscriminately in the zone of politics. |
Finally, there is the zone of transition bridging the two. This should be a rather narrowly defined zone of societies that really have meaningful prospects of moving into the zone of consolidated democracies, as judged by such preconditions as literacy, per capita income and/or institutional development of the rule of law, political representation and media of rational public discourse. And yet these are countries where some key barriers to consolidation remain and that could still slip back--countries like South Africa and Turkey. In this zone, the objective is to move the society into the principled consensus of the hegemonic order, but the means remain largely consequentialist and instrumental: do whatever works to effect the transition smoothly and reliably. If that means cutting a deal with Turkey's militarists, for example, then cut the deal, as long as it leaves them toothless and/or reconciled to the post-transition order. |
Differentiating between the zones of law and of pragmatism holds out the best prospect for prudently advancing the cause of democracy and human rights, while at the same time preventing the growth of a de facto coalition of its foes. Such differentiation runs counter to powerful liberal instincts among the US public and elite that see human rights as universal imperatives that cannot be compromised. Nonetheless, some mixture of idealism and pragmatism is inevitable in American foreign policy. A formula differentiating between the zone of law and the zone of pragmatism would help to clarify the guidelines for balancing these two impulses. |
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