Post-Schna-ulations

"Mealy mouthed crotch pheasant!"

Barren Ground for Democracy

I'm not sure where to even begin with this article. The overarching point is that other countries need to "evolve" or "catch up" with the United States, as if they are just, in some way, not as far along in history as we are. For a good critique of this way of thinking, I suggest checking out Jon's Blog, (especially some of the earlier posts). In short, this implies that history is some straight, chronological, pre-determined line that all countries (or people or knowledge) move along towards an end goal of perfection (or in the case of knowledge, towards omniscience), with different countries falling at different points along the progression. So, those poor primitive people just aren't as "modern" or advanced as those of us in the US, huh?

Here are a few excerpts from the article, to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

To see all this clearly, one must look at the campaign in the Persian Gulf region not as an isolated effort but as the culmination of a decade-long effort to bring the vast lands of the defunct Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and Asia into the modern world and the Western orbit.
After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, communist satellites like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary promptly evolved into successful Western democracies. This transition was relatively easy because the countries boasted high literacy rates, exposure to the Enlightenment under Prussian and Hapsburg emperors, and strong industrial bases and middle classes prior to World War II and the cold war. In retrospect, it seems clear that only the presence of the Red Army had kept them from developing free parliamentary systems on their own.
...
Mr. Levine defined pragmatism as a respect for liberal progress not in a fixed, ideological sense, but in terms of "the cultural context" in which such progress takes place: each people and terrain according to its own pace of political development, in other words.

Throughout the article, the author is attempting to view the situation in light of the fact that each region has its own historical and geographical context (on that point, I don't disagree). However, I think the very essence of his argument then takes a wrong turn, as he seems to imply (while in some cases stating otherwise) that this context is just a more primitive version of what all countries go through. To me, that seems as if he is contradicting himself (or perhaps I am falsely reading his points).

Any thoughts?

posted by Schna @ 9:33 AM