ABSTRACT
On its face, using military occupation as a tool to promote democratization is about as intuitive as forcing people to take a self-improvement class to learn how to be more spontaneous. And yet the two most recent US administrations, though on opposite ends of the political spectrum, have used [the United States’] might to try to advance the cause of democracy in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, at least nominally, Afghanistan. The Bush administration’s major statement of its strategic policy, known mainly for its justifi cation of preventive war, dwells on the need to “shift the balance of power in favor of freedom.” 1
Scholars and public intellectuals have played a prominent role as drummers on this bandwagon. Historian Niall Ferguson, in a colorful collection of stories that ends with a paean to empire, contends that “without the infl uence of British imperial rule, it is hard to believe that the institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been adopted by the majority of states in the world, as they are today.” 2 Indeed, most of the postcolonial states that have remained almost continuously democratic since independence, such as India and some West Indian island states, are former British possessions. Still, as Ferguson acknowledges, many former British colonies have failed to achieve democratic stability: Pakistan and Nigeria oscillate between chaotic elected regimes and military dictatorships; Sri Lanka has held elections that stoked the fi res of ethnic confl ict; Malaysia has averted ethnic confl ict only by limiting democracy; Singapore is stuck in a pattern of stable but noncompetitive electoral politics; Kenya is emerging from a long interlude of one-party rule; and Iraq in the late 1940s fl irted with electoral politics that played into the hands of violent radicals. The list continues with even more parlous cases, from Burma to Zimbabwe.
