Why have the United States been unable to foster quality civic engagement in Iraq? The US government never adequately earned its authority in the country. Despite the advice of General David Petraeus and others, commitments to the basic welfare of Iraqis went undemonstrated. Schools and roads were left in disrepair or unbuilt. By the time the 2005 elections happened, Iraqi voters had little trust in US-led institutions for improving their own lives and prosperity, which led to the joint disaster in which Iraqis and Americans presently find themselves. Had the United States been able to establish legitimacy early, US diplomats would have been able to help stop Iraq’s internal conflicts.
So say Nancy Soderberg and Brian Katulis. For them, Iraq provides the most conspicuous example of a frequent problem for the United States. Their book, The Prosperity Agenda, presents a way of reorganizing the role of the United States in the world. US-led projects that raise global prosperity, they suggest, would be reciprocated with greater willingness to cooperate with other US political, social, and economic interests.
How can we reduce this thesis into something more measurable? Here’s one suggestion.
- Use the Human Development Index as a proxy for prosperity.
- Use voter participation rates as a proxy for willingness to cooperate globally.
- Hope that increases in the former will support increases in the latter.
- Be cautiously happy to see results which suggest precisely such a positive correlation. (See Figure 29.)
To my estimation, equating HDI to prosperity should not be terribly controversial. The second assumption, though, is admittedly more problematic. Our right to equate a society’s overall willingness to vote to its overall willingness to cooperate globally depends, in turn, on a host of other assumptions. Voting is the most common, and probably most effective, mechanism for making collaborative decisions on a large scale. In a healthy society, people vote in order to influence decisions that affect them. If people become healthier, more literate, more educated, and more financially comfortable, and if they vote in large numbers, then hopefully they will vote in such a way that is, in aggregate, at least slightly more favorable to addressing common human concerns — even if those concerns are not as common as we sometimes assume they are, and even if those concerns don’t always overlap with US foreign policy concerns.
Comments 6
Vote locally; participate globally — October 12, 2008
[...] just wrote on Thick Culture about The Prosperity Agenda. Don’t all jump at once. This entry was written by Jonathan [...]
Kenneth M. Kambara — October 12, 2008
I've been thinking about civic engagement since 2000 or so, when I was working on projects dealing with increasing health & welfare in rural communities. The foundations were struggling to figure all of this out. Build leadership? Fund collaboration of NFPs and NGOs?
I think there is something to increasing welfare and stability. I had the good fortune to talk to a retired Canadian Forces general who returned from Afghanistan as a military consultant. A major short-term objective for Canadian Forces is to stabilize areas to allow for humanitarian aid.
I think that Soderberg and Katulis' thesis is a compelling one. I think of how transfer payments to Cuba by the USSR allowed an infrastructure to be maintained that fostered stability. There's also the timeframe, since prosperity is subject to causal ambiguity.
I would imagine that enhancing prosperity can be used in concert with efforts to build civic engagement. The question is whether or not US policy can allow systems to evolve that aren't entirely democratic. I say this since I feel that civic engagement needs to follow the extant socialcultural milieu. In Iraq, I wonder how to create a post-Saddam polity that would have sociocultural legitimacy. Inserting Western-style democracy in countries with no history of this seems like a recipe for disaster. I recall this said of a Middle East expert at the Sorbonne:
I'm sure these local perceptions would seem to be coming out of left field for many.
Jonathan Pfeiffer — October 12, 2008
I wasn't aware of that, Dr. Kambara. In addition, what happens if a foreign Jeffersonian democracy produces a Muslim Brotherhood theocracy? In other words, what happens when US-backed institutions produce policies and legal norms unfriendly to the US?
jose — October 12, 2008
Given this discussion, you all should check out Spencer Ackerman's article in the March 2008 American Prospect entitled "The Obama Doctrine." He speculates on how an Obama administration might be different than the current regime and touches on the idea of "dignity promotion" as the key idea driving American engagement.
Kenneth M. Kambara — October 13, 2008
Feel free to call me Ken. Yes, that's the rub, but these things will follow trajectories of power and wealth, further complicating matters. If one takes The Battle of Algiers (video link) and its lesson that revolution can come from decentralized cells embedded in the middle-class and linked to fundamentalist Islam, and extrapolate to the current situation of the concerns of the same in the oil-rich Persian Gulf, we can draw some inferences on how to address the issue.
José's cite of The Obama Doctrine provided some interesting food for thought. I think the idea of moving away from any rigid orthodox definitions of democracy will have to be at least considered, given history and culture.
jose — October 13, 2008
It would be an interesting approach to apportion foreign aid based on whether nations are taking strides to improve human development outcomes.