From The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/opinion/global/End-the-Campaign-to-Spread-Democracy.html?ref=global&_r=1&
By DOV RONEN
Published: April 30, 2013
Boston
AFTER its victory in the ideological confrontation between two camps during the Cold War, the United States has been waging an ideological campaign to spread democracy around the world, and many of its citizens hope that the campaign will eventually be victorious.
This is not likely to happen. An old proverb says: “You cannot whistle against the wind; the wind is stronger.” One can whistle the ideological campaign’s tune of democracy forcefully, but it will be silenced by the thunderous storm of the human struggle for self-determination.
The launching of the ideological campaign is most likely based on the conviction that the collapse of the Marxist/Communist Eastern camp during the Cold War proved once and for all the unquestionable superiority and universal applicability of democracy and its political and economic institutions.
This is not the case. The victory only proved that the implementation of the Marxist idea failed in the Soviet empire, and the collapse of economies there did not lead to entrenchment of democracy but to the exercise of self-determination by Estonians, Hungarians, Poles, Ukrainians, among others, including Chechens under Dzhokar Dudayev.
Yes, peoples of the Soviet empire did proclaim aspirations for democracy. So did participants in ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, and so did participants in the Arab Spring uprisings some two decades later. But neither peoples of the former Soviet empire, nor peoples of Yugoslavia, nor those in the Arab Spring uprisings aspired to democratic rule.
All these peoples aspired to what Woodrow Wilson advocated during and after World War I: self-determination.
He remarked, “No people must be forced under sovereignty under which it does not wish to live.” President Wilson also wrote in Article 3 of his first draft of the Covenant of the League of Nations: “The Contracting Powers unite in guaranteeing … territorial adjustments … as may in the future become necessary by reason of changes in the present social conditions and aspirations or present social and political relationships, pursuant to the principle of self-determination.”
Continue reading at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/opinion/global/End-the-Campaign-to-Spread-Democracy.html?ref=global&_r=1&
