Historical Knowledge and Understanding for Development

There is an old saying:

Those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it.

This week's Economist quotes Anthony Shadid's book Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War:

"(A) question (was) thrown up during the 7th-century squabble between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq, which has not been settled since: 'Who has the right to rule, and from where does that right arise?'"

I guess for most countries and most of history, the right to rule arises from might, and the rulers are those who have the might to rule. But the United States government is based on the "self-evident" truth descibed in the Declaration of Independence:

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The Bush Administration apparently thought that once the Saddam regime, which clearly ruled by might, was overthown it would be quick and easy to install a government that ruled by the consent of the governed. The Bush Administraation appeared not to consider the possiblity that most Iraqis might think that the right to rule derived from God, although the United States itself rejected the "devine right of kings" only a couple of hundred years ago.

Osama Bin Ladan refers to events 80 years past, secure in the knowledge that his Muslim listeners will know he means that overthrow of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, and the instalation of Western colonial rule in the lands of the Middle East. Most Americans would not have understood the reference. Perhaps more to the point of this posting, the Bush Administration had it more carefully considered the history of the region during the past 80 years might have doubted its ability to create democratic governance in Iraq quickly or easily.

The United States in the last century sought on a number of occassions to improve governance in small countries close to its own borders. Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic come to mind. None of these would appear to have achieved anything close to U.S. style democracy as a result of U.S. interventions.

I was chatting with a Russian friend over the weekend, and he pointed out that the Russian population is dropping by about a million people per year. Birth rates are down and death rates are up. Georgian GDP dropped by 90 percent after the break-up of the Soviet Union. The transition from the Soviet Communist governance to an alternative form of government has been long and painful in the former Soviet Union, and is probably far from complete.

The notable successes of externally imposed "democratization" are to be found in Germany, Italy and Japan after World War II. I would note that the United States did not act alone in Europe, and that the reconstruction benefitted greatly from the lessons learned in the failure to create a peaceful Europe after World War I. Clearly the democratization of the Axis countries after World War II took time and money, and resulted from the empowerment of people in those countries who had long opposed the previous fascist governments. The European cultures of Germany and Italy were close to those in which democracy had arisen previously.

I am no historian, but I believe a close analysis of historical precedents would increase understanding of the process of democratization. But surely anyone how looked at a century of repeated failures might question whether the assumption of a quick and easy democratization of Iraq was reasonable.