With the Group of 8's pledge of billions in aid to fledgling democracies in Egypt and Tunisia, democracy is once again being yoked to the free market--as if the one could not exist without the other. Yet democracy--with its rhetoric of equality and popular participation--and liberalism--with its recourse to individual rights and liberties--may, if we take each of these ideals to its extreme, cancel each other out. If I am "free" to pursue my own economic interests unhindered by state intervention, I am also free to exploit you unfettered should you possess a resource that might contribute to my own pursuit of economic development.
Liberal democracy's imagining of a human in the abstract bereft of any specificity, not to mention its human rights-based discourse, has certainly opened it up to criticism from the left. Such an unspecified insistence on the centrality of human rights remains open to a bland leveling effect, rendering it unanswerable to a specific politics of critique and therefore manipulable by hegemonic powers. Yet, flawed as it may be, a politics rooted in a language of human rights must still be the basis of any effective realpolitik when it comes to emerging democracies in the Arab world. The West should therefore provide its aid, but with no strings attached, and no hidden agenda of liberalizing new markets.
No comments:
Post a Comment