As I have noted many times on this blog, the United States is heavily engaged in trying to catalyze democracy in some of the world’s most divided countries, such as Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Iraq. Thanksgiving, the United States’ most unique holiday, is a good time to consider the difficulty of building democracy in divided societies. The reason is not because of the fine example of democracy the US provides, but because of the warning.

The United States emerged from the Revolutionary War as a deeply divided society.  Tyranny of the majority, specifically southerners’ fear that the larger population of the north and its general hostility to slavery threatened their interests, was one of the main cleavages. Like the US advocates in many divided societies today, the US Constitution created a variation of power sharing to ally these fears, most prominently decentralization (federalism) and over-representation of states with small populations in the legislature (the Senate).

Power sharing did not alleviate southerners’ concerns. Subsequent compromises, such as the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, also ultimately failed. In the event, the country descended into civil war, the south was economically and militarily decimated, and the north militarily occupied the south after the war, imposing a new set of institutions, such as voting rights for African-Americans, that most white southerners resisted. Reconstruction also led to the rise of terrorist groups seeking to drive out northern troops and intimidate blacks from exercising their rights.

The cost and difficulties of reconstruction caused the north to lose interest in it and the military occupation ended in 1877.  Following the withdrawal, African-Americans lost almost all the rights granted to them during reconstruction. Thus, while the war eliminated slavery and the threat of succession, reconstruction failed to bring anything close to democracy and equality to African-Americans.

It seems to me that US history can provide three lessons for considering whether the US can help facilitate democracy in divided societies today:

1. No matter how clever the institutional design, power sharing is fragile if a minority fears domination.
2. Imposing new institutions is an expensive, long-term, and painful process.
3. Political support in the US to impose these new institutions must be very strong.

President Obama said today that he will announce his decision on whether or not to send more troops to Afghanistan next Tuesday. While he gave no firm indication on what he is going to request, the expectation is that he will announce somewhere around 30,000 additional troops. Two powerful Democrats in Congress, House Appropriations Chairman David Obey and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, plan to introduce legislation calling for a war tax to finance it.  It’s a clever move for Democrats who do not support the war as they will be able to position themselves not as anti-war, but as fiscally responsible.  The war in Washington over the war in Afghanistan is probably just starting.  Watch out for flying spittle on the cable news.

Roger Cohen channels my thoughts on Obama in today’s New York Times:

The great battle of the 21st century is going to be between free-market democracies and free-market authoritarian systems. America’s position in that struggle has to be clear if Obama’s simultaneous grandmaster openings are to produce victories.

The Iraqi parliament passed a revised election law, following last week’s veto by Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi.  On the surface, this would seem like good news.  It is not.  Hashemi, a Sunni, vetoed the law because it did not give sufficient representation to Iraqis living abroad.  To address this concern, the new law allocates votes from Iraqis living abroad according to the province where they lived prior to leaving as well as increases the number of seats for Kurdish regions.  Both measures reduce the number of seats in Sunni regions.  The Sunnis walked out of the parliament in protest and the bill passed by a wide margin.  Hashemi has stated he will veto the law a second time.  However, parliament can override the veto with 60% majority, which a Kurdish-Shia coalition could easily provide.  Reider Visser at Iraq and Gulf Analysis argues sees this as a revival of sectarian tensions in Iraqi politics between the Kurds and Shia on the one hand and the Sunnis on the other.  Not good news.

Today’s attack on local opposition supporters in the Philippines is a chilling reminder of what Freedom House’s Arch Puddington called the global “decline in freedom” – for three straight years, Freedom House has measured a net drop in democratic indicators around the world. The Philippines is just one example; five years ago, this country rated as “Free,” but today the New York Times reports the abduction of 40 people who were on their way to file gubernatorial election candidacy papers in the province of Maguindanao. Up to 30 have been killed, most of them women, including the wife and sister of the candidate. While this is the most brutal single attack in recent history, it is indicative of a trend of extrajudicial killings and impunity in this once-impressive democracy. With cases like this, it seems unlikely the global democratic deficit will be making a strong about-face anytime soon.

I have been devoting a lot of attention to democrats who are pressuring the Obama administration to take a firmer stance on supporting democratic movements abroad.  Today’s installment comes from the New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier:

A few days before the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall in Berlin, there occurred the thirtieth anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The dictators’ commemoration…was ruined by rallies of democrats and dissidents. Obama’s response was to intone wanly that ‘the world continues to bear witness to their powerful calls for justice.’…Was the Soviet Union brought down by “witness”? We did not, on our own, bring the Soviet Union down…but we assisted keenly in its collapse. Are we assisting in the mullahs’ collapse? I think not…American support for the democracy movement in Iran…is also a strategic duty. Such support might indeed be “destabilizing,” but there is no stability in Iran anymore, there is only a vicious tyranny fighting for its life against a popular uprising that explains itself with principles that we, too, espouse.

I predict that the Obama administration will eventually come around to supporting democratic movements abroad more forthrightly (perhaps not in Iran), although I am less certain than Michael Allen at Democracy Digest that such changes are imminent.

Jack Santucci at the Democratic Piece has some good insights into the institutional foundations of Iraq’s current political impasse. Jack’s basic point is that the primary fear of minority groups in Iraq (Kurds and Sunnis) is domination by the majority Shia.  Thus, we should expect political leaders from these groups to use whatever means they have to prevent it. The big question is if can we get them to do it without violence. Jack analogizes what’s happening in Iraq today as a Game of Chicken and usefully reminds us that the car wreck is one outcome.