While commenting on another piece. Anthony suggested that this topic probably needed to be a new thread.  This threadstarter is Anthony's second piece to be published on Webdiary.

Exporting Democracy
by Anthony Nolan  [0]

 It appears to me that bringing a democracy into being requires more than parliamentary and other institutions. It requires citizens to fit the bill. In other words it requires citizens who are capable of acting as agents within a demos. No small requirement.

The history of Western modernity is the history of the development of particular kinds of subjectivity within the citizenry in which a self reflective capacity is a key feature. Citizens of a democracy  need to be other regarding, sophisticated, self aware.

I do not think that the people of Afghanistan are of this order. Nor of any other Muslim state. I do not think that the people of China are of this order as yet either. The people of India are on their way to developing deomocratic subjectivity but the situation is fragile and they are too often dragged back into pre-modern and communal mind sets. Numerous African states would also fall into the category of 'not yet capable' of being democracies. Certain South American nations are making their way towards that end.

The history of the development of democracy, from the French and English revolutions onwards, shows that it is no easy undertaking. It is a bloody struggle to create both the insitutions of democratic social life and people capable of placing a concern with rational democratic processes at the centre of institutional and individual life. It is a constant struggle in Australia as well to defend and advance democratic practice.

What I am getting at is the impossibility of establishing democratic conditions by fiat or by force. There needs to be a will towards that end from within the history and culture of the country and the people themselves. Islam is a countervailing force to democratic modernity.

So why then bother with Afghanistan at any level? Social conditions of existence in Afghanistan may be distasteful to democratically oreinted men and women in Australia. they certainly are to me. But it is beyond my authority to do anything about them except offer refuge to those who seek to escape.

I no longer believe that we can export democracy and think we must learn to live, like good post-moderns, in world simultaneously constituted by premodern and modern conditions and attitudes. As to Afghanistan as a locus of terrorist training - well, of course it is. But so is the CIA.

The only meaningful way to combat terrorism is to assist in creating social conditions in which fear, ignorance, poverty and oppression are marginal experiences. A long task.