Imagining Global Democracy

Every day I read the newspapers, hoping to learn something more about this war, this total war, this war against terrorism, that we are fighting. But only two images haunt my waking and sleeping; the smoldering tomb of 2,905 souls (at the latest count) at Ground Zero, and the arid Afghan landscape, starkly beautiful in my mind (and in the words of the press). In both my images, there are no people, in one because they are interred in concrete, in the other, because Afghanistan has been described to us so many times as a harsh, inhospitable land.

But despite the vision of New York, I still understand this war mostly through the fish-eye lens of my television.

Unable to visualize the war, I understand it politically. Others have cast this as a war about religious fundamentalism; I think of it as a war against political extremism. We already know, indeed, we have known, that millions of people around the world (many of them non-Muslims, many of them in our own country) share the political views of Osama bin Laden.

The reason we do not have millions of terrorists on our hands is because these people disagree with his tactics. In Wednesday’s New York Times article about Muslims in Britain, a British man was quoted as saying, “Put aside his methodology and what’s [bin Laden] actually saying?” The former stockbroker who condemned the Sept. 11 attacks continued, “He is only saying what all the Arabs in the world want to say but cannot say in their own country.”

Like all political battles, there is a large group with shared opinions and goals (insofar as the goals are political and not military), and then there is its extreme, dedicated to achieving those goals (and other, more brutal ones) at all costs. Sinn Fein has the Irish Republican Army, the Palestinian Authority has Hamas, the Basque nationalists have Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA).

Political conflicts involving legitimate political movements and their extreme political terrorist offshoots have been resolved successfully by bringing the political moderates into a position where they have more to gain by participating in a democratic political process than by implicitly allowing extremists to wage war (as Muslim leaders do when they fail to publicly condemn bin Laden and his followers). At a crucial moment in the process, it becomes detrimental to the goals of the political movement to condone violent extremists, and then, usually, they are self-policed into oblivion. This week the legitimate political wing of the Northern Ireland nationalist movement (Sinn Fein), for instance, asked its violent extremists (the Provos) to disarm. In Spain, ETA has targeted Basque nationalist politicians who have joined the Spanish democratic process, knowing as their power grows, the ETA’s will diminish.

These examples are much smaller, national political movements, compared to the broad, cross-national political movement bin Laden has hijacked. I think that the millions of people who believe like Osama bin Laden that Palestinians are oppressed by Israel and that sanctions should be lifted against Iraq—but who despise his methodology—are also frustrated by a system of global coercion they feel is undemocratic. America has brushed off the democratic process of the U.N. We have strong-armed our allies into having our way, and we have ignored dissent in the world. We have pursued our national interest vigorously, with no concern for the national interest of others.

The main complaint of our critics is that we are hypocritical—we say we represent democracy, but around the world we act in an undemocratic fashion.

So, and perhaps this is crazy, we should, at the end of this military action, participate in a truly democratic U.N., showing ourselves to be in good faith committed to democracy on a global level. And perhaps we should seek to empower in this process the political moderates of the Muslim world by showing our willingness to engage in a political debate with them, a debate we must be open to the possibility of losing (just as the Democrats are open to the possibility of losing to the Republicans).

We have seen (Palestine) what happens when the political wing is handed over to the extremists because moderates seem powerless to effect change (whether or not that is the fault of the moderates or their political opponents).

I have two images of the world after the war. In one the U.S. is transformed into a military nation, constantly on the defensive against political extremists who engage in terrorist attacks with frightening intensity. In the other, I see us participating in a free, democratic debate with our opponents, opponents who are committed to the same democratic process as us, the sort of worthy, peaceful opponents that any democratic nation recognizes as essential to democracy.

Meredith B. Osborn ’02 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.