David Cameron is unpacking further his concept of a "liberal Conservative" foreign policy today. I have written before about why I am not a "liberal Conservative" on this issue. I shan't rehearse the whole of that argument here. But I do wish to take up Cameron on one point. [He says]: "We should accept that we cannot impose democracy at the barrel of a gun; that we cannot drop democracy from 10,000 feet – and we shouldn’t try. Put crudely, that was what was wrong with the ‘neo-con’ approach, and why I am a liberal Conservative, not a neo – Conservative."
I broadly agree that attempting to impose democracy[*] where people do not want it is likely to be counterproductive, and that this was a weakness of the neocon approach. But Cameron appears to want to draw the lesson that, therefore, we should sometimes forswear imposing anything. And that is where I believe he is wrong - and importantly so. For though democracy may be difficult to impose, that is not true of ordered liberty (indeed, ordered liberty often involves the use of force by the state to protect order and the liberty of the individual from predation by the wicked). The right lesson to learn is that when we are forced, by our duty as the good and the powerful, to intervene, we should not always seek to impose democracy - for imposing democracy will often be at the expense of ordered liberty. But democracy is not an end in itself - its function is to promote and protect ordered liberty. So if democracy and ordered liberty come into conflict, it is democracy that must be dispensed with. Cameron's "liberal Conservatism" would have us not intervene in many situations that we have a duty to become involved in and that we could make better. And his reason for refusing intervention in those cases is that we would find it difficult immediately to impose democracy. I consider that inadequate.
Let us rehearse a theme I have visited many times: why ordered liberty is better than democracy. Consider two states. In the first, there is no democracy - let us assume that the state is run by a king, for simplicity, but it could as well be by a ruling oligarchy. The king protects order, allows freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom of the press (including to criticize the king's policies), freedom of marriage, freedom of thought, freedom of commerce, equality of all subjects before the law and the tax authorities, due process of the accused, and other elements of the apparatus of ordered liberty.
The second state is a democracy. Let us assume that 55% of the population is of one race, and 45% of another. Political parties are organised along racial lines. The party of the majority race always wins. Laws favour the majority population over the minority - for example, people from the minority population are not permitted to own businesses; if they are to marry each other they must have special permits, and they are forbidden from marrying members of the majority race. The majority race tends to belong to a different religion from that of the minority race - members of the majority religion are permitted to attempt to convert members of other religions, but the reverse is not true, and anyone that does convert from the majority religion gives up his right to inherit property. Members of other religions must pay a special tax, notionally to fund a special police force that "protects" the minority religions from violence, following (government-orchestrated) riots some years earlier. A "Patriotism Law" prevents newspapers from criticizing the government. Opposition party rallies are not permitted to involve more than 25 people.
Now, which of these two states is closer to the ideal for government? I submit that the first is closer to the ideal than any existing state in the world, even though there is not democracy. "Ah", you say, "perhaps this is true, but no state would be like that without being democratic." I deny this, but let us suppose it were true - all that would be shown is that democracy is a good way to promote this near-ideal form of state. And I emphasize that I do deny that. In fact, many states in the world today and of the past are (or have been) fairly close to one or other of these extremes. Democracy does not automatically promote ordered liberty; the absence of democracy does not automatically preclude ordered liberty; and when we are faced with the choice of a liberal-state-without-democracy or a democratic-state-without-liberty I submit that almost every educated liberal Westerner would, in practice, prefer the first.
Not that I oppose democracy. Far from it. But in my view democracy should be understood as a way that we choose our rulers that is good and useful if properly tamed, not as a device by which we rule ourselves and the only legitimate source of authority. I am a democrat, just not a Democrat.
In every state, I believe that in the long-term ordered liberty will be advanced if, at some point, democracy is instituted as amongst the devices by which rulers are chosen. I am not of the view that "democracy is not for Arabs" or some such nonsense as that. But the great American Error is to believe that democracy is the startpoint; that it is from democracy that liberty flows, and consequently that the honourable thing to do, upon taking over a country, is to institute some grand Congress of the People so that they can choose how to organise their own state. The British model of democracy, although Britain has been the most successful of all democracies and although Britain's democracy has been the most successful at promoting and defending ordered liberty, is discounted. For in Britain ordered liberty came first, and democracy was introduced gradually, with the franchise widened slowly, giving each new section of society the chance to become politically educated and absorbed into the process. This meant that in Britain, much more than almost anywhere else, democracy became a battle of ideas, not of tribes or classes or regions - and that despite great and longstanding heterogeneity in British society.
I submit that Britain should be offering to the world, in foreign policy terms, the lessons of British history:
- of the primary importance of ordered liberty, and that democracy is not required for this
- of the need to give the institutions that express, promote and defend ordered liberty time to develop organically, including (of necessity) an Establishment to provide an organic tradition and including non-democratic elements as vital checks and balances
- of the value of a politically-educated electorate, not simply a democratically-empowered one, and that this may involve gradual extension of the franchise rather than an all-in-one approach.
This would, I believe, be a Conservative foreign policy, and be more "liberal" in its impact than the pessimistic "liberal Conservatism" currently on offer.
[*Cameron attempts, at some point in his speech, to conflate democracy and ordered liberty - to define "democracy" such that it must include ordered liberty. This seems to me to simply confuse ideas. Democracy is about who our rulers are; ordered liberty is about how our rulers rule us. By conflating democracy and ordered liberty, Cameron effectively defines away the possibility of ordered liberty existing without democracy as well as of democracy existing without ordered liberty, and thus makes the debate I seek impossible to express in words. I here use the terms in their ordinary meaning.]
