Democracy: U.S. Style?

Last week's latest military coup popular revolution in Egypt only missed landing on the Fourth of July by a few hours, duly noted by many on the Internet. And it's easy to argue, as many have, that as a struggling would-be democracy, the folks in Cairo would do well to follow our example. They may be right. But how closely?

Earlier this week, one Ed Krayewski, a writer at Reason.com, made the case for why Egyptians should adopt a near carbon-copy of the U.S. Constitution as their governing document. Egypt's existing constitution, a 236-page monstrosity, reads more like an owner's manual than a promise of order and liberty--and of course, it has not done very well at providing either. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg commented that it was more reminiscent of troubled, unstable South Africa than of America. (Naturally, though, she thought this was a good thing.) Anyhoo, Krayewski suggests that Egypt preserve its attempt at democracy by forming a constitution very similar to ours, in its formal organization of government, its system of checks and balances, its Bill of Rights or equivalent thereof, etc.

I can think of ideas a lot worse than this. There's no denying that America's democratic system has been the most stable and long-lasting of its kind, ever, and definitely outshines its rivals--say, continental European technocracy--by a mile. But is trying to completely recreate our political order over there the best option?

Here, of course, we have one of the big fault lines for American policymakers, and one of the key contested assumptions behind the project of "nation-building," since at least the Iraq War. Whether or not a Western-style liberal democracy can be created within a few years in a country with little or no such native political tradition, such as most of the Arab world, is a question still up for grabs. And not being a foreign policy expert myself, I don't pretend to have a clear answer. But I am a bit leery (though not entirely so) of the idea that carbon copies of our government and our ethos of ordered liberty will solve things. It's not that they wouldn't work--they might--but that our system in all its particulars is not a universal, self-evident rule; it has a political history, like all documents, and that history is particular and different from other locales.

Consider our principle of federalism, for example. Personally, I think the more decentralized a government is, the better; it's one of the key reasons why I am a conservative. Keep in mind, though, how such a dispersal of power originated in our country. America began as a string of separate and often isolated colonies--colonies with a common language and legal system, to be sure, but still as self-contained and internally sovereign as Ghana, Nigeria, Rhodesia, etc. would be a century or two later. Any overarching government those colonies formed would have to respect their existence and leave them as sub-units with a lot of autonomy; hence our federalist system. That doesn't make as much sense in Egypt, where most of the population is concentrated in a small land area and easily connected by the Nile river. No doubt some delegation and decentralization of authority would be useful, but there's just not the same call for it--for the sovereign state of Cairo, or Alexandria, or Giza, or what have you--in that situation.

Not a fatal issue, most likely, but it is one example of these different political traditions. In any case, beyond such matters of form, there is that thorny question of whether it's in everyone's best interests for the country to experience such full universal democracy all at once, the one you can't ask without sounding like a pretentious jerk. (No, trust me--you really can't do it.)

Lots of people, especially libertarians, would naturally answer that you have to empower the people, let them make their own decisions, even if the consequences are sometimes negative. Fair enough, and perhaps that is the best option in the long run; given how mass political movements often go, however, especially in the Middle East, the possible short-term consequences are worth giving some thought to. If mass democracy should somehow lead to a war with Israel or Iraq or whoever, that would assuredly not be a good thing.

All of which is to say, for Egyptians to try and introduce an all-new political system overnight, even a fully democratic one, would be extremely risky and unstable without taking account of the realities in the country and what people are familiar with. If nothing else, consider the inertia and quasi-independence of the civil service and other institutions, which don't like discontinuity. More than a few observers have noticed the inactivity of the police and other services under Morsi, for example, and wondered whether they actively undermined the regime. Either way, deliberately alienating those who hold so many of the levers of power is rarely smart, and another reason to make the changes as slow and smooth as possible, not impose new schemes.

That being said, I do think the Reason article makes some very good points, especially its characterization of our Constitution as a document of "negative rights" (i.e. the government declines to interfere in daily life), versus the "positive rights" (spelling out what the government will be doing), as one sees in the current Egyptian and other owner's manual constitutions today. A revision to the negative form would be helpful indeed, if for no other reason than it would transfer a lot of the responsibility for Egyptians' security and prosperity to Egyptians themselves, and encourage the growth of a strong civil society. In that respect, maybe the lesson is for Egypt (and others) to take the spirit of our American documents as their guide, and not necessarily the letter. But this is just one interpretation. Feel free to share yours.