Security Policy

As in the Carter years, the different elements of the democratic agenda are again in competition with one another--human rights versus the expansion of free trade, as one example. Whether the democratic agenda of control should be carried out by multilateral means or, in case of need, by the United States alone, has again become a source of confusion and grief, as in Bosnia. Meanwhile, the nation's enthusiasm for bearing the human and financial costs of carrying out a policy of both democratic internationalism and democratic nationalism has waned. Whereas control of the military had provided a reasonably clear rationale for policy and a lever for mobilizing public support, neo-Wilsonianism seems a guideline made of rubber and has left the American public deeply ambivalent. This ambivalence reflects the confusion implied by viewing the normative and practical issues of national policy.

This is not new. As Jack Snyder (1991) establishes in Myths of Empire, the golden ages of liberal democratic nationalism were the periods that followed the two world wars, and, to some extent, the 1980s, when the Cold War was being "won" by the West and the "third wave" of democratization occurred. This is not a coincidence; it suggests that in order to understand the current difficulties of democratic national security policy on the world stage and in the hearts of Americans, there is a need to go far beyond the all too familiar and depr

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economic society of free commerce and industry linking people across borders; and creating strong state interests in cooperation and peace (Maoz, 1994, pp. 632-634). The other great unanswered question for traditional liberalism was suggested by Snyder. Liberalism, a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, discussed the relations of state and society in terms of mutual obligations between the individuals and the rulers--a rational relationship--often symbolized by the idea of the social contract (Snyder, 1991, pp. 170-210). But as the people, or a sizable portion of the people, began to play a role in the management of their affairs, a new issue arose: that of loyalty, of the emotional bonds of allegiance that tie the society to the state. This was the issue of nationalism: a new collective consciousness that could evolve from mere feeling to a passion and an ideology capable of being grafted onto every other conceivable political creed. A key factor in addressing this issue is that liberalism's embrace of national self-determination raises more questions than it answers (Owen, 1994, pp. 90-91). There is, always historically, the dilemma of intervention for the emancipation of oppressed nationalities. In addition, th
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1608
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)