Quote Originally Posted by Schmedlap View Post
I think the assumption is not that people like us, but rather that there is a universal yearning for freedom. Sorry if that sounds like administration propaganda, but that seems to be the assumption.
That's the way the Bush administration phrased it, but I don't think that's really the assumption. The assumption is that everyone yearns for freedom AND believes that liberal democracy and market economies are the best way to attain it.

I think there are two flaws in the assumption:

1. It assumes that because Americans value INDIVIDUAL freedom above all else, everyone else does. In reality, for many cultures GROUP rights and justice/honor are more important than individual freedom.

2. It assumes that a yearning for freedom is enough to make a democracy function. In reality, the hard part isn't everyone wanting freedom for themselves. It's everyone being willing to tolerate the freedom of OTHER people. That doesn't exist in sufficient quantities in some cultures.

In my book, one of my main lines of criticism of the Bush strategy is that it ignored the role of culture and simply mirror imaged American preferences and desires on the rest of the world. I believe this was because the administration and its supporters mis-read the "lessons" of the Reagan administration. They believed that because once repressive regimes collapsed in Eastern Europe, democracies of one sort of the other blossomed, that would happen everywhere. They overlooked the fact that it tends to happen in certain cultures but not others.