Demo-democracy
Just in case anyone gets the wrong idea about what I wrote in the introduction to my post yesterday, I just wanted to clarify that I do not believe that all the talk by US administrations since the 80s of ‘promoting democracy’ etc should be taken at face value. There is no doubt that this is largely a rhetorical/ideological manoeuvre, but that still doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be taken seriously and examined on a case by case basis.
No doubt people in the US political elite realised some time back that supporting dictators and unpopular regimes at all costs for (cold war) strategic reasons could give rise to considerable blowback. And they also realised that there might be a way to allow pro-US states to transition to some form of controllable or limited representative democracy while still fulfilling US geostrategic aims. What’s interesting about looking at South Korea in 1987 is to see how uneven and contested this process was (and still is - just look at how reluctant the current administration was to allow elections in Iraq until forced to by Ayatollah Sistani). Clearly, back in June 87 there was considerable conflict going on within the Reagan administration over how to handle the Korea situation, and it seems that as with the Philippines the previous year, those who wanted to support the status quo were running the show until the very last minute.
Of course we have a wonderful illustration of ’selective democracy’ going on right now. See this brilliant analysis of what is happening in Palestine at the moment and the ‘Bay of Pigs’ style defeat the US has just suffered there. Obviously the results of Hamas’ victory are not all good, since Abbas has just added another coup to the list of recent US-backed coups and coup attempts (Venezuela 2002, Haiti 2004, Palestine 2007…).
