In Russia the popular revulsion against war has become so great that Gorbachev promised that Russian troops would never be used again outside the country without the permission of the legislature. This is a pledge that no American president has been willing to make although I, for one, believe he should.
Regrettably, while there has been a decline in chauvinism in some parts of the world, it is definitely on the rise in Central and Eastern Europe. This is likely to trigger repeated conflict, but unless the great powers become involved, it should not cause a conflagration. Conflicts there will trouble the world’s conscience but if the great powers intervene, they are likely to do this rarely, preferring to sequester conflicts and to allow local hatreds to burn themselves out. One reason for this impulse toward nonintervention will be that the old geopolitical calculus will no longer hold. A shift of authority in Slovakia may trouble Hungary but it will not greatly concern the major powers, which understand that their place in the new international order will be affected more by economic developments at home and internationally than by diplomatic shifts in the Balkans.
Affecting this reluctance to intervene is a rise in the level of political consciousness around the world. Something very profound is happening in the political culture of both democracies and nondemocracies. Ordinary people are progressively being brought into the decision-making circle on foreign issues. Modern communications have given them a tool that greatly enhances their power. Indeed, television empowers people who might never have chosen on their own to become involved. Visual coverage of wars or famines spills into the living rooms of average Americans, creating interest and concern where decades earlier there would have only been policy silence. Our leaders hate this intrusion into the privileged realm of policy, but there is little they can do about it.
We are not simply talking about television. We are also talking about the cassette recorder, the computer, the fax and the camcorder, which permit ordinary citizens to contest the state’s monopoly of information and its ability to determine an official version of events. Evidence of the importance of these new tools is present everywhere. In Los Angeles, Afro-Americans have been able to document long-standing charges of police brutality by using a camcorder to film a group of policemen brutally beating a hapless black man. In Mexico, grass roots groups used computers to prove after the earthquake that the government had large numbers of uninhabited apartments it could provide to the homeless. In Brazil, protesters used the fax and computer to alert the world to the assassination of environmental activist Chico Mendes.
So long as illiteracy or control of communications allowed those in power to keep the majority of the population politically inert, leaders could decide independently the issues of peace and war with little political cost to themselves. They did not fight the wars and if the decision to go to war was wrong, they did not suffer unless the defeat was total. Kings or presidents in victory or defeat usually returned to their castles or mansions.
Once knowledge is available, an element of accountability is introduced. The head of state may be weakened or even driven from power if he makes the wrong decision. Both Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Milhouse Nixon can attest to that democratic reality. Of course, even in democracies, for some time people have accepted the undemocratic idea that foreign affairs is an area of public policy where the ordinary rules of democratic rule and accountability should not apply. Secrecy and executive branch control are deemed so essential to the conduct of a successful foreign policy that democratic principles and practice are often pushed aside. But that mood is also changing. The line between domestic and foreign policy is being erased and ordinary people are insisting that they have a voice in the foreign affairs of state.
In this regard the end of the cold war will deprive governments of another tool that they have used to control political debate. This is the sense of permanent crisis that has controlled and distorted our politics for much of the postwar period. Fear of a surprise nuclear attack and of Communist subversion persuaded people in the United States that the executive branch should be accorded extraordinary powers: a tight circle of secrecy, which made it difficult to determine who was accountable for decisions taken; covert tools, which were not exposed to criticism or the restraints of law; and the right of the executive to act alone in using military force, which limited democratic debate. With the end of the cold war, there should be a steady decline in this sense of permanent crisis. The need for secrecy and covert action should continue to decline. In short, there should be more opportunity for greater democratic control of foreign policy.
Of course, greater popular participation in foreign policy can also drive governments to take actions they might otherwise avoid. It is difficult to believe that the United States would have sent troops to Somalia during the cold war. Now public opinion or at least pundit opinion has driven policymakers to select a military option. Nonetheless, the congressional debate over U.S. entry into the Gulf War was a harbinger of the future.
Of course, the security situation of each country is different. But even in nondemocratic states, similar forces are having some impact on policy. How else do we explain the challenge to authority in both the Soviet Union and China in recent years? As Fred Starr, an American scholar of the Soviet Union, has pointed out about the Soviet Union, when Stalin was conducting the purges, only 10 percent of the Soviet population had a 10th grade education or more. By the time Khrushchev was dominating the world stage and instituting important reforms, that percentage had risen to 32 percent. By the time that Gorbachev had gained power, the figure was close to 90 percent.
Or we can look at the Chinese population which is much less educated than the Soviet one. Yet the degree of outside penetration has increased enormously and urbanization has increased significantly. As John Fincher, an American scholar of China, has pointed out, in 1982 the Chinese census estimated that the urban population was 20 percent. By 1987 the state statistical services, reexamining the data, placed the figure at 40 percent, and it is growing. The change has profound implications for the people in power. Urban populations are more difficult to control ideologically. Information moves more easily than in the countryside. There is more contact with foreigners. And groups of opposition can mobilize quickly against the people in power. In short, governments have to be more concerned about the opinions of urban populations.
We must be clearheaded about these changes. There is nothing that guarantees that every society will become a model democracy. Nor is there anything that guarantees that the democracies that exist will not regress diplomatically, economically, or politically. History is not fixed in its course. But all over the world the nature of the relationship between governor and governed is changing because of the developments mentioned. It will be harder and harder for the old methods to work. People will resist leaders who try to use them.