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Following costly U.S. engagement in two wars in the Middle East, questions about the appropriateness of American military interventions dominate foreign policy debates. Is an interventionist foreign policy compatible with the American constitutional tradition? This book examines critic Irving Babbitt’s (1865–1933) unique contribution to understanding the quality of foreign policy leadership in a democracy. Babbitt explored how a democratic nation’s foreign policy is a product of the moral and cultural tendencies of the nation’s leaders, arguing that the substitution of expansive, sentimental Romanticism for the religious and ethical traditions of the West would lead to imperialism. The United States’ move away from the restraint and order of sound constitutionalism to involve itself in the affairs of other nations will inevitably cause a clash with the “civilizational” regions that have emerged in recent decades. Democracy and Imperialism uses the question of soul types to address issues of foreign policy leadership, and discusses the leadership qualities that are necessary for sound foreign policy.
“Uncompromising and unconventional . . . Cornel West is an eloquent prophet with attitude.” — Newsweek“ "A timely analysis about the current state of democratic systems in America." — The Boston Globe In Democracy Matters, Cornel West argues that if America is to become a better steward of democratization around the world, we must first wake up to the long history of corruption that has plagued our own democracy: racism, free market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and escalating authoritarianism. This impassioned and empowering call for the revitalization of America's democracy, by one of our most distinctive and compelling social critics, will reshape the raging national debate about America's role in today's troubled world.
Claims that liberalism tends to produce empires and empire kills or corrupts democracy in metropolitan "home" countries, using examples from British, French, and American imperial histories.
This volume assembles the main documents of the international debate on imperialism that took place in the Second International during the period 1898-1916. It asseses the contributions of the individual participants, placing them in the context of contemporary political debates.
Using an analysis of imperialism and case studies of Syria, Iran, Iraq, Bosnia, Russia and Ukraine, Global Democracy and the Crisis of Anti-Imperialism shows that the purported anti-imperialism of many self-professed socialists amounts to explicit or implicit support for totalitarianism, fascism, Islamist theocracy and imperialism. The analysis shows that the Russian revolution was followed by a counter-revolution, and resulted in state capitalism and the revival of Russian imperialism under cover of the Soviet Union. Thus the Cold War was actually a prolonged period of inter-imperialist rivalry between the United States and Russia. A large section of socialists who call themselves anti-imperialists oppose only Western imperialism and the despots it supports, not Russian imperialism and despots like Bashar al-Assad who are supported by it. As Russia has moved further and further to the right under Putin, they have effectively defected to the far right. They and other socialists also mistakenly believe that political democracy is organically connected to capitalism and therefore need not be defended, whereas, on the contrary, democracy is only established by mass struggles, and is an indispensable resource in the fight against exploitation and oppression. Finally, these socialists fail to understand that without internationalism, it is impossible to defeat global capitalism and its neoliberal policies. All the case studies in this book represent attempts to carry out democratic revolutions, which are supported by genuine socialist internationalists but opposed by pseudo-anti-imperialists. The book ends by suggesting steps that can be taken to promote democracy and end mass slaughter.
Over the last decade, political Islam has been denounced in the Western media and in the surrounding literature as a terrorist or fascist movement that is entirely at odds with Western democratic ideology. Kai Hafez's book overturns these arguments, contending that, despite its excesses, as a radical form of political opposition the movement plays a central role in the processes of democratization and modernization, and that these processes have direct parallels in the history and politics of the West. By analyzing the evolution of Christian democratization through the upheavals of the Reformation, colonisation, fascism, and totalitarianism, the book shows how radicalism and violence were constant accompaniments to political change, and that these components - despite assertions to the contrary - are still part of Western political culture to this day.
Freedom and Democracy in an Imperial Context: Dialogues with James Tully gathers leading thinkers from across the humanities and social sciences in a celebration of, and critical engagement with, the recent work of Canadian political philosopher James Tully. Over the past thirty years, James Tully has made key contributions to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including: interventions in the history of moral and political thought, contemporary political philosophy, democracy, citizenship, imperialism, recognition and cultural diversity. In 2008, he published Public Philosophy in a New Key, a two-volume work that promises to be one of the most influential and important statements of legal and political thought in recent history. This work, along with numerous other books and articles, is foundational to a distinctive school of political thought, influencing thinkers in fields as diverse as Anthropology, History, Indigenous Studies, Law, Philosophy and Political Science. Critically engaging with James Tully’s thought, the essays in this volume take up what is his central, and ever more pressing, question: how to enact democratic practices of freedom within and against historically sedimented and actually existing relationships of imperialism?
After Iraq traces Iraq's colonial history, Saddam Hussein's brutal rise to power and their relationship to Iraq's major oil reserves. Harding also explores the rise of Pax Americana and the worldwide military expansion of the US following Bush Junior's presidency. He exposes the stark challenges to international law, multi-lateralism, the UN and to the USA's neighbours and allies. Harding suggests there are frightening ramifications for the USA's own democracy lurking in the fundamentalist proposition that we must make a choice in a clash of civilizations. He emphasizes the need for concerted activism to challenge a US-dominated new world order.
This examination of the American national character provides a sobering look at the course foreign policy has taken since 9/11, revealing how the combination of two contradictory brands of nationalism have undermined American security and the war against terrorism.--Publisher's description.
“A brilliant, revisionist argument that places oil companies at the heart of 20th century history—and of the political and environmental crises we now face.” —Guardian Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy. Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called “the economy” and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order. In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.