DaCuBaN
31st July 2004, 15:38
Extracted from Geo-graphing Uzbek & U.S. Fundamentalism By Chris Seiple April 6, 2004
Americans' democratic fundamentalism ignores hard power. And, worse, it also ignores regional and cultural realities, benevolently if naively seeking to help people around the world understand an American conception of universal human rights. Read almost any American document, governmental or non-governmental, from the 1990s regarding the development of "civil society" in Central Asia, and you detect a cookie-cutter, regional approach where civil society is thought of as simply having more NGOs. Country-specific approaches have been too infrequent. In the case of Uzbekistan, there has been little acknowledgement of the tolerant and community-based Uzbek society that already existed.
Another example is religious freedom. Americans pay lip service to it but don't know how to operationalize it, except to threaten sanctions. We punish because we do not know how to promote. Americans are just not good at finding, and enabling, culturally congruent forms of universal values, and this has been a detriment to the U.S.-Uzbek relationship. The sad irony is that a "democratic fundamentalist" approach to values endangers both our values and interests.
These failings are not helped by our current credibility gap, as my Internet-reading class at UWED reminded me. This class wanted to know why America lied about the WMD in Iraq; why we hold almost 600 people at Guantanamo; and why we are not even-handed in our approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These observations were not made against the U.S.; they were earnest and articulate attempts by future leaders to understand the inconsistencies of American foreign policy. Where is the value in American values if they amount to just another fundamentalism? Worse, why bother if values apparently give way to "hard power" whenever push comes to shove?
Full Article (http://www.globalengagement.org/issues/2004/04/geographing.htm)
I thought some of you might enjoy this article. It's quite biased in favour of the US for this site, but it's an interesting concept nonetheless.
Americans' democratic fundamentalism ignores hard power. And, worse, it also ignores regional and cultural realities, benevolently if naively seeking to help people around the world understand an American conception of universal human rights. Read almost any American document, governmental or non-governmental, from the 1990s regarding the development of "civil society" in Central Asia, and you detect a cookie-cutter, regional approach where civil society is thought of as simply having more NGOs. Country-specific approaches have been too infrequent. In the case of Uzbekistan, there has been little acknowledgement of the tolerant and community-based Uzbek society that already existed.
Another example is religious freedom. Americans pay lip service to it but don't know how to operationalize it, except to threaten sanctions. We punish because we do not know how to promote. Americans are just not good at finding, and enabling, culturally congruent forms of universal values, and this has been a detriment to the U.S.-Uzbek relationship. The sad irony is that a "democratic fundamentalist" approach to values endangers both our values and interests.
These failings are not helped by our current credibility gap, as my Internet-reading class at UWED reminded me. This class wanted to know why America lied about the WMD in Iraq; why we hold almost 600 people at Guantanamo; and why we are not even-handed in our approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These observations were not made against the U.S.; they were earnest and articulate attempts by future leaders to understand the inconsistencies of American foreign policy. Where is the value in American values if they amount to just another fundamentalism? Worse, why bother if values apparently give way to "hard power" whenever push comes to shove?
Full Article (http://www.globalengagement.org/issues/2004/04/geographing.htm)
I thought some of you might enjoy this article. It's quite biased in favour of the US for this site, but it's an interesting concept nonetheless.