After War

Tyler Cowen directs my attention to Chris Coynes' new book After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy. The prognosis isn't good:

What do the data indicate regarding the effectiveness of reconstruction as a means of achieving liberal democracy? In short, the historical record indicates that efforts to export liberal democracy at gunpoint are more likely to fail than succeed. Of the twenty-five reconstruction efforts, where five years have passed since the end of occupation, seven have achieved the stated benchmark, resulting in a 28 percent success rate. The rate of success stays the same for those cases where ten years have passed. For those efforts where at least fifteen years have passed, nine out of twenty-three have achieved the benchmark for success, resulting in a 39 percent success rate. Finally, of the twenty-two reconstruction efforts where twenty years have passed since the exit of occupiers eight have reached the benchmark, resulting in a 36 percent success rate.

It's worth saying, of course, that you're unlikely to ever find the United States actually invading other countries in order to turn them into democracies. Rather, it so happens to be the case that pretty much all of the good candidates for "enemy" status are dubiously democratic regimes, so that rhetorical invocation of democratic values becomes an attractive strategy. The poor record, in practice, of armed democratization is just a further reason to think that such rhetoric should be basically ignored. Sometimes situations may arise where using military force to topple a foreign government is the right thing to do (Germany during World War II and Afghanistan after 9/11 come to mind) and then I think we have an obligation to do our best to bequeath a decent new regime to the place we've conquered. But the prospects for success aren't nearly good enough to make this the reason for launching a war.

Comments

Oh, that's not fair -- there's a *chance* we'll get democracy back after the Bush-Cheney Administration leaves office, but then again, it'd be silly to think that those guys were *trying* to make America have any democratic features. (/sarcasm)

Snark aside, I wonder if there's any research about the impact of such attempts to export democracy on the exporting country (e.g., will America suffer for trying to export democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan? The slaughter we're engaging in as counter-insurgency probably isn't impressing many people with our commitment to anything good, and doesn't seem to be making us that much better-off at home, in real or civic terms).

Posted by Chris | November 1, 2007 6:47 PM

Your readers may be interested in the forum we'll be hosting for the book on the 26th:

http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=4115

Posted by Justin | November 1, 2007 6:47 PM

Sometimes situations may arise where using military force to topple a foreign government is the right thing to do (Germany during World War II and Afghanistan after 9/11 come to mind) and then I think we have an obligation to do our best to bequeath a decent new regime to the place we've conquered. But the prospects for success aren't nearly good enough to make this the reason for launching a war.

I have to admit being a little mystified by the last sentence. My impression was that this blog simply opposed wars of choice, and not for statistical reasons . . . By your lights, Matt, there's no acceptable reason for launching a war, right?

Posted by southpaw | November 1, 2007 7:46 PM

In fact, there is no acceptable reason for "launching", i.e., initiating, a war.

There are acceptable reasons for RESPONDING to someone else's attempt to initiate a war on one's country. That's it.

And Matt is wrong about Afghanistan. There was no acceptable reason for overthrowing the Taliban. Getting bin Laden was not an acceptable reason since it could have been done with much less effort and a much better outcome than destabilizing Afghanistan, then losing the subsequent insurgency as we are now doing, getting the heroin trade back in business, and destabilizing Pakistan - a country with nukes - to boot.

We did all this to "overthrow the Taliban"? Why?

Do we HAVE bin Laden? Is Al Qaeda out of business?

No.

So what was the reason again?

Oh, right...good intentions...

Sure. Tell me another.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | November 1, 2007 11:42 PM

As far as I can see, by the standard used in the book, Rwanda ought to be considered a success for nonintervention. This suggests to me that there is something wrong with the standard.

Posted by dsquared | November 2, 2007 4:07 AM

Rather, it so happens to be the case that pretty much all of the good candidates for "enemy" status are dubiously democratic regimes, so that rhetorical invocation of democratic values becomes an attractive strategy.
Agreed, and because of that, the numbers are actually way too low for _serious_ efforts to enforce democracy. Of course that takes us back to the difficult task of determining the seriousness of democratisation rhetoric, which in turn renders the statistical argument moot.

Posted by markus | November 2, 2007 5:36 AM

Is 28% really such a bad figure? As noted the countries we invade tend to be ones that have horrible governments going in. What would be the percentage of governments that we might invade but choose not to which then have democratic governments in 5 years, 10 years etc.

I think the difficult problem with the comparison is knowing when to start counting our non-invasions. But without a control group these statistics don't seem that useful.

Posted by Lon | November 2, 2007 9:37 AM

"As far as I can see, by the standard used in the book, Rwanda ought to be considered a success for nonintervention. This suggests to me that there is something wrong with the standard.

Posted by dsquared | November 2, 2007 4:07 AM"

Oh come on. Do you even get what the point of the argument is? The argument is about the empirical historical lack of success of outside armed intervention leading to democracy. If an invasion somewhere sometime in the future is likely to backfire, saying "well, we didn't invade Rwanda" is not an argument for such an invasion.

"Is 28% really such a bad figure?"

If you're a NL pitcher and you bat .280, that's great. When it's the success rate of a type of major policy, it's pathetic.

Posted by Reality Man | November 2, 2007 11:55 AM

RM, my point is that the book actually overestimates the success rate of intervention - most of the "success" stories are actually failures because the number of people who died as a result of the war.

Posted by dsquared | November 2, 2007 9:22 PM