From: George Fujii <gfujii@umail.ucsb.edu>
SHAFR/H-Diplo Conference Report (Report #6)
2004 Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Conference,
University of Texas at Austin and the LBJ Library
Panel 9: American Foreign Policy and Failed States: Nation-Building in
Historical Perspective
Chair: Douglas Little (Clark University)
"State Building and Civilization: The Roosevelt Corollary as Prologue"
Cary Fraser, Pennsylvania State University
"Building Nations after Failure: The Philippines and Vietnam Compared"
Anne Foster, Indiana State University
"The Allied Occupation of Japan: A Successful Case of Nation-Building?"
Sayuri Shimuzi, Michigan State University
Commentary: Douglas Little
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SHAFR/H-DIPLO Commentary by Christian A. DesRoches, Concordia University,
Montreal, Canada
Conference participants who attended Panel 9, "American Foreign Policy
and
Failed States: Nation-Building in Historical Perspective," had reason to
expect
that the panel's theme would lend itself well to analogies with the Bush
Administration's current policies in the Middle East. As it turns out, the urge
to compare the United States's past nation-building efforts with contemporary
events in the Middle East proved irresistible and constituted the unifying
theme of all three presentations and the ensuing discussion.
Cary Fraser opened the panel by discussing Francis Fukuyama's recent article
on
nation-building, which contends that "the chief threats to [the United
States]
and to world order come today from weak, collapsed, or failed states."
Echoing
President George W. Bush's transformation from a presidential candidate opposed
to nation-building into a president "committed to writing the history of
an
entire troubled part of the world," Fukuyama insists that America's security
in
the post-9/11 world rests on its "ability not just to win wars but to help
create self-sustaining democratic political institutions and robust
market-oriented economies, and not only in [Afghanistan and Iraq] but
throughout the Middle East." [1]
But concern over "failed states" and "nation-building"
is not an entirely novel
historical phenomenon. In fact, as Professor Fraser reminds us, Fukuyama has
touched a theme that came to full flower in the early years of the twentieth
century with the Roosevelt Corollary. Proclaimed in 1904, President Theodore
Roosevelt's Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine placed the United States in the
role of the Western Hemisphere's policeman, with responsibility to foster
regional stability and make sure that Latin American countries honored their
financial obligations. Professor Fraser suggested that the Roosevelt Corollary
was an early attempt at state-building. His paper compared the rhetoric and
policies of Theodore Roosevelt with George W. Bush's justification for waging
a
preemptive war against Iraq.
Theodore Roosevelt's state-building policies may have been implemented under
the
shadow of a big stick, but TR nonetheless assumed that the interests of the
United States were virtually identical to those of its southern neighbors. In
this respect, the Bush Administration's "liberation" of Iraq in the
name of
freedom and democracy is not dissimilar to Roosevelt's aim of fostering trade
and stability in Latin America. Professor Fraser pointed out that both the
twenty-sixth and forty-forth presidents justified their policies in the name
of
"civilization." But, he asked, does the United States itself measure
up to
standards of civilized conduct it claims to promote?
To be sure, "state-building with a big stick" had portentous implications
for
Latin America, leading to U.S. interventions in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and
the
Dominican Republic. But Theodore Roosevelt was above all a dedicated
internationalist who strove to build a coherent international system based on
the rule of law. On the other hand, the Bush Administration, alleged Professor
Fraser, has broken with the spirit of the Roosevelt Corollary and TR's plan
for
world cooperation. The invasion of Iraq was ordered without the support of the
United Nations and with little legitimacy or standing in international law.
In
fact, the Bush Administration, Fraser contends, has acted as "an outlaw
regime."
Fraser does not interpret the Bush Administration's policies as
neo-isolationist. Rather, he sees the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation
of Iraq as evidence of an imperial design that marks a sharp break with the
United States's long tradition of internationalism in the twentieth century.
This tradition began with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who both
sought to engage the world, not to isolate the United States from it. The Bush
Administration, argued Fraser, has instead embraced another tradition, one that
has a long pedigree and that is closer to the disastrous schemes of King
Leopold in the Congo and the Germans in South-West Africa. The detentions at
Guantanamo and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal have underscored the grave human
rights implications of the Bush Administration's imperial project.
Anne Foster, the second presenter on the panel, also used Fukuyama as a starting
point. According to her, Fukuyama is good at identifying the problem, but he
provides the wrong answers. The major flaw in his argument is that he confuses
"nation-building" and "state-building." The latter, while
still a difficult
undertaking, can be accomplished by an occupying power. But it is almost
impossible for an occupier to achieve the former. In her paper, Foster examines
two U.S. attempts at "nation-building" in Asia, looking first at the
occupation
of the Philippines in the early twentieth century and then Vietnam in the early
1960s.
By 1900, the United States had begun to envision colonial rule over the
Philippines. To protect the local population from insurgents, the United States
encouraged the establishment of an indigenous police force, but early on it
became obvious that the poorly paid forces were plagued by inefficiency and
corruption. By 1904, an internal U.S. report described the indigenous force
as
"useless" and "worthless." This led U.S. occupation authorities
to establish a
national police force whose main goals were to maintain peace and order and
prevent crime. But, as it turned out, the bulk of the new national police
force's efforts was directed at fighting political insurgents, leaving
Filipinos with few resources to fight everyday crime.
The second case study examined by Professor Foster is the Republic of South
Vietnam's Strategic Hamlet Program (SHP), implemented by President Ngo Dinh
Diem and supported by the Kennedy Administration between 1961 and 1963. The
SHP
was a counterinsurgency plan that sought to maintain order and bolster support
for Diem's regime in rural areas. Diem and his American backers sincerely
believed that the SHP, which was crafted as a plan for modernization and
nation-building, would thwart communist insurgents and foster support for the
regime. But widespread corruption and lack of support among villagers made its
success unlikely. In fact, Professor Foster emphasized, the peasantry's
sympathy for the communist insurgents and its distrust of local administrators
made its success virtually impossible.
While she acknowledges this is hardly "an apple to apple comparison,"
Professor
Foster maintains that these two case studies provide important lessons for U.S.
policymakers. Her analysis suggests that U.S. concern with security has been
dealt with ineffectively in the past and that security and stability are
impossible to achieve without a clearly articulated strategy that also promotes
development. The failure to achieve quick success and the persistence of
conflict led the United States to support a militarized and coercive approach
to nation-building.
The Allied occupation of Japan in the aftermath of World War II was the focus
of
the third paper on the panel. Sayuri Shimizu, an Assistant Professor of History
at Michigan State University, began by addressing the Bush Administration's
comparison between postwar planning in Iraq and the U.S. occupation of Japan.
She pointed out that M.I.T. historian John W. Dower already expressed a number
of strong reservations about such an analogy in the months preceding Operation
Iraqi Freedom.[2] Dower argued that the U.S. occupation in Japan was different
from the situation in Iraq on at least four counts. First, the legitimacy of
the American occupation of Japan was never in doubt. The emperor supported
Japan's formal surrender, and the occupation enjoyed moral and legal legitimacy
among Japan's population and the neighboring countries. Second, the local
conditions in Japan were exceptionally favorable for nation-building: there
was
no armed resistance, no tribal animosities and the population as a whole
enjoyed high literacy and training. Third, the United States was ready for such
an undertaking, as U.S. war planners had been working on occupation plans since
1942. Fourth, there is no oil in Japan.
Professor Shimizu pointed out that the U.S. occupation authorities implemented
a
number of far-reaching New Deal-type policies in Japan before cold war
orthodoxies began to set in, including major police and land reforms (most
notably the abolition of absentee ownership), strong labor laws, a progressive
constitution, and an overhauled civil code. These were all examples of
fundamentally effective and well-intentioned policies of state-building.
Yet, as she reminds us, some of these democratic and reformist ideas had strong
indigenous roots in Japanese society. In the years preceding the war, a number
of progressive reforms were advocated and, in some cases, implemented at the
national level. A number of Japanese historians protest the notion, or myth,
that the U.S. occupation remade Japan into a modern nation, especially with
respect to gender issues, female suffrage and economic modernization. Shimizu
emphasized that U.S. occupation authorities did not create these precedents
out
of thin air; indeed, the work of prewar reformers in Japanese society provided
the foundation for these policies. This perspective should cause current U.S.
leaders to temper their belief in empire as an agent of liberation and
rehabilitation.
Her work critically reassesses the myth according to which the United States
is
the benevolent liberator and modernizer of Japan. American historians have paid
scant attention to the adverse impacts of postwar reconstruction of Japanese
society. The liquidation of the Japanese empire, argued Shimizu, led to the
establishment of officially sanctioned legal and political discrimination
against Japan's former colonial subjects by depriving them of citizenship and
the right to compensation. It may have been easier to build a nation with an
ethnically homogeneous population but in process other groups were brushed out,
including thousands of Korean immigrants.
Commenting on Professor Fraser's paper, Douglas Little remarked that George
W.
Bush's unilateralism, like Theodore Roosevelt's, is mainly directed at Western
Europe. He suggested that the Bush Administration and its supporters should
not
only read Fukuyama, but Benedict Anderson and Michael Ignatieff as well, for
these authors convincingly demonstrate that nations cannot merely be built
using military might alone. Professor Little then turned to Professor Foster's
paper, which he praised for highlighting the perplexing quandary that plagued
U.S. nation-building efforts in both the Philippines and Vietnam: in order to
achieve success at modernization and nation-building, the United States had
to
rely on indigenous forces. Unfortunately for U.S. policymakers, these groups
often had interests that were different from those pursued by American foreign
policy.
Professor Little expressed considerable alarm at the Bush Administration's
foreign policy and wondered whether it had not learned the wrong lessons from
the United States's previous attempts at state- and nation-building. He cited
a
recently published book by James Dobbins, a RAND Corporation scholar who is
reputedly close to the Administration, which examines America's role in
nation-building from Germany to Iraq.[3] Professor Little clearly voiced his
skepticism about the Bush Administration's willingness to accept the
consequences of democracy in Iraq.
A number of interesting points were raised during the discussion period. Two
questions addressed Professor Fraser's reliance on Theodore Roosevelt's
rhetoric as source material; Fraser described TR's public pronouncements as
"imperialistic" in nature but countered that his policies were essentially
pragmatic in deed. One audience member asked Professor Shimizu if she thought
that Japanese feminists would have been able to implement these reforms without
U.S. support. She expressed doubt that this could have been achieved in the
short term but emphasized that much of the impetus for the reforms did come
nevertheless from the Japanese reformist tradition. A great deal of the
discussion revolved around notions of state- and nation-building, and whether
the German and Japanese examples were applicable to Asia and the Middle East.
While one doubts that anyone from the Bush Administration was listening, this
panel provided a fascinating opportunity to examine "failed states"
and
"nation-building" according to a historical perspective.
Christian A. DesRoches
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
ca_desro@alcor.concordia.ca
For a complete listing of all sessions at SHAFR 2004, the conference
program may be viewed at http://www.utexas.edu/cola/shafr/program/.
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Copyright (c) 2004 by H-Diplo, all rights reserved. For any proposed
use, contact the H-Diplo Editors at h-diplo@h-net.msu.edu or the
H-Diplo article discussion coordinator, George Fujii, at
gfujii@umail.ucsb.edu.
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