Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Democracy promotion, Asian values and the 
‘clash of civilizations’
The last two decades have seen a revival of the politics of identity – but they
have also seen movements in the other direction, some of which will be
traced in Chapter 11. Under the influence of West Europeans and liberal
North Americans, a serious attempt has been made to strengthen the
international human rights regime, develop a doctrine of humanitarian
intervention, and, more generally, establish the individual as an interna-
tional actor and both the object and subject of international law. Needless
to say, this trend goes against much of what has been discussed above. In the
realm of religion both Islam and Christianity are, in principle, universal
movements, but in practice they oppose fully-developed notions of universal
rights because such notions usually involve legitimating practices that are
anathema to religious fundamentalists, such as abortion, gender equality
and the right to change religion. Nationalists begin from a perspective
The International Politics of Identity
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where individual rights are understood as generated by the group, which,
again, goes against the kind of universalism discussed in the next chapter.
There is a clear tension here, but whether it is made manifest has been a
matter of practical politics; in practice, the key issue has become whether
the West would attempt to generalize from its victory over communism and
promote its values on a global scale.
It is fair to say that in the early post-Cold War years, the answer to this
question was ‘no’. In the late 1980s and early 1990s some aid agencies
began to insist that aid recipients carried out reforms to promote human
rights and good government, Western-style, but this version of ‘conditional-
ity’ received little support from the US or the other major Western powers.
Indeed, when President George H. W. Bush attempted to promulgate a
‘New World Order’, pluralism was built into his thinking (Bush 1990). The
essence of the New World Order was to be: the sovereign state as the key
unit of international relations; respect for the norms of non-aggression and
non-intervention; and support for international law and institutions. This
is, in effect, the liberal internationalist position of the immediate post-First
World War era, restated for the post-Cold War world, but with one impor-
tant difference. In 1919, a crucial element of Wilson’s vision was that peace-
loving states would be liberal-democratic. Bush, on the other hand, offered
a New World Order in which all states of whatever political complexion
would receive the protection of the norms of non-intervention and non-
aggression if they were prepared themselves to endorse these norms. There
is no sense here that the US or any other state ought to engage in the
promotion of democratic politics, and neither is there any suggestion of an
elaborated doctrine of humanitarian intervention.
In any event, with the ambiguous end of the 1990/91 Gulf War – Kuwait
liberated, but Saddam still in power and massacring his own people – the
reaction of most commentators to Bush’s formula was, perhaps predictably,
somewhat jaundiced. ‘The New World gives the Orders’ was a characteristic
jibe – and it did indeed seem that the New World Order was simply a slogan
designed to give international legitimacy to US policy preferences. The
incoming Clinton Administration did not endorse Bush’s vision, but instead
promised to take the idea of ‘democracy promotion’ seriously. Anthony
Lake, Clinton’s leading foreign policy adviser seemed particularly taken
with the idea that ‘democracies do not fight democracies’ – the ‘Democratic
Peace’ thesis discussed above – and seemed to be looking forward to an era
in which the US would actively push to promote Western/American values
in the world, in particular, getting behind moves to strengthen the interna-
tional human rights regime. A major UN Conference was designed to do
just that in the Summer of 1993 in Vienna. But before this conference a
number of regional conferences were held, and from one of these the
Bangkok Declaration emerged, which expressed the desire of many Asian
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