Democracy and free-market not linked (therefore bomb Iran)
Direland flags up a study in the forthcoming Foreign Affairs:
There's a preview of the article, by de Mesquita and Downs, in the International Herald Tribune. I'm not so sure about an unconditional thumbs-up, however. What de Mesquita and Downs present will be read as support for a neo-conservative argument: the free-market alone isn't enough: we have to reinforce its beneficial effects with deliberate "democratization", by force if needed. The happy way in which the authors throw Hugo Chavez in alongside Vladimir Putin is one indicator; but only by decoupling economic questions from the strictly political is it possible to confuse the two. Bat has more on democratic revolutions, over at Lenin's Tomb.
It's a finger in the eye for the likes of the Times' Tom Friedman and other prophets of the beneficial effects of globalization: a new study of 150 countries, to appear in the September-October issue of the archi-establishment journal Foreign Affairs (published by the Council on Foreign Relations), demonstrating how the conventional wisdom which says that free market economies inevitably bring democracy in their wake is a myth.
There's a preview of the article, by de Mesquita and Downs, in the International Herald Tribune. I'm not so sure about an unconditional thumbs-up, however. What de Mesquita and Downs present will be read as support for a neo-conservative argument: the free-market alone isn't enough: we have to reinforce its beneficial effects with deliberate "democratization", by force if needed. The happy way in which the authors throw Hugo Chavez in alongside Vladimir Putin is one indicator; but only by decoupling economic questions from the strictly political is it possible to confuse the two. Bat has more on democratic revolutions, over at Lenin's Tomb.
posted by Meaders at
3:22 pm
