Michael Mandelbaum, a leading authority on international affairs, was able to speak about foreign policy and democracy, as well as Comedy Central’s The Daily Show in the 2007 Benjamin A. Rogge Memorial Lecture.
The speech Mr. Mandelbaum gave last Friday was titled the same as his current book, Democracy’s Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World’s Most Popular Form of Government, his current best-seller.
Michael Mandelbaum said he believes Russia, China and the Arab world are areas where democracy could grow. But the Director of the American Foreign Policy Program at Johns Hopkins University thinks the Arab world and Iraq present the biggest challenges.
In the lecture, Mr. Mandelbaum said that America was a shining example to the rest of the world.
“Americans would practice and perfect their democracy and other people would be so attracted and so impressed by it,” Mandelbaum said, “that they would fashion democracies of their own.”
Recently, this country has tried tactically to try to do something about democracy. It has engaged in the active promotion of democratic government across the world – Iraq is, obviously, the current example. He said that he doubts America will be successful in bringing democracy to Iraq in the coming years.
“None of the recent attempts by the United States to bring democracy to other countries – Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo, and so forth, have succeeded,” Mandelbaum said. “None has come close to bringing a working democracy. After all, the United States stands at the height of its power. It is more powerful than any other country in the world, and, perhaps, more powerful than any other country has been in recorded history.”
Democracy is so much a part of our political vocabulary that we take it for granted, and we should not do so. Democracy represents the fusion of two distinct political traditions. Mandelbaum described this fusion as a hybrid two-part character, popular sovereignty and liberty. This hybrid character is the key to understanding the fate of democracy in the 21st Century. This is also the reason why America has had trouble in promoting democracy abroad. Elections can happen quickly, but liberty takes time.
He further said that the rule of law is “the essence of liberty and people must respect this.” Democracy is difficult to establish because it is impossible to establish by imposition alone. According to Mandelbaum, liberty has to be homegrown and it must be voluntarily adopted. Democracy can be imported, but it cannot be exported.
“Democracy is more like a tree – you can plant the seeds, you can water it and protect it from pests, but for a tree to grow it needs time,” Mandelbaum said. “Anyway, in order to flourish, a tree, like democracy, requires what outsiders simply can’t supply, in the case of a tree, proper climate and fertile soil.”
In Mandelbaum’s eyes, American democracy promotion efforts have failed because the United States has not succeeded in establishing liberty where it has sought to promote it because it is hard to do so in a small amount of time. This would seem to make democracy a rare and exotic thing, and that used to be the case, but not today. In 1900 there were ten, in 1950 there were 30, and in 1975 there were still 30, but in 2005, out of the world’s 190 countries, 119 could be counted as democracies.
“This happened because democracy became attractive to other countries because in the 1920s the richest and most powerful countries were all democracies,” Mandelbaum said. “The example of the United States and Great Britain helped to spread democracy because societies are a bit like individuals – they imitate what they observe and admire.”
Once the lecture ended there were over 20 minutes of questions that Mr. Mandelbaum eagerly answered. Attendees felt that this helped make the 2007 edition of the Rogge Memorial Lecture. One of those who attended the lecture, freshman Spencer Dawson, felt that the lecture was definitely a great experience.
“It opened my eyes to democracy and its implications on the world,” Dawson said. “The emphasis on democracy as a hybrid of popular sovereignty and liberty was interesting, the fact that without both of these two elements democracy can neither exist nor function properly or beneficially.”
Tony Neymeiyer ’09 felt that Mr. Mandelbaum’s execution to questions from the audience was quite notable.
“I thought the man was extremely intelligent and effective at explaining his points of view,” Neymeiyer said. “One thing I was most impressed about was how fast he formulated answers to the questions the audience asked him.”
Mr. Mandelbaum’s speech was not all about democracy, though. At the end of the lecture he spoke about his encounter with Jon Stewart on the multiple award-winning television program The Daily Show.
“The most attention I ever got was when I appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” Mandelbaum said. “The day I walked into class after that show, my students gave me a standing ovation. That had never happened before.”
The airing of that episode was in March of 2006 and later that fall, Mr. Mandelbaum gave an introductory talk at John Hopkins University in Washington to students who were interested in his field.
“At the end I asked if there were any questions and there was complete silence. Then one hand raised in the back and she stood up and asked me, ‘What was it like to meet Jon Stewart?’” I always say, ‘If you can’t be on Oprah, then the next best thing is to be on The Daily Show.’”