Deterring Democracy (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 173 Deterring Democracy. By Noam Chomsky. New York: Verso, 1991. $29.95/ Hardcover. Reviewed by Sayres S. Rudy, MA., SAIS. Noam Chomsky's latest book, Deterring Democracy, is an exhaustively researched , impassioned and reasoned analysis of American foreign policy. It defies dismissal. Chomsky argues that the United States historically has pursued "stability" instead of "democracy" overseas while claiming to pursue both. These two pursuits, Chomsky asserts, are incompatible because democratic history is an unstable terrain, a dialectical process wherein laboring classes (peasants, urban proletarians, trade unions) struggle against repressive regimes (corporate, military and political elites). In the midst of these inevitable conflicts and in an age ofcapital-intensive modernization, urbanization and surplus labor, twentiethcentury American foreign policy has been made. The U.S. Government, Chomsky persuasively argues, is ruled—albeit democratically—by a politico-corporate elite that has consistently sided with repressive regimes in the developing world, whose "assigned 'function' . . . has been to serve the needs of the industrial West." American business elites have demanded access to overseas markets, cheap labor and primary resources which repressive governments have been willing to exploit for a price. That price has been American financial, military and diplomatic support for regimes which in turn stifle democratic reform movements through violence, coercion, death-squad killings and widespread jailings. Chomsky further suggests that the United States has perpetuated an ideological system that masks these practices because they are morally reprehensible . The press, he shows, serves the corporate-governmental elite by defending and disguising U.S. Governmental hostility towards the political and economic freedom oflaboring classes throughout the world. Chomsky addresses in detail the press's ideological commitment to the state's exceptionalism and "democratic mission." Chomsky establishes, therefore, that the United States has deliberately fought against democratic, progressive movements in order to pursue its coercive, capitalist interests. Herein lies the so-called radicalism of his work: Chomsky's critique is systemic. As a system, Chomsky claims, American elitist capitalism has perpetuated lies, wars, massacres and popular deception in the name of "national interests." What the United States actually wants are open markets and impunity to abuse foreign labor and resources for profit. "Population control," he states, is the means to this end in "friendly" countries; "terrorist attacks," "economic strangulation" and all-out war are the methods employed against "unfriendly" regimes. The "friendliness" of the regime, of course, is defined by the extent to which it submits to American coercion and exploitation. In this situation, Chomsky believes, "the removal of the limited Soviet deterrent frees the United States in the exercise of violence." Even more ambitiously, Chomsky attacks the orthodoxy—so prevalent now in the "post-historical" phase of history—that capitalism is the highest stage of 174 SAISREVIEW economic development. Critiquing the mystification offree-market economics as extolled by the U.S. Government and press, Chomsky demonstrates the terrible human costs of "economic liberalization" to the working and peasant classes. Drawing on case studies of Africa, Latin America, Asia and South America Chomsky shows that "policies [of] the Western powers . . . are guided by the selfinterest of those who hold the reins, not by any solid understanding of the economics of development or any serious concern for the human impact of these decisions." In this analysis Chomsky describes all states as "two-tiered" systems consisting ofone class ruling oppressively, the other toiling hopelessly. Chomsky uses a dualistic approach because he seeks to prove that the ruling class in the United States is establishing an oligarchic network—a supranational ruling class—throughout the world to secure mutual, elite interests. Here, though, Chomsky unnecessarily overdraws his case, resorting to a vulgar Marxian conceptualization ofstates that renders his work heavily polemical. The complexity of bureaucratic states precludes a binary class analysis, though it does not obviate a structuralist approach to U.S. foreign policy. In Brazil, Egypt, the Philippines and elsewhere poverty exists on a vast scale but at the same time a large, state-supported middle class prevails outside the two-tier society Chomsky describes, calling into question aspects of his thesis. Chomsky also oversimplifies the role of democracy in development. While he blames Brazil's economic failure on the overthrow of democracy twenty-five years ago...