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New Essay: The Forgotten U.N. Intervention to Build Democracy in Cambodia https://palladiummag.com/2021/01/20/the-forgotten-un-intervention-to-build-democracy-in-cambodia/
Or as I might have titled it: "The first failure of the liberal, rules-based order"
Or as I might have titled it: "The first failure of the liberal, rules-based order"
This essay is in part a review of @sstrangio's (newly revised!) book Cambodia: From the Khmer Rouge to Hun Sen and Beyond. You can buy that here: https://www.amazon.com/Hun-Sen-s-Cambodia-Sebastian-Strangio/dp/0300190727/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1483460845&sr=8-1&keywords=hun+sens+cambodia&linkCode=ll1&tag=theschssta-20&linkId=b70745d0a6a12e3494b25d774200b555
One of the underlying themes of Strangio's book is that the history of the post-cold war international order can be traced in Cambodia's journey through it. To foreign affairs circles today this is perhaps most obvious in Cambodia's status as a quasi-Chinese satrapy, an
indication perhaps of where the international order is headed. But it is even more true in Cambodia's early experience at the beginning of the post Cold War world.
Most of you know that the 1991 Gulf War was explicitly conceived as an attempt to use multilateral institutions to try and shape the contours and rules of the emerging post cold war order at its very birth. That was the martial side of the new liberal ethos. But it was not the
only attempt to define the new rules that year. Just as the international community had built a broad-based coalition to fight a war in Iraq, now a similar coalition would come together to end one in Cambodia.
In the UN resorted to military tools to stop Saddam from making an illiberal world, it would develop a new set of tools--the word "peacebuilding" was invented for this purpose--to create a liberal one. There testing spot was Cambodia. As I write in the essay:
The intervention was gigantic, multilateral endeavor:
But in terms of its original mission--creating a peaceful, human-rights respecting, democratic regime--it was a complete failure, a failure which in many ways presaged the failures America would later experience in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The essay narrates at some length why UNTAC and then later meddling attempts to liberalize Cambodia did not succeed. Towards the end I try to draw some more general lessons.
The central problem, I suggest, was a belief that liberalism was natural and democracy inevitable--history was the agent here, and belief in that agency stopped Western liberalizers from appreciating the true scale of the task before them and the commitments needed to meet it.
To this belief was added a poor sort of moralism. An illiberal Cambodia (and an illiberal Afghanistan, etc.) could not be accepted as a "normal country."
That was the bind: unwillingness to tolerate illiberalism and an unwillingness to shoulder the multi-decade burden of liberal state building.
Attempts to liberalize Cambodia were soon reduced to a charade, where Cambodian politicians pretended to be liberal and liberal donors pretended to believe them, because with the money they had spent they needed *something* to show for it.
The same process would be repeated in Iraq and especially Afghanistan. Had we been paying closer attention to the Cambodian experience perhaps we would not have tried to replicate it in the Middle East.
Read the full thing here: https://palladiummag.com/2021/01/20/the-forgotten-un-intervention-to-build-democracy-in-cambodia/
Read the full thing here: https://palladiummag.com/2021/01/20/the-forgotten-un-intervention-to-build-democracy-in-cambodia/
