Den nordamerikanske filosof, samfundsanalytiker og latinamerikaelsker Noam Chomsky fortæller om sin nye bog ”Hopes and Prospects” i et interview med Keane Bhatt. U-landsnyt bringer et lille uddrag af interviewet.
NEW YORK, 19 November 2010: Keane Bhatt: Your new book “Hopes and Prospects” begins with the story of Haiti, and that’s what we discussed last, so it’s an appropriate place to start the interview. For hundreds of thousands of people, decent, hurricane-resistant housing is a chimera.
Despite the billions given to relief agencies, Carrefour camp-dwellers pay a monthly “tax” just to stay there; 1,3 million people are still internally displaced. An estimated 8.000 displaced persons have been forcibly evicted. If there were a functioning, democratic Haitian state, it could use eminent domain on behalf of the affected population to secure land for permanent housing.
But in the upcoming elections that the U.S. is financing, the largest political party, Fanmi Lavalas, has been excluded along with 13 others, and there hasn’t been a comprehensive initiative to provide internally displaced persons with the ID cards required to vote.
You’ve talked about the contempt for democracy shown before – funding [World Bank official and former Duvalier minister] Marc Bazin’s candidacy against Aristide in 1990, punishing Gaza for voting the wrong way, funding opposition parties throughout Latin America – but now it seems that pretenses for supporting even procedural democracy can be abandoned. The Honduran elections under the coup regime were accepted too. Are we seeing a new trend of greater brazenness and extremism?
Noam Chomsky: I think it’s always been true. Democracy is a danger to any powerful group. Take, say, the United States – formally maybe one of the most advanced democracies in the world. And one of the earliest, in fact – in the 18th century, it was way in the lead. The founding fathers were very concerned about the danger of democracy and spoke quite openly about the need to construct the democratic institutions so that threat would be contained. That’s why the Senate has so much more power than the House, to mention just one example.
KB: But it seems that in foreign policy, there used to be a greater tolerance of formal, procedural democracy. Now, as shown by Honduras and Haiti, there’s not even an effort to maintain the pretense.
NC: The scholarly literature is pretty straight on this. With regards to Latin America, but in general it’s true worldwide, the main scholarship on “democracy promotion” is by Thomas Carothers. He’s a neo-Reaganite, who believes that Reagan was kind of a Wilsonian trying to bring democracy, and he was in the State Department in the Reagan years working on democracy-enhancement programs.
KB: In “Failed States,” you mention seven solutions for dealing with international problems. The third one is, “Let the UN take the lead in international crises.” While I see the general wisdom in this, particularly with regard to Iraq and Iran, how does this apply to Haiti, which has been under UN MINUSTAH occupation since the 2004 coup?
NC: First of all, I was actually reporting public opinion there in those passages. Public opinion said, “We think the UN, not the U.S., should take the lead in international crises,” and I think there’s some legitimacy to that, but we have to recognize – and I probably discussed it in the same context – that the UN is not an independent agent. The UN is an agent of the states that constitute it, and more specifically, of the five veto-holding states in the Security Council, and even more specifically than that, of the United States.
The UN can go as far as the U.S. will allow, and no further. And it’s bound by conditions that the powerful states, which means mostly the U.S., impose. Haiti’s a case in point. But there are plenty of others. Take, say, the sanctions on Iraq under Clinton and until the invasion. They’re called UN sanctions and they were administered through the UN, but if you look at them more closely, it turns out they were U.S. sanctions. So yeah, the flaw you mention is right in here. But that’s inherent in the UN structure. I mean, the UN to some extent diffuses U.S. power. Therefore it’s less direct an agency of the United States than the U.S. Army is. But still, it can’t escape the distribution of power in the world.
