For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And our next guest on the show today is James L. Payne, and he taught political science at Yale and at Wesleyan, Johns Hopkins University, and at Texas A&M.
And I'm looking at an essay that he did called, Did the United States Create Democracy in Germany?
That ran in the Independent Review back in the fall of 2006.
So there's the article we're referring to for everybody who wants to Google that up.
Welcome to the show, James.
How are you doing?
Fine.
Good to meet you, Scott.
Likewise.
Thank you very much for joining us on the show today.
Yes.
So this is a very interesting topic to me, I guess because I was trying to think back, trace it back.
When I was a little kid, I remember my mom explaining how she lived in Japan for a few years when she was a little girl.
And I thought, well, why was that?
And, oh, that was because there was a giant world war, and America, unlike all the rest of the evil empires throughout history, instead of just conquering our enemies, we rebuilt them and made them our friends.
And that was the reason she was there, because her father was stationed there in the U.S. Air Force.
And so this is one of the very first things, I guess, I ever learned about wars in American foreign policy is that the U.S. is different and that at the end of the Second World War, we did ride by our enemies.
Unlike the Treaty of Versailles, we rebuilt Germany and the Marshall Plan and all these things.
There's a whole myth that everybody believes in.
And you've got this great article deconstructing this.
So I guess there were different plans about what to do with Germany once the surrender was made.
So let's start with that.
Scott, let's put it in a larger context.
The reason why the Germany issue is interesting and important is that it is used as an example today for why the United States should go about invading and occupying other countries, the idea being that, well, see, we did it in Germany.
We set up a democracy that's functioned, and therefore we know how to do it.
And it's possible to do more or less anywhere.
And this thinking was very strongly behind the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq.
Absolutely.
And it remains the, well, World War II in general remains the model.
But certainly the occupation, Japan and Germany were cited over and over again in 2002 and 2003 for, don't worry, this is going to go swimmingly.
People love it when we invade them.
It'll be like when we liberated Paris.
Right.
And also not just the politicians.
There's quite a number of scholars in a field called nation-building and democratic development that have also bought into this, that somehow we did something right in Germany and Japan, and therefore we can do it again.
And so, yes, I looked into this.
Before we get to that, though, I did another study that's also in the Independent Review called Does Nation-Building Work?
And the United States has sent troops to many different countries and occupied them, especially in Latin America with Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, and so forth.
And they have a strong experience of American interventions.
And also Britain has done this, of course, with their colonialism and trying to produce self-government in many other countries through occupation and so forth.
So for me it was important to get the overall kind of statistical picture of how often does it happen that after you invade an occupied country and try to set up democracy, how often do you actually get democracy out of that?
And I found 51 cases where the United States and Great Britain had been in countries, and it includes Germany and so forth, but many others.
Cuba, I say, and Nicaragua.
And out of those 51 cases, only 27% of them did you get a democracy at the end.
Did you measure how many of them they really meant it at all?
I mean, this question even comes up in your article about Germany here, as to whether they wanted to create a democracy in Germany or whether it happened in spite of the Americans.
Well, that, yes, we can get to that.
It's like calling Karzai a democracy in Afghanistan in a way, right?
It's just PR for the rubes back home.
Well, whatever.
But they're saying they're trying to do it, or they're hoping it's happening.
There are other interventions that I don't count where you had no interest.
You were just, for instance, back many years ago, say you were trying to punish Morocco for harboring pirates, that kind of thing.
So those don't count as attempted nation-building.
But the ones I have— You're holding them to their own standard of what they claim they're trying to do anyway.
Yes.
Yeah, that's fair enough, sure.
And so anyway, in general, in other words, the record is very discouraging on whether after you invade a country you get a democracy out of it, even when you've meddled and messed around in their politics and had hopes for good things coming out of it.
So this is what led me to Germany.
I said here was supposed to be a case of supreme success.
And what did they do here?
And it turns out this has not been studied.
And the modern people of scholars and so forth that talk about nation-building haven't seemed to bother to go back and see actually what was happening.
And yes, as you mentioned, the first point is that at first, this was the first couple of years, we were so mad at Germany as being our enemy in the war that we wanted to hurt it.
And our policy, the official policy was, Franklin Roosevelt said, I want to keep Germany on a breadline for 25 years.
And our policy, official policy, was to hold the economy back, to restrict production, not to give Germans food when they were starving, for example.
Cases of where you had like cocoa that troops couldn't drink, you poured it in the gutter.
That's your instruction.
And the hungry Germans, they were really starving at this time, were looking on and of course it created a certain amount of resentment and so forth.
So on the economic thing, our policies were not to try to help them economically, which of course would be the foundation of any kind of democracy.
It was to further punish them.
And then we had this policy of non-fraternization.
You weren't supposed to talk to them, converse with them.
You weren't supposed to play games with them.
If you went to a church where Germans were also in the church, you had to sit in separate queues.
It was all, I'd say, very...
And this policy, by the way, it was seriously enforced.
They arrested over a thousand Americans, soldiers and so forth over there, for violating this policy of non-fraternization, for being friendly to Germans.
You weren't supposed to be friendly to them.
Well, and even worse, he's saying here that they had a policy, and this is just perfect Democratic Party thinking here, I guess, tear down all their factories and then give them a bunch of American tax money as aid, even though, I guess, you're saying at the same time, they're still keeping them off the bread line.
They're not even giving them food aid.
Sure.
Well, it's how government, government has left hand doesn't know what the right hand does.
Actually, what you're referring to mainly is, after two years, what happened, see, we had the Soviet Union to contend with, and communism and the worldwide threat of communism and so forth started entering into our thinking.
And this changed our policies more than anything.
It wasn't that we, you know, wanted to be nice to Germany particularly, but we saw we'd have to decide, did we want Germany as an enemy or an ally in this war with the Soviet Union?
So this caused us to gradually abandon various of these punitive policies.
And it led, among other things, to the Marshall Plan, which got announced in 1948, which was a plan of aid to actually all of Europe.
And the theory of the Marshall Plan, and this has kind of gone down in history that Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe.
I think there's no evidence for that, and actually a lot of evidence that shows it didn't have any effect at all.
In the case of Germany, the Marshall Plan funds were half the level that they were even in France and England, and I don't think it had very much positive effect there.
Well, I think you say in the article it was only $1.2 billion, but that was in 1948 dollars, so how much would that translate into, do you think?
Oh, you could probably multiply it by about ten.
Still pretty small.
Again, the dollars don't matter, but I think it was $24 per capita for the Germans, is what the aid.
But you've got to understand, this aid, when you give foreign aid, and people really in the know here understand this now, the aid really goes to very unhelpful things.
It follows political channels.
So it goes to some ministry of this or that, and it's used to pad their payroll and pretend to do things that sound good and don't really matter and so forth.
It's a kind of slush fund.
And this was happening to the Marshall thing.
In fact, a lot of the Marshall Plan funds were used to prop up various types of interventions like exchange rates that were unnatural and should have been abandoned and so forth.
So the $24 per capita did not get to German pockets.
It went to ministries that, I say, had picnics with it or whatever they do.
So really, it didn't amount to much.
Well, and you say in the article, too, that, well, again, it's James L. Payne.
The article in question here is in the Independent Review.
It's called, Did the United States Create Democracy in Germany?
And you talk about in here how they just banned currency.
And I guess I've heard a little bit of reference to spontaneous currencies like cigarettes taking the place of dollars.
But I didn't realize this was all due to the dictates of the American occupation.
Well, or a failure to issue a currency is what it was.
That's how slow at sleep at the switch they were.
So that, yeah, Germany until 1948 didn't really have a currency, and people were using cigarettes.
So that if you wanted to buy anything and sell anything, you know, wholesale, retail-type stuff, it was a very dicey proposition.
And as soon as they issued that currency, the economy started to revive.
And I think I remember reading somewhere that they had all these price controls, and then on a late Friday afternoon or something, some German minister went on the radio and announced that all the price controls were lifted.
And the Americans couldn't counterman the order until Monday or something, and therefore they got away with lifting the price controls.
And there was all of a sudden bread back on the shelves.
That's right.
Yeah, that came later in around at least 1950 or maybe a year or two after that, when the German government was getting to be a pretty functioning government, by the way.
And, yeah, this was Erhard, by the way, the German finance minister, who realized that price controls were crippling the economy.
Again, American sort of dithering and foolishness.
I mean, this is the way governments operate.
One of the big lessons of this and any other study you do is people tend to assume governments have some kind of magic.
I call it the watchful eye illusion, in that if you turn it over to government, you've turned it over to people that are somehow smarter, more responsible, more forward looking and more intelligent than ordinary people are.
And that's just not true.
It's because they don't have that terrible profit motive.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
They work selflessly for the greater good of the world.
And so, so, yeah, what you had to see the other thing about this nation building is there are no experts in this.
Nobody knows how to do it at all.
And who takes over these countries when you invade them?
Some soldiers, you know, like Lucius Clay and so forth.
And these are just generals or whatever.
And they don't know anything about politics or government or anything more than the man in the street.
So they're just trying to hold body and soul together and do what comes naturally.
And so this example of didn't get around to thinking, hey, we ought to have a currency here for three years.
You know, David Petraeus told the New York Times last week that as we invade Marjah here, we have a government in a box that we're going to give them or something.
It's it's sort of like when Robert Higgs criticizes the modern day Keynesians.
And he says, you're not in Keynesians, you're vulgar Keynesians.
You haven't even read him.
You're just doing your own version.
This is kind of vulgar occupation of Germany.
You know, they didn't even actually study it.
So you're taking off this fantasy of what it was like.
Yes, we have a government in a box for you.
It's going to work perfectly.
Yeah, yeah, no.
And that's all.
And even in terms of the politics, it turns out that the Germans themselves, the old see what you had.
Of course, the real question you want to ask is you did get a democracy coming out of that after Hitler.
And why or how?
And the answer is Germany was a democracy for a century.
And Hitler came in and kind of perverted it and undermined it.
Well, when Hitler got wiped out with the loss in the war, the old leaders, democratic leaders came forward and they met together in Berlin weeks before the American occupation army even got there.
Well, the same is true with Japan.
They'd been allies with the British for at least generations.
I don't know if they'd been a democracy that long, but they had a parliament and a diet.
They did.
It dates to about 1890 in Japan.
And again, a similar thing happened in which a very violent you got to bring in this word violence, because that's the key to it all.
When political leaders are going to be nonviolent toward each other and not try to kill each other and start wars with each other and so forth, then what happens is more or less automatically democracy.
And that's what had been happening in Japan and Germany.
And then you had in both countries this very interesting subgroup that was very oriented toward violence and actually murdered one after the other the possible opponents and so forth that would have resisted them.
And they took over the country and ran the policies.
Well, in the case of both countries, this strange violent subgroup was simply eliminated.
And the public in general in the country said, thank goodness, let's get back to our normal democratic politics.
And that's what happened.
The United States had nothing except for defeating that cabal of violent leaders.
The United States had nothing to do with the construction of democracy.
Well, you know, that's part of the model, too, though, in a way, is that the German people really did blame Hitler for getting them into this mess, blame the Nazi party and repudiated them.
And that's kind of the model, too.
That's what will happen in Iraq.
That's what will happen when we put these sanctions on Iran, is the people will blame the Ayatollah for the sanctions rather than blaming the United States.
Well, the difference is now, to give you the broader theory of when it'll work and when it won't work, nation building.
If you already have a low-violence society, that is, I've written a book, by the way, that anybody listening might find of interest called A History of Force.
And it details really the worldwide trend over many, many, actually thousands of years against the use of force.
Some countries make that movement away from using force sooner than others.
And these are the ones that we know of have emerged as the modern democracies.
So where people have set aside, to a large degree, these violent habits, you not only can have, but can't avoid having a thing called democracy.
Well, we just kind of externalize our violence, though.
It seems like the democracies are just as violent.
It's sort of like bringing the North and the Southern armies together to go kill off the rest of the Indians, you know?
Yes.
Well, foreign policy and the use of war, another use of violence, by the way, which has not been turned away from, even in the less violent societies, is taxation.
Okay, so we're not saying that a country like, say, take Holland, if you want a good example, or Britain.
These countries, their politics were violent, if you go back, I'd say, four or five hundred years ago.
Henry VIII, and so forth, was murdering everybody, not just wives, but his prime ministers, and minister of the treasury, and so forth.
And people were revolting against him, and he was suppressing them by killing them, and they were trying to kill him, and so forth.
These countries, Britain and so forth, moved away from that violent politics.
That is, the political leaders no longer were disposed to resort to violence, to gain office or retain office.
And when you have that, I say, that automatically means you've got a democracy, what we call a democracy.
Now, in the less developed countries, in Mideast places like Iraq, as an example, Iraq is a high-violence society, where the leaders, the elites, and so forth, have not reached that level of cultural evolution that they don't feel disposed to, don't want to use violence against each other.
They still do.
They still are willing to.
And so, you really can't have a democracy there.
It's going to collapse into some kind of civil war, or some strongman is going to become the strongest, and start oppressing and repressing the other people that are out to kill him, and, of course, making a lot of mistakes, and killing a lot of extra people in the process, and so forth.
All right.
Now, so back to the myth of, I guess, what could generally be called the Marshall Plan, although, obviously, it's a much more specific part of this, but just the myth of the rebuilding and the making friends out of our enemies from World War II, and all that.
This country, the occupation, really did not do right by the people of Germany, whatsoever.
And, really, it was only, I guess, as you say, because of the Soviet occupation, all the way up to, you know, halfway across the state of Germany, throughout Eastern Europe, and surrounding West Berlin, of course.
Then they decided, basically, they had to let the West Germans control their own destiny a little bit, just in order to shore up their support against the Communists, I guess.
And it was only then that they were really able to get their act together, which was years after VE Day, right?
Yeah, but you don't want to knock or insist that there were no good intentions.
I think there were.
You don't need to claim, by the way, that the United States is the only one.
I mean, Britain has been very proud of its good intentions throughout its colonial empires, and so forth.
Although, again, behind these good intentions, some very horrible and nasty stuff happened.
Well, I mean, when you quote FDR talking about keeping them on the breadline for a generation, that's not a good intention.
That's sadism.
No, but remember, there was a dispute, even in American circles.
Some people wanted that policy of stone-aged for Germany thing, but others really wanted to be nice.
And as time went on, the nice idea kind of prevailed.
But the error, see, the error is not so much in intentions.
You don't want to say, even in the case of Iraq or any case you want of occupation or colonialism and so forth, you don't want to have to decide, are the people evil-intentioned or good-intentioned?
What it is is that government as an institution is so inept that what it tries to accomplish, it mostly spoils or wrecks.
That's the underlying illusion that you've got to be aware of.
And it comes into domestic policy, whatever you're talking about, like health care.
You see, you have this idea that, oh, if we just give government the role of handling health care, it'll fix it.
Well, government is an inept, tangled, multifaceted institution, and it wastes and contradicts and so on and so forth.
That's the tragedy.
Well, you know, so much of what is debated publicly about these things stays on such a surface level, mostly they would never have this conversation unless some Republican said something about a Democrat and used this in context or something to get this on TV.
It's not really part of the discussion, but it seems like as far as the myth of World War II, which in my view has really supplanted the myth of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the American Revolution as the real founding of the American way now, the empire as it's been since then, it seems to all be based on the myth of World War II, and this is a major component of it, is how everybody else, whenever they beat somebody, they conquer them, and we don't because of how good we are, and this is, as you say, the perpetual model for what's to be done to the next country and the next one after that.
Yeah, yeah.
No, you're right.
That's certainly a very shallow point of view.
Yeah, and it's certainly the one that's embraced, right?
I mean, maybe I'm going too far in saying that George Washington is dead, but it really does seem like FDR is our founding father now.
Uh-huh.
Well, I tell you, I don't know how much to blame on FDR.
The reason why you're absolutely right that, I mean, FDR, here's the case of a guy that kind of wrecked the country and kept us in depression, and he somehow gets credit for having saved us, but the reason why he gets credit and the reason why he kind of got away with that and so forth is there are a bunch of illusions about what government can do, and people believe government is an effective, powerful, problem-solving institution, and because of these illusions, and that's what I'm writing on right now.
I'm sorry to change the subject, but it's really remarkable how, and I think Obama's case, and you can see in his speeches, in fact, I'm using him as one example of somebody that has just succumbed to these illusions about government that exaggerate its abilities, and one of these, like, is the watchful eye.
I mean, for 100 years, we have had institutions, laws, and agencies and so forth that are supposed to stabilize the economy and prevent booms and busts and so forth.
The first one was the Federal Reserve, and you'll find Woodrow Wilson saying, this will help, not just help, this will put an end to business depressions.
That was in 1912, okay?
So this has been going on for a century, and why do people think it will?
Well, they have this notion that government is somehow smarter, that the people of government are more responsible, thoughtful, forward-looking, and so forth, instead of just ordinary, fumbling, distracted people like the rest of us.
Well, yeah, it is.
It's the basic illusion.
Everybody hates politicians.
They're just like lawyers.
They're the butt of every joke, and yet somehow they're magic and omniscient, too.
In fact, I've heard the state defined as that thing by which we all interact with each other.
It is the civilization.
It is the society, the state.
If your neighbor's stereo is too loud, you don't ask him to turn it down.
You ask the cops to ask him to turn it down.
That's just how it is in this country now.
Yeah, that's the illusion of government preeminence, I call it.
It's my sixth illusion in this book.
By the way, it starts, even a lot of the conservatives and limited-government people get caught in by it.
For instance, the U.S. Constitution says, in its preamble, right, in order to ensure blah, blah, blah, you know, the general welfare.
So you'd say, well, wait a minute.
This government is supposed to ensure the general welfare.
And, you know, if you just read that and you say, well, I see anything wrong out there, that's part of the general welfare, so government's supposed to fix it.
Right, it's necessary and proper.
Let's go for it.
So you have to, actually what you have to do is you have to develop an understanding of there being a separate sphere.
I call it the voluntary sphere.
You could call it the private sector or the society or other words for it.
But that is also a problem-solving system.
Because every time we get up in the morning and make ourselves breakfast, we are solving problems.
Like we're solving the problem of hunger for ourselves and so forth.
And all the volunteer groups and churches, you know, all these businesses and shops and so forth.
All of that is a problem-solving system.
And it's separate from, and I feel a lot better than and more efficient than, government.
But people don't kind of see it because it's all decentralized and it's in bits and pieces.
And government is this one big thing that looks so important and powerful.
Yeah.
Well, as George W. Bush used to like to say, it's hard work, but we're making progress.
Yeah.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
It's very interesting stuff.
Okay.
Great talking to you, Scott.
Everybody, that's James L. Payne from the Independent Review and taught at Texas A&M and at Yale and Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins University.
And there's another one here, does nation building work, which you can find at independent.org as well.
