Did the United States create democracy in Germany?

• Author: Payne, James L.

Do we know how to promote democracy in a troubled land? Do we have a set of policies and practices that administrators can take off the shelf, as it were, and apply in a reasonably straightforward fashion to produce a lasting democracy?

Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, many commentators and policymakers seemed to believe that such an established methodology exists. The difficult experience in that country has somewhat dimmed this confidence, but it has by no means destroyed it. Many writers continue to speak of nation building as if it involved a settled technology, like that of building interstate highways. They seem to believe that nation-building experts can go to any country and, regardless of its culture and traditions, successfully impose a democracy. What accounts for this confidence in the efficacy of nation-building expertise?

One important source appears to be the U.S. experience after World War II. Those who today advocate assertive policies of nation building repeatedly cite this era as a golden age of nation building. The United States should invade dictatorships and failed states, they say, and turn them into democracies. How do we know this task is feasible? They answer, "Look at what we did in Germany and Japan."

Writing in the New York Times Magazine in June 2005, Michael Ignatieff, a professor of human rights at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, urged an "American crusade to spread democracy" around the world. His main evidence for the soundness of this undertaking is the presumed success in Germany. "Freedom in Germany was an American imperial imposition, from the cashiering of ex-Nazi officials and the expunging of anti-Semitic nonsense from school textbooks to the drafting of a new federal constitution" (Ignatieff 2005, 45).

A political analyst for the Rand Corporation, James Dobbins, makes the same claim: "The post-World War II occupations of Germany and Japan were America's first experiences with the use of military force in the aftermath of a conflict to underpin rapid and fundamental societal transformation. Both were comprehensive efforts that aimed to engineer major social, political, and economic reconstruction. The success of these endeavors demonstrated that democracy was transferable" (2003, xiii).

Three leading scholars of democratic development, Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset, echo the point. After the victory of the Allied powers in World War II, they say, "Democracy was imposed on Germany, Italy, and Japan, and surprisingly took hold and endured" (1989, xi).

Political scientist Mark Peceny advances the same idea: "In by far the most successful application of this policy [of encouraging democracy] in the history of U.S. foreign policy, U.S. occupation governments transformed Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan into liberal democratic allies in the wake of World War II" (1999, 81).

Even those who oppose nation building agree that the United States did succeed in Germany and Japan. Gary Dempsey, a foreign-policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, criticizes observers who assume that "with enough money, experienced bureaucrats, and military firepower, retrograde states anywhere can be turned into open, self-sustaining, peaceful democracies, as Germany and Japan were after World War II" (2002, 3). Thus, even though Dempsey is critical of the idea that we can easily create democracies, he apparently accepts the premise that Germany and Japan were "turned into" democracies by U.S. action.

The current Bush administration absorbed this view. Two weeks before invading Iraq, the president defended the impending attack by pointing to the post-World War II interventions: "America has made and kept this kind of commitment before--in the peace that followed a world war. After defeating enemies, we did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments. We established an atmosphere of safety, in which responsible, reform-minded local leaders could build lasting institutions of freedom. In societies that once bred fascism and militarism, liberty found a permanent home." (1)

These many references to the case of Germany make one curious. What exactly did U.S. administrators do to succeed so well in promoting democracy there? Surely, one supposes, this experience should yield a wealth of valuable lessons for modern-day nation builders to apply elsewhere.

On opening the contemporaneous books and articles about the postwar occupation of Germany, however, we find this assumption of success rudely contradicted. At the time, reporters and scholars did not have a glowing, confident view of U.S. policy. As they saw it, muddled policies and incompetent administration were botching the task of encouraging democracy. Illustrative of the tenor of these writings was an article entitled "Why Democracy Is Losing in Germany" that appeared in Commentary in September 1949. "We must face the fact," the author wrote, "that the contradictions, vacillations, and reactionary manifestations of Western occupation policy have appallingly discredited democracy in Germany, both as a political system and an intellectual outlook" (Gurland 1949, 235). A close look reveals that, from the standpoint of democratic nation building, the U.S. occupation of Germany is actually a lesson on what not to do!

Don't Shake Hands!

In Germany, the Allied effort had two aspects. One was the impact of the war. In World War II, Germany's enemies defeated Hitler and in the process revealed to the German people that his pretensions were absurd and colossally destructive. As a result, the national mood in Germany that had enabled Hitler to come to power vanished. In this specific sense, one can say that U.S. action contributed to democracy in Germany: the Allied victory created a tabula rasa that permitted it to emerge.

The Allied effort's second aspect was the military occupation, which extended from victory in 1945 to (for most practical purposes) 1952. As the previous quotations indicate, modern writers assume that skilled and purposeful U.S. officials applied sophisticated nation-building techniques during this period and thereby "imposed" democracy where it otherwise would not have come into existence. This hypothesis is extremely doubtful. The occupation's actual policies and activities from 1945 to 1952 did little to Further democracy, and many of them caused positive harm.

Modern writers' first mistake is to assume that the goal of the American occupation in Germany was to make the country a democracy--that it constituted, as Dobbins puts it, a "comprehensive effort that aimed to engineer major social, political, and economic reconstruction" This view is wildly at variance with the facts. Building democracy was not the aim of occupation policy. Instead, policymakers aimed to punish Germany and to deny it any war-making potential. Some American leaders advocated a "back to the Stone Age" policy for Germany. One such plan, drawn up by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and his assistant Harry Dexter White, called for Germany to be dismembered and turned into an agrarian society in which the inhabitants would live by subsistence farming. Other leaders did not go so far, but they all agreed on severe punishment. "If I had my way," President Franklin D. Roosevelt commented, "I would keep Germany on a breadline for the next 25 years" (qtd. in Davidson 1959, 7). From this angry mood came JCS 1067, the Joint Chiefs of Staff directive on U.S. objectives and basic policies that formed the orders of the military government from May 1945 to July 1947. It emphasized not reconstruction or democracy, but harsh treatment of the Germans.

One directive of JCS 1067 that the U.S. military authority attempted to...