--- Warren Ockrassa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I still feel (so far) that, all things being equal > or equivalent > (population, power, etc) at the beginning of a > contest, if you have two > evenly-matched nations, one of which is totalitarian > and the other more > liberty-oriented, the totalitarian system will > ultimately, eventually > collapse. I don't believe totalitarian systems are > flexible, innovative > or robust enough to survive that kind of > competition.
This is an argument first made my Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy. Tocqueville also suggested in _Democracy in America_, although, oddly enough, he didn't apply it to the US. In both cases, though, they believed that this was something that could happen only after a democracy had a long time to develop. They thought that democracies when they first developed would be very vulnerable - far more so than equivalent dictatorships. Certainly political scientists have noticed that democracies tend to win the wars they fight more often than should be expected (although they usually credit this fact to democracies' superior ability to mobilize national resources during a crisis). All things being equal, this may be true. The point Dan and I are making, though, is that historically, things usually aren't equal. There are lots of highly plausible scenarios you can spin where the most powerful country in the world is a fascist dictatorship (Nazi Germany), a totalitarian Communist dictatorship (the USSR), or any number of other options. For example, had the North lost the Civil War, it's arguable that democratic reform in England would have been far less successful - certainly, that's what Gladstone thought, and he ought to have known. If any of these things had happened, we wouldn't even know about this hypothetical advantage democracies have. The argument that "good" governments win their wars is based on events that could very easily have gone other ways, suggesting that such an advantage, if it exists, is so small that it's hardly sufficient to use to justify the superiority of liberal governments. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now. http://messenger.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
