tragic example, in 1954 a democratically elected
government was overthrown by a CIA-organized
military coup (Cullather, 1999) that changed that
country’s political landscape for ever. By the end
of the 1990s an estimated 200,000 people had
died in the civil war that followed the military
coup d’état. This figure represented approxi-
mately 2 per cent of the total population, the
rough equivalent of around 5 million deaths in a
war within the United States. In all these exam-
ples, the democratically elected governments
that were overthrown (Guatemala, the Domi-
nican Republic and Chile) or undermined and
destabilized through the financing of contra-
guerrillas as in the Nicaraguan case, were develop-
ing policies that sought to redistribute wealth and
income, introduce land reform, and construct a
nationalist programme of development. They
were not one-party states as was Cuba, but they
were regarded as a threat to the United States
because they represented a democratic alterna-
tive and genuine ‘third way’ between capitalist
underdevelopment under US hegemony and
socialist revolution within the sphere of influ-
ence of the Soviet bloc.^3
In our times of geopolitical amnesia, it is not
only important to continually recall these events,
but also to think through their meaning, linked
into the politics of memory. It is surely neither
justifiable nor wise, especially writing after
11 September 2001, to indulge in what Trouillot
(2000) calls the ‘abortive rituals’ of governmental
apology when the conditions and ruling ideas
that make possible western interventions have
not been transformed. The rule of hegemonic
western representation seeks to convince us that
interventions from the centres of modern ‘civili-
zation’ have always been marked by the pursuit
of justice and democracy.^4 The geopolitical
record shows otherwise, but its reality must be
continually reactivated and remarked.
Third, a particularly western notion of
‘democracy’ and the desire to defend it have pro-
vided a justification for a variety of geopolitical
interventions, as was so clear in the Central
America and Caribbean of the 1980s. Falk (1995)
has referred to this phenomenon as the geopolitical
appropriation of ‘democracy’, pointing to the
pivotal significance of the continuing struggles
over the meanings of democracy. In the 1980s,
the Reagan administration launched ‘Project
Democracy’ and the ‘Democracy Program’ to
promote, as Huntington put it, ‘democratic insti-
tutions in other societies’ (1984: 193). Conver-
sely, and during the same years, the Sandinista
government in Nicaragua was attempting to
develop its own combination of representative
democracy with popular democracy, having wona resounding vote of confidence in the 1984
elections. Two visions of democracy and the
unequal powers behind them came into open
confrontation. The first, which was a market-
led and US-friendly version, based on the
Schumpeterian notion of the ‘democratic
method’, whereby individuals are supposed to
acquire the power to decide by means of a com-
petitive struggle for the people’s vote, eventually
triumphed owing to the greater geopolitical
power of the United States. The second, which
was a revolutionary model that combined elec-
toral competition between political parties with
the encouragement of popular organizations and
an anti-imperialist strategy, lost out in the 1990
elections where a US-supported opposition
acquired governmental power.
What needs to be stressed here is that a parti-
cular vision of western liberal democracy is used
as a gauge or model for judging the success or
failure of non-western societies to develop
democratically. It is always worthwhile remem-
bering that there are many definitions of ‘demo-
cracy’, a classic example of a polysemic term. A
post-colonial perspective would underscore the
particularity and limits of western visions which
purport to have universal relevance, and which
are frequently employed in discussions on aid
and development as a kind of gold standard for
what are seen as aspiring democracies in the
global south.
Fourth, in any critique of Euro-Americanism
one of the salient elements concerns the complex
interweaving of cultural representation and
geopolitical power. In the historical annals of
western democratic theory, one can encounter
defining examples of a strong universalist
ambition which has prioritized certain cultural
practices and invested them with spatial power.
Taking an example which is relevant for its
general theoretical influence as well as for its roots
in a western perception of the experience of the
United States, it is instructive to refer to aspects of
Tocqueville’s work on democracy in America.
Towards the middle of the nineteenth century
Tocqueville argued that the historical consolida-
tion of what he referred to as the civic-territorial
complex required the elimination of the Indian, the
original American other who had the right of
neither soil nor sovereignty and had to be cleansed
from the founding of American democracy. For
Tocqueville (1990) civilization had to be seen as
the result of a long social process, which takes
place in the same spot and is handed down from
one generation to another. Consequently, peoples
who are nomadic can never attain the status of
being civilized, or as Tocqueville expressed it,
‘civilization began in the cabin, but soon retired toBEYOND EURO-AMERICANISM 4273029-ch22.qxd 03-10-02 11:01 AM Page 427