The 8th Circle

Barack Obama

Last week’s first presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama attracted over 50 million viewers as voters sought to get a sense on where the candidates stand on foreign policy. While this was the biggest TV event since the Superbowl, the debate surprisingly did not fare well in historical perspective:

It wasn’t even one of the 10 most-watched presidential debates, falling well short of the record 80.6 million people who saw the only debate between President Carter and Ronald Reagan in 1980, Nielsen said.

Two reasons contributed to this: (1) It wasn’t clear until midday Friday that the debate was even taking place, ( 2) Friday traditionally has fewer viewers. That should not be a problem for the upcoming Vice Presidential debate on Thursday.

But anyway, I have digressed from the main topic of the post - fledgling democracies. Ever heard of the term?

This is the exchange (full transcript) between the moderator and Obama during Friday’s debate:

LEHRER: Russia, goes to you, two minutes, Senator Obama. How do you see the relationship with Russia? Do you see them as a competitor? Do you see them as an enemy? Do you see them as a potential partner?

OBAMA: Well, I think that, given what’s happened over the last several weeks and months, our entire Russian approach has to be evaluated, because a resurgent and very aggressive Russia is a threat to the peace and stability of the region…

So far so good…

And we also have to affirm all the fledgling democracies in that region, you know, the Estonians, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Poles, the Czechs, that we are, in fact, going to be supportive and in solidarity with them in their efforts. They are members of NATO.

Holy s#$%! Did Obama just say that? My German and Polish friends gasped in unison when they heard the Baltic three and two of the Visegrad group countries described as “fledgling democracies” by one of the presidential candidates, who - unlike Joe Biden or Sarah Palin - does not yet have a reputation for saying nonsense.

I mean it’s not really that big of a deal, but Obama clearly misspoke. None of the above countries can be reasonably described as fledgling (formal definition). To be fair, McCain also used the word, but in a different context when referring to Iraq, not half of Eastern Europe that’s now part of the European Union and hardly fledgling.

From a political science point of view, the term does not hold the same currency as say “liberal democracy” or “participatory democracy.” Whenever it has been used in scholarly literature, fledgling democracy is usually employed when discussing states such as Russia, Nigeria, South Africa, East Timor, Nepal and others, not Estonia or the Czech Republic (check for yourself).

For better or worse, this part of the debate did not spark any discussion in the aftermath with many commentators focusing on what either candidate said about Pakistan (Judah Grunstein at WPR blog), Russia (Robert Amsterdam here and here) or Ukraine (Taras’ post). [UPDATE]: or what was omitted from the debate.

ONE MORE THING - GERMANS, ITALIANS AND SPANIARDS on NATO

Flag of NATO

The “fledgling” gaffe aside, I agree with Barack Obama when he says at the end of that paragraph:

…we are, in fact, going to be supportive and in solidarity with them in their efforts. They are members of NATO.

Absolutely. The whole concept of the North Atlantic security framework is built on mutual support for one another in peace or in times of crisis. Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, the Czech Republic are all members of NATO.

So it was a complete shock when I got an email containing the Financial Times story by James Blitz titled Europeans see Moscow as security threat:

The Russian military’s recent incursion into Georgia means that many more west Europeans now regard Russia as a greater threat to global stability than states such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea, according to a survey for the Financial Times.

Despite this, a clear majority of people in western Europe remain firmly opposed to their governments spending more on defence and diverting resources away from public health and social programmes…

…in Germany, Italy and Spain, more people say they would oppose the notion of their national troops rushing to defend the Baltic states than would support the idea.

In Germany, as many as 50 per cent of people say they would oppose national troops going to the defence of the three states, compared with only 26 per cent who say they would support it. Only in Britain and France do more people support the idea of their armies defending the Baltic states than oppose it.

Such opinions are shocking because they undermine the foundation upon which the Alliance was founded. We are not talking about defending Afghanistan or training troops in Iraq. We are talking about major portions of populations in NATO member states unwilling to defend one of their own!

If that’s the case, what’s the value of being a member? The push to join NATO by Georgia, Macedonia, or Ukraine is then a waste of time.

In the short-term, the Alliance’s deterrence effect remains credible. This is because elites in each NATO state remain committed to the viability of NATO as a security organization, but the opinion of the population in democratic countries cannot be ignored. The elites, although in charge of the country, still need to be elected and one wonders at which point will the self-interest to stay in office trump the need to maintain NATO’s deterrence effect.

Finally, it’s not surprising that large portions of population in western European states oppose increased spending on defense vs. social spending. Why wouldn’t they? In light of the U.S. carrying the bulk of the defense burden, western Europeans face no incentive to tend to their own security choosing instead to free ride on America’s military power.

• Image credit: Barack Obama photograph is by CAPAF licensed under cc-by-sa.