Could and Should America Have Made an Ottoman Republic in 1919

Generations of American school children have memorized the words of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. Its evangelical spirit was echoed in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and scores of other presidential addresses. Partly on that account, numerous Americans, perhaps especially American lawyers, have since the 1780s presumed to tell other peoples how to govern themselves. In 2006, that persistent impulse was echoed once again in an address to the American Bar Association by a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. (1) The purpose of this Essay is to question the wisdom of this evangelical ambition. Sometimes cited as examples of successful political evangelism are the constitution of Japan and the Basic Law of Germany. (2) Both of those constitutions were for numerous reasons congenial to the existing local cultures and traditions. (3) The 2003 invasion of Iraq was in important respects a product of the notion that orderly democratic government can be imposed almost anywhere, an idea that seems to have had special appeal to the militant "neo-conservatives" who expressed their hopes and expectations in the Statement of Principles of the Project for a New American Century, an instrument that should be read and remembered with remorse for centuries to come. (4) The missionary impulse to change the political cultures of other peoples by force that is expressed in that Statement is often misguided, hopeless, and even counterproductive. But just possibly there are times and places when cultural change can be externally imposed. One of the limits of our human condition is our preoccupation with recent experience that sometimes teaches the wrong lesson. As a possible example, this Essay considers whether a democratic regime could or should have been imposed on all or parts of the former Ottoman Empire in 1919, after its collapse following World War I. I. THE IMPERIAL IMPULSE Before addressing the question posed, one should note the resemblance of legal evangelism to imperialism. Andrew Bacevich has vigorously urged Americans of the "neo-con" persuasion (5) to try to see themselves as others do: as overbearing imperialists. (6) He followed Reinhold Niebuhr, who noticed long ago that Americans "frantically avoid[] recogni[zing their own] imperialis[t] impulses." (7) This American tendency was prefigured by other imperialists who long explained their military initiatives as a service to the peoples they subjected to conquest. The Spanish explained their imperial search for precious minerals as a dissemination of the Christian faith, (8) just as Moors had earlier justified their conquest of Spain as necessary to inform the vanquished that Muhammed was a prophet sent by God. (9) Wise and learned Germans professed in 1914 the belief that the German people were called to defend the humane values of western civilization against the evil threat of Czarist Russia and its craven French ally. (10) Gladstone, that most eminent Victorian, oblivious to the class-ridden nature of Victorian law, explained the aims of the British Empire as equally benign: We think that our country is a country blessed with laws and a constitution that are eminently beneficial to mankind, and if so, what [is] more ... desired than that we should have the means of reproducing in different portions of the globe something as like as may be to that country which we honor and revere? (11) Earlier evangelical imperialists were also sometimes warned of their failure to see themselves as others did. Long before Jefferson wrote the Declaration, John Milton cautioned his fellow legislators that they should not "[l]et ... England [] forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live." (12) And in 1899, James Bradley Thayer, then the most eminent scholar of American constitutional law, would echo Milton: [We Americans have] an opportunity to illustrate how nations may be governed without wars and without waste, and how the great mass of men's earnings may be applied, not to the machinery of government, or the rewarding of office-holders, or the wasteful activities and enginery of war, but to the comforts and charities of life and to all nobler ends of human existence,--so, I say, to our country . …