Identity and Democracy (Extract)

By JASON WARSHOF
Extract from an article in Issue 12, September 29, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. Natan Sharansky's new book falls short in the important discussion of the role of identity in the promotion of democracy. In 2004, Sharansky - the former Soviet dissident and former Israeli cabinet minister - gained wide attention for his book encouraging the promotion of democracy in all societies, no matter their history or ethnic makeup. "The Case for Democracy," co-authored with Ron Dermer, is an idealistic, tightly spun treatise that seems to have been intended especially for U.S. leaders' ears (and indeed it won President George W. Bush's admiration). That book's central premise was that Western leaders should "link" changes in policy toward non-democratic states with improvements in those states' internal policies or "behaviors." In other words, if a nation wants sustained economic aid from the West, it must first loosen restrictions on freedom of the press, lay the groundwork for an independent judiciary, and open the national dialogue to voices that oppose government policy, rather than silencing them. Whether readers agreed with Sharansky's core ideas or not - whether they embrace his idealism or detect a strain of naiveté or even cynicism - many saw in this book a salvo whose time had come. The fall of Communism, after decades of oppression, gave hope to those who sought to undermine tyranny worldwide. Sharansky, having endured nearly a decade of imprisonment in the former USSR, emerged after immigrating to Israel in 1986 as a determined and passionate spokesperson for the cause. Four years after publishing his case for democracy - and just in time for another U.S. presidential election - Sharansky, an early associate editor of The Jerusalem Report, who is now chairman of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem, has released a kind of sequel. "Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy" was written with Shira Wolosky Weiss, a U.S.-born professor of English and American studies at Hebrew University, who formerly taught at Yale. The book's thesis is that democracies can only maintain their strength - both defusing domestic tensions and fending off security threats from outside entities, such as al-Qaeda - by allowing all residents to realize full self-expression, so long as that expression does not undermine the nation's stability. "Identity without democracy is totalitarianism; democracy without identity is weak and self-betraying... democracy and identity demand each other," the authors write starkly. And yet their assertiveness can mask imprecision. For starters, Sharansky defines "identity" in rather vague terms - "[it] could mean belonging to a religious, a national, or an ethnic group" - giving the book a shaky foundation. Never are the inherent differences between religious and national - or national and ethnic - identities parsed. A second complicating fac- tor is the book's scope. Whereas "The Case for Democracy" was a straightforward political treatise - and the co-author, Dermer, a political adviser and journalist - this book drifts into murkier waters, including what might be summed up as cultural studies. For the most part, Sharansky's political-activist voice melds smoothly with the scholarly perspective offered by Weiss, but cracks appear - most visibly in the random-seeming adversaries they single out for discussion. Foes range from the late songwriter John Lennon, for writing the distinction-blurring ode "Imagine;" to the Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua, for saying at a conference that outside of Israel "it is impossible to have a Jewish identity of any significance;" to the nonagenarian Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, whom the authors credit as being the "father of [the] post-identity" school of thought. The targeting of Lennon - utopian though his song's message may have been - comes off as misplaced and excessive, while the other two examples illustrate more discreetly the difficulty of writing a polemic on a subject as elusive as identity. Yehoshua, for his part, plays an important role in Israel as a voice for the Sephardi community, and yet this gets no mention. And the Jewish, Egyptian-born Hobsbawm, though an interesting case study, seems to arouse disproportionate attention as a symbol of all that is wrong with left-wing academics. Sharansky quotes a particularly damning passage from the scholar's 2002 autobiography: "To this day I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness." If anything will raise Sharansky's hackles, it's tolerance for the former Soviet Union (especially, perhaps, when shown by a fellow Jew). An almost visceral memory of his confinement - and of the maddening hypocrisy of Soviet officialdom - drives some of Sharansky's more compelling passages. He appeals to readers' common sense, writing lucidly on the fundamental differences between democratic and non-democratic societies (lest anyone think the United States had joined the latter under Bush); how true personal freedom is achieved when "your words and thoughts [are] in consonance;" and how people can cooperate more effectively when they embrace their own cultural background while recognizing and respecting difference in others. In comparing democracies that allow identity to thrive with those that do not, Sharansky often uses exaggerated language. He writes that "European countries… are becoming a shell of their former selves in the name of abstract democracy." The thrust of his critique is that when states suppress public expressions of identity - from, say, a Muslim Pakistani in London or a Transylvanian peasant in Bucharest - grievances fester, putting states' health at risk. He draws useful contrasts, such as that between Muslim girls wearing veils in schools - a practice he views as posing no direct challenge to democracy but that the French have banned nonetheless - and the tragedy of (isolated) honor killings and forced marriages across Europe, both of which go unprosecuted. The United States is presented, sometimes cloyingly, as the righteous alternative, such as in a story about the residents of Fort Collins, Colorado, who in 2006 banded together to protest a town council vote blocking the display of a menorah in the town square. Extract from an article in Issue 12, September 29, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.