Book Review: Democracy in Exile (Daniel Bessner)

Daniel Bessner’s biography of the life of Hans Speier is clearly an academic text, but offers valuable insight into the nature of the way foreign policy is conducted today. Expert-directed foreign policy is a relatively modern phenomenon, yet it has come to so dominate Washington thinking that we never imagine that there was once an alternate (more democratic) approach to the field.
Speier comes of age in Weimar Germany, in a period characterized by democratic fragility. He starts out as a rebellious democratic socialist, a member of the SPD, one of the first Marxist parties in the world. In 1929, he receives his doctorate in sociology, and becomes a professor at Deutsche Hochschule für Politik. He also participates in the task of worker education for the SPD, still being under the belief that the work of an intellectual is to train the working class in order to help build a successful and inclusive democratic socialism.
However, as the Nazi party starts gaining popularity in Germany, Speier begins to lose his faith in the ability of the ordinary people to sustain democracy. In 1933, after his wife is dismissed from her nursing position for being Jewish, Speier emigrates to the United States with his family, and soon finds employment at the New School with a cadre of German emigres.
When the United States enters World War 2, Speier is hired by the government to interpret and combat Nazi propaganda. He is extremely skilled at this new role, and begins to gain prominence among the intellectual class that advises government. It is here that Speier finally takes the stance that democratic values can and must be put on hold, at least temporarily, when democracy is itself threatened. Speier also begins to identify the United States as critical to the cause of democracy worldwide, and starts to believe that the defense of America is always justified, regardless of the means used.
After the war is over, Speier attempts to return to academia, but having had a taste of real power, finds the experience less than satisfying. Before long, he is roped back into the defense-intellectual complex, becoming the Director of Social Science at the RAND corporation — in a position where he can directly advise people in power, thus directly being in a position to influence policy. By this time, Speier has largely abandoned the educationist position, and no longer believes that ordinary people are capable of making wise decisions about which policies to pursue.
After the Soviets get the bomb in 1949, Speier, along with other defense intellectuals, once again sees an existential threat for democracy. However, this time, the threat is clearly seen as long-term, as no direct conflict is possible between two nuclear powers. Yet, the suppression of democratic procedures, and the increased reliance on experts operating under secrecy is championed by Speier and his cohort of intellectuals — thus, Speier’s transformation from a democratic socialist to a full blown Cold Warrior is complete. Many others in this cohort are also prominent exiles, most notably Zbigniew Brzezinski & Henry Kissinger — having seen totalitarianism firsthand, many of the exiles have an amplified perception of the totalitarian threat, and a corresponding blindspot for the violence perpetuated by US empire.
The remainder of the book focuses on Speier’s later career, including his role as anticommunist propagandist in East Germany, and internal disputes between social scientists on the relative importance of quantitative studies.
While the book is rather slow reading at times, the insights gleaned from reading it are rather important. Firstly, a large number of the people we now think of as irredeemably evil neoconservatives were at one point in time among the more optimistic utopian thinkers in their societies — humans are shaped to a large degree by the experiences they have had, and it is important not to base the entirety of our policy based on the very worst experiences of a subset of people. Secondly, the way threats are framed is very important — recklessly overestimating the threat coming from societies that are different from us tends to lead us to both overreact, and to be blind to the violence that we commit ourselves as a matter of routine. In a time when even progressive Democrats in the United States frame the potential conflicts in the world as a simple matter of “the good guys” versus the international authoritarian axis of evil, reading Bessner’s book is a valuable reminder of why that approach is ultimately likely to be very destructive.
In summary, this is likely to be a useful read if you are interested in the way foreign policy is shaped today, and the reasons for why it is so. Otherwise, it is a little overly detailed and academic for the casual history buff.
