How US action in Venezuela invokes Fukuyama’s end of history 

Venezuela is a significantly oil rich country and US President Donald Trump has been reported as saying that America could oversee Venezuela and control its oil revenue for years. Against this backdrop, a debate has emerged around the ‘violation of sovereignty’, ‘democracy’, and ‘rules-based international order’, with experts even raising unsettling questions around the very idea of democracy. 

What is ‘carbon democracy’

In Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, one of the most important books on democracy to appear around the time of the Arab Spring in 2011, the Columbia University academic Timothy Mitchell advances the argument that the US-led western espousal of democracy across the world has been premised on the global hydrocarbon fuel industry and the retention of US-led Western imperial interests. It is particularly noted in the regions with the most extensive and concentrated fossil fuel and hydrocarbon resources, such as the Middle East.  

Mitchell’s book makes a simple argument: the US-led West has encouraged and exported “carbon copies” of democracy to large parts of the world. These carbon copies are abundant in quantity but poor in quality – much like the fading nature of carbon copies. For that matter, the overall quality of liberal-democracy in prominent Western countries like the US and the UK has also been noted and commented upon. 

The Indian political theorist Partha Chatterjee in his book I Am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today (2019) notes how “various features that are characteristic of democracies in Africa or Asia are now being seen in Europe and the United States because of underlying structural relations that have long tied metropolitan centers to their colonial and postcolonial peripheries.” 

In Micthell’s own words, carbon democracy creates “both the possibility of modern democracy and its limits”. In this manner, the US-led West has tended to support regimes in various regions of the world that are compatible with the advancement of Western interests. Such interests broadly include free markets, trade liberalisation policies, and the free flow of capital. 

Oil, intervention, and the export of Western political order 

The imperial project has often involved promoting, installing or supplanting democracies, usually in countries with significant resources that US corporations may have been eyeing. Scholars often cite the 1953 coup in Iran, backed by the British and the Americans, which overthrew then Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The coup led to the reversal of Mossedegh’s nationalisation policies and brought back foreign control of the country’s oil. 

Two decades later, the Socialist President of Chile, Salvador Allende, was overthrown in another military coup in September 1973 supported by the US and the British. Allende was replaced by General Augusto Pinochet whose repressive regime catered to Western interests in the region. In December 1989, just a few months ahead of the end of the Pinochet regime in Chile, then US President George H W Bush oversaw a military operation that captured and imprisoned then ruler of Panama, General Manuel Noriega. 

The recent US military action against Venezuela’s President Nicholas Maduro is being seen as a recent parallel to the earlier precedent set in Panama. Mitchell’s book Carbon Democracy, which has already been referred to, notes how back in 1914, when Royal Dutch/Shell began producing oil in Venezuela, the country’s dictator at the time, General Juan Vicente Gómez, directed the company to build its refinery offshore on the Dutch island of Curacao. He did this as he was just interested in the money coming from oil production, but was wary of the concentrations of the large numbers of workers if a refinery were built in Venezuela. 

Energy resources and democratic instability

Recent developments in Venezuela have brought into sharp focus the estimated 300 billion barrels of oil reserves that lie in the country’s Orinoco region, which is approximately 17 per cent of the world’s reserves. It is also worth noting that Venezuela, along with Saudi Arabia, was among the founding states of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960, which is an influential cartel that regulates the supply and price of oil in the overseas market. 

For over a quarter century, Venezuela has been dominated by ‘Chavismo’ politics – an ideological and political movement named after the left-wing populist leader Hugo Chavez. who died in 2013. After Chavez, Nicholas Maduro succeeded him and continued these policies rooted in ‘Chavismo’ that put Venezuela at odds with the US. 

It is not just in Latin America that the presence of oil reserves has been linked to democratic instability. In West Africa, Nigeria’s Niger Delta region contains very large oil reserves, and the country has also witnessed alternations of military dictatorships and phases of democratic governance. 

In the Middle East, the concentration of US strategic interests, including in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, is often cited as an example of how energy resources and geopolitical influence intersect. On the other hand, the US has also been associated with support for colour-coded revolutions to promote democracy in post-Soviet states. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004 and Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003, for example, were widely seen as aligning these countries more closely with Western political and economic models.

Is Western liberal democracy the end of history?

The US interest in advancing and exporting democracy across the world has been linked with the various ‘waves of democracy’ that Harvard University political scientist Samuel Huntington’s work indicated. Western media has often been seen as creating a perception of these democratic waves as inevitable and irreversible. What we see instead today is a clear ‘democratic backsliding’ that political scientists have noted, especially over the last decade since the beginning of the first Trump administration.

The first Trump administration prompted Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt to write their much-acclaimed book How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future (2018).  After President Joe Biden’s victory against Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential election, he made a case for championing the cause of democracies against autocracies, where he seemed to be referencing Russia and China. 

Clearly, when the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama claimed in his book The End of History and the Last Man Standing (1992), written after the end of the Cold War, that Western liberal democracy would spread and disseminate to the rest of the world, he could not foresee contemporary developments. 

Post read questions

Do you think that the access to natural resources has often shaped the fate of democracy in many countries? Illustrate your answers with examples.

Does the revival of the Monroe Doctrine in the form of the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ signal a return to imperial geopolitics in the Western Hemisphere? Examine.

How did the end of the Cold War lead to the belief in the global triumph of liberal democracy? Why has this belief been challenged today?

How could India and the European Union shape a rules-based international order in these times of uncertainty and conflict?

Can democracy be imposed from outside? Discuss the ethical and political implications.

(Amir Ali is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.)

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