Democracy promotion is a tactic of ideological hegemony – empirical failures are obscured within the imperative assimilation of non-liberal Others

Ideation and hegemony are also evident politically speaking. Economic neoliberalism’s political counterpart, democracy, is a parallel projection of global governance. Democracy is advanced, rightly or wrongly, as the means by which we may secure a less violent interstate system, as the institutional architecture in which to embed liberal economic practices; and as a panacea for producing peace in conflict and post-conflict environments (Paris 2004; Chesterman 2004; Sorensen 2oo6).Western states and international institutions coerce democratic development through lending conditionality, human rights bodies observe concordance with democratic practices concerning prison conditions, media freedom and judicial impartiality, and democratic standards like accountability and transparency are applied in Weberian fashion to audit, evaluate, reward and punish conformity and non-conformity with liberal values and practices. Even where the evidence shows that political liberalization fails to change elite behaviour, or fails to enhance everyday lives in any meaningful way, the idea of liberal democracy and the Liberal Peace enjoys institutional, productive and ideational hegemony and authority (Roberts 2008a; Richmond 2008). Global governance is biopolitical in this sense: it disciplines the international system into conforming to liberal political values, reaching into supposedly sovereign territory and, where conformity is absent, punishing a state and its people. Transiting states are audited for such conformity; there is no shortage of organizations in the West, public and private, that scrutinize the Other for conformity with global governance demands. Transparency International, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the World Bank — all act to check that particular liberal political and economic processes are being adhered to, with requisite punishments for nonconformity. The power of global governance is profoundly capillary in this sense; but it is focused primarily on top-down institutional transformation that anticipates trickle-down democracy. In practice, liberal peace is often a limited peace for a limited minority, since institutional democracy is not meaningful in any immediate sense for the majority of a ‘democratizing’ society because its top-down institutional metropolitan emphasis has very limited impact on urgent everyday needs in very poor societies, since immediate—to—medium-term needs are normally governed by and a product of access to socio-economic resources, rather than abstract political rights (Roberts 2oo8c5 Mac Ginty 2008). Thus, both political and economic liberalism are advanced as means to ends as well as ends in themselves. Gill calls this the ‘new constitutionalism’, which is ‘the political project of attempting to make transnational Liberalism, and if possible liberal democratic capitalism, the sole model for future development’ (1995: 412), in a discourse that parallels Tom Young’s consideration of the ‘Liberal Project’ as a means of assimilating the non—liberal Other into ‘Westernity’ (I004). The means by which they are propelled are the institutions and productive values of global governance with the explicit intention of disciplining and assimilating the non-liberal Other. Global governance, then, can be understood as the ideationally hegemonic biopolitical process by which neoliberalism disciplines and punishes polities, economies and societies globally through asymmetrically orientated public and private international institutions.