I cannot remember a time in Guyanese history when the West, particularly the United States of America, have not been deeply involved in Guyanese internal affairs. The recent statement by the current US ambassador to Guyana that Mr. Azruddin Mohamed of the We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) party is not fit to be involved in national governance, pales in comparison to what has gone before.
Immediately after the West engineered Cheddi Jagan out of office in the 1960s and before Forbes Burnham began to show similar socialist-type proclivities, Guyana received the highest United States per capita aid in the world – even more than Israel. Only last week, I noted that the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) was banished from government for three decades because it failed to grasp the limits of state sovereignty and democracy, so please let us not again make a similar mistake.
Two of the most important issues facing Guyana today have to do with the establishment of inclusive democratic governance and the border dispute with Venezuela. These issues have been festering since the 1950s/1960s and require the assistance of the international community, and particularly the USA, if they are to be resolved and/or contained.
Where governance is concerned, a few weeks ago, the case of Northern Ireland and the establishment of the Good Friday Agreement that put an end to decades of civil war after the Irish diaspora persuaded the US government to become involved, was given some prominence in the national media, and this column has consistently argued that the Guyanese diaspora should make a similar effort.
Partly because of his Irish heritage President Joe Biden was intricately involved in the Good Friday process and his presidency become so involved in attempting to make governance in Guyana inclusive and more equitable that the recalcitrant PPP celebrated its demise with large billboards welcoming the new US government!
Realpolitik dictates that individual states can do what they want once what they want is not seriously out of step with what the powerful global actors want. In other words, individual states can only achieve and secure their goals if they have sufficient individual or collective soft and hard power. The present situation in Ukraine is a good example of this general position.
That country voted for Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s party ‘Servant of the People’, which wishes to join North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The Russians claim the Ukraine’s joining NATO would constitute an existential threat. It labelled the Ukraine regime Nazi-oriented and invaded, in the view of some with the sole intention of annexing the entire country.
Alone, Ukraine does not have the military power to stop the Russians and is only being saved by the economic and military strength of NATO, which, with the coming to the US presidency of Donald Trump, has become less certain. Apart from the total defeat of Russiam, which is very unlikely, unfortunately it does appear that a final agreement will have to include a condition that negates the will of the Ukrainians to join NATO.
The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia ended the 30 Years War in Europe between the Catholics and Protestants, gave birth to a modern international system and the principle of state sovereign equality by which states are not to intervene in each other’s internal affairs. But while the treaty brought contemporary peace to Europe it could not prevent some of the most devastating later conflicts. Even the establishment of other major international organisations such as the United Nations has not been able to put an end to destructive global conflicts.
Indeed, in our times, the situation has become more complicated. Various forms of communications, migration and the need to properly manage the global commons have become sufficiently important to call into question the principle of sovereignty that has allowed states, particularly large and powerful ones, to do as they please.
‘Today, we are living in a world that is more interconnected and in which we have a lot of shared problems that need a collective responsible approach on the part of states. …. (T)he Westphalian model, especially in the shape of sovereignty … won’t help us resolve collective issues of today’s world. We need to reinvigorate the current international system with norms that prefer collectivity over exclusivity.’
The USA is the world’s most powerful country and certainly so in our neighbourhood, even putting aside its on and off dance with the Monroe doctrine. Thus, when a US ambassador makes such a public statement about one’s national governance, quite apart from theorising about sovereignty and democracy, one needs to quickly get to realpolitik and seriously consider the actual needs of Guyana and the context and meaning of the intervention.
It is certainly not that the US, with all its resources and global access, is always conceptually or practically correct. An aspect of its association with Hamas, which in one dimension runs counter to what the ambassador is now suggesting about Mr. Mohammed, provides a useful insight into the context of US decision-making.
In brief, in about 2005, Israel was withdrawing from the Gaza Strip from which it had already evicted some 8,000 Jewish settlers who had been paid to resettle in the West Bank. President George Bush Jr and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, imbued with the democratising zeal of Natan Sharansky, a charismatic human-rights activist and former Soviet dissident who spent nine years as a gulag political prisoner, supported new elections in Gaza in 2006 to fill this power vacuum.
The radical Palestinian groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which supported the destruction of Israel, decided to take part (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/was-hamas-elected-to-govern-gaza-george-w-bush-2006-palestinian-election.html).
The more liberal Palestinian Fatah that accepted the two-state solution, was fearful that Hamas might win and like Israel advised Bush against the holding of the election. Even Sharansky had doubts, and others thought that if an election was to be held, the radical parties that sought the destruction of Israel, should be banned.
Western democracies have regularly banned radical communist and other parties, but the US government rejected the views and even refused to become involved in tipping the scales in favour of Fatah. So that while ‘Fatah and Israel were against holding the elections; Hamas and President Bush were in favour’ (Ibid)?
In January 2006, elections were held in the Palestinian territories and Hamas won a decisive victory, taking 45 of the 74 available seats, with 44% of the votes to Fatah’s 41%. Neither party was keen on sharing power and fighting broke out between the two.
A unity government was finally formed in mid 2007 but collapsed and fighting between Hamas and Fatah resumed and ended with Hamas taking control of the entire Gaza Strip, continuing its war with Israel which decided to reoccupy the Strip, its exit from which Sharansky had originally criticised.
Sharansky had argued – and the case of Guyana, where democratic aspects of governance have totally collapsed, substantiates the point – but in his quite understandable eagerness to export democracy, President Bush ignored one of the main points in Sharansky’s 2004 book ‘The Case for Democracy’ in which he insisted that elections ‘are not a true test of a democracy.
[They] ‘are never the beginning of the democratic process. Only when the basic institutions that protect a free society – a free press, the rule of law, independent courts, political parties, etc – are firmly in place can free elections be held. [Until then] elections are just as likely to weaken efforts to build democracy as they are to strengthen them’ (Ibid)!
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This article was first published on August 3, 2025, headlined ‘Realpolitik: the limits of state sovereignty’
