President Bush's address to the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday was remarkable in at least two important respects. First, the speech was not simply a defense of the United States's conduct in Iraq nor the usual recitation of international policy initiatives. Rather, Bush chose to focus on the importance of universal moral principles as the driving force behind his foreign policy. The third paragraph of the speech was most important:

The United Nations and my country share the deepest commitments. Both the American Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaim the equal value and dignity of every human life. That dignity is honored by the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, protection of private property, free speech, equal justice, and religious tolerance. That dignity is dishonored by oppression, corruption, tyranny, bigotry, terrorism and all violence against the innocent. And both of our founding documents affirm that this bright line between justice and injustice -- between right and wrong -- is the same in every age, and every culture, and every nation.

Political actions always presuppose moral principles and sometimes even theses about the character of moral principles may be similarly presupposed although not articulated. It is a rare state paper, however, that makes such notions explicit and in which a president sets himself and his policies against moral and cultural relativism with the emphasis that Mr. Bush has done more than once, but with particular force in New York. In his condemnation of recent terrorist attacks around the world, Bush noted that such acts "violate the standards of justice in all cultures, and the principles of all religions." The major theme of the speech was human dignity: Bush began six successive paragraphs of policy statements with the phrase, "because we believe in human dignity." On the third of these he urged the U.N. to pass a resolution sponsored by Costa Rica that would ban human cloning. Bush characterized the resolution as affirming "a basic ethical principle: No human life should ever be produced or destroyed for the benefit of another."

One can always by wary of politicians who dress up their positions in the language of moral principle and one can certainly entertain doubts about the moral quality of some of Mr. Bush's policy decisions. Nevertheless, the kind of public endorsement of what amounts to an objective and antirelativist theory of moral principles in politics is unusual.

This brings me to the second remarkable aspect of the speech. Mr. Bush's defense of universal moral principles was also put to work in defending his aim of spreading democratic political institutions throughout the world, especially the Arab world. The president has stated this goal a number of times, most notably in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute before the invasion of Iraq. Yesterday in New York the president said the following:

Because we believe in human dignity, peaceful nations must stand for the advance of democracy. No other system of government has done more to protect minorities, to secure the rights of labor, to raise the status of women, or to channel human energy to the pursuits of peace. We've witnessed the rise of democratic governments in predominantly Hindu and Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish and Christian cultures. Democratic institutions have taken root in modern societies, and in traditional societies. When it comes to the desire for liberty and justice, there is no clash of civilizations. People everywhere are capable of freedom, and worthy of freedom.

Mr. Bush has sometimes spoken of "cultural condescension," implying that those who oppose this international democratization initiative are guilty of a kind of tacit racism for wondering whether the policy isn't overly utopian. British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed a similar sentiment in his speech to the U.S. Congress in July 2003:

There is a myth. That though we love freedom, others don't, that our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture. That freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law are American values or Western values. That Afghan women were content under the lash of the Taliban. That Saddam was beloved by his people. That Milosevic was Serbia's saviour. Ours are not Western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit and anywhere, any time, ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same. Freedom not tyranny. Democracy not dictatorship. The rule of law not the rule of the secret police.

Here there is, I think a more serious question to be asked. There may be people who think that Arabs or Muslims are simply incapable of living in democratic political systems (I use "democratic" here in the contemporary sense to indicate broadly representative constitutional polities). And there are certainly people who would oppose the president's policy because they reject his claim about universal moral principles and their political implications. However, I suspect that most critics of the idealism evinced by the president mean something different. There is no contradiction in believing that there are universal and objective moral principles (for example, that innocent human life ought never to be intentionally taken) and that those principles are best vindicated in and protected by political institutions that are culturally and historically particular. It may even be that the reality and objective character of some moral principles are only clearly seen at a particular historical moment, and this is certainly true of many institutions that serve such principles. One is reminded in this context of Aquinas's view that while the natural law never changes by subtraction, it can be changed by addition (Summa theologiae, 1-2, q. 94, a. 5). Moreover, the history of western political institutions of free government is a long one that includes many fits and starts and a good deal of violence prior to the settlement that we now have.

American political institutions are directly derived from those of England and anyone who has studied the history of English politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries knows just how difficult the transition to a stable, moderate and largely peaceful political life was. It may be in this context that we should see the heightened importance of many legal and political institutions that aim to protect human dignity in the political world dominated by the modern state, e.g., the protection of basic rights, concrete limitations on government power, access to courts, etc.

The discovery and establishment of such institutions took a long time and occurred in particular historical and cultural contexts and the transfer of them to other very different contexts is difficult and could take a great deal of time and effort. To evince uncertainty about any quick democratization of the middle east is not necessarily cultural condescension or relativism, but simply a sensitivity to the reality that even basic values need to be realized in institutions that are themselves rooted in human habits and mores. Such things do not sprout quickly. One can agree with the president's ultimate goals but also worry about the means of achieving them and the expectation that they can be realized quickly or cheaply. Excessive expectations about the imminent transformation of the politics of Iraq, much less of the entire Arab world, could be more dangerous than the patience and realism--cultural as well as moral--that is not skepticism.

lewisb@cua.edu