The Spirit of Democracy, page 15
Thus, in January 1989 the Solidarity movement was legalized in Poland, at about the same time that the Hungarian Party decided to abandon its leading role, and accept multiparty elections. Then, in the June 1989 [Polish] elections, Solidarity scored an overwhelming victory. . . . In October, the Hungarian [Communist] Party changed its name to the Hungarian Socialist Party and explicitly abandoned its Leninism. Then in November 1989 the Czech and German parties respectively lost their political monopolies through mass protests. Finally, in February 1990 the [Soviet Communist Party] abolished clause 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which has for so long formally guaranteed the party’s leading role in Soviet society.5
A decade later, the model of mass peaceful mobilization to reverse electoral fraud and effect a democratic revolution spread from Serbia in 2000 to Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. The scale and discipline of demonstrations in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution then ignited the civil society movement in Romania, which was struggling with a Communist hangover of corruption, criminality, and authoritarianism. In the 2004 Romanian elections, these civic efforts helped to bring to power “a new generation of young, pro-European democrats” vowing a sharp break with the sleazy, semiauthoritarian practices of the former Communists, who had ruled for most of the period since 1990.6
Perhaps nowhere was the snowballing more robust than in Africa after the seminal shifts in South Africa and Benin in 1990. The pressure for liberal democracy in South Africa had been spurred by changes elsewhere in the region, as the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola relieved the perceived threat from Marxist forces while Namibia’s passage to independence under black-majority rule in 1989 intensified South Africa’s isolation.
The South African democratic transition, however, laid bare the divergence between what African leaders were demanding for that country and what they were doing to oppress their own peoples. By 1990, Africans themselves were exposing the hypocrisy of demanding liberties in South Africa that were routinely trampled elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. In condemning the repression of Samuel Doe’s regime in Liberia, a prominent Nigerian newspaper editorialized, “The very same reprehensible practices, which the world has persistently condemned in South Africa, are being daily replicated by the government of an independent African country.”7 Declared Roger Chongwe, chairman of the African Bar Association, “All Africa demands: if South Africa is to have one man, one vote, why not us?”8 African leaders finally conceded at the OAU summit in July 1990 that they would need “to democratise further our societies and consolidate democratic institutions.”9
Significantly, their statement on the need for human rights, political accountability, and the rule of law was titled “The Political and Socio-Economic Situation in Africa and the Fundamental Changes Taking Place in the World.”10 Africans displayed an acute responsiveness to the democratic wave sweeping through Eastern Europe and across the globe. As Nigeria’s UN ambassador, and political scientist, Ibrahim Gambari observed, Africans “listen to the BBC, the Voice of America, Radio Moscow, sometimes in their local language. They’re fully aware [of what’s been happening in Eastern Europe] and they ask, ‘Why not here?’”11 Indeed, “Many young African protesters, inspired by television images showing Eastern European crowds demonstrating against communism, [were] seeking to emulate the success of Poles, Hungarians, East Germans, Czechoslovakians, Bulgarians and Romanians in throwing off unpopular one-party governments and demanding multiparty democracy.”12 Even one of the architects of the African one-party state, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, said that his country could learn a “lesson or two” from Eastern Europe.13
The impact of Eastern Europe’s democratic changes on Africa shows that snowballing rolled far beyond the confines of individual regions. The Spanish and Portuguese transitions had a profound impact on their former colonies in the Americas, which then turned to democracy as well. By the 1980s, civil society struggles for democratic change were linked across the globe. “Solidarity’s struggle in Poland and Marcos’s downfall in the Philippines had a resonance in Chile, that would have been unlikely in earlier decades.”14 Virtually all of the democratic countries in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean had been British colonies, and in the early 1990s, many movements against authoritarian regimes in Africa drew from a common reservoir of historical values and linkages from the colonial past.
Methods and techniques of democratic change also began to spread widely across borders, through passive observation and direct transfer of skills, from the strategy of forging compromise pacts to the tactics of popular mobilization and protest. The model of peaceful nonviolent resistance that brought down the dictator Slobodan Miloevi spread to Georgia and Ukraine, partly through the efforts of the very activists from the student group Otpor who had spawned the democratic revolution in Serbia. In the early 1990s, the African National Congress (ANC) made what may have been the most systematic and deliberate effort to learn from other democratic transitions and constitutional systems, sending teams of experts to study models in a number of different countries on several continents.
The relative success of democratic countries, the deepening failure of various types of authoritarian regimes, the consequent exhaustion of authoritarian ideologies, and the absence of alternative visions of regime legitimacy also helped diffuse democratic values. As news spread of nearly universal authoritarian dysfunction and corruption, people living under an authoritarian regime placed their national experiences within a wider context. They “could and did ask the relevance for themselves of political events in far-off countries.”15 Authoritarianism was failing as a system, not because of the perversion of an individual or an experiment gone wrong. With the end of the Cold War, communism was as thoroughly discredited as fascism had been by its defeat in World War II.
Diffusion effects are also, by their nature, long-term, involving a gradual swing toward the values of personal liberty, pluralism, and political voice and a preference for market competition. In Taiwan, the leaders of the democratic movement that emerged in the 1970s were mainly educated abroad in law and the social sciences. They returned “ready to apply at home” the “ideas and institutions of a reference society” in the West. “They adopted Western democratic ideals as well as democratic procedures, institutional design, political techniques, and legal frameworks.”16 Through overseas study, economic exchange, and the explosive growth of international communications, democratic, antiauthoritarian norms and ways of life have seeped into many countries. While the points of contact have initially been through elites, the diffusion of Western news, opinion, music, and entertainment has influenced the reception of democratic movements.17 Together, these dense international connections fed an unprecedented global democratic zeitgeist.
PEACEFUL PRESSURE
Since the mid-1970s, the established democracies—in particular, the United States—have used peaceful forms of pressure against authoritarian states to advance human rights and democracy. Initially, under President Jimmy Carter, this pressure was limited to the goal of diminishing repression and saving its victims. Under President Ronald Reagan, pressure increasingly focused on promoting and sustaining democratic regime change, a goal that Reagan’s successors in the presidency embraced.
During the late Cold War and post–Cold War periods, Western pressure for political liberalization of authoritarian regimes had a significant impact—in certain conditions. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way demonstrate that leverage and linkage determine the potential for exercising effective peaceful pressure for democratic change.18 Generally, the impact has depended not only on the resolve of the states or coalitions applying the pressure, and to some extent on their unity, but also on the leverage that Western democracies have had over autocratic states, and on the degree to which those states have been linked socially, culturally, and economically to the West. Linkages that render authoritarian states vulnerable to Western pressure include conventional economic ties (trade, investment, and credit), security ties (treaties and guarantees), and social ties (tourism, immigration, overseas education, elite exchanges, international NGO and church networks, and Western media penetration). Strong linkages forge cultural bonds that help rally democratic societies and parliaments to lobby for the defense of human rights and democracy, as seen with pressure on the Clinton administration to move against the Haitian military dictatorship in 1994 and the “extensive Hungarian lobbying” of the European Union to press Romania and Slovakia to improve the treatment of their Hungarian minorities.19
At the same time, international linkages can make critical social and political constituencies within authoritarian countries either more committed to democracy or more sensitive to Western pressures. Ties to the West induced elites both “to reform authoritarian parties from within (as in Croatia, Mexico, and Taiwan)” and “to defect to the opposition (as in Slovakia and, to a lesser extent, in Romania during the mid-1990s).”20 After Western countries “forced severance of [Taiwan’s] formal ties” and revoked Taiwan’s UN membership in order to warm relations with mainland China, Taiwan’s elites saw that democratic reform might provide a means to renew the sympathy and support of the American public and other Western democracies.21 The desire to be accepted as a partner among industrial nations also contributed to the democratic transitions in South Korea as it prepared to host and risked losing the 1988 Olympics and in Chile as it prepared for the 1988 referendum on whether to extend Pinochet’s dictatorship. In these contexts, international criticism of authoritarian rule bred a sense of isolation and a desire to be regarded with respect by the industrialized democracies.22 But where ties are less intimate, for example, in the former Soviet Union and much of the rest of Africa, Western pressure to democratize has been less consequential.
Leverage, too, depends on the power of the authoritarian state, and thus, mighty states like China and the Soviet Union (and subsequently Russia) have largely been immune. The realization that trade sanctions just were not going to move a country as big and powerful as China to liberalize politically persuaded the Clinton administration to lift its conditioning of “Most Favored Nation” trading status on human rights in 1994. In the cases of Iran, the Arab Gulf states, Nigeria, and more recently Azerbaijan and Venezuela (under Hugo Chávez), Western dependence on their vast oil revenues greatly diminishes the leverage of the rich democracies.
Alternately, support from an external authoritarian power can insulate a dictatorship that might otherwise be susceptible to Western leverage, as with China’s role in sustaining dictatorships in Burma and North Korea against extensive Western sanctions and Russia’s obstruction of democratic pressures on regimes in Belarus, Armenia, and Central Asia. But for many regions, including Central Europe and the Americas, “no alternative regional power exists, leaving the EU and the United States as ‘the only game in town.’”23 It can, of course, be a democracy that provides a lifeline for authoritarian survival, as with France’s renewed backing for authoritarian strongman Paul Biya in Cameroon and the sometimes fluid American stances toward authoritarian states.
Indeed, leverage is reduced when other policy interests compete with the concern to promote democracy and human rights. Sometimes these interests are economic, as when the Clinton administration balked at applying vigorous sanctions against the Nigerian military dictatorship after the regime aborted a democratic transition in 1993 and then in 1995 executed the widely admired Niger Delta human rights leader Ken Saro-Wiwa, along with eight other activists. U.S. officials at the time told me (and others who lobbied for pressure) that they worried a tough stance might prompt the Nigerian military to take away the lucrative concessions of American oil companies and give them to French and other European companies. More often, though, competing interests have been strategic. For most of the Cold War, the United States readily supported right-wing, anti-Communist dictatorships as part of its containment of the Soviet power bloc. Until Jimmy Carter elevated human rights in U.S. foreign policy, America maintained warm relations with the dictatorships in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Chile, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Zaire, and Kenya because they were firm allies in the Cold War. Indeed, several of these autocratic regimes came to power with the active or at least tacit support of the United States.
The strategic imperative subsided with the end of the Cold War but resumed again after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when a new group of authoritarian “frontline” states in the war on terror—Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan—assumed much greater importance to American security, and thus relative immunity from pressure to democratize. Even before September 11, “Pakistan’s status as a nuclear power hostile to India, with ties to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and fundamentalist factions gaining ground at home,” led the Clinton administration to temper its response to the October 1999 military coup.24 In recognition of Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori’s support for the war on drugs, the Clinton administration maintained military cooperation and attended his third-term inauguration despite describing Fujimori’s fraud-ridden 2000 election as “invalid.” For its part, the Bush administration initially welcomed the attempted April 2002 coup against Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, because of his leftist and anti-American policies, and only endorsed an OAS resolution condemning it after most major Latin American leaders denounced the unconstitutional seizure of power.25 Then, in the fall of 2005, Bush refused to meet with opposition forces in oil-rich Azerbaijan. “This sent a clear signal that the United States would tolerate a tainted parliamentary election there in November 2005,” and six months later, President Ilham Aliyev was granted an official White House visit.26
Peaceful pressure to democratize generally takes three intentional forms: diplomacy, the conditioning of aid, and sanctions. Often these converge or overlap. Diplomacy may be more effective in encouraging democratic change when it offers to sustain or initiate positive inducements (various forms of aid) in exchange for democratic reforms, and when it threatens to impose costs (sanctions) for authoritarian defiance. But where diplomacy advances democracy, it usually happens in a fairly narrow time frame, during a period of political crisis when an authoritarian regime that is on the defensive must decide whether to repress or reform. Conditionality and sanctions, in turn, may seek to have an impact over a much longer period of time.
Diplomatic pressure pushed a number of countries toward democracy during the late 1970s and 1980s. The initial wedge of change was President Carter’s campaign against human rights abuses in Latin America. By documenting and publicly denouncing abuses in countries like Argentina and Uruguay, and coupling these denunciations with reductions in aid—in the case of Argentina, entirely eliminating military aid and voting against most of its international loan applications—the new policy “helped to limit direct human rights abuses.” In addition, by reducing symbolic and material support the policy helped “to isolate military regimes from a traditional ally,” which in turn undermined their legitimacy and strengthened soft-liners.27 In a classic instance of diplomatic intervention to tilt the balance in a crisis, Carter directly contributed to the Dominican Republic’s turn to democracy in 1978. When the country’s military stopped the presidential election vote count in the face of an apparent opposition victory, the administration led a chorus of vigorous warnings from international actors, including President Carter, U.S. secretary of state Cyrus Vance, American embassy staff and military attachés, and the commander in chief of the U.S. Southern Command. These pressures persuaded the Dominican military to allow the opposition candidate to take office, inaugurating a nascent, if troubled, period of democracy.28 The defeated incumbent, Joaquin Balaguer, returned to power in 1986 and ruled the country until 1996, when he was legally removed from office in the wake of electoral fraud, under pressure from the United States and through mediation by the OAS.29 Regional diplomacy also helped to broker agreement on constitutional and legal reforms of the electoral process.
On the Reagan administration’s diplomatic watch, the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos was induced in late 1985 to call a presidential “snap election” that independent election observers judged he lost to Corazón Aquino. In the tense days following the February 7, 1986, vote, Marcos’s bid to retain power through massive electoral fraud was frustrated by a U.S. policy, led by Secretary of State George P. Shultz, to “accelerate the succession.” The United States warned Marcos against suppressing the independent poll-watching group NAMFREL; vigorously challenged the election’s credibility; threatened to cut off military aid if Marcos used force against a pro-democratic army rebellion; and finally—with the prospect of mass bloodshed—told Marcos it was time to resign.30 The Reagan administration also deterred Chun Doo Hwan’s dictatorship in South Korea from forcibly suppressing pro-democracy demonstrations in 1987 and prevented military coups in El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, and Peru by warning of a sharp downturn in relations with the United States.31 In the second Reagan term, Shultz began laying a strategy to encourage democratic change in Chile, beginning with the dispatch of a new ambassador instructed to press for human rights and a return to democracy.32 In each of these cases, the private messages and public actions of the United States pressured the dictator to hold elections and grant civic freedoms that ultimately brought him down. “However, international support for democracy reinforced domestic groups and sectors of the military opposed to military intervention.”33 Moreover, throughout the Reagan years, the goals of promoting democracy and fighting communism struggled for preeminence in American foreign policy. Although the former increasingly prevailed, military assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras did much to undermine the ability of embattled democratic forces to wrench control from abusive militaries.34
