The Spirit of Democracy, page 18
As we have seen above, there have been many instances where external democratic assistance made a critical difference to democratic breakthroughs, and others where the effects were either modest or faint. Whatever the impact, however, such aid always plays a supporting role behind larger structural and historical factors, internal and external, that erode the viability of an authoritarian regime and drive a democratic transition. Democracy assistance can enhance these factors and “support democratic activists, but it is not a substitute for [indigenous] democracy groups’ own courage, energy, skills, and legitimacy.”84 Not surprisingly, as Thomas Carothers notes in one of the most carefully researched and balanced assessments of U.S. efforts, international democracy assistance appears to have the most visible positive effects where there are already modestly favorable conditions, such as indigenous support for democracy, weak and divided authoritarian rulers, previous historical experience with democratic institutions, “a peaceful regional setting in which democracy is spread,” and some degree of economic and educational development.85 If, as in South Korea and Taiwan, conditions are highly favorable, democratic assistance is unlikely to add much benefit (and in any case, generally does not flow to prosperous countries). If, as in Cambodia and Haiti, the conditions are quite unfavorable, even large amounts of international democracy aid may not prevent the consolidation of authoritarian rule or the descent back into chaos.
Overall, Carothers wisely appeals for restrained expectations of what democracy assistance programs can deliver, and how fast.
The effects of democracy programs are usually modestly positive, sometimes negligible, and occasionally negative. In countries where democratization is advancing, democracy aid can, if properly designed and implemented, help broaden and deepen democratic reforms in both the governmental and nongovernmental sectors. In countries where an attempted democratic transition has stalled or regressed, democracy programs can help actors keep some independent political and civic activity going and, over the long term, help build civic awareness and civic organizations at the local level. In countries that have not experienced a democratic opening, democracy programs may help democracy activists survive and gradually expand their work and may increase the flow of political information not controlled by the government.86
One reason to maintain modest expectations is that most democracy assistance programs are only modestly funded. Critics have complained about the “exorbitant cost” of donor-financed transitional elections, utilizing technologies that poor countries cannot afford to sustain; the overly expensive models of party organization and finance exported by the West; and the tendency for Western donors to support “only a narrow range” of “democracy NGOs” that are “elitist” and detached from deeper bases of societal tradition and support.87 While such criticisms are not entirely unfounded, they miss the fact that these more extensive expenditures to secure transparent, free, and fair elections in many cases achieved impressive results, facilitating wide participation and broad acceptance of the results.88 As for the civil society recipients, they are overwhelmingly drawn from the educated middle class, and some are merely opportunists, even shysters who construct “briefcase NGOs” to milk the international community. But around the world, I have seen a great many of these internationally funded NGOs working courageously—often at great personal risk and sacrifice and with manifest levels of grassroots support—to defend human rights, expose government corruption, broaden popular participation, disseminate democratic values and skills, and deepen democracy. As Gyimah-Boadi writes, “Professionally run NGOs and watchdog groups are indispensable to sustained democratic change because they are typically more ’civic-minded’ and are relatively resistant to government cooptation and repression.” With their educated talent and international resources and standards, these groups have brought “energy, dynamism, and professionalism into a sector whose effectiveness has often been hampered by amateurism and apathy.”89
Further, once a formal transition occurs, the impact of democracy assistance programs will be gradual and incremental, hopefully cumulating in a deepening consolidation of democracy. According to Carothers, “The country must be not too large (so that the aid is not spread too thin), the aid must be extensive and varied, and the political system must be populated with enough reform-oriented actors to take advantage of the aid.”90 When this assessment was made almost a decade ago, the countries meeting these conditions were mainly in Latin America and Eastern Europe, and Romania was a striking example, because “in almost every area where positive change seems to be taking place, external aid is present.” In his visits to the country, Carothers found that an “extremely high” percentage of Romanians active in politics and civil society had received significant Western training or exposure. He concluded: “Romania’s democratic progress since 1989 is primarily the work of Romanians. Yet Western aid, taken together, has been a substantial partner.”91 That judgment is even more apt for Romania (and Bulgaria) in 2007 but also applies to countries like Ghana, Mali, and Mongolia that are making democratic progress against historical odds.
And while overall, general levels of foreign aid appear to make no difference in the strength of democracy, the higher the level of USAID expenditures on democracy and governance in a country, the greater the level of democratic progress, as measured, for example, by the annual Freedom House survey. When they were assessed recently by a team of social scientists, the effects were “consistent and clear” but modest because individual country levels of assistance amounted on average to only about $2 million per country per year between 1990 and 2003 (rising to about $3.7 million on average in 2003). Larger levels of democracy assistance yield larger impacts. Each additional million dollars of democracy assistance increases the “normal” rate of improvement in democracy by 50 percent, “or in other words, ten million additional dollars would produce—by itself—about a five-fold increase in the amount of democratic change that the average country would be expected to achieve, ceteris paribus, in any given year.”92 Among the “toughest” regions, two of the three (Asia and Africa, but not the Middle East) showed the largest effects as the levels of democracy assistance increased. The findings—unprecedented for their empirical depth and statistical precision and sophistication—fully justify the authors’ conclusions that overall levels of democracy assistance should be increased, and that democracy assistance should be sustained in countries even after they have reached what has heretofore been considered a “satisfactory” stage of democratic development.
DEMOCRATIZATION BY FORCE
When all else fails, the last resort open to international actors is the use or threat of force to impose or restore democracy. However, the record of accomplishment of democratization by international coercion is not very encouraging—as evidenced by the disaster of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq and the difficulties in postwar Afghanistan. There are of course the oft-cited success stories of post–World War II Germany and Japan (as well as Italy), but those transitions came in a different era, when the Axis powers had been totally defeated in war and the American occupations had broad international legitimacy. Three examples from the Americas provide more recent guidance about the potential for success, and for failure, of forcing democracy.
In October 1983, U.S. forces invaded Grenada—with the endorsement of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States and after Grenada’s governor general appealed to that body for help—restoring a parliamentary democracy that had been toppled by a left-wing insurgency four years previously. In December 1989, American forces invaded Panama, arrested the military strongman Manuel Noriega on drug-trafficking charges, and enabled the winner of the May presidential election, Guillermo Endara, to assume office. Both of those democracies endured.
Yet, those successes offered few transferable lessons when it came time to use force for the sake of democracy in Haiti. In July 1994, after almost three years of escalating sanctions through the United Nations and OAS, the Haitian military regime retained power while the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, waited in exile to return to office. The UN Security Council was enjoined to vote on an authorization for member states “to use all necessary means to facilitate the departure from Haiti of the military leadership” and “the prompt return of the legitimately elected President.”93 The ensuing 12–0 Security Council vote was historic—the first time that the United Nations authorized the use of force to restore a democratically elected government. And it did so explicitly under chapter 7 of the UN Charter, thereby linking the humanitarian crisis, “the illegal de facto regime,” and the “systematic violations of civil liberties” to that chapter’s justification of force “to maintain or restore international peace and security.” It was an unprecedented show of muscular international support for democracy.
Although a number of Latin American states criticized the vote, it had its intended effect. As President Clinton readied twenty-one thousand American troops for invasion in September 1994, the Haitian generals blinked. They accepted an eleventh-hour mission to Port-au-Prince, during which “former president Jimmy Carter, Senator Sam Nunn, and General Colin Powell negotiated an agreement that returned Aristide to power without a violent invasion.”94
But while the threat of military intervention could restore an elected president to power, it could not make him govern democratically; nor could it build a culture of tolerance and nonviolence overnight. Haiti lapsed into a new version of its previous woes, as political forces fragmented and fought one another and successive elections were marred by fraud and boycotts that robbed them of legitimacy. Some years later, in Iraq, the United States would learn the limits of democracy by force much more bitterly.
WHAT DRIVES DEMOCRACY:
THE REGIONAL INFLUENCE
To solve the mystery of democratic progress in the world, it is sometimes necessary to examine, as Sherlock Holmes did in Silver Blaze, the dog that did not bark. On April 22, 1996, the dog did not bark in Paraguay. In this, one of Latin America’s most physically isolated and politically and economically backward countries—the last South American country to democratize—the military did not seize power in a constitutional crisis, as it was so accustomed to doing. The army commander, General Lino César Oviedo, tried and—amazingly—failed.
The crisis began when the power-hungry Oviedo refused to comply with an order to resign from Paraguay’s newly elected and weak president, Juan Carlos Wasmosy. After Wasmosy’s election in 1993 and what passed, rather superficially, for a democratic transition, General Oviedo remained (and considered himself rightfully to be) the most powerful man in the country. But by 1996, Wasmosy, other branches of the armed forces, and most of the rest of the country had had enough of the army chief’s domineering. When Oviedo rejected the president’s order, demanding instead that Wasmosy resign, the country girded itself for yet another coup.
But this time, the inter-American community rallied to the president’s, and Paraguay’s, defense. The United States was joined by Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay—Paraguay’s partners in the Southern Cone Common Market (MERCOSUR)—in condemning Oviedo’s defiance as “a direct challenge to the constitutional order in Paraguay” and contrary “to the democratic norms accepted by the countries of the hemisphere.”1 The Organization of American States (OAS) called an emergency meeting of its Permanent Council under the terms of Resolution 1080, providing for the collective defense of democracy in the region. Other democracies in the region followed suit. “As dawn approached, support for the president from the international community swelled into a torrent,” bucking up the wavering president and mobilizing significant sectors of the Paraguayan population in defense of the constitutional order. With the swift and unconditional support of Paraguay’s neighbors, the OAS, the United States, and many European democracies, Wasmosy found “the resolve to stand firm in the face of military insubordination,” and Oviedo was forced to resign, preserving Paraguay’s fragile democratic experiment.2
The defense of democracy in unlikely Paraguay was indicative of something powerful that had been emerging in the Americas, and around the world. As we saw in chapters 1 and 5, democracy has increasingly become an international norm, and international actors are increasingly inclined to promote and defend it, laying aside long-standing purist conceptions of national sovereignty. But the actions and norms that have driven this trend are not only at the level of the international community as a whole, or at the discretion of individual democracies, particularly the United States. With rising frequency and vigor, groupings of states have embraced democracy as an important regional norm, incumbent on all member states, and have created mechanisms and taken actions to advance it. The regional promotion of democracy has been boldest in postcommunist Europe and, as in Paraguay, has begun to have a decisive effect in Latin America. In other parts of the world, it has proceeded more meekly or, as in the case of Southeast Asia and the Middle East, not at all. And in Africa—which was, until recently, not to be undone in its jealous defense of the absolute sovereignty of its member states—regional resolve is on the rise.
THE EUROPEAN LEAD
No regional organization or influence has had a more powerful impact on democratization in its own neighborhood than the European Union (EU). The European Community (now the European Union) was the first regional body to take democracy seriously. In 1962, it set as a condition for membership that states “guarantee on their territories truly democratic practices and respect for fundamental rights and freedoms.”3 And this conditionality provided an important incentive for the early consolidation of democracy in Spain, Portugal, and Greece in the 1970s. In the 1992 Maastricht Treaty establishing the European Union, the condition was heartily reaffirmed, with EU membership opened to any European state that respects the principles of “liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law.”4 The following year, the new Copenhagen Criteria for EU admission required that candidate countries demonstrate “stability of institutions guaranteeing” the Maastricht attributes of liberal democracy.5 These membership requirements were then elaborated in overpowering detail in the acquis communautaire, which mandates laws, norms, and standards across a sweeping set of political, economic, bureaucratic, and technical issues, stretching to thirty-one chapters and some eighty thousand pages.6
The highly conditional process of European enlargement, particularly following the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty, has constituted the most compelling set of external peaceful pressures for reform of governance (and economic structure) in the history of the modern nation-state. After communism collapsed, the European Union exerted a magnetic gravitational pull on the postcommunist states of Central and Eastern Europe. Not only would admission bring tangible economic benefits of integration and aid; it would also “mean ‘a return to the West’—something that many East European politicians often described as their most important goal” and that East European publics wanted passionately.7 The return involved more than cultural identification; it had an expressly political motive as well: the hope “that the European Union could do for the Poles, the Czechs, and the Hungarians what it had done successfully for democratic consolidation in Spain, Portugal, and Greece.”8 Democratic politicians, civil society activists, and intellectual leaders in the region knew that if their countries became embedded in European institutions, defection from democracy would become unthinkable.
The EU’s postcommunist enlargement was repeatedly postponed, however, as prospective members struggled to meet the political, legal, bureaucratic, and economic conditions for entry. After Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Estonia were approved for the accession process in July 1997, “each candidate country had to enter into extensive negotiations with EU officials in order to prove that it would be able to meet EU standards and conform itself to the acquis.”9 (As other postcommunist candidate states were admitted to the negotiation stage, the same process applied to them.) Annually the European Commission closely monitored and reported on the implementation of the necessary reforms in each candidate’s state, which culminated after seven years with the entry into the European Union of eight postcommunist states (along with Cyprus and Malta) on May 1, 2004.
Often the commission reports cited specific deficiencies in the quality of democracy and market institutions, thereby inducing states to adopt specific remedies. Thus, thanks in part to EU pressure, “the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Latvia all gradually cleaned up and stabilized their banking systems.”10 Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic decentralized state administration to bring it closer to the people. The Baltic states changed laws and practices that discriminated against their Russian-speaking minorities. The Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary adopted measures to improve the treatment of their Roma (Gypsy) minorities. “All candidates received numerous EU requests to speed up judicial reforms” by removing tainted judges and prosecutors and enhancing efficiency; they also were put under pressure to depoliticize the civil services.11 And every EU candidate had to agree to be bound by the treaties on which the European Union was founded, legally committing them to a host of human rights standards. Throughout the region, the accession process forced candidate countries to rein in the cronyism, corruption, fraud, and insider speculation that had accompanied the first phase of market reforms after the fall of the Communist system.
