The Spirit of Democracy, page 42
Second, effective aid to state institutions depends on the political will to use it for democracy. Aid to state agencies is a tricky business—and an expensive one. Formal state-to-state political assistance programs, particularly when they involve construction of buildings, purchases of equipment, and payroll for staff, are typically much more expensive than grants to civil society organizations. It does little good to train and equip judges, legislators, and countercorruption agents if they and the institutions they work in are not structurally independent. Before donor organizations spend millions of dollars, they have to analyze whether institutions have the independence, leadership, and will to advance democracy. In theory, this is part of what USAID’s strategic assessment process of the political context means to achieve.11
A third principle is developing realistic expectations for what democracy assistance efforts can achieve, especially in the short run. Typically, democracy assistance has an incremental rather than a transformative effect. Where democracy is in place, assistance can absorb best practices from other countries and provide the resources to advocate and mobilize for additional reforms. In transitional or stalled democracies, it “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 highly authoritarian countries, it “may help democracy activists survive . . . and may increase the flow of political information not controlled by the government.”12 It is not practical to expect individual democracy aid projects to transform levels of freedom. But they can ensure that elections are better monitored and more transparent, that citizens know their rights and participate actively, that political parties become responsive to public concerns, and that legislative committees question and investigate executive branch actions more effectively—all worthwhile, and requiring a patient, long-term approach. Pressure to produce “showy,” near-term results tends to generate simplistic formulas for counting people trained or extravagant claims that overlook subtle but real achievements.
Patience is also required in another sense. Donor organizations and their officers (who are often on fixed-term contracts or country assignments) are frequently under “pressure to spend money quickly.”13 This
often leads to waste: splashy conferences, cushy tours for senior officials, big grants to just a few organizations that may not be in a position to deliver results. But it takes time to determine how funds can be spent effectively, from surveying a country to detect which programs are most needed to determining the most appropriate actors for developing and implementing a program priority. For example, political party assistance programs should move beyond their short-term focus on elections and campaigns, and even their traditional “fraternal” assistance to likeminded parties, and do more to address the challenge of building and reforming party organizations.14
The next principle involves the problem of scale. Democracy assistance programs at the level of 5, 10, or 20 million dollars annually may have a discernible impact in a small country, but they are a drop in the bucket for countries the size of China, Russia, Nigeria, or Indonesia. In large countries, democratic organizations and norms must be built up in dozens of provinces and hundreds of localities, well beyond the capital. No political assistance organization today is prepared to deliver on that kind of scale, even where, as in Indonesia, the political climate may be favorable. To make more headway there, let alone in China, Russia, and Nigeria, overall levels of funding for democracy assistance must be size-ably increased. Yet a massive burst of spending will not be enough unless it can be sustained over the long term. Often that means building institutions, crafting technologies, and developing practices that are scaled to a country’s level of economic development. A simpler, lower-tech approach—for example, in the administration of elections—makes better sense if it will allow a country to operate and sustain democratic practices on its own for years to come.
Scaling projects for local sustainability does not mean, however, that donors are let off the hook on committing to longer engagements. For some years now, the aid industry, and particularly USAID, has been obsessed with the imperative of “graduation”—seeing aid recipients develop as quickly as possible to a point where they no longer need development assistance. This is a justifiable concern; no country should be lulled into an expectation of indeterminate dependency. Certainly middle-income countries like Thailand and Brazil (not to mention more developed countries like Malaysia, Romania, and Mexico) have reached the point where they no longer need conventional foreign aid to give them the basic means to grow out of poverty. Once a country reaches middle-income status, it can and should rely more on internal revenue generation and private capital markets. What it most needs from the international community is open trade and foreign investment to create jobs and stimulate economic growth. But even where there is much wealth in the economy, there may not be the resources or the tradition of philanthropy to support civic organizations pressing for democratic change. Organizations may desperately need external assistance to defend human rights, educate democratic citizens, build effective parties, and investigate and control corruption. Democracy promoters must be prepared to offer extensive training and exchange programs and to direct outright grants to organizations even in countries that would otherwise be too developed or too far past a democratic transition to qualify for conventional aid. The travails in the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Guatemala demonstrate that two decades after a democratic transition, enormous needs for institutional assistance remain.
Particularly in poor countries, there is a parallel need for expanding and sustaining funding among individual civil society organizations. Some critics suggest that NGOs tend to be too dependent on Western aid and too detached from their own societies.15 But the fact that an NGO cannot raise its core funding in a poor country is hardly a reflection on its value to democratic development, or on its legitimacy and support in society. Where is such an organization supposed to get the funds to pay a professional staff, rent an office, purchase computers and cell phones, hire students to do research and polling, and deploy community organizers, if not from the international community? It cannot be expected to raise money from the state it is scrutinizing and holding accountable, or from a business community that may itself be politically captured or cautious, without becoming less effective as an agent of vertical accountability and reform. One of the strongest convictions I have formed in twenty-five years of studying civil society organizations in developing countries is that they need core organizational funding from external donors. Constant scrambling for specific project grants is too precarious. Thus, once an NGO accounts well for its international grants and demonstrates good performance in building democratic institutions and norms, it should become eligible for general support, ideally from multiple international donors. This would enable the organization to plan for the long term and develop a bottom-up reform agenda without growing dependent on any one country or funder—or of being perceived as such in local eyes.16
Just as civic organizations in a country must broaden their support, international donors must extend their cooperation and networking. While donors have been doing a somewhat better job of coordinating both individual country missions and international efforts, duplication still exists, decreasing the potential leverage that can be brought against recalcitrant or wavering governments. There is also a certain tendency toward competition among a country’s donors for contacts and credit. Effective coordination often comes down to the particular mix of donor representatives and the amount of time they have had to work with one another. The growth of nongovernmental networks—including, as mentioned in chapter 5, NED-like democracy assistance organizations and the civil society organizations and networks drawn into the World Movement for Democracy—offers promise of better coordination.
This networking is not enough, however, to counter the gathering backlash against efforts to promote democracy. Authoritarian states like China, Russia, Egypt, Iran, and Uzbekistan are implementing an array of legal restrictions and extralegal measures to block, neutralize, criminalize, and disrupt the flow of democracy assistance. Increasingly, they are learning and borrowing from one another’s efforts.17 In these circumstances, new methods for supporting besieged democratic forces must evolve. Where the United States and other powerful democracies have leverage, they could condition their aid, trade, investment, and other ties on some measure of a state’s tolerance for international assistance to civil society organizations and independent media. Western diplomats must take a principled, energetic stand, and the more they stand together, the more leverage they will have. Aid can also be channeled through neighboring countries, such as the cross-border efforts of NGOs in Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania to aid Belarusian and Central Asian democrats. Whenever possible, democrats within a region should draw together to exchange techniques and strengthen networks, supporting those in more tenuous circumstances. More use can be made of new as well as old communication technologies—the Internet and satellite television, international radio broadcasting, and underground organizations like those that have aided dissident democrats in the former Soviet bloc.18
Finally, political assistance efforts have more impact when they are integrated into economic assistance efforts. Traditional development programs—literacy, HIV/AIDS treatment, health services for mothers and children, agricultural assistance—should include means for generating political participation and citizenship awareness. USAID and other donors are already seeking to do this. A national assistance strategy must weigh not only the purely political obstacles to democracy but also the social obstacles of poverty, economic inequality, and extremely hierarchical systems that treat citizens as peons or clients of powerful patrons. As we saw in chapter 4, higher levels of development and education provide a more fertile soil for democracy to take root. This requires a comprehensive agenda of policies and investments targeted to empower the poor and reduce extreme poverty.
CONDITIONING DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE
Democratic assistance of the types mentioned above can help to build the institutions, networks, capabilities, and values that make for democracy. But if democracy is to emerge and function decently, there must be some dedication to it on the part of the country’s rulers. As I have argued throughout this book, a deep normative conviction that democracy is the best form of government is not necessary. That can emerge gradually, and may only really come with a generational turnover in the political elite. However, even if the elites commit solely on the calculation of their own economic and political interests—that the costs of resisting democracy are greater than the costs of allowing it—it will open the door to transition.19 Whatever the motivation, democrats can translate elite commitment into the political will for reform.
International efforts to facilitate democratic change must pay much greater attention to this question of the elites’ incentives. What can induce authoritarian elites who have monopolized power for years, if not decades, to surrender it, or at least put it at risk in free and fair elections? What might persuade a dictatorship to begin a serious process of political liberalization, with the risk that it might eventually lead to its loss of power? Why might ruling elites, even democratically elected ones, who have grown fat feeding off the public trough decide to accept an independent judiciary, a serious countercorruption commission, and other potent structures of horizontal accountability? Rare in history is an enlightened authoritarian ruler. Usually, dictators yield power and scoundrels accept scrutiny because they judge that they have no better choice. One of the key levers that brings them to this painful reckoning is running out of the resources to sustain a ruling coalition and pay the coercive apparatus that keeps them in power.
Some regimes stay afloat on international rents from oil exports. It will take time for the Western democracies to engineer a revolution in energy use—through conservation and conversion to alternative energy sources—that can dramatically reduce oil prices. Yet doing so is vital to creating favorable conditions for democracy in the world’s oil-dependent states.20 Many of the remaining authoritarian regimes—including a number of elected authoritarians—are sustained, however, through foreign aid, which generates the resources to keep the state alive, pay the army, police, and bureaucrats, and to deliver just enough to the population to avoid widespread protests. For the developing countries that do not have large oil reserves, donors can do a great deal to change the interests and therefore the calculations of elites by conditioning aid on improvements in governance and then rewarding the better governments with higher levels of aid.
This conditionality—or more properly termed, selectivity, since countries are selected and rewarded in advance for demonstrating progress—is controversial. Many well-intentioned people believe the rich Western countries have a moral obligation to transfer wealth to the poor countries of the world, particularly to Africa. Some economists give intellectual foundation to this outrage by arguing that the biggest obstacle to development is a lack of resources.21 The wealthy societies of the world do have an obligation to the world’s poor. But the obligation is not to transfer money; it is to help lift suffering people out of degrading poverty and oppression. Aid is an instrument for fostering development and reducing poverty, nothing more, and where the instrument does not work, it must be reconsidered. As Steven Radelet, one of the most objective analysts of foreign aid policy, has observed, “Much aid is wasted on countries with governments that are not serious about development and cannot use it well.”22
Unfortunately, the cause and effect relationship between governance and poverty has often been confused by this moral outrage. The Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs—the leading advocate for vastly increased aid—has it upside down when he argues, “Africa’s governance is poor because Africa is poor.” Africa is poor because its governance is rotten, and it will not truly develop until its governance improves. What good is done for a country’s poor by dumping generous aid into the laps of a corrupt, repressive government? In such a case, the principal benefit of the aid is to salve the conscience of the West, leaving it to feel that it is not its fault if, as is common in the world’s poor countries, half or more of the population lives in extreme poverty, earning under a dollar a day; a third or more of adults are illiterate; two in every five babies born will not live to the age of forty; and 10 percent will die before the age of one.23 If, as the facts suggest, aid is actually making things worse by sustaining abusive governments, then it is the West’s fault, and doubling aid uncritically and unconditionally will make it doubly so.
If the rich West is going to be effective at promoting democracy in the world’s poor countries, it needs a radically new philosophy of aid and debt relief. Aid must become what it is now euphemistically labeled development assistance, and no longer be a guilt payment or the fuel for a massive industry of bureaucrats, for-profit corporations, and idealistic do-gooders who are too often not achieving much good in their results. Democratic change in the world’s remaining corrupt dictatorships requires a radical manipulation of ruler incentives and a revolution in aid.
If they continue to provide aid on an unconditional basis, donor nations and organizations will merely cement the power of authoritarian rulers. But what principles should be followed? Many of the new directions needed in this revolution have already been set out in USAID’s 2002 report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest, but they have only been partially implemented.24 Here is a slightly revised agenda:
1. Overall levels of foreign assistance must be linked clearly to a country’s development performance, and to demonstrations of political will for governance reforms. The historic pattern by which dictatorships received as much or more foreign aid than democracies must end.25
2. Good performers must be tangibly rewarded. When political leaders demonstrate respect for democratic procedures and freedoms and the will to implement reforms, they should benefit with increases in assistance, including debt relief, incentives for foreign investment, and trade liberalization.
3. Governance performance must be judged by absolute standards, not by “grading on a curve.” If virtually all low-income countries lack the basic institutions to control corruption and foster transparency and a rule of law, then it does limited good to reward those that fall short less egregiously than others. It takes time to build a competent, functioning court system and state bureaucracy, but every government can create an independent countercorruption commission and electoral administration, and every parliament can pass laws giving citizens freedom of information and requiring that officials declare their assets. Every government can decide to tolerate an independent and critical press and a vigorous civil society. These require political will, not economic development or high state capacity.
4. Rewards must be granted for demonstrated performance, not for promises that may be repeatedly made and broken. The only way to exit from the chronic game of conditionality is to make increases in assistance contingent on what governments actually do, not what they say they will do.
