(From previous issue)
4) A feebler policy commitment: Of course, not all aspects of the international environment are unfavorable for democracy work. New communications technologies are helping prodemocratic networks to expand across borders and oceans and bringing political abuses to light. Repeated efforts by determined, courageous citizens in different parts of the world to protest against political wrongs are inspirational and underline the urgency of helping such people to translate their energies into sustained political gains. Yet the headwinds buffeting democracy aid-the waning of global democratic momentum, the growing pushback against democracy aid, the damaged status of Western democracy, and rising competition from nondemocracies-also influence many Western policy makers and add up to a further challenge: weakened commitment by the United States and other established democracies to making democracy support a foreign-policy priority.
In the 1990s, democracy promotion was clearly on the rise in Western foreign policy. As democracy expanded across the globe, it looked to Western politicians like a “growth stock” worth significant investment. Countervailing policy interests, such as the need to maintain strong ties with oil-rich authoritarian regimes, while certainly still present, appeared to be in decline. Democracy support appealed as a way to give definition to the optimistic spirit of the era and to provide an overarching policy framework at a time of post-Cold War policy drift. Although both U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and some of their counterparts in other Western democracies pursued democracy-related policies that were marred by compromises and contradictions, they did try to find a place for it near the center of their foreign-policy visions.
That outlook no longer holds. With democracy stagnant or in retreat in many parts of the world, Western politicians have less incentive to associate themselves with the cause. Democratization has come to appear to many Western policy makers as a risky, even ill-advised endeavor in some places due to its potential for unleashing sectarian conflict, as in Iraq and Libya, or for giving rise to populist, anti-Western politicians, as in Hungary and various parts of Latin America. Moreover, as more developing countries make big new oil and gas finds or become front-line states in counterterrorism struggles, the number of countries where the West feels a tangible need to befriend nondemocratic governments is increasing.
The result is a highly uncertain commitment on the part of the Obama administration and some of its allies to put democracy high on their foreign-policy agendas. Although some advisors around President Obama insist that he is strongly committed to democracy promotion, contrary evidence is more persuasive and shows a U.S. hesitation to push hard for democratization in many places. As the century’s second decade nears its midpoint, the United States and Europe are preoccupied with daunting security challenges in the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, and East Asia that many policy makers read as making political stability rather than democratic change the overriding priority.
Thus, even though the overall spending worldwide on democracy aid is generally holding steady (despite drops at some major institutions such as USAID, where spending on democracy programs has shrunk significantly over the past five years), the aid is less grounded in policy frameworks that support the overall endeavor of advancing democracy. So if a government cracks down on civil society aid from abroad, the diplomatic response from the affected Western governments may be weak, as it was when Egypt took harsh steps in this direction in 2012 and 2013. Or an international election-monitoring effort may find serious shortcomings in an electoral process, but result in no negative consequences for the regime because the Western governments sponsoring the effort are fearful of offending a useful friend, as was recently the case with Azerbaijan. In other words, the “low policy” of democracy support remains in place, but it often cannot count on the “high-policy” side for backing when it matters.
A quarter-century into its existence, the enterprise of assisting democracy across borders finds itself in an unusually complex state. On the one hand, it has grown in size and evolved positively in response to learning from experience. Yet now it must endure and make gains in a harsher international context, marked by an array of crosscurrents that have come on very strongly in the last several years, radically eroding the structural underpinnings that helped democracy aid to flourish in the 1990s.
The democracy-aid community is only just starting to come to terms with this much more troubled context. The major difficulties posed by this environment will not go away anytime soon.
(To be continued)
(Thomas Carothers is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the founder and director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Program and oversees Carnegie Europe in Brussels.)
Democracy-aid providers need to invest much more energy and resources in finding ways to adapt and respond. With regard to the closing-space problem, signs of a strengthening response are emerging. Some of the most heavily affected aid providers, such as the U.S. government, are working on a menu of measures that includes strengthening the international norms protecting civil society’s freedoms, better coordinating diplomatic campaigns against restrictive NGO laws, and providing protective technologies to local partners threatened with surveillance and harassment. There is no magic bullet that will vanquish the closing-space phenomenon. A great deal more will need to be done, and by a wide range of aid actors, but at least a start has been made.
In contrast, democracy-aid providers have shown less willingness to confront the problems of Western democracy’s declining prestige and the growing competition from alternative political models. Some Western aid practitioners still talk behind closed doors about the special value of their own country’s political system and their mission of bringing its benefits to distant lands. They seem startlingly unaware of just how damaged Western models have become in the eyes of others and how much democracy aid needs to be built on far more modest assumptions about the relative appeal of Western democracy. A few groups including the U.S.-based National Democratic Institute have for some time emphasized comparative expertise drawn from established and transitional countries alike and hired many non-Western staffers with experience from other transitions, but such practices are still too rare in the aid community. In addition, aid providers need to go beyond their ritualistic assertions of openness to democratic variety, working together in a more focused way with those in other parts of the world who insist on a preference for non-Western forms of democracy, in order to clarify whether such alternatives are compatible with core universal principles of democracy and how Western democracy aid can support more varied but still legitimate democratic approaches.4
Regarding the diminishing Western commitment to making democracy support a foreign-policy priority, democracy-aid providers can play a counterbalancing role by drawing on their experiences around the world to address more systematically the growing concerns of Western policy makers about democracy. How can Western governments insert an effective prodemocracy element into their dealings with democratically deficient but strategically useful governments without sacrificing a broader cooperative relationship with them? Why should flawed democratic development be regarded not just as a side issue in many of the security threats that are flaring up from Ukraine to Iraq, but a root cause of them? How can elections be designed and supported in ways that specifically help to reduce the chance of emergent sectarian conflicts? By answering questions such as these, the “low-policy” side of democracy support (that is, democracy aid) can move away from its tendency to view itself merely as a beneficiary (or victim) of the “high-policy” side of democracy support and take on a significant role in shaping it instead.
The forbidding waters in which democracy aid now finds itself are prompting quiet but audible talk of a fundamental crisis facing the field. This talk is mistaken. The context is indeed daunting, yet this is not especially surprising. For too long democracy promoters have tried to hold on to the appealing but incorrect idea that rapidly expanding democracy, opening doors, and a lack of ideological rivals are natural global conditions that will continue indefinitely. In other words, democracy aid is not facing an existential crisis so much as it is coming up against hard realities that are far from historically unusual when seen in a longer-term perspective. For the foreseeable future, democracy aid will have to operate principally in countries rife with forbidding obstacles to democratization; powerholders in many places will resist and resent such aid; and alternative political models will vie hard for attention and influence. Coming to terms with these realities is not about dealing with crisis, but rather about shedding lingering illusions.
In short, democracy aid has arrived not at a crisis, but at a crossroads, defined by two very different possible paths forward. Some democracy-aid providers facing the new environment will feel inclined to pull back, spend fewer resources, exit from difficult countries, trim their political sails, and avoid direct competition with contending models. In short, they will aim to reduce their risks, and their ambitions. Others will favor a different path. They will accept that backsliding, closing political space, and greater competition are the “new normal” of democracy aid. They will invest more heavily in learning, accept the need to tolerate greater risks, work harder to achieve greater cooperation and solidarity among diverse democracy-aid providers, and argue more effectively for principled, persuasive prodemocracy diplomacy to support their efforts.
It is unclear which of these paths will attract more adherents among the large set of relevant actors. But the eventual answer to this question will do much to determine whether a stocktaking of democracy aid another quarter-century down the road will tell a story of decline and growing irrelevance, or reveal a pattern of sustained productive engagement and iterative progress in the face of significant adversity.
Thomas Carothers is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the founder and director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Program and oversees Carnegie Europe in Brussels.
