Exporting Democracy: A Progress Report
Muravchik, Joshua
Joshua Muravchik EXPORTING DEMOCRACY: A PROGRESS REPORT From the pampas to Peking, a new kind of quiet diplomacy is at work. Democracy is more than a system of government. It is a way of life.. ....
...and wide-ranging discussions of philosophy and literature...
...Opposition to NED has not come exclusively from the left...
...The Endowment was saved by the Senate, and it subsequently adopted guidelines designed to sharpen the fine line separating partisan electoral activity∔ which is forbidden∔from other political institution-building...
...The Soviets apparently see something in NED that Brown and Kilpatrick don't see...
...Even so questionable an exercise of American power as the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic resulted in lasting democratic rule (preserved in 1978 by stern diplomatic warnings from the Carter Administration to Dominican officers on the verge of aborting an election which transferred power to the democratic left...
...Although most of NED's activities are less than a year old, a small-scale campaign has begun against NED in the Soviet media...
...From a public service announcement on Argentine television sponsored by Conciencia, an Argentine women's organization...
...both have enjoyed enduring democracy ever since...
...A similar When a House appropriations subcommittee met for the routine task of marking up the bill providing funds for NED for fiscal year 1986, no American news reporters were present, but the session was covered by a correspondent from TASS...
...The Endowment is also supporting an attempt by the OEF, with Conciencia's assistance, to set up a similar organization in neighboring Uruguay which has also returned only recently to elected rule...
...Conciencia sponsors public service ads about democracy on Argentine television, conducts forums for citizen debate over public issues, and runs a pyramiding scheme of coffee klatches in which Argentine women talk to each other about the virtues and methods of democracy...
...The magazine began by sending 500 copies and has increased the number, now aiming to send a total of 10,000...
...To the extent that the Endowment succeeds in its mission, it will bring benefits to others and strengthen our own security as well...
...In its broadside, COHA condemned Nicaragua's struggling independent unions for standing "outside the mainstream coalition of unions," COHA's phrase for the Sandinista federation...
...But even if covert action has sometimes served democratic ends well, the deception inherent in it is corrosive of the goal...
...The Endowment, therefore, does not ordinarily give grants directly to foreign groups, but to American ones for support of particular overseas programs or for transfer to their foreign counterparts...
...In less than a year of operation, the NED has begun to support some eminently worthy causes, and has made a start at wrestling with the daunting and neglected question of just how the United States can effectively aid others in securing the blessings of liberty...
...The most hopeful situations are those, like many in Latin America, where democratic institutions are now in place but not well established...
...But Congress last year barred any NED funds from going to these institutes during fiscal year 1985...
...The NED was an initiative of the Reagan Joshua Muravchik's new book, The Uncertain Crusade: Jimmy Carter and The Dilemmas of Human Rights Policy, will be published by Hamilton Press in November...
...And, with NED's support, the New York-based Committee in Support of Solidarity is preparing translations of a volume of Solidarity documents into Czech, Hungarian, Russian, and Ukrainian, for circulation in those countries...
...The magazine's target audience is the 10,000 scholars and students from the People's Republic of China who are studying in the West, most of whom will return home to influential positions...
...There is no doubt that the United States has the capability to spread democracy, at least by some methods...
...Some of the complexities of this task are illustrated by the very way in which the Endowment was set up...
...Aiding the development of democracy is of course profoundly "political," and NED's President, Carl Gershman, argues cogently that strengthening political parties is critical to strengthening democracy, but anything that smacks of direct intervention in a foreign election raises hackles in Congress...
...Thus NED is supporting the efforts of Armando Valladares, the poet now living in Europe after surviving two decades in Castro's prisons, to establish a string of committees in European countries that will disseminate information about Cuban human rights abuses and pressure the Cuban government to attenuate the more egregious ones...
...which permits us to live in freedom, to express ourselves without prior censorship, to profess our religious faiths, to choose those who govern us, but it requires our participation, whether we are in the majority or the minority...
...NED will need time, and it will have to learn through trial-and-error which democracy-building programs are most effective...
...Rightist dictators repress the opposition that they naturally provoke from both democrats and Communists...
...America embodies not just territory and population but also an idea, and defense of America requires not just guns, but also political work in defense of that idea...
...NED President Carl Gershman notes that even in Chile under General Pinochet, probably South America's harshest right-wing dictatorship, NED is able to find democratic-minded political, labor, business, church, and intellectual leaders with whom to work...
...faces of many people appear on the screen superimposed on a map of Argentina...
...government without compromising them...
...It has also aroused a curious collection of critics on both the left and right...
...NED's goal there is to help nourish and deepen democratic roots...
...To Liang's own surprise he has secured permission from the Chinese government to send copies into China...
...tides reprinted in officially accepted Chinese magazines, and even to hire the editor of one of these as the official Peking representative of the Chinese Intellectual...
...The model for much of this activity is the assistance which for years has been given by institutes affiliated with the AFL-CIO to fledgling labor unions in the Third World, and the biggest share of NED's budget has been earmarked by Congress for an expansion of labor's programs...
...He argues that NED is doing nothing useful that is beyond the powers of existing arms of the U.S...
...When a House appropriations subcommittee met for the routine task of marking up the bill providing funds for NED for fiscal year 1986, no American news reporters were present, but the session was covered by a correspondent from TASS...
...The fortnightly journal, Soviet Trade Unions, recently ran a lengthy satire about the activities of the AFL-CIO and NED, needless to say with the CIA mixed in...
...A further step separating NED's beneficiaries from the U.S...
...modernistic Chinese poems...
...A good example of how such lines are drawn in practice was seen during last years's elections in Grenada...
...When the government used its control of foreign currency to prevent the independent newspaper, La Prensa, from importing critical printing supplies (the San-dinista newspaper received its supplies as "donations" from East Germany), a NED grant helped La Prensa to keep publishing...
...For decades the Soviets have worked to promote Communism around the world unchallenged by any countervailing systematic effort on our part to promote democracy (except at times through covert action...
...COHA lashed out in particular against aid given by the Free Trade Union Institute to one of the two independent trade union federations in Nicaragua still competing with the officially sponsored, Soviet-style Sandinista labor federation...
...These opposition leaders are harassed by the regime, but they still exist, and NED hopes that by strengthening them it can help to hasten the conclusion of Chile's painful authoritarian interlude and to ensure that the Communists will not be its heirs...
...Representative Hank Brown, a conservative Republican from Colorado, and columnist James J. Kilpatrick have also gone after it...
...In Guatemala, which is in transition to elected government, NED affiliates have sponsored the country's first national, issue-related public opinion polls...
...But not all Communist countries are as "closed" as Cuba, and sometimes it is possible to find mechanisms to advance the cause of democratization...
...But the effort is a necessary one...
...The Endowment's goal is to discover or develop peaceful, overt ways to spur the growth of democracy everywhere it can...
...A year ago the United States began trying to export democracy...
...Institutes affiliated with each of the two major political parties have been created, inspired by the four Stiftungen, or foundations, associated with West Germany's political parties...
...Other grants are going to support the work of the Permanent Commission on Human Rights and the newly formed Nicaraguan Center for Democratic Studies which will sponsor research, publication, and training for the groups that make up the democratic Coordinadora (the alliance of democratic political parties, business and professional associations, and unions that sought in vain to run Arturo Cruz for the presidency last year...
...A he tragedy of Nicaragua, where a leftist dictatorship verges on consolidating its rule after decades of rightist dictatorship, is an all too familiar story...
...In Nicaragua, NED funds are helping the civic opposition to survive despite the Sandinistas' claim that it is historically doomed, a prophecy that they have been trying in myriad ways to make come true...
...Although funded by the U.S...
...The two party institutes have survived, however, albeit with programs scaled back considerably from original plans...
...One issue did not reach its PRC addressees, apparently for having overstepped some undefined border, but the others have gotten through despite containing material unfamiliar to PRC audiences: articles by such anti-Communist American intellectuals as Sidney Hook, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Irving Louis Horowitz...
...Most of the programs supported by NED could not be underwritten directly by the U.S...
...For this purpose, the Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy...
...intelligence agencies had a constructive hand in rebuilding the democratic institutions that stymied Stalin's efforts to add Mediterranean Europe to his empire...
...policy of 19 spreading freedom by the sword is neither possible nor desirable...
...Japan and Germany never succeeded in establishing democracies until occupied by U.S...
...Opposition exists only clandestinely...
...Known oppositionists are either in jail or exile...
...Through the Overseas Education Fund (OEF), an internationally oriented spin-off of the League of Women Voters, NED is underwriting Conciencia's drive to expand from nine to thirty chapters...
...Its creation was emblematic of the American people's renewed confidence that their country can and should be a force for good in the world...
...With any luck, these polls may enable Guatemalan office-seekers to pander to the twisting trends of public opinion as shamelessly as American pols do...
...Some congressmen object to the creation of a private organization to spend public funds, but this arrangement enables the NED to assist deserving foreign democrats who could not accept direct support from the U.S...
...More recently in Grenada, the U.S...
...They distributed T-shirts, bumper stickers, and ball-point pens and provided free transportation to the polls...
...A. Ithough NED's ultimate goal-democracy∔is the same for all countries, the wide variations in the status of democratic forces in different countries leads it to support widely diverse programs...
...To Kilpatrick, any financing of international travel and meetings in a time of budget deficits smacks of "boondoggle" (although only a small fraction of NED's budget is spent on such things...
...And you are the protagonist...
...military showed its continuing efficacy as an instrument of democracy...
...A smaller, but growing, imitative program sponsored by the U.S...
...Ironically, although Ronald Reagan's people often criticized President Carter's human rights program for focusing so strongly on right-wing regimes, NED too is finding that it is much easier to work in rightist than leftist countries...
...Earlier this year, Liang was allowed a two-month visit to China where he was able to secure lists of intellectuals to be added as subscribers, to lay the groundwork for having some of his arpolemic ran in a journal of the Ukrainian writers' union...
...But in each of these cases, the democratic result was not in itself the principal motive for the military action, and a dedicated U.S...
...NED funds have purchased food, clothing, and medicine for the families of Solidarity activists who have lost their jobs or are in jail, and have boosted the work of the Polish Legal Defense Fund, a coalition inside Poland that works to defend and succor political prisoners...
...It seems that the reform group among China's rulers may welcome circulation of the magazine as a measure of liberalization, even though it contains material that still could not conceivably be published within the PRC...
...The attack was then picked up in a "dear colleague" letter circulated by Representative John Conyers, a congressional stalwart of causes of the anti-democratic left, and by columnist Jack Anderson, who condemned NED for supporting "right-wing political parties" in Nicaragua and elsewhere...
...We participate through appropriate institutions: schools, hospitals, financial institutions, trade unions, political parties...
...All of the activity was strictly nonpar-tisan, but the large turnout by Grenada's "silent majority" probably contributed to the sweeping victory of the democratic center, an outcome not at all unpleasing to the NED affiliates...
...In Argentina, for example, Conciencia, a women's civic group founded during the Falk-lands war, is working to draw traditionally politically passive Argentine women into the political process and to cultivate their attachment to democracy...
...They obviously do not welcome the competition...
...Last year, when NED funds given to the American Institute for Free Labor Development were passed on to Panamanian labor groups which used them for partisan activity in Panama's presidential election, the House was so distressed that it voted to kill NED entirely...
...government, in an earlier time, to give aid covertly...
...columns about the rule of law or the role of the media in the U.S...
...These satires have all the humorous sparkle of a Chernenko report to the Supreme Soviet, but, notably, they also contain accurate figures for recent funding requests and authorizations for NED, suggesting that the Endowment is being watched with some care...
...Brown objects to the fact that as an independent organization, NED is not subject to all of the controls that apply to government agencies...
...21...
...In two countries likely to serve as the next scenes for the reenactment of this sad drama∔Chile and the Philippines∔ NED is working to strengthen democratic labor federations...
...It will have to tread carefully to avoid intruding in a partisan way into foreign elections...
...In Poland, the outlawed Solidarity union survives, and NED is helping to keep it alive...
...It was precisely this problem that led the U.S...
...Another method of spreading democracy that has had some success in the past is covert action...
...The creation of NED is one more step in America's recovery of national will...
...Administration's, but it is a kind of hybrid, with roots both in Ronald Reagan's quest for ideological rearmament and in Jimmy Carter's human rights policy...
...Some observers feared that cynicism among Grenadan voters, born of experiencing the consecutive betrayals of democratic promises by former strongman Eric Gairy and then by the New Jewel Movement, would discourage voter participation, and that this might have the ironic result of strengthening Gairy and the NJM, both of whom were running with the support of small but dedicated coteries...
...The Soviet canard about the CIA was soon echoed by the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), a lobbying group supportive of Nicaragua's Sandinista rulers...
...forces...
...government results from NED's conviction that the best way to encourage pluralism is to enable private American groups to assist similar groups abroad...
...Apparently, the congressmen were more familiar with the junketeering proclivities of American political professionals than with the highly regarded work done by the Stiftungen in the Third World and Iberia, and feared that the Republican and Democratic International Institutes would be used as little more than slush funds by the Democratic and Republican National Committees...
...Two NED affiliates, the Republican Institute for International Affairs and the Free Trade Union Institute, organized programs in Grenada aimed at getting out the vote...
...The Sandinista federation's officers are openly appointed by the government and they proclaim that their federation "makes its central concern such questions as labor discipline [and] fulfillment of production goals...
...And the CIA revelations of the 1960s and 1970s have robbed this kind of activity of much of its effectiveness...
...By treading delicately, Liang Heng hopes his magazine can remain on the near side of official tolerance while offering criticism of Marxism-Leninism and Maoism and promoting discussion "of the importance of democracy and the rule of law...
...In Communist Cuba, by contrast, there is no one with whom NED can work...
...In a closed society such as this, NED can do little more than, as it says, to help "keep alive the flame of freedom...
...In the early postwar years U.S...
...In Chile, NED is also underwriting an International Symposium on Problems of Contemporary Democracy which will bring together Chilean intellectuals 20 with experts from Venezuela, Spain, Argentina, and other countries that have undergone the transition from rightist authoritarian rule to democracy...
...These tupperware-type parties may seem a rather hokey means of spreading the democratic creed, but they are not much more so than the activities which have long been used by Communists in many countries to develop cadres dedicated to the destruction of democracy...
...When popular discontent sooner or later undermines the regime, the democratic center is too weak to offer an effective alternative...
...Congress is also concerned about allowing NED to become too "political...
...But in this case, as often, wanting to do good is much easier than knowing how to do it...
...In Colombia, NED funds are sponsoring a research program by two national labor federations into the voting records of elected officials, a kind of local version of AFL-CIO COPE's legislative scorecard...
...Chamber of Commerce and aiming to encourage civic action by Third World businessmen's groups is NED's second largest program...
...A he Endowment is also underwriting a new magazine, the Chinese Intellectual, edited by Liang Heng, author of the widely acclaimed book, Son of the Revolution...
...But the Communists, with their conspiratorial, top-down methods, are far better equipped to survive clandestinely than are the democrats...
...government, it is a privately incorporated organization responsible to its own board of directors, a carefully balanced mixture of Democrats, Republicans, labor leaders, businessmen, academics, and foreign affairs specialists...
Vol. 18 • November 1985 • No. 11
