After the freedom agenda
Doyle, Michael W.
After the freedom agenda MICHAEL W. DOYLE The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did) by James Traub | Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2008 | 272...
...The newly designated forces of freedom find that they cannot rule, and, as in Iraq, a civil war follows the liberating invasion...
...Promoting democracy is best done indirectly through trade, investment, and foreign aid...
...Democracy is not only government "for" and "of," it is also government "by" the people...
...Disclosure: I am currently one of the secretary-general's individual representatives and chair of the board of UNDEF...
...They send a message of solidarity and opportunity to subjects who are prepared to take the risks of becoming active citizens...
...They build bridges to friends and associates overseas...
...But the good news needs to be qualified: where the rule of law and public institutions are weak and where society is fractionated along ethnic, religious, and regional lines, politicians can be tempted to use violence to achieve and hold office...
...Is this because, unlike Afghanistan, Pakistan has the economic preconditions for democracy...
...These comments do not necessarily reflect the views of UNDEF, its donors, or the UN...
...The instability of the new democracies is real, but far from being unusual, it is typical of new democracies almost everywhere in the past...
...The combination of Bush's purple rhetoric and Baghdad's political reality tarnished democracy promotion, but they were not the only reasons for moving away from it...
...Ronald Reagan relit the fires of democratic rhetoric in his famous speech before the British Parliament in 1982 but also found it difficult to disengage from the friendly dictators with whom the United States was allied against communist or left forces...
...Dispelling this conventional wisdom, Traub nicely tells the story of desperately poor Mali, whose culture welcomes popular deliberation, despite its lack of economic development that would sustain schools or a press that would sustain a developed democracy...
...Does the administration have in mind a better ruler who could not win the upcoming elections but who would be a more reliable guardian against al Qaeda than someone who could be elected...
...Or, third, the freedom faction learns that to stay in power it must govern as the previous dictators did, by force...
...Democracy itself seems to be in retreat after the "third wave" that brought a tide of democracies to Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America in the 1990s...
...enhance human rights, produce higher levels of political participation, and decrease state repression...
...Obama's foreign policy truly seemed to push the "reset" button, and not just in relations with Russia...
...Voters have since turned against elected regimes that failed to deliver material progress, toward ethnic and religious rather than civic parties...
...Democracy promotion for Obama had to be part of a package that allowed citizens to "choose their leaders in climates free of fear," with "accountable institutions that deliver services and opportunity: strong legislatures, independent judiciaries, honest police forces, free presses, vibrant civil societies...
...Unless the people see themselves as a people and are prepared to pay taxes, defend their borders, and abide by majority rule, democracy is not sustainable...
...And, practically, forcing democracy tends not to work...
...Bangladesh and Thailand may have had coups, but they are being reversed, and Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, has made notable advances over the past decade toward elected constitutional rule...
...Globally, comprehensively and on average, every step toward greater democracy within countries reduces the chances of war...
...Liberal internationalism is no simple recipe for peace...
...But quite frankly, ladies and gentlemen, they are not sufficient...
...freedom from want...
...and reduce economic inequality...
...George W. Bush started out with a policy against nation building that resonated with oldfashioned nationalism and isolationism...
...To avoid "disease, terrorism and conflict," we "need to invest in building capable democratic states that can establish healthy and educated communities, develop markets and generate wealth...
...A more careful reading of Obama's campaign statements and Vice President Joseph Biden's important speech at the Munich Security Policy conference in February offers an answer...
...Pointing to the failure of the new democracies to deliver material welfare and to the rise of autocratic China, the deepening authoritarianism in Russia, and the successful defiance of theocratic Iran, pundits now proclaim an age of authoritarian advantage...
...Authoritarian resurgence shows up in the attraction of the Chinese model of growth and the new assertiveness of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran...
...Michael W. Doyle is the Harold Brown Professor of International Affairs, Law and Political Science at Columbia University...
...tend to foster economic growth...
...In short, neither Bush nor democratic pessimism nor authoritarian resurgence is a good reason to abandon the promotion of democracy...
...Bush's dismantling of the cold war, could welcome a democratic spring across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa...
...But what are the reasons in favor of the project...
...Building the institutions of the rule of law, a free press, and education also contributes, indirectly, to democratic transformation...
...He stood before his fellow citizens and said he was "humbled by the task before us" with "an economy badly weakened," seeking "a new way forward" that includes an offer to "extend a hand" if those who rule through corruption and the silencing of dissent will but "unclench their fist...
...We also need to wield development and democracy, two of the most powerful weapons in our collective arsenals...
...He applauded democracy but, as Traub shows, made very few hard choices in its favor, backing down from early efforts to push democracy in Egypt after Hamas won the elections in Palestine...
...foreign policy...
...Even today-even post-Bush-Larry Diamond, another democracy expert, finds that 80 percent of the public in every region of the world say in polls that democracy is the best political system...
...Poor societies and dysfunctional states . . . can become breeding grounds for extremism, conflict, and disease...
...This pattern continued in U.S...
...The words "democracy," "freedom," "liberty," and "tyranny" appear forty-seven times in the short address...
...These three can help diversify societies, and diversified, growing societies tend, over the long run, to demand responsive governance...
...That is the good news...
...Among them are that democratic institutions promote peace and mutual respect among democratic peoples...
...democracy promotion from the choke hold of the Bush administration...
...So, rather than a free nation, it becomes a cog in an imperial machine...
...colonialism carried with it a promise of democratic self-determination, repeatedly compromised in practice to satisfy security and commercial concerns for stable and accommodating rule by local elites...
...When even well-meaning foreigners seek to liberate a country whose people haven't been able to liberate themselves, they fall into one of three traps...
...It spreads by good example, by incentives and assistance...
...Authorized at the 2005 World Summit in a unanimous General Assembly resolution, it distributes about twenty to thirty million dollars per year, predominantly to civil-society organizations that apply for a grant to promote measures such as voter education and mobilization...
...Fueling the retreat from such projects is pessimism about the worldwide prospects for democratization...
...Assisting the formation of civil society organizations that crosscut ethnic, regional, and other divides helps produce stable and productive democracies...
...Effective trade negotiations and effective arms control need to include all the world's major producers that are prepared to abide by agreed-upon rules, whether they are democratic or not...
...After Iraq, it is unlikely to be repeated soon, but the ethical and practical lessons still need to be absorbed...
...Self-government should mean authentic "self" government, not laws and regulations imposed by foreigners, however well-meaning...
...serve to protect the mass of the population from state indifference during a natural disaster, thus reducing the danger of large-scale famine...
...With the public seeking a "peace dividend" and a government focused on the economy, the administration floundered in the former Yugoslavia, and democracy promotion received little concerted action beyond support for the National Endowment for Democracy and its two institutes, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute...
...Multilateral assistance is particularly useful because it frees the recipient organization from the taint of foreign control...
...it needs constant, prudent vigilance to avoid crusades and misguided interventions...
...Should we have believed them...
...For two centuries, democracies committed to the ideal of individual liberty and endowed with well-established constitutional governments have tended to maintain, and likely will continue to maintain, a reliable peace with each other...
...The liberating invaders are thus responsible not only for the costs in lives and money of the invasion but for an invasion that has literally done no good-produced a civil war, a colony, or one more tyranny with a new ideological label attached...
...Another reason lay in the world trends I have already noted...
...Liberal Britain, France, and the United States have been among the most expansionist empires, sometimes producing order and progress and at other times fostering chaos, oppression, and war...
...Or is it that President Hamid Karzai is widely believed to be popular and yet ineffective and tolerant of corruption...
...He also made little actual investment in democracy in very poor countries, such as Mali, that were attempting a transition to democracy...
...We ought to aim at the first, but we cannot really renounce the second until we are sure we can avoid the third...
...Democratic transformation is best fostered peacefully...
...Even there, Ukraine and Georgia survive, as do democratic South Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan...
...His practice, however, fell far short of his rhetoric...
...And Russia's and China's authoritarianpromotion policy has not extended effectively beyond their immediate neighborhoods...
...The question remains: how to foster the first and avoid the second...
...We need to avoid a repeat of the Bush administration's "forced democratization...
...Most strikingly, he ended his address not with global transformation but with an evocation of the spirit of local resistance, recalling the winter patriots of George Washington's bedraggled army of insurgents, driven from their new capital by a mighty imperial army, hungry and chilled in the fields of Valley Forge...
...In February 2009, Biden gently revised Clinton and reaffirmed this strategic package in Munich: Defense and diplomacy are necessary...
...Or, second, the new freedom faction finds that it can stay in power only with ongoing foreign support...
...Meeting the challenge of climate change will also require the cooperation not just of the established democratic powers of Europe, Japan, and the United States, but also of China and Russia and democratizing (or not) states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America...
...Indeed, given the record of the previous eight years it was easy to be ABB (anything but Bush...
...Keep al Qaeda out, make Pakistan democratic, and help Afghanistan become self-reliant and politically and economically developed (not necessarily democratic), without trying to "dictate its future...
...Democratic pessimism flows from the sense that the new democracies of the 1990s were especially fragile...
...See the UNDEF Web site at www.un.org/democracyfund/ index.htm...
...Freedom on the march" was over, would-be candidate Obama explained in an unmistakable reference in Foreign Affairs (July/August 2007), because it had become associated with "war, torture, and forcibly imposed regime change...
...Lest today's Afghanistan-Pakistan policy seem an accident of strategic incoherence, we can refer to Traub's account of how conflicted and yet central the promotion of democracy has been in the history of U.S...
...And the informal "Community of Democracies" usefully serves as a kind of "trade" association, encouraging coordination and democracy promotion, without undermining multilateral institutions...
...And for this holistic strategy of democracy promotion he was prepared to pledge $50 billion by 2012...
...In a survey of the status of democracy in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe, Carothers demonstrates that the only significant change is the authoritarian trend in Russia...
...We can supplement Traub's account with the cold war maxim of John F. Kennedy's administration...
...During Hillary Clinton's nomination hearing as secretary of state, she said "We need to focus on the three Ds: defense, diplomacy, and development...
...This legacy of liberal peace helps account for the success of the NATO alliance in the cold war and the end of the cold war itself, as the USSR/Russia under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin temporarily liberalized...
...foreign policy...
...Although autocrats sometimes buy popular support with economic well-being, and authoritarian socialists sometimes defend economic equality, expanding the democratic franchise tends, overall, to reduce inequality as politicians respond to the majority's demand for greater welfare...
...Using classic doctrinal prose, the president proclaimed, "So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world...
...The fiasco of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq gave democracy promotion, the invasion's last and most desperate justification, a bad name...
...Where, the pundits asked, was the fourth D, democracy...
...Republicans tended to favor commercial interests...
...In the first test case of the new approach, the administration announced on March 28, 2009, a strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan best described as a m‚lange: "The following steps must be done in concert to produce the desired end state: the removal of al-Qaeda's sanctuary, effective and democratic government control for Pakistan, and a self-reliant Afghanistan that will enable the withdrawal of combat forces while sustaining our commitment to political and economic development...
...Then, after 9/11, its leaders promised to prosecute al Qaeda...
...Traub, despite the promise of his subtitle, says little about why the United States (or any other democratic people) should try to promote democracy...
...Or is it because the administration thinks any self-reliant Afghanistan can reliably promise to keep out al Qaeda...
...Let us begin with what we need to avoid and conclude with what we can reasonably expect to do to promote sustainable democratization...
...Democrats, ideology...
...Democracy," "freedom," "liberty," and "tyranny" appear only five times in the address...
...Democracy promotion was less conflicted for the Clinton administration, which, benefiting from George H.W...
...The "liberation" of Iraq is only the latest in these costly adventures...
...But the compromises with security were a constant...
...Barack Obama set a very different tone in his inaugural this past January...
...The recently established UN Democracy Fund has an especially significant role in this endeavor...
...Although there is no appreciable direct effect, democracy not only does not harm growth (as some have charged) but has robust, positive indirect effects by increasing human capital, lowering inflation, reducing political instability, and enlarging economic freedom-all of which are positively associated with economic growth...
...In The Freedom Agenda, James Traub, a journalist for the New York Times Magazine, sets out to rescue U.S...
...Nor is becoming a democracy a cure-all...
...Elsewhere, democracy is advancing as much as it is retreating...
...A telling chapter on the occupation of the Philippines shows how U.S...
...Thomas Carothers, one of the few expert scholar-practitioners of democracy promotion, recently published a thoughtful essay urging us not to overestimate those trends and to step back from democratic pessimism and belief in authoritarian resurgence...
...Shunning a potential Gorbachev or a new De Klerk is not the best way to win their confidence...
...We should also avoid attempts to replace the United Nations with leagues of democracies...
...Nondemocratic nations frustrate the rightful aspirations of their citizens and fuel resentment...
...Among the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of international democratic transformation-think of them as the shock troops of democratization-are students, tourists, and business investors...
...Being a democracy, however, is no cure-all...
...His key argument appears to be existential...
...Since 2000, the number of free countries in Freedom House's measurement "has risen from 86 to 89 and [the number of] partly free from 58 to 62, while the number of not-free countries has diminished from 48 to 42...
...The terrorist attacks of 9/11 turned him into a world revolutionary, a Trotsky of the Right, trumpeting a global civil war against authoritarianism...
...It is statistically significant from the perspective of social science and strategically well worth protecting and fostering...
...This is telling, but he also could have added practical and instrumental reasons...
...But what would Obama be for...
...By chronicling the fate of the Freedom Agenda and its precursors, Traub suggests that peaceful strategies offer the best chance for expanding the zone of peace among fellow democracies and reaping the internal and external benefits of democratization...
...He begins his lively account with Bush's remarkable second inaugural address in January 2005, when the president declared, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands...
...Directed by a small staff of UN officials, it is overseen by a board composed of the seven leading state donors, six other states representing the rest of the UN membership, two civil society organizations, and a few individuals appointed personally by the secretary-general.* Carothers shows that we need not be pessimistic, but we do need to be patient...
...The very international respect for individual rights and the shared commercial interests that establish grounds for peace among liberal democracies establish grounds for additional conflict between liberal and illiberal societiesas in U.S.-Russian and U.S.-Chinese relations today...
...As Carothers has pointed out in another publication, bilateral assistance can play a valuable role if it is carefully planned with local actors in the lead...
...Democracy is thus a vital source of transformation with enormous upside and some downside potential...
...Few if any of the world's major challenges can be met by dividing democratic sheep from nondemocratic goats...
...Here one should recall that before September 11, 2001, the Taliban theocrats, with remarkable self-reliance, endured comprehensive, multilateral, international sanctions and yet harbored al Qaeda...
...After the freedom agenda MICHAEL W. DOYLE The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did) by James Traub | Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2008 | 272 pages | $25 "Stepping Back from Democratic Pessimism" by Thomas Carothers | Carnegie Papers, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace February 2009 | 19 pages The promotion of democracy has fallen on hard times...
...How can the American people tell another people that says it wants democracy to wait until the country is richer or more ethnically or religiously homogeneous...
...Kennedy promoted the democratic Alliance for Progress, but the president also acknowledged that there were choices between principles and interests in our policy toward the Dominican Republic: "There are three possibilities in descending order of preference: a decent democratic regime, a continuation of the Trujillo [dictatorship by his followers], or a Castro regime...
...But recent studies suggest that the pessimism is overdone, and democracy is still worthy of prudent and principled promotion...
...Indeed, the very hope of a peacefully democratizing world rests on persuading patriotic autocrats in nondemocracies that their countries will be better off if they transfer authority to their peoples...
...We still need improvements in the overall governance of world politics...
Vol. 56 • July 2009 • No. 3
