Source: USAID DRG 2.0 Conference
As the United States seeks to reform and strengthen its efforts to support democracy abroad, the U.S. Agency for International Development held a conference on its new strategy for Democracy, Rights, and Governance. USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah gave a speech on USAID’s role in democracy support. The Administrator spoke of the importance of democracy assistance in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and USAID’s plans to better integrate democracy and development work.
In a panel immediately following Administrator Shah’s remarks, Carnegie’s Thomas Carothers compared the early years of U.S. democracy assistance with the current context.
Democracy Support Circa 1989
The post-1989 era in democracy promotion was not only about post-communist transitions in Central and Eastern Europe. It also included transitions in Latin America as well as some parts of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet military rule in Latin America was quite different from communism in Eastern Europe and at the time we weren’t sure whether these regions were each experiencing distinct process or were part of a broader movement toward democracy.
In the early 1990s, the United States was unsure how to proceed in a post-Cold War era. The experience of being the lone superpower was both exhilarating and confusing, because there was no clear sense of what the U.S. was pushing against in defining its security interests. How democracy would fit into our foreign policy was an open question. In Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, democracy was clearly part of U.S. policy because it meant finishing the Cold War.
Yet in the rest of the world, the United States was much less certain about its support for democracy. We were searching for a rationale for why the U.S. should care about democracy. There was an attempt to put forward a litany of reasons why this was important, but the more reasons were added to the list and the more justifications we provided, the more it was clear we weren’t sure about this agenda.
The policy mechanisms for democracy support were also quite weak. USAID had few dedicated democracy and governance staff in 1989 and less than $100 million budgeted for democracy work. There were serious doubts among developmentalists at USAID about democracy and how it would fit into USAID’s work. At the State Department, the Human Rights Bureau did not have democracy in its mandate. There was no real policy capacity in the State Department on these issues. The National Endowment for Democracy was quite small. Overall it was a thin policy apparatus to respond to the enormous post-1989 challenges of democracy support.
Apart from the German party foundations, the United States was close to being alone in providing democracy support. The European donors didn’t work on democracy and the multilateral development banks stayed far away from it. Moreover, the barriers to political work by the United States were quite high given its powerful legacy of political interventionism in the developing world to prop up friendly tyrants during the Cold War.
Our knowledge of how to support democracy was very nascent. The task was conceived as fulfilling the transition paradigm. The idea was to help countries get through post-authoritarianism onto the conveyor belt to democracy. There were no competing models to democracy at the time and democracy supporters had the sense that democracy was a naturally self-reinforcing process.
We were just learning how to work on elections, institutional reform, and civil society. The entire apparatus of international election observation which is taken for granted today had to be constructed from scratch. We focused on strengthening state institutions, but it took some time to realize that reform of state institutions often fails due to lack of political will. In 1994 USAID published a report on its justice sector work, and it was the first acknowledgement that if political will is lacking, assistance is difficult. With regard to civil society support, the idea that we could work directly with citizens was very new, because during the Cold War the United States had been afraid of popular movements. The idea that citizens should be trusted and empowered was a revolution.
Democracy Support in 2011
Today we are in a very different place. The democracy enterprise is at a puzzling halfway state. In Central and Eastern Europe a lot has been achieved, but in the former Soviet Union very little has improved. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America we can argue whether the democracy glass is half full or half empty.
With respect to its place in U.S. policy, democracy is one interest among many. It sometimes competes with other interests, but it is something we would clearly like to be present in our foreign policy. We still emphasize democracy more in rhetoric than in practice, but it is part of our thinking. Despite calls to either promote democracy more aggressively or emphasize it less, this middle track has been the persistent default mode of successive administrations since the early 1990s.
Compared to the 1990s, it is clear that the momentum for democracy slowed in the first decade of the 2000s. Democracy faces more competition from other models of governance and new democracies are struggling to deliver for their citizens. Democracy promotion is more actively resisted by authoritarian governments. International trends such as high oil prices are working against democracy. Furthermore, established democracies in Europe and North America are losing confidence in their place in the world following the financial crisis.
Yet there are also hopeful trends. Many countries are getting wealthier, which may be good for democracy, and new communication technologies are empowering people. The world is becoming more multipolar and many of the rising powers such as Turkey, Indonesia, South Korea, and Chile are democratic and have at least some interest in supporting democracy outside their borders. And then we have the surprising events in the Middle East and the renewal of universal democratic aspirations.
In this context of 2011, we have seen an attempt to improve and broaden democracy assistance. This has taken several forms. First, there is a new focus on integrating the democracy and development communities. Second, there is a new determination to get the international aid community to work together more effectively. USAID is turning a corner in reaching out to other donors in a way it didn’t before. Third, the democracy community is struggling with how to deal with pushback from authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China who are determined to stop democracy assistance. Finally, there is a desire to seize the momentum of the moment. In both Washington and in European capitals, I was startled to see how fast the democracy community woke up during the Arab Spring and said “we are still here and we are ready to make a difference.”
