Promoting Democracy

Matthew Spence has a superb op-ed about promoting democracy in IHT. This passage, I think, quite accurately details the absolutely ridiculous position that Congress and the left and right wings of the punditocracy punditocracy put decision-makers and policy executors find in.

Meanwhile, when America’s efforts at promoting democracy do not replace a dictator in a matter of months or years, Congress demands some ill-chosen proof of success – the number of newspapers printed, say, or civil society groups founded, or candidates on the ballot – that themselves are not the same as meaningful political change.

Attitudes like this have made democracy promotion a lose-lose proposition in American politics. To be sure, the Bush administration has greatly increased financing for efforts to nurture democracy in the Middle East. But it has left the rest of the democratizing world behind. The National Endowment for Democracy, for example, recently saw its budget double to $80 million, but all the increase was earmarked for Middle East democracy efforts. At the same time, democracy-building programs in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union by different agencies have been slashed under Bush’s watch.

Part of the problem is that whenever a democracy promotion program does what it is supposed to – that is, help strengthen local forces to have a voice against a repressive government – accusations of improper meddling immediately fly.

And the reason I don’t put this entirely on the Bush administration is not because I’m a supporter, but because just about every administration finds itself in similarly silly positions when it comes to foreign policy. That being said, the Bush administration certainly has painted itself into a corner with democracy promotion, forcing the US to focus resources on the Middle East as opposed to places like the former Soviet Union. If we were talking agriculture, it’s almost like planting crops and then deciding to harvest the untended field next door.

Read the rest of Spence’s piece. He rightly points out that the US is forced to pretend democracy promotion is value-neutral in the face of accusations that the goal is all about CIA domination or some such silliness. Nothing the US does in the tasks of promoting democracy would, after all, bear fruit were the seeds not already planted. We just bring some water water.

In response to Spence’s conclusion (take out “democracy,” make it a fill-in-the-blank, and I think it’s good advice for critics wishing to pass premature judgment on any policy that takes time), praktike adds his thoughts (note: I found the Spence article via praktike).

Fair enough. But I do think we also need to be realistic about which countries are and are not presently suitable choices for “democracy promotion.” I do believe that liberal democracy is the best form of government ever devised (or rather the worst except for all the others), but that hardly means that I believe that it is easily transferred or wisely promoted at every point in time, everywhere, under widely disparate conditions. For instance, I find myself increasingly in agreement with arguments like Mark Safranski’s where Russia is concerned. It’s tempting to slam the Bush administration for winking at creeping Putinization, but on the other hand, it’s hard to see any other game in town.

I hear you. It’s why I can’t be just like the all-too-common overheated critics of Uzbekistan because, what are we going to do? No matter how much people want to draw parallels between it and say, Iraq (I’m looking at a wide swath of the left on this one… Mr. Murray’s been saying it too.), it is a unique case. Our options are limited and it will take some significant imagination or a total realignment of this country’s geographic priorities for our efforts to be worth a whole lot more than spitting in the wind. Which, unfortunate as it may be, leaves us few options with the tough cases of the world beyond what Robert Kaplan identified in Eastward to Tartary.

I am afraid that calls in Western capitals for “democracy”-while branding as “evil” those who do not comply-is an evasion, not a policy. Holding an election is easy. But because the “state,” as Buckhardt says, “is a work of art,” building one from scratch requires guile, force, and years of toil. …The only way to ensure that the latter triumphs [liberal democracy] is not to force elections on societies ill-prepared for them but to project economic and military power regionally, through pipelines and defense agreements. If our weight is felt, our values may follow. But if we only lecture sanctimoniously, new empires that arise in the Near East will not reflect our values. The human landscape is grim, but great powers throughout history faced grim landscapes and were not deterred from pursuing their goals.

Dan Darling also has thoughts on these issues, and he brings up an important point about the Middle East and why we have to focus so much of our resources on the region.

Another point that I believe John Reilly made some time ago is that one of the problems we’re having in Iraq is that we’re more or less having to build democratic institutions from the ground up where there previously were none outside of Kurdistan. That isn’t the case in say, Iran, where the institutions that would support a democracy already exist and appear to be understood by large segments of the population (hence all the protests and calls for boycott) but are restrained from functioning properly by the clerical-security apparatus of the regime. This is one of the reasons why I think that a “velvet revolution” in say Iran would be far more easily and quickly accomplished than in Syria or Saudi Arabia. With limited resources at our disposal, we should try to maximize our gains and minimize our losses.

Which, when paired with Kaplan’s quote above, glances on why I would be positively tickled pink about US engagement with Iran.

There is much more that could be said about this to be sure, but we certainly should, given finite resources at our disposable, how we can maximize our democracy promotion investments.