China’s government is hunting down signatories of the Charter 08 reform manifesto and upgrading its internet censorship software to allow the authorities to identify and suppress dissent much earlier and efficiently.
Nearly 7,000 intellectuals, farmers, students, journalists, and activists have endorsed Charter 08, modeled after the Czechoslovakian dissidents Charter 77, which warns of “the possibility of a violent conflict of disastrous proportions” in the absence of democratic reform.
The communist authorities appear hypersensitive to the risk of unrest as widespread lay-offs and declining economic growth, fearing that economic insecurity could lead the charter to become a rallying call for unemployed graduates.
Bao Tong, a former top Communist Party official jailed for seven years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, signed the charter as “a citizen”. “Would the powers-that-be please tell 1.3 billion people why freedom is a crime?” he wrote recently.
Senior government officials have expressed concern that high unemployment among migrant workers could foment further unrest and instability in 2009, a year in which the ruling Communist party celebrates 60 years in power, while dissidents and democrats will seek to highlight the 90th anniversary of the 4th May protest movement or Chinese Enlightenment and the 4th June 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
China’s internet police are using state-of-the-art internet spying technology to pre-empt criticism and manage public opinion, according to the country’s leading provider of search technology.
Officials are under huge pressure following recent events like the Sichuan earthquake, the Olympics, and the economic crisis, He Zhaohui, marketing manager at TRS, told the Financial Times. “Among those working in the news and propaganda in China the heart attack rate is highest,” he said.
The Communist regime has based its legitimacy on its performance in delivering sustained economic growth and improved living standards rather than on a discredited marxist-leninist ideology. For that reason, analysts suggest, it is acutely sensitive to the political implications of the current economic crisis and is consequently wary of any calls for reform.
“The Party apparently thinks–probably correctly–that further economic reform would threaten the country’s authoritarian system, so the Party will not sponsor much more change,” writes Gordon G. Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China.”So it should come as no surprise that this slow-or-no-reform period coincides with a time of political retrenchment.”
During the chaos of Portugal’s democratic revolution in April 1974, Mário Soares, the provisional government’s foreign minister, visited Henry Kissinger. The U.S. Secretary of State was concerned that Portugal’s communist party would seize power and urged the democratic socialist Soares to take a tougher stance against the Stalinists.
“You are a Kerensky,” Kissinger said, “I believe your sincerity, but you are naive.”
To which Soares replied: “I certainly don’t want to be a Kerensky.”
And Kissinger shot back: “Neither did Kerensky.”
The anecdote was noted by Samuel Huntington, the hugely influential political scientist who passed away Christmas Eve, in a 1997 Journal of Democracy article. Huntington, a member of the International Forum for Democratic Studies‘ Research Council and the Journal of Democracy’s International Advisory Committee, went on to argue that democracy promoters should prioritize transformation of electoral democracies into liberal democracies over democratizing the world’s unfree countries.
He also stressed the need to “develop the sense of community and enhance the forms of cooperation among liberal democracies,” not least through the creation of more publicly funded foundations akin to the National Endowment for Democracy and the UK’s Westminster Foundation for Democracy. “It is also highly desirable that these institutions join together in an international association to coordinate their efforts and to become an effective lobbying group with national governments and international organizations on behalf of democratic development,” he argued.
Huntington was a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey’s 1968 presidential campaign. As “an old-fashioned Democrat” wrote Robert Kaplan, Huntington “always held liberal ideals. But he knows that such ideals cannot survive without power, and that power requires careful upkeep.”
“Even back then we were nation-building,” Huntington told Kaplan. “We rejected religious and ethnic loyalties as counterweights to the Vietcong because we wanted a modern, democratic nation-state with a national army. Our problem with Vietnam was our idealism.”
Fareed Zakaria, amongst others, takes pains to stress Huntington’s conviction that political order took precedence over regime type. “American-style progress — more political participation or faster economic growth - actually created more problems than it solved,” Zakaria argues. “If a country had more people who were economically, politically and socially active yet lacked effective political institutions, such as political parties, civic organizations or credible courts, the result was greater instability.”
Others observe that Huntington’s theory about “modernizing authoritarianism” was either discredited or discarded. “Huntington showed that the lack of political order and authority were among the most serious debilities the world over,” said Jorge Dominguez, Harvard’s vice provost for international affairs. “The degree of order, rather than the form of the political regime, mattered most.”
But, Dominguez contends, Huntington’s 1991 book, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, “looked at similar questions from a different perspective, namely, that the form of the political regime - democracy or dictatorship - did matter“.
Huntington is more widely known for his theory of a clash of civilizations (a phrase in fact coined by Bernard Lewis). “The fundamental source of conflict in this new [post-Cold War] world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic,” Huntington wrote. “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.”
His writings on democracy exhibited sensitivity to the critical function of religious and cultural factors. The Economist notes his belief that “democratization might have more to do with the Second Vatican Council, which had unleashed a wave of democratization across the Catholic world, than with the spread of free-markets.”
Writing in The Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell, suggests that his thesis led him to be more cautious about promoting democracy in regions that lacked Judaeo-Christian cultural or religious underpinnings:
It was unclear to many of Huntington’s readers whether the centrepiece of western diplomacy, spreading democracy, would avert inter-civilizational violence or incite it. Most assumed Huntington thought the former. In fact, he consistently thought the latter.
“My argument remains,” he said in a 2007 interview with Islamica magazine, “that cultural identities, antagonisms and affiliations will not only play a role, but play a major role in relations between states.”
No observation aroused more controversy than his statement that “Islam has bloody borders.” But, Caldwell notes, to Huntington, “this was an empirical statement, not a judgment on Islam’s merits as a civilization and still less an argument for western meddling.”
Anyway, the west’s increasing entanglement with Islam has not been the result of an increasing enmity. On the contrary. Viewed from Orthodox Christian civilization, in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo the west took the Muslims’ side.
Huntington was well aware of the “paradox of democracy“, writes Fouad Ajami:
Democratic experiments often bring in their wake nationalistic populist movements (Latin America) or fundamentalist movements (Muslim countries). The world tempts power, and denies it. It is the Huntingtonian world; no false hopes and no redemption.
Francis Fukuyama, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, takes issue with Huntington’s approach:
While I fully appreciate the power and durability of culture, and the way that modern liberal democracy was rooted in Christian cultural values, it has always seemed to me that culture was more useful in explaining the provenance than the durability of democracy as a political system. [Huntington] underrated the universalism of the appeal of living in modern, free societies with accountable governments. … The gloomy picture he paints of a world riven by cultural conflict is one favored by the Islamists and Russian nationalists, but is less helpful in explaining contemporary China or India, or indeed in explaining the motives of people in the Muslim world or Russia who are not Islamists or nationalists. Nation-states and not civilizations remain the primary actors in world politics, and they are motivated by a host of interests and incentives that often override inherited cultural predispositions.
Now that the Third Wave is well and truly over, and advocates of modernizing authoritarianism gaining confidence and adherents, it seems fitting to return to Huntington’s 1997 JOD article and take heed of his call for a renewed democratic internationalism:
Now, after 20 years of the Third Wave, conditions are much more favorable, and private groups should move to create an international association of organizations and movements dedicated to expanding democracy on a global basis and to enhancing the performance of democracy within countries. The Comintern is dead. The time for a Demintern has arrived. The creation of such an association will be a major step toward ensuring the consolidation and the continuation of the momentous expansion of human freedom that began under the leadership of Mário Soares 23 years ago.
Zimbabwean human rights activist Jestina Mukoko is one of 17 activists charged with conspiracy to overthrow Mugabe's regime (Credit: VOA)
A Zimbabwean judge has ruled that 16 democracy and human rights activists must remain in jail over the New Year. They are charged with plotting to overthrow President Robert Mugabe, said Irene Petras, director of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy.
On December 22, 2008, the Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy issued a statement on Zimbabwe, expressing its solidarity with the country’s democracy and human rights activists, including World Movement participants. The statement- signed on behalf of the Steering Committee by its chair, The Hon. Kim Campbell, former Prime Minister of Canada, and two other members, Michael Danby, an Australian member of parliament, and Jana Hybaskova, a Czech member of the European Parliament- calls for the immediate release of abducted democracy and human rights activists, including prominent human rights activist and Zimbabwe Peace Project leader Jestina Mukoko.
The Steering Committee urges the international community to act to protect Zimbabwean citizens from the severely deteriorating economic, health, and humanitarian situation, a consequence of the continuing political crisis.
Government control of key media outlets and interference in editorial decisions is diluting Georgian journalism’s democratic function, observers suggest. Democracy cannot exist without the kind of scrutiny and accountability that independent investigative journalism provides, says Sozar Subari, Georgia’s ombudsman for human rights.
President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government has come under fire for its opaque decision-making. Even after the recent government reshuffle, an event conspicuously under-reported on state media, “power is still confined to a small, closed circle,” notes an RFE-RL report.
“Praising your own team instead of holding them responsible is a long way from seeking to establish the truth,” it continues. “The media response — to omit from the main news programs one of the day’s most important developments — is tantamount to riding roughshod over the facts.”
“The reality is that the Saakashvili government is the fourth one-party state that Georgia has had during the last 20 years, going back to the Soviet period,” said Lincoln A. Mitchell, formerly with the National Democratic Institute. “And nowhere has this been more apparent than in the restrictions on media freedom.”
Journalistic TV investigations were one of the catalysts of the Rose Revolution. Investigative television programs are as necessary as news programs, says Vakho Komakhidze, a journalist and founder of the Reporter studio, financed by the National Endowment for Democracy.
“The focus of discussion on media in Georgia should not be what government channels will or will not broadcast but whether private ownership of national TV stations will be transparent and independent,” says Miriam Lanskoy, NED’s Senior Program Officer for Central Asia and the Caucasus. She cites two current cases in Georgian courts where former station owners allege that they were coerced by government agents to give up shares.
Saakashvili’s New Year resolution should perhaps be to curb his erratic behavior and focus on democratic reform. “The advice of people like me is: To whatever degree possible, forget about the Russians,” said Ronald D. Asmus, executive director of the Transatlantic Center at the German Marshall Fund. “Accelerate reform and regain the moral high ground you had, and lost.”
But his commitment to democratic institutions seems wobbly, judging by his recent record and comments. “If I had been in the opposition, I would have destroyed this government in three months,” especially given the economic crisis, he told the New York Times. “I know how to do it,” he said, “but I don’t want to teach them how to do it.”
Following Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution, Saakashvili took advantage of enhanced state capacity to promote economic development and counter-corruption initiatives. But the “laudable achievements of Saakashvili’s state-building program have come at the high price of a superpresidential political system,”, according to Lanskoy, and Giorgi Areshidze, director of the Partnership for Social Initiatives (PSI), a Tbilisi-based NGO, write in the Journal of Democracy.
Former NDI staffer Mitchell detects two competing personalities at work. “I’ve seen him do things right out of Giuliani’s playbook, and I’ve seen him do things that are right out of Putin’s,” he told the New Yorker.
Others suggest time is running out for him to recapture his credibility. “What is the future for Saakashvili?” said Sozar Subari, a longtime critic of the president. “He started the war, he lost the war, he lost the territories. There is a crisis. There is no investment in Georgia. The situation is getting worse and worse. If there is no change, he will leave Georgia as the president who lost everything.”
Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev yesterday signed a law extending presidential terms from four years to six, apparently expediting Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency. The move fed speculation that Putin, eager to act before the financial crisis further erodes his popularity, is unlikely to wait until scheduled elections in 2012 to return to the office.
The Kremlin acted unusually quickly, pushing the amendment through both houses of the Duma and all of the nation’s 83 regional assemblies in less than 50 days. The liberal Yabloko party objected, highlighting a clause in the 1998 law which requires that regions be given a year to consider proposed constitutional amendments.
“They’re completely ignoring the law,” said Sergei Mitrokhin, Yabloko’s chairman. “Unfortunately, this happens quite often, but this is the first time the process has been ignored for such a significant issue as a constitutional amendment.”
The amendment coincides with another proposal to expand the definition of treason, a move that democrats fear “could mean a return to Soviet-style prosecutions of government critics as traitors, making crimes even of conversations with foreign reporters and nongovernmental organizations.”
Activists and lawyers suggest that the law is being pushed through in anticipation of increased political dissent and social unrest prompted by the financial crisis and the Kremlin’s economic mismanagement.
The financial crisis is testing the viability of the Putin-Medvedev “tandemocracy,” notes one observer. “The two centers of power promised a gradual evolution of Russia’s political system toward more pluralism and public accountability,” Vladimir Frolov writes in the Moscow Times. But Medvedev’s modernization agenda has given way to crisis management and Putin’s White House is “the political center of gravity.”
The declining price of oil - from $140-plus to $40 a barrel - is hurting authoritarian “petrocrats” like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Hugo Chavez as well as Putin. The Wall Street Journal suggests that the Russian premier is particularly vulnerable, noting that the authorities have banned state media from using the word “crisis,” although the Public Opinion Foundation reports that 42% of Russians believe the country is in one.
The closure of political space and emasculation of democratic institutions may backfire against the regime as discontented citizens take to the streets:
As the state is unable to tolerate or channel public anger into democratic debate, hostility can erupt in unpredictable ways. Earlier this month, some 30 Russian cities held demonstrations against a high new tariff on imported second-hand cars. … Riot police were sent from Moscow 3,750 miles east to Vladivostok, the epicenter of the movement. So far, the anti-tariff demonstrations aren’t overtly political, but the Kremlin seems to believe that can change and isn’t taking chances.
Robert Amsterdam’s blog features a rare document of dissent from within the security services, highlighting a posting on the Interior Ministry’s website from a disaffected police officer:
The power knows that actions of people’s protest are possible, and that the consequences could be unpredictable. A question. On whom is the power relying? Who can save it from the people’s wrath? Who will help hold on to what has been pillaged? That would be you and me, colleagues. The Russian police. We are going to disperse the protesters, like we did on 1 May of 1993 and in October of that same year, like we dispersed the Russian March in 2008. So, in everything that has taken place with our Motherland since the year 1993, there is our guilt…. A question. Are we going to be the dogs-on-a-chain of this regime?
As RFE/RL’s excellent Power Vertical notes, the posting has since been removed and replaced with a message apologizing for the “inconvenience.”
As analysts speculate on which elements, if any, of the Bush foreign policy legacy the new Obama administration should retain, and even ask whether liberals should promote liberal democracy, a new book notes that American presidents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Bill Clinton made democracy promotion a centerpiece of foreign policy.
Even realist icon Henry Kissinger concedes that Wilsonianism is the dominant tradition of U.S. foreign policy, noting that it is “above all to the drumbeat of Wilsonian idealism that American foreign policy has marched since his watershed presidency and continues to march to this day.”
The end of the Cold War seemed to vindicate Wilsonian idealism as “democratic transitions and economic integration had ushered in what some saw as a global Wilsonian era,” according to Woodrow Wilson, the Bush Administration, and the Future of Liberal Internationalism, edited by G. John Ikenberry, Thomas J. Knock, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Tony Smith:
There are few observers today who do not think moments arise when the international community-or, if necessary, the Western democracies-should intervene in troubled countries to prevent genocide, alleviate humanitarian crises, and thwart transnational terrorists. There is also a good deal of support across the political spectrum for international assistance in support of struggling democracies. But how do these Western democracies distinguish between enlightened and legitimate interventions and liberal imperialism?
But the contributors differ on whether “optimistic assumptions about democracy promotion and peace, … [lead] inevitably to imperialist adventures” and whether Wilson’s notion of liberal internationalism focused less on promoting democracy than on inter-state collaboration to build a cooperative and rule-based international order.
Democracies must also respond to challenges with which liberal internationalism has little historical experience. “Building liberal order today must entail some systematic response to the problem of weak and failing states; globalization and the increasingly deadly technologies of violence makes this so, even if more idealist aspirations of democracy promotion do not,’ Ikenberry contends.
Using international leverage to arrest Nicaragua’s downward spiral toward authoritarian rule could prevent President Daniel Ortega from “morphing” into another Robert Mugabe, argues Kevin Casas-Zamora, senior fellow in foreign policy at Washington’s Brookings Institution.
Ortega’s Sandinista movement has reacted violently to the alleged rigging of last month’s elections, cancelling the registration of two opposition parties, and harassing its critics - including former Sandinista poet Ernesto Cardenal - as well as domestic and international civil society groups.
“Our democracy is in grave danger,” said Carlos Tunnermann, a former Sandinista ambassador. “There are dictatorial tendencies taking away Nicaraguans’ right to choose.”
As the largest bilateral provider of aid, the U.S. should follow the lead of European states, and reconsider cooperation links with the Ortega regime, Casas-Zamora argues, “prudently, but firmly” using as leverage the $175 million five-year Millennium Challenge agreement signed in 2005.
With the lowest approval rating of all six Central American heads of state at just 22 percent, Ortega has been courting unsavory international allies, including Iran and Libya. “Ortega has become a deeply unpopular president after a series of scandals,” the U.S.-based Stratfor consulting firm notes. “Making grand gestures in the international system is one way for Ortega to step into the spotlight and perhaps attract an international sponsor.”
Demonstrations against Egypt's authoritarian government are unlikely to spark regime change, a new study suggests (Credit: globalvoicesonline)
Egypt’s political evolution will “shape the timing, character, and success of democratization throughout the Arab world”, claims a new study. The country provides a particularly insightful case for understanding regional prospects for democracy, writes Bruce Rutherford, because of the relatively open and historically rooted rivalry between the “liberal, Islamic, and statist conceptions of political order that compete for preeminence in the Arab world.”
The current regime exhibits a growing contradiction: on one hand, it is a “classic example of stable authoritarianism“, controlling much of the media and political life, while suppressing opponents with legal and extra-legal instruments and monitoring and manipulating political parties and civil society groups; on the other hand, a vibrant judiciary, an assertive Judges’ Club, and a large and well-organized Islamist opposition are poised to take advantage of “a fundamental change in the character of Egyptian politics since the early 1990s”, namely the declining legitimacy and sustainability of the Nasserite statist order.
Egypt typifies the dilemma facing many of the region’s regimes, namely that a consequence of economic restructuring is that “the massive welfare states that enhanced regime legitimacy in many countries have proven financially unsustainable.” The region’s autocratic institutions are not threatened by color revolution-style transitions even if “the tools of centralized state power are gradually eroding,” Rutherford contends. The result is a hybrid regime that combines autocratic elements - a powerful and largely unchecked executive - and democratic institutions that constrain the state and increase accountability.
He notes the role played by the democracy assistance and human rights community in supporting indigenous demands for democratic reform:
These measures were reinforced by a growing network of transnational civil society groups that promoted democracy and human rights. These organizations included human rights groups, international party foundations, and media advocacy groups. They drew international attention to human rights abuses and lobbied Western governments to monitor and punish autocratic regimes. Some of the groups also sought to protect and strengthen pro-democracy forces through lobbying, funding, and training. In addition, international election observers became an important force for identifying and documenting electoral fraud. Their efforts led to substantial improvements in the fairness and transparency of elections.
Despite the challenges to the regime, Rutherford concludes, Egypt is “likely to remain a hybrid regime that contains some legal and institutional constraints on executive power, but which falls short of Western norms of democracy.”
While the European Union’s gravity model has been an incredibly successful engine of democratization within its borders, the EU is doing a poor job promoting democracy in its near neighborhood, a new report concludes. “Overall trends have been disappointing in most cases,” according to a report from FRIDE’s Richard Youngs.
“Democracy and human rights assistance remains extremely limited, although increased amounts have been allocated for broader governance reform,” Youngs notes. EU support through the European Neighbourhood Partnership “remains heavily state-centered” and even where it has supported media, civil society and opposition figures - as in Belarus - the aid has been has been small scale.
In Morocco, only 4 per cent of ENP funds go towards democracy and human rights, in Lebanon the focus is “overwhelmingly” on economic governance and capacity-building for state institutions, while EU assistance to Jordan stresses economic and poverty alleviation at the expense of public administration reform.
In the EU’s North African periphery, Moroccan modernization has failed to generate democratization; Jordan “remains essentially a ‘security state’”, having curtailed the countervailing powers of parliament, parties, the judiciary and civil society, and NGOs; while
Lebanese stability and confessional power-sharing have been secured at the cost of postponing essential democratic reforms.
To the EU’s east, Ukraine has failed to embed robust democratic institutions and culture; Azerbaijan continues to manipulate elections and restrict the opposition and civil society, although intra-regime divisions hint at prospects for future reform; and in Belarus, the release of political prisoners has yet to lead to meaningful political liberalization.
“The general trend has been towards increasing the share of aid given for direct budgetary support (that is, flowing directly into governments’ coffers) rather than investing significantly in democracy support,” the report states, concluding pessimistically:
In sum, our case studies do much to confirm a relatively pessimistic view of democracy
policies within the EU’s Neighbourhood. Democracy-related challenges are getting harder and political reform processes continue to disappoint despite partner countries having now been in structured partnership with the Union for many years. Within the EU there is an apparent absence of political will fundamentally to revise approaches to democracy support, even if the shortcomings of these policies have been apparent for some time.
Unlike the twentieth century’s failed autocracies, contemporary authoritarianism represents an alternative form of capitalism and a sustainable rival to liberal democracy. Or does it?
Democracy may be facing a backlash or, at least, have stalled; China has married a one-party dictatorship with capitalist modernization; rising energy prices have fuelled autocratic regimes from Central Asia and the Middle East to Venezuela; and there may even be signs that “these autocratic states are making common cause against the liberal Western states, with nascent alliances such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.”
But liberal democrats need not be overly concerned, argue Daniel Deudney of Johns Hopkins University and Princeton’s G. John Ikenberry. Writing in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, they dispute recent arguments of authoritarian resurgence, highlighting “deep contradictions between authoritarian political systems and capitalist economic systems”:
- rising living standards and education levels generating demands for political participation, articulated by a middle class with an interest in challenging unaccountable decision-makers;
- private property necessitates rule of law, and economic rights and institutions become “an intrinsic limitation on state power and, over time, create demands for wider political rights”;
- capitalist economic development produces a profusion of complexity and specialized activities, and this “diversity of socioeconomic interests leads to demands for competitive elections between multiple parties”.
Deudney and Ikenberry outline the “deeply rooted incapacities and dysfunctions …. inherent in the structure of autocratic hierarchies”:
- corruption arising from abuse of state power is hard to constrain in autocratic regimes without constitutional checks and balances;
- history suggests that the political cleavages and conflicts resulting from social and economic inequalities can only be resolved through universal-franchise democracy, political parties responsive to diverse needs and interests, and some firm of welfare state;
- autocratic hierarchies cannot perform optimally because of weak accountability and inadequate information. “Contemporary autocratic capitalist regimes … are still intrinsically impeded by censorship and the absence of open debate on policy alternatives,” as China’s 2003 SARS illustrated, with “severe consequences for public welfare and political legitimacy.”
Such contradictions and dysfunctions aside, the autocrats remain a political force in the world that, they suggest, needs to be engaged and integrated rather than confronted:
Proposals to “draw up the gates” of the democratic world and exclude nondemocratic states — with measures such as the expulsion of Russia from the G-8 …… promise to worsen relations and reinforce authoritarian rule. ……. Proposals such as a “concert of democracies” should be configured to deepen cooperation among democratic states and reinforce global institutions rather than to confront nondemocratic states. The United States and the other democratic nations should take the initiative in solving global resource and environmental problems and produce global frameworks for problem solving that draw in nondemocratic states along the way. The democratic states should orient themselves to pragmatically address real and shared problems rather than focusing on ideological differences.
Further to Deudney and Ikenberry’s arguments on corruption and accountability, Freedom House has an insightful posting on presidential succession - the authoritarian leaders for life - noting the diminishing prospect of a meaningful rotation of power in Russia, Zimbabwe and Venezuela. One consequence of this lack of accountability is a high level of corruption, detailed in a chart showing that such “politically managed systems” perform no better than 105 (out of 179 countries) in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.
