The political aftershocks of the Sichuan earthquake are now emerging, writes Bruce Gilley, author of “China’s Democratic Future“. The quake left 88,000 people dead or missing and the communist authorities’ response was an issue of acute political sensitivity. Gilley quotes officials’ observation that “natural disasters often threaten ruling parties with collapse or replacement if they are not handled properly.”
The quake not only “undermined support for local government in the affected areas, and intensified the campaign against corruption, he notes. It also prompted a shift in elite public opinion on the function of civil society “which conservatives accurately view as a dangerous double-edged sword that will slice authority away from the party-state.”
But expectations of a liberalization of a system in which NGOs are closely regulated by the state may be premature given official anxiety about current levels of social unrest, including the recent taxi strikes, Longnan riots and protests by laid-off workers at closed factories in southern China.
The first sustained wave of protests in decades could be emerging. “Keeping such local strains from escalating into broader political tensions is a high priority for the government,” the Wall Street Journal reports, citing the country’s top public-security official’s call to identify and control risks to social stability.
Such events have also prompted the communist authorities to change their approach to managing the media. Realizing the difficulty of blocking or censoring information in the age of the internet and cell phones, the party is trying to ‘spin’ the news by getting in first with its interpretation of events.
“The Chinese government has started to loosen its control on the negative information,” said an academic familiar with the propaganda agencies. “They are trying to control the news by publicizing the news.”
Divisions within the European Union will thwart attempts to develop a common Russia policy even though the EU consensus is to engage rather than confront or isolate its authoritarian neighbor.
The EU does not compete for geo-political influence, but must defend its values by engaging its eastern neighbors, Tomas Valasek, foreign policy and defence director at the Center for European Reform, told a Washington meeting today. Given EU resistance to further enlargement, its principal agent for democratization and stability, it can only offer such incentives as visa-free travel and “deep” free trade.
There is a “real problem” with Rome and Berlin, with Germany in particular seeking a special relationship with Moscow through a new ?stpolitik, a policy which is causing “very serious concern” in Paris, CER’s Charles Grant told the meeting at the German Marshall Fund.
Russia appeared threatening to its neighbors, but was really of little strategic significance. With less than 35 of global GDP, it remained an economic pygmy. “For all the talk of a multi-vector world, and the support Moscow has given to authoritarian regimes like Venezuela, Burma and Uzbekistan, it has almost no friends,” said Grant, addressing a Washington, DC, meeting today, dismissing notions of an authoritarian axis as “fantasy”.
China’s leaders are openly “contemptuous” of the Kremlin, he said. Beijing is also resisting Russian efforts to turn the Shanghai Cooperation Organization into a geopolitical instrument, writes Bobo Lo, Grant’s CER colleague.
Neither the US nor the EU can influence domestic policy but Russia needs western technology and bolstering its economic development will ultimately enhance the influence of modernizing elements, Grant said. There are undoubtedly factional divisions within the ruling elite but they remain opaque, he said, reflecting on a recent meeting with both President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. He cited Winston Churchill’s claim that Kremlin conflicts were like two dogs fighting under a carpet.
The EU should offer Moscow the carrots of WTO membership, postponing missile defense until a real Iranian threat emerged, and deferring NATO enlargement. Yet if Russia again transgressed its neighbor’s borders, the EU should employ serious sticks, including banning Russian companies from seeking investment in European capital markets.
Kremlin political technologists like Gleb Pavlovsky often cite their preference for dealing with Europeans rather than pushy Americans promoting NATO enlargement, Grant said. But others believe Russia’s supposed fear of NATO encirclement is a ruse to hide a deeper fear of the civilizational alternative represented by the European Union.
The most critical challenges facing the world - from climate change and nuclear proliferation to infectious diseases and terrorism - are transnational in nature, demanding a transnational response. New approaches to global governance require the exercise of ‘responsible sovereignty’, argues Carlos Pascual, foreign policy director at the Brookings Institution.
Style and message were also important to realizing foreign policy objectives. Democracy could only be nurtured from within societies, said Pascual, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy. He was speaking today at the launch of the Managing Global Insecurity (MGI) Project’s Plan for Action, a set of foreign policy recommendations for world leaders, he stressed the importance of building civilian capacity for renewing U.S global engagement, contrasting the $750 billion military budget with the $38 billion available for diplomatic, foreign assistance and other foreign policy commitments.
Imposing democracy is an oxymoron, said former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Highlighting her role as chair of the National Democratic Institute, she stressed that real democracy promotion involved “systematic work supporting the nuts and bolts of democracy”, including independent media and rule of law.
Canada’s new government is formally committed to establishing a “new, non-partisan democracy promotion agency.” Yesterday’s ‘throne speech’ outlining official policy said the initiative would “support the peaceful transition to democracy in repressive countries and help emerging democracies build strong institutions.”
While the proposal reflects a manifesto pledge by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party, it enjoys cross-party support. “Both parties are now sort of recognizing this idea that promoting democracy abroad is a necessary and useful foreign policy tool,” said David Donovan, former research director at Queen’s University’s Centre for the Study of Democracy.
“It would have to be on a multi-party basis,” he said. “If it involved going into oppressive regimes, you would have to work with all political parties, which is the model that’s kind of the way it’s going, not sort of picking one kind of political opposition party and supporting that to overthrow a regime.”
The new center is partly inspired by existing democracy assistance foundations, including the UK’s Westminster Foundation and the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy.
Burmese democracy activist Bo Kyi
A veteran of Burma’s “8.8.88 Uprising,” Bo Kyi participated in the popular uprising in which millions of people took to the streets. An estimated 3,000 people were killed in junta’s violent backlash. Thousands more were injured and imprisoned, including Bo Kyi who spent seven years and three months in prison were he suffered repeated interrogations, beatings, shackling, and torture in prison, amid squalid living conditions.
Upon his release, he fled to the Burma-Thailand border, where he helped to found the Assistance Association of Political Prisoners (AAPP) in Mae Sot, Thailand, which works on behalf of current and former political prisoners and their families. The group provides financial support and medical care, monitors prison conditions, and conducts international advocacy for prisoners’ release.
The New Yorker’s George Packer reports on his encounters with Bo Kyi, and cites his moving comments on receiving the Human Rights Watch award (along with Uzbek journalist Umida Niazova):
Last February, in Mae Sot, Thailand, a transit point on the border with Burma, I met a Burmese man named Bo Kyi. He had smoker’s breath and bad teeth from chain-smoking cheroots, and he spoke passable English. His flat gaze gave very little away. Bo Kyi had been a political prisoner in Burma for many years. After his release, he had fled the country. In Mae Sot, he founded an organization called Assistance Association for Political Prisoners in Burma. His outfit occupied a small house on an obscure sidestreet-even in Thailand, dissidents aren’t safe from the reach of Burmese intelligence. In the front yard a wall was covered with black-and-white photographs-they looked like mug shots-of political prisoners in Burma, along with their length of sentence. Some of them had dates of death.
Read the whole thing (scroll down).
The National Endowment for Democracy and Human Rights Watch are holding a meeting honoring Bo Kyi, Co-Founder, Assistance Association for Political Prisoners in Burma, and recipient of Human Rights Watch’s 2008 Human Rights Defender Award. Larry Diamond, International Forum for Democratic Studies, and Tom Malinowski, Human Rights Watch will join Bo Kyi to discuss the state of political prisoners in Burma and the current political environment inside the country.
Details: Tuesday, November 25, 2008. 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM (lunch served 12 PM to 12:30 PM) at the National Endowment for Democracy, 1025 F Street, NW, Suite 800, Washington, DC 20004. RSVP to Aung Maw Zin at aungmz@ned.org or 202-378-9700 ext. 569 by November 21.
The new U.S Administration will inherit an intimidating array of foreign policy challenges, not least the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the threat of a nuclear Iran, a stagnant Middle East peace process, and addressing Russia’s resurgent authoritarianism. As in every other administration, there are likely to be internal differences on strategy and policy.
A pre-taste of some of the debates likely to emerge can be found in an ongoing Council on Foreign Relations forum on liberal foreign policy under the Obama Administration, which includes the question asked by CFR’s Peter Beinart: how central is the promotion of liberal democracy to a liberal foreign policy?
… even if one grants that democracy promotion mostly requires non-military means, that it should be done multilaterally, that it should address questions of economic justice as well as political freedom, and that it should focus on the rule of law rather than merely elections, the broader question remains: Is democracy promotion really that valuable anyway? Does a liberal foreign policy have to make democracy and human rights central to America’s relationship with, say, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, China or North Korea? Or can liberals comfortably say that questions of domestic, regional and international security take precedence given America’s lack of influence, and perhaps lack of wisdom, when it comes to the internal affairs of other states?
A key issue is which of the Democratic Party’s liberal foreign policy traditions emerge as dominant, suggests the Progressive Policy Institute’s Will Marshall. Will it be the anti-war tradition or tough-minded liberal internationalism. He suspects that President-elect Obama will “fashion a foreign policy synthesis that is uniquely his own.”
One way of transcending the traditional Democratic divide between hawks and peaceniks is to focus on the value of law and institutions, says Princeton’s Anne-Marie Slaughter.
The merits of promoting democracy in the Middle East should be determined by the “diplomatic equivalent of the Hippocratic oath“, argues Aaron David Miller. “Above all do no harm but beyond that avoid failure.”
This is correct, argues Georgetown University’s Samer Shehata, but continued support for Arab authoritarian regimes does harm US interests and standing in the region. “Formulating new, intelligent effective yet cautious American policies to support democracy in the region will not be easy,” she notes. “The difficulty will be working out a range of policy options that intelligently and effectively support the principles of democracy (e.g., rule of law, accountability, transparency, participation and hopefully good governance) which are realistic and workable-and reflect American principles.”
The emergence of a non-democratic model of development could have an appeal to states in the Middle East, a senior U.S. intelligence official suggested yesterday. China and, to some extent, Russia, arguably represent an alternative to liberal democratic market economies, National Intelligence Council chairman Thomas Fingar told a meeting at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Previewing the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025 report, due to be published later this week, he noted that the Middle East and Africa, amongst other places, “historically made the wrong choice in the ’50s and ’60s for the centralized, authoritarian model of development and paid a price.”
The short-lived unipolar moment of U.S. global hegemony had ended. “The U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished,” Fingar said. America’s leadership was eroding “at an accelerating pace” in “political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas.”
One consequence of the shift of economic power from West to East is the “end of the Atlantic era”, says French analyst Laurent Cohen-Tanugi. This has profound implications since these new powers are “not only outside the West; they are often non-democratic“, he observes in his new book, The Shape of the World To Come: Charting the Geopolitics of a New Century.
The transatlantic partnership remains central to the West maintaining leadership. “Europe and the United States and generally all democratic and, even beyond that, moderate countries must work together…in trying to shape this multipolar world in an orderly way,” he contends.
The “color revolutions” ushered in democratic transitions, but also prompted a pronounced backlash against freedom of association worldwide, according to a new report from Freedom House. Governments are taking calculated action to restrict nongovernmental organizations, human rights groups and independent trade unions, notes Freedom of Association Under Threat: The New Authoritarians’ Offensive Against Civil Society.
“There are reasons to believe that the current round of restrictions is not a passing phenomenon,” said Arch Puddington, Freedom House director of research. “These setbacks can largely be traced to the emergence of a new breed of authoritarian leaders who employ repressive tactics that are much more sophisticated than those used in the past.”
From 2004-2007, freedom of association deteriorated in almost every region except Western Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, with the most pronounced declines in the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America, while associational rights were already endangered in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East/North Africa region. The analysis draws on the organization’s Freedom in the World data and includes reports on countries where associational rights are particularly threatened: Algeria, China, Colombia, Egypt, Iran, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, Uzbekistan, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
“The officers of NGOs are seldom arrested, placed on trial, sent to gulags, exiled, or murdered, though all these things do happen from time to time,” the report states. “Today’s authoritarians instead rely on legalistic or bureaucratic methods to hobble civil society,” including tax investigations and funding restrictions. “And because the drive against associational rights is conducted largely without violence, it evokes little notice from the outside world.”
The report notes that organized labor has experienced severe constraints on associational rights since the end of the Cold War, not least in Latin America where it confronts a range of challenges, from right-wing death squads in Colombia to Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez’s “tried and true Marxist tactic of establishing parallel unions in an effort to bring the labor movement under his political control.”
Related news:
- The “closing of political space” in Ethiopia was raised on a recent trip to Addis Ababa by David J. Kramer, Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. He drew attention to a draft legislation on civil society organizations that will impose a 10 % threshold of foreign financing and 30% cap on administrative overhead. “Restrictions on the kinds of activities that would be affected by this legislation - basically, any organizations that are considered foreign or receive foreign financing that engage in human rights issues or issues dealing with the rights of women or the rights of children or the disabled, or conflict resolution - all of those things would be at risk under this legislation,” he noted.
- Idasa, the Southern African democracy group, has called for the release of Mario Masuku, leader of Swaziland’s banned Pudemo party who was detained three days ago under anti-terrorism legislation. Masuku has played a “leading role in promoting democracy and free political association and activity,” Idasa notes.
- “For the first time since 1989, Beijing seems scared.” Source: wikimedia
China’s middle classes have appeared content to trade freedom for prosperity, accepting Communist rule in exchange for steadily rising living standards. But that basic bargain is beginning to unravel, argues Joshua Kurlantzick, as the global economic crisis threatens to undermine the social contract underpinning the country’s developmental authoritarianism.
Despite its reputation, Beijing’s autocracy is anything but absolute. The government long ago abandoned real communist ideology, and its current leader, Hu Jintao, a cipher with a background as a rural bureaucrat, has about as much revolutionary charisma as Bob Dole. And while China’s security apparatus is sophisticated, the country is too large, with too many educated, Internet-savvy people, for Beijing to brainwash its citizens the way Kim Jong-il has in North Korea.
The Economist Intelligence Unit recently highlighted the possibility of the global financial crisis undermining democracy and democracy assistance.
Richard Youngs notes that even before the economic downturn, many commentators had drawn attention to the declining appeal of ‘Western’ democratic and human rights. But the key, he argues in a new analysis for FRIDE, the Madrid-based think-tank, is how democracies deal with the crisis:
If they succeed better than non-democratic states then pluralism’s appeal could actually rise. If they demonstrate that - in the spirit of Amyrta Sen - openness and robust democratic debate can help mitigate crises better than autocratic guidance it is not inevitable that the crisis will be entirely negative for democratisation.
“Current seismic shifts in the world economy will need to be factored in by national and international democracy-building actors when assessing their future strategies,” writes Vidar Helgesen, Secretary-General of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA). Democracy assistance practitioners have learnt many lessons, including the importance of “domestically-driven and nationally-owned democratisation processes” and an appreciation that democracy assistance should be “holistic, long-term and carefully contextualised.”
But, he suggests, a changing environment and political challenges merit a fresh look at established institutions and practices:
In an environment characterised by high levels of uncertainty and volatility, distrust, polarisation and the meltdown of global frameworks of economic governance, democracy-building efforts cannot and should not remain static and conditioned by old assumptions. Rather, they are increasingly in need of fresh questioning and testing.
