It took the “electric shock” of the Arab Spring for the Obama administration’s democracy policy to fully emerge from a phase of retreat and recalibration to revitalization, a Washington meeting heard yesterday.
Initially concerned to distance itself from the legacy of George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda, force of events compelled the administration to adopt a more engaged and energetic approach to democracy support, said Tom Carothers, author of Democracy Policy Under Obama: Revitalization or Retreat?, a new report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
While the administration subsequently launched a series of initiatives to reinforce international pro-democracy norms and institutions, it is unclear whether they are either sustainable or ambitious enough to match the scale of the challenge suggested by the Egyptian government’s recent raids on civil society groups.
“A significant shift is occurring within international civil society assistance,” Carothers told Democracy Digest (see separate post). “Something big is going on – it really is something different.”
For the first fifteen years or so, there was a consensus and acceptance of the need for technical assistance, institution-building and similar programs, especially in transitional states.
“But now governments are feeling threatened. It’s no longer cute NGOs doing international social work,” he said. “It requires us to rethink models of assistance as we can no longer rely on a benign framework.”
Other regimes will be watching closely to see how the US responds to the Cairo raids, the meeting heard.
The administration followed the familiar pattern of its predecessors since 1989: assuming office dismissive or skeptical of foreign engagement in general and democracy support in particular, before “getting pulled in,” Carothers told the Carnegie meeting. It went through a deeply entrenched Washington syndrome: rediscovering and relearning the democratic imperative.
Similarly, Obama adopted the same strategic calculus as previous administrations: where compelling economic, energy or security interests were at stake – as in Bahrain, Central Asia or oil-rich sub-Saharan Africa – autocrats got a pass on democracy and human rights issues.
“Thus, the unevenness of Obama’s commitment to democracy abroad is more a continuation of a decades-long pattern than a change or a retreat,” he writes.
At the same time, “Obama has succeeded in greatly diminishing the damaging association of democracy promotion with the Iraq war and with unilateral, forcible regime change generally while still pursing active prodemocracy diplomacy in many places.’
In one respect, however, Obama’s democracy policy is distinctive: the absence of a “transformational narrative” that posits democracy as a key priority or leitmotiv of foreign policy.
“This absence of a central narrative, and one in which democracy promotion would have a natural place, is not a failing of President Obama and his foreign policy team,” Carothers notes. “Rather, it is a reflection of the state of the world.”
It was in a context of “damaged U.S. pro-democratic credibility and grim global democratic prospects” – with democracy support tainted by association with the Iraq war, forcible regime change and perceived US human rights violations – that Obama and his senior foreign policy officials sought to “recalibrate” U.S. democracy policy, he suggests.
Obama’s Cairo speech was emblematic of the shift, stressing that democracy can never be imposed, that the US was not seeking to promote any specific model, and endorsing a holistic conception of democracy as more than elections, incorporating rule of law and aspects of the development agenda.
The democracy assistance community was notably “disappointed and concerned” by the administration’s downplaying the democratic agenda, Carothers said, but more reassured when, in the words of one democracy practitioner, the “pendulum swung” as events in Honduras, Côte d’Ivoire, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan demanded US engagement.
While the “fusion of interests and ideals” remains as elusive as ever, the administration has developed a relatively coherent policy, built on regular speeches or statements by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton on democracy themes; a range of initiatives to counter democratic breakdowns or regression, and to support democratic transitions using various forms of diplomatic and economic leverage; as well as maintaining democracy assistance to nearly 100 countries.
In lieu of a grand transformational narrative, the administration has improvised a “long game” strategy set of initially ad hoc initiatives designed to reinforce international norms and institutions conducive to democracy and human rights, including reforming the Community of Democracies; encouraging emerging democracies such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Turkey to adopt a more energetic role in supporting democracy; and promoting government accountability and citizen participation through the multilateral Open Government Partnership.
The long game approach reflects the administration’s conviction that its “emphasis on indirect, quieter measures rather than high profile gestures would sit well with the heightened sensitivities in many parts of the world about democracy promotion as political interventionism,” Carothers writes.
Such an approach to democracy support is necessarily “eclectic,” Carothers told the meeting, when the administration also confronts compelling economic, security and other strategic priorities. But it is also more consistent with democracy promotion as “being a helping hand” in small-scale, low-profile, locally-driven initiatives.
The challenge is to ensure their sustainability through the institutionalization and bipartisan support that is “central to embedding such initiatives in the policy bureaucracy so they last through successive administrations – as exemplified by the notable longevity of the National Endowment for Democracy.”
“An uneven, unsteady recovery” is a more appropriate description of the administration’s democracy policy, Freedom House president David Kramer told the Carnegie meeting.
The Bush administration in which he served was notably remiss in failing to match the president’s rhetorical commitments with serious pressure on Russia and China on democracy and human rights regressions. But it did change perceptions of democratic possibilities in the Arab world through Bush’s 2003 NED speech, for instance, and Condi Rice’s refusal to visit Egypt until Ayman Nour was freed, before the administration became gun-shy” after Hamas’s electoral victory.
By contrast, the Obama administration set a different tone, with his early emphasis on engaging authoritarian leaders and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s reference to the “three D’s” of US foreign policy. Similarly, when it is left to a White House press spokesman to protest the December 2010 post-election crackdown and arrests of Russian democrats, but President Obama himself issues a statement congratulating Ukraine’s Yanukovich on transferring uranium to Russia, such gestures “send a signal to authoritarian regimes” about the administration’s priorities, Kramer said.
It is in this context that we can understand why Egypt’s ruling military believes “they won’t pay a price” for the recent raids on pro-democracy NGOs. “Why do they think they can get away with it?”
The Carnegie analysis is correct in asserting that the Obama administration sought to “rehabilitate, refresh and reclaim” the democracy agenda, Stanford University’s Jeremy Weinstein told the meeting, but incorrect in suggesting that democracy policy was not part of a strategic narrative.
Obama’s speech to the UN General Assembly and the National Security Strategy outline its contours, based on the premise that “collective challenges demand collective solutions,” including: reforming the architecture for international cooperation; engaging the “new heavyweights” in the emerging democracies; and letting multilateral mechanisms assume leadership, especially where regional groupings could exercise more leverage on democracy issues, such as the Arab League in Libya, ECOWAS in Côte d’Ivoire, OAS in Honduras or the EU/OSCE in Belarus.
The administration’s response to the Arab Spring demonstrates “there has been a strategic shift,” said Weinstein, until recently a National Security Council official with responsibility for democracy issues. It has shattered the myth that Arab publics don’t care about democracy and shattered the orthodoxy of authoritarian stability. But the regional tumult also demonstrates the limits to government action, including inconsistency, limited resources, and the fear that political change will be at the cost of strategic interests, which all raise the “risk that we will fall back into old patterns” of preferring stability to democracy.
Given that military, economic and other strategic interests tend to trump democracy, Weinstein said, “How do we tie our own hands to ensure that policy and interests don’t conflict?”
The National Endowment for Democracy, for instance, can provide direct assistance regardless of such constraints, he said.
“Governments complain to the State Department but they are told that the NED makes its own decisions,” but, while funded by Congress, it’s politically autonomous.
The US Congress could also helpfully tie the administration’s hands by considering conditionality for financial aid to Egypt’s military, while there are also hopes that the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which has a mandate for promoting democracy, could provide the necessary “stickiness” for incentivizing reform if its reach was extended into MENA.
Like the labor of Sisyphus, “sustaining and sharpening the U.S. global role on democracy support remains a continual work in progress,” Carothers writes.
Partisan foreign policy debates and disputes over how assertive the US should be on over other government’s democratic deficits and human rights abuses.
“But these arguments can mask the fact that by far the vast majority of the daily work of democracy support is a matter of bipartisan agreement,” he concludes:
And they may fail to highlight the less visible but often equally crucial issues for bolstering U.S. democracy support in the years ahead, whether under Democrats or Republicans, including: injecting at least some serious prodemocratic content into U.S. relations with putatively helpful autocrats; keeping as much democracy aid intact as possible in the coming almost certain wave of serious cuts in U.S. foreign assistance; completing the institutionalization of new prodemocratic policy frameworks and mechanisms toward the Arab world to replace decades of default support for Arab autocrats; deepening the effort to build constructive ties with the growingly active non-Western arena of international democracy support; and above all, never losing sight of the powerful connection between the health of democracy in the United States and the credibility and power of U.S. democracy promotion abroad.
