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.

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.

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.

“Alongside every religion lies a political opinion which is linked to it by affinity,” wrote Tocqueville. The religious motivation of political forces, not least in the world’s conflict zones, is one reason why the incoming U.S. administration must integrate issues of religious freedom into foreign policy in the areas of democracy promotion, counter terrorism, and public diplomacy, a new book argues.

“Religion is seldom a purely private matter,” writes Thomas F. Farr, visiting professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, as people “draw on their religious beliefs to shape the laws and policies under which they live their lives.” 

The new administration should reinstate the position of Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, created by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, and appoint an individual “capable of mainstreaming this issue into democracy promotion, counter-terrorism and public diplomacy”, Farr suggests.  

“In the 21st century the challenge for American policy is to help shape the religion-state relationship in key countries — such as Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, India, Russia, and China — so that religious ideas and actors are accommodated to the public good,” he contends.

The National Endowment for Democracy and its affiliates have done excellent work in seeding democracy, and assisting groups cultivating the “civil society of those voluntary associations and non-governmental organizations that teach citizens the habits and the virtues that democracy needs.” But religious freedom should also figure more largely in the work of democracy assistance groups, he says.

“We have got to include religious freedom in the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the USAID, and all of our democracy promotion efforts,” he writes. “We’ve got to mandate it, because it’s not going to happen unless it is required. The habits of thought are too entrenched.”

Others appear to share his view. “The National Endowment for Democracy promotes programs largely indifferent to the question of religious freedom,” wrote Joseph Loconte in a recent review of Farr’s book. But the NED’s grantee profile does include many groups that actively promote religious liberty, tolerance and inter-faith dialog.

Sudan’s Inter-Religious Council, for example, publicizes violations of religious liberty, surveys educational institutions to identify religious biases and trains Christian and Muslim youth on issues of religious freedom.
 
The China Aid Association’s quarterly journal analyzes and documents human rights abuses of religious believers, and maintains an online library of Chinese and English-language laws and regulations governing religious practice in China.
 
In Pakistan, the Lahore-based Democratic Commission for Human Development runs an educational and advocacy program to counter the influence of religious extremism and to foster principles of religious freedom and tolerance.
 
Que Me, the leading international advocate of human rights in Vietnam, has worked extensively with the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam and the Paris-based International Buddhist Information Bureau in promoting freedom of worship in the communist state.

The International Forum for Islamic Dialogue supports and assists liberal Muslim democrats in promulgating modern interpretations of Islam and highlighting the compatibility of Islamic values with universal values of human rights, democracy, pluralism, cultural diversity, and women’s rights.

Promoting democracy inevitably requires an appreciation of the fact that freedom of worship is inextricably bound up with basic democratic rights, including freedom of speech, association and conscience. Religious freedom is, to coin a cliché, the canary in the coal mine: where freedom of worship is denied or compromised, other liberties are invariably and equally vulnerable.

The United States should abandon both the “myth of externally-orchestrated regime change” and the “illusion of imminent revolution” in Iran, a new analysis suggests. Highly-publicized initiatives to support Iranian reformers have backfired, exposing activists to repressive measures and playing into the hands of a regime eager to portray indigenous democrats as agents of foreign powers, argues Brookings’s Suzanne Maloney, a former State Department advisor.

“Abandoning the regime change fantasy means disbanding or significantly retooling democracy promotion programming for Iran, she contends in a report for the U.S. Institute for Peace.  It is understandable that policy-makers seek to replicate the apparent success of democracy assistance in supporting democratic transitions in the likes of Ukraine and Georgia. But Western intervention is the “third rail” in Iranian domestic affairs and conspicuous democracy promotion is likely to backfire on local activists.

The various agents for change within Iran include students and youth, reformist clerics like Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri and a technologically-empowered women’s movement. But, despite what Ladan Boroumand describes as the remarkable resilience of civil society, the opposition currently lacks leadership, organization and a convincing strategy for political change. It also needs to challenge and transcend the current rules of the game.

“The fundamental shortcoming hampering Iran’s democratic aspirations has been the general unwillingness of Iranians to risk their lives and livelihoods to demand the change they want or to defend the dissidents who have been imprisoned for their own advocacy,” she writes.

Meaningful change is unlikely to occur without significant mobilization, but a mixture of repression-induced timidity and fear of political turmoil. “The disinclination of Iranians to mobilize on a mass basis reflects a widespread aversion to unrest and violent change, she notes, “an understandable, if unfortunate, legacy of the Islamic revolution.”

Another analyst notes “Tehran’s trepidation” at the new U.S. administration’s signals on U.S.-Iranian relations:

Tehran’s reception of the early warning signs from Washington are focused on calls for increases in military spending, NATO expansion, boosting intelligence agencies, strengthening of the “nation-building, democracy-promoting” National Endowment for Democracy, …..

Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, won’t be surprised at the Islamic Republic’s hostile response to the prospects of a new administration in Washington. Despite occasional suggestions of Tehran’s openness to dialog with the United States, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s ideological commitment has led him to sabotage any serious initiatives:

Khamenei considers himself not only the leader of the Islamic Republic but also the highest authority on Islamic ideology in the world. He therefore sees himself as responsible for the survival of Islamic ideology and its values, as well as his image as its leader. Because the Islamic Republic has failed to meet its economic, cultural, and social promises, Khamenei has made anti-Americanism the cornerstone of that Islamic ideology.

The plight of Iranian dissidents was recently highlighted by the Omid, the virtual memorial database of the Islamic Republic’s victims, specifically the peaceful dissidents and intellectuals slain in Iran in the fall of 1998:

Ten years ago, on November 22^nd 1998, Darioush and Parvaneh Forouhar were brutally murdered in their home by agents of the Ministry of Information. While the Iranian society was still chocked by the news of this abject crime, two members of Iran’s writers’ association, Mohammad Mokhtari and Mohammad Ja’far Pouyandeh disappeared and were found dead on December 3^rd and December 10^th, 1998, respectively.

(The Forouhar, Mokhtari, and Pouyandeh families are appealing for an independent investigation into these deaths. To support this appeal please send your name and city of residence to daadkhahi@googlemail.com)

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono opened the Bali Democracy Forum today, at which some 33 states are expected to address the theme of “Building and Consolidating Democracy: A Strategic Agenda for Asia”. The forum would not promote any single form of democracy, said Hassan Wirajuda, Jakarta’s foreign minister. “Instead we are hoping Asian countries can learn and share experience about democracy from one another,” Hassan said.

“Indonesia’s transformation offers examples to other Asian states of how to consolidate a vibrant democracy,” writes Joshua Kurlantzick, amidst a widespread anti-democratic backlash in the region. In the 1990s, he notes, Asian reformers identified with the United States and “its blossoming democracy promotion outfits, like the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute.”

But a toxic blend of corruption, crony capitalism and a failure to develop institutions capable of channeling protest into peaceful channels has discredited democracy. This has provided an opening for quasi-authoritarian forces to offer an ostensibly attractive alternative, with Russia and China “advertising their undemocratic systems … as development models that Asian countries should emulate.”

Asia has also seen the unwelcome emergence of “uncivil society” movements in Thailand and the Philippines, notes Mark R Thompson. “Elite groups have met challenges to their hegemony by claiming to speak in the name of civil society,” he observes, citing the incivility of business-based NGOs and the authoritarian Thailand’s “network monarchy” alliance of bureaucrats, military and Bangkok middle class.

Indonesia’s upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections will determine whether the world’s largest Muslim democracy continues along the path of “uneven but nonetheless substantial reform”, notes Greg Fealy. But he cautions that resilient residues of the country’s authoritarian past are still evident in its culture. “Patronage, clientelism, corruption, intimidation, monopolistic and oligarchic practices, and primordialism remain widespread and continue to distort and undermine further democratic consolidation,” he warns.

The Bush administration launched several initiatives to “encourage reform, democratization, and political openness” in the Middle East, notes Oussama Safa, general director of the Beirut-based Lebanese Center for Policy Studies in Beirut, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy. Citing the Middle East Partnership Initiative, the Democracy Assistance Dialogue, the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative, and the Foundation for the Future, he argues that while “most of these tools were designed with grand democracy goals in mind, their effectiveness has waned and they now should be redefined to take into account new priorities in the region”:

Reform declarations issued by conferences in Alexandria, Sanaa, and Doha, among others, should be revived and governments in the region should be urged to keep their commitments to them. Concomitantly, the new US administration should encourage the dissemination across the region, where appropriate, of successful homegrown experiences of democracy and openness in countries such as Turkey, Morocco, and Kuwait that reconcile religious values and local cultures with demands for reforms.

Amid speculation about the new U.S. administration’s commitment to democracy in the Middle East, at least incoming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is committed to promoting Arab democracy, the Council on Foreign Relations reports. “We want to continue to export democracy, but we want to deliver it in digestible steps,” she said in reference to Iraq. Clinton also stressed the importance of sustaining democracy through institution-building, noting that “we’ve done a good job talking about democracy, but we sure haven’t done a comparable good job in promoting the long-term efforts that actually build institutions after the elections are over and the international monitors have gone home.”

That view would seem to chime with what David Brooks describes as the new orthodoxy of bottom-up, multi-disciplinary “full-spectrum operations” that marry democracy, security and development. “The U.S. is not about to begin another explicit crusade to spread democracy,” he suggests. “But decent, effective and responsive government would be a start.”

But Middle East analyst Gilles Keppel is placing his hopes on a Euro-Mediterranean initiative, with liberalization resulting from “an economic renaissance centered on the Mediterranean would bring together, in one dynamic region, Europe’s industrial and technological wealth and its academic and scientific expertise; the Gulf’s petroleum assets and financial clout; and the human resources and rich cultures of the Levant and North Africa.”

A new agency, modeled on the National Endowment for Democracy, should be established to restore U.S. standing in the world, a new report on public diplomacy concludes. Like the NED, the USA-World Trust would be governed by a non-partisan board of directors, including members of Congress from both major political parties and representatives of key interests in American society. 

The report claims that the changes advocated will aid the fight against terrorism and its associated ideologies, and help build international coalitions to “encourage the wavering to choose democracy and freedom.” It goes on to suggest that “the spread of democracy has changed the global political calculus” in the contest to shape public opinion in authoritarian states as well as democracies:  

Though democracy is now faltering in some countries, the number of democracies has nonetheless doubled since 1974. In democracies, leaders suffer domestic political costs-a loss of power or authority-based on how well citizens think leaders have protected the country’s interests. For the United States to attract the support of foreign governments, therefore, foreign publics must accept or at least acquiesce. If such cooperation is politically poisonous for democratically elected leaders, attracting support will be difficult even when interests align. Of note, authoritarian regimes are also sensitive to public opinion, even as they try to limit its influence. These regimes know that publics have more latent power to mobilize opposition than ever before due to unprecedented access to information and the ability to disseminate it cheaply and widely.

The incoming administration is not short of advice on how to rescue democracy promotion, how liberals should spread liberal democracy internationally and how it can reinvent U.S. leadership in a networked world.

But liberals are “less excited about the idea of democracy promotion in the aftermath of the Iraq War,” writes Ilan Goldenberg, policy director at the Obama-friendly National Security Network. He draws on a classic article addressing Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy (PDF) to outline four basic strategic choices for the new U.S. administration:

• neo-isolationism - in effect a marginalized non-option;
• the selective engagement associated with the 1990s realists as well as President George W. Bush’s first campaign commitment to a “humble foreign policy“;
• co-operative security - typified by the first Clinton Administration’s contention that stability and peace are best secured through international institutions and by spreading democratic values and freedom; and
• primacy - which is divided into a neo-conservative hard primacy and the soft primacy of Liberal Hawks.

Goldenberg detects a broad consensus emerging among liberals, liberal hawks and realists:

There is relatively universal agreement among these groups that we need to begin withdrawing from Iraq, focus more on Afghanistan, opt for direct diplomacy with Iran, reengage with the world, improve our image, strengthen our alliances, close Guantanamo and deal with global warming and energy security. 

One liberal hawk, the New Yorker’s George Packer, doesn’t think there’s “much point in having a Democratic president if his foreign policy will be all about China and Russia and have nothing to say about Burma and Zimbabwe.” He suggests that President-elect Obama is right to stress the centrality of the conflict with the Taliban:

Afghanistan is where nation-building, multilateral counterinsurgency, democracy promotion, and the other elements of liberal internationalism as it operates in global flashpoints are going to survive or go to their grave.

Whatever discontinuities in policy occur, Nathan Sharansky hopes that President Obama will continue the current president’s practice of meeting with democratic dissidents:

Meeting with democratic leaders is terribly important for dissidents because, even when they are not in prison, they are generally isolated in their own countries. Meeting the leader of the free world transforms the dissident in the eyes of his people from a lonely Don Quixote to the person who can expose the truth about their suffering to the outside world and influence the world to take action to address it.