Tara McKelvey suggests that the Obama administration is following a more “culturally sensitive” way of promoting democracy, in marked contrast to the Bush administration’s “cowboy” approach.
It is a strategy that many democracy advocates may endorse, given the apparent absence of likely candidates for democratization, the low-hanging fruit that shed authoritarian rule during the Third Wave.
Indications are that the administration is fashioning a more European-style developmental approach to democracy assistance or, as McKelvey puts it, providing “assistance for other forms of democracy-building, such as resources for women’s groups, public-health initiatives, agricultural projects, and other ways to help strengthen a nation so that democracy may someday take root.”
But democracy advocates remain concerned that a developmental approach should not become an excuse for political timidity or conflate incrementalism with the perpetual postponement of democratic reform characteristic of Arab authoritarians, for example.
As NDI’s Madeleine Albright once put it: gradual is fine, glacial is not.
McKelvey’s article also highlights a theme at or near the top of most democracy advocates’ agendas: ensuring that democracy delivers by addressing the practical, material needs of would-be citizens, and cultivating the social underpinnings that sustain genuine democracies:
Last fall, Joshua Marks, a program officer from the National Endowment for Democracy, met with a group of community activists in a classroom in Abeche, a city in eastern Chad. Many of the activists had received small grants, ranging from roughly $200 to $5,000, to help in their efforts to foster civil liberties, political rights, and transparency in government. Yet democracy was not what they wanted to talk about on that day. “The main concern at the meeting,” Marks says, “was ‘How are we going to feed ourselves?’”
Recent Comments