Promoting democracy: a principled, pragmatic approach?

The inconsistencies and setbacks of George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda should not lead the incoming Obama administration to ditch democracy promotion as a foreign policy objective, argues Gideon Rachman. “No Western governments should be comfortable about shaking hands with autocrats who torture and imprison their political opponents,” he writes in the latest Washington Quarterly. And the outside world should support those people – from the Burmese monks to Ayman Nour – that historical events throw up as catalysts for freedom.

Yet democracy is not always a feasible option, he argues, suggesting that it is legitimate to relegate democratization as a foreign policy priority in the Arab world. While toning down the rhetoric, the new administration should accept the sound analytical and diplomatic reasons for adopting a practical, principled and long-term approach to promoting democracy.

Pragmatism dictates that in the short term the United States will frequently have to deal with governments it does not like. Yet, it can aspire to foster the social and economic underpinnings of future democratic development in such countries by carefully directed aid policies, educational exchanges, and supporting democratic forces when the ‘‘right” opportunity arises. The ‘‘right” opportunity is most likely to occur when a combination of indigenous economic and political forces produces a democratic movement with real social roots. And, when such forces emerge, a well-timed U.S. intervention can make all the difference.

Rachman’s analysis chimes to some extent with the views of Brent Scowcroft, a leading foreign policy ‘realist’, who is dismissive of Wilsonian “evangelizers of democracy”. While contending that U.S. policy makers were mesmerized by the “color” revolutions, seeing them as democracy on the march“, he concedes that…

… in a sense, they were. But those movements were also the aftereffects of countries emerging from the Soviet Union; states that are still trying to figure out who they are and where they belong. Of course America should help with that process. But the best way to do so is to use the European Union as a vehicle for change. One of the EU’s missions is to prepare countries like Georgia and Ukraine by modernizing their political and economic structures so they can become members of the democratic-capitalist system. That is not the job of NATO; NATO is a military alliance.

But even as he has caviled at military-driven ‘regime change’, Scowcroft has remained supportive of democracy promotion as a foreign policy objective and democracy assistance as the legitimate means.  “I thought we ought to make it our duty to help make the world friendlier for the growth of liberal regimes,” he told the New Yorker. “You encourage democracy over time, with assistance, and aid, the traditional way.”