The Challenges facing Developing Countries in their International Relations

7. Aiding Democracy Abroad: Lessons from the late 1980s-90s

Thomas Carothers, Carnegie Endowment, Washington DC

Abtract: US government spending on democracy assistance abroad amounted to over $700 million a year by the end of the 1990s. This presentation analyses the essential elements and evolution of this unprecedented wave of democracy aid. It traces the learning curve along which democracy programmes have evolved over the past decade. Its verdict is mixed. It is true that democracy aid programmes have learnt from experience and been modified accordingly. But the endpoint model and exclusively political focus of unconditional democracy aid has limited adaptability. A new phase of democracy assistance is suggested, that is based on a process model, and which synthesises political and economic constraints.

The promotion of democracy abroad as a goal of American foreign policy is not new. However, the importance of democracy assistance in aid programmes and as an explicit foreign policy objective, has reached an unprecedented high over the last decade. The rising importance of democracy assistance can be attributed to three factors. First, events on the ground i.e. the wave of democracy that began in Latin America and continued into other parts of the world, prompted democratic countries to respond to these political changes with advice and financial assistance. Second, the end of the Cold War reduced the sinister connotations of terms such as ?political assistance? and rendered the promotion of democracy a much more legitimate international objective. Third, the African experience with structural adjustment in the 1980s demonstrated that economic reform could not be successfully achieved without accompanying political change. It was hence assumed, if somewhat simplistically, that market reform and democracy go together, while the end of the Cold War and trends towards democratisation provided favourable conditions to promote such political reform.

Irrespective of the missionary zeal with which the democratisation agenda is being pursued, American foreign policy in aiding democracy can best be described as ?semi-realist?. In other words, democracy aid is selective, geared to suit American economic and security interests. The noteworthy point however, is that the policy context today is less uneven and selective, than it used to be in the Cold War. This is illustrated by the fact that at the end of the 1990s, the US government?s expenditure of $700 million in democracy aid, was spread over approximately 100 countries.

The rise of the democratisation wave and the accompanying euphoria that guided American policy-makers, resulted in somewhat simplistic designs of democracy aid projects. These projects, even today, are based on an n-point analysis - a checklist of institutional endpoints driven by assumptions of a natural, orderly sequence along which democratisation proceeds. The tripartite categories of endpoints are elections, state institutions and civil society, although the emphasis on the categories has shifted as a result of a learning process. Hence the focus of democracy aid in the 1980s was elections, 1992-96 saw a shift in focus to state institutions. Today aid programmes emphasise the role of civil society for operationalising democracy. Changes have also been incorporated within each category. An evolution of these categories and the shifting emphases among them is described below.

The agenda and strategies of democracy aid towards elections have undergone substantive change. Election observing has been replaced by serious election monitoring with sophisticated and specialised techniques. However, democracy promoters have come to the realisation that elections do not equal democracy. In fact, elections are effective in distributing political power that has already been overturned. However, if power is still concentrated, elections end up legitimising existing power distributions. Further, elections are a culmination of a process ? and fair but bad elections result when autocratic leaders are able to restrict access to media/ intimidate candidates i.e. curb the democratic process early enough. Even as democracy promoters move along a learning curve, they must realise that there is also a learning curve of manipulation that non-democratic leaders are developing simultaneously.

Recognition that elections do not equal democracy led to the concentration on reform of state institutions. Institutional reform was initially based on an assumption of a virtuous cycle of elected governments promoting institutional reform. Institutional reform, however, can be painstakingly slow, have huge short-run costs, and often cuts into the existing patronage system. Newly elected governments are often especially ill equipped to deal with such costs, besides the fact of an institutional reform that renders reform difficult. Only a very gradual realisation has begun to seep into democracy aid programmes, that institutional reform requires deeper changes in the balances of power among various political groups and economic interests.

The attempt to go beyond elections and state institutions has led to the emphasis on civil society. Much of this emphasis has resulted in aid to NGOs devoted to public interest advocacy on socio-political issues. But even here there are problems. The most important of these is how far are NGOs that successfully attract democracy aid, actually representative of the populace? NGOs frequently conform to donor needs, and are creations of foreign funding with little sustainability or popular support.

That the limitations outlined above are not merely theoretical ones, is substantiated by the ground reality of the democracy aid model. The mid-1990s are considerably different from the euphoric wave of democratic transitions of the late 1980s. Except for a small group of affluent countries in East Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, much of the developing world has witnessed retrenchment or stagnation of the initially promising transitions. It is clear that the 1990s model of aid for democracy has not worked.

Critical to the failure of the democracy aid model, has been the failure to recognise that political change is impossible if adequate consideration is not given to issues such as concentration of wealth, education, balance of power among political groups, levels of development. To amend these inadequacies, a new phase of democracy assistance is needed. In this phase, an effort must be made to synthesise political and economic considerations. The checklist approach with a stress on pre-defined ends must be replaced by a more process-oriented approach.

In the course of the discussion, the question was raised if much of the assistance to democracy has then been a waste, and has actually had adverse consequences on the democratising country by legitimising corrupt governments? The speaker admitted that the aid programmes have failed on their own terms. But the important lessons taught by these failures, and the responsiveness of the programmes themselves to the imperatives of change, indicate the utility of the experiment. Further, even though aid programmes perform an important legitimisation function, governments are unlikely to survive simply on the strength of such legitimisation if they do not provide the necessary services to the populace. Another participant raised the question of methods of evaluation of democracy work. The leading new method of evaluation is that of the USAID - not unlike the endpoint analysis of the democracy aid model. A set of mechanisms has been devised for ‘performance monitoring’ that is largely quantitative in nature. However, if the lessons of the past decade are to be heeded, it is clear that both democracy aid projects and their effective evaluation, need to be based in-depth qualitative analysis suitable to the needs of the individual democratising countries.

(See for details and to order the full-length study Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve)

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The rest of the seminar series:
Introduction
The Politics of Aid and Conditionality by Stephen Jones
International Investment Treaties, Valpy Fitzgerald
Good governance and the MDBs, Christina Biebesheimer
Global Governance and the Post Washington Consensus, Richard Higgott
Intrusive Regionalism, Amitav Acharya
Regionalism in the Middle East, Louise Fawcett
Aiding Democracy Abroad: Lessons from the late 1980s-90s, Thomas Carothers
Developing Countries and the International Financial Architecture, Ngaire Woods
Humanitarian Intervention, Thomas Weiss