Democracy Assistance Bypassing Governments in Recipient Countries

Supporting the “Next Generation”

Paulina Pospieszna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138895065
• eBook ISBN: 9781351717083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book addresses important and under-researched issues such as, the role of young people in democratization processes, the role of new democracies in sharing their transition experience, and the effectiveness of aid. A major theme of the book is democracy assistance efforts by the NGOs from Central and Eastern Europe to support young people in Eastern Europe, the Western Balkans, and Central Asia. It examines this theme in a comparative perspective and with a deeper analysis of reasons and ways to support young people, the need to support them and the effectiveness of these efforts.

Bringing together a wide range of material on democracy assistance of Central and Eastern European countries that includes surveying the providers and beneficiaries of aid and looking for better methods of impact evaluation, the book advances a framework for assessing democracy assistance efforts. It concludes with implications of the impact of democracy assistance on young people and democracy diffusion from Central and Eastern European democracies to other countries.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of democracy, democratization, Central and Eastern Europe, Post-Soviet studies, and European and Comparative Politics, as well as for practitioners (donors, NGOs) who want to know what works best, and why and when in aid provision.

1 Theoretical framework

The questions addressed in this book arise largely from ongoing debates in the literature on democracy promotion regarding approaches and effectiveness of strategies used to assist recipient countries in their struggle for democracy. However, this study also engages many other literatures in political science. Some of them lie at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations—specifically research on democratization and democratic consolidation, and the role of external actors in these processes, as well as on regional diffusion of democracy.

Today, democracy promotion is certainly facing unfavorable conditions: a backlash against external democracy promotion (Carothers, 2006; Gershman and Allen, 2006) and emergence of “closing space” policies in authoritarian regimes (Carothers and Brakemaker, 2014; Mendelson, 2015), and weak faith in democracy promotion.¹ As a result, democracy-promoting countries’ commitment to aiding democracy overseas has started to wane. Given these circumstances the question is: What would be the solution to rebuild democratic conviction and thus to make democracy promotion more effective?

“Democracy promotion means the process by which an external actor intervenes to install or assist in the institution of democratic government in a target state” (Hobson and Kukri, 2012, p. 3). Whereas democracy promotion has a much broader range of tools and includes various forms of diplomacy, or even democracy imposition by military action, it is sometimes also defined narrowly to describe technical and financial aid and other programs, provided by peaceful means. It is offered for moral and pragmatic reasons because of the belief that democratic states are more secure, and also are better neighbors. This book focuses on democracy assistance as a soft power (Basora, Marczyk and Otarashivili, 2017) that encourages the spread of democratic ideas and institutions. A wide range of states (national governmental agencies’ programs), party foundations, international organizations, and NGOs participate in these practices, nevertheless, the research on democracy promotion has primarily been state-oriented, dealing with single actors. In this book, democracy assistance is not understood only as a form of foreign policy, not only as aid provided by the government, embassies or development agencies overseas, but rather as an external force that helps democratize societies in other countries.

In order to rebuild democratic conviction and to make democracy promotion more effective, scholars argue that it is also important to improve the understandings of what should be promoted, and what type of democracy (Diamond, 2017; Hobson and Kurki, 2012; Jahn, 2012; Youngs, 2012). Democracy remains the only legitimate form of government in the world. However, there is a growing need to understand what democracy is, and how it can work in practice more effectively (Diamond, 2017). Democracy as a system of government, despite all its imperfections, has demonstrated an ability to take root in every single region despite predictions that certain religions or cultures are not compatible with democratic norms and institutions (Basora and Yalowitz, 2017). Nevertheless, today we experience an exhaustion of the “liberal moment” in politics (Krastev, 2007).

Liberal democracy was widely accepted as a panacea, as the answer to all problems after 1989. A liberal democratic consensus model has dominated in the democracy promotion agenda and achieved striking universality (McFaul, 2005). The confidence in liberal democracy prevailed within the democracy promotion community, and NGOs in CEE were also very much influenced by this practice.

However, not all post-communist countries, especially the post-Soviet countries in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia, democratized and followed similar paths in the 1990s. Countries that overcame communist dictatorship, and the various problems and obstacles experienced on their way to democracy, are called post-communist, but in each country this development took a different path. Central Europe and the Baltic states embarked on a (mostly) successful reform course, establishing stable and consolidated democracies and market economies, joining the NATO and the European Union, whereas the post-Soviet countries in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia did not follow a similar path. Their transition to democracy and market economy was fractional, changeable and unstable (e.g., Ukraine). Therefore, one should not equate developments in Slovakia with those in Georgia or Russia.

Although overtly authoritarian regimes have disappeared from many parts of the world, in the post-communist region, they were replaced with hybrid regimes, combining both democratic and authoritarian regimes, and this has been a trend since the end of the Cold War. These regimes adopted the form of electoral democracy but failed to adopt liberal norms (Diamond, 2002; Levitsky and Way, 2002). They were trapped into the gray zone becoming illiberal (Zakaria, 1997), delegative (O’Donnell, 1994) and pseudo-democracies. In the 2000s, given the infrequencies with which stable democracies were emerging despite many years of democracy promotion, the high expectations began to wane (Bermejo, 2009). Often democracy promotion and peace building were going hand in hand (Ottaway, 2003; Paris and Sisk, 2009). A few years later, Fukuyama (2006, p. 67) in order to explain his “the end of the history” said that

(…) the democratization of Central Europe was a miracle. And, one can react to a miracle either by dramatically raising expectations for a repeat-effect or by being grateful, pocketing one’s luck, and reflecting on the uniqueness of circumstance. Unfortunately, the democracy promotion community shared the first reaction, and tried to turn the miracle into a natural law.

As a result, many post-communist countries looked like democracies, but were anti-democratic in their nature. Citizens had the right to vote, but counting the votes was not clear and fair. Moreover, in some “transitional countries,” although reasonably “regular, genuine elections are held, political participation beyond voting remains shallow and governmental accountability is weak” (Carothers, 2002, 15). Also, disappointment with post-communist democratization: corruption, misled privatization processes, inefficiency, unresponsiveness to society’s needs, in addition to electoral fraud, was a reason for the citizens’ frustration that had its peak in form of the Color Revolutions (Krastev, 2006; McFaul, 2005), as well as the Euromaidan in Ukraine. These protests in post-communist regions, which were nonviolent, liberal and pro-Western, were not against authoritarianism but democratization from above. People were demanding democracy but at the same time rejecting “democracy” based on what they experienced since the collapse of communism. Even in case of Euromaidan which was dissatisfaction with the President Yanukovich’s failure to sign the association agreement with the European Union, and opting for closer ties with Russia, was more about a general discontent with the president and the government (Kuzio, 2015).

As the result of such dissatisfaction, autocracies in post-communist regions preventing the spread of revolutionary spirit in their countries, have tightened their repressive policies. They are pushing back against the advance of democracy, containing democracy by controlling civil society and independent media, imposing limits on political space, clamping down on independent organizations, and thus limiting effectively political and civic space for citizens’ activities. Additionally, the initial euphoria of the Arab Spring, which failed to produce any significant gains for democracy, combined with instability spreading in the Middle East (violence in Syria) diminished prospects for the spread of democracy worldwide.

The faith placed in liberal democracy turned out to be too optimistic when democracies in the region also began to experience challenges bigger than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union (Basora and Yalowitz, 2017). Hopes of definitive democratic consolidation have been disappointing in the CEE countries, which began to experience backsliding that even the EU is unable to prevent, although they were once considered stable consolidated democracies. With a surge of populism in these countries, as well as the emergence of far-right movements in other liberal democracies in Western Europe (such as Front National in France, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Lega Nord in Italy, Sweden Democrats, UKIP in the UK, PiS in Poland, and Jobbik in Hungary), their image as democracy promoters has been undermined. To a greater extent, multiple Middle Eastern crises (with democracy failing to emerge in Afghanistan and in Iraq) and terrorism as well as civil wars that spread to the broader region, mass migration and refugee crises, as well as the 2008–2009 financial crisis that hit Europe and the United States, contributed to the success of right-wing parties and populism which since the late 1990s have been on rise in electoral politics.

The global context is certainly much less favorable than it was in the 1990s; “much of the powerful democratizing momentum (and thus the great optimism) of the 1990s has been lost” (Basora and Yalowitz, 2017, p. xiv), and contrary to Francis Fukuyama’s view, history has no intention of ending. Scholars and practitioners agree (Basora and Yalowitz, 2017; Gershman, 2017) that there is a striking contrast between the post-Cold War period and period after 2006. There is a growing debate on whether we are experiencing the reverse wave² or global authoritarian resurgence (Diamond, 2015; Fukuyama, 2015; Platter, 2015; Levitsky and Way, 2015), having some scholars also talking in terms of a democratic recession (Burnell and Youngs, 2010).

Jahn (2012) argues from the theory-informed perspective, that unsatisfactory outcomes of democracy promotion policies frequently have their roots in a poor understanding of liberalism and its relation to democracy. Therefore, it is important to remind ourselves what liberal democracy is as well as why it is vital to make it central again in democracy promotion. The “freeing of the people” as well as “empowering the people” provides the basis for liberal democracy (Sartori, 1995). Jahn (2012) reminds us that the freedom of the individual is a precondition of democracy, since liberalism was in most cases established before democracy.

Scholars have made an important distinction between “electoral” and “liberal” democracies (Diamond, 1996). Electoral democracy requires universal adult suffrage, free, competitive, fair and recurring elections, multiple political parties and a plurality of sources of information (Dahl, 1971). Diamond and Morlino (2005) identify eight dimensions that constitute a good democracy: the rule of law, participation; competition; electoral accountability; inter-institutional accountability; responsiveness to the needs, interest and expectations of citizens; political and civil freedoms, as well as and socioeconomic rights; equality/solidarity. The former one (liberal democracy) presents the minimalist approach, while the latter is more extensive that since incorporates liberal rights. Both are important but there has been a trend to transform electoral democracies into more robust democratic systems of governments (McFaul, 2002). In fact, today, definitions of democracies vary from the minimal definition that focuses on elections to extensive ones that encompass socioeconomic factors, individual rights, freedoms, and civil society. Moller and Skaaning (2013) combined the classic concepts of Joseph Schumpeter, Larry Diamond and Robert A. Dahl’s concepts of democracy and distinguished between minimalist, electoral, polyarchic and liberal democratic regimes. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project (Coppedge et al., 2011) outlines seven models: electoral/minimalist, liberal majoritarian, consensual, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian. Similarly Held (2006) also offers a wider range: liberal, direct, elitist, pluralist, socialist, deliberative and cosmopolitan.

Despite all the various concepts of democracy, the most popular distinctions are electoral, liberal, social and participatory forms. The liberal democracy is based on the ingredients in an electoral democracy. However, it also includes additional rights and liberties for example: minority rights, regardless of cultural, ethnic or religious features; multiple of channels for political expression (beyond parties and elections); multiple of sources of information (media pluralism) as well as a wide range of freedoms including freedom of expression (belief, opinion, discussion, speech, publication), assembly, demonstration; as well as the rule of law, securing human rights and protecting citizens from discriminatory judiciary, unjustified detention and terror as well as torture (Diamond, 2015; Lipset, 1995). Liberal democracy can be found in the UK or the US. Social democratic models, like in the Scandinavian countries, put more weight on equality and participatory and deliberative democracy involvement by people in decision-making processes. The most common definition of a democracy has, however, excluded the socioeconomic aspects in a democracy, although these aspects and also other aspects have shed light on democratization as an open-ended process (Diamond, 1999).³

The democratization literature generally refers to electoral and liberal democracy (Diamond, 2008; McFaul, 2010). Liberal democracies are characterized by free, fair and competitive elections, protection of civil and political freedoms, and accountability and responsiveness to citizen needs, and the rule of law. Such democracies have been located in Western Europe and North America. However, liberal democracy also spread to the post-communist region with the third wave. The liberal Zeitgeist was well captured in Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, according to which “Western liberal democracy is the final form of human government” (Fukuyama, 1989). Rapid democratization in Central and Eastern European countries with the alignment between advancing democratic values and greater security enhanced by the prospects of EU membership and admission to NATO was a powerful incentive for CEE governments to persevere with the reforms. Moreover, there was support among societies and elites for the general geopolitical reorientation to the West.

The liberal principle identifies democracy with limited government, rule of law, and the preservation of individual liberties. The liberal model assumes a “negative” view of political power as it judges the quality of democracy by the limits placed on government. Principles and procedures must be established so as to ensure that rule by the majority does not result in the loss of individual liberties.

Adherence to liberal democratic identity in democracy promotion also means dismissing democracy promotion as an elite-driven project designed to legitimize the capitalist economy and pursue economic interest, because public disillusionment with capitalism led to liberal democracy facing many obstacles which undermined its importance that need to be rebuilt (Brown, 2015; Gershman, 2017). Neoliberalism was a form of economic liberalism that assumed primacy after the failure of classical economic liberalism. The idea was that increasing economic freedoms tend to raise expectations of political freedoms, eventually leading to democracy. Economic development is not a necessary nor a sufficient condition for stable democracy. In fact, economic development is unnecessary for the development of liberal democracy, as Plattner (2008) said “the philosophy of liberalism contains within itself the seeds of its own liberalization.” The emergence of non-democratic but at the same time market-liberal regimes demonstrate that such a general relationship is not maintained. Nevertheless, different actors—states, IGOs, and NGOs—pursued a multitude of different policies ranging from support for economic development through political democratization and institutional support, to the development of civil society. Following the end of communism in CEE, liberal democracy was desired and supported. It was equated with economic prosperity as well, and overall dissatisfaction with the economy and wellbeing translated into dissatisfaction with this type of democracy.

However, scholars also point out that it is not convincing to argue that the problem with democracy promotion is not only lack of adherence to a liberal form of democracy (Youngs, 2012). Some even argue, like Patomaki (2012) that movement towards a global social democratic model is needed today in order to achieve genuine democratization. Therefore, instead, the problem is to defend core liberal norms in a way that would allow local variations and genuine civic empowerment and emancipation to flourish (Youngs, 2012). The dominance of a liberal democratic model also should not blind us to the diversity and varieties that exist today within democracy promotion practice.

Also, in improving democracy promotion, it is important to improve our understanding of the democratization process. Democratic progress will always face difficult and dangerous challenges as neither success nor demise of democracy is guaranteed (Kraemer, 2017). The Western democracies seemed to have higher hopes for the democratization than the CEE countries themselves, because the trajectory of CEE democratization has always been full of twists and turns (Dufek, Holzer and Mares, 2016). Tilly (2007) points out that the story of democracy has been full of uncertainties, and many of the established Western democracies would have trouble satisfying all the criteria of democratic consolidation as well. Long term superiority of liberal values is always “yet to come” (Hobson and Kurki, 2012; O’Donnell, 2007b), and it is important to understand that democracy is an open-ended process and never-ending gap between what it promises and what it delivers. As Havel (1995, p. 7) said an “open system that is best able to respond to people’s basic needs—that is as a set of possibilities that continually must be sought, redefined, and brought into being.” Just as democratization can never be finished, “democracy may be resending in practice, but it is still ascendant in people’s values and aspirations” (Diamond, 2017).

Moreover, scholars point out that it is important to make a distinction between view of democracy and evaluation of democracy (Ferrin and Kriesi, 2016). It does not mean that people do not want democracy—the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, and also recent protests and civil opposition in Poland demonstrated that democratic ideas and democratic norms still appeal to people and they demand it. Only public enthusiasm for the functioning of democracy both in the transitional countries as well as those new democracies is waning due to malfunctioning of institutions and wrongdoing of the governing elites. On a positive note, the a number of democracies worldwide still remains higher than in the early 1980s.

Finally, without equating liberal democracy with economic reforms also means distinguishing between purp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Fm
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Theoretical framework
• 2 Democracy assistance bypassing governments
• 3 Identifying bypass democracy assistance programs targeting youth
• 4 The need to provide democracy assistance to youth in target countries
• 5 Evaluating the impact of bypass democracy assistance
• 6 Closing space for bypass democracy assistance
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• References
• Index