New Challenges to Democratization

Peter Burnell, Richard Youngs, Peter Burnell, Richard Youngs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415467414
• eBook ISBN: 9781135198602
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This important text explores the widespread contention that new challenges and obstacles have arisen to democratization, assessing the claim that support for democratization around the world is facing a serious challenge.

Bringing together leading international scholars of democratization, including Thomas Carothers, Michael McFaul, Laurence Whitehead, Bassma Kodmani, Nancy Bermeo, Marina Ottaway, Shaun Breslin and, Renske Doorenspleet, this book examines the issues relating to developments within non-democratic states and issues related to the democratic world and its efforts to support the spread of democracy. Featuring in-depth studies on the limits of US democracy promotion, the Middle East, Russia, China and new democracies, the book sheds light on such questions as:

• 
  
  

• Is the wave of democratization now in retreat or should we be careful not to exaggerate the importance of recent setbacks?

• 
  
  

• Do serious, sustainable alternatives to democracy now exist?

• 
  
  

• Is international democracy promotion finished?

New Challenges to Democratization brings together a variety of academics and writers from major think-tanks in the United States and Europe, and makes the book ideally suited to a wide international readership. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of democratization, comparative politics and international politics.

1
New challenges to democratization

Peter Burnell

Introduction

Readers familiar with the general discourse on contemporary democratization and on international promotion of democracy today could be forgiven for thinking that both of these are currently in crisis – or if they are not there yet, then they are heading remorselessly in that direction. For example, Larry Diamond, over the past 20 years or so one of the most prominent scholars in the US writing about democratization, has surmised that a new ‘reverse wave’ of democracy might be underway, with resistance to democratization or, even, democratic regression being particularly marked in a number of ‘swing states’ that possess significant demographic and economic size.¹ In 2008, democratic progress in small countries with little importance on the world stage such as the Maldives, Bhutan and Nepal have to be balanced against the negative political trends inside a resurgent power like Russia and the forceful clamp-down on protestors in China that surrounded the run-up to the Olympic Games in Beijing.

The reasons range widely, over the effects of singular decisions such as the waging of war on Iraq to developments of a more deep-seated and structural kind. They include both recent political developments inside countries and some disturbing economic as well as political trends at the level of the international system. At the country level, the increasing concentration of power in Russia under former President Putin is a prominent example. Internationally, the consequences for democracy in the developing world of large hikes in the price of major internationally traded commodities, most notably oil, are no less troubling, notwithstanding the sharp price corrections late in 2008. The same is true of the apparent appeal for some developing country leaders of a national model that generates development without democracy, as found in China, whose dramatic economic growth helped fuel the commodity price hikes in the first place. The evidence is that neither economic liberalization nor genuine economic progress offer a guarantee of significant democratic reform.

In the Middle East, the dreams of US President George Bush that freedom and democracy would spread in the wake of the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq have turned out to lack substance. Instead there is talk of the exceptionalism of the Arab world, or of the world of Islam. In Latin America and elsewhere the disappointment that has been expressed by ordinary people with democracy’s seeming inability to address their economic and social ills is palpable. And the European Union’s project of enlargement, which has been a major force for consolidating democratic transitions in Central and Eastern Europe, appears to have run out of steam.

Meanwhile the industry that has built up around the international promotion of democracy seems to be facing a ‘backlash’, substantially but not wholly due to the use of external military force to remove governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. The mood among democracy practitioners now appears to be that their activity badly needs a new image. More hard evidence that it really can achieve favourable results, at a time when the commitment to democracy support of both government and society in the US seems to be waning, would be most welcome not just in the US but in Europe too. The enhancement of national security takes priority. At the minimum, and as a US Congressional Research Service Report for Congress (2007) put it, ‘The democracy promotion ideal is now under close scrutiny.’ Various security issues all looked at through a short to medium perspective appear to be uppermost in the foreign policy deliberations of the established democracies. Of course, this miasma does not constitute a judgement on the contemporary state of democratization any more than that process of change equates to the condition of democracy itself. Nevertheless the presence of what seem to be parallel worrying trends concerning both democratization and democracy promotion does raise the possibility that there could be mutual reinforcement.

Democracy is of course a much-contested concept. But in most of the discourse on democratization and in the understandings held by democracy promoters also there are certain widely accepted notions of electoral democracy and liberal democracy, the latter characterized in particular by a fuller set of civil liberties and freedoms for individuals and minority groups. None of the datasets claiming to describe trends in democracy around the world are without their critics. But one of the most prominent examples, the Freedom House annual survey of political rights and civil liberties in the world, appears to offer compelling evidence. The survey for 2007 indicated not just that the total number of democracies had reached a plateau (it stood at 121 in 2007) but that levels of freedom were starting to erode.² The trend is broadly based, with examples in South Asia, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Four times as many countries experienced a decline in freedom during 2007 as registered improvement. The signs are that, in very general terms, 2008 will tell a similar story of modest declines in freedom affecting some countries in most regions.

More particularly, the task of stabilizing new democracies and preventing democracies in transition from falling back now appears more difficult than we used to think. Meanwhile the resistance mounted by the opponents of reform in many of the non-democracies looks as firm as ever: highly authoritarian regimes are among the most durable regimes, and semi-democratic regimes are vulnerable by comparison (Hadenius and Teorell 2007). In addition, we are all now more aware of the existence of many fragile and failing states, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example. These provide particularly hostile terrain for establishing democracy. The staging of elec-tions has proven to be premature. The challenges in these different categories of country are all different. The fact of difference compounds the challenge facing democracy promoters, who cannot hope to alight on a single model or just one approach to promoting democracy that would suit all circumstances. Their ability to transfer lessons of experience from one country or set of countries to another is severely circumscribed, which makes their task more difficult.

The aim of this book is to explore the widespread contention that new challenges and obstacles have arisen to democratization and to the spread of democracy around the world. This means exploring what lies behind the claims that a crisis exists or is now looming, and assessing their accuracy. And it means doing it in a format that brings together the several different strands of the debate. The book makes no assumption that all the more pessimistic claims are correct. After all, while Hadenius and Teorell (2007) calculate that more than three-quarters of transitions from authoritarian rule in the years 1972–2003 produced not democracy but yet another authoritarian regime, they also claim that because multiparty regimes are now common among authoritarian regimes, this offers a hopeful sign for democracy’s future. Similarly, far from international democracy support having now been discredited and disowned in all quarters, in 2008, Britain’s Foreign Minister David Miliband said unequivocally in a speech entitled ‘The Democratic Imperative’, ‘I am unapologetic about a mission to help democracy spread throughout the world.’³ While less vocal on the issue than his predecessor in the White House, US President Obama in his inaugural speech on 20 January 2009 hinted more at a new approach to freedom and democracy support, not a policy of abandonment.

Rather than take sides, then, this book seeks to interrogate the arguments, to try to establish where the balance of evidence and reasoning lies. Based on the evidence and reasoning provided in the intervening chapters, the final chapter will sum up the forces and conditions where detailed knowledge can help us not to predict with certainty the future of democratization or even the future of democracy promotion but, rather, to establish the most important influences that may well have a significant bearing on the outlook for both of these.

The central questions to be borne in mind throughout can be summarized very simply: is democratization in trouble and, if so, what is the nature of the problem and how serious is it? Are viable alternatives to democracy now coming forward? Is old-style democracy promotion past its sell-by date, and, if so, are actors who are central to it developing an effective response? And what can the new challenges facing democratization and democracy promotion tell us about the future for democratization and the global political order?⁴

Crisis or challenge?

Crisis is a much-overworked word in social science generally and in politics in particular. In this book, the word challenge is preferred. Certainly, challenges singly or in combination can turn into a crisis. And almost by definition a crisis itself poses a challenge, notably where the sentiment is that if the crisis is not overcome then the consequences will be intolerable. And yet too often the use of the term crisis rests on a weak conceptualization or no precise definition at all, and goes beyond what an objective study of all the evidence would support. With hindsight, many ‘crises’ have turned out to be a false or one-sided diagnosis: the patient recovered, and the ‘crisis’ did not then seem so critical after all. One aim of this book is to establish whether the challenges currently facing democratization and democracy promotion warrant us saying that there is now a decisive moment, a time of especially great difficulty or danger.

Certainly a challenge can be a trial. But there are no a priori grounds for thinking it must be insuperable. Moreover it can be a catalyst for action that overcomes obstacles, solves problems. Some challenges persist, some are defeated; others just fade away. New challenges come along to add to or replace old ones. Failure throws up challenges but then so does success. The democratic transitions that occurred in such impressive numbers in the early 1990s brought about the challenge of consolidating democracy. This has proven to be very demanding, unrealistic, in many cases.

In Africa, for instance, there is the challenge of converting the increasing trend to institutionalize elections as the means whereby government is determined – a development that Lindberg (2006) for one considers very positive for democratization – into making the entire electoral process consistently and uniformly free and fair.⁵ For the European Union (EU), its successful strategy of using politically conditioned accession to the EU as an incentive to the consolidation of new democracies in post-communist Europe has brought the challenge of repeating this record of democratic achievement, now that EU enlargement is almost finished and nearby states have no prospect of being offered membership. A record of success can mean that it is the really hard cases or the most difficult extra moves that are left. And while democratization today faces not one challenge but several, the many new or emerging or prospective democracies are themselves all different: they may be facing challenges that are peculiar to them as individuals as well as others that are common to a larger group.

The mainstream understanding of democratization that is centred on movement towards western-style liberal democracy is accompanied by a complex, contested and still evolving discourse on how to explain democratization – the ‘causes’, the conditions or prerequisites – and on reasons for the absence of democratic reform initiatives in certain places and the failure to democratize successfully in some others. The forces accounting for trends in democratization are both domestic – internal to the countries – and international. They extend to the growing number of influences in world politics that are transnational or transterritorial and supranational. While a consensus exists that domestic forces are uppermost in explaining the long-term prospects of democratization at the country level, compared to short-term fluctuations, analyses of democratization have come to pay increasing attention to international and transnational influences as well. Among these, the international promotion of democracy by the deliberate actions of democracies and certain inter-governmental organizations and their agents is a leading example. While not necessarily the most significant influence when compared with, say, shifts in the global political economy, the international promotion of democracy is controversial. The challenges it now faces – challenges that include the diffusion if not quite the deliberate export of alternative political models exhibiting illiberal and authoritarian values – are a notable feature of the contemporary international landscape of democracy. There may be links running in both directions between the challenges to democratization and challenges to the promotion of democracy.

Important analytical distinctions should be made between the practical challenges to democratization which reformers on the ground may be most acutely aware of, the challenges that face the international promotion of democracy, and the intellectual challenge of making sense of what is going on – explaining developments and trying to hazard well-grounded predictions about the future. The past 20 or more years have seen an enormous expansion in our knowledge and in the amount of theorizing about democratic change. This has helped overcome some of the myths that previously stood in the way of support for democratization. One such myth was the view that developing countries face a cruel choice whereby they cannot realistically expect to pursue both economic development and democratic reform simultaneously, without running a major risk of jeopardizing one or both of these goals. Another was that only authoritarian rule can deliver the economic liberalization which is needed if economic growth and development are to be sustained. But while not necessarily arguing that the more we know, the less we understand, there is a sense in which the failures of democratization must push scholars to think harder about the relevance of western-derived analytical frameworks and models of democracy and democratic change to societies whose political traditions, social structure and culture may be fundamentally different. Renewed attention to making more sense of democratic regression now begins to look somewhat overdue. And as we have come to explore democratization more thoroughly, so the challenge of integrating the methods of inquiry used in single country studies and comparative politics has gained in importance. The rationale for combining comparative politics with the study of international affairs has become more obvious too. A holistic approach to the study of democratization, one that tries to integrate the best of all relevant disciplines, makes heavy demands. But its potential to add insights is increasingly apparent now that approaches as diverse as political economy, gender and development studies, international relations and area studies have all had an opportunity to offer their distinctive insights.⁶

A selection of puzzles

Although it is hard to justify selecting just a few from the many puzzles that continue to baffle students of democratization, three will be mentioned for the purpose of illustration. Typical of the state of the discourse is that scholars do not all agree on which puzzles deserve priority of attention. But on the larger canvas there is the never-ending struggle to find a plausible balance between structure and agency in couching explanations of democratization-related phenomena. Focusing in more closely, the way that informal institutions not only influence political outcomes but might actually be of service to democratic objectives also offers a highly intriguing and, perhaps, underrated subject – one that demands further study.⁷

More pressing even than the above could be the need to curb what has been called the increasing ‘babel’ in democratization studies (Armony and Schamis 2005), more specifically the proliferation of different categories and sub-categories depicting specific types and sub-types of democratic, semi-democratic and non-democratic regime (each with their qualifying adjective), to the point where the great array of alternative labels now on offer risks contributing more confusion than clari...

Table of contents

• Democratization Studies
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 New challenges to democratization
• 2 State sovereignty and democracy
• 3 Ideological challenges to democracy
• 4 The continuing backlash against democracy promotion
• 5 Democracy assistance and the search for security
• 6 Public support versus dissatisfaction in new democracies
• 7 External sources and consequences of Russia’s “sovereign democracy”
• 8 Democratizing one-party rule in China
• 9 Democratization by whom?
• 10 Energy
• 11 Addressing democracy’s challenges
• Bibliography
• Index