Democracy Promotion, National Security and Strategy

Foreign Policy under the Reagan Administration

Robert Pee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781032098456
• eBook ISBN: 9781317572596
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book investigates the relationship between democracy promotion and US national security strategy through an examination of the Reagan administration's attempt to launch a global campaign for democracy in the early 1980s, which culminated in the foundation of the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983, and through an analysis of the early political interventions of the Endowment until 1986.

A case study of the formation and early operations of the National Endowment for Democracy under the Reagan administration, based on primary documents from both the national security bureaucracy and the private sector, shows that while democracy promotion provided a new tactical approach to the conduct of US political warfare operations, these operations remained tied to the achievement of traditional national security goals such as destabilising enemy regimes and building stable and legitimate friendly governments, rather than being guided by a strategy based on the universal promotion of democracy.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of US Foreign Policy, Democracy Promotion and for those seeking to gain a better understanding of the Reagan Administration.

1 The roots of democracy promotion

From covert operations and modernisation to party-building

The blueprint for democracy promotion emerged during the 1970s from a small number of academics and political organisers working outside the US national security bureaucracy. The idea drew on previous modes of political intervention such as the state–private network of CIA-supported US civil society groups and the modernising socioeconomic reforms pursued by the Kennedy administration; however, it went beyond these in two ways. First, it abandoned the ideological and socioeconomic approaches to the export of democracy pursued through these modes of intervention to focus more narrowly on strengthening democratic political forces. Second, it tied this new tactic to a more strategic approach to the spread of democracy.

The opportunity to design and promote this new conception was created by the collapse of these previous modes of political intervention in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Before this crisis the state–private network and Modernisation policies had been deployed within an overarching framework of containment which meshed US national security and democratic ideology. However, the deep strategic, organisational and ideological clashes inherent in the attempt to use these tactics to export democracy in support of US national security interests culminated in a rupture between the state and the private civil society groups which were allied to it and a downgrading of Modernisation in the Third World as a US policy aim.

This rupture, coupled with the failure of the administrations of the 1970s to regenerate an effective US capability for the reform of political structures overseas and a rise in political instability in the Third World, provided the opportunity for non-state figures to reformulate elements of the state–private network and the Modernisation paradigm into a new conception of how democracy could be exported. In contrast to the pre-1967 situation, when private groups had been deployed on a tactical, case-by-case basis within a strategic framework generated by the national security bureaucracy, however, the rising network generated its own strategic framework that deployed these reformulated organisational and tactical concepts as elements of a program of democratisation which was far wider and more coherent than previously implemented by the US government. By 1980 these figures had coalesced into a loose network that was preparing to lobby the US government for funding to implement this new design.

Pre-existing tensions between democracy and national security in US foreign policy

The most consistently deployed US strategic framework for waging the Cold War was containment, conceived by George Kennan in 1946–47 as a method of forcing political change within the USSR or the break-up of the Soviet Empire through denying the Soviets opportunities to expand their zone of political control.¹ The decline of containment and the instruments and strategies associated with its implementation opened up space from 1967 onwards for new paradigms of US foreign policy, including democracy promotion, to rise in importance. Geopolitically containment, as it evolved, had to face three problems: the rise of Soviet power; the weakness of Western Europe in the face of this power; and, particularly after the initial phase of the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the power vacuum in the Third World which appeared due to the decline of the European colonial empires. This final development brought greater instability in the former colonial areas and increased the threat that independent nationalist leaders would pursue foreign and domestic policies not compatible with US interests.² Thus, the core of the strategy was the prevention of political change outside the boundaries of the Soviet bloc which might increase the power of the USSR or harm US security and economic interests in other ways.

However, containment’s strength as a framework for US foreign policy was its construction and explanation of this geopolitical and anti-communist strategy as a defence of freedom against a totalitarian slave state.³ This public explanation of the doctrine eased its acceptance by the wider foreign policy elite and US civil society by tapping into long-standing traditions of US nationalism that conflated the fate and power of the United States with the fate and expansion of democracy, as both a political doctrine and a form of government, and saw the US as the ‘the project of mankind’.⁴ Democratic ideology thus consolidated containment as a framework for perceiving US foreign policy practice and goals by ‘translating its objectives into an understandable and compelling reflection of the domestic society’s dominant norms.’⁵

The equation of US national security with the defence and spread of democracy was not cynically deployed by US officials and national security bureaucrats to legitimate a policy shaped wholly by realist security and economic concerns, however. Rather, the US’ pre-existing liberal democratic ideology functioned as a filter through which policymakers perceived the threat from the USSR in terms of ideology as well as security.⁶ Thus, ideology and security concerns fused in the construction of the containment framework.⁷ The practical result of this fusion was the construction of a liberal foreign policy elite which supported a US foreign policy it perceived as aimed at safeguarding both US national security and freedom. This elite consensus extended into US civil society and included the leaders and members of US civil society groups which co-operated with the CIA to project democratic ideology and the academics who advised US policymakers on designs for political reform in the Third World.

However, while democracy may have meshed with national security concerns at the ideological level, support for democracy did not serve US national security goals consistently in pragmatic terms. Although the Truman and Eisenhower administrations waged a covert campaign to for the ‘Liberation’ of the USSR’s Eastern European satellite states involving propaganda initiatives, covert action, support to anti-Soviet guerrillas and a serious attempt to destabilise the communist government of Albania,⁸ this campaign was waged sporadically and inconsistently, and US policymakers were forced to recognise early in the Cold War that while it was possible to broadcast propaganda into the Soviet bloc, little could be done in practical terms to ‘liberate’ it due to the strong political control exercised by the governments of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact nations, and the brute fact of Soviet military power. This geopolitical fact of life constrained the US response to a workers’ uprising in East Germany in 1953, and to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.⁹ In the Third World, democratic processes did not always produce leaders who were willing to de-emphasise the interests of their own countries and populations in favour of US national interests, leading the US to mount coups against a constitutional regime in Iran in 1953 and an elected government in Guatemala in 1954 to defend these interests.¹⁰ The application of democracy to national security policy produced tensions at the strategic level which were then replicated at the organisational and tactical levels in the projection of democratic ideology by the state–private network, and in the US attitude to democratising reforms in Third World dictatorships.

The state–private network

The tension between democracy and national security at the organisational level occurred in attempts to project democratic ideology through US civil society groups funded and managed by the CIA: the state–private network. This network consisted of civil society groups such as anti-Soviet committees and radio stations staffed by Eastern European émigrés,¹¹ intellectuals,¹² women’s groups, African-American groups,¹³ students¹⁴ and trade unions¹⁵ receiving ‘covert guidance and … assistance from the Government’¹⁶, usually the CIA. The network was the brainchild of George Kennan, architect of the containment policy, acting as Head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. It was Kennan who proposed the earliest state–private network operations in 1948, in order to implement a strategy of ‘political warfare’, defined as:

the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures … and ‘white’ propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, ‘black’ psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.¹⁷

The functions of the US private groups supported by the CIA within this conception were initially to secure Western Europe against Soviet subversion and to solidify Western European commitment to NATO by promoting a common Western democratic identity, and also to complicate control of the Soviet regime’s own population, and of Eastern Europe, through the projection of democratic propaganda behind the Iron Curtain. After the abandonment of Liberation, the network continued many of its programmes within the framework of the containment policy, while broadening the scope of its operations to include key countries and regions in the Third World. These groups were focussed on the projection of democracy as a counter-ideology to communism in order to secure the loyalty of key overseas demographic sectors for the US cause in the Cold War, rather than in a consolidated effort to build democratic parties and structures overseas. This was a tactical alliance in which private groups lacking a clear strategic plan which transcended a commitment to democratic ideology or the needs of their particular section of civil society deployed their political skills within a strategic framework created by the state. State agencies thus acted as a coordinating hub for a constellation of private groups who did not function as members of a wider network independent of these agencies and did not possess a strategic framework of their own.

The role of the US state as chief coordinator and financier of the network gave rise to ideological and organisational tensions, however. The state sought to use the democratic nature of the groups to present freedom as an attractive alternative to totalitarianism through providing examples of democracy in action. As Lucas argues, ‘it was the nature of American ideology that demanded a private facade’.¹⁸ Furthermore, NSC-68, the founding planning document for the US’ global containment campaign, also stated that one component of US Cold War strategy was to ‘demonstrate the superiority of the idea of freedom by its constructive application’.¹⁹ The state–private network could be seen as one way of operationalising this goal, projecting an attractive image of American democratic freedom to foreigners. Within the network, democratic ideology also performed an important function in rationalising and easing the convergence between non-state forces and national security officials; thus, the conflation of democracy and US national security at the strategic level was replicated at the organisational level and created the consensus which bound the state and private forces together. However, the covert role of state organisations as coordinators was not congruent with the democratic ideology which enabled state–private convergence, and constituted a key vulnerability.

This meshing of state organisations and civil society groups also produced an organisational tension. The private facade of the groups was the key to their operational effectiveness overseas, as their actions were ‘plausibly deniable’ and could be disclaimed by the US government as they were funded covertly, while the groups also possessed more credibility than the US state with their counterparts abroad, who were more likely to co-operate with an American representative of their own civil society group than a US official. However, a measure of state guidance was necessary to ensure that the groups’ actions were consistent with the US’ anti-communist foreign policy and constituted a coherent part of this wider strategy.²⁰ Without such a guidance function, the effort ran the risk of degenerating into a dispersed and incoherent series of private programmes led by private interests or democratic ideology rather than more narrow state goals, or of proceeding beyond national security policy due to ideological fervour.

The nature of the state–private relationship thus created an autonomy/control dilemma for the state. A measure of government control was necessary to manage clashes between ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: democracy and national security in US foreign policy
• 1 The roots of democracy promotion: from covert operations and modernisation to party-building
• 2 Democracy and national security during the early Reagan administration: no grand design
• 3 Democracy promotion and national security policy
• 4 Building a consensus for democracy promotion
• 5 The foundation of the National Endowment for Democracy
• 6 Promoting democracy
• Conclusion: US democracy promotion during the final phase of the Cold War and beyond
• Bibliography
• Index