The Conceptual Politics of Democracy Promotion

Christopher Hobson, Milja Kurki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136643606
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How do different meanings of the concept of 'democracy' operate in democracy promotion? How do conceptual decisions influence real political events? How is policy and reflection on democracy promotion shaped by the way different practitioners and scholars understand democracy?

The Conceptual Politics of Democracy Promotion explores the way in which the meaning, content and context of 'democracy' are interpreted by different actors in democracy promotion, and how these influence political decisions. Introducing a theoretically new approach to the study of democracy promotion, the volume shows how the alternate ways that democracy can be understood reflects specific interpretations of political and normative ideals, as well as being closely tied to social power relations, interests, and struggles between political actors. With original contributions from some of the most prominent specialists on democracy promotion and democratization, the book examines a number of concrete cases of democracy promotion and contestation over democracy's meaning.

Re-examining democracy promotion at its time of crisis, this book will be of interest scholars and students of democracy and democratization, politics and international relations, international law, development studies and political theory.

Part I

Orientations

1

On ‘cultivating’ democracy

Enlivening the imagery for democracy
promotion

Laurence Whitehead

The conceptual politics of democracy promotion

This chapter – and indeed this whole volume – is concerned with democracy promotion at the conceptual level. Other levels of analysis are also essential in order to gain a full understanding of the topic, and some of the other contributions included here incorporate more comparative historical, empirical, and policy-based considerations. This chapter tries to take such insights into account, but its focus lies elsewhere. It rests on an initial assumption that the conceptual level has been understudied or taken for granted, and that recent experience has underscored the costs that can arise from inadequate reflexivity. It was written during a period of rather dark days for democracy promotion, a policy objective that has been in retreat for some time now. While the most notable disappointments and reversals have been in Afghanistan, the post-Iraq Middle East, and perhaps Pakistan, there have also been setbacks in Africa (the Ivory Coast and Kenya, among others), and more generally. Such developments should not be disregarded in a project of this kind. But neither should they take centre stage, especially since they could prove fleeting. Indeed, just as this chapter was about to go to press, an unanticipated popular revolt in Tunisia abruptly reintroduced the question of democracy support onto the agenda of hitherto inattentive Western policymakers. ¹ Standing back from such contingencies, a ‘conceptual politics’ approach to the topic of democracy promotion invites deeper probing into the background assumptions and underlying commitments of its practitioners, meriting consideration regardless of whether the immediate context is atypically favourable and enthusiastic (as in the late 1990s) or perhaps overly negative (as may have been the case one decade later).

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall there has been no shortage of hopeful initiatives pursued by activist agencies, and there now exists a very extensive literature on the practicalities of supporting, encouraging, stimulating and even imposing what the international community classifies as democratic political arrangements in the many post-Cold War countries where such systems are not as yet in place or are not fully secure. In this sense, ‘democracy promotion’ is an established sub-field of policy-relevant investigation and comparative study. But neither the theoretical foundations nor the practitioner distortions of this branch of activity have received adequate attention in this literature, the focus of which has been mainly pragmatic, applied, and heavily process-oriented. ²

Despite the proliferation of literature referring to ‘democracy promotion’, it is far from clear that the scholarly community has yet settled on a unified and coherent consensus about what the term must encompass or exclude, or on who owns it and how boundary disputes over its meaning are to be arbitrated. Still less is there agreement on how, or indeed even whether, it is supposed to work. Among the diverse elements that could fall within its ambit, there are international conventions; national government programmes and agencies; non-governmental agencies such as party foundations and human rights monitors; electoral observation missions; solidarity networks; some journalism and blogging activities; and perhaps even a wider range of ‘international civil society’ exchanges and initiatives.³

With such a wide range of activities under consideration, the question arises about how they might be coordinated (or might conflict) and which aspects should be viewed as central rather than incidental. There is also the question of where the resources come from to support effective ‘promotion’ activities, and what possibly hidden conditions might be associated with such financing.

Since the promotion of democracy has been widely viewed – at least in the West since 1990 – as a public good, there is also the possibility that this political capital might be appropriated by actors pursuing less noble objectives. This is where the question of ownership and monitoring becomes important, indeed increasingly so in recent years as evidence has accumulated that economic sanctions, invasions and covert interventions may also be undertaken in the name of this cause. As the evidence has accumulated that a multitude of sins could be sanctified under this rubric, the need for more analytical precisions, including more conceptual clarification, has become more urgent. But the democracy promotion community is a network of competing and partially overlapping institutions pursuing multiple agendas at the behest of a diverse set of sponsors, and it may not be easy for them to stand back and reflect dispassionately on what they are collectively trying to achieve, or on what the outcomes actually amount to. This is readily understandable, and not to their discredit – the situations they confront often require urgent responses, and too much self-criticism could easily demoralise and re-direct the resources of backers. Even when best efforts are made to evaluate outcomes, process tracing remains a debatable art, while causal attribution and the identification of criteria for success are also difficult and often disputed. This may help to explain why public opinion in many long-established democracies has begun to get restive about what can be portrayed as a substantial mismatch between what was promised and what is being delivered. In this context, the case for a revision of the first principles involved seems quite compelling.

This chapter pursues one approach out of several alternative possibilities. It investigates the imagery deployed to explain and justify the democracy promotion enterprise. In particular, it reflects on the background assumptions underpinning the two key terms: ‘democracy’ and its ‘promotion’. It does so from a specific and perhaps idiosyncratic standpoint. Elsewhere I have suggested that the democratization sub-field has been too dependent on vivid imagery – metaphors and analogies – drawn from the physical sciences, with their assumptions of tightly specified causal linkages between sharply delineated interacting entities. I have argued for an ‘enlivening’ of this conceptual toolkit, through the introduction of an alternative set of analogies drawn from biology and the life sciences.⁴ This chapter recapitulates some of my arguments in this respect, and argues that democracy promotion is best conceptualised not as the engineering or imposition of an alternative set of political design principles, but rather as a cooperative process of ‘cultivating’ or even ‘nurturing’ locally pre-existing democratic potentialities.

The bulk of the chapter is concerned to demonstrate how this shift in conceptualization might contribute to a revision of established assumptions about democracy promotion. Clearly, this is not the only avenue worth pursuing. The terminology and theoretical foundations of democracy promotion can also be re-examined from other standpoints, notably through comparative historical enquiry. Moreover, conceptual innovation should be grounded on the available evidence. Contributions from these other perspectives can help us select the most appropriate sources of analogical reasoning, and can steer us away from vivid but misleading metaphors and theorizations.

The second section looks at an enlivening metaphor drawn from biology that could open the way to a more relevant and illuminating conceptualization than the prevalent terminology of ‘democracy promotion’. The title to this chapter suggests ‘cultivating’ democracy, an analogy derived from agriculture and gardening. But this is not the only option. Equally valid would be ‘nurturing,’ a metaphor drawn from nutrition and healthcare. Other images – such as ‘transplanting’ – are also considered below. These three suggestions each amplify and reconceptualise the activity usually designated as ‘promotion’. Section three then turns to the practices to be promoted (what do biological analogies suggest about the re-conceptualization of ‘democracy’?), and argues for a more contextualised understanding of democratization processes. In light of these suggestions, section four reflects more broadly on the morphology of core political concepts and how it pertains to democracy and democratization. Section five elaborates on the resulting benefits derived from the incorporation of biological rather than mechanical sources of conceptual innovation, but also recognises the associated risks and limitations of such a procedure. The concluding section six offers a fuller statement of the implications of the ‘enlivening’ perspective for the re-conceptualization of democracy promotion and support as core public policy objectives.

‘Promotion’ or ‘nurturing’?

What unites the large array of initiatives and activities conventionally encompassed by the terminology of ‘promotion’? In what relationship do these activities stand to currently ongoing processes of democratization observable around the globe? From a mechanical perspective, all democracy promotion activities are designed to increase the probability of durable democratic regime outcomes.⁵ From the same prevalent perspective, successful democracy promotion activities are those that demonstrably deliver such outcomes. Would it get us any closer to reality if we substituted with the imagery of ‘cultivation’ or ‘nurturing’ the straightforward and easily intelligible causal attribution associated with ‘promotion’? Here it seems best to bring in some illustrations.

Let us start with an extreme case, chosen not because it is representative, but because it indicates the non-consensual status of some major public policy claims about democracy promotion, and highlights the contrast between alternative underlying conceptualizations of the subject. In its own terms, the Helms-Burton law enacted by the US Congress and signed into effect by President Clinton in 1996 constitutes a clear attempt at ‘democracy promotion,’ even though fifteen years later it has yet to deliver on its promised outcome. There is far more scope for doubt as to whether, even in its declaratory intentions, it can be classified as an effort to ‘cultivate’ or ‘nurture’ Cuban democracy. The idea is to impose such overwhelming sanctions – unilateral in origin, even if extra-territorial in effect – that insular resistance to its Washington-determined demands is either crushed or disintegrates. This is an example of ‘coercive’ democratization, the imposition of an externally crafted institutional design regardless of local choices or preferences. The engineering design is what validates the structure, not any internal response or rootedness. In fact, it is probable that this method of democracy promotion has maximised the chances of resistance and rejection owing to its perceived arrogance and illegitimacy.

Certainly Helms-Burton is an outlier among democracy promotion initiatives (although other examples of the ‘coercive’ approach can also be cited), but it belongs within that diverse family of initiatives, at least so long as mechanistic assumptions persist about what is to count as democratization, and how it may be caused. In a similar vein, one might conclude that over-mechanical and intrusive conceptions of democracy promotion in various parts of the Middle East have underestimated the centrality of local agency and consent, with the result that their assumptions about causation have proved unreliable and potentially more fruitful strategies have been pushed aside.

However, the contrast between physical and biological images of how to support democracy is not reducible to a ‘coercion vs. persuasion’ dichotomy: it is more complex and cross-cutting than that (a ‘transplant’ is a drastic external imposition), and embraces multiple dimensions of policy variation. Between the two extremes of intense local resistance to democratic innovation and irresistible local enthusiasm for the same, there exists a wide gamut of intermediate situations. This is where internationally coordinated initiatives are most likely to alter the balance of probabilities and may potentially shift finely balanced political trajectories – at least temporarily – in a pro-democracy direction. But such intermediate contexts are not uniform or mono-causal. They are not, therefore, promising sites for the application of ‘one-size-fits-all’ democracy promotion formulae. Mechanical and de-contextualised approaches of the kind often favoured by prevalent conceptualizations are therefore unlikely to engage with the crucial participants at the strategic sites in the moments of critical choice.

To switch to the gardening metaphor for a moment, the skilled cultivator is very attentive to the soil, the micro-climate, and the specific survival characteristics of the species she wishes to propagate. Such ‘cultivation’ skills may be more valuable to the democracy promotion community than the horsepower available to an undiscriminating mechanical digger. In a similar vein, from the healthcare perspective, an effective intervention may require an accurate diagnosis of a specific case, together with well-timed action based on a detailed understanding of the specific syndrome involved. Such attributes tend to be undervalued by mechanistic conceptions of democracy promotion and support.

Proponents of ‘large N’ causal models are liable to object that these hypothetical cases of skilled cultivation and contextually sensitive doctoring are unscientific, because they are not easily validated by statistical corroboration. At the extreme, they may be dismissed as travellers’ tales, or unrepresentative anecdotes. This is not a debate that can be resolved in abstract – the rival evidential claims need to be compared, and in some areas it may well turn out that mechanistic models work as well as, or better than, some biological alternatives. The case being made here is not for the wholesale abandonment of all existing methods, but only for openness to a wider range of possible strategies, approaches, and conceptualizations. After all, skilled gardening or good medical practice are also evidence-based approaches informed by scientific general laws. And on the evidence of the past twenty years one should not be too confident that any ‘large N’ findings in the area of democracy promotion and support can be relied upon to deliver consistent and reliable results in all contexts. Indeed, at the simplest aggregate level it would seem worthwhile to check whether most democracy promotion activities since 1990 can be rated as leading (i.e. causally relevant precursor) factors, or whether, on the contrary, they register mostly as lagging indicators (i.e. when the prospects for democracy advance for other reasons, that is when democracy promotion agencies respond by becoming more active). After all, democracy promoters will be rewarded for associating with success, whether or not they are responsible for it. And it is they – if anyone – who have the knowledge and resources to undertake the fullest evaluations of the outcomes they are aiming for. On this basis, it could be concluded that there is still scope for methodological pluralism and conceptual innovation when assessing what is conventionally referred to as the ‘democracy promotion’ community of interests.

‘Enlivening’ and contextualizing democracy: a conceptual innovation

If the ‘promotion’ half of this binomial can benefit from re-conceptualizations derived from biological sources of reasoning, so too can the ‘democracy’ half, as we shall now see. Political theory, political history, political science, comparative politics, political sociology, and political economy have all studied the concept of democracy topic exhaustively and from every conceivable angle. So what level (or levels) of analysis are appropriate for testing or investigating the diverse claims generated by the concept of democracy? There is also a broader issue at stake. In the physical sciences, knowledge mostly progresses through accumulation and refinement, within conceptual frameworks that are so universally accepted that they rarely require re-examination. But in the human sciences, the objects under observation are also the observers, and the concepts used to frame analysis of their experiences may not match their self-understandings. Consequently, the consensual, stable, and externally given framing devices that underpin most ‘hard’ scientific reasoning (henceforth referred to as ‘stipulatively defined’ concepts) may be exposed to periodic challenge (Shapiro 2005). This is especially likely with highly abstract or normative political concepts, which draw significance from socially constructed associations that are external to the formal definition (‘tacit’ knowledge in Polanyi's (2009) sense).⁶

The concept of ‘political democracy’ currently meets all these conditions, and its practical instantiations (‘conceptions’) encounter intense feedback from a global array of rapidly changing historical realities. Democracy is a paradigmatic example of an ‘essentially contested’ concept and differentiates the comparative study of democratization from the model of scientific specialization that works so well in the physical sciences. It may be possible to generate a stipulative definition of such a democracy and thus derive a small number of empirically verifiable indicators by which to measure the ‘state of democracy’ in a succession of political entities. But if democracy is a deontological and an ‘essentially contested’ concept, then it is both a really existing set of procedures and practices and a desired ideal. Analysts therefore must recognise that there will always be at least some aspects of democratic aspirations that are not yet fully realised. The discrepancy between actual and ideal conditions is what drives all processes of ‘democratization,’ and it also obliges empirical comparativists to incorporate ‘quality of democracy’ considerations into their exercises in calibration.

To evaluate variations in the ‘quality’ of democracy requires both some uniformity of underlying criteria and also due recognition that differences in performance may be partially determined by local context. Moreover, prevailing conceptions of ‘democracy’ also vary considerably according to setting. Iceland has one experience of it, Switzerland another, and Zimbabwe a third. Beyond contemporary nation states, the city of São Paulo practises democracy in a somewhat different manner to that of Stockholm or Salt Lake City. What Fox News viewers understand by democracy is not quite what most BBC viewers have in mind. More historically, democracy has been ‘invented’ on multiple occasions and in a wide variety of contexts (Goody 2006: 247–56; Keane 2009). Over time and space, democracy has assumed many guises (from Athenian direct self-rule in city states to French Republicanism), and in each place, democratization is associated with different constitutive processes (apartheid in South Africa, Zionism in Israel, for example) that are heavily charged with local contextual associations.

Different understandings derive in good measure from unanalysed preconceptions⁷ and tacit assumptions about the nature of the polis, the demos, and political order. Traditionally, British citizens are liable to ‘free associate’⁸ political democracy in terms of Labour versus Conservative; first past the post constituencies; party political broadcasts and doorstep leaflets; and parliamentary majorities. These ‘Westminster’ features are highly specific and are not core components of the abstract concept of democracy, but they have been shared and taken for granted so widely and for so long that they frame the British collective understanding of the general category. In the US, free association would invoke some similar features but ...

Table of contents

• Front cover
• The Conceptual Politics of Democracy Promotion
• Democratization studies
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: the conceptual politics of democracy promotion
• Part I Orientations
• Part II Cases
• Conclusion: reflections on a new approach in a new era of demo cracy pro mo tion
• Bibliography
• Index