If recent trends are any guide, the period of rapid and easy gains for democracy in the world is now over. At best, we have probably entered a long period of halting institutionalization, uneven marketization, and considerable regime instability, in which most new democracies that progress toward consolidation will do so incrementally, others will continue to deteriorate institutionally or perform very poorly, and some will break down altogether.
Skeptics question whether external assistance can do much to foster democracy in the face of historical traditions, value systems, class structures, and embedded power distributions that are profoundly hostile to democracy.145 To be sure, socioeconomic development (especially at higher levels) does alter political culture, class structure, civil society, and patterns of participation in ways that make stable democracy more likely.146 Yet there are numerous grounds to resist an emphasis on societal preconditions. Democratization is triggered mainly by political factors. And many of the countries with longstanding democracies today--such as Germany, Austria, Italy, Japan, and Spain--were dismissed as unready for democracy only shortly before they achieved it. Given the precarious balance of political and social forces in many newly democratic and transitional countries, international actors would appear to have real scope to influence the course of political development. Their ability to do so, however, will depend on the extent to which they can rally their will, improve their effectiveness, and extend their time horizons. Whether and how they can do so raises a few additional issues worth mentioning in conclusion.
As the number of donor organizations, programs, and potential recipients proliferates, improved communication and coordination among political assistance efforts looms as an ever more important challenge. Agreement among international actors, both public and private, on more explicit norms and guidelines would help to focus their various aid and diplomatic efforts to promote democracy on a common set of clear, tangible, general, but realizable goals. With such stronger normative coordination, various democracy promotion efforts would have more potent reinforcing impacts, both practically and symbolically. At the operational level, greater networking and coordination may help to avoid duplication and waste, pool resources for major projects and urgent priorities, and diffuse knowledge about what works. Within individual countries, coordination of donors in the field can improve the efficiency and political leverage of their efforts.147 Indeed, the need to systematize and share learning, develop common norms and rules, and coordinate more closely among the donors was the overarching conclusion of the conference organized by the Swedish government in May 1994 to consider improved donor cooperation in electoral assistance.148
In recent years, the official aid donors have made progress in coordinating their policies and programs for promoting democracy and good governance. Since 1990, the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD has become increasingly active in promoting common policy orientations and shared learning with respect to what it has termed "Participatory Development and Good Governance" (PDGG), a catchall term encompassing political democratization, human rights, the rule of law, public sector management, controlling corruption, reducing excessive military expenditures, strengthening civil society, and mobilizing broad-based participation in development (including participation of women and minorities, and especially at the local level). At its December 1993 High Level Meeting, the DAC adopted a remarkably comprehensive statement of common principles, approaches, and objectives for rendering assistance in these various areas, and established an ad hoc working group on PDGG.149
At the level of general principles and priorities, the donor countries appear increasingly united around the above PDGG aims. In practice, however, some powerful countries continue to chart divergent courses in the spirit of traditional, amoral "realism" in foreign affairs. French policy in Africa has heavily reverted to this pattern, and Japan has been the slowest of the major powers to break from it. This is perhaps not surprising, since Japan has also had the least democratic input into its foreign policy, and within the established democracies the concern for promoting democracy, human rights, and good governance abroad has been heavily driven by pressure from the media, civil society, legislators, and the informed public in their own societies.150
Effective coordination must go beyond principles, to specific countries and programs. For more than two decades, that has been the province of the "consultative groups" of aid donors for various specific countries, which are convened in Paris by the World Bank. During the 1990s, the consultative groups have become much more assertive in considering political issues of governance, democratization, and human rights, and even in conditioning aid on democratic progress, as was done for Kenya and Malawi. However, with a charter and an organizational culture that constrains it from venturing beyond economic considerations, the World Bank has not been comfortable dealing with democracy and human rights issues. This underscores the importance of tapping a different (bilateral donor) member, perhaps on a rotating basis, to take leadership responsibility for democracy issues within each consultative group, not only in preparing and facilitating the meeting but in following up and monitoring compliance. It may also be helpful to hold preparatory meetings within the recipient country to elicit broad commentary and open debate about the official aid relationship from civil society, opposition politicians, policy analysts, and the press in advance of the closed consultative group meetings in Paris.151 Had such in-country meetings taken place in Kenya, and had there been rigorous monitoring of the regime's post-election assaults on democracy, it would have been much more difficult to justify the resumption of official economic assistance. PDGG principles and goals now appear firmly established on the agendas of the individual country consultative groups. But the consideration of PDGG goals must become more institutionalized, with standard procedures for broad consultation, more active participation of civil society in the policy dialogue, and sustained monitoring and enforcement.
Greater sharing of information and approaches is also needed among nongovernmental democracy assistance organizations. NED sought to initiate enhanced cooperation with a "democracy summit" in February 1993 that brought together representatives of NED and its four core institutes, the German Stiftungen, the Westminster Foundation, Canada's International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, as well as observers from the Japan Institute for International Affairs. A follow-up meeting, focusing more narrowly on programs in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, was convened later in the year by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. These were important first steps, but such exchanges and dialogues need to be institutionalized through more than occasional meetings. A useful instrument in this regard may be the new NED International Forum for Democratic Studies, which is constructing an electronic database of democracy promotion grants, a directory of democracy promotion organizations, and a global electronic information network connecting democracy promotion organizations and study centers, as well as conducting research, hosting conferences, and publishing on problems of democracy.
The International Institute for Democracy, set up on the initiative of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament, serves as a clearinghouse for information on democracy and human rights by publishing the bimonthly Clearing House Review, a list of conferences and seminars as well as recent publications. It also publishes Democracy, the quarterly newsletter of the Strasbourg Conference on Parliamentary Democracy (which groups the Paliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, and the national parliaments of Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, and the United States). The institute also organizes training seminars on parliamentary procedure and law drafting for parliamentary staff and publishes its own studies.
Another valuable point of coordination will be the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), which was established in February 1995 at a founding conference of fourteen country sponsors, led by Sweden, whose government has contributed substantial resources to the effort, including a prominent building near the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm. The result of a two-year planning effort, International IDEA aims to facilitate interaction among organizations, agencies, and individuals active in the field of democratic development and electoral assistance; to establish and promote common guidelines for the development of democratic elections, parties, media, and other institutions; to create a user-friendly databank and inventory of existing research on elections and democracy; to produce and disseminate new research on the development and promotion of democracy; to link donors and recipients, and researchers and practioners; and to offer advisory and capacity-building services for improving elections and other aspects of democratic functioning.152
Other private efforts are also under way, some regional and some sectoral, to facilitate the regular (even instantaneous) exchange of information among democracy assistance organizations (and research and studies programs) through E-mail and other networks. Comprehensive coordination of the incredible profusion of efforts is beyond the capacity of any organization, and such tight coordination might even threaten pluralism. But overlapping networks for information exchange and collaboration are gradually emerging and will be broadly beneficial.
As we have seen, nowhere is coordination more needed, and nowhere could it make a quicker and more decisive difference, than in the area of diplomacy (including sanctions and conditionality). Sanctions and diplomatic pressure succeed only where they are backed cohesively by the countries with influence over the target regime. In most countries where democratic possibilities have been squandered, stalled, or diminished, the trail of big-power divisions is easy to locate. Beyond Africa, one could point to Cambodia, where France and Japan supported antidemocratic demands of the incumbent Cambodian People's Party (while Thailand treated with the Khmer Rouge in an exceptionally greedy pursuit of logging and gemstone profits); or Burma, where Thailand and Japan have backed a brutally repressive regime (to which Europe is also now resigning itself); or Vietnam, where the Western democracies abandoned the leverage they might have exercised for fundamental political liberalization in a headlong race to open Asia's next booming market; or Pakistan and Turkey, where, for strategic reasons, the United States has reacted rather passively to human rights violations and covert military domination.
Major and middle-level powers are not going to surrender their freedom to act to secure their own interests, but stronger democratic conditionality for aid, more closely coordinated among the major donors, would force ruling or military elites to think twice before desecrating democracy, "even if they know that the principle is not entirely consistently enforced."153 More vigorous and creative diplomacy might mobilize pressure on dissenting donors, resulting in a more coherent stance by the democratic powers in a number of critical cases. That requires U.S. leadership, however, which in turn requires vision, vigor, and coherence in U.S. foreign policy. In the absence of these, the Western democratic alliance has weakened, drifted, and divided.
Failure to hone and coordinate the big-power and multilateral diplomatic instruments of democracy promotion could exact a heavy price. Not only does it risk big, visible setbacks for democracy with potentially significant regional effects--as in Nigeria, Pakistan, and, most of all, Russia--but it also threatens to erase enormous investments of money and human resources in specific democracy promotion projects that come to naught. One of the most serious problems in democracy promotion today is the disarticulation between the hundreds of democracy assistance donors, seeking incremental gains in civic and institutional capacity at the micro level, and the foreign policy strategies and actions--or inactions--of the major powers. Early action at crucial moments might prevent the macro-level blow-ups that level the democratic terrain. What democratic assistance impacts have survived the holocaust in Rwanda? Or the ruthless dictatorship in Sudan? What will survive in Nigeria if it descends into civil war? Or in Russia if an ultranationalist dictator takes power?
Both for individual organizations and governments and for the international community of democracy-promoting organizations and states, sharper strategic thinking is needed. The leading democracies, through their foreign policies and official aid commitments, must set priorities. Several criteria suggest themselves: the strategic importance of the country to their own security and to regional and global security more broadly; the degree to which democratic assistance is needed; the capacity of indigenous institutions and actors to absorb aid effectively; and the potential of a country to serve as a model, a point of diffusion, a "beachhead" for democratic development (and even a stabilizing anchor) within a region. Small countries like Cost Rica and Botswana have been able to play that role of regional model, and this argues for a global strategy that seeks to advance and consolidate democracies in every region, while recognizing that some countries are more plausible and serious democratic prospects than others. Partly because of its own ethnic complexity, the United States most of all--but increasingly Europe, Canada, and Australia as well--cannot afford to write off any portion of the less-developed world. It is increasingly apparent that intergroup conflict and humanitarian disasters have their roots in abusive and incompetent governance. The established democracies, and the multilateral institutions in which they exercise leadership, must seek to get at these roots, and that means a global strategy of democracy promotion, with intelligent priorities in each region. This does not rule out the type of decision the Western democracies have made to give priority to democratic development in the former Soviet bloc. But it should raise concern about the decline of aid to and engagement with Africa, where AID closed eight of its thirty-five missions last year, with more to follow.154
Among individual donor organizations, there is often a tendency to support democracy and human rights wherever worthy causes present themselves (globally or within regions). Too little thought is given to weighing resource constraints against desirable--and achievable--end goals, especially strategic objectives. NED, for one, has been criticized for the "scattershot nature" of its programming, for trying to fund too many types of programs in too many countries with a limited budget.155 Yet, for democracy promotion, strategic objectives must be large in scale and time horizon, involving prolonged (and often subtle) engagement. Such sustained engagement must aim for enduring improvements in institutional capacities, in the quality and stability of democracy in a country, and in structural variables, such as market development and civil society, whose democratic impact will be felt most over the long run. Even if the international community collectively can help to bring about changes of this magnitude, individual organizations, even those with annual budgets of $35 million, most certainly cannot.156 Only if the principal governmental and nongovernmental donors strategize with one another from time to time can they maximize their chances to tip truly uncertain but plausible democratizers--from Russia and Ukraine to South Africa and Benin-- firmly into the democratic column. For the biggest, most sensitive and important cases in particular, like Russia and Ukraine, this requires coordination among the major powers at the highest levels of government, which argues for institutionalizing discussion of democracy promotion issues on the annual agenda of the G-7 nations. Similar far-reaching coordination is needed to develop the democracy-building and conflict-regulating capacities of regional organizations, most urgently the OAU, at a time when the UN, its specialized agencies, and its powerful member states are increasingly exhausted by the burdens of direct intervention, and new patterns of dependency on international emergency aid and protection need to be broken.
The major democratic powers of the world need to think boldly and creatively about the kind of world order that can best nurture and sustain democracy and human rights. This involves many of the most controversial collective security issues of our time--when and how to intervene against genocide, civil war, human rights atrocities, and forcible overthrows of democracy; how to bring to international justice the perpetrators of these crimes; how to reconfigure and revitalize alliance structures and multinational organizations toward these ends. It may demand hard choices--for example, between the desire of arms industries, defense ministries, and trade bureaucrats for ever-expanding weapons exports and the urgent need--for democracy, development, and peace--to reduce military expenditures in less developed countries. And it raises issues of world order that have not even entered serious international discussion, such as the construction of a truly global rule of law to confront the increasingly global threats of terrorism, narcotics trafficking, financial fraud, political bribery, money laundering, weapons smuggling, and other organized crimes.
Particularly needed is an international mechanism for imposing biting and specifically targeted sanctions (as the United States did belatedly in Haiti) on the ruling elites directly responsible for violating international laws and accords and suppressing popular aspirations for democracy, so that pain and pressure can be pinpointed on them and not inflicted on innocent and long-suffering people.157 The international community, ideally acting through the UN, must have the ability to freeze the personal assets of these elites worldwide and to deny them and all their family members visas to enter any law-abiding country. This will require intensive new efforts to gather international financial and political intelligence, radical changes in international banking practice, and probably a new international covenant. Without these kinds of radical legal and institutional steps toward a new world order, the corruption and greed of small and potentially very vulnerable elites--like the ruling military clique in Nigeria--are likely to continue to ravage democratic aspirations in much of the world.
Finally, and no less importantly, the established democracies--and not least the United States--must "heal themselves." The post-Cold War ideological hegemony of democracy in the world has been brief indeed--if it ever really existed. Today, new ideological challengers scorn democracy and scoff at the social decay, economic stagnation, political corruption, and general sclerosis of the most powerful practitioners and promoters of democracy in Europe and North America. The most sophisticated challenge in this regard comes not from the Islamic fundamentalists or Eastern European and post-Soviet ultranationalists, though they are vigorous and passionate enough. Rather, it emanates from the more economically dynamic East Asian countries (such as Singapore, Malaysia, China, and Indonesia), whose governments (and progovernment intellectuals) claim they have found--in the convergence (in varying degrees) of economic liberalism, limited societal pluralism, and centralized political hegemony--a truly superior political system. It is doubtful that even the most successful of these political systems, Singapore's quite regimented and illiberal electoral regime, will smoothly resist the growing pressure of the socioeconomic, generational, and attitudinal changes its society will be experiencing over the next decade or two. Nevertheless, such stresses in the nondemocratic world offer in themselves no comfort for the established democracies. With some striking commonalities across continents, the wealthy, industrialized democracies in North America, Europe, and Japan find themselves mired in serious problems of political corruption, stagnation, decay of political parties, voter disillusionment and apathy, fiscal imbalance, racial, ethnic, and nationality conflict, and so on. These problems do not yet threaten the stability of democracy, but they do diminish its quality, as well as its capacity to inspire and provide models for democratic development elsewhere in the world.
Ultimately, the established democracies cannot be successful promoting democracy abroad unless they find ways to reform, repair, and revitalize their own democracies at home. A vast array of political challenges await committed democrats within these countries: for example, reforming systems of campaign finance; reinvigorating school curricula and civil society to educate for democracy and interethnic tolerance; and finding new, technologically innovative ways to connect citizens with parties, legislators, and government officials. Reforming from within need not and should not compete with the imperative to assist the development of democracy around the world. Indeed, the two tasks are complementary, and democratic reformers in countries like the United States will find they have lessons to learn from civic activists and constitutional reformers in newly emerging democracies.
Taking this challenge of democratic renewal seriously will not only generate a new surge of democratic energy and commitment in the industrialized world, it may also provide a healthy antidote to the tendency toward hubris and paternalism of too many democracy assistance programs that are conducted in the post-Communist and less developed countries. Particularly in circumstances of sharp economic decline and loss of international power and prestige, as in Russia today, arrogance in international assistance programs reinforces perceptions of victimization and threat, strengthening the appeal of antidemocratic, ultranationalist forces.
If democracy is to expand and triumph in the twenty-first century, democrats everywhere must view the challenge of democratic development and improvement as universal and ongoing. And democratic systems--new and old--must demonstrate anew that democracy is, in the long run, the best, most just, effective, and humane form of governance for all peoples.