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Article Excerpt
Many authors have issued anxious warnings about a disturbing "backlash against democracy"--this in spite of the growing affirmation of democracy as an international standard against which other systems are measured. This article considers the role of democracy promotion, which is understood as activities aimed at assisting in consolidating, disseminating, and advocating democratic governance in this context. The theoretical framework in which the promotion debate occurs is highlighted in order to show how the concept of "democracy" is socially constructed and interpreted in different ways by the various promoters. The article examines the main targets of this activity (state structures and civil societies) and compares two major supporters of democracy (the European Union and the United States). On this basis, claims about a "democratic rollback" are challenged by reference to hybrid regimes that contrast the idea of democracy with that of civilization. The backlash is better understood as resistence to some of the methods of promotion and some promoters, rather than as being against democracy itself, and the article holds that the best way to promote good governance worldwide is through an oblique, cosmopolitan or European-style democracy that fosters the multiple and processual grounds on which democratic polities can flourish. Keywords: democracy, backlash, good governance, European Union, United States
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A decade ago the US pundit Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., looked at the democratic prospect for the years ahead with optimism. Writing about the happy ending of a century that Isaiah Berlin had previously labeled as "the most terrible in Western history," Schlesinger recognized that, despite the challenges ahead, democracy had a future, as the "leaders in the century to come may do a better job than we have done of making the world safe for democracy." (1) Yet, all of a sudden, a novel chapter seems to have started. Slowly but inexorably, scholars are engaging in a new debate distinguished by alarming predictions and pessimistic reviews of the contemporary situation.
At first there were just a few skeptical voices, but these grew to advance a more widespread claim that "the world has slipped into a democratic recession." (2) Opinion columns and editorials in major journals and conferences in prestigious venues found support in a number of influential surveys. Freedom House's 2007 report, Freedom Stagnation Amid Pushback Against Democracy, advanced claims about worrying trends on a global scale. The so-called "new democracies" were objects of particular concern: It was argued that the experiences of Georgia, Kenya, Venezuela, Pakistan, and Russia, among others, highlighted the hitherto unexpected possibility of democratic reversals. (3) Plagued by poor or nonexistent governance, many countries traditionally considered to be "in transition" have many countries traditionally considered to be "in transition" have succumbed to opportunism and pragmatism, resulting in predatory states in which, as Robert Putnam put it, "corruption is widely regarded as the norm." (4)
At the same time, there has been a surge of stark criticism of Western modalities of democracy promotion. In 2005, for example, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization issued a joint declaration of its heads of state, pointing out that "every people must be properly guaranteed to have the right to choose its own way of development." (5) In the same framework, the then-president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and China's President Hu Jintao issued a joint statement on "World Order in the Twenty-first Century" that firmly rejected "alien models of social and political systems." (6) Likewise, executives from other parts of the world raised similar condemnations, cither by reiterating historic positions, as in the cases of Cuba and China, or by reviving criticisms of perceived Western imperialism, as for instance in the cases of Venezuela and Malaysia. In the Far East, calls for "Asian exceptionalism" grew stronger after a public statement by the Singaporean government about the existence of "shared Asian values" that contrast with the values of the West. (7)
However, public uncase is not limited to some of those places that Immanuel Wallerstein would call "peripheral areas" (8); it is also present within the criticized societies as well. Furthermore, as Christopher Hobson has argued, democracy has been "caught up and used in global structures of domination, hierarchy and violence." (9) This has led to a crisis in the legitimacy of the role in global politics of the United States, once regarded as the pinnacle of a Western empire founded on a perception that "democracy is what it is virtuous for a state to be." (10) This crisis is expressed, for example, in the contemporary transatlantic divide between the New World and a so-called Fortress Europe that is challenging presumptions of unity and a shared understanding of security, forms of democratic governance, and appropriate methods for promoting democratic practices. (11)
Many other forces are challenging the promotion of democracy around the globe. Fareed Zakaria famously suggested more than a decade ago that we might be witnessing the rise and consolidation of "a disturbing phenomenon in international life--illiberal democracy." (12) Much like Robert Putnam's "predatory states," illiberal democracies are said to be characterized by elites who systematically ignore their constitutional limits while nonetheless being formally elected through plebiscites; China and Singapore are usually listed as exemplar cases. Such countries have also frequently rallied popular support on the grounds that Western attempts to strengthen democratic institutions are really disguised forms of interventionism, (13) a line of argument that has gained plausibility due to the Hides of recent US administrations: many political leaders have reacted to the prospect of being forcibly removed with a certain degree of political acumen by adopting democratic rhetoric while acquiring support for resisting threats of foreign invasion. In addition, military interventions have created new local elites who have turned against those who supposedly freed them or generated more chaos than the deposed totalitarian rulers. (14)
The Promotion of Democracy
In spite of its ancient roots, democracy as "we" know it is a rather recent concept. As Amartya Sen noted: "The idea of democracy as a universal commitment is quite new, and it is quintessentially a product of the twentieth century." (15) The common understanding of this complicated concept is perhaps best expressed through the Wilsonian triad of liberal governance, peace, and free markets. In a recent book, Michael Mandelbaum defined these three as "the ideas that conquered the world" and proclaimed President Woodrow Wilson as "victorious" not because they have been adopted globally but rather because they have today "no serious rival in the world of the twenty-first century." (16) This argument echoed Francis Fukuyama's well-known assertion about the end of history, wherein liberal democracy represents "the final form of human government" deemed to become universal. (17)
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, democracy has acquired a widespread status as the "new standard of civilization." (18) Not surprisingly, the "winner" of the cold war has, at least rhetorically, taken up the task of advancing this form of governance beyond the West on the assumption that this was a duty of those with primacy in world politics to guide the lesser powers. (19) This assumption was quickly expressed in a doctrine of "liberal internationalism" and policies of pacification through political and economic liberalization carried out through diplomacy, international trade, humanitarian aid, and eventually military force. In effect, this account of democracy guided a new neocolonial or imperial mission civilisatrice in which peacebuilding operations could "serve as vehicles for a particular type of globalization" that attempts to "transplant the...
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