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Palo Alto, Calif. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ebrary affiliated libraries. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate Donor bostonpubliclibrary Edition 4. Certain distinctive features do mark U. At root, however, most forms of Western democracy assistance, whether from Sweden, Spain, Australia, the Organization of American States, Canada, the United Nations, the European Union, or the United States, are not all that different from each other, despite what non-U.
In fact, comparing democracy programs sponsored by varied governments and international institutions, what is most striking is not their differences but their similarities. In writing this book I have drawn heavily from two sources. The first is my personal experience as a practitioner and analyst of democracy assistance since the mids.
My first exposure to the field came in when I was detailed from the legal adviser's office of the State Department to a newly created office for democracy programs in the Latin American bureau of USAID. Late in the decade, after leaving the government, I carried out extensive research on the policy process surrounding democracy aid and wrote a book on U.
I broadened my involvement in democracy programs through diverse consulting assignments in the first half of the s for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and the International Foundation for Election Systems, in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Through the Democracy Project I have carried out field research on numerous aid efforts, organized many study groups and seminars with practitioners and scholars on different aspects of the subject, worked as a consultant on democracy aid projects in different regions for several U.
I draw on all these experiences here, especially my observation of projects in the field and countless formal and informal conversations with both aid practitioners and aid recipients over the years. A second, more specific source is a set of four studies of U. For each of the four case studies—on Guatemala, Nepal, Zambia, and Romania—I first gathered extensive information in Washington through documents and interviews on all publicly funded U.
I then traveled at least twice to each country to interview people who had participated in, observed, or were otherwise knowledgeable about the U. For the case studies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, I was assisted by three American researchers, each of whom is a specialist in democratization in his or her region of specialization and is knowledgeable about democracy aid.
These research partners—Michael Shifter for Latin America, Marina Ottaway for Africa, and Stephen Golub for Asia—traveled with me on the field visits and carried out further field research on their own. In the case of Romania, I incorporate some of the findings from extensive research on U. I updated that research with additional visits to Romania in and In carrying out the field research, my research partners and I strove to understand not only the substance and effects of the U.
We followed the evaluation guidelines that I set out in chapter We made a point of talking not just to people who received the assistance, for example, but to others who were not included in the aid programs but were knowledgeable about the sectors in question.
We took a highly qualitative approach, asking in an open-ended fashion about the effects of programs rather than quizzing interviewees on whether the programs reached particular preset goals. We tried to make clear that we were interested in what was being learned on all sides, whether or not the story involved mistakes or misadventures.
Given the large number of countries in which U. Nevertheless, Guatemala, Nepal, Zambia, and Romania provide some useful representativity. They are on four different continents. Each has been host to a set of U. Their democratic transitions or attempted transitions were part of the democratic wave of the s and s.
Each has ended up in the large, gray middle zone of so many transitions of that period, having neither moved rapidly and painlessly to democracy nor fallen back into outright authoritarianism.
They are not the exceptional cases that have attracted the lion's share of international attention—such as South Africa, Poland, Russia, Chile, El Salvador, or the Philippines. They are instead part of the less visible but much larger group of transitional countries that had their moment in the news briefly during their initial democratic opening but have since grappled with democratization out of the limelight, aided by low-profile but nonetheless often substantial U.
I have not written up each case study as a separate chapter. I introduce the cases in chapter 4, and present some concluding thoughts about each in chapter In between I have woven material from the cases into the other chapters, both directly, as examples intended to illuminate specific points, and indirectly, as learning that helped shape my overall analysis.
This method makes it difficult to go into great detail or tell a complete story with the cases, but it spares readers a book dominated by long, detailed studies of countries in which few people have an all-consuming interest. I have discovered over the years that if you take democracy assistance seriously as a subject for analysis and writing, some people automatically suspect you of harboring rosy assumptions, in particular two: first, that democracy is advancing steadily around the world and clearly works well for all countries, regardless of their political background or economic condition; and second, that the grandiose official rhetoric about the central place of democracy promotion in U.
In fact, however, neither of these assumptions informs my outlook or this book. With regard to the state of democracy in the world, it is true that significant advances have been achieved in some parts of the world in the past twenty years. Most East European countries have made substantial democratic progress since and appear headed toward political and economic integration with Western Europe. In Latin America, the institutional performance of many democratic governments remains weak, but democracy has shown greater staying power than many analysts predicted when the region returned to elected, constitutional governments in the s.
Several East Asian countries, notably South Korea, Taiwan, Mongolia, and Thailand, are making serious efforts at democratizing, and in much of the region the notion that democracy is an unnatural Western implant has faded. At least a handful of sub-Saharan African states have managed to keep basically on track with democratic transitions begun in the early s. More broadly, all around the developing world and former communist countries, the concepts of political pluralism, governmental accountability, and the right of people to choose their own leaders are discussed and considered much more widely than in the past.
At the same time, the much-heralded global democratic trend has fallen short of expectations. In the mids, significant retrenchment and backsliding from initially promising democratic transitions began to occur. Many of the former Soviet republics are now dominated by semiauthoritarian or outright authoritarian leaders. Russia remains a democracy in form but threatens to go badly astray politically if the socioeconomic situation fails to improve.
In Africa, a distressingly large number of countries attempting transition have lapsed into civil war, coups d'etat, or resurgent strongman rule.
The liberalizing trend that made itself felt in the Arab world in the second half of the s has come to little. South Asia has stopped moving forward on democratization. In many parts of the world, disillusionment about democracy has replaced the infectious enthusiasm of ten years back as citizens watch fledgling elected governments wallow in corruption, incompetence, and instability. Democracy continues its post-cold war reign as the only political ideology with broad international legitimacy.
Nonetheless, it has become painfully clear that many countries face a tremendous struggle to make democracy work. It is all too common for countries attempting political transitions to achieve the forms but not the substance of democracy. The analysis here rests on this mixed review of the state of democracy in the world. Democracy aid was relatively easy to sell and often easy to implement when the political winds were at its back in the first half of the s.
Today, with democratic setbacks and failures more frequent, democracy aid faces a harder road, forcing democracy's promoters to try to sharpen their skills. I chart their learning curve. As for the place of democracy promotion in American foreign policy, I take as a starting point a similarly mixed picture: although its role has expanded since the mids, it remains at most one of several main U.
When contrary, it is usually overridden. This semi-realist approach to democracy promotion has been adopted by both the Republicans and Democrats and is unlikely to change anytime soon. My aim here is not to lament this state of affairs or to issue a clarion call for a vigorous new embrace of the Wilsonian ideal as the twenty-first century dawns. I do believe that American policy makers should give greater emphasis to democracy promotion and that it should play a major though not necessarily dominant role in U.
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