Conflicting Objectives in Democracy Promotion

Do All Good Things Go Together?

Julia Leininger,Sonja Grimm,Tina Freyburg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351571173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The agenda of external actors often includes a number of objectives that do not necessarily and automatically go together. Fostering security and stability in semi-authoritarian regimes collides with policies aimed at the support of processes of democratization prone to conflict and destabilization. Meanwhile, the promotion of national self-determination and political empowerment might lead to forms of democracy, partially incompatible with liberal understandings. These conflicting objectives are often problematized as challenges to the effectiveness of international democracy promotion.

This book presents systematic research about their emergence and effects. The contributing authors investigate (post-) conflict societies, developing countries, and authoritarian regimes in Southeast Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. They identify the socio-economic and political conditions in the recipient country, the interaction between international and local actors, and the capacity of international and local actors as relevant for explaining the emergence of conflicting objectives. And they empirically show that faced with conflicting objectives donors either use a 'wait and see'-approach (i.e. not to act to overcome such conflicts), they prioritize security, state-building and development over democracy, or they compromise democracy promotion with other goals. However, convincing strategies for dealing with such conflicts still need to be devised.

This book was published as a special issue of Democratization.

Not all good things go together: conflicting objectives in democracy promotion

Sonja Grimm^a* and Julia Leininger^b

^aDepartment of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany; ^bGerman Development Institute/Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), Bonn, Germany

Conflicting objectives are often problematized as challenges to the effectiveness of international democracy promotion. However, systematic research about their emergence and effects is still missing. This special issue addresses this research gap and seeks to provide conceptual and empirical answers in the field of conflicting objectives in international democracy promotion. The authors represented in this special issue investigate (post-) conflict societies, developing countries, and authoritarian regimes, attempting to identify the patterns of conflicting objectives in democracy promotion, the reasons for their emergence, and their consequences. This introduction presents a conceptual framework that pursues four aims: first, it differentiates between two types of conflicting objectives (intrinsic and extrinsic); second, it offers an approach for identification of their phases of emergence; third, it proposes reasons for their emergence; and fourth, it discusses how political actors deal with these conflicting objectives. The empirical findings of the contributions to this special issue illustrate and substantiate the theoretical and conceptual reflections.

Introduction

This special issue of Democratization studies the emergence and consequences of conflicting objectives in democracy promotion. It pursues two aims: (1) to systematize significant conflicts of objectives in democracy promotion (conceptual dimension), and (2) to analyse these conflicts of objectives in order to explore their origins and their consequences for the effectiveness of democracy promotion (empirical dimension). To this end, the authors in this special issue have investigated selected African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American processes of political change, seeking to clarify the patterns and consequences of democracy promotion policies. They focus their analyses on possible intrinsic trade-offs between various factors in democracy promotion, as well as on extrinsic trade-offs between democracy promotion and other relevant areas of external support, such as peace-building, state-building, stabilization, security, and capacity-building.¹

Conflicting objectives are inherent in any kind of policy-making and cooperation between two or more actors. Scholars and practitioners widely acknowledge that conflicting objectives challenge the effectiveness of democracy promotion.² Any target country of democracy promotion will find itself facing a multitude of international actors pursuing divergent interests and goals. Consequently, the objective of democratization is likely to compete with alternative objectives of foreign policy of the various international actors. At times, the same actor can simultaneously attempt to pursue competing objectives. The individual nature of the paths that democratization can follow aggravates this complex situation further. In general, democratization does not follow a universal pattern that could serve as a guideline for facilitation of external support. Accordingly, there is no blueprint for successful democracy promotion. In each individual case, democracy promoters must rethink how, when, and by what means democratization can be supported.

Faced with such complex realities, since the end of the Cold War international actors have often pursued democratization from the point of view that ‘all good things go together’.³ They have integrated into their democracy promotion portfolio a mixture of objectives including peace, stability, freedom, prosperity, good governance, and the rule of law – objectives that, in their perspectives, could all be conducive to democratization. In other cases, international actors have indirectly assumed that policies such as economic assistance or peace- and security-building will positively complement measures to support democratization. Over time, international actors and scholars of democratization and international relations have become increasingly aware of the fact that ‘not all good things do necessarily go together’, learning from experience that ‘good things go together only under certain favourable conditions’.⁴ In order to promote democracy effectively, the conditions and time spans in which good things such as peace, security, and development do indeed go together must be investigated in a detailed and systematic fashion. This special issue seeks to explore this topic and to enrich the empirical foundations of the current debate on the challenges of democracy promotion.

The contributions to this special issue cover a representative range of conflicting objectives, in particular trade-offs between security, stability, peace, and democratization, as well as between the diverging norms, concepts, and instruments applied in democracy promotion. The authors study nine countries and a variety of international actors; the latter range from international and regional organizations (such as the European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)) to multilateral peace missions like United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) in Kosovo or United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) in Timor-Leste, to actors exerting influence in bilateral development cooperation (such as the governments of the United States of America (USA) and Germany). Authors describe typical country contexts in which conflicting objectives are likely to emerge: unstable environments and post-conflict settings are the most vulnerable to divergent objectives. One of the countries examined is currently embroiled in a war situation (Afghanistan), another one trapped in a violent conflict (Palestine), and five of the cases are post-conflict countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo under UN Security Council Resolution 1244, and Timor-Leste). The case studies of Bolivia, Morocco, and Zambia illustrate that trade-offs in democracy promotion can also arise in generally peaceful, stable settings.

In this introduction, we establish a conceptual framework for the analysis of conflicting objectives in democracy promotion; we substantiate our theory-driven concepts using evidence from the contributions included in this special issue. Accordingly, each section in this introduction starts with a conceptual outline, followed by empirical findings. In the first section, we briefly review the literature. Given the lack of previous theoretical contributions on conflicting objectives in foreign policy-making we focus on identifying research gaps. In view of these gaps, we formulate four guiding research questions that will be addressed by the contributions to this special issue. In the second section, we present our concept of conflicts of objectives and highlight which are covered in the following contributions. In the third section, we argue that conflicts may equally evolve during the norm-building, strategy-building, and implementation phases of democracy promotion. In the same section, we explore the conditions under which conflicts of objectives may evolve and identify which of these are addressed in this special issue. In the fourth section, we propose a scheme for how the actors involved could theoretically deal with conflicts of objectives and illustrate how domestic and international actors have handled trade-offs in real-world situations. In the fifth section, we theoretically explore the effects of conflicting objectives on democratization and present whether the empirical findings of this issue confirm this correlation. We conclude by summarizing the main challenges of democracy promotion derived from the special issue’s contributions.

Setting the stage: what are the most pressing questions, in light of existing research gaps?

Until now, two branches of research have addressed the question of whether ‘all good things go together’ in a more or less explicit fashion. The ‘older’ branch focuses on the relationship between democracy and development, asking whether socio-economic development is best suited for democratization, and vice versa. The ‘newer’ branch is founded in peace and security studies and researchers ask to what extent and under what conditions processes of democratization complement, support, or undermine stabilization and peace in a postconflict society. Both research strands have also served to inform policy-makers in international democracy promotion. In what follows, we briefly summarize the two extant research fields and identify research gaps.

S.M. Lipset (1960) was one of the first to argue that democracy is related to a country’s socio-economic development or level of modernization. With a quantitative large-N study measuring wealth, extent of industrialization, degree of urbanization, and level of education in selected countries using various indicators, Lipset found that the more democratic countries consistently had higher levels of socio-economic development than the more authoritarian countries.⁵ His concise conclusion – ‘the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy’⁶ – inspired the international development community by presenting the prospect of the uncomplicated democratization of developing countries by socio-economic modernization.⁷ However, Lipset did not reflect about possible conflicting objectives for international support to democratization.

Since the early 1990s, in reflecting on the scholarly debate on the causes of democratization, the member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation (OECD) have begun to consider democratic rule not as a logical outcome of development, but as a necessary requisite for it.⁸ In consequence, strengthening socio-economic development has evolved into an important objective of democracy promotion. However, democracy promotion and support of socio-economic development have historically belonged to two parallel worlds that have rarely intersected. Only recently have donor countries like the USA and Germany begun to conceptualize programmes that pursue both objectives, seeking to mainstream sectoral programmes and to ensure that they are supportive of democratic governance.⁹ However, to date there has been little evidence that democratization and consequently democracy promotion actually work as a motor of socio-economic development.¹⁰ Given the limited resources of development cooperation, new policy choices are likely to be made at the expense of democracy support.¹¹

Meanwhile, in search of strategies to handle the challenging post-war and postconflict regime changes in south-eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and sub-Saharan Africa, peace-builders seem to have resurrected the idea that ‘all good things shall go together’ from the development debate.¹² For the sake of stability- and peacebuilding, they aspire to support domestic actors in removing the root causes of violent conflict and create a pacific atmosphere (1) by reforming the security sector in order to secure public life and provide legitimate means to control the use of force, (2) by developing the rule of law in order to reduce human rights violations, (3) by investing in a market economy free from corruption in order to discourage individuals from believing that the surest path to fortune is by capturing the state, and – last but not least – (4) by supporting democracy in order to reduce the tendency toward arbitrary power and give a voice to all segments of society.¹³ Their conflict-management tools are intended to support the replacement of a culture of war and violent conflict with a culture of tolerance and respect. However, seldom do peace-builders achieve this comprehensive aim successfully.¹⁴

In fact, the expectations of supporters of development policies, peace-builders, and democracy promoters ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Foreword
• 1. Not all good things go together: conflicting objectives in democracy promotion
• 2. Democracy promotion, empowerment, and self-determination: conflicting objectives in US and German policies towards Bolivia
• 3. Financing poverty alleviation vs. promoting democracy? Multi-Donor Budget Support in Zambia
• 4. Coerced transitions in Timor-Leste and Kosovo: managing competing objectives of institution-building and local empowerment
• 5. Power-sharing and democracy promotion in post-civil war peace-building
• 6. Two at one blow? The EU and its quest for security and democracy by political conditionality in the Western Balkans
• 7. Inconsistent interventionism in Palestine: objectives, narratives, and domestic policy-making
• 8. Peace-building and democracy promotion in Afghanistan: the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Programme and reconciliation with the Taliban
• 9. The two sides of functional cooperation with authoritarian regimes: a multi-level perspective on the conflict of objectives between political stability and democratic change
• Index