The Reagan Administration, the Cold War, and the Transition to Democracy Promotion

Robert Pee, William Michael Schmidli, Robert Pee, William Michael Schmidli, Robert Pee, William Michael Schmidli

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319963822
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

This book posits that democracy promotion played a key role in the Reagan administration's Cold War foreign policy. It analyzes the democracy initiatives launched under Reagan and the role of administration officials, neoconservatives and non-state actors, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), in shaping a new model of democracy promotion, characterized by aid to foreign political movements and the spread of neoliberal economics. The book discusses the ideological, strategic and organizational aspects of U.S. democracy promotion in the 1980s, then analyzes case studies of democracy promotion in the Soviet bloc and in U.S.-allied dictatorships in Latin America and East Asia, and, finally, reflects on the legacy of Reagan's democracy promotion and its influence on Clinton, Bush and Obama. Based on new research and archival documents, this book shows that the development of democracy promotion under Reagan laid the foundations for US post-Cold War foreign policy.

© The Author(s) 2019

Robert Pee and William Michael Schmidli (eds.)The Reagan Administration, the Cold War, and the Transition to Democracy PromotionSecurity, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary Worldhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96382-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Reagan Administration and Democracy Promotion

Robert Pee¹ and William Michael Schmidli²

(1)

Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

(2)

Institute for History, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

Robert Pee (Corresponding author)

William Michael Schmidli

End Abstract

Something extraordinary occurred in American foreign policy during the 1980s: democracy promotion emerged as a defining feature of the US engagement with the global arena. At the outset of the decade, Ronald Reagan’s sweeping victory over the incumbent Jimmy Carter administration sent a chill coursing through East-West relations. The Soviets were “monsters,” Reagan repeatedly declared, dedicated to an implacable and unending crusade to spread “Godless communism” throughout the world. “Let us not delude ourselves,” he told an interviewer in June 1980. “The Soviet Union underlies all the unrest that is going on. If they weren’t engaged in this game of dominoes, there wouldn’t be any hot spots in the world.”¹ Rejecting the Carter administration’s emphasis on human rights, Reagan took office determined to regain the initiative in the global Cold War. Seeking to carve out leverage to engage the Soviets from a position of strength, the new administration embarked on a massive US military buildup. Correspondingly, in what would later become known as the “Reagan Doctrine,” Reagan aimed to raise the costs of perceived Soviet expansionism by aiding anti-communist militants in the Third World. Tension between the superpowers escalated; by the fall of 1983, both the US and the Soviet Union were engaged in bloody proxy wars in the developing world, while international incidents such as the tragic Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 threatened to touch off a nuclear war.

By the end of Reagan’s second term in office, however, the global landscape of the Cold War had changed dramatically. Relations between the two superpowers warmed, particularly following Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascension as Soviet premier, and increased dialogue between Washington and Moscow decreased the likelihood of war. Correspondingly, reversing its initial rejection of human rights as a US foreign policy priority, the Reagan administration embraced the rhetoric of human rights—which it defined as anti-communism, neoliberal economic policies, and democracy promotion—to describe and justify its policy initiatives.

More to the point, the Reagan administration presided over a watershed moment in the development of American democracy promotion. This volume deploys a definition of democracy promotion as a direct attempt to alter the political system of a foreign state to bring it into accord with democratic institutional models. According to political scientist Peter Burnell, democracy promotion is operationalized through the use of force, the support of democratic forces inside a state, and the use or threat of sanctions.² To this, we would add efforts to support the growth of democratic institutions and processes through material and technical aid and diplomatic initiatives to press authoritarian rulers to institute democratic reforms.³ Therefore, democracy promotion is concrete action aimed at altering the internal political system and institutions of a foreign state in accordance with democratic models.

“Democracy promotion” is a loaded term. As noted by Conry, democracy promotion can be a “nebulous objective” which is easily manipulated to achieve the interests of powerful groups.⁴ First, the language of democracy promotion can be used by policymakers to gain support for policies which lack a clearly democratic component, such as the overthrow of hostile regimes through military force without specific plans to institute democratic reforms in the aftermath. Second, “democracy promotion” can convey the impression of a policy driven primarily by normative factors. Yet, even when policy is aimed at creating democratic structures and systems, this may be a tool to achieve concrete geopolitical and economic interests, rather than purely normative aims. Third, the “democracy” element of “democracy promotion” is often presented by policymakers as an uncontested term. However, democratic systems vary even between Western states; the model of democracy followed by the US differs in important respects, for example, from Scandinavian models of social democracy. In addition, democratic theorists such as David Held have delineated a variety of elitist, deliberative, and direct models of democracy.⁵ Yet, Hobson argues that when Western states promote democracy, they typically promote a single liberal variant.⁶ A small number of critics of US policy have gone further, arguing that the US promotes a model of “low-intensity democracy” in which formal democratic institutions legitimize rulers but social and economic structures based on previous authoritarian models and influenced by global economic forces limit popular empowerment.⁷

Drawing from this body of scholarship, this volume does not take the Reagan administration’s democracy initiative at face value. Yet the limitations of language make it difficult to analyze concepts like “democracy promotion” without falling into a semantic trap: simply using the phrase “Reagan’s democracy initiative”—even critically—runs the risk of conveying the idea that Reagan actually did promote democracy. While we use the administration’s terminology of “democracy promotion” and “democracy initiative” as a convenient shorthand to discuss US policies aimed at instigating political change in other states, we recognize that they are not neutral concepts; the chapters in this volume work to both illuminate the extent to which US democracy promotion was rooted in political contestations—rather than moral sensibilities—and reveal its relationship to broader US foreign policy goals.

Bearing these considerations in mind, the 1980s witnessed a significant rise in the priority given to democracy promotion as a component of US foreign policy. Reagan’s foreign policy rhetoric included liberal reference to “foster[ing] the infrastructure of democracy,” “oppos[ing] tyranny in whatever form, whether of the left or the right,” and pursuing a “forward strategy of freedom.”⁸ To be sure, pro-democratic concepts had been a staple theme of US presidential rhetoric for decades. But the Reagan administration went beyond rhetoric to integrate efforts to promote democracy overseas into US foreign policy at the level of strategy, organization, and tactics.

In terms of strategy, the Reagan administration linked US pressure for political reforms in both the East and West into one overarching project. The administration steadily increased support for democracy movements in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and expanded US covert and overt security assistance to anti-communist insurgents in Central America, Southern Africa, and Afghanistan. More surprisingly, the Reagan administration encouraged transitions to democracy in anti-communist dictatorships in Latin America and Asia—erstwhile allies that had filled the ranks of the US global Cold War alliance over the previous quarter-century.

In terms of organization, US efforts to promote democracy were increasingly institutionalized in the US government bureaucracy over the course of the 1980s. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) set up an Office of Democratic Initiatives in 1984 and the State Department Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs emerged as a vocal advocate of democracy promotion as the core of the administration’s human rights policy.⁹ The 1980s also saw the emergence of an organizational alliance between the US state and American civil society groups interested in democracy promotion, symbolized by and organized around the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Created in 1983 by Congress with strong support from the Reagan administration, the NED emerged as a hub connecting individuals, organizations, and epistemic communities involved in democracy promotion, including think tanks and academics, funding organizations, and NGOs. In turn, the NED facilitated the transfer of democracy promotion training and material assistance to pro-US political organizations and projects overseas.

In terms of tactics, the administration came to focus on actions designed to directly impact political systems and processes overseas, rather than indirect initiatives such as the public diplomacy programs aimed at the projection of “freedom” as an ideological concept implemented under Truman and Eisenhower or the Kennedy administration’s Alliance for Progress, which was based on the idea that foreign aid and technical assistance programs aimed at fostering economic growth would lead to democratic political change.¹⁰ Instead, the Reagan administration deployed state-to-state pressure and top-level negotiations to foster institutional change, combined with new activities to build political systems compatible with American interests such as technical elections assistance and aid to pro-US democratic political parties and civil society groups overseas. In extreme cases such as Nicaragua, the Reagan administration combined these tactics with direct US support for an insurgent army using terrorist tactics to destabilize the leftist government.¹¹

By the late 1980s, a distinctive form of US democracy promotion—pursued through civil society or “low-intensity” military interventions and closely connected to the neoliberalism underpinning US-led globalization—had emerged as a central pillar of US foreign policy. Indeed, the rising importance of democracy promotion under Reagan had significant implications for post-Cold War US foreign policy. Both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations accorded democracy promotion a key place in their national security strategies, expanded the US government infrastructure for democracy promotion, and increased funding for non-governmental actors such as the NED and for the US government’s own democracy promotion programs.¹² Put simply, Reagan’s democracy promotion initiative laid the foundation for a defining feature of US grand strategy in the post-Cold War era: while the merits of NED President Carl Gershman’s 1991 recommendation that democratic globalism replace the Cold War as the focus of American foreign policy were (and remain) debatable, his assertion that “the basic elements of such a policy are already in place, having been assembled in the course of more than a decade” was entirely accurate.¹³ The genesis of contemporary American democracy promotion, in other words, occurred in the decade preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The chapters in this collection analyze democracy promotion under the Reagan administration at multiple levels—the conceptual, the strategic, the organizational, and the tactical. Drawing on recently declassified US government documents, non-governmental human rights organizations’ records, and in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The Reagan Administration and Democracy Promotion
• Part I. Ideology, Strategy, and Institutional Change in the Shift Toward Democracy Promotion
• Part II. US Democracy Promotion and the Soviet Empire
• Part III. Democracy Promotion and the Third World
• Part IV. Legacy
• Back Matter