Development & Aid, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Human Rights, North America, Poverty & SDGs

POLITICS-US: Overcoming Toxic Legacy of Bush-Style Democracy

Ali Gharib

WASHINGTON, Apr 24 2009 (IPS) - A massive overhaul of U.S. development assistance is needed, says a new report from an influential Washington think tank.

While the “heightened rhetorical attention” given to democracy issues by George W. Bush’s administration was welcomed by many democracy activists, said the report, the effects of some of his policies may have “set back” U.S. democracy promotion efforts.

Now, says the report, “Revitalising U.S. Democracy Promotion: A Comprehensive Plan for Reform”, released this week by the New America Foundation in conjunction with Georgetown Law’s Human Rights Institute, the U.S. must rethink its policies in order to emerge from the dark shadows of the Bush administration.

The report, authored by Michael Cohen and Maria Figueroa Küpçü, consulted a who’s who of U.S. democracy promotion experts in order to come up with a set of proposals for the new administration of Barack Obama.

Among the groups’ recommendations were to take the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and make it a cabinet-level position – a proposed Department of International Development (DID) – and place “all government-wide development and democracy assistance programs (which are now scattered among many government agencies)” under the department.

However, while efforts at democracy and development are to be consolidated – eliminating bureaucratic inefficiencies – other forms of foreign assistance need to be sectioned out of that pool.

“Sharper delineations should be made between strategic assistance, development and democratisation aid, and humanitarian, public health, and disaster relief assistance,” said the report.

The split is because, after years of disastrous Bush policies that mixed political and strategic goals with the ostensible goal of spreading “democracy”, the issue has become toxic.

“The Iraq War and Bush’s policies have clouded democracy,” said Chris Homan, a foreign policy adviser on the staff of Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, at a New America event launching the report.

After Iraq, Homan said, “democracy” suddenly meant “regime change” to people around the world. And Bush-era policies on interrogation and detention have undermined U.S. influence.

“America’s example matters,” he said. “Our own adherence to the rule of law and human rights [matters].”

With Obama ordering an end to harsh interrogations and, based on his early opposition to the Iraq invasion, unwilling to start wars of choice for regime change, the priority for the administration must become how to reinvigorate enthusiasm and trust in the process of democracy promotion abroad.

But in order to do that, said the panelists, the administration needed to make sure that democracy promotion was not being mixed with political goals, as it often has in the past.

Among their highest recommendations were “raising the profile” of democracy and development as a major part of U.S. foreign policy, as well as thinking of democratic change on a new time frame.

“While there are occasionally exceptions to the rule, democratic evolution does not occur overnight,” says the report. “It can take years, even decades… Nor, in general, does the occurrence of a free and fair election signal the ascendancy of democratic rule.”

The last sentence seems like a deserved shot at the Bush administration, which with its neoconservative fervor for democracy and almost exclusively democracy as a means to remake the world, often conflated the concept with mere elections. But sometimes, as in 2006 in Palestine when Hamas won parliamentary elections or when, again and again, U.S. adversary Hugo Chavez takes the presidency in Venezuela, the U.S. turns its back on democratic results and plays hardball with democratically elected governments as if they were authoritarian rivals rather than democratic ones.

“We have to support processes,” said Ted Piccone, a fellow and democracy expert at the Brookings Institution, who said it was time to stop “trying to pick winners.”

But inherent in much of the reports recommendations would seem to imply picking winners: there is much talk in the report about the importance of non-state actors as targets for help promoting democracy.

In contrast to the way U.S. democracy promoters usually see their task as a “top-down state-driven process,” says the report, democracy promotion needs to be thought of as “largely driven by an empowered citizenry and maintained by the establishment of institutions geared toward shepherding and safe-guarding democratic practices.”

“Moreover,” the report continues, “engaging with non-elites and civil society organisations has an important multiplier effect, spearheading a process of decentralisation and local empowerment that must be encouraged in future democratisation endeavors.”

Many on the panel celebrated the notion of bottom-up democracy promotion. The report notes that by building a democracy from its roots – people – it will have a greater chance of sustaining itself.

That’s why the report recommends that the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), formed in 2004 to distribute aid to some of the world’s poorest countries, will need to play an important role in U.S. development assistance.

The MCC model of using performance indicators to asses grant viability were celebrated by the report, which suggested it as an excellent organ for linking up with civil society.

But if the bottom-up approach to building democracy will work better, it must be noted that the approach will also take longer.

Participants in the discussion group for the report, whose views the report did not necessarily reflect, according to a disclaimer, included State Department official Susan Johnson, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Thomas Carothers, Center for American Progress Fellow and former Bill Clinton administration democracy hand Morton Halperin, and Georgetown Law Human Rights Institute director Rosa Brooks.