*Topicality/Definitions Democracy Promotion Includes Military Intervention



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Fragile States Impacts


FRAGILE STATES POSE MULTIPLE PROBLEMS

Stephen Browne, UN Aid Program Director, 2006, Aid & Influence: do donors help or hinder? p. 59-60

Strong powers used to fear each other. Now their concerns emanate from states that are fragile and that threaten global stability. These states are still numerous – at least one-third of all developing countries. And they harbor up to one-and-a-half billion people, almost one-quarter of the world’s population.

Fragile states are of universal concern because they are the source of many of the most challenging global problems. Many are chronically prone to conflict, with more than a dozen civil war raging at any one time. Some are major exporters of narcotic drugs – Afghanistan, Burma, Colombia. Some are developing nuclear weapons and exporting the capability to develop them – North Korea and Pakistan. They are incubators of violence and terrorism, such as Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. In the zones of death, people are displaced, property is destroyed and natural resources are plundered. Weak states are also host to traffickers of people and to the still widespread practice of slave-labor. People quit failing states under the threat of persecution or economic deprivation and seek asylum or refugee status elsewehere.

Fragile states are also stalked by the silent crises of peacetime. People still starve to death in them – as in some of the West African countries in 2005 – and epidemic diseases can grow and spread alarmingly. The HIV/AIDS pandemic is the most obvious example, with 40 million carriers of the virus worldwide and 5 million additional infections every year. The much older disease of malaria – until recently the cause of even higher mortality rates in Africa than HIV/AIDS – has been almost completely eradicated in many tropical countries, but continues to afflict countries that have not applied the resources to sustain national campaigns. And polio, a disease spread by poor sanitation, but that can be controlled through universal immunization with a vaccine discovered 50 years ago, it still endemic in six countries (Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Niger, Nigeria and Pakistan). In 2005, it was carried across borders to several others, including Indonesia and Yemen.
GRANT AID BETTER FOR FRAGILE STATES

Stephen Browne, UN Aid Program Director, 2006, Aid & Influence: do donors help or hinder? p. 92



In fact, the World Bank has begun to provide more grant assistance – an average of around 20 percent – out of its International Development Association (IDA) programs for the poorer countries. Donors, outside and within the multilateral system, should provide only grants to fragile states and they should also retreat from imposing their agenda. Rather, as part of ground-up capacity development, they should allow consensus to build around national strategies. Encouragingly, this idea comes out quite strongly in numbers 4, 8 and 9 of the latest OECD/DAC principles of engagement with fragile states.


AT: “Transition Period Unstable/Risks Conflict”


INDONESIAN MODEL DEMONSTRATES THAT TRANSITIONS CAN BE PEACEFUL

Carnegie ’13, (Pau, Senior Lecturer Political Economy at the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, “Can An Indonesian Model Work in the Middle East?” Middle East Quarterly, Vol, 20, No. 3, pp. 59-67)

The Indonesian experience shows that countries do not emerge in a straightforward transition from authoritarian rule to multiparty democracy overnight: The challenges of transition are multiple. Success depends on translating momentum for change into meaningful reform and improvements over a sustained period of time. This involves redressing past injustices, economic stabilization, popular legitimization, judicial reform, diffusion of democratic values, marginalization of anti-system actors, ensuring greater civilian rule over the military, party system development, and the routinization of politics.[11] What also needs to be recognized is that democratization is not the same as democracy; one is a process, the other a political system. Democracy can become the "only game in town" if and when change occurs incrementally on the behavioral, attitudinal, and constitutional levels.[12]

Indonesia's transformation, in common with other democratizations, has been anything but easy.[13] There continue to be corruption issues, ongoing policy ineffectiveness, judicial problems, institutional frictions, and personality politics but what is clear is that there has been substantive reform. The political system is now a functioning democracy with all its benefits and shortcomings. Reviewing the steps taken to get there may help in producing applicable measures for steering the turbulent Middle Eastern societies toward a more democratic future.
ZERO EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FFOR THE CONFLICT/DEMOCRATIZATION LINK

Narang & Nelson ’09, (Research Fellow Harvard Belffer Center’s International Security Program, “Who are These Belligerent Democratizers? Reassessing the Impact of Democratization and War,” International Organization, Vol. 63, Issue 2, pp. 357-379)

Based on Mansfield and Snyder's chosen measures for regime change and war, we therefore argue that there is no empirical basis for the claim that incomplete democratizations systematically unleash a wave of belligerent nationalism that results in external war. Not only is there a severe dearth of observations involving incomplete democratization, weak institutions, and war, but we find that the main results hinge entirely on several unrepresentative observations clustered around the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Partly as a result, when we compare the full Mansfield and Snyder model to a parsimonious controls model, we find that the former adds no predictive power over the latter. We note that it is entirely possible that the indicators that Mansfield and Snyder employ do not exactly operationalize the logic of the theory. Certainly, changes in the various Polity measures may not capture what they consider to be incomplete democratization, and the Correlates of War data set may be a blunt measure for “belligerence,” especially when the chosen measurement is simply war participation. But given the best available measures for the phenomena of interest, we find no systematic empirical support for the theory that incomplete democratizers with weak institutions are more war-prone toward other states.

Given the high-profile prominence and persistence of the Mansfield and Snyder claim, these results bear on both academic and policy debates. Academically, our findings help provide some intellectual housekeeping in the debate between whether incomplete democratizers implode or explode. In showing that there is a marked lack of empirical support for the relationship between these states and war participation, let alone initiation, our conclusions strengthen the findings of the state-failure project which argues that this class of states is particularly vulnerable to internal—not external—conflict. Though there can certainly be spill-over effects from internal conflicts, there is no empirical evidence that incomplete democratizers pick fights with other states. Indeed, the Ottoman Empire observations that provide the entire statistical support for the Mansfield and Snyder results are more consistent with the state-failure hypothesis since the series of wars launched against the Ottoman Empire were primarily about dismembering it and parceling out its spoils, not about an incomplete democratizer with weak institutions engaging in diversionary external wars. Furthermore, the most salient contemporary cases of incomplete democratizationsuch as post-Cold War Russia, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia—tended to invariably result in disintegration rather than external belligerence.

Our findings are also relevant to policy debates concerning the consequences and management of democracy promotion abroad. Policymakers have invoked the finding that democratizing states are more likely to become war-prone members of the international system as a compelling argument against promoting democracy internationally. In The National Interest, Mansfield and Snyder caution that a democratizing China, with its nationalist “demand to incorporate Taiwan in the People's Republic of China, [and] its animosity toward Japan” could pose serious threats to regional and international security.55 They suggest that the international community should be extremely wary of a democratizing China and may need to take measures to contain potential Chinese belligerence during such a phase. However, the empirical evidence implies that concerns that democracy promotion will trigger international conflict are misplaced since, historically, movements towards democracy have not unleashed belligerent foreign policies. As such, adopting containment policies toward incomplete democratizers—whether it be China or others such as potentially Russia or Pakistan—in anticipation of aggression may be unnecessary and even possibly counterproductive since they risk triggering conflict through the creation of security dilemmas or other pathways completely independent of democratization.

We have thus shown that one concern about democracy promotion, that incomplete democratizers have a higher propensity to instigate external wars, is empirically unfounded. This is not to say that democratization is at all a smooth process; we do not dispute that such transitions may be fraught with risks, and that the proper sequencing and pacing of the process is critical for full democratic consolidation. But there is simply no empirical basis to think, or adopt policies predicated on the fear, that incomplete democratizers will be more belligerent members of the international system.


IT’S RELATED TO STATE BUILDING NOT DEMOCRATIZATION – QUANTITATIVE STUDIES BIASED BY MISCODING ERRORS

Carothers ’07, (July, Thomas, Director, Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Exchange: Misunderstanding Gradualism” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 18, Number 3, pp. 18-22)

I greatly appreciate the serious, thoughtful responses by Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder and by Francis Fukuyama to my January 2007 Journal of Democracy essay entitled “How Democracies Emerge: The ‘Sequencing’ Fallacy.” Unfortunately, Professors Mansfield and Snyder attribute to me ideas that I do not express in that article, mischaracterize some of the points that I do make there, and fail to engage at all with some of my fundamental arguments. The very first sentence of their response hints at the problems to come. For nowhere in my article do I, as they claim, “acknowledge the now widely recognized fact that countries taking early steps on the journey from dictatorship toward electoral politics are especially prone to civil and international war, violent revolutions, and ethnic and sectarian bloodshed.” I make no such acknowledgement because in fact I reject this view, and I find the evidence for it set out in their book Electing to Fight unpersuasive.

Their use of highly refined statistical methods to make their case is undermined, in my view, by some significant problems with their classification of cases. Thus they somehow categorize the 1982 Falklands Wara conflict started by the Argentine military juntaas an example of the warlike propensities of democratizing countries. Similarly, most observers of Balkan politics will be surprised to learn from Electing to Fight that it was the democratizing character of Serbia under the thuggish Slobodan Miloševiæ that was responsible for Serbia’s militaristic predations in Kosovo and elsewhere.

More generally, Mansfield and Snyder base a sizeable part of their case for the dangers of democratization on the internecine conflicts that flared up after the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia each broke apart. Blaming democratization for the wars that sprang from the collapse of multiethnic authoritarian federations—the messy, often violent process of establishing the borders of the newly emergent states—is a significant category mistake. As Francis Fukuyama stresses in his comment, the overwhelming bulk of the many wars that have raged in Europe over the last half a millennium have been related not to democracy, but to state-building.

Throughout their response, Mansfield and Snyder steadfastly reassert the preferability of sequentialism and their disapproval of what they call “out-of-sequence” democratic transitions. They do not, however, actually address, let alone refute, my two core arguments. To recapitulate, these are:



1) Outside East Asia, autocratic governments in the developing world have a terrible record as builders of competent, impartial institutions due to deep-seated conflicts between autocracy and the second phase of state-building (that is, going beyond establishing a monopoly of force to creating effective institutions); and

2) Although emergent democratic governments struggle with this second, institution-strengthening phase of state-building and with ruleof-law development, they have some important advantages when it comes to tackling these tasks.

Mansfield and Snyder maintain a strong skepticism about the wisdom of holding elections in places that lack what they believe are necessary preconditions for democracy. Yet this view overlooks the decades of authoritarian rule in Africa and other parts of the postcolonial world that have left so many states in such terrible condition. Prescribing the deferral of democracy—and consequently the prolongation of authoritarian rule—as a cure for the ills of prolonged authoritarianism makes little sense. In this regard, it is telling that a probing recent study of African politics since the early 1990s finds that those countries which moved early toward elections and persisted with elections thereafter have done better at consolidating all aspects of democracy than those countries that delayed holding elections.1




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