*Topicality/Definitions Democracy Promotion Includes Military Intervention
Should Direct U.S. Democracy Assistance Towards Civil Society and Rule of Law Projects
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- U.S. Foreign Assistance in Mideast Effective
- U.S. Addressing Problems with Democracy Assistance
- Democracy Assistance Does Not Dictate Outcomes
- Middle East Key Region for Democracy Promotion
- AT: “Arab Democratization Inevitably Fails”
Should Direct U.S. Democracy Assistance Towards Civil Society and Rule of Law ProjectsUS SHOULD DIRECT DEMOCRACY PROMOTION TOWARD STRENGTHENING CIVIL SOCIETY, RULE OF LAW AND TRANSPARENCY Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow Hoover Institute, In Search of Democracy, 2016, p. 169 Second would be a change in US policy to resume principled engagement and more extensive practical assistance to encourage and press for democratic reforms, not just in the electoral realm but with respect to enhancing judicial independence and governmental transparency as well as expanding freedom of the press and civil society. If this were pursued in a more modest tone, and reinforced to some degree by European pressure, it could help to rejuvenate and protect domestic political forces that are now dispirited and in disarray. But to proceed along this path, the United States and its European allies would have to overcome the undifferentiated view of Islamist parties and engage those Islamist actors who would be willing to commit more clearly to liberal-democratic norms.
George A. Laudato, USAID Mideast Bureau, 2008, House Hearing: U.S. Assistance to the Middle East: Old Tools for New Tasks?, May 8, [http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/110/42296.pdf], p. 11 Since USAID began working in the Middle East over 50 years ago, U.S. assistance has been used to provide clean water and sanitation facilities, better health care, modern schools and teacher training, microfinance and help for small business, roads and cutting edge information technology. We have helped countries in the region to improve their trade regimes, modernize their banking systems, remove impediments to private sector development, and put effective regulatory systems in place to ensure accountable and transparent governance. The region has seen many improvements over these years that will undergird future advancements where USAID development programs operate. U.S. Addressing Problems with Democracy AssistanceUSAID ADDRESSING PROBLEMS WITH DEMOCRACY ASSISTANCE Representative Berman, 2010, House Hearing: Human Rights and Democracy Assistance: Increasing the Effectiveness of U.S. Foreign Aid, June 10, [http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-111hhrg56888/html/CHRG-111hhrg56888.htm] To address these problems, we recently released a discussion paper on human rights and democracy assistance--which is available on our committee Web site--that proposes a number of common-sense solutions to those problems. These proposed reforms--such as requiring action plans to broaden civic participation and prevent human rights abuses, enhancing the democracy and governance functions at USAID, modernizing and codifying existing human rights statutes, and improving training for democracy and human rights officers--will allow us to more effectively assist human rights defenders, promote participatory forms of government, and strengthen the rule of law. Democracy Assistance Does Not Dictate OutcomesDEMOCRACY ASSISTANCE PROVIDES TRAINING AND RESOURCES – DOES NOT DICTATE OUTCOMES Representative Berman, 2010, House Hearing: Human Rights and Democracy Assistance: Increasing the Effectiveness of U.S. Foreign Aid, June 10, [http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-111hhrg56888/html/CHRG-111hhrg56888.htm] It is worth noting that our democracy assistance does not aim to impose a particular form of government on anyone: These funds help local partners build representative and accountable institutions in their own countries. They take the lead, while we provide the training and resources that will enable them to be more successful. Our programs include activities often carried out by nongovernmental organizations--such as training judges and journalists, monitoring elections, and encouraging the development of political parties and civil society organizations. Middle East Key Region for Democracy PromotionMIDDLE EAST KEY REGION TO STUDY EFFECTIVENESS OF DEMOCRACY PROMOTION Dionysis Markakis, Center for International and Regional Studies- Georgetown University, 2016, US Democracy Promotion in the Middle East: The Pursuit of Hegemony, p. 5-6 The Middle East provides a particularly interesting context to study the US strategy of democracy promotion. It is one of the few regions to remain relatively impervious to the processes of democratization that have characterized much of the world. Yet it remains of crucial geo-strategic importance to the US and the West more generally, with regional stability a paramount interest. The Middle East illustrates the fundamental tension posed between America’s ongoing relationships with authoritarian governments in the region, in the hope of maintaining the status quo and in particular stability over the short-term, and its desire to encourage political reform and the spread of its ideology, so as to ensure a more sound, enduring form of stability over the long-term. Yet Middle Eastern governments have largely sought to resist the liberal democratic political and free market economic reforms advocated by the US, while Middle Eastern societies have, to varying degrees and by no means exclusively, shied away from the social and cultural values that are part of the promoted American ideology. At the same time the Middle East serves as the host of one of the few viable counter-hegemonic ideologies in the form of Islamism, which has been gathering political momentum across the region over the last decade and more, with Islamist parties winning elections in Algeria, the Palestinian territories, Tunisia, and Egypt. AT: “Arab Democratization Inevitably Fails”NEITHER RELIGION, CULTURE NOR ECONOMICS IS AN OBSTACLE TO ARAB DEMOCRATIZATION Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow Hoover Institute, In Search of Democracy, 2016, p. 13 I dispute in Chapter 9 the common instinct to blame the absence of Arab democracy on religion. The mere fact of Islam being the dominant religion of the Arab world cannot be the cause, because a number of Muslim-majority countries have had significant experience with democracy elsewhere in the world (most especially Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country, but also, off and on, Bangladesh and Pakistan, and in Africa countries like Senegal, Mali and Niger). Neither does culture seem a very satisfying explanation, at least if we examine the manifestations of it in public opinion surveys such as the Arab Barometer, which were showing when I wrote the essay in 2009, and which continue to show, widespread Arab public support for democracy as a system of government. It seems implausible to blame the democracy deficit on economic development, since there are a number of rich Arab oil states, and even the non-oil states have less of development that have permitted democratic development elsewhere in the world. ARABS DO WANT DEMOCRACY, FREEDOM AND A SYSTEM THAT RESPECTS THE RULE OF LAW Daniela Huber, Senior Fellow Instituto Affari Internazionali, Rome, 2015, Democracy Promotion and Foreign Policy: Identity and Interests in US, EU, and Non-Western Democracies, p. 134-6 In the Middle East and North Africa democracy has never passed the 10 percent threshold since it fell below it in 1975. Nonetheless, Figures 9.1 also shows a cautious liberalization process in the early 2000s which was short-lived and declined from 2007 onwards after political Islam had been increasingly successful in relatively democratic elections Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority in the 2005/2006 period and government of countries such as Egypt or Jordan tightened their grip on the opposition again. Nonetheless, a desire for democracy in the Arab world was apparent in opinion surveys. In its 2006 surveys, the Arab Barometer showed that an average of 90 percent of respondents believed that it would be good to have a democratic system of governance in their country, and an average of 86 percent of respondents found that democracy is the best system of governance. In addition, the 2005 Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the 2008 bread riots and strikes in Egypt, and the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran were the first signs of a trend which cascaded in the 2011 Arab uprisings. At the time of writing, significant democratic advances were achieved in Tunisia and possibly Libya which, however, struggles with establishing a monopoly of power in the country. In the other MENA states that experienced major protests, Bahrain, Egypt, and Syria – authoritarian regimes have suppressed or adapted to the uprisings. Other states, like Morocco, Jordan, and Algeria, were successful in preventing large-scale protests from evolving in the first place. Nonetheless – and indeed similar to the third wave of democratization that “reinforced the view that respect for human rights and democratic principles was not an exclusively Western phenomenon and could and should be promoted abroad” – the Arab uprisings have powerfully dispelled an argument championed by Samuel Huntington, namely that “individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, …often have little resonance in Islamic…cultures.” FALLING OIL PRICES WILL FACILITATE ARAB DEMOCRATIZATION Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow Hoover Institute, In Search of Democracy, 2016, p. 169 The biggest game changer would be a prolonged, steep decline in world oil prices (say to half of current levels). Although the smallest of the Gulf oil kingdoms would remain rich at any conceivable price, the bigger countries such as Saudi Arabia (population 29 million) would find it necessary to broach the question of a new political bargain with their own burgeoning (and very young) publics. Algeria and Iran would come under even greater pressure, and while Iran is not an Arab state, it has an Arab minority, and one should not underestimate the felicitous impact on Arab democratic prospects of a democratic transition in a major Middle Eastern country that also contains the region’s only example of a full-blown Islamist regime. When one looks at what has happened to democracy in Nigeria, Russia, and Venezuela as the price of oil has soared in recent years, the policy imperative for driving down the price of oil becomes even more compelling. Before too much longer, however, accelerating climate change is likely to compel a much more radical response to this challenge. When the global revolution in energy technology hits with full force, finally breaking the oil cartel, it will bring a decisive end to Arab political exceptionalism. TRANSITION FROM CURRENT ARAB LEADERSHIP INEVITABLE – CAN’T PREDICT HOW IT WILL TURN OUT Dionysis Markakis, Center for International and Regional Studies- Georgetown University, 2016, US Democracy Promotion in the Middle East: The Pursuit of Hegemony, p. 179-80 With reference to the achievement off a Gramsian hegemony, it is clear that the US strategy of democracy promotion did not achieve this in Egypt, Iraq or Kuwait. The achievement of hegemony is an organic process, whereby coercion is replaced by consensualism, the promoted ideology internalized voluntarily by society itself as the natural order. By the end of the G. W. Bush administration’s second term in January 2009, this did not apply in either of the case studies or the wider region. But through an emphasis on strengthening civil society, and imparting American political, economic, social and cultural values on a societal level both the Clinton and the G.W. Bush administrations did seek to encourage the acceptance of the promoted ideology by Egyptian, Iraqi and Kuwaiti societies. When one considers that both democratization and the achievement of hegemony are long-term, multi-layered processes, then developments in the Middle East indicate that to some extent their efforts may have been significant, although how much exactly remains unclear. Beginning in late 2010, under the banner of the Arab Spring, various countries in the Middle East witnessed the emergence of popular movements that demanded, at least broadly, some of the very norms and values promoted by the US. Starting with Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, successive authoritarian governments fell across the region in the face of popular protests. Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the US’s main Arab ally in the region, was perhaps the most unexpected. Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Ali Abdullah Sale in Yemen followed. In the meantime Bahrain and Syria witnessed civil uprisings, the former repressing it violently, while the latter degenerated into civil war. Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Sudan all saw protests. Smaller ones also took place in Lebanon, Mauritania, Oman and Saudi Arabia. The Middle East appeared to be on the precipice of significant political change. As Prince Hassan bin Al-Talal of Jordan stated: “the outcome of this tectonic realignment is not just unpredictable but unknowable.”
Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow Hoover Institute, In Search of Democracy, 2016, p. 14 Islam has entered into the picture in a peculiar sense: The fear of radical Islam has induced many middle-class Arab professionals who would be liberal democrats in other regional settings to back these largely secular authoritarian regimes as the lesser of two evils. This, unfortunately, has been important factor explaining the failure of democracy in Egypt after the fall of Mubarak: Under President Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood tried to aggrandize its power, rather than reaching out (as its sister party, Ennahda, did in Tunisia) to form a broader coalition that would cooperate with liberal and secular elements of society, while adhering to the rules of the democratic game. More or less unquestioning Western support has added further ballast to Arab authoritarian regimes, helping to sustain them and insulate them from societal pressures. That changed when a number of Arab societies rose up in protest in 2010 and 2011, but unfortunately the destabilization and near state collapse in Libya, the debacle of Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt and the intense polarization of Egyptian society, along with the rise of the Islamic State and the ongoing chaos and violence in the region, have all combined to enervate the resolve of the West to support democratic principles and groups in the Arab world. As a result, authoritarianism has gained a new lease on life in that region, and perhaps so have my arguments explaining it in Chapter 9. Yet I think this lease is bound to be temporary, because Arab societies are undergoing fundamental change, and the old ruling bargains based on repression, co-optation, and intimidation cannot address the fundamental challenges these societies confront.
Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow Hoover Institute, In Search of Democracy, 2016, p. 161 As Alfred Stepan and Graeme Robertson have shown, there is a big “democracy gap” among states in the world, but it is an Arab much more than a “Muslim gap.” Comparing the 16 Muslim-majority countries that are predominantly Arab with 29 other Muslim-majority countries, Stepan and Robertson find among the latter a number (including Albania, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Senegal, and Turkey) with significant records of extending reasonably democratic political rights to their citizens. Among the Arab countries, the only one that meets this description is Lebanon before the civil war that began in 1975. Moreover, taking account of the level of political rights one might predict from the level of per capita income, they find numerous “electoral overachievers” among the Muslim-majority states that are not predominantly Arab, and none among the Arab states.
Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow Hoover Institute, In Search of Democracy, 2016, p. 162 It could also be argued—and has been regarding both Iraq and Lebanon—that sectarian and ethnic divisions run too deep to permit democracy in these countries. Yet Iraq and Lebanon – for all their fractious, polarized divisions—are the two Arab countries closest to full electoral democracy today, while two of the most homogenous countries, Egypt and Tunisia, are also two of the most authoritarian. In fact, ethnic or religious differences hardly pose a more severe obstacle to democracy in the Arab world than they do in countries such as India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Ghana. Again, something else must be going on.
Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow Hoover Institute, In Search of Democracy, 2016, p. 162 Maybe it is that Arab populations simply do not want or value electoral democracy the way mass publics have come to desire and value this form of self-government in other regions of the world. But then how do we account for the overwhelming shares of Arab publics—well over 80 percent in Algeria, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority, and even Iraq—who agree that “despite the drawbacks, democracy is the best system of government” and that “having a democratic system would be good for our country.” Not only is support for democracy very broad in the Arab world, but it doesn’t vary by degree of religiosity. “In fact, more religious Muslims are as likely as less religious Muslims to believe that democracy, despite is drawbacks, is the best political system.” Look at the way Iraqis turned out to vote three times in 2005, amid widespread and dire risks to their physical safety, and it is hard to conclude that Arabs do not care about democracy. By contrast, when elections (as in Egypt) offer little meaningful choice, or where (as in Morocco) they are of little consequence in determining who will really rule, it is not surprising that most people become disillusioned and opt not to vote. RELIGION NOT AN OBSTACLE TO ARAB DEMOCRATIZATION Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow Hoover Institute, In Search of Democracy, 2016, p. 162-3 Here is where religion and attitudes do enter in as relevant factors. We do not yet know, on the basis of the Arab Barometer data to date, what proportion of those who opt both for “democracy” and for Islamic influence in government favor an understanding of democracy that affirms not only majority rule but also minority rights—including the right of the minority to try to become the majority in the next election. The evidence examined by Amaney Jamal and Mark Tessler suggests that proponents of secular democracy vary little from their compatriots who back Islamic democracy when it comes to support for democratic values such as openness, tolerance, and equality, with the qualification that secular democrats seem modestly more liberal when it comes to racial tolerance and the rights of women. Jamal and Tessler conclude hopefully that Arabs value democracy, even if their concern for stability leads them to want it to come only gradually, and that neither religious politics not personal religiosity pose a major obstacle.
Dionysis Markakis, Center for International and Regional Studies- Georgetown University, 2016, US Democracy Promotion in the Middle East: The Pursuit of Hegemony, p. 58-9 A second premise behind the US’s sustenance of authoritarianism has been the influence of arguments of Middle Eastern “exceptionalism.” These have sought to explain the prevalence of authoritarianism, and the perceived resistance to Western political, economic, social, and cultural values, by focusing on aspects of the region’s culture: these include “Islam, ‘Oriental despotism,’ patrimonialism, patriarchalism, ‘small group politics’ and mass passivity.” Elie Kedourie’s statement that the idea of democracy is quite alien to the mind set of Islam’ is one notable example. Such claims of exceptionalism have long contributed to the perception of a troubled region, set apart from the rest of the world, immune to its trends and influences. This reduced the onus on the US to act as a catalyst for reform in the region, somewhat excusing its support of the authoritarian status quo. Yet claims of exceptionalism are largely redundant, particularly when reference is made to a monolithic, static Arabo-Islamic political culture. As Raymond Hinnesbusch observers: “most analysts insist that Islam varies too widely by context and time to constitute an unchanging religious obstacle to democratization.” Lisa Anderson argues further that “the repeated demands for human rights, political liberalization, and democratic government in the Arab world in the 1980s and 1990s – demands that actually yielded contested parliamentary elections in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen – belie uniform hostility to democracy.” Yet successive American administrations have been influenced by these very arguments. It was therefore a significant statement when, in 2004, President G. W. Bush explicitly rejected the prevailing notion of Middle Eastern exceptionalism. He claimed: “We also hear doubts that democracy is a realistic goal for the greater Middle East, where freedom is rare. Yet it is mistaken, and condescending, to assume that whole cultures and great religions are incompatible with liberty and self-government. I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again.” This argument in favor of a universal interpretation of democracy marks an important threshold for the US strategy of democracy promotion in the Middle East. It established a significant precedent for US policy to the region as a whole, driven by the unequivocal recognition that, in the aftermath of 11 September, authoritarian systems of government could no longer best ensure US interests over the long-term. G.W. Bush concluded: “Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.” Directory: assets assets -> Northern territory of australia assets -> Number: caveat in the [Will/Will and Codicil/Estate of] assets -> Invitation for Bid Calact/mbta for Standard Floor and Low Floor Rural Duty Vehicles ifb no. 12-03 November 14, 2012 assets -> 12 Step Retreats For Everyone in Twelve Step Recovery Ratner Fellowship assets -> 12 Step Retreats For Everyone in Twelve Step Recovery Ratner Fellowship assets -> Sigaccess annual Report assets -> Central Government is expected to ask the seventh pay commission to consider merging 50% dearness allowance assets -> List of accessible executive records assets -> Emergency telephone numbers Call toll-free from anywhere in France Download 2.51 Mb. Share with your friends:
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