*Topicality/Definitions Democracy Promotion Includes Military Intervention
Democracy Promotion Undermines US Security Interests
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Democracy Promotion Undermines US Security InterestsREALISTS REJECT DEMOCRACY PROMOTION AS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO US SECURITY INTERESTS 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. 31 Realism deals with states as rational, unitary actors in an anarchic environment in which they seek to acquire power to defend their pre-given national interests. Structural realists are suspicious of idealistic policies like democracy promotion. John Mearsheimer or Christopher Layne, for example, see democracy promotion as a dangerous undertaking that will lead to “disastrous military interventions abroad, strategic overextension, and the relative decline of American power.” Kenneth Waltz claimed that “crusades are frightening because crusaders go to war for righteous causes which they define for themselves and try to impose on others.” Besides, structural realists also regard democracy promotion of “second-order normative concern” and argue that it can surface only if security or vital economic interests are not at stake and when systemic pressures are indeterminate. The most comprehensive theorizing on democracy promotion from a structural realist perspective has been set up and tested for the US case by Benni Miller who argues that only under hegemony will democracies promote ideology abroad, pursuing it by offensive means in a highly threatening environment and by defensive means in a benign one. Mark Peceny’s study on US military interventions for democracy contradicts this theory in two respects: first, he finds instances of US democracy promotion before and during the Cold War, that is, under multi- and bipolarity, and argues, secondly, that higher threats also hinder offensive democracy promotion. What might be missing in the realist discussion of democracy promotion is a more rigorous elaboration of democracy promotion and its relation to the security interest of democracies which will be pursued later on in this chapter. *General Negative Solvency Arguments*Arab Spring has been a FailureARAB SPRING WAS MOSTLY A FAILURE – ONLY TUNISIA HAS SUCCEEDED Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow Hoover Institute, In Search of Democracy, 2016, p. 13 Part I concludes, in Chapter 9, by addressing the puzzle of why the Arab world has been the one broad cultural region of the world not touched by the third wave of democracy. The timing of this essay, which was originally published in the Journal of Democracy in January 2010, was rather ironic, as the Arab world began to erupt by the end of that year in a wave of pro-democracy protests that came to be known as the “Arab Spring” or (perhaps more appropriately) “the Arab awakening.” As this book appears five years after the original publication of that article, the question in the title is no longer fitting in the literal sense, since Tunisia has emerged as the first Arab Democracy (in at least four decades). This is a development of enormous historical and geopolitical significance, one that the established democracies in Europe and North America should place an extremely high priority on assisting. Yet, of the six Arab countries that experienced significant uprisings during the period from December 2010 through 2012 (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria), only Tunisia has achieved electoral democracy. As I note in Chapter 4, four years after mass popular protests for democratic change began to sweep through the Arab world, most of the region’s regimes are either as authoritarian as they were in 2010, or more so. So the fundamental question persists: Why has the Arab world been so resistant to democratic change?
Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow Hoover Institute, In Search of Democracy, 2016, p. 426-7 In recent decades, no major current of American foreign policy thinking has advocated using force in order to promote democracy as the main or highest objective. From Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade back to the most ambitious American ventures in democratic transformation—in Germany and japan at the end of World War II – national security has always been the principal driver of American decisions to wage all-out war. To be sure, some American (and international) military interventions—Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia in the 1990s, and Libya in the early 2011—were motivated by humanitarian imperatives (or the intersection of humanitarian and geopolitical concerns) rather than by “hard” security calculations of imminent danger or harm to the United States. But in virtually all of these interventions, the effort to stand up and strengthen democratic institutions became an important part of the postwar nation-building effort. Moreover, this has not just been an American impulse to make democracy the form of government left behind. Increasingly, democratization has been a major theme of United Nations’ nation-building missions in war-torn countries like El Salvador, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and East Timor. And despite the legendary tensions between the American administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, and the UN Mission there, the goal of reconstructing the Iraqi state on democratic foundations was one that the UN and US shared. As is evident from the previous chapter, post-conflict states present some of the most challenging circumstances for promoting democracy because they lack many of the conditions that make democracy sustainable. International democracy promotion in these circumstances is not bereft of at least partial success stories, including El Salvador, Mozambique, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and East Timor. But the more broken the state, the more “nation building” is an immensely challenging, expensive, and protracted exercise. Moreover, the evidence shows that regime transitions are much more likely to give birth to democracy, and democracy is much more likely to persist and gain in quality if the struggle for democracy occurs mainly through nonviolent means. Thus, if the goal is success in promoting democracy, violence is the least promising tool for achieving it. BUSH STRATEGY FAILED MIDDLE EAST—STRENGTHENED MILITANT FUNDAMENTALISTS Juan Cole, History Professor-University of Michigan, 2013, American Democracy Promotion in the Changing Middle East: From Bush to Obama, eds. Akbarzadeh, MacQueen, Piscattori & Saikal, p. 21 The stunning victory of the militant Muslim fundamentalist Hamas Party in the Palestinian elections of January 2006 underlined the central contradictions in the Bush administration’s policies toward the Middle East. Bush pushed for elections, confusing them with democracy, but seemed blind to the dangers of right-wing populism. As a result, Sunni fundamentalist parties, some with ties to violent cells, emerged as key players in Iraq, Egypt and Palestine. AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ PROVES THAT COERCIVE DEMOCRACY PROMOTION COUNTERPRODUCTIVE Juan Cole, History Professor-University of Michigan, 2013, American Democracy Promotion in the Changing Middle East: From Bush to Obama, eds. Akbarzadeh, MacQueen, Piscattori & Saikal, p. 23-4 We may conclude that muscular Wilsonianism failed in the Middle East in part because the candidates chosen by Bush for this exercise were poor candidates, and because the method of externally imposed democratization is highly problematic. By invading Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush essentially allied the US with what were in those systems the “radical” faction and completely overthrew both the hard-liners and the regime reformers. This total revolution forestalled an alliance between regime reformers and outside moderate dissidents, simply removing the former along with the hardliners. The consequent polarization between a broad swathe of former regime supporters and a new elite that saw them as analogous to former Nazis in post-war Germany, drove both Afghanistan and Iraq toward civil war. Likewise, the very presence of foreign occupying troops polarized politics and encouraged suicide bombings and guerilla warfare. The new elite of moderates and radicals, confident of foreign military backing, showed an unwillingness to compromise with former regime supporters, often driving the latter into violent opposition. This method of invasion also destroyed the existing military, giving its officers no chance to split with the regime, and requiring a long and laborious attempt to build a new military, which often took on a strong ethnic coloration – the ethnicity of the newly installed regime.
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. 24-5 Democracy can be promoted through diverse actions, namely coercive, utilitarian, and identitive ones. Coercive democracy promotion is democracy promotion by force through military intervention, or covert force. Possible examples of a unilateral pro-democratic military intervention would be the US invasion of Panama (1989), or the invasion of Iraq (2003) which had both been justified with democratic motives (among other reasons); a bilateral instance is the French intervention in Mali in 2013 at the request of Mali’s government; and a multilateral example is the United Nations Security Council authorized intervention in Libya in 2011. However, this type of action to promote democracy is problematic for several viewpoints. First, it does not actually aim at any of the three targets outlined above, but at regime change only. The more substantive work which follows a military intervention classifies as utilitarian or identitive democracy promotion. Thus it makes more sense to look at the efforts invested after a military invasion than at the invasion itself. Second, military invasions usually do not aim at building democracy only. Either democracy promotion did not constitute a direct reason for participation in a war as, for example, in the often cited case of the entrance of the United States into World War II against Germany and Japan, where democracy promotion came in after the war in utilitarian, not military, form; or democracy promotion was named as one of the reasons besides security or economic goals as in the US invasions in Panama and Iraq; in these cases, however, it is unclear if democracy only served as a rhetorical device or indeed constituted one of the reasons to intervene. Added to these challenges, are normative concerns. Military democracy promotion is not a peaceful foreign policy and arguably not a democratic one. Mlada Buikoovansky, for example, terms military democracy promotion as an “undemocratic act” and Piki Ish-Shalom shows how an understanding of democracy in normative terms cannot lead to a strategy of promoting democracy at gunpoint. It might also hurt democracy per se, at home and abroad. Due to this ambivalence, it makes sense to exclude military democracy promotion from the class of phenomena of democracy promotion examined in this study and to focus instead on the utilitarian or identitive commitments which follow a military invasion. INTERVENTION INCREASES VIOLENCE AND STABILITY—NOT DEMOCRACY William Maley, Asia-Pacific College Director-Australian National University, 2013, American Democracy Promotion in the Changing Middle East: From Bush to Obama, eds. Akbarzadeh, MacQueen, Piscattori & Saikal, p. 39-40 Fifth, when a nation has intervened in another to overthrow a regime, the ‘democratization’ phase that follows is likely to be burdened with some of the unintended consequences of the earlier intervention. It is by now a commonplace observation that the United States was ill-prepared for the challenges that it encountered in Iraq, and the same is probably true of Afghanistan, from which the Bush Administration turned its attention long before it was safe to do so. (In 2007, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff commented ‘In Afghanistan we do what we can. In Iraq we do what we must.’) In the aftermath of an intervention, new and violent political forces can take shape; known forces can become spoilers; and support for involvement in the country can dwindle both amongst international allies and on the home front: this was Washington’s bitter experience in Iraq, and it is now being repeated in Afghanistan. In each country, the failure to deliver ambient security has struck at the heart of the US mission.
James Piscatori, Head of the School of International Studies-University of Durham, 2013, American Democracy Promotion in the Changing Middle East: From Bush to Obama, eds. Akbarzadeh, MacQueen, Piscattori & Saikal, p. 61 The democratization project was spectacularly derailed by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the oxymoronic term ‘coercive democratization’ seemed to cover the worst aspect of democracy promotion policy. But, even if we look at the broader record, democracy promotion often appears selective, partial, or heavy-handed. The overturning of the Algerian electoral results and consistent support for Middle Eastern monarchies are frequently cited as examples of Western hypocrisy. Julia Choucair-Vizoso says that Jordan, for example, is ‘the classic case of the United States and Europe shying away from political reform because of other strategic interests.’ What has mattered is the defense and intelligence cooperation of a dependable ally. In addition, because democracy assistance has often been conditional, particularly on the implementation of the specific prescription of economic liberalization, it has often been counterproductive. The resulting difficulties, at least in the short-term, have undermined popular support for the broader agenda, as in Egypt with its open-door (infitah) policy during the 1970s, or enriched already entrenched elites, as in Syria and Jordan.
Leanne Piggott, Director Business Programs-University of Sydney Business School, 2013, American Democracy Promotion in the Changing Middle East: From Bush to Obama, eds. Akbarzadeh, MacQueen, Piscattori & Saikal, p. 94 However, the “Catch-22” for authoritarian regimes, and the US in its pursuit of regional stability, is that such policies breed disaffection in the wider population and the more a regime exercises its coercive power in an attempt to protect its rule, the more its institutional weakness and lack of popular legitimacy is reinforced. This is turn promotes instability, provoking the threat of violent resistance, and in some cases, violent action. The more violent the dissent, the more brutal is the state’s response. The more brutal the state’s response, the more violent is the dissent. For US policy-makers engaged in counter-terrorism, Islamist opposition groups that promote extremism and violence are a case in point. As Hafez argues in his book, Why Muslims Rebel: Repression and Resistance in the Islamic World, there is a strong correlation between political and institutional exclusion, on the one hand, and reactive and indiscriminate repression on the other. Islamist rebellions, he explains are “often defensive reactions to overly repressive regimes that misapply their repression in ways that radicalize, rather than deter, movement activists and supporters. DEMOCRACY PROMOTION IN IRAQ FAILED – TRIED TO IMPOSE US MODEL Aiman Saikal, Political Science Professor-Australian National University, 2013, American Democracy Promotion in the Changing Middle East: From Bush to Obama, eds. Akbarzadeh, MacQueen, Piscattori & Saikal, p. 107 The US push for democratizing Iraq was poorly defined and instituted from the beginning. It essentially aimed at planting a kind of replica of American democracy in a country whose traditions and conditions acted against it. It not only sharpened the deep-seated sectarian and ethnic differences, but also ultimately empowered the Shi’a majority to become more assertive in its quest for power, with three important consequences. One was that the Sunnis, who had historically governed Iraq and forged the country’s national identity as an Arab state in close sectarian and ethnic affiliation with the rest of the Arab world, and the Kurds, who had built an autonomous enclave for themselves in northern Iraq with US backing since the first Gulf War off 1991, became alarmed at the prospect of a Shi’a dominated government. The second was that the Shi’a Islamic Republic of Iran could draw strategic benefit from the development, given its close sectarian links with a number of powerful Iraqi Shi’a groups – Al-Sadr’s group in particular – and strategic partnership with another US regional adversary, Syria, as well as the Shi’a Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. The third was that most US-allied Arab regimes viewed the changing situation as potentially shifting the balance of power in favor of Iran and Shi’a Islam in the region. These constituted developments which were contrary to everything that the US wanted to achieve as a result of the invasion of Iraq. 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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