*Topicality/Definitions Democracy Promotion Includes Military Intervention
Civil Society Assistance Undermines Genuine Democracy
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- Civil Society Assistance Fails: Civic Education
Civil Society Assistance Undermines Genuine Democracy“TECHNICAL” ASSISTANCE FOR CIVIL SOCIETY PROMOTION PRIVILEGES STABILITY OVER TRUE DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION Imco Brouwer, Mediterranean Program Coordinator-European University Institute, 2000, Funding Virtue: civil society aid and democracy promotion, eds. M. Ottaway & T. Carothers, p. 32-3 The literature on democratic transitions stresses that they are the result of power struggles between actors—elite and/or mass groups—over alternative political programs and world views. Such struggle can be more or less peaceful and can be resolved in various ways: through a pact, imposition, reform, or revolution. In short, regime transitions are political processes.
Chantal Mouffe, Political Theory Professor-University of Westminster, 2011, Globality, Democracy and Civil Society, eds. T. Carver & J. Bartelson, p. 100 The current disaffection with politics that we witness in many liberal democratic societies stems in my view from the fact that the role played by the political public sphere is becoming irrelevant. Political decisions are increasingly taken to be of a technical nature and thus better resolved by judges or technocrats as bearers of a supposed impartiality. Today, because of the lack of a democratic political public sphere where agonistic confrontation could take place, it is the legal system that is often seen as responsibility for organizing human coexistence and for regulating social relations. Given the growing impossibility of envisaging the problems of society in a political way, it is the law which is expected to provide solutions for all types of conflicts. This situation, in my view, explains the current revival of the theme of civil society, which is perceived as a realm whose resources can provide a solution to the absence of a vibrant political life.
Chantal Mouffe, Political Theory Professor-University of Westminster, 2011, Globality, Democracy and Civil Society, eds. T. Carver & J. Bartelson, p. 101 Even pragmatists like Richard Rorty (2008), despite carrying out a far-reaching and important critique of the rationalist approach, fail to propose an adequate alternative. The problem with Rorty is that, albeit in a different way, he also ends up privileging consensus and missing the dimension of “the political.” To be sure, the consensus that he advocates is to be reached through persuasion and “sentimental education,” not through rational argumentation, but he nevertheless believes in the possibility of an all-encompassing consensus. Such privileging of consensus, in my view, is inimical to democracy, because it tends to silence dissenting voices. This is why I believe that an approach which reveals the impossibility of establishing a consensus without exclusion is of fundamental importance for democratic politics. By warning us against the illusion that a fully achieved democracy could ever be instantiated, it forces us to keep the democratic contestation alive. Civil Society Assistance Fails: Civic EducationCIVIC EDUCATION PROGRAMS FAIL TO CHANGE POLITICAL VALUES AND BEHAVIOR Imco Brouwer, Mediterranean Program Coordinator-European University Institute, 2000, Funding Virtue: civil society aid and democracy promotion, eds. M. Ottaway & T. Carothers, p. 34-5 Civic education programs attempt to do one or more of the following: 1) increase knowledge of Western liberal democratic principles and institutions; 2) socialize people in recipient countries to Western civic values; and 3) stimulate them to become politically active citizens who vote in elections, write petitions to their representatives, and eventually become embers or founders of civil society organizations. The programs assume that the targeted individuals lack knowledge, are not sufficiently civic-minded, or are politically passive—sometimes all three. While civic education possibly has a strong, positive effect on the recipients’ formal knowledge of democratic institutions, its effect on values and behavior is much less certain and has been shown to diminish rapidly after a program ends. Nevertheless, large-scale civic education programs have been financed and implemented in both Egypt and Palestine. Civic education was used to provide information and motivate citizens to participate in the 1996 elections in Palestine and the 1997 local elections in Egypt. The election in Palestine was the first held after the territories had become autonomous and was expected to be relatively free and fair. Civic education seems to have had a positive effect on voters’ turnout and on the proportion valid votes cast. But the local elections in Egypt were not expected to be free or fair, and the civic education program—implemented by the newly established Group for Democratic Development and by Hoda, the Association of Egyptian Women Voters—were useless. Citizens who had been led to believe that their vote was important discovered otherwise, and possibly this increased political pessimism and passivity. Under such conditions, citizens probably should not be taught how to vote, but be assisted in organizing against the regime. JAPAN AND GERMANY DO NOT DEMONSTRATE EFFECTIVENESS OF US DEMOCRACY PROMOTION THROUGH EDUCATION IN POST-CONFLICT SOCIETIES E. Doyle Stevick, Education Professor- University of South Carolina, 2008, Advancing Democracy Through Education: US influence abroad and domestic practices, eds. E. Stevic & B. Levinson, p. xix-xx The major wave of education reform that occurred in Japan during the postwar occupation involved the promotion of peace and democracy through education for the reconstruction of Japanese society. Many of these reforms are still controversial with conservatives and nationalists in Japan. Germany does not seem to be beset with the same concerns, and the divergence of Japan and Germany seems to echo the differences Go revealed in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Beate Rosenweigh (1998) compared educational reforms in postwar Japan and Germany, finding that although changes in the structure of the school system as a result of the American occupation were much more evident in Japan than in Germany, the more meaningful curricular and pedagogical changes, which are less visible, took place in the German schools. Structural change should therefore not be conflated with “success” in democratization of the education system, although it was a leading criterion for officials of the American occupation. Although both Germany and Japan evolved in the half-century after the war into relatively peaceful and prosperous societies, the extent to which U.S. involvement in reforming their education systems should be credited is extremely difficult to assess. In fact, the victors’ goals could often be ethnocentric and inappropriate to the context. For example, presiding general Douglas “MacArthur’s greatest disappointment may have been his failure to convert the Japanese masses to Christianity, despite his conviction that ‘true democracy can exist only on a spiritual foundation,’ and will ‘endure when it rests firmly on the Christian conception of the individual and society.’” American ventures in educational reform around the world were, and continue to be, fraught with cultural baggage and assumptions, some explicit, many not, others embedded in larger polices and practices.
E. Doyle Stevick, Education Professor- University of South Carolina, 2008, Advancing Democracy Through Education: US influence abroad and domestic practices, eds. E. Stevic & B. Levinson, p. xxi Where its military ventures proved unsuccessful, the U.S. had no opportunity to attempt to repeat the system reconstruction pursued in Japan and Germany. Divided Korea manifests the problem that Noah Webster feared for the United States: both North and South Korea embrace a rhetoric of one Korean nation, divided into two political units, as Ford, Wilson, and Jones (2005) have shown. They thus identify what they call two strains of nationalism in the history curricula of North and South Korea: “’civic nationalism’ that emphasizes the rights and duties of citizenship and identification with the [particular] political state… [and] ‘ethno-cultural nationalism’ that highlights the inherent unity of the Korean ‘national people’ (minjok)”. Had the U.S. been able to fully implement an educational component in the reconstruction of Iraq, it is likely that state-building would have had to take a secondary role to nation-building. Although foreigners may refer primarily to its citizens as Iraqis, the extent to which the peoples of Iraq feel themselves to be above all Iraqi, or Muslim, or Kurdish, or Sunni, or Shiite, is of critical importance to the prospects for crafting a united Iraqi nation and identity, lest the centrifugal forces of separatist identities lead ultimately to partition, ethnic cleansing or genocide, Iraq, after all, did not evolve “naturally” as a “nation-state” in the European mold, but rather was the outcome of foreign interventions and conquests that shoe-horned distinct and often rival groups into a common territory. USAID CIVIC EDUCATION PROGRAMS IN PALESTINE HAVE FAILED TO PROMOTE DEMOCRACY E. Doyle Stevick, Education Professor- University of South Carolina, 2008, Advancing Democracy Through Education: US influence abroad and domestic practices, eds. E. Stevic & B. Levinson, p. xxiv A Palestinian educator and scholar, Ayman Alsayed presents a critical account of “discourse versus practice” in efforts by international donors to help develop democratic civic education in Palestine. In his chapter, Alsayed fundamentally questions the very meaning and direction of national “development.” He contrasts grassroots Palestinian normative goals of social justice, and fulfillment of human potential, with the prevailing developmentalist goals of free markets and macroeconomic prosperity. He notes that international donors consider democracy and “good governance” absolutely necessary to development, but then he wonders why donor-supported civic education programs tend to carry forth such a narrow vision of democratic education. Taking up the debate over what really constitutes “democracy” and democratization, Alsayed contrasts the urban and elite orientation of donor programs for democratic civic education with the often more radical, and popularly rooted, education of other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). He uses document analysis to focus his attention on these problems in a particular USAID program for adult civic education in Palestine, called Tamkeen (Arabic for “empowerment”). According to Alsayed, the Tamkeen program illustrates many of the problems with international donor funding of so-called democratic civic education. Because of geopolitical exigencies, he argues, the USAID program enforces narrow definitions of democracy, restricts participation to government (i.e. Palestinian National Authority) allies, exemplifies authoritarian rather than democratic means of governing, and marginalizes popular groups. In the end, the application of USAID funding rules has the effect of limiting the successes of civic education to the realm of formal, cognitive knowledge, while dampening the participation and behavioral transformation that democratic theorists agree are truly the ingredients of successful democratic citizenship.
Ayan M. Alsayed, Counselor in International Education and Development, 2008, Advancing Democracy Through Education: US influence abroad and domestic practices, eds. E. Stevic & B. Levinson, p. 77 The Palestinian case is a particularly complex example of the politics of donor involvement in democracy and governance, and clearly reflects the critiques of civic education and democratization for development that I have noted above. Aid that supports civic education in Palestine is high on the agenda of many donors. This aid is promoted as a support for peace and stability and the basis for a strong democracy in the future Palestinian state. While donors speak of empowering the Palestinian people and supporting the growth of their democratic institutions, however, they also—to varying extents—impose conditions and agendas on those institutions that in fact are not democratic and not in Palestinian interests for the long term. CIVIC EDUATION ASSISTANCE TO PALESTINE HAS INCREASED KNOWLEDGE BUT NOT DEMOCRATIC RESULTS Ayan M. Alsayed, Counselor in International Education and Development, 2008, Advancing Democracy Through Education: US influence abroad and domestic practices, eds. E. Stevic & B. Levinson, p. 91 Overall, USAID and other donors’ civic education assistance to Palestinian civil society has had mixed results. On the one hand, as the USAID evaluation shows, knowledge about democracy and governance has increased and some related practices have appeared. On the other hand, this aid has created many skeptics, who argue that the values represented in programs are not practiced by donors, that the organizations selected to provide civic education programming are elitist and not representative, and that the political constraints on Palestinians do not support the development of a sustainable civil society and a healthy democracy. USAID’s terrorism certification is a particularly clear example of why this skepticism exists.
E. Doyle Stevick, Education Professor-University of South Carolina, 2008, Advancing Democracy Through Education: US influence abroad and domestic practices, eds. E. Stevic & B. Levinson, p. xxvii-xxviii Although policy elites who work from an implicit model of “from the top-down” policy may regard deviations from their goals and expectations as “failures of implementation,” in fact, individuals throughout these policy networks inevitably appropriate policy in ways that alter it from the initial conception. The top-down policy and coercive diplomacy of informal imperialism are no more likely to be successful than the transmission-orientation discussed in the previous chapter. As we strive to manifest democratic values and processes in the advancement of democratic education in our societies and others, the needs for openness, for deep engagement, for relating across differences, are highlighted within Levinson’s and Sutton’s (2001) definition of appropriation itself as,
For their chapter; Levinson and Sutton explore what happens when concepts and models of democratic education that were first developed in the Euro-American context meet the condition of large, poor, newly democratizing countries. They draw on a historical-institutionalists perspective that takes seriously the possibility that there can be “modernization without Westernization.” Thus, they find that globally circulating concepts of democratic citizenship education undergo important modifications in Mexico and Indonesia, where unique circumstances—such as historical experiences with the dominant religions of Roman Catholicism and Islam, or different roles of the military—as well as diverse understandings of democracy, insinuate themselves into policy making and implementation. The chapter begins with an historical overview of important political and structural changes in the two countries, and them moves on to compare their “policy processes and the production of new curriculum for civic education.” It closes with a conceptualization of how the “local and the global” intersect in complex ways to give particular shape to civic education programs. Based on this comparative study Levinson and Sutton conclude that countries that are modernizing and democratizing their political structures can –and indeed, must—recover and elaborate democratic traditions from within and, in the process, define democratic citizenship in terms uniquely inflected by local cultural contexts. PROMOTING CIVIC EDUCATION THROUGH NON-DEMOCRATIC ORGANIZATIONS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE Ayan M. Alsayed, Counselor in International Education and Development, 2008, Advancing Democracy Through Education: US influence abroad and domestic practices, eds. E. Stevic & B. Levinson, p. 80-1 In addition, “many of the civil society organizations that are supported by donors in the name of democracy are themselves not internally democratic” (Sabatini, 2001, p. 5). Indeed, these institutions remain largely authoritarian, even when speaking about democratization. This is problematic when delivering civic education, because actions speak louder than words. Organizations which are teaching democracy but are not themselves democratic are unable to build the trust of citizens those organizations or in a democratic system.
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