Sanctions/Political Conditionality Not Democracy Assistance

Sanctions/Political Conditionality Not Democracy Assistance

(Peter, PhD, Professor of Politics and International Studies at University of Warwick, Democracy Assistance: International Cooperation for Democratization, pg 8-9)

(Peter, PhD, Professor of Politics and International Studies at University of Warwick, Democracy Assistance: International Cooperation for Democratization, pg 26-8)

If the idea of 'post-consolidation' conjures up a situation where a democracy is impregnable, democratization's actual record in the 1990s reminds us how fragile the momentum and the achievements can be. The uneven progress of what White and Luckham" call this 'jagged wave' is now clear. What started out as a willingness by international donors to attach political requirements and political conditionalities to development aid (a seemingly logical extension of aid's economic conditionalities, which was a leitmotif of North–South co-operation in the 1980s) turned increasingly to democracy assistance. This seemed to offer a longer-term approach to promoting democracy. It could be applied in situations where conditionality was unnecessary (as in some of the former communist countries eager to make a political transformation) or had become superfluous (democratic transition now successfully achieved) and where development aid is not required. It also could be relevant where conditionality was insufficient (full democratic transition not yet taken place) or makes demands on the donors that are unlikely to be met. Examples of the last are high levels of co-ordination among donors and a sustained commitment to applying the instrument consistently, without making exceptions for strong allies and other 'special cases' .

The sequence that runs from conditionality to assistance in respect of political objects puts the historical progression of international development co-operation in reverse. For that started out with development projects and programmes, and only later became more wedded to conditionalities, applying them across an increasing number of issue areas. But the contrasting trends are not wholly unconnected. For not only does the possible value of economic conditionality apply only to aid-dependent countries, but a growing number of detailed studies found that it is at best a weak policy instrument even there. The track record has been unimpressive, especially where the local political conditions were not receptive to change." The World Bank in a recent reasssessment of aid says conditionality 'is unlikely to bring about lasting refoini if there is no strong domestic movement for change' .44 All this comports with what we already knew about international trade embargoes and economic sanctions applied for political ends: they have had only mixed success, while imposing pain on the civilian population.

Inferences drawn from the unimpressive performance of development reform were applied in short order to the emerging debate over how to further the cause of political reform. Political conditionalities are credited with helping to advance political liberalization and transition in some countries, by pushing governments to legalise political pluralism and hold multi-party elections, as in Hastings Banda's Malawi. But it always seemed likely that the very nature of such conditionalities would make them especially vulnerable to the limitations that were exposed in the attempts to deploy economic conditioning for economic policy reform. The latter's chances of success are reduced once powerful people estimate that compliance would harm their particular interests. A reluctance to co-operate fully with conditionalities aimed at dispersing their political power or at enabling a transfer of power to other hands is no less predictable.

The issue turns not so much on the presence or absence of political will (a somewhat vacuous concept, often resorted to as a desperate kind of residual explanation), as on a rational calculus of interests. The ruling group is not structurally obliged to take much notice of the people's interests. The force of domestic pressures to comply with the external demands is simply not strong enough. And while Schedler reminds us that we should not ignore the 'heroes' of reform – individuals whose enthusiasm for change is not captured by rational choice theory – he too admits that the evidence suggests that 'any progress on this front is likely to be fragile and vulnerable to contingent political junctures and political personalities', where the `electoral nexus' does not work properly and rulers lack a tangible self-interest in the institutionalisation of accountability." Hence Killick concluded a major review of economic conditionality by saying it is `difficult not to be sceptical' about the deployment of political conditionality: 'external sanctions will very rarely be sufficient in themselves; they are only likely to be effective when reinforcing powerful internal forces'." What is more, the objectives of democratic reform are less amenable than economic ones to formulation in quantitative terms. This and the fact that different parts of the 'international community' interpret political reform and the main priorities differently, only make it more difficult to construct and implement a monitoring regime for democratic conditionalities. At the same time such a regime's chances of enforcement suffer from having to compete with yet other conditionalities, such as in the economic and social policy domains.

Of course the practice of introducing political requirements and conditionalities into the arrangements for development aid, together within the threat and deployment of aid sanctions, have not completely disappeared. Indeed, in many developing countries concrete support for democratization, improved governance capability and so on is often perceived informally to be part of a larger overall package of donor involvement that extends

financial support to governments and balance of payments help, even where there are no formally stated linkages. The donors are unlikely to discourage this impression. But generally speaking conditionalities on their own offer little to a sustainable democratic momentum. They can put pressure on authoritarian regimes to liberalize and consider political transition, tilting the balance in favour of reform in the early stages. In more dire situations aid conditioning might discourage the extensive or gross abuse of human rights.

But not all countries where abuse is perpetrated need aid, or their governments choose to do without aid. In some countries the political leadership seems powerless to combat the atrocities that are perpetrated by others, and the state is in disarray. Political conditioning may help maintain democratic gains where the government seems inclined to abandon them, although where democratic slippage occurs only gradually the donors have difficulty identifying the right moment to introduce effective sanctions.47 For instance, it has been said about Africa that it is much easier 'to exert pressure successfully against non-democratic governments than it is to influence the positive evolution of political openings into democratic directions' .48 So, the greatest strength of democracy assistance vis-a-vis conditionalities appears to lie in helping democratic transition and consolidation carry further forward, which could mean where it is least needed. But this does not exclude a role for certain forms of external intervention (assistance to human rights groups, say) in countries where firm authoritarian rule prevails. Indeed, whereas a number of economists draw the inference that development assistance should be concentrated where there is a strong indigenous commitment to institutional and policy reform, a major challenge now facing democracy assistance is how to be constructive across the full range of political situations. In other words, how can it be made to perform well not just in countries where the tide generally is running strongly in the right direction anyway.