Democracy Promotion Redux
CFR's William Mensch Evans is thinking about democracy promotion, only this time "better".
Instead of focusing on top-down advocacy through pressure on repressive governments, we must work within societies that lack democratic traditions. From the bottom up, we can help create the conditions for a societal agreement.
The next administration's democracy promotion strategy should reflect this in four ways:
First, it must publicly repudiate Iraq as the model for promoting liberal democracy, which cannot develop in the inevitable chaos that follows military intervention.
Second, Washington has to strengthen its capacity to build a basic democratic framework in places that lack it through global educational initiatives that like checks and balances and protection of minority rights. Building democracy where it does not yet exist requires an understanding of what the system is and how it works.
Third, we must learn to recognize when societies are ripe for change but are held back by authoritarian governments. As the world's superpower, the US has a responsibility to use non-military influence to ease such governments aside.
Finally, we must understand that, given the choice, not all societies interpret democracy as we do in the West. For example, as John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed note in "Who Speaks for Islam?" liberal democrats in the Muslim world do not "require a separation of church and state."
Benjamin Barber argued that "Democrats need to seek out indigenous democratic impulses."
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