A novel ‘international policy industry’ was born in the early 1980s–democracy promotion and protection. DPP expanded rapidly for the next 30 years and shows no signs of disappearing. An unprecedented effort has been made on its behalf, in terms of the magnitude of resources expended and the geo-cultural spread of the countries involved. Although these activities represent only a relatively small proportion of the total of public and private transfers from donor to recipient countries (roughly 10 percent), this is still a great deal more than was spent in the past. DPP has become a very prominent theme in public discourse, at times eclipsing previous emphases on economic development, social equity, or political stability. Transfers from the established to the deserving in the name of democracy are justified in terms of their contribution to domestic growth and international peace, rather than vice versa.

Even more surprising than the donors’ enthusiastic embrace of these objectives has been the way in which they have been received. Whereas such intrusion by outsiders would have been rejected in the past on the grounds of unwarranted ‘interference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state’, DPP has not only been accepted (often willingly, sometimes grudgingly) in contexts of regime liberalization, but has been actively encouraged by elites seeking to consolidate democracy. This is especially puzzling in light of traditional assumptions that attempts to consolidate regimes, and democratic regime consolidation in particular, were uniquely autochthonous affairs, heavily overlaid with national symbols and domestic calculations. As such, manifest intrusions by outsiders could be expected to diminish chances of success.

The principles and practices of political democracy have long been an object of international diffusion. All regimes that claim to be democratic have proclaimed a permanent national interest in having other regimes adopt similar rules and ideals–even if they have done little to promote or protect democratic outcomes explicitly, and have not infrequently supported autocratic regimes when this suited other national interests. While events such as revolutions conducted in the name of democracy and choices of rules to implement democratization in a particular country have often spread from one place to another, this was only rarely the subject of deliberate effort–until recently.

This rather dismal historical record may help to explain why the practice of DPP was so devoid of any theoretical backing when it began in earnest in the early 1980s. In striking contrast to the initiation of foreign economic aid to ‘third world’ countries in the 1960s and 1970s, which came fully equipped with a (at the time) widely respected set of justifying concepts (remember the ‘take-off to self-sustained growth’?) and an expanding professional cadre of ‘development economists’, one looks in vain for serious attempts to ground DDP in existing theories of democracy or democratization.

This was not because there were no such theories available or in the making. If practitioners had dared to take seriously what scholars had been writing on well-established democracies, they could only have drawn a negative lesson: i.e., one should not intervene directly in the internal affairs of a fledgling democracy, because such interventions are destined for failure. Not only did the relevant countries lack the elementary democratization ‘prerequisites’, but the practitioners themselves would not know what to do, because such highly uncertain enterprises depend on contingent power relations within a relatively small subset of actors inside the country.

Philippe C. Schmitter was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for 2009.

Practitioners could have taken heart from the emerging literature on democratization that was subsequently labelled ‘transitology’. Here, the emphasis shifted from probabilistic analyses of what had been associated with the advent of liberal political democracy in the past, to ‘possibilistic speculations’ about what actors might do in the present to ‘craft’ mutually acceptable rules for channelling political conflict into competition between parties, associations and movements. This strategic rather than structural conception of regime change quite explicitly failed to mention the importance of material or cultural requisites, and thus implied that efforts to democratize in ‘unfavourable’ settings were not a priori doomed to failure. But had such advocates of DPP read a little further, they would have learned that this ‘possibilism’ placed great emphasis on domestic elites, be they incumbent authoritarians or challenging democrats. In the context of the exaggerated uncertainty of transition, only those with ‘local knowledge’ of rapidly changing interests and with ‘credible capacity’ to deliver the compliance of key groups stood any chance of making a positive contribution–precisely the qualities that foreign DPP experts are least likely to have.

It was only once the transition was over and reversion to autocracy more or less excluded that politics would begin to settle into more predictable behaviours, reflecting (and reproducing) pre-existing patterns of socio-economic inequality and cultural differentiation. During subsequent ‘consolidation’ or ‘institutionalization’ phases, foreign democracy assistance programmes might have a more important role to play. But by then, the range of probable outcomes would have narrowed considerably; many, if not most, of the crucial decisions would have already been made. The most that DPP could reasonably have expected would be to make a marginal contribution, more to the type and quality of democracy than to its emergence or persistence.

The DPP industry seems to have been blissfully unaware of either of these ‘schools’ and to have gone ahead on a more practical and immediate basis. The logic it followed seems to have been that if people were (or should have been) trying to democratize their national regimes, then well-established democrats should help them (although other motives may have lurked behind these public proclamations). The fact that such a policy tended to funnel additional resources into donor agencies that already existed to promote economic and (sometimes) military aid certainly made the choice to intervene on behalf of democratization more palatable. The advent of DPP subsequently galvanized into action a wide range of non-governmental organizations, many of which took advantage of the ‘sub-contracting’ opportunities offered by national and (in the case of Europe) supra-national authorities.

Timing seems to have played an important role. DPP began in earnest in the early 1980s–before, not after the fall of the Wall and the end of the Cold War. While these events at the very end of the 1980s gave an additional impetus to the policy, they cannot be assigned initial responsibility for it. Instead, the very first case of democratization in the most recent wave occurred under very special circumstances: the Portuguese Revolução dos Cravos in 1974 sent the (in retrospect, erroneous) message that regime change from protracted authoritarian rule was going to be a tumultuous process. In addition to leading to aspirations for radical forms of ‘popular power’ and the expansion of the role of the state, it might also call into question international alliances and thus endanger the security of existing liberal democracies. Events in Portugal were not only unexpected, but also caught these powers without any instrumentarium to deal with such a threat–with the notable exceptions of the German party foundations and national intelligence services.

Ronald Reagan’s famous speech before the British House of Commons in 1982 has been widely and rightly regarded as ‘the kick-off event’ for DPP. The Council of Europe had a long-standing commitment to democratization that it implemented through its own membership requirements and a growing network of treaties. The German party foundations (Friedrich Ebert, Konrad Adenauer and Friedrich Naumann, at the time) were also actively aiding ‘sister parties’ and sponsoring academic encounters in countries with authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. But it was not until the Americans entered the arena aggressively in the early 1980s that DPP can be said to have begun in serio. And when they did so, the Americans were unequivocally motivated by the desire to prevent experiences such as the Portuguese and those just beginning to emerge in Latin America from upsetting the international balance of power and/or producing democracies that would be much less compatible with American economic interests. It is not too much of an exaggeration to claim that US interest in democracy was secondary to concerns about containing the spread of the ‘evil empire’ and, not coincidentally, with insuring the health and welfare of capitalism.

Had it not been for two quite unexpected developments and one lucky guess, I suspect that DPP would never have attained its subsequent prominence. It would have been (accurately) perceived as just another weapon in the US anti-communist arsenal (and a relatively minor one at that). Europeans at that time were experimenting with various forms of Ostpolitik and would certainly have distanced themselves from the endemic excesses that have plagued such policies in the past: the Manichean vision of politics divided into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys;’ the tendency to support right-wing and sometimes even reactionary political groups; the propensity to confuse ‘free politics’ with ‘free markets;’ and the unwillingness to admit that the enemy itself might be changing.

The first development was the discovery that democratization might not be such a tumultuous process, as was implied by the Portuguese Revolution and subsequently reinforced by the Philippine experiment with ‘people power’. The spectre of radical popular democracy proved to be a mirage. In case after case, domestic groups struggling against autocracy rather quickly came to realize that, whatever eventual changes might be forthcoming in property relations, income inequality or social justice, the route to attaining them passed through–rather than around or on top of–the limited and prosaic procedures of institutionalizing ‘liberal political democracy.’ The lessons of Cuba, Nicaragua and other abortive revolutionary or populist breakthroughs had been learned and were not going to be repeated in the post-1974 wave of democratization that began in Southern Europe and then spread to South America and Asia.

The second development was the divine surprise of 1989 in Eastern Europe and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. Not only did this manifestly knock the props out from under the whole edifice of anti-communism–it also vindicated the European strategy of ‘constructive engagement’. Moreover, it virtually doubled the number of potential recipients of DPP overnight. Deprived of their enemy and overwhelmed by the demands of their new friends, the US architects of DPP seized the opportunity to intervene, although interestingly they emphasized the absolute priority of economic over political reform. (Presumably, this reflected their primary underlying goal since it was by dismantling the structure of economic management and state ownership that the communist system would be most irrevocably destroyed, not just by decreeing the end of single party rule and introducing competitive political institutions.) They also prudently ‘off-loaded’ operational responsibilities for many DPP programmes in Eastern Europe to a ‘consortium’ run predominantly by Europeans and channelled through the European Community (later the European Union).

The ‘lucky guess’ was that the more optimistic ‘strategic’ theories of democratization turned out to be better descriptors and predictors of the process of regime change and its outcomes than were the more pessimistic ‘structural’ ones. Country after country that should have been condemned to immediate failure and regression to autocracy somehow managed to ‘craft’ its way through the transition. Many have already made substantial progress towards consolidating a mutually acceptable set of rules for competition between political groups, rotation in power, and some degree of accountability of rulers. Countries as initially unpromising as Bolivia, Mongolia, Nepal and Romania did not succumb to the temptations of ‘heroic leadership’ or ‘populist power’.

Whatever the actual impact of their programmes for organizing and observing elections, civil society development, judicial independence, or the rule of law, these efforts were only rarely associated with manifest regime collapse. Even with the (by now habitual) references to the low quality of the democracies that are being crafted under these conditions, there can be no denying that the strategic choices of actors matter. This leaves open the possibility (but does not prove) that external democracy promoters and protectors have contributed positively to that unprecedented successful outcome.

Still, DPP seems to be an area in which academic theory and policy practice are unusually difficult to reconcile. With very few exceptions, those who reflect in a generalizing and comparative way about outsider attempts to guide and improve the process of democratization are destined to be sceptical about the effort. With few exceptions, the ‘foreign agents’ involved in designing and implementing policies of DPP are very likely to complain that ‘abstract theoreticians’ are insensitive to their practical problems and, hence, that their efforts are not properly appreciated. Most of the time, however, the former do not waste much serious research time and effort on what they see as naïve and misguided policies. The latter rarely bother to read attentively such irrelevant ‘scribblings’; and when they do, they complain that the theoreticians adopt contrary perspectives and do not provide clear and compelling guidelines for action.

The author of this essay is a card-carrying theorist and, therefore, a sceptic. I cannot pretend to resolve this intrinsic clash between academics and practitioners, or even to present a balanced view on the issue. The best I can offer is a set of sceptical propositions suggested by the recent literature on democratization that suggests why DPP is bound to be such a difficult and paradoxical activity:

1) The net contribution of DPP can be potentially significant (and positive), but it is rarely more than marginal in determining democratization outcomes.

2) The existence of DPP is normally voluntary and reciprocal in principle, but is almost always semi- to in-voluntary and asymmetric in practice.

3) The presence of DPP in a country usually involves a formal contractual arrangement between public authorities, but its performance is largely contingent upon informal relations between non-governmental organizations and private persons.

4) The epistemological basis of DPP is the presumed superiority of well-established liberal democracies. However, democracy in these donor countries is often in serious crisis–precisely in the areas they are most insistent on transferring to recipients (e.g., electoral politics and competitive party systems).

5) While the success of DPP is intrinsically problematic and long term (as well as marginal in impact), donors require repeated evidence of immediate, visible, significant accomplishments in order to provide continuous support.

6) The success of DPP is likely to be greater where it is least needed and, hence, there will be a tendency for donors to ‘cherry pick’ by concentrating their effort on those countries where democratization would have occurred anyway.

7) Inversely, the success of DPP is likely to be greater when the desire of donors to provide it is weakest–when it is not used as a ‘cover’ for the pursuit of other objectives like national security or commercial advantage.

8) The institutional transfer inherent in DPP is often the greatest where it leaves the least perceptible traces–where the practices and rules that it encourages look the most remote from those of the foreign donor and the closest to the traditions of recipient countries.
9) The net contribution of DPP is most positive when it is ‘self-cancelling’–when its practices and rules are most quickly taken on board by national authorities and politicians and require no further foreign input.

10) The long term probability of a successful transfer of institutions from donor to recipient is greatest when grounded in a generic understanding of what democracy is. However, the short term chance that a given programme will work well depends on specific knowledge of national conditions.

11) DPP works best for recipients when there is a multiplicity of competing donors, allowing them to pick and choose the programmes or projects they prefer.

12) By contrast, DPP works best for donors when they can collude in order to compel recipients to accept the programmes or projects donors think are most effective.

13) Since successful democratization involves ‘hitting a moving target’ of actors and objectives, DPP must change its programmes or projects correspondingly. This is likely to mean disrupting or abandoning previous exchange relations between donors and recipients.

14) The more that DPP becomes a salient and well-funded component of donor policies, the greater will be its appeal for ambitious organizations and individuals in these countries and the more they will seek to professionalize and control access to its provision. A similar process of closure is likely to emerge on the recipient side, particularly in those countries with the least ‘domestic capacity’ to absorb DPP and, hence, the greatest potential need for it. Professionalization becomes a mutually reinforcing process and, accordingly, programmes and projects tend to become less responsive to the country’s needs and more attuned to the aspirations of providers on both sides.

It would not be easy to convert all of these 14 propositions into discrete and testable hypotheses, although all of them are, at least in principle, falsifiable. Some are worded in too abstract a manner; others contain ‘essentially contested’ concepts that would be difficult to measure objectively. Not a few refer to trends whose effects may be too soon to evaluate. However, I am not trying to set out an academic research programme, but rather to stimulate practitioners to reflect on what they have been doing. Their tasks are novel and demanding; the pressures upon them to respond to immediate challenges and dilemmas are great. Nevertheless, I hope that this effort by a card-carrying sceptical theorist will be of some utility.

Philippe C. Schmitter, Professorial Fellow at the European University Institute (Florence), was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for 2009.