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The Relationship of Political Parties and Civil Society
Remarks by Carl Gershman,
President of The National Endowment for Democracy

Wilton Park, U.K.
March 17, 2004

Remarks given at the conference on "Achieving Sustainable Political Change in Emerging Democracies: The Political Party Challenge"

My thanks to David French for that kind introduction, and to the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) for its role in organizing this timely conference on aid to political parties and party systems. It was the creation of the WFD in 1992 that led the NED, at the request of the U.S. Congress, to organize the first meeting of democracy foundations at a conference center in Virginia very much like Wilton Park. The meeting was attended by the NED and its four party, labor, and business institutes; the WFD, all the German Foundations, a new Canadian center, and an observer delegation from Japan. Since then, foundations have been established in many other countries, and last March more than thirty institutions attended the sixth of these meetings that was held in Paris under the auspices of two French foundations.

The growing field of democracy promotion now includes even governments and multi-lateral organizations. The areas of work have proliferated accordingly to include support for political parties, independent media, trade unions, business associations, human rights groups, and a wide variety of civil-society NGOs. Inevitably, as the field grows there is a tendency toward “stove-piping,” a Washington term that suggests dealing with each sector separately, without taking into account the total picture or the inter-play of different processes and institutions. Meetings of democracy foundations that foster the sharing of perspectives and information help counter this tendency, and now the NED and other institutions have brought together a much wider association of democratic practitioners and thinkers called the World Movement for Democracy that convened just last month in Durban. (I’ve counted nine people at this conference who attended the Durban Assembly.) In keeping with this “big tent” concept of democracy promotion, we also take a multi-sectoral approach in our grants program, supporting both party work and civil society, as well as free media, trade unions, and business associations.

Thus, the question that I’ve been asked to address -- the relationship between political parties and civil society -- is one that bears directly upon our work. It raises many critical issues, not the least of which is how organizations like our own and others involved in democratic development can support political parties and meaningful party contestation at the same time as we aid the work of civic groups that address broad societal issues in a nonpartisan manner. By their very nature, parties are partisan and therefore problematic. They represent only part of the political spectrum and are regarded with a certain suspicion, not just by their opponents and a skeptical citizenry but also by external assistance organizations that are uncomfortable with partisanship and don’t want to be accused of meddling in the internal politics of foreign countries.

The inherently partisan nature of parties was high-lighted by the statement made last week by Gerard Latortue, the economist and former diplomat chosen to be Haiti’s new interim prime minister. Upon his return from exile, Mr. Latortue said, “I come with all my impartiality, with no political party. I come to work with all Haitians.” The statement is understandable as a gesture of unity in a highly polarized society. But the sentiment is commonly held and has been expressed many times before, most prominently by George Washington in his Farewell Address, when he warned the citizens of the fledgling American republic against “the spirit of party” that “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.”

Parties have been especially suspect in the post-communist countries that suffered under a party dictatorship and have yet to develop a system of strong parties that can command deep and enduring loyalty from significant sectors of society. Significantly, it was in these countries that the concept of civil society was revitalized -- during the communist period as a movement representing the interests of a united citizenry against the state, and in the post-communist period as an advocate of reform, accountability, and transparency. Whereas parties have lacked internal democracy and have had to rely on corrupt oligarchs for financing, civil society organizations have had more credibility. They stand for high principles and focus on solving practical problems. They have close ties to the press and to think tanks and thus have a greater capacity for policy advocacy and public opinion polling and analysis. They’re accustomed to collaborating with partner NGOs in their own and neighboring countries and have had success in tapping into international networks and sources of funding. They also offer attractive opportunities to young people with talent and idealism.

The gap between parties and civil society has led to a phenomenon that the Georgian political scientist Ghia Nodia has called “civil society narcissism.” It’s characterized by an anti-political attitude that regards politics as something dirty and the work of civil society NGOs as clean by contrast. Political society, Nodia observes, is happy to reciprocate the claim of moral superiority, charging that NGOs are greedy opportunists who seek after Western funding, or feckless idealists who talk a lot and state general principles but are out of touch with political reality.

There is thus a natural tension between parties and civil society, but there is also a mutual interdependence. A principal reason the “rose revolution” in Georgia succeeded was that democratic parties and civil society NGOs found a way to work closely together. Where these sectors fail to see their common interests, the result is usually bad for both of them. If parties are weak or even collapse, which generally happens if they are isolated from civil society, a populist demagogue can fill the political vacuum and pose a threat to parties and NGOs alike. This is exactly what has happened in Venezuela where Hugo Chavez, having swept aside the traditional parties, then proceeded to attack the trade unions, the media, the church, the independent business community, NGOs, and the rule of law in general.

In fact, as Seymour Martin Lipset has written, political parties are indispensable to the point that modern democracy is unthinkable without them. It is in the process of managing the competition between governing and opposition parties that new democracies establish democratic norms and rules. Oppositions can restrain incumbents, and if the rights of opposition parties are accepted, then so, too, are freedom of speech and assembly, regular elections, the rule of law, and principle of turnover in office. The most stable and successful party systems, Lipset notes, are those linked to deep-rooted sources of cleavage, leading to the institutionalization of peaceful class conflict and political competition. Democracy’s dependence on party contestation has led Larry Diamond to add to Barrington’s Moore’s thesis, “No bourgeois, no democracy,” the corollary, “No coherent party system, no stable democracy.”

Both parties and civil society organizations mediate between the individual and the state, but they do so in different ways and have different functions. Civil society, as Diamond points out, is made up of a vast array of organizations, both formal and informal. There are ethnic, religious and communal institutions; commercial associations; interest groups representing workers, professionals, pensioners and others; informational and educational entities that disseminate knowledge and information; issue-oriented groups that promote environmental, human rights, and other causes; developmental organizations that work to improve the quality of life of the community; and nonpartisan civic groups that work to make the political and economic system more accountable and transparent.

While civil society groups perform valuable functions and can articulate a clear message, they do not seek to gain power and form a government. This is the function of political parties, towards which end they offer policy choices and options for which they are held accountable in the electoral process and also for their performance in office. It is only through the activities of parties that there can be the periodic and orderly competition for power that is the substance of democratic politics. Civil society groups can represent specific needs and interests, but they cannot translate their actions into national decisions, nor can they make the trade-offs and compromises necessary to assemble broad coalitions that can produce a governing majority. Civil society can initiate a democratic transition; but only parties, with the help of civil society, can consolidate a democratic system and institutionalize a democratic political process.

Having said this, it is also important to emphasize that there is no generic model that can capture the role of parties and civil society organizations in the process of democratization. This role varies according to the political context in each country, as does the relationship of parties and NGOs to each other. This context is what others at this conference have called “the big picture.” While each picture differs from country to country, it is possible to group them all into four broad categories.

The first is a dictatorial or authoritarian political order in which there can be no real party system or competition. Here civil society serves as a surrogate for parties, defending and advocating human rights; disseminating uncensored information, often surreptitiously; and giving voice to citizen concerns and the interests of society against the state. In its struggle to perform these functions, civil society serves as a training arena for citizenship, awakening in oppressed and powerless people a consciousness of their rights, helping them to overcome fear, and preparing them to take responsibility for their own lives. In so doing, it also initiates the process of opening a closed system. Civil society played this role in Spain and Portugal before the transition from authoritarianism, and it is beginning to do so in Cuba today. Obviously, though, when a country is as closed as North Korea, it cannot play this role. But even in this case civil society groups can begin a process of change from exile by circulating information about human rights abuses and mobilizing international pressure against the totalitarian regime.

If these efforts help bring about the downfall of a dictatorship, the role of civil society itself is then transformed. This introduces the second category -- that of emerging democracy – that consists of countries where an autocratic regime is replaced by a democratically elected government committed to a process of reform and democratization. In this context, groups representing civil society now try to help fashion a democratic state that is responsive to popular needs and attitudes. Their task in the post-breakthrough period is neither to resist the state nor to defend it uncritically, but to monitor its performance and to insist on its accountability, transparency, and effectiveness. They must also encourage citizen activism in solving practical problems, fostering tolerance and inclusiveness, and beginning the difficult process of bringing social reality and respect for rights into line with new democratic aspirations and norms.

Civil society can actually be weakened in this period by losing some of its leading members to government service. Earlier one of the speakers at this conference expressed surprise that many civil society activists went into government in Kenya after the defeat of Moi, wondering whether the support his development agency had given civil society groups had actually been a form of aid to a future democratic government. But there’s no reason for surprise. What happened in Kenya is quite common and is to be expected, since civil society groups are a talent pool that fledgling democratic governments need to draw upon. The same phenomenon occurred in South Africa after apartheid, in Nigeria after the fall of the military dictatorship, and it is happening today in the Congo as civil society activists enter the transitional government established under the new peace accord.

While there are close linkages between NGOs and parties in emerging democracies, they have different roles and interests. The parties often want to control the NGOs, and the NGOs try to protect their independence. In the aftermath of a breakthrough, the parties that constitute the new government may try to recruit civil society activists, but they also want to shape the political agenda and often see NGOs as a hindrance. The NGOs, for their part, tend to feel ignored and shut our by their former partners and grow dissatisfied with the pace of reform. Some set up their own parties, such as Fidesz in Hungary, the Civic Alliance in Romania, and the G-17 and Otpor in Serbia after the fall of Milosevic. But this rarely works – the success of Fidesz in Hungary is the exception – since the NGOs lack the base needed for long-term political viability.

But the parties, too, have problems. They tend to be weak, top-down structures that lack transparency and are reliant on a single personality. They have little analytic or policy development capacity and, as I have noted, are frequently dependent for financing on oligarchic interests. They also tend to be more responsive to externally driven reform agendas than to their own electorates – the responsiveness of Balkan leaders to the E.U. is a good example – leading to “the gap” between governments and their citizenry that Ivan Krastev of Bulgaria highlighted in his keynote address in Durban.

Still, the problems of parties and civil society organizations in emerging democracies are relatively manageable compared to those faced by their counterparts in post-dictatorial situations where the governments have no commitment at all to democracy. Many countries where dictatorships have fallen are not emerging democracies but rather refashioned and only moderately reformed autocracies that political scientists call hybrid regimes or competitive authoritarianism. In the NED’s Strategy Document we call them “semi-authoritarian” regimes. This third category of political regime is characterized by the centralization of power in the office of the president, weak parliaments, the absence of an independent judiciary, high levels of corruption, and mostly state-controlled media.

Semi-authoritarian regimes allow elections, but they manipulate them through controlling access to the media, harassing and outlawing opposition parties, using bribes and threats to split the opposition or to get the leaders of new parties to defect, and so forth. These elections nonetheless offer an opening that the opposition, under the right circumstances and depending on its capacity to hold together, can successfully exploit to achieve a democratic breakthrough.

The NED staff that manages the grants programs in Central Europe and Eurasia has worked up a matrix that assigns a numerical weight to 12 factors that affect the possibility for an electoral breakthrough in 15 post-communist countries. In four of these countries – Slovakia, Croatia, Georgia, and Serbia/Montenegro – the democratic opposition was able to achieve a breakthrough, so the matrix helps explain why it was successful in these countries and what the chances are for a similar breakthrough in the other 11 countries. In descending order of democratic possibility they are Ukraine, Armenia, Moldova, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

The factors are: 1) The leader’s control over the state apparatus, especially the security system, and the tendency to use violence to suppress opposition; 2) the leader’s unpopularity; 3) The extent to which there is a national consensus for change growing out of the population’s disenchantment with the current policies and its desire for reforms; 4) The degree to which citizens have political rights, meaning the ability of the opposition to participate freely in the political process and to vote for the candidate of its choice; 5) The degree to which citizens have civil liberties, meaning their freedom to associate in independent institutions and to develop and express opinions without interference from the state; 6) The maturity of the NGO sector, meaning the degree of its development and the political influence of non-governmental organizations; 7) The influence of political parties, meaning the degree to which opposition parties can affect the political process in the country; 8) The consolidation of pro-reform elements, meaning the level of unity and cooperation between the NGOs and opposition parties before the crucial election; 9) The influence of the pro-democratic forces on electoral process, meaning the degree to which the opposition is able to monitor the vote count and prevent fraud by the authorities; 10) The role of election observers, meaning the degree to which both international and domestic observers can affect prevent vote-rigging, intimidation, and manipulation; 11) The opposition’s access to the media, meaning the opportunities available to democrats to express their views through the mass media; and 12) The prominence of the international response, meaning the degree of interest of the international community in the elections and its impact on the authorities.

This matrix does not pretend to be scientific and probably needs to be refined. There is obviously some overlap between factors (1) and (4) – the use of violence to suppress the opposition and the exercise of political rights – and factors (9) and (10), both of which involve monitoring the electoral process to prevent fraud. It is also probably the case that the 12 factors do not deserve equal weight. But for the purposes of this discussion, factors (6), (7), and (8) are of critical importance, since they underline the importance of the maturity and independence of the NGOs and the coherence of the opposition parties, and the need for both sectors to cooperate and to help each other. In each of the four countries where there was a successful breakthrough, the parties and NGOs were able to unite against a common enemy, and the NGOs played a major role in uniting a fractious opposition under a common banner of reform. It was the absence of this unity in Azerbaijan, in contrast to neighboring Georgia, that accounts in significant measure for the opposition’s failure to achieve a democratic breakthrough in last fall’s election.

If cooperation between opposition parties and civil society NGOs is a key to a successful breakthrough in semi-authoritarian countries, their unity is even more important in the fourth political category, that of war-torn or post-conflict countries. Yesterday one of the participants said that in a country like Afghanistan, where there are no institutions and minimal infrastructure, it is hard to know where to begin in providing political assistance. She suggested organizing around such common and elemental themes such as health and educational assistance and community development.

But Afghanistan has elections scheduled in the near future, and there needs to be a democracy strategy related to those elections if they are not to be dominated by armed warlords or fundamentalists. In such a situation, assistance for the development of new parties is necessary but far from sufficient. What needs to be encouraged is the emergence of a broad national civic and political coalition or movement – like the citizen movements that came together in Central Europe in the immediate aftermath of communism – that can give the mass of the population that is not tied to the warlords or the theocratic extremists a platform and a political space. Such a movement for renewal and peace would bring together political, civic, and communal organizations already working for national reconstruction and constituting a natural base for a new government committed to continuing the process of rebuilding. Over time and if stability can be preserved, a new foundation can be established for the growth of a party system and democratic political institutions.

A distinct plan of action flows from each of the four political contexts I have described. Rather than neglect dictatorships where party work is not possible, we need to find a way to support and build political space for independent enclaves of civil society, leading ultimately to a political transition. Even if this work has to be done through support to groups based in exile that promote human rights and the dissemination of information, it is important and worth doing on both moral and political grounds.

In emerging democracies it is necessary to encourage parties to include NGOs in their efforts to communicate reform priorities to constituents; to develop NGOs as catalysts for civic advocacy campaigns aimed at influencing government decisions; to strengthen the capacity of NGOs to influence party platforms, and to encourage parties to take the opinions of civil society into account in the development of their platforms; and to strengthen the policy development capacity of parties so that they can shape a clear identity and compelling message. While NGOs should be encouraged to act as watchdogs, support to them should be conditioned on their own transparency, professionalism, accountability, and responsible behavior, especially when it comes to issues of ethnic, religions, and class conflict. Also, in response to a question raised yesterday about when to “graduate” a country, I would caution against withdrawing from emerging democracies prematurely. In the mid-1980s, when the NED was just getting underway, our Board opposed funding programs in Venezuela on the grounds that it was a stable, established democracy. The current deterioration in Venezuela is a reminder that democracy in many transitional countries is only skin deep and will require continued attention and support.

In semi-authoritarian situations it is necessary to assist the development and independence of civil society organizations, to train parties, and to encourage the unity of democratic political forces. One way to build unity is to promote the development of pro-reform coalitions of NGOs and parties around specific issues such as fighting corruption or protecting the environment. It is also important to provide material support to party coalitions that bring all the democratic parties together under a common umbrella of reform and democracy. Finally, it is critically important to link the democratic opposition to democratic political forces in the region that have recently experienced a breakthrough and can offer both encouragement and help to their embattled colleagues.

I’ve already suggested what I think needs to be done in war-torn, post-conflict situations. Here civil society is often far more developed than parties. There are groups that have provided humanitarian assistance to relieve suffering, others that have rebuilt schools and communities, and especially there are groups that have tried to prevent violence and to build a culture of tolerance and the rule of law. Such groups, combined with educators, journalists, and entrepreneurs, can form the basis of a national political formation that can compete in elections and is inclusive of parties, but that is not a party or a party coalition as such. Rather, it is a popular movement for democracy, development, and national unity. Such a movement can offer an alternative to armed factions and communal extremists and also provide the foundation for national renewal. Even where such movements do not emerge in a formal way as a political alternative, it is nonetheless important in post-conflict countries to strengthen the capacity of democratic parties and NGOs and their ability to cooperate on the basis of common goals and values.

While it is necessary to encourage cooperation between parties and civil society organizations, it’s important to recognize the differences between the two sectors. The distance between them is necessary and healthy. Civil society should not be subordinate to parties, and it’s a mistake to wrap the party sector into an undifferentiated concept of civil society. They have distinct functions that change depending on the political conditions. We should find effective ways to aid them both and, where necessary, to foster their close collaboration. But we need to respect their autonomy and help them realize their own democratic objectives.