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The Assault on Democracy Assistance
Address by Carl Gershman, President
The National Endowment for Democracy

Washington, D.C.
April 25, 2006

I want to begin by acknowledging the work of my co-author, Mike Allen, who prepared the central sections of our Journal of Democracy article which deal with the different types of measures that are being used to impede or prevent democracy assistance. I also want to thank Doug Rutzen, President of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, and Cathy Shea, its program director, for their invaluable assistance in preparing this part of the article. I also want to note that the JOD article is the basis for a report that has been submitted to Senator Lugar, who will hold a hearing on this problem on June 8. The INCL was also helpful in the preparation of that report.

The problem of the resistance to democracy promotion has emerged in recent years as a reaction against the worldwide growth of assistance programs that seek to empower civil society, democratic political parties, free media, and independent trade unions and support free elections and an open economy, among other aspects of a democratic society. The new phenomenon needs to be distinguished from the conventional resistance to democracy that is a central feature of such long-standing dictatorships as Cuba, Burma, North Korea, and Syria. This new resistance takes place takes place in countries where democracy assistance until recently has been possible and relatively unobstructed, even though NGOs have been subjected to various forms of harassment. The difference today is that the new legal restrictions and extra-legal impediments have assumed menacing proportions and pose a major new threat to the advance of democracy.

The backlash against democracy assistance is largely a by-product of the proliferation of so-called hybrid regimes in the aftermath of democracy's third wave, which ended in the early 1990s. These are regimes where autocrats have been able to hold onto power, where elections are largely manipulated, the executive very strong, the parliaments very weak, and the courts controlled, but where there are some formal democratic procedures, including elections, and where civil society organizations and independent parties have for the most part been able to function and receive foreign assistance.

As we know, the independent groups in some of these societies have been able to use the available political space to mount significant campaigns to expand political freedoms and challenge the ruling party. Democratic breakthroughs occurred in Slovakia in 1998 and subsequently in Croatia, Serbia, and Georgia. And then the Orange Revolution in Ukraine dramatically unfolded in 2004, raising alarms in neighboring Russia and Belarus and sending shock waves that were felt as far away as China, the post-Soviet Central Asian countries, and Venezuela, all places where international democracy assistance organizations had established a presence.

Many of the remaining hybrid regimes, whether fraudulent or backsliding democracies or partially open dictatorships, concluded that if they were to hold onto power they had to more tightly control political expression and choke off foreign democracy assistance. In effect, they saw the force of Abraham Lincoln's adage, stated in one of his debates with Stephen Douglas, that "a government cannot endure permanently half slave and half freeIt will become all one thing or all the other." Just as democratic movements seek to expand political space and rights, the hybrid regimes are moving in a much more concerted way than ever before to restrict rights and block access by democratic groups to international assistance. Since this reaction is occurring largely though not entirely among backsliding countries of the third wave, and since it has now gathered an unmistakable force, it must be said to constitute the reverse wave of democratic regression that has long been anticipated and the absence of which until now has, in itself, been an important and poorly appreciated phenomenon.

The current offensive against democracy assistance is not an entirely new phenomenon: The Moscow office of the NED's Solidarity Center was closed some time before the Rose Revolution in Georgia, and the Lukashenka regime in Belarus has been "pre-empting" democracy, as Vitali Silitsky termed it in a recent JOD article, since it came to power more than a decade ago. But the Orange Revolution has clearly accentuated the resistance to democracy by autocrats, as has the higher profile accorded to democracy assistance in the United States and in Western and Central Europe. The resistance has come in the form of legal constraints as well extra-legal tactics such as the use of thugs or auxiliary forces to assault or intimidate democratic activists.

The official measures undertaken by governments are often rationalized as a response to terrorism or to counter money-laundering or foreign espionage. But the means used are far more repressive than needed to fight NGO malpractice and are often contrary to obligations to protect the right to free association required by international conventions the country has signed or even by its own constitution. The intent of measures against NGOs was clearly stated last May by Russia's chief of security, Nikolai Patrushev, at a meeting in Kazakstan of secret service chiefs from the CIS countries. Patrushev declared that "we all need unified legislation across the CIS, something that would define the sphere of activity for NGOs; and the constitution and the laws must be changed before the wave of orange revolutions spreads to the leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States." The NGOs have been a key target in Russia, as well as in other countries, because they are the last remaining outpost of independent political activity, after the government had secured control over the parliament, the judicial system, the regional governments, and the media and effectively neutralized the opposition parties and business community.

The types of official measures described in the article fall into nine categories, and as I've said, we want thank Doug Rutzen and Cathy Shea of the ICNL for their help in gathering and categorizing this information. These include:
  1. Constraints on the right to associate which take their most severe form in dictatorships like Libya, Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba and Vietnam.


  2. Impediments to registration such as making registration expensive, exceedingly inconvenient, burdensome in terms of the type or amount of information that is required, held up by excessive delays, requiring re-registration every few years, thus giving the government the power to re-visit the issue of whether a group can exist at all, in effect compromising or denying legal status for NGOs.


  3. Restrictions on foreign funding, including onerous taxes on foreign grants (in Belarus), the requirement (in Uzbekistan, for example) that funds be channeled through designated accounts where the bank can refuse to release the funds, the requirement that groups must receive prior government permission before a grant can be received (as in Egypt), and the actual criminalization of the receipt of democracy assistance, as in the case of Sumate in Venezuela.


  4. The power to arbitrarily shut down NGOs, such as the 2002 law in Egypt that gives the supervising ministry the authority to terminate a group that is deemed to threaten "national unity" or violate "public order or morals," or the 2004 law in Belarus that enabled the government to dissolve more than 20 organizations.


  5. Constraints on political activities, broadly defined by Zimbabwe's public-service minister Paul Mangwana as NGO funded "antigovernment activities, in the name of democratization," or by the Criminal Code in Belarus as activities that "discredit" the countries image abroad or that appeal to foreign powers or groups to act "to the detriment of the countries security, sovereignty and territorial integrity."


  6. Arbitrary interference in NGO internal affairs, such as the new Russian NGO law that gives the Russian Registration Agency, with 30,000 new employees stationed in every region of the country, unchecked oversight authority to audit the activities and finances of NGOs, attend their meetings, terminate their activities, and stifle them administratively by demanding what one NGO leader just called "an insane amount of details."


  7. Harassment by government officials, such as the questioning and searching of NGOs in Belarus by the national security agencies, and the confiscation of their materials, leading to the closing in 2003 of 78 organizations and warnings in 2004 to 800 others.


  8. The establishment of ersatz NGOs called GONGOs (or Government-Organized NGOs) which attack and seek to monitor and undermine independent organizations and receive special funding from the government.


  9. And finally the harassment, prosecution, and deportation of civil society activists, such as the repeated characterization of NGOs in Russia as fronts for foreign espionage, an example being the notorious British "spy stone" scandal last January that unfolded shortly after the new NGO law was signed; the imprisonment of Ayman Nour in Egypt; the bankrupting of Chee Soon Juan in Singapore, from whom I received a message just this morning to the effect that Lee Kuan Yew and his son were suing the opposition and trying to close down its publication The New Democrat in anticipation of next week's elections; and the criminal investigation in Uzbekistan of staff members of several U.S.-based organizations for the alleged crimes of having an unregistered logotype and failing to register specific activities with the government.
The last section of the paper deals with how to respond to the assault on democracy assistance. In developing a concerted response, it is worth bearing in mind a number of points: First, that we're talking about a relatively limited number of countries, probably 20 out of more than 80 countries where democracy assistance is provided; second, that the governments in question are reacting defensively, basically conceding that without the tightening of controls they might not be able to hold on to power; third, that the democracy activists who are being attacked are, generally speaking, highly resilient and resourceful people who are used to encountering and resisting difficult obstacles; and finally, that the response will have to be fine-tuned, addressing the general problem and also its particular manifestation in each country.

In the article we discuss three levels of response – the tactical, the political, and the normative. The tactical response involves the work of the indigenous NGOs and activists affected by the new restrictions as well as the international donor and programmatic organizations that provide democracy assistance. The international groups will have to be guided by the readiness of NGOs to accept assistance, as well as by the manner in which indigenous pro-democracy groups choose to deal with the legal and administrative barriers that their governments have erected.

In some instances the NGOs may wish to test and challenge the new laws. The ICNL points out that the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights fought a ministry in court, ultimately prevailing after more than ten years of litigation. International organizations with a presence on the ground may, where feasible, use their access to government officials to negotiate access to political space and use transparency and contact to demystify their work, without however changing their relationship with grassroots partners or grantees.

But it may also become necessary to revert to practices employed in formerly or currently closed societies regarding methods of financing, running trainings and other programs in adjacent countries, and making greater use of cross-border programs carried out, for example, by Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Lithuanian NGOs in Belarus, Central Asia and beyond. Many programs will also certainly take advantage of the Internet and other forms of communication that were unavailable to activists in dictatorial countries only two decades ago.

It is also important to try to insulate democracy assistance from political pressures by strengthening its international and multilateral character. Joint programs by assistance groups from different countries, shared funding arrangements, and regular meetings to coordinate assistance in priority countries is useful in itself and also sends the message that democracy assistance is an international activity which is not meant to further the narrow foreign policy interests of any particular government.

Beyond these and other tactical efforts to neutralize or evade restrictions on democracy promotion, it is necessary to mobilize political pressure on governments that block democracy assistance and persecute local NGOs and activists. This is the second or political level of response. While some offending governments will be easier to influence than others, it should be possible to develop a coherent, coordinate, and comprehensive policy to defend democracy assistance and NGO activists.

The key political response is linkage, a term that was commonly used to describe efforts to defend human rights under repressive regimes during the 1970s and 1980s. The idea is to link a state's treatment of democracy activists and independent civil society organizations to the political and economic dimensions of interstate relations. Such efforts by governments and international organizations can also complement campaigns by indigenous NGOs to mobilize pressure against government repression. A version of this policy was followed last fall when the US and a number of Europeans governments sought and partially obtained changes in the draft Russian NGO law. It also led to the temporary shelving of repressive NGO legislation in Kazakhstan and Zimbabwe and to the indefinite postponement of the Sumate trial in Venezuela after representatives of European governments expressed a determination to observe the trial.

Russia agreed to trim back some of the NGO law's more egregious provisions to guard against embarrassment at the G-8 Summit set for St. Petersburg in July. The modified law went into effect a week ago today, and NGOs leaders in Russia fear that the guillotine may fall after the Summit, though they are already experiencing new hardships. It becomes essential that the G-7 governments use the Summit to show solidarity with democrats in Russia and to let the Russian government know that efforts to crush civil society and black democracy assistance will meet with stiff opposition.

Other ways democracies can respond to the backlash is through public statements by high officials and by national or regional parliaments defending pro-democracy NGOs and criticizing restrictions on democracy assistance; symbolic gestures such as high-level meetings with democracy activists and opposition leaders; conditioning foreign assistance and trade benefits on democratic performance and the treatment of groups working to strengthen democracy; and reports by public bodies or credible private groups that gauge democratic progress and monitor the ability of civil society and political organizations to receive democracy assistance.

Such reports can be useful in helping democracies distinguish between countries that are making genuine efforts to democratize and regimes that use elections and other democratic forms to legitimize illiberal and antidemocratic behavior, which is a growing problem. This distinction is especially important in the case of backsliding autocracies such as Russia and Venezuela that were once electoral democracies but where democratic rights and processes have been steadily eroded. At what point can it be said conclusively that such regimes have crossed the line and no longer deserve the respect that comes with being considered a democratic government? Many believe that these countries have already relinquished any claim to democratic legitimacy, yet Russia remains a member of the G-8 and next month takes over the chair of the Council of Ministers of the Council of Europe, and both it and Venezuela continue to be full participants in the Community of Democracies.

That these and other regimes covet the image of being democratic and value the advantages that come with participation in the Council of Europe, the OAS, and other assns of demo countries highlights the extent to which democratic values have spread throughout the international system. Regimes that seek to suppress democracy assistance may just want to stay in power, but they will often state a public rationale in which they paint themselves as sentinels guarding the principle of state sovereignty that international democracy assistance is alleged to undermine. This leads to the third or normative level of response.

The precondition for the acceptance of democracy promotion as a normative practice within the international system is the existence of a broad, if not universal, consensus about the definition of democracy promotion and the means by which it is appropriately carried out. Opponents of democracy promotion have tried to associate it with the war in Iraq, claiming that democracy promotion is simply the pursuit of regime change by other means. But support for democracy promotion here and around the world is as great as it is because its purpose is not to remove particular regimes but rather to strengthen democratic processes. The removal of a non-democratic regime does not, after all, automatically produce democracy, as the replacement of Batista by Castro or the Shah by Khomeini confirms. Democracy assistance does not focus on determining particular political outcomes but on nurturing democratic values, practices, and institutions.

It is true that the expansion of democratic participation can lead in some instances to a change of government and even, where the government in question is not democratic, to a change of regime. But that is not the goal of democracy promotion, nor is supporting free, fair and competitive elections its only dimension, as we and other proponents of democracy assistance constantly point out.

In June 2000, democracy promotion – understood as a cooperative international effort designed to strengthen all aspects of the democratic process, elections included – received the endorsement of more than a hundred sovereign governments meeting in Warsaw to found the Community of Democracies. To be sure, the Warsaw Declaration also acknowledged the importance of "sovereignty and the principle of non-interference in internal affairs." But it gave no sanction to the view that democracy promotion – meaning nonviolent and transparent efforts "to strengthen institutions and processes of democracy" – conflicts with sovereignty or violates the principle of noninterference. On the contrary, the Declaration affirmed the importance of democracy promotion in the evolving international system of transnational bodies, democracy-assistance organizations, grassroots NGOs – and sovereign states.

While the Community of Democracies was never meant to be a democracy-assistance agency as such, its aims do emphatically include the goal of fostering greater cooperation and commitment among democratic countries in order the advance the cause of democracy worldwide. Heretofore, however, the Community's voice has been muted and its role unclear – and as I've noted, its character has been compromised by the participation of some semi-authoritarian and backsliding governments. The new backlash against democracy promotion gives the Community an opportunity to play a more visible role and important role in the current international debate. The Community needs to reaffirms and further elaborate the Warsaw Declaration in light of new circumstances and to seek approval for the Declaration from governments and parliaments around the world, as well as from regional bodies and global institutions, including the United Nations. With its core mission under attack, this unique but still untested international association should mobilize in a concerted way to broaden the acceptance of democracy promotion as an international principle and practice. If the Community of Democracies can rise to this challenge, it will help to isolate and discredit the new assault on democracy promotion and bring the world's democracies together around a worthy common purpose.

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