Democracy Promotion: Initiatives for Institutional Reform

Remarks delivered by Carl Gershman, President
The National Endowment for Democracy

At the conference "Democracy Promotion: The European Way"
Organized by the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe

The European Parliament (Brussels) December 7, 2006

I want to thank the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe and the Transnational Radical Party for convening this meeting. It's great to be here with so many old and new friends, among them Edward McMilllen-Scott, Marco Pannella, and Marco Cappato. The subtitle of this conference is "Urgent Message to Europe from the World's Dissidents," and we have heard already from dissidents and advocates of democracy from so many different places, among them Taiwan, Iraq, Palestine, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Albania, Georgia, Cuba, Laos, Somaliland, East Turkestan, and Lebanon. We are – and I wish to emphasize this – a community of democrats -- a community of people who share a common faith in human dignity and whose struggle for their own liberty or for the liberty of others is an expression of the belief that democracy is a universal idea rooted in the belief that all people have a certain innate human dignity.

Our work starts with this idea of a community. The critical task in democracy promotion is to find people who share this faith and who are ready to sacrifice to assist people who are struggling for freedom, and then to find a way to help them in their struggle. We need to remember that democracy needs democrats. It cannot be advanced or realized without democratic activists. They come in many different sizes and shapes, and they work in many different fields. Some are NGO and civil-society activists. Some are people who defend human rights and the rights of minorities, women and other marginalized groups. Some are active in political parties, while others are journalists, like our late dear friend Anna Politkovskaya, who are ready to risk their lives to bring the truth to light. Some are trade unionists who fight for workers' rights; some fight against corruption, and some are entrepreneurs who help create an open and growing economy. Some fight for religious liberty, and some – like our friend Walid Salem described yesterday, educate people at the grassroots to understand the concept of citizenship and to become citizens.

The issue before us is not what we should do. We know what we should do – we should help such people. The issue is how to do it.

Here I would like to raise a question about the title of this conference: Democracy PromotionThe European Way. I accept the title as a way to sell the idea of democracy promotion to a European audience. But is there really a European way to promote democracy that is different from an American way or, for that matter, a Canadian way or a Taiwanese way? There is an effective way and an ineffective way. We have our own differences in the United States about the best way to go about this work. These differences revolve around not just the distinction between hard power and soft power but between governmental and non-governmental approaches, approaches that are controlled by governmental bureaucracies and approaches undertaken by mission-driven people independent of government who are given room to exercise their creativity and initiative.

As we heard yesterday from our friend from Iran, governments have many critically important functions, among them providing security, defending peace, and conducting economic and diplomatic relations with other governments. But work to aid civil and political groups must be conducted over the long-term by people and organizations that can develop enduring relationships of trust and partnership with local actors, based upon shared political values. Democracy support must be driven by the needs and vision of local democrats, not by the immediate imperatives of policy, which is why it is best carried out at arms-length from the complex pressures of diplomacy. Governments have too many other priorities that will inevitably interfere with and compromise such work. They are simply not the natural partners of non-governmental activists, whose independence from government is vital to their work and must often be defended at a price.

This is not to say that governments have no role in democracy promotion – far from it. Two very important things that governments need to do are to provide assistance to official and semi-official institutions to professionalize their performance and improve their ability to deliver services – something that is called promoting good governance; and they should use their leverage and diplomatic weight to pressure authoritarian governments to open political space, which involves acting to defend democratic activists when they are victims of harassment or persecution. But the work of providing practical help to democracy activists and NGOs should be left to non-governmental grant-making and training organizations, and where they don't exist they should be created. The effort to create a European Democracy Foundation to undertake functions that cannot be effectively carried out by the European Commission is an important case in point.

Having said all that, let me use the time remaining to me to briefly outline five critical challenges that we face, all of which, I might note, were touched on yesterday in the presentations by "on the ground" activists.

The first challenge is the defense of human and minority rights in dictatorial countries. We should remember that there are many different kinds of dictatorships, ranging from a completely closed country like North Korea to a relatively open authoritarian country like China, with countries like Burma, Cuba, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam ranged somewhere in between. My friend Penelope Faulkner just told me that when Secretary Rice was in Vietnam, she said that it would be a step forward if North Korea and Burma could be like Vietnam. I know that our Vietnamese friends were probably not happy with that remark, but it's true. It would be a step forward since these are actually more closed and repressive dictatorships than Vietnam. In the most closed countries the key priorities for democracy promotion work are defending human rights and providing independent information. In less closed countries it is possible to do more, even to take advantage of new communications tools like the Internet or to work with independent think tanks. The important thing is that we should do whatever is practical and continue to press the envelope to do more if that becomes possible.

The second priority is to reverse the backsliding and to resist the anti-democracy backlash in so-called semi-authoritarian countries like Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Egypt, and Uzbekistan. There are differences here, too. Belarus is more repressive than Russia, and Zimbabwe is probably worse than Venezuela. But the issue is the same in all cases: Autocratic governments are trying to do whatever they can – such as repressing independent groups and cutting off channels of international assistance to them -- to pre-empt and avert a "colored revolution," and so they Our job must be to find ways to continue to aid democrats in these countries and to build international support to deter governments from closing down NGOs and imprisoning activists, and also to build a new international consensus defending civil society and its right to receive international assistance for work that advances fundamental democratic values and processes.

The third challenge is to help emerging democracies succeed. By succeeding, I mean getting corruption under control and addressing the basic needs of the population for better health care and housing, more economic opportunity, and quality education. This is an area where government-to-government assistance can play an important role, as I've already suggested. But there is also a role for non-governmental groups to diagnose the scope and causes of the ineffective performance of democratic institutions; to monitor the functioning of particular democratic institutions; to propose reforms of governmental institutions, or the creation of new institutions, to check and control the abuse of power, strengthen the rule of law, increase the transparency and accountability of government, enhance government responsiveness to citizen interests, and so diminish the confidence gap between the politicians and the public; to build civic coalitions to advocate for a reform agenda; and to educate the public at all levels about the needs for commitment to ethical standards, respect for law, and citizen involvement and vigilance, if good governance is to be achieved.

Let us not forget that if new democracies fail to perform well and to live up to the expectations of the people, they will be challenged and possibly forced to move aside by anti-democratic populists.

The fourth challenge is to help civil-society activists in situations where there is armed conflict, or where conflict has ended and societies must rebuild, often from scratch. Often in such situations the international community overlooks the conflict-resolution and human-rights NGOs. But peace will not come if the only people sitting at the negotiating table are warlords, and it will not be sustained if there are not democracy and peace activists working to promote dialogue among the key power brokers, political parties, and civil-society groups leading to agreed grounds rules for power-sharing and making public decisions.

Finally, the fifth challenge is to address the problem described yesterday by our Palestinian colleague Walid Salem – the weakness of the democrats in the Middle East and the strength of autocratic regimes and Islamist movements, the latter using religion and the provision of services to mobilize support among poor, marginalized, and rural constituencies. Here a broad strategy is needed to help democratic parties understand what they need to do to broaden their base, and to aid the growing number of civic and professional groups in the Middle East that are working to promote human rights and the participation of women and youth, as well as independent media and groups that educate people at the grassroots about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. It will also be necessary to engage with and support, wherever possible, serious reformers within the ruling parties as well as moderate Islamists who are advocates of democratic reform and who might become the political leadership of a new "Muslim democracy" in the region on the model of the AK Party in Turkey.

I want to make one final point. What I have outlined is a very large agenda, much too large for a single organization or country to try to carry out. We need a global effort, at the core of which should be an international network of democratic activists cooperating together through initiatives like the World Movement for Democracy and the Transnational Radical Party; as well as a new transatlantic partnership for democracy. There is too much talk about the differences between the United States and Europe. Let's look at what we have in common.

I was struck yesterday by the repeated us of the term "West" by our Georgian friend, Elene Tevdoradze. I thought that term might have died with the end of the Cold War. But she used it in the broadest sense to mean people who aspire to, as she said, modernity and civilization. There are people who choose the West, she said, and it is the West – the U.S. and Europe together and all our democratic friends – who must join together to help them succeed.

The creation of a new European Democracy Foundation could be a key building block in consolidating this new concept of a West, turning it into a working alliance for freedom and human dignity. So let's get on with it.