Now What???

The election in Iraq seems to have been a relative success. It is not yet known whether a corner has been turned, but a big first step was taken Sunday.

So, Now what? That is a good question. I have a few thoughts:

1. One election does not a democracy make
As Tom Carothers has written about the fallacy of democracy promotion:
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In the last quarter of the twentieth century, trends in seven different regions converged to change the political landscape of the world: 1) the fall of right-wing authoritarian regimes in Southern Europe in the mid- 1970s; 2) the replacement of military dictatorships by elected civilian governments across Latin America from the late 1970s through the late 1980s; 3) the decline of authoritarian rule in parts of East and South Asia starting in the mid-1980s; 4) the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s; 5) the breakup of the Soviet Union and the establishment of 15 post-Soviet republics in 1991; 6) the decline of one-party regimes in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa in the first half of the 1990s; and 7) a weak but recognizable liberalizing trend in some Middle Eastern countries in the 1990s.

The causes, shape, and pace of these different trends varied considerably. But they shared a dominant characteristic—simultaneous movement in at least several countries in each region away from dictatorial rule toward more liberal and often more democratic governance. And though differing in many ways, these trends influenced and to some extent built on one another. As a result, they were considered by many observers, especially in the West, as component parts of a larger whole, a global democratic trend that thanks to Samuel Huntington has widely come to be known as the “third wave” of democracy.

This striking tide of political change was seized upon with enthusiasm by the U.S. government and the broader U.S. foreign policy community. As early as the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan, Secretary of State George Shultz, and other high-level U.S. officials were referring regularly to “the worldwide democratic revolution.” During the 1980s, an active array of governmental, quasi-governmental, and nongovernmental organizations devoted to promoting democracy abroad sprang into being.

This new democracy-promotion community had a pressing need for an analytic framework to conceptualize and respond to the ongoing political events. Confronted with the initial parts of the third wave—democratization in Southern Europe, Latin America, and a few countries in Asia (especially the Philippines)—the U.S. democracy community rapidly embraced an analytic model of democratic transition. It was derived principally from their own interpretation of the patterns of democratic change taking place, but also to a lesser extent from the early works of the emergent academic field of “transitology,” above all the seminal work of Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter.

As the third wave spread to Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere in the 1990s, democracy promoters extended this model as a universal paradigm for understanding democratization. It became ubiquitous in U.S. policy circles as a way of talking
about, thinking about, and designing interventions in processes of political change around the world. And it stayed remarkably constant despite many variations in those patterns of political change and a stream of increasingly diverse scholarly views about the course and nature of
democratic transitions.

The transition paradigm has been somewhat useful during a time of momentous and often surprising political upheaval in the world. But it is increasingly clear that reality is no longer conforming to the model. Many countries that policy makers and aid practitioners persist in calling “transitional” are not in transition to democracy, and of the democratic transitions that are under way, more than a few are not following the model. Sticking with the paradigm beyond its useful life is retarding evolution in the field of democratic assistance and is leading policy makers astray in other ways. It is time to recognize that the transition paradigm has outlived its usefulness and to look for a better lens.

Core Assumptions

Five core assumptions define the transition paradigm. The first, which is an umbrella for all the others, is that any country moving away from dictatorial rule can be considered a country in transition toward democracy. Especially in the first half of the 1990s, when political change
accelerated in many regions, numerous policy makers and aid practitioners reflexively labeled any formerly authoritarian country that was attempting some political liberalization as a “transitional country.” The set of “transitional countries” swelled dramatically, and nearly 100
countries (approximately 20 in Latin America, 25 in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, 30 in sub-Saharan Africa, 10 in Asia, and 5 in the Middle East) were thrown into the conceptual pot of the transition paradigm. Once so labeled, their political life was automatically analyzed in terms of their movement toward or away from democracy, and they were held up to the implicit expectations of the paradigm, as detailed below. To cite just one especially astonishing example, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) continues to describe the Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa), a strife-wracked country undergoing a turgid, often opaque, and rarely very democratic process of political change, as a country in “transition to a democratic, free market society.”

The second assumption is that democratization tends to unfold in a set sequence of stages. First there occurs the opening, a period of democratic ferment and political liberalization in which cracks appear in the ruling dictatorial regime, with the most prominent fault line being
that between hardliners and softliners. There follows the breakthrough— the collapse of the regime and the rapid emergence of a new, democratic system, with the coming to power of a new government through national elections and the establishment of a democratic institutional structure, often through the promulgation of a new constitution. After the transition comes consolidation, a slow but purposeful process in which democratic forms are transformed into democratic substance through the reform of state institutions, the regularization of elections, the strengthening of civil society, and the overall habituation of the society to the new democratic “rules of the game.”

Democracy activists admit that it is not inevitable that transitional countries will move steadily on this assumed path from opening and breakthrough to consolidation. Transitional countries, they say, can and do go backward or stagnate as well as move forward along the path. Yet even the deviations from the assumed sequence that they are willing to acknowledge are defined in terms of the path itself. The options are all cast in terms of the speed and direction with which countries move on the path, not in terms of movement that does not conform with the path
at all. And at least in the peak years of the third wave, many democracy enthusiasts clearly believed that, while the success of the dozens of new transitions was not assured, democratization was in some important sense a natural process, one that was likely to flourish once the initial breakthrough occurred. No small amount of democratic teleology is implicit
in the transition paradigm, no matter how much its adherents have denied it.

Related to the idea of a core sequence of democratization is the third assumption—the belief in the determinative importance of elections. Democracy promoters have not been guilty—as critics often charge— of believing that elections equal democracy. For years they have advocated and pursued a much broader range of assistance programs than just elections-focused efforts. Nevertheless, they have tended to hold very high expectations for what the establishment of regular, genuine elections will do for democratization. Not only will elections give new postdictatorial governments democratic legitimacy, they believe, but the elections will serve to broaden and deepen political participation and the democratic accountability of the state to its citizens. In other words, it has been assumed that in attempted transitions to democracy, elections will be not just a foundation stone but a key generator over time of further democratic reforms.

A fourth assumption is that the underlying conditions in transitional countries—their economic level, political history, institutional legacies, ethnic make-up, sociocultural traditions, or other “structural” features— will not be major factors in either the onset or the outcome of the transition process. A remarkable characteristic of the early period of the third wave was that democracy seemed to be breaking out in the most unlikely and unexpected places, whether Mongolia, Albania, or Mauritania. All that seemed to be necessary for democratization was a decision by a country’s political elites to move toward democracy and an ability on the part of those elites to fend off the contrary actions of remaining antidemocratic forces.

The dynamism and remarkable scope of the third wave buried old, deterministic, and often culturally noxious assumptions about democracy, such as that only countries with an American-style middle class or a heritage of Protestant individualism could become democratic. For policy makers and aid practitioners this new outlook was a break from the longstanding
Cold War mindset that most countries in the developing world were “not ready for democracy,” a mindset that dovetailed with U.S. policies of propping up anticommunist dictators around the world. Some of the early works in transitology also reflected the “no preconditions” view of democratization, a shift within the academic literature that had begun in 1970 with Dankwart Rustow’s seminal article, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model. For both the scholarly and policy communities, the new “no preconditions” outlook was a gratifyingly optimistic, even liberating view that translated easily across borders as the encouraging message that, when it comes to democracy, “anyone can do it.”

Fifth, the transition paradigm rests on the assumption that the democratic transitions making up the third wave are being built on coherent, functioning states. The process of democratization is assumed to include some redesign of state institutions—such as the creation of new electoral institutions, parliamentary reform, and judicial reform— but as a modification of already functioning states. As they arrived at their frameworks for understanding democratization, democracy aid practitioners did not give significant attention to the challenge of a society trying to democratize while it is grappling with the reality of building a state from scratch or coping with an existent but largely nonfunctional state. This did not appear to be an issue in Southern Europe or Latin America, the two regions that served as the experiential basis for the formation of the transition paradigm. To the extent that democracy promoters did consider the possibility of state-building as part of the transition process, they assumed that democracy-building and statebuilding would be mutually reinforcing endeavors or even two sides of the same coin.
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Democracy promotion has become the de facto reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. While the election on sunday was a success, it is truly only a tiny step on a generational long process to building a stable, democratic country in Iraq.

2. Get the troops out of the big cities
--U.S. troops need to get out of the cities and into the countryside, away from overburdening Iraqis with their presence (it is easy to find complaints from Iraqis about the disruption caused by big military humvees rolling through busy streets). U.S. troops would be more effective patrolling around oil pipelines that run throughout the country and insecuring the borders than anything they can do in Baghdad or Mosul right now.

2a. Get the U.S. embassy out of Saddam's old Republican Guard palace. American policymakers should have already learned about associating themselves to closely with remnants of the old Baathist regime (see e.g. Ghraib, Abu). The last thing they need is to be seen as replacing one dictatorship with another. Symbolism is important.

3. Rapproachment with the Europeans/NATO
One of the lessons that should be learned by the Bush administration by now is that ad hoc "coalitions of the williing" do not have the perseverance to stick through a long term engagement such as Iraq reconstruction. What is needed is a strong institution to oversee the state building exercises. That institution should be NATO, the pillar of U.S. cold war security that has proven its worth ina post-Cold War era, undertaking successful state-building exercises in the Balkans and acting a s beacon for newly independent states in Central and Eastern Europe to move towards the west, thus adopting many western institutions and vaslues.

That's it for the moment.