Democracy Promotion and Soft Power (original) (raw)
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The U.S. Policy of Democracy Promotion – Concept and Practice
THE MIDDLE EAST: POLITICS AND IDENTITY, 2022
An important component in interaction between the USA and Middle Eastern countries is the unilateral promotion and even obtrusion of specific features of western political model on these societies and nations. Countries that implement the policies of democracy promotion are often guided not so much by the interests of the object societies, but by creating favorable conditions for consolidating their own influence. This duality of goal-setting involves, on the one hand, ideological messianism aspired to spread more progressive social forms, and, on the other, to ensure one’s own pragmatic interests. Such duality is often described by the researchers as the policy of “semi-realism”
Wolff, Jonas: Power in Democracy Promotion, in: Alternatives 40: 3-4, 219-236., 2015
The international promotion of democracy is about power, but the scholarship on this issue offers little systematic attention to the role and relevance that power might have in this context. This article critically discusses the literature that does explicitly deal with power in democracy promotion and proposes a multidimensional perspective as a way to improve our understanding of the international politics of democracy promotion. First, the typology of power proposed by Barnett and Duvall is applied to systematically conceptualize the power dimension of democracy promotion. Second, the article revisits the two main attempts to theoretically grasp the role and relevance of power in democracy promotion that draw on the Realist concept of relative power and the neo-Gramscian theory of hegemony, respectively. In both cases, the article argues, a multidimensional concept of power is analytically useful, as it enables an understanding of the complex nature of democracy promotion that goes beyond interstate relations and includes the attempt to change the very constitution of the recipient or target country from within. Jonas Wolff, Powr in Democracy Promotion, in: Alternatives 40: 3-4, 219-236. doi: 10.1177/0304375415612269
"Democracy Promotion" and Abstracted Sovereignty
Arab Studies Quarterly, 2012
The United States always presents itself in exceptional terms. In the last thirty years, it has presented itself as the beacon of democracy. As -leader of the free world,‖ the United States has taken upon itself the responsibility to spread (an implicitly-assumed) universally-desired liberal democracy. While it uses, and has used, war-euphemized as intervention, the global war on terror, or various operations of freedom-the US also relies on democracy promotion efforts that spread norms, procedures, and methods of pluralist governance. These include free and fair elections, universal adult suffrage, basic individual freedoms, free opposition parties, and rule of law, which ostensibly benefit all people. The narrative also insists that altruism is what drives US interest in seeing -American‖ values of freedom and -democratic peace‖ prevail in the international state system. This paper argues that claims of exceptionalism are crucial for constructing the myths necessary for sustaining and expanding American dominance over global capitalism and the international system of states. Democracy promotion is a means of constructing shared values and concepts, structures, procedures, and elites that subdue and channel mass popular demands arising from the socio-economic arena. Popular grievances are kept separate from the political sphere.
The Contingent Nature of Democracy Promotion
Political Studies Review, 2015
The set of works reviewed here suggest that the problems inherent in post-Cold War democracy promotion cannot be explained solely by policy failures. Attempts to push for democracy have been met with resistance, whether in response to the imposition of democracy or to 'softer' approaches. Collectively, the research in these volumes suggests that if democratization efforts are to succeed, those who hope to promote them must be more reflective about their own role in the process and cognizant of the fact that democracy promotion efforts are subject to political forces at the domestic, global and intermestic levels. Bridoux, J. (2011) American Foreign Policy and Postwar Reconstruction: Comparing Japan and Iraq. During the period immediately following the end of the Cold War, optimism about prospects for the advancement of global democracy reached a high-water mark. In the 1990s, Nils Petter Gleditsch described a collective sense in the field of international relations that the world was entering a 'liberal moment' centered on three liberal bastions: democracy, trade and international organization (Gleditsch, 2007, p. 691). The 1990s will always be known for Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which helped pave the way for a bevy of academic articles and books on the topics of democracy and capitalism. Much of the language of the time referred to the idea of newly democratizing countries as being in the midst of some sort of 'transitional' period, referring to the fact that these polities appeared to be destined for some sort of democratic, capitalistic end point. While democratic consolidation was not seen as inevitable , many of the weaknesses we have seen with democracy promotion strategies themselves were not foreseen. Democracy proponents held high hopes for the possibility of promoting regime change – either via direct force or by 'soft' means such as aid, sanctions, trade and support for democracy NGOs. Fast forward more than twenty years. We have, both practically and academically speaking, moved on quite a bit from Gleditsch's 'liberal moment', and it is clear that a good deal of resistance has emerged – much of it from unexpected sources. By the same token, a good deal of learning has also occurred, and democracy scholars have had time to reflect on the events of the past twenty-plus years. Our understanding of democratization processes during the 1990s was heavily influenced by the recent successes of southern Europe and Latin America as well as the early evidence from a number of
Between Norms and Interests: US and German Democracy Promotion in Comparison
PRIF Working Paper 15, 2012
Academic interest in democracy promotion notwithstanding, there is still little research that systematically compares different democracy promoters with a view to identifying the factors that explain variance in democracy promotion policies. The paper presents results of a research project that set out to contribute to filling this gap by analyzing the democracy promotion policies of two "donors" (USA, Germany) towards six "recipient" countries (Pakistan and Turkey, Bolivia and Ecuador, Russia and Belarus). It studies how "donor" states react to specific challenges that arise from "recipient" countries and that lead to conflicting objectives on the part of the democracy promoters. The paper asks how democracy promoters, across the twelve cases, deal with conflicting objectives and assesses the overall national patterns that characterize U.S. and German democracy promotion. With a view to both tasks, the paper offers causal explanations that are based on a theoretical framework that combines power-, interest-and norm-based determinants. While the mainstream view argues that "hard" interests regularly prevail over "soft" norms in cases of conflict, the analysis shows that the causal effect of the individual determinants on democracy promotion is not uniform, but depends on both the configuration of determinants and on the specific conditions in the "recipient" country.