Promoting Democracy while Fighting Terror
Remarks by Larry Diamond to the Secretary's Open Forum
U.S. Department of State, September 21, 2001

Thank you for the honor you have bestowed upon me by asking me to speak here today.  Your invitation reflects the commitment of people in this building, and of foreign service officers around the world, to the promotion of democracy, freedom, and the rule of law.  Our national commitment to those principles is one of the main reasons why we are respected and admired around the world, and why so many people and governments, from diverse countries and cultures, have rallied so movingly to our side in the past ten days.

I have had to revise my remarks here today in light of the tragedy our nation—and indeed, civilization—suffered on September 11.  That horrific attack will have sweeping political, social, economic, and military consequences.  These will bear directly on the fate of freedom and democracy in the world, in ways that cannot be fully anticipated today.  Already foreseeable, however, are the contradictions we will face and the painful choices we will have to make in the protracted, complicated, and highly unconventional war that lies ahead.  In the course of this struggle, we will do grave damage to our cause if we ignore or demean the principles for which we stand.

In the past quarter century, and especially in the past decade, democracy and freedom have spread globally to an unprecedented degree.  More countries, and a higher percentage of countries, have democratic forms of government than ever before in the history of the world.  And no form of government other than democracy has any broad legitimacy and appeal beyond individual countries.

Twelve years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, important gains for democracy continue to be registered.  In the past few years these have included:

• The breakthroughs to electoral democracy in Mexico, Senegal, and Ghana.

• The deepening of democracy in Korea and Taiwan with the defeat of long-ruling dominant parties.

• The transitions to democracy in Indonesia and Nigeria.

• The integration of Central Europe's consolidating democracies into the economic and security communities of the democratic West.

Economic and political freedom, human rights, and electoral choice have appeared ascendant in the past decade as never in history.  Yet, even before the attack on America, democracy globally has been drifting toward a much more worrisome and vulnerable state.

• Support for democracy and faith in democratic institutions is declining in many emerging democracies.  Today, only 45 percent of Koreans say that democracy is always the best form of government, down from almost 70 percent in 1997.  Support for democracy has also declined broadly throughout the Americas between 1997 and 2001, from 75 to 58 percent in Argentina, from 50 percent to 30 percent in Brazil, from 69 to 36 percent in Colombia.  Cynicism is rampant.  Only 20 percent of Latin Americans have confidence in political parties.  Trust in parties is lower still in many post-communist countries, even in Central Europe.

• Underlying this cynicism is the perception that corruption is widespread, if not endemic.  An astonishing four-fifths of Latin Americans say that corruption has “increased a lot” in the last three years.

• The sense of economic distress, and that democracy is not performing, is rising throughout many emerging democracies.  Most Latin American countries have seen sharp increases in the percentage of the public (typically now a majority) viewing the economy as bad or very bad.  Faith in both democracy and the market is eroding.

• In the past decade, many transitional regimes have slipped below the threshold of democracy.  A growing number of regimes are “pseudo-democracies” or “electoral authoritarian.”  Superficially, they have democratic constitutions, regular multiparty elections, parliaments with opposition, and independent courts.  However, state power is highly concentrated and used undemocratically to maintain the incumbents’ grip on power.  The irreducible condition for a minimal democracy—free, fair, and meaningful elections—no longer holds.  In much of Africa, political transitions have gotten stuck at this point.  The most significant regression has been in Russia and Ukraine, where power-aggrandizing presidents have crushed the independent media, intimidated opposition, and sponsored electoral fraud to the point where it is no longer possible to defeat them in national elections.

• In a crucial swing state, Pakistan, the civilian, electoral regime was overturned by the military two years ago and has yet to be restored.  The underlying causes of democratic failure in Pakistan—miserable economic performance, stalled economic reforms, gross (quasi-feudal) inequality, endemic corruption and criminality, a dysfunctional rule of law, and ethnic, regional, and religious polarization and violence—plague many fragile democracies around the world.  In the eyes of a growing number of citizens in these countries, democracy is venal and ineffectual.  It remains preferable, if at all, only for want of a clear alternative.

The global state of democracy is thus quite mixed.  In the Baltics and Central Europe, democracy has been consolidated.  However, in most of the rest of the world, even in such relatively rich nations as Korea and Taiwan, it is struggling through troubled times.  These troubles should not counsel despair or resignation on our part, but they do generate a powerful case against complacency or self—congratulation.  The historic forward momentum of democracy globally halted around the mid-1990s.  During the last few years, we have been in a period, likely to persist for some time, of heightened fluidity, uncertainty, crisis, and doubt.  This is a period in which many democracies (including some of great strategic importance to the United States) could swing in either direction politically—toward a deeper and more secure democracy, or toward an ever more hollow and decadent shell of democracy, if not blatant authoritarianism or state collapse.

Yet periods of danger also present moments of opportunity.  Even as we wage a global war against terrorism, we have an opportunity—and indeed an imperative—to help steer swing states toward more effective, accountable, responsive, legitimate, and humane governance.  To do that, we need a new, more coherent and comprehensive national strategy to promote democratic reforms, both in emerging and fragile democracies and in authoritarian states.

Political reform is a vital component of a long-term war against terrorism.  To fight this war, we are going to need heightened intelligence and financial monitoring, covert operations, military force, security cooperation, and enormous patience and vigilance.  But none of these measures can address the underlying sources of alienation, anger, and despair that propel growing numbers of people toward unspeakable acts of terror and sacrifice for some twisted vision of a cause.  As Tom Friedman observed in his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, “There will always be a hard core of Ramzi Yousefs.  The only defense is to isolate that hard core from the much larger society around them.”  And that requires reforms that give societies progress, justice, and a stake in the system of globalization.

We know all too painfully in this country that terrorists can come from anywhere.  But the principal breeding grounds and safe harbors for this kind of terror lie in oppressive, corrupt, and/or failing states.  Some of these states are our allies.  And one of them is our second highest aid recipient.  We urgently need the support and cooperation of these governments in the war on terrorism.  But we also need these governments to implement sweeping reforms to build a rule of law, punish corruption, promote openness and accountability, improve education, attract investment, create jobs, and so diminish or pre-empt the kind of alienation that breeds the destructive, nihilistic rage of terrorism.  You, the makers of our foreign policy, are going to have to find a way to manage this contradiction, or we are not going to be successful in this war.

I suggest four political elements of a long-term strategy to advance democracy while we fight terror:

1. Build and expand democratic communities of countries, organized around free trade.  The European Union has been a remarkable instrument for helping to consolidate democracy.  Its success stems not just from the social, cultural, and political by-products of economic integration, but from the explicit political conditionality that requires member states to practice democracy and respect human rights.  It is strongly in the American national interest to encourage the expansion of the EU as far as possible, and to help the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and crucially, Turkey as well, meet the conditions for admission.  Nothing would do more to advance the democratic prospect in the Americas than the construction of a free trade community throughout the hemisphere, with membership conditioned on democracy and human rights.  To be effective, the political conditions for entry would need to be taken as seriously as the economic ones.
   
   In the Middle East, we should reward progress toward and commitment to better governance with economic incentives.  With timely support, Jordan might become one anchor and model for progress in the region.  We have been debating for a year a free-trade agreement with Jordan.  We should adopt it and implement it immediately.

2. Condition aid and debt relief.  The key problem with backsliding and pseudo-democratic countries is the lack of political will to install or maintain a genuine democracy.  Ruling elites do not want to surrender power and the enormous wealth and privileges it confers.  No amount of political assistance to strengthen institutions of governance and civil society will advance democracy if political elites are not willing to respect its rules and constraints.  In much of the contested world, rulers do not value democracy over their own power and privilege, and civil societies are in themselves too weak to force them either to respect democracy or to surrender power.  Only principled, potent, and predictable international pressure can tip the balance.  This requires political conditions for aid and debt relief, standards for governance that people in these societies will welcome and support.
   
   We need a new international bargain: debt relief for democracy, and development assistance for good governance.  It makes no sense to write off the debts of highly indebted poor countries governed by oppressive, corrupt elites who cannot be checked or removed by democratic means.  To relieve unconditionally these debts, largely accumulated through corruption and bad governance, is to invite continuing venality and waste.  Poor people in these countries will not benefit from this misguided act of intended generosity.  Relief must provide hard incentives for reform.  Debt relief should be conditioned on a free press, free associations, free and fair elections, and credible institutions to control corruption, including an independent commission for that purpose and an independent judiciary.  Commitment to these institutions should be locked into place by suspending debt service payments of a qualifying country and retiring its debt at 10 percent a year for every year the country adheres to the political conditions.  Where national security imperatives are not at stake, the United States should move to condition state-to-state development assistance (other than emergency humanitarian assistance) on these same political standards, or at least demonstrated progress toward them.
   
   We must view political assistance as a multi-faceted, long-term challenge and invest more heavily in it.  The most fundamental obstacle to economic development is not scarcity of resources, it is corrupt, unaccountable, lawless governance.  If we want to promote economic development, we must do more to help build the institutions of good governance in both the state and civil society.  Conditioning official assistance on good governance would enable us to do more for recipient countries in two respects.  First, we could concentrate state-to-state assistance on those countries that are serious about reform, and thus about development.  Second, only with this “tough love” approach that sets clear standards and demands accountability can we justify a larger overall investment in aid to the Congress and the American people.
   
   Democratic development is not going to be accomplished in a piecemeal fashion or in a few years.  Action is needed on a number of fronts simultaneously.  People must be educated to know their rights and responsibilities as democratic citizens, and mobilized to exercise them.  All kinds of grassroots civic organizations must be fostered and empowered.  Independent media—not only newspapers and television, but crucially in poor countries, radio stations—must be established and fortified.  At the same time, the input, output, and accountability structures of the state and political system must be developed: parties, legislatures, local governments, a professional bureaucracy, and independent structures to administer justice and elections, control corruption, audit public accounts, and respond to citizen complaints.
   
   Different priorities prevail in different countries.  A distinctive strategy for democratic development must be crafted for each recipient country in an open, consensual process that brings together the donors, the state, and civil society.  But in every poor country, the agenda of political development will be wide-ranging and expensive.  We can help these countries to develop and sustain democracy in unlikely places, and thereby to improve the prospect for human development more generally.  But that is only possible with comprehensive investment in the development of democratic institutions, sustained over a very long period of time, even a generation or more.

3. We must be flexible about the sequencing of democratic reforms.  In some countries, democratization will be more sustainable if fully competitive and meaningful multi-party elections follow the implementation of fundamental economic and governance reforms.  Restoring multiparty elections in Pakistan today without such reforms will not likely produce a democracy that is any more workable and accountable than the one that collapsed in October 1999.  Similarly, in many Arab countries, democratization, to be sustainable, must be part of a comprehensive project to construct a more efficient, open, accountable, law-based, legitimate—and hence fundamentally stronger—state.  In a program of gradual democratization from above, the timing of elections is crucial.  But here again we confront the painful dilemma that rulers in a position to negotiate reform typically lack the political will or skill to undertake it.  Deferring democratic elections then merely reflects a strategy for deferring any serious political liberalization at all.  Through creative engagement with the different elements of these regimes and their civil societies and through tangible rewards for governance reforms, we need to help generate the political will and vision for democratic reform.

4. We must be clear, consistent, and credible in articulating democratic principles and values, even as we pursue other interests.  Nothing is more damaging to the democratic prospect than to treat and honor as democracies regimes that are manifestly no such thing.  Such hypocrisy only entrenches pseudo-democracy as a legitimate regime form, while breeding cynicism about the real intentions of the U.S.  and other leading democracies.  The convocation of a “Community of Democracies” in Warsaw last year may turn out to have been an important step forward for democracy.  Certainly it produced a declaration that was historic in the scope of democratic principles to which more than 100 countries committed themselves.  But what is the message we give to the world when a government like the current one in Egypt is seated at such a meeting, parades itself as a democracy, signs the declaration, and then promptly spits on it by arresting and jailing its most important democratic activist?

   The test will be faced anew in October 2002 when the Community of Democracies meets again, this time in Seoul.  If there are no independent procedures to evaluate countries' compliance with the Warsaw Declaration, and if numerous pseudo-democracies are once again invited to participate- with no means to redress their failures of compliance- the Community of Democracies will lose its purpose and promise.  The United States must insist that participating governments honor the Warsaw principles.  If it is not possible to establish a genuine community of democracies, we should not legitimate a sham with our presence.

At this deeply troubled moment in our history, let me return, finally, to a note of realism.  Clearly, we have other interests than the promotion of democracy.  We have business to do with Putin and Mubarak, no matter how undemocratic their governments may be.  But there is a lesson to be learned from our long, Cold-War experience in dealing with dictatorships.  We can pursue multiple tracks of interest at once.  We can raise issues of human rights and democracy while we also deal on matters of strategic interest.  We can bargain, we can persuade, and even publicly, we can respectfully speak out for principle.  Most of all, what we must not do is to degrade the currency of democracy by honoring undemocratic regimes with the label “democratic.”  Even when we pursue harder interests, let us preserve our credibility as a nation—the leading nation—committed to democracy and human rights as fundamental goals.  That credibility—that devotion to principle—is one of our most precious assets in the long and difficult struggle ahead.  It is what has made us a target, but it is also what will enable us to prevail.