Abstract
Placing another idea under the microscope, this chapter finds as much transatlantic competition with democracy as with trade, markets, and colonies. After defining democracy and placing it within a transatlantic context, the chapter compares how the democratic ‘pathways’ of the European Union and the United States were implemented in East Europe, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively. While the analysis helps distinguish between state building and nation building more precisely (exposing both transitions and phases within them), EU conditionality from the graduated US phases, and the ‘top-down’ versus the ‘bottom-up’ varieties, it ultimately accords the EU variety a longer future shadow than the US counterpart owing to the lesser reliance on the military, though the relevance of the US model is found to be wider globally. Diversity riddles the democratic picture here as much as trade did in other chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
John Dunn, Democracy: A History (New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2005), 66.
- 2.
Jack Plano and Milton Greenberg, The American Political Dictionary (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993, 9th ed.), 8–9.
- 3.
Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, “What democracy is…and is not,” Journal of Democracy 2, no. 3 (Summer 1991).
- 4.
Georg Sørensen, Democracy and Democratization: Processes and Prospects in a Changing World, Dilemma in World Politics Series (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 7.
- 5.
From ibid.
- 6.
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, NY: Harper, 1947, 2nd ed.), 269.
- 7.
Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), Chap. 1; also see his On Democracy (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1998); and the original, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1956).
- 8.
See Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), esp. 6–9; Sørensen, Democracy and Democratization, 11–6; Renske Doorenspleet, Democratic Transitions: Exploring the Structural Sources of the Fourth Wave (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 14–22; as well as Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson, The Failure of Democratic Nation Building: Ideology Meets Evolution (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 28–9. The list is only partial.
- 9.
Context distinguishes both approaches. Usage here corresponds to Paul G. Buchanan’s, with ‘top-down’ representing “a gradual liberalization and political opening followed by competitive elections,” and ‘bottom-up’ “when civil society mobilizes and expands the range of its demands while moving to secure a greater voice in the governmental decision making process.” See Buchanan, “From military rule in Argentina and Brazil,” Authoritarian Regimes in Transition, ed., Hans Binnendijk (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State, 1987), 224, but see 223–33. Definitions later in this chapter are consistent with these.
- 10.
Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966), Chap. 1.
- 11.
Ibid., Chap. 3.
- 12.
This is a take on Mancur Olson’s central argument in both of his seminal works, the first within a domestic context, but extended externally in the second: The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965); and The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).
- 13.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed., Richard D. Heffner (New York, NY: New American Library, 1956), part I, Chap. 3.
- 14.
On enclosures, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, NY: Academic Press, 1974), 109–29.
- 15.
Stefano Allievi, “Muslims and politics,” Muslims in the Enlarged Europe, eds., Brigitte Maréchal, Allievi, Felice Dassetto, and Jørgen Nielsen (Boston, MA: Brill, 2003), 184–5.
- 16.
Geneviève Bouchard, and William Chandler, “The politics of inclusion and exclusion: Immigration and citizenship issues in three democracies,” Crossing the Atlantic: Comparing the European Union and Canada, ed., Patrick M. Crowley (Aldershot, Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2004), Chap. 4.
- 17.
Huntington, op. cit., 35.
- 18.
One might find a parallel here with a Chap. 5 observation about establishing free trade agreements: Europeans found that a long-term developmental approach helped reach this goal more effectively in Latin countries than the blindfolded adoption of FTA instruments, whereas the US approach was to express a commitment to democracy immediately, letting both FTA instruments and development to automatically emerge later.
- 19.
See comments in ibid.
- 20.
See Reinhard Bendix, Nation-building and Citizenship: Studies of our Changing Social Order (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977).
- 21.
Shawkat Ali, Nation Building, Development, and Administration: A Third World Perspective (Lahore: Aziz Brothers, 1979); and Henriette Riegler, ed., Nation Building: Between National Sovereignty and International Intervention (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2005).
- 22.
Volker Bornschier, State-Building in Europe: The Revitalization of Western European Integration (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Stefano Bianchini, and George Schöpflin, State Building in the Balkans: Dilemmas on the Eve of the 21st Century (Ravenna: Longo, 1998); and Su-Hoon Lee, State-building in the Contemporary Third World (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988).
- 23.
For example, Francis Fukuyama, ed., Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
- 24.
Francis Fukuyama, “Nation-building 101,” The Atlantic Monthly (January-February 2004), 159–62, from: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/1/fukuyama.htm and ———, State-Building: Governance and Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
- 25.
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, introduced by Nicolas Murray Butler (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1939); also see Michael Doyle, “Liberalism and world politics,” American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (December 1986):1150–69, among others in a large literature.
- 26.
Richard Youngs, The European Union and the Promotion of Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 14–5.
- 27.
For Youngs, see ibid. Geoffrey Pridham, Designing Democracy EU Enlargement and Regime Change in Post-Communist Europe (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
- 28.
Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
- 29.
On the EU’s top-down policy approach, see Martis Brusis, “The instrumental use of European Union conditionality: Regionalization in the Czech Republic and Slovakia,” East Europe Politics and Societies 19, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 291–316.
- 30.
For a fine comparative analysis of the three countries along several business front, see Jeffrey Garten, The Cold Peace: America, Japan, Germany, and the Struggle for Supremacy (New York, NY: Times Book, 1992), Chap. 4.
- 31.
Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster for American Enterprise Institute, 1982), esp. 23–52.
- 32.
Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper, Lessons From the Past: The American Record on Nation-building, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Briefing Paper # 24, May 2003.
- 33.
Elena Fierro, The EU’s Approach to Human Rights Conditionality in Practice, International Studies In Human Rights, vol., 76 (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinis Nijhoff Publishers, 2003), 94, but see 93–5.
- 34.
Gordon Crawford, Foreign Aid and Political Reform: A Comparative Study of Democracy Assistance and Political Conditionality (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave, 2001); Jean Grugel, ed., Democracy Without Borders: Transnationalization and Conditionality in New Democracies (London, UK: Routledge, 1999); Marc Maresceau, and Erwan Lannon, ed., The EU’s Enlargement and Mediterranean Strategies: A Comparative Analysis (New York, NY: Palgrave and European Institute, University of Ghent, 2001); Sørensen, Political Conditionality (London: F. Cass, 1993); and Olav Stokke, Aid and Political Conditionality (London: F. Cass, 1995).
- 35.
Fierro, op. cit., 94.
- 36.
For a tight description of conditionality, see Heather Grabbe, The EU’s Transformative Power: Europeanization Through Conditionality in Central and Eastern Europe (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 10, but see 10–31.
- 37.
Grabbe, op. cit., 16.
- 38.
Klaudijus Maniokas, “The method of the European Union’s enlargement to the east: A critical appraisal,” Driven to Change: The European Union’s Enlargement Viewed from the East, ed., Antoaneta L. Dimitrova (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004), 20, but see 18–21.
- 39.
Youngs, “The European Union and democracy promotion in the Mediterranean: A new or disingenuous strategy?” Democratization 9, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 44, but see 40–62.
- 40.
Pridham, op. cit., 50.
- 41.
Youngs, European Union and Promotion of Democracy, 21.
- 42.
Fierro, op. cit. 118.
- 43.
In absolute numbers. Sweden gave a larger proportion of its GDP. See Youngs, op. cit., 30–34.
- 44.
Allan Rosas and Jan Helgessen, “Democracy and human rights,” Democracy and Human Rights: Human Rights in a Changing East-West Perspective, eds., Rosas and Helgessen (London: Pinter, 1990), 17–57.
- 45.
Youngs, op. cit., 31–2.
- 46.
Somit and Peterson, op. cit.
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Hussain, I. (2018). Transatlantic Democracy: Of Soft Contenders. In: Transatlantic Transitions. Global Political Transitions. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6608-5_7
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