The Democratic Rollback

The Resurgence of the Predatory State

Larry Diamond

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008

Summary:  After decades of historic gains, the world has slipped into a democratic recession. Predatory states are on the rise, threatening both nascent and established democracies throughout the world. But this trend can be reversed with the development of good governance and strict accountability and the help of conditional aid from the West.

LARRY DIAMOND is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Co-Editor of the Journal of Democracy. This essay is adapted from his new book, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (Times Books, 2008), © Larry Diamond.

The most urgent imperative is to restructure and empower the institutions of accountability and bolster the rule of law. Changing the way government works means changing the way politics and society work, and that, in turn, requires sustained attention to how public officials utilize their offices. This is the fundamental challenge that all at-risk democracies face.

AIDING THE DEMOCRATIC REVIVAL

The current situation may seem discouraging, but there is hope. Even in very poor nations drowning in corruption and clientelism, citizens have repeatedly used the democratic process to try to replace predatory governments. Connected by grass-roots movements, community radio stations, cell phones, civic organizations, and the Internet, citizens are rising up as never before to challenge corruption, defend the electoral process, and demand better governance. The most important challenge now for the United States and other international actors is to stand with them.

The leverage needed to bring about radical change will never exist unless the politicians and officials who sit atop the structures of predation come to realize that they have no choice but to reform. In the early 1990s, many African regimes moved toward free elections when a combination of internal and external pressure left them no choice: they were running out of money and could not pay their soldiers and civil servants. Now, with the momentum going against democracy, a resurgent and oil-rich Russia flexing its muscles, and China emerging as a major aid donor in the rest of Asia and Africa, it will be more difficult to encourage reforms. Forcing change that leads to better governance will require serious resolve and close coordination among the established bilateral and multilateral donors.

The key is the principle of conditionality (or selectivity), which lies at the core of the Millennium Challenge Account -- one of the Bush administration's least heralded but most important foreign policy innovations. Under the program, states qualify for generous new aid payments by competing on the basis of three broad criteria: whether they rule justly, whether they invest in basic health care and education, and whether they promote economic freedom. The instrument of aid selectivity is showing promise as a tool that civil-society actors in predatory states can use to campaign for governance reforms and as an incentive for corrupt governments in need of more aid to reform their ways.

The international donor community's habit of keeping afloat predatory and other troubled states (in some cases covering up to half of their recurrent government expenditures) must end. The overriding purpose of foreign assistance must be genuine development, not the assuaging of Western guilt or the care and feeding of the massive network of career professionals, nonprofit organizations, and private-sector companies that constitute the global aid industry. It is time to start listening to the growing chorus of activists and organizations in developing countries that are imploring the West to please stop "helping" them with indiscriminate aid that only serves to entrench corrupt elites and practices. To be sure, it will be an uphill struggle to get international donors, and especially institutions such as the World Bank, to refocus their aid strategies on good-governance goals. Still, the reality of the link between development and decent governance -- in particular the control of corruption -- is gradually taking hold in foreign-aid circles, and the civil societies of developing countries are emerging as some of the most compelling and legitimate advocates of this concept.

Now, as democratic setbacks multiply, is the moment for a new strategy. Without a clear understanding of the fundamental problem -- bad governance -- and the necessary institutional responses, more democratic breakdowns are likely. Without a resolute and relentless international campaign to rein in corruption and improve the quality of governance in at-risk democracies, the current democratic recession could lead to a global democratic depression. Such a development would be enormously costly to human freedom and dangerous for U.S. national security. Public opinion surveys continue to show that majorities in every region of the world believe democracy is the best form of government. The urgent imperative is to demonstrate, through the effective functioning of democracies worldwide, that it really is.