The European Council on Foreign Relations

As the ‘post-Cold War era’ turned into the ‘multipolar world’ era, the notion of Western democracy promotion underwent similarly dramatic changes. The West became too weak to pursue democracy promotion head-on, and was seen as being forced to fall back on old-school realist approaches to democracy. But just when this realist approach to democracy promotion seemed finally to become almost dominant, the popular wave of protests in the EU’s southern neighbourhood changed everything again. Now the question is what will come next.

The Realist Consensus

For a couple of years the realist consensus on democracy promotion seemed to be on a seemingly unstoppable rise. It marked the end of two decades of noisy, often arrogant but concerned tough talk and action to promote human rights and democracy. The idea was that time has come to focus on achieving certain, rather quantifiable interests, such as ensuring security, fighting terrorism, expanding trade or managing migration, rather than adopting vague goals like promoting human rights and improving governance.

Obama’s foreign policy seemed to be a visible embodiment of this realist approach to foreign policy. The formulation of the Obama administration’s primary foreign policy goals was structured around a few clusters of issues – (more or less) achievable, quantifiable, measurable and tradeable (e.g. get an international consensus on Iran, make sure Russia plays a constructive role in Afghanistan etc). US partnerships with third states would be measured depending on how they help or complicate the achievement of certain goals, not by how those states were governed. The US-Russia reset was a clear example and testing-ground of this approach.

The EU was also by default moving in the same direction, sometimes well before the US did. Of course EU foreign policy was never as clear-cut and neat as that of the US, but as a ‘policy cloud’ it adopted the same trajectory – towards greater realism. EU policy on Russia, for example, has long ago abandoned any pretence of systematic support for human rights and democracy, except for scattered summit remarks for consumption by EU media here and there. The EU also started to engage with Lukashenko in Belarus, almost completely ceased any serious criticism (as opposed to occasional pro forma huffing and puffing) of human rights issues in Russia, China and even smaller places like Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tunisia and Libya. The sanctions on Uzbekistan were removed, those on Belarus suspended (until January 2011) and the pressure – public or private – on other autocratic regimes or even democratic regimes with small authoritarian hiccups significantly scaled down.

All this was branded under the respectable-sounding name of ‘engagement’. I actually believe ‘engagement’ is a legitimate strategy to deal with dictators. I also do not think wishy-washy targeted sanctions and big public speeches are the only way to promote democracy. The primary function of many of these (like travel bans on Burmese generals) is to provide substitutes for action, placate domestic Western public opinion, the gung-ho media and preserve a modicum of self-respect, rather than achieve any specific democracy promotion goals in tough places like Burma or Zimbabwe.

But ‘engagement’ is when you minimise public criticism and talk to a dictator in the hope that it opens up space for you to do some other useful things on the side like getting political prisoners out or supporting media and NGOs. Unfortunately, however, the banner of ‘engagement’ is often used for pretty unprincipled stuff. In Tunisia such ‘engagement’ (see the post on Post-Revolutionary Tunisia) led to a situation where Ben Ali was receiving hundreds of millions of euro, which allegedly ‘bought’ the EU the chance to spend €100,000 a year on civil society (though a good chunk of it was going to fake NGOs set up by the government). ‘Engagement’ with Russia and China does not strike me as having been used to scale up support for civil society in these states. Quite the contrary. And it is this kind of fake engagement stemming from the realist consensus that became increasingly dominant in democracy promotion (or lack of it).

The Unhappy Consensus

But the realist consensus was not a happy consensus. Many of the reasons for its emergence were structural. The gradual shift in power away from the West meant that it could not just shout around the world promoting democratic values. Its pressure was less and less effective, the targets of this pressure could ignore the EU and US more and more without significant consequences. Countries like China and Russia, but also Brazil and India, were happy to offer alternative trade deals, economic assistance and political protection for the Mugabes of this world.

But tactical factors also played an important role. Bush’s presidency discredited democracy promotion as an explicit foreign policy goal. After Bush, going around the world talking democracy promotion rang all the wrong bells and was counter-productive. What is worse, many of the supposed beneficiaries of the democracy promotion wave seemed to fall short. Coloured revolutions in places like Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan or Lebanon disappointed many, starting with their most committed activists. The coloured revolutions also provoked a much wider counter-revolutionary backlash in other countries, adding to the negative side of the balance. (See Tymoshenko’s recent reflections on revolutions. Good, but not self-critical at all). All these factors put together set the stage for the end of ‘post-Cold war’ democracy promotion. But the realist consensus, which came in its wake and seemed like an alternative – albeit an unpleasant one – proved to be an illusion.

The (Happy?) Death of the Consensus

Just when most Western decision-makers finally (more or less) settled for this realist consensus – it all exploded in their face in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East. After such a wave of revolts, which do have significant potential to open up the political space in many Arab states (not overnight, not in one go and not always successfully) it would be stupid to continue with the realist consensus. But returning to nineties style democracy promotion is also not going to work. The West has less money and less relative political power to back up its support for democracy (not mentioning the allergy the US provokes in so many states).

They cannot go back to the policies of democracy promotion seen in the last two decades, but they can no longer settle for the minimalist ‘realist’ approach either, since it is out of touch with popular demands on the ground. What will emerge is unclear, but will be an important conversation for the next couple of years.

This post first appeared on Nicu's blog at EUObserver.com.