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Democracy promotion / Working Paper

Democracy Promotion and the European Left: Ambivalence Confused?

12/12/2006 By David Mathieson, Richard Youngs

The new prominence of debates over democracy promotion has engendered much soul searching in Europe. While the European Union (EU) has introduced enhanced democracy promotion commitments since 9/11, a distinct lack of enthusiasm has been evident from many European governments.
Democracy promotion commitments have routinely been conveyed in a fashion suggesting that Europe has followed reluctantly in the US’s footsteps.

Many European governments and officials either give the impression that they are not enthusiastic about democracy promotion, but rather grudgingly feel the need to move with an international zeitgeist clumsily foisted upon them by the United States; or they confidently assert that the EU already has an established and superior model of democracy promotion.

Although the United States has been committed to democracy promotion to some degree under Republican and Democratic presidencies since the 1960s, US democracy policies appeared to move up a gear in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.

Overall, US funding on democracy increased from around 800 million dollars at the beginning of the century to 1.4 billion dollars in 2005; the new Millennium Challenge Account has made additional aid increases conditional upon democracy-related criteria; Washington began for the first time openly to criticise the democratic shortfalls of some key allies, such as Saudi Arabia; and notable pro-democracy interventions were undertaken in Ukraine and Georgia. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has spoken of a new ‘transformational diplomacy’ guiding US foreign policy.

Rather than being widely welcomed, this US advocacy of democracy promotion has been generally viewed with suspicion. Far from the US’s new focus on
democracy having fomented a widespread and intensified support for democracy promotion amongst other states and international organisations, misgivings have increasingly taken root. Indeed, the democracy agenda is now widely judged to be treading water.

‘Freedom’s agenda’, in the words of one expert, is ‘under siege’. European doubts have emanated from different positions on the ideological spectrum, with divisions often forming along national rather than left-right lines. But debates over democracy promotion appear to have engendered some very specific and particularly difficult dilemmas for the European left. While European leftist criticism of the United States is familiar and of long pedigree, the admonishment has traditionally centred on the pre-eminence in American policies of unprincipled realpolitik.

Advocacy of foreign policies centred more strongly on human rights and democratic values was often seen, to a significant extent, as the preserve of progressives. With a widely derided, right-wing US president now adopting a ‘forward leaning’ strategy to spread ‘freedom’, the left’s broad criticism of US foreign policies seemed to infuse its perspective on the democracy agenda. This question invites further investigation.

This paper provides an account of democracy-related debates within different quarters of the European left. It adds to on-going debates through empirical research aimed at revealing more about the way in which democracy promotion is being debated within left of centre parties in four of the most influential member states of the European Union: Spain, France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

The paper’s originality lies in it providing primary source material, from a large number of interviews conducted with politicians and political party officials, as well as from published policy statements, position papers and speeches of party leaders.

With the support of:

 

 

 

 

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Keywords

Democracy promotion European Neighbourhood Policy European Union

Bio author: David Mathieson

PhD in Modern History and Economics from the University of London. He has published numerous articles in Expansión, El País, El Correo, La Razón, the magazine Temas para el Deabte, The Guardian, Tribune, The New Statesman and the Foreign Policy Centre.

Bio author: Richard Youngs

Richard Youngs is Senior Research Fellow and Coordinator of the Democratisation programme at FRIDE. He also lectures at the University of Warwick in the UK. He studied at Cambridge (BA Hons) and Warwick (MA, PhD) universities.