From transformation to reality: the role of local context in EU democracy promotion

Representative government and democracy engineering: the Leninist option ⁵

The EU’s democracy agenda emerges with its own transformation from an economic into a political entity and the general seismic changes in the international environment with retreat of the USSR from its European satellites and its subsequent dissolution. ⁶ While the end of the Cold War marked an important caesura in international relations, it also meant the culmination of a universalist understanding of democracy (most famously captured by Fukuyama, 1992), ⁷ which influenced the initial approach to democratization taken by the EU.

As has often been noticed, the practical understanding of democracy and its operationalization as policy option have been starkly influenced by the work of Joseph Schumpeter and Robert Dahl ⁸ as well as by debates about institutional set-ups in comparative political science of the 1980s and early 1990s. ⁹ Derived from these debates, the belief prevailed until the mid-1990s that democracy – consisting of tangible, material components and principles – could be designed and crafted. ¹⁰ This belief had also been fostered by a notion of democracy that was underpinned by certain idea about the nature and ‘task’ of democracy: Rather limited in its remit, representation was considered the crucial feature ensuring democratic rule of society. As a form of social contract, it rationalized aggregated societal interests according to ‘democratic principle’ – the explicit consent of its citizenry ¹¹ – while seeking to safeguard government from populism. ¹²

Based on a certain – albeit undoubtedly simplistic – idea of what democratic government is ¹³ and what was needed to address the ‘gaps between the idealized endpoints and the actual state of the correspondent institutions and processes in the recipient countries’, ¹⁴ externally democratizing these institutions, so the logic went, would transform target countries into democracies. ¹⁵ This is not to argue that democracy promotion was necessarily state-centric. Civil society has come to be understood as an important component and requirement for democracy. ¹⁶ However, it has been perceived as precisely the following: a component that could be equally fostered and engineered as other essential components of democracy, such as electoral systems, constitutions and institutional arrangements. Attention, thus, was mainly primarily paid to the representative aspects of democracy as a system of government and, interlinked, the institutional mechanisms checking and balancing – that is, structuring, framing and fencing in – the playing field of the political game.

How this translated into practice in the wake of post-Cold War enthusiasm has been aptly described by Marina Ottaway as the ‘Leninist option’. ¹⁷ Drawing a parallel to Lenin’s idea that ‘socialist man’ could be engineered despite the lack of necessary preconditions, Ottaway argues that Western democratization efforts in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War were driven by the belief that ‘democratic man’ could equally be brought about by taking a short-cut: ‘[e]xternal pressure, support, and expertise’ which ‘can make elections happen, strengthen parties, and create institutions’. In addition, ‘civil society’, so the rationale, ‘must also be strengthened to provide the underpinnings for the new democratic structures’. Albeit less brutal in its implementation than the Leninist version, the ‘assumption that the right political institutions and processes can make up for poor underlying conditions is the same, as is the belief that deliberate plans can change the society in the desired directions’. ¹⁸ Early democratization efforts were grounded in the idea of linear historical trajectories and the possibility of transformation. Their conceptual starting point consisted in the vision of a prefabricated future for those lagging behind.

The EU’s democratization agenda was born into this interventionist and prescriptive approach based on idealized end points to be achieved. Despite the EU not clearly separating out democracy assistance as a singular field of foreign policy intervention, ¹⁹ its approach seemed to be generally fed by an unproblematized belief in and vision of the possibility of bringing about swift transitions to democratic rule. The initial approach, thus, focused noticeably on influencing political elite ²⁰ and particularly on providing electoral assistance. ²¹ Moreover, the EU, in one of its earliest documents on democratization dedicates itself to the ‘setting-up of new democratic institutions’ in countries outside of the EU. ²² Following the more institution-centred model of democracy, the EU had little difficulty in aligning itself with the ‘international community’ of prescriptive democracy engineers and proclaimed to take a ‘“hands-on” approach … to actively supporting the transition to democracy’. ²³

‘From Concepts to Dynamics’2⁶⁴ contingent governance, local reality and participation for self-management

As quoted in the introduction, the EU considers ‘governance’ to have gained in significance and importance since the mid-1990s. Particularly over the past 10 years, a vast majority of policy documents and practitioners handbooks issued by the European Commission on democracy and democratization have at their heart a concern for governance. ²⁵

Governance, as the EU defines it, ‘refers to rules, processes, and behaviour by which interests are articulated, resources managed, and power exercised in society’. ²⁶ Obviously, these rules, processes and behaviour refer to a sphere that is not and cannot be captured by prescriptive and workable principles and institutional models as such. Rather, they denote social characteristics, that is, norms that shape and guide how people act. Crucially, within the ‘Leninist approach’, these were perceived to be the result of transforming political institutions and did not require separate attention. As the EU itself explains, the ‘concept of good governance remains implicit in a political and institutional environment respecting human rights, democratic principles and the rule of law’. ²⁷ Now, however, norms and behaviour constitute the starting point rather than the outcome of policy programming. As such, they have moved into the limelight of what is being understood to be the site and determinant of democracy.

Rather than exporting institutions and promoting elections, democratic governance in EU discourses is closely linked to local ownership, capacity-building and enabling participation and inclusion. ²⁸ Being increasingly concerned with subjective behaviour and relationships rather than institutional arrangements for the democratic control over the exercise of authority, there is, in a sense, no form or ‘limit’ to democracy: It has no specific locus, event, principle or realm – such as government, decision-making or elections – but is a constant process encompassing all spheres of society. All sectors both provide a potential platform for optimizing behaviour but also, in the absence of a reliable institutional framework, require democratized subjects and their participation. ‘Democratic governance processes cannot be reduced to one specific component’. ²⁹ Hence, ‘[d]emocratic governance is to be approached holistically, taking into account all its dimensions (political, economic, social, cultural, environmental, etc.) … Accordingly, the concept has to be integrated into each and every sectoral programme’. ³⁰ Institutions, for sure, do not simply disappear, but they undergo a significant reconceptualization. Most pointedly, this is captured by EuropeAid’s handbook on capacity development. ‘[I]nstitutions’, the handbook elaborates, ‘denotes resilient social structures formed by norms and regulations which provide solidity and meaning to social life’. ³¹

With this more sociologically inspired understanding of democracy as governance, a reality is being produced that is predestined to become intractable: There is always already a context. People are always already embedded in social relationships guided by some inherent norms, processes and rules. Governance is a fact. Moreover, its dynamics follow an inner, contingent law and thus elude outside knowability. External intervention based on a universalist model of linear transformation is now perceived to be obstructed by domestic politics. It is local governance dynamics that pose a limit to, rather than rationale for, democracy promotion. ³² As a consequence, rather than a democratic model providing the starting point of approaches to democratization into which societies must be transformed, it is the local environment around which democracy must be moulded. The aim of democratization measures is relegated to optimizing what is given as opposed to bringing about what is ‘missing’. ³³ As a EuropeAid handbook for practitioners explains:

[D]emocratic governance is a domestic issue as recognized by the EC [European Commission], and consequently governance support cannot be based in blueprints or one size fits all solutions or show immediate results, but requires a realistic and incremental approach based on the current governance reality. ³⁴

In such a situation, one needs to ‘act strategically’. Acting strategically means ‘refrain[ing] from adopting normative approaches or exercising hands-on control’ ³⁵ but rather strengthen capacity and inclusion. ‘[C]apacity can be defined as the ability to perform tasks and produce outputs, to define and solve problems and make informed choices’. ³⁶

As a result, the reference object of democracy is not primarily the political system, which would have transformative power over society. Rather, what is sought to be democratized are management capacities – the ability to perform tasks and define problems based on the local realities and immediate parameters. Inclusion is thus essential if self-management is the objective. The approach adopted is not the transformation of political systems and societies according to a prescriptive template but to optimize local contexts so as to enable individual and collective subjects to secure their well-being and to solve problems now presented to be their own.

Conclusion

While the emerging imaginary and role of democracy in EU discourses is certainly a significant shift away from the civilizing mission reverberating in the Leninist approach, it does not exactly result in a move towards emancipation or seeks to bring about political agency. Democracy thus promoted does not offer a vision of a future whether embraced or contested by those subject to democratization measures. Rather than a revival of the mission civilisatrice of old, where societies had to be transformed in order to ‘live up to’ democratic standards, it is democracy itself that is being moulded around local ways of living and well-being. This may not be the imperialism of power projection and superior knowledge, but it may well be the imperialism of low expectations, of adaptation, and of the individual management of problems presented to be subjective.

‘Democracy’ as a foreign policy concern of the EU can hardly be said to ever have been propelled by a pithy vision of emancipation. However, with the reinvigoration of democracy as democratic governance rather than democratic politics, it may be that not only as policy intervention but, more profoundly, as an idea, democracy itself is being emptied from its emancipatory potential. Democracy as governance, in which agency is not understood as the capacity to act but rather as the capacity to adapt, seems to bereave it from – at least conceptually – offering a politics through which external conditions of the world we live in can be transformed.