Abstract
The international promotion of democracy is about power, but the scholarship on this issue offers little systematic attention to the role and relevance that power might have in this context. This article critically discusses the literature that does explicitly deal with power in democracy promotion and proposes a multidimensional perspective as a way to improve our understanding of the international politics of democracy promotion. First, the typology of power proposed by Barnett and Duvall is applied to systematically conceptualize the power dimension of democracy promotion. Second, the article revisits the two main attempts to theoretically grasp the role and relevance of power in democracy promotion that draw on the Realist concept of relative power and the neo-Gramscian theory of hegemony, respectively. In both cases, the article argues, a multidimensional concept of power is analytically useful, as it enables an understanding of the complex nature of democracy promotion that goes beyond interstate relations and includes the attempt to change the very constitution of the recipient or target country from within.
Introduction
International democracy promotion is concerned with power, in many respects. By supporting local agents of democratic change, external democracy promoters shape domestic balances of power. 1 In trying to get governments in target countries to embark on democratic reforms they would not otherwise pursue, democracy promoters also themselves exercise power. 2 In order to project such political power, democracy promoters need the capacity to do so, that is, they require corresponding relative power vis-à-vis the targets. 3 This multiple relation between power and international democracy promotion is rooted in the subject matter. On the one hand, democracy as a system of political rule “is above all a matter of power,” and democratization is basically a process of redistributing political power. 4 On the other hand, as a unidirectional relationship between a promoter and a “recipient” or “target,” democracy promotion almost by definition mirrors asymmetric international power relations. 5
Given the unresolved debate about the concept of power in the analysis of international relations, 6 it does not come as a surprise that there is no consensus view on the role and relevance of “power” in the international promotion of democracy. What is surprising, however, is the limited attention scholars have so far paid to this issue when studying democracy promotion. This corresponds to the “paradoxical” situation Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall observed some years ago with a view to global governance that the increasing attention to this topic “has not included a sustained consideration of power.” 7 In this sense, the present article aims at initiating a systematic consideration of power in the academic study of democracy promotion. It, therefore, critically reviews the existing scholarship on democracy promotion that explicitly deals with power and proposes a multidimensional perspective on power as a way to improve our understanding of the international politics of democracy promotion.
The article proceeds in two steps. The first section draws on conceptual discussions about power in the analysis of international relations, and particularly on the typology of power developed by Barnett and Duvall, 8 in order to systematically grasp the different ways in which democracy promotion is about exercising power. In line with Barnett and Duvall’s multidimensional perspective on power, I argue that power in democracy promotion does not only show up when democracy promoters somehow exert coercion in the sense of compulsory power. Rather, because it aims at changing from within the very constitution of a given target state, democracy promotion is about exercising what Barnett and Duvall call structural and productive kinds of power. Yet, as will be seen, such constitutive (structural and productive) kinds of power cannot be simply “exercised”; both the (re)sources and the effects of constitutive power lie beyond the relation of interaction between a democracy promoter and its target. The second section then revisits those two strands of democracy promotion research that have explicitly dealt with power, namely, those that draw on neoclassical Realism and neo-Gramscian international political economy, respectively. In discussing these two approaches to democracy promotion, I will show that both would benefit from a multidimensional perspective on power and, in particular, from recognizing the crucial and complex role of constitutive power in democracy promotion. Because democracy promotion is essentially about changing target countries from within, power cannot be limited conceptually to the notion of an external actor exercising “power over” a given recipient.
Although sympathetic to the neo-Gramscian perspective, this article does not aim to propose or defend a specific theoretic approach to democracy promotion. Rather, it suggests that the multidimensional concept of power is useful also for analyses of democracy promotion that are informed by different (for instance, Realist or Liberal) theoretical perspectives. In general, I argue that the constitutive (structural and productive) dimensions of power explain why democracy promotion is so difficult, so limited in its ability to achieve the kind of effects it aims at, so contested and, in fact, so contradictory.
In focusing on power in democracy promotion, this article does not argue that democracy promotion should be viewed as power politics and nothing else. As Martha Finnemore and Judith Goldstein have argued, “power politics rarely explains all international outcomes,” but “ignoring relations of power risks missing the underlying dynamic of international affairs.” 9 This also holds for international democracy promotion. At the same time, the overall aim of this contribution is of a theoretical, conceptual nature. It is written as an issue-specific contribution to the “agenda for theorizing power” in international relations. 10 Consequently, I deliberately focus on questions specifically related to this issue: how can we conceptualize power in democracy promotion? To what extent can we conceive of democracy promotion as an exercise of power? To what extent is power a factor shaping democracy promotion? and what is it that determines (relative) power in democracy promotion?
In what follows, I use a broad definition of democracy promotion that encompasses all measures that external actors take with the declared aim to contribute to establishing, strengthening, improving, or defending democracy in another country. Such activities range from development aid projects and diplomatic appeals to democratic conditionality (incentives and sanctions) and the use of military force. Democracy assistance, in turn, refers to the subset of activities that are nonviolent and concern the delivery of economic resources and technical know-how through foreign or development aid. 11
Generally, democracy can be promoted by different kinds of external actors, be they states, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or even private companies, 12 but the focus here will be on states. International organizations and nonstate agencies are considered only as instruments of governmental democracy promotion, not as actors in their own right. Although democracy promotion implemented by, or on behalf of, states still represents a large part of activities in the field, this certainly implies that the argument put forward in this article is limited. I cannot discuss here whether and how the conceptual framework proposed might also grasp the power of multilateral or nongovernmental democracy promoters. This state-centered perspective, however, does not apply to the recipient side. Target governments constitute a crucial counterpart for democracy promoters, and supporting and/or reforming state institutions is a core area of democracy assistance. Yet, cooperation with and support of nonstate actors—such as NGOs, trade unions and business associations, private media, schools, and universities—are also crucial avenues for democracy promotion which have to be considered when discussing the question of power in democracy promotion.
The above definition of democracy promotion implies a normatively agnostic perspective: Democracy promotion is what a given external actors declares to be aimed at promoting democracy. This means, first, that the kind of democracy that is promoted in any individual case is dependent on the conception of democracy held by the particular democracy promoter. 13 Second, to treat an activity as democracy promotion does not imply the assumption that it will necessarily have a corresponding effect: whether democracy promotion actually promotes democracy and, if so, which kind of democracy, is an empirical question and cannot be defined beforehand.
Conceptualizing the Power Dimension of Democracy Promotion
In order to grasp the power dimension of international democracy promotion, this article adopts the multidimensional concept of power in international relations developed by Barnett and Duvall. 14 This approach is particularly suited for the issue at hand for three reasons. First, Barnett and Duvall substantially broaden the concept of power and therefore allow for grasping types of power that go beyond notions of material-based coercion. This is crucial because most activities of democracy promotion do not consist in the simple exercise of physical, compulsory force. Second, however, their concept of power is still “restricted to the production of particular kinds of effects, namely those on the capacities of actors to determine the conditions of their existence”: 15 Power, as they define it, “is the production, in and through social relations, of effects on actors that shape their capacity to control their fate.” 16 This focus, which deliberately rejects an all-encompassing notion of power synonymous with causality, 17 is well-suited to the topic of democracy promotion, which is, by definition, about such kinds of effects. 18 Third, their taxonomy of four types of power enables scholars to look at the “multiple forms of power [that] are simultaneously present in international politics,” including at the connections between these different forms. 19 As will be seen, this multidimensionality of power is indeed important if we are to understand the complex role of power in democracy promotion.
Barnett and Duvall’s four types of power are defined by differences in terms of two analytical dimensions. On the one hand, “power is either an attribute of particular actors and their interactions or a social process of constituting what actors are as social beings, that is, their social identities and capacities.” 20 On the other, there are different degrees “to which the social relations through which power works are direct and socially specific or indirect and socially diffuse.” 21 The resulting four types of power are (1) compulsory power, which refers to “relations of interaction of direct control by one actor over another”; (2) institutional power, which refers to “the control actors exercise indirectly over others through diffuse relations of interaction”; (3) structural power, which concerns “the constitution of subjects’ capacities in direct structural relation to one another”; and (4) productive power, which concerns “the socially diffuse production of subjectivity in systems of meaning and signification.” 22
The former two types of power refer to an actor-centered kind of power over: compulsory power directly refers to Robert Dahl’s definition of power as a relation that enables control (“A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.”) 23 and includes Realist approaches; the notion of institutional power has been emphasized especially by the literature on international institutions and regimes. The latter two types of power, by contrast, refer to a constitutive kind of “power to”: structural power, in particular, takes up the neo-Gramscian expansion of the concept of power as prominently developed by Steven Lukes, while the notion of productive power draws explicitly on Michel Foucault. 24 Table 1 summarizes Barnett and Duvall’s four types of power. The ways in which they can be applied to democracy promotion, also summarized in the table, will be outlined in the following.
Barnett and Duvall’s Four Types of Power and Democracy Promotion.
Source: Author’s compilation based on Barnett and Duvall, “Power in International Politics.”
Power is a social phenomenon, a property or opportunity characterizing a social relationship. 25 As defined in the Introduction, democracy promotion concerns activities by an external actor that take place in or are related to another country, this relationship, at least, includes such an external actor and one or more recipient(s) in the target country. This holds true no matter if we are concerned with intergovernmental democracy promotion through diplomatic appeals, with official development cooperation between aid agencies and local “partners” or with purely nongovernmental relations between international and local NGOs. Democracy promotion is, thus, exercised in “relations of interaction of actors,” 26 which points to the first two—actor-oriented—types of power over.
Actor-centered Power in Democracy Promotion: Compulsory and Institutional
By definition, democracy promotion is about exercising compulsory power: it refers to “relations between actors that allow one to shape directly the circumstances or actions of another.” 27 This is unequivocal in the case of democracy promotion by imposition 28 or “foreign-imposed regime change.” 29 But promoting democracy by exerting pressure or imposing conditionality also includes the use of direct power: even if democracy promoters avoid outright coercion and no matter their potentially “benign intent,” by imposing costs on and offering incentives to a given target government, they aim at causing the latter “to concede, to do something it would not otherwise choose to.” 30 This is an exercise of power in the narrow (Dahlian) sense of compulsion or control. 31
Democracy promotion as an exercise of compulsory power, on the one hand, draws on material capabilities (military force, economic resources spent on democracy assistance, asymmetries in the distribution of material capabilities, and vulnerabilities that allow for political conditionality and sanctions). On the other hand, it may also include the strategic usage of nonmaterial resources. In the neo-Gramscian reading of democracy promotion, as coined particularly by William Robinson, democracy promoters do also exercise power if their activities are strictly limited to cooperative measures based on an explicit consent of the counterpart. In fact, the possibility to largely replace the use of “straight power” (i.e., coercive control) by “persuasion” as a means of consensus-based domination (hegemony) is precisely seen as the strategic advantage of democracy promotion. 32 In this neo-Gramscian sense, Jeff Bridoux distinguishes between “coercive and consensual power,” a distinction that can be found, with different connotations, also in Joseph Nye’s concept of soft (as opposed to hard) power. 33 In Nye’s conceptualization, “soft” (or “co-optive”) power concerns the capability of one country “to get other countries to want what it wants,” as opposed to “the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.” 34 Both “consensual” and soft power, therefore, explicitly include an element of ideological, or ideational, compulsion that is exercised by one actor over another. 35
But why should democracy assistance delivered in the form of development aid or moral appeals raised by diplomats be considered to involve power? Of course, democracy assistance does not involve (the use of) power as long as development cooperation is really equitable cooperation, based on “collective choice” and “joint action,” 36 without any asymmetry. In the area of diplomacy, ideal-type persuasion that is “completely voluntary,” 37 entirely based on the better argument and not shaped by any kind of asymmetric (economic, institutional, and ideational) playing field is not power related. Yet, these two theoretical constructs of “power-free” democracy promotion are in fundamental tension with a basic asymmetry that is at the heart of the whole endeavor: Democracy promotion always presupposes the existence of some external actor able and qualified to promote democracy and another one in need of receiving this kind of external support. In this “pedagogical” relationship constituted by the practice of democracy promotion, 38 donors and recipients are, thus, fundamentally unequal, and it is the latter only whose “capacity to control their fate” 39 is affected. 40
In addition, democracy promotion operates through the activities of multilateral organizations and the effects of international regimes, which point to institutional power. When, for instance, the Organization of American States promotes democracy in the Americas and democracy-related norms established at the level of the Western Hemisphere constitute collective expectations as to the appropriate structure and behavior of political regimes in the region, this is something different from the kind of direct power the United States may exercise when it promotes democracy bilaterally. These are examples of institutional power because, here, the United States as a democracy promoter exercises power “through institutions rather than directly.” 41 Given the US government’s privileged influence on inter-American institutions, the United States does still exercise power over other American countries (and does not just engage in horizontal cooperation), but it does so by “working through the rules and procedures that define those institutions.” 42 Also in the area of bilateral democracy promotion, governments in part deliberately chose indirect or mediated ways to pursue their policies. This is best exemplified by the public funding of NGOs that execute democracy aid projects. The criterion that distinguishes compulsory from institutional power is whether the democracy promoter maintains direct control over the intermediate institutions. 43 Thus, when the US Agency for International Development (USAID) contracts consulting firms to implement its democracy assistance programs, it still exercises compulsory power, just as the German government does through its official implementing organizations, the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) and the KfW Development Bank.
Constitutive Power in Democracy Promotion: Structural and Productive
Democracy promotion is by definition about (external) actors that do something. Yet, the logic of democracy promotion cannot be grasped by looking only at the interaction between a democracy promoter and a recipient or target. The specific thing about democracy promotion, compared to other areas of foreign policy, is that it is intentional action that does not focus on “changing the policies of their counterparts in other countries but on altering the domestic authority structures within which these counterparts are embedded.” 44 Democracy promoters, thus, aim at producing constitutive effects in the sense of the other two types of power. Even if a donor is capable of exercising (a certain amount of) control over a given recipient government or NGO through the interaction between the two, the real target (the shape of the political regime in question) lies beyond these direct “behavioral relations.” 45 In their attempt to shape the political regime of another country, democracy promoters normally have neither direct nor indirect “control […] over the conditions of existence and/or the actions” of the recipient. 46 This points to constitutive—structural and also productive—power.
In less theoretical and more policy-oriented terms, this power dimension of democracy promotion has been highlighted by what Peter Burnell has dubbed the “Carnegie Perspective.” 47 Analysts from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and, in particular, Thomas Carothers, have emphasized that democratization implies “struggles over power” 48 and that democracy promotion, therefore, is about redistributing political power by strengthening “those groups inside countries who look most likely to make a difference.” 49 But supporting specific change agents is not enough: in order to make a difference, democracy promoters also have to deal with the “underlying relationships and structures of power at work in any particular sector they are trying to change.” 50 The core issue at hand is what Nicolas Guilhot has called the “intrinsically revolutionary” nature of democracy promotion: “To promote democracy is fundamentally to promote change. It aims at restructuring societies from the grass-roots level of civil society to the formal structures of power, transforming their economies as well in the process.” 51
Thus, democracy promotion involves much more than the direct or institutionally mediated power external actors exercise over local recipients or targets. Democracy promoters, in acting in target countries with a view to shape their domestic politics and polities, 52 exercise structural and productive power. They change from within the very constitution of a given counterpart: its properties, capacities, and also its interests and collective identity. Constitutive effects in terms of democracy promotion thus depend on constitutive types of power—otherwise, democracy promoters do nothing but produce “uncertainty.” 53 While democracy promoters directly interact with actors on the recipient side, democracy promotion is about (indirectly) contributing to the establishment, in other (recipient) countries, of democratic political institutions and democratic “change agents” (structural power) as well as of an overall “democratic political culture,” that is, generalized systems of meaning and signification (productive power). 54
Furthermore, just like the capital–labor and master–slave relationships mentioned by Barnett and Duvall, donor–recipient relations in the area of democracy promotion are also an example “of how social structures constitute unequal social privileges and capacities.” 55 In the case of democracy promotion, however, the logic behind this asymmetric relationship is its overcoming: the “deficient” recipients are to become what the donors already are. Looking at the problematique from the perspective of structural power, then, shows that democracy promotion very much depends on the target country: at least a critical bloc of domestic actors has to buy into this subordinate role and the notion of a deficient state of their country, while accepting the role model status of the donor that shows to the recipient country “the image of its own future,” to use Karl Marx’ famous expression. This relationship, as internalized by the recipient, therefore constitutes a crucial element of the power base on which democracy promotion rests. The donor–recipient relationship is shaped by the structural power of the democracy promoter, but it also depends on more general “systems of knowledge and discursive practices of broad and general social scope,” 56 which are only indirectly influenced by the democracy promoter and point to the productive type of power. The latter, for instance, refers to the importance of the global development discourse which constitutes the categories of developed and developing countries and establishes concepts and standards of development (such as good governance or liberal democracy). 57
In sum, constitutive power (structural and productive) is crucial for democracy promotion in two related ways. On the one hand, a specific democracy assistance project or a diplomatic exercise in shaming and blaming may be regarded as being based on compulsory power (see above), but their very aim requires democracy promoters to use these interaction-related power resources in order to exercise constitutive power. On the other hand, the very practice of democracy promotion is enabled and constrained by bilateral/direct and broader/diffuse relations that constitute structural and productive power. 58 Democracy promoters, in the end, largely depend on recipients to acquire the corresponding “beliefs” and form the corresponding “desires.” 59 In this sense, Levitsky and Way have argued that the (compulsory) use of “leverage” by Western states in order to promote democracy is most effective when combined with “extensive linkage to the West.” 60 It is such economic, political, and social linkage that “shapes the preferences of domestic actors,” creates “domestic stakeholders in democracy,” and “redistributes domestic power in ways that favor democracy.” 61 Democracy promotion, thus, involves the exercise of constitutive power at the level of the target country, but, at the same time, this exercise of power depends on democracy promoters and their targets being embedded in power relations that constitute the material and ideational conditions enabling democracy promotion. As I will argue in the following section, recognizing these constitutive dimensions of power offers important insights for existing approaches to the role and relevance of power in democracy promotion.
Analyzing Democracy Promotion with a Multidimensional Concept of Power
Two types of scholars working on democracy promotion have explicitly dealt with power: those informed by neoclassical Realism and those drawing on neo-Gramscian international political economy. In this section, I will discuss these two approaches to democracy promotion in order to show that both would benefit from a multidimensional perspective on power. With a view to the Realist perspective, which is characterized by a narrow focus on relative power understood solely in terms of compulsion, the multidimensional power concept demonstrates that the different ways in which democracy promotion implies and requires an exercise of power concern not only the (more or less coercive) instruments used but also the kinds of effects that are to be produced. Acknowledging the constitutive dimension of power, I will argue, allows for broadening the Realist explanation of variance in democracy promotion policies so that it can better grasp observable empirical patterns.
Recognizing the need of democracy promoters to exercise power also in institutional, structural, and productive terms has crucial consequences for the neo-Gramscian perspective on democracy promotion, too. As will be shown, prominent neo-Gramscian interpretations of democracy promotion, while including a deliberate attempt to go beyond a narrow, materialist notion of power and hegemony, very much stick to a compulsory (top-down) understanding of power. The multidimensional concept of power, I argue, enables differentiating the neo-Gramscian attempt to theorize democracy promotion so that it can better capture the contradictions inherent to the very endeavor to promote democracy from the outside.
Explaining Variance in Democracy Promotion Policies: Revisiting the Realist Perspective
In drawing on neoclassical Realism, scholars such as Henry Nau, 62 Jonathan Monten, 63 and Benjamin Miller 64 have emphasized that “relative power” is a significant factor that shapes (US) democracy promotion by constraining and enabling “the capability to use intervention as a mechanism of democratic change.” 65 Power, here, is used as an explanatory factor. More specifically, Monten and Miller have argued that shifts in relative (US) power help explain why some US administrations have adopted democracy promotion as a major goal of their foreign policy and were even willing to use military force in its pursuit, while others have not (or much less so). None of the authors mentioned regards (relative) power as the one cause that explains everything (all of them, in fact, integrate identity-based and/or perceptual factors into their theoretical models). Still, relative power is regarded a necessary, if not sufficient, “precondition to actively promoting democracy abroad.” 66 Because the relative power of a would-be democracy promoter determines its potential to exert influence on a given target state, relative power is regarded an important causal factor that helps explain variance in the democracy promotion policies of states. 67
In line with (neoclassical) Realism, power is defined as relative power of states measured by the relative distribution of material capabilities among states. Monten explicitly refers to the overarching Realist argument that “as their relative power rises states will seek more influence abroad, and as it falls their actions and ambitions will be scaled back accordingly.” 68 As power in neoclassical Realism is defined as the material capabilities “with which states can influence one another,” 69 relative power is understood as “the relative amount of material power resources countries possess.” 70 Such a materialist definition of power is explicitly defended against a relational definition of power as put forward, most prominently, by Dahl: neoclassical Realists see Dahl’s notion of power as a relation that enables control (see above) as practically unusable and also theoretically problematic (because power here is defined by its—potential—effects). 71 Still, the theoretical argument advanced is clearly relational: as already mentioned above, Monten considers relative power as crucial in shaping democracy promotion because it defines a state’s capability to effectively support “democratic change” in other countries. 72 This, of course, immediately provokes the question whether it is (relative distributions of) material capabilities alone that determine the capability to exert this kind of influence (see below). 73
A second issue raised by the Realist conceptualization of power concerns the question relative to what material (power) capabilities are to be measured. Again following neoclassical realism, relative power for Monten and Miller means the power of one state (the United States) “vis-à-vis the rest of the international system.” 74 While this may be reasonable when trying to account for overall changes in US grand strategy, democracy promotion policies are, by definition, oriented not at the systemic level but at a particular target state (where democracy is to be promoted). Such policies, according to the overall Realist logic, will then be shaped by the specific capability of power projection in a given bilateral relationship—and, therefore, by relative (US) power vis-à-vis the individual target country. This is, in fact, the way Henry Nau conceptualizes and measures relative (US) power: as the (dyadic) distribution of power capabilities between the United States and an individual counterpart. At any point in time, therefore, US relative power in a given dyad can range from “decentralized and relatively equally distributed” to “unequally distributed and eventually centralized.” 75
Third, a major empirical problem with the grand theory explanations offered by Monten and Miller is that they tend to overlook the dramatic differences within one and the same US administration at any given point in time. For instance, the George W. Bush administration is categorized as having pursued an aggressive vindicationism (Monten) and as having turned to offensive liberalism (Miller). Even after 9/11, however, President Bush’s actual policies were far from consistently aimed at spreading democracy across the world in an assertive manner. As Carothers has concluded, “[t]he main lines of Bush policy, with the singular exception of the Iraq invasion, have turned out to be largely Realist in practice, with democracy and human rights generally relegated to minor corners.” 76 In the Middle East, events such as the “electoral gains by Islamists in Egypt, Palestine and Lebanon” quickly caused the Bush administration “to abandon its pro-democracy push,” around the world, the so-called War on Terror and the administration’s international energy policy drove the United States “into closer relations with helpful non-democratic governments.” 77 While questions of power are certainly not the only relevant issues for this story, a multidimensional concept of power does help understand the dynamics at play.
A research project comparing US (and German) democracy promotion in Belarus, Bolivia, Ecuador, Pakistan, Turkey, and Russia found that “relative power” as measured by the distribution of material capabilities between donor and recipient does play an important role in shaping democracy promotion policies. 78 The causal effect of power, however, was not as clear-cut and homogenous as in the Realist conception. There was an unambiguous effect only in the case of small (or even negative) power asymmetries. In these circumstances, limited relative power directly led to a perception, on the part of the democracy promoter, that the potential influence on the recipient country was small. Under such premises, donors were reluctant to promote democracy and, as far as they did, avoided confrontational strategies. Conversely, however, high power asymmetries did not necessarily lead to high assertiveness. 79
Taking the above discussion about the role of structural and productive power for democracy promotion into account, the reason for this finding is straightforward: success of democracy promotion largely depends on the local conditions that enable constitutive effects within the given recipient country. These local conditions, as emphasized by the “Carnegie Perspective,” include, for instance, the existence of potent entry points and partners for the democracy promoter, a favorable domestic balance of power that includes existing alternatives to the incumbent government, and an ideational acceptance by a critical bloc of domestic political forces of the donor–recipient relationship as well as of the shared goal (liberal democracy). Interaction-related (compulsory and institutional) power is a necessary condition for democracy promotion. Therefore, its absence effectively constrains what external actors can and will do in this policy area. Still, its presence is not sufficient for effectively enabling democracy promotion.
This argument also explains why, as Carothers observed, the electoral victories by Islamist movements led the US administration to adopt a much more reluctant stance on promoting democracy in the Middle East. Events such as the 2006 victory of Hamas did not reduce the relative power of the United States vis-à-vis Palestine. Yet, it showed the limited US capacity to shape domestic internal dynamics in Palestine and other Arab countries, the overall loss of attraction of ideas and values associated with “the West” as well as the risks for US strategic interests in the region associated with democratic procedures under such circumstances. The failure to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq confirms that such a lack of constitutive power cannot be compensated by the use of military (compulsory) power. 80 Very clearly, a specific distribution of material power capabilities does not directly imply the necessary structural and productive power required to exert the intended influence in a given recipient country. It is, therefore, not the dyadic distribution of power capabilities as such, but the perceived power of the donor in terms of influence that shapes democracy promotion. This requires a broader perspective on power, even when seeing the world from the perspective of neoclassical Realism. Given the fact that scholars such as Miller, Monten, and Nau have already incorporated ideational factors into their theoretical models, there is no reason why they should not be able to broaden also their perspective on power.
Theorizing Democracy Promotion: Revisiting the Neo-Gramscian Approach
The concept of power used by neo-Gramscian perspectives on democracy promotion goes beyond mere material-based compulsion. Most prominently, William Robinson has theorized democracy promotion as a deliberate strategy led by the US government that aims at securing “the hegemony of a transnational elite which is the agent of transnational capital.” 81 Recognizing this overall strategic purpose, according to Robinson, is necessary to understand what the United States does—and does not—when it promotes democracy. For instance, democracy promotion is about promoting “polyarchy” or “low-intensity democracy” because it aims “not only at mitigating the social and political tensions produced by elite-based and undemocratic status quos, but also at suppressing popular and mass aspirations for more thoroughgoing democratization of social life.” 82 In contrast to the Carnegie perspective, democracy promotion here is seen as a strategy to basically guarantee existing structures of power both at the national and at the international level. 83
Although neo-Gramscian analyses of democracy promotion are among the few works that are explicitly interested in “the power politics of today’s democracy promotion,” 84 existing studies mostly do not engage with the concept of power as such. 85 Neo-Gramscian analyses generally focus on a specific kind of power relation (hegemony) that, in Gramsci’s understanding, relies on “consensual domination.” 86 Under conditions of hegemony, power structures (or relations of domination) are based on (ideological) consent protected by at least potential (material) coercion. 87 In this sense, the neo-Gramscian understanding of power is broader than the narrow materialist conception in neoclassical Realism. As prominently argued by Steven Lukes, the most effective power structures are those in which open resistance is prevented in the first place because “[t]hose subject to it are led to acquire beliefs and form desires that result in their consenting or adapting to being dominated.” 88
In line with a broader understanding of power, neo-Gramscian analyses of democracy promotion therefore emphasize the ideational dimension of exercising power (hegemony as consensus-based domination). 89 Yet, they nevertheless tend to reduce democracy promotion to an instrument that is deliberately manipulable and deployable by those forces exercising global hegemony: they “ultimately rest on a conception of hegemony as a process of centrifugal or top-down diffusion of power, permeating civil society, culture, educational institutions and so forth, without ever encountering resistance.” 90 Democracy promotion, according to Robinson, follows “the view that ‘democracy’ is the most effective means of assuring stability, the former seen as but a mechanism for the latter.” 91 The implicit assumption seems to be that not only coercion-based but also consensus-based ways of exercising power in and through democracy promotion enable hegemonic forces to directly control the constitutive outcomes of their activities (low-intensity democracy). Yet, when seen from the perspective of a multidimensional concept of power, this is not a convincing application of the neo-Gramscian perspective. 92 Taking the shape of hegemony, power, in the neo-Gramscian reading, is exercised at two levels: the international (between donor and recipient) and the domestic (intrarecipient). At both levels, the peculiar constitutive power of democracy promotion consists in its “ideological dimension,” namely “that democracy is a universal aspiration and the claim to promote it has mass appeal.” 93 This ideational power base of democracy promotion imposes limits on the use of compulsory power.
At the international level, democracy promoters need at least a certain amount of credibility in order to be able to exercise the kind of power associated with democracy promotion. In other words, the international institutions and norms that support democracy promoters’ compulsory power in terms of institutional power at the same time limit their capacity to unilaterally do (in the name of democracy promotion) whatever they please. Otherwise, they will undermine the very power base on which democracy promotion rests, as the experience with George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda clearly shows. 94 As Ned Lebow has argued, the Iraq War “offers dramatic evidence that power [here understood in terms of material, compulsory power, JW] does not necessarily produce influence, and that its use in inappropriate ways—at odds with prevailing norms and practices—can seriously erode a state’s influence. For the United States, it has led to the seeming paradox that the most powerful state the world has ever witnessed is increasingly incapable of translating its power into influence.” 95
The same holds true for the intrastate level. In order for (US) democracy promotion to function the way Robinson claims, the people in the recipient countries have to believe, at least to certain extent, in polyarchy-as-democracy. Hegemony, in the neo-Gramscian framework, requires “active consent” and, therefore, involves “the internalization on the part of subordinate classes of the moral and cultural values, the codes of practical conduct, and the worldview of the dominant classes or groups.” 96 Democracy, in this sense, has to be real to some extent. 97 Otherwise, it cannot fulfill its dual role to enable “intra-elite compromise and accommodation” and to politically incorporate “popular majorities,” 98 and it will lose the ideological capacity to filter out “as illegitimate demands that actually call into question the social order itself.” 99
Robinson seems to assume that “the generation of consent—or hegemony—in civil society” can be thought of “as a unidirectional flow going from the top, i.e. the transnational elites, to the bottom, the popular masses.” 100 Again, the experience with (US) democracy promotion in Iraq after the invasion shows very clearly that this is not that easy, 101 as do cases of nonviolent democracy promotion such as Bolivia. 102 Theorizing democracy promotion from a neo-Gramscian perspective, therefore, would benefit from a broader perspective on power which recognizes the need for democracy promotion, even in terms of Robinson’s promotion of polyarchy, to rely on constitutive power if it is to effectively support the emergence of polyarchic, consensus-based political regimes in other countries.
This brief discussion suggests the need to incorporate the dimensions of institutional and, especially, constitutive (structural and productive) power into the neo-Gramscian theorization of democracy promotion. 103 Prominent neo-Gramscian analyses of democracy promotion, while embracing the ideational dimensions of power, tend to stick to an overly compulsory understanding of power. The theoretical move proposed here, in particular, reveals the intrinsic contradictions in democracy promotion as a simultaneous exercise of multiple kinds of power. 104 Most notably, coercion- and consensus-based strategies to promote democracy are not simply complementary instruments that may be combined as need be in order to guarantee a given hegemonic world order. The result is paradoxical: Democracy promoters have the greatest power to effectively do the work they proclaim if they rely, in a consistent way, on (material and ideational) resources of compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive power. At the ideational level, however, these power resources shrink once democracy promoters try to simply manipulate or instrumentalize democracy promotion to their advantage. The other way round, power is greatest when democracy promoters least compromise the capacity of the recipients to control their fate. Yet, the production of effects that constrain other actors’ “capacity to control their fate” is precisely part of Barnett and Duvall’s definition of power. This implies that any successful exercise of power in and through democracy promotion (as it, by definition, impairs a recipient’s self-control) tends to reduce the very power base on which this exercise rests. This inherent inconsistency of democracy promotion is exemplified by the common call for local “ownership,” 105 which is seen as necessary for effective democracy promotion but is, at the same time, basically denied by the very activities of democracy promoters. 106 The limited effectiveness of democracy promotion is, thus, very much a consequence of its intrinsic contradictions. Acknowledging this is, by the way, also much more in line with “Gramsci’s own assertions on the complex and contradictory relationship between structure and agency within the fashioning of hegemony.” 107
Conclusion
More than half a century ago, Robert Dahl predicted that scholars were not likely to produce “anything like a single, consistent, coherent ‘Theory of Power’,” but most probably only “a variety of theories of limited scope, each of which employs some definition of power that is useful in the context of the particular piece of research or theory but different in important respects from the definitions of other studies.” 108 While certainly not exhaustive, the typology of power proposed by Barnett and Duvall has the advantage of conceptually grasping multiple forms of power that are of relevance for international politics in an integrative manner that refrains from treating them as competing concepts. As I have sought to show, this offers a promising way to conceptualize the role and relevance of power in international democracy promotion.
By promoting democracy in other countries, states exercise power over others. This may include the use of material power resources, but it is obviously more than that. Furthermore, democracy promotion is not simply about an actor-centered kind of power over, be it material or ideational, compulsory or institutional. Promoting democracy also requires the capacity to exercise a constitutive power to: the aim, in the end, is to change from within the political regime of another state and, thus, its properties, capacities, interests, and collective identity. At the same time, the whole endeavor of democracy promotion is dependent on inter- and transnational relations that constitute an asymmetric power relationship between democracy promoters and their “recipients.” A multidimensional concept of power helps us understand and conceptualize the ways in which the different types of power are relevant for democracy promotion and connected to each other.
Specifically, a broad perspective on power draws our attention to the structural conditions, material and ideational, both within and beyond the recipient country, that enable and constrain the capacity of external actors to exercise constitutive kinds of power, be they structural or productive. On the one hand, this helps to better grasp the role of (relative) power as a factor shaping democracy promotion policies and thereby serves to overcome some of the theoretical limitations inherent to a neoclassical Realist approach to democracy promotion. On the other, it explains why democracy promotion is so limited in its ability to achieve the kind of effects it aims at and, in fact, so contradictory. It, thereby, also helps to improve the attempt to theorize democracy promotion from a neo-Gramscian perspective.
Yet, the core claim of this article, that the multidimensional concept of power is useful for understanding the international politics of democracy promotion, is independent from these two specific theoretical approaches. Just as Barnett and Duvall have argued, each theoretical tradition may favor “one or another” type of power, but this should not prevent scholars from drawing on those types of power “that are associated with other theoretical schools.” 109 No matter the theoretical predisposition of the individual scholar, this article has suggested that it is futile to think about power in democracy promotion without paying attention to the local, trans- and international power relations that constitute the very practice of democracy promotion and, thereby, enable and constrain external actors in exercising the constitutive power they require in order to effectively promote whatever they regard as democracy. In the field of democracy promotion, actor-centered, top-down kinds of power are systematically dependent on constitutive conditions and local dynamics which can, themselves, not be simply produced “from the outside,” not even by overwhelming physical compulsion.
Footnotes
Author Note
This article draws on results from a research project conducted between 2008 and 2012 at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) and Goethe University Frankfurt which received generous funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG). The overall results of the project are published in Jonas Wolff, Hans-Joachim Spanger, and Hans-Jürgen Puhle, eds., The Comparative International Politics of Democracy Promotion (London: Routledge, 2014).
Acknowledgment
The author would like to thank Jarrod Hayes, Annika E. Poppe, and Vera Rogova for helpful comments.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
TThe author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research on which this article is based was made possible by a research grant of the German Research Foundation (DFG).