Links

Democratic Transition economic growth Foreign Aided: Why Democratization

Brings Growth When Democracy Does Not
Hariri, Jacob GernerView Profile. British Journal of Political Science45.1 (Jan 2015):
53-71.

Working

Brazil Counterplan

1NC

Of
The Federative Republic of Brazil should promote good
governance in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.
The Counterplan solves democracy but the Af doesnt a
Brazilian campaign for good governance activates global
modeling
Stuenkel, PhD Political Science, 13 (Oliver Stuenkel holds a PhD in
political science from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, and a Master in
Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where
he was a McCloy Scholar. He is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at
the Getlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in So Paulo, where he coordinates the So
Paulo branch of the School of History and Social Science (CPDOC) and the executive
program in International Relations. He is also a non-resident Fellow at the Global
Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin and a member of the Carnegie Rising
Democracies Network. His research focuses on rising powers; specifically on
Brazils, Indias and China's foreign policy and on their impact on global governance,
Rising Powers and the Future of Democracy Promotion: the case of Brazil and
India, Third World Quarterly 34:2 p. 339-355, 2013)
Conclusion As the analysis makes clear, a realist approach is best at accounting for rising democracies behaviour.
Brazil and India promote democracy as long as doing so is aligned with their overall strategic and economic
interests, and if they are willing to adopt democracy promotion as means to legitimise their growing influence. In

promoting democracy may

is increasingly aligned with
Brazils national interests as a regional hegemon. Given that autocratic
leaders are more likely to endanger Brazilian investments in the region, for
example by expropriating Brazilian investments, democracy promotion has become a key
tool with which to contain threats against the legitimacy of the established order and to defend
Brazils growing economic presence in South America. Yet rising
democracies fundamentally difer from established actors in that they rarely justify
this respect their approach is similar to the Western practice. While

endanger Indias foreign policy goal of maintaining regional stability, it

their democracy-related activities in the context of the larger liberal narrative often used by European and US policy

Brazil and India remain suspicious of the at times sweeping Wilsonian

rhetoric and concepts used by European and US democracy
promoters, a rhetoric which policy makers in Braslia and New Delhi consider to be both
inefective and smacking of cultural imperialism. It is worth noting that, despite
their democracy-related activities, no Indian and Brazilian policy maker or civil
society representative describes these as democracy promotionvery much
contrary to Europe and the USA, were the term is common. Therefore it is no
makers. Both
liberal

surprise that neither Brazil nor India has embraced US ideas such as the League of Democracies. As a
consequence, observers in Europe and the USA have generally seen the scope for cooperation with rising
democracies on democracy-related activities as limited. Nevertheless comparisons between Western and nonWestern views about democracy promotion often overlook the fact that there is ample room for cooperation.

Emphasising the more technical termssuch as good governancerather

than the ideology-laden liberal democracy promotion may be an
important step to facilitate cooperation, particularly on the multilateral
level. In this context the European approach, which often seeks to avoid the term democracy promotion in

order not to estrange the host government105 (for example by promoting good governance or by strengthening
civil society 106), may provide more room for collaboration between established democracy promoters and rising
democracies. For example, when US President Barack Obama visited India, the USA and India signed an Open
Government Partnership to start a dialogue among senior officials on open government issues and to disseminate
innovations that enhance government accountability.107 These less visible approaches are likely to be more
acceptable to rising democracies than being asked to join established powers in condemning autocrats openly.

Emerging powers position matters greatly because they are located in

regions of the world where democracys footing is not yet firm. In
addition, there are indications that Brazils and Indias credibility among poor countries
may exceed that of the rich worldperhaps precisely because they are
rarely perceived as overly paternalistic or arrogant. Perhaps most importantly
Brazils and Indias societal structureshigh inequality, a high degree of illiteracy (in Indias
case) and pockets of povertyare similar to those in many countries that are
struggling to establish democracy. Seen from this perspective, Brazilian and Indian
policy makers have much more experience in making democracy work in
adverse environments. In Brazils case an additional asset is a very recent
experience of successful transition to democracy. Emerging power such as
Brazil and India are therefore in a much better position to share their
experience of democracy than Europe or the USA, whose democratisation
lies in the distant past, and whose societies look very diferent from those
in the rest of the world. Finally, in a world where an increasing number of
national leaders look to China as an economic and political model to copy,
India and Brazil provide powerful counter-examples that political freedom
is no obstacle to economic growth.108 In this sense, as Pratap Mehta
points out, Brazils and Indias own success may do far more for
democracy promotion than any overtly ideological push in that direction
could ever hope to accomplish.109

Net Benefit
U.S. democracy promotion destabilizes the international order
and incites perpetual warfare all democratic progress has
occurred in spite of, and not because of America
Smith, Econ Professor at Yale, 12 (Tony Smith is Professor of Economics
and Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Economics at Yale,
America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy
(Expanded Edition),
http://site.ebrary.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umich/detail.action?docID=10594477,
Princeton University Press, February 2012)
The irony of American liberal internationalism by late 2011 was that a
framework for policy that had done so much to established Americas
preeminence in world afairs between 1945 and 2001 should have
contributed so significantly to its decline thereafter. Following 1945, American control
over West Germany and Japan had allowed it to transform these two lands politically and economically, integrating
them into Washingtons orbit in a manner that gave the free world a decisive advantage over its Soviet and
communist rivals. If containment had been the primary track for U.S. foreign policy during the cold war, a secondary
track, consolidating the political and economic unity of the liberal democratic countries through multilateral
organizations under American leadership, had had decisive influence over the course of the global contest. The
power advantage the United States enjoyed was basic, to be sure, as were the personalities of Ronald Reagan and

Woodrow
Wilsons hope to make America secure by making the world peaceful through the
expansion of what by President Bill Clintons time was called free-market democracies
Mikhail Gorbachev, who brought the contest to a successful conclusion that very few anticipated. But

meant that liberal internationalisms contribution to the outcome had shown itself to be fundamental. Yet during the
first decade of the twenty-first century, the very forces that had allowed America to win the cold war had

created the illusion that with relative ease history could now be controlled
and international afairs fundamentally restructured by the expansion of the freemarket democratic world into an international order of peace. Under
neoconservative and neoliberal auspices, democracy was believed to have
a universal appeal with peace-giving qualities of benefit to all peoples.
A market economy both domestically and globally would compound the
process of political stabilization. Under the terms of the responsibility to
protect,1 progressive imperialism became a form of just war" and the
American military that President George W. Bush announced was "beyond
challenge" was tasked with ushering in a new dawn of freedom worldwide.
For a " unipolar world1 a global mission was conceived, as in neoliberal and neoconservative hands neo-Wilsonian
ism evolved into a hard ideology, the equivalent in conceptual terms to Marxism-Leninism, with a capacity to give
leaders and people a sense of identity and worldwide purpose to a degree that liberalism had never before

fueled not only by ideology but also by a will to power after triumph in
the cold war, all the earlier reservations about the difficulties of nationand state-building abroad that had been discussed over the preceding half century were
disregarded, so that even after policymakers understood that democracy did not grow spontaneously
in many places, they were reassured by authoritative studies put out by institutions like
the RAND Corporation and the Army and Marine Corps that such missions could be
accomplished. As a consequence, although it was widely recognized that the failure to plan
properly for Iraq after Baghdad had been captured was a fundamental error, very few voices in
positions of power were heard saying that the democratization of Iraq and
Afghanistan (or the thought of working with '"democratic Pakistan) was likely a fools errand
possessed. In this march of folly,

from the start. Instead, efforts to rectify the failures at conceptualizing state- and nation-building turned out
to be how ton' or llcan do publications that only prolonged and deepened a misplaced
American self-confidence that it was possible 10 use the window of opportunity at the country s
disposition as the world"s sole superpower to changc the logic of international relations forever. Much the same

arrogance, self-interest, and self-delusion characterized the

arguments underlying the Washington Consensus which boldly saw the key to world
mixture of

prosperity and peace in the interdependence generated by economic globalization with its trinity of concepts
privatization, deregulation, and openness. To be sure, economic interdependence was indeed capable of delivering
on its promise, as the integration of the European Union and the growth in world trade and investment centered on
the free-markct democracies so powerfully demonstrated for half a century after World War II. However, a serious
problem lay in the inability of political forces, either nationally or internationally, to control the capitalist genie
once let out of its bottle. For in due course, deregulation turned against the very system that had given birth to it,
unleashing a flight of technology, capital, and jobs to countries in Asia especially and permitting the irresponsible
banking practices that engendered in the United States and the European Union (after having affected Mexico,
Russia, Southeast Asia, and Argentina more than a decade earlier) an economic crisis second in its devastation only
to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The result in the United States was not only the decimation first of the
working and then of the middle classes as the top 10 percent of the nation (and especially the top 1 percent)
monopolized virtually all the gains of economic openness for a period of more than two decades but also a decline
in national power as technology, capital, and jobs moved abroad and as China grew apaceJ For all the talk by
President Barack Obama about the example the United States should set for the sake of democracy promotion
abroad, the first three years of his administration did not meaningfully address the deep-seated underlying
problems of economic growth and inequality in this country, nor the control by corporations of the nations political
life, nor concerns about national power based on an economy in decline. As a result, liberal economic doctrine and
practice were undermining democratic government as well as national power. Aspects of the liberal agenda once
too easily assumed to be automatically mutually reinforcing were coming to be increasingly at odds with one
another. Woodrow Wilson had recognized just such a possibility a century earlier when he chastised the greed and
incompetence of the nation's monopoly capitalists and asked for their regulation for the sake of the common
good. Despite similar public utterances by President Obama a century later, there was no follow-through with
respect to asserting Washingtons power over corporate interests as had occurred when Wilson became president.
For Wilson and his fellow progressives, the question had been how to recover representative government, not
supersede it. For his day, Washington's main duty was 6tto prevent the strong from crushing the weak,"' and he
left no doubt but that it was the captains of industry who were the greatest threat to the democratic life of earlytwentieth-ccntury America. Wilson introduced antitrust laws, child labor laws, a federal income tax, and the Federal
Reserve System, among other reforms that made capitalism a more effective economic system as well as one that
reinforced democratic government.2 In 2011 the question was whether a similar resolve could be found in

The Wilsonian
tradition thus found itself in crisis. Within onlv two decades after the cold war, liberal
internationalist overconfidence in the universal appeal of democratic
government and in the blessing of free-market capitalism had combined to reduce
the efectiveness of mullilateral institutions and the capacity of the United
States to provide leadership in settling the problems of world order. A
liberal order capable of withstanding the challenges of both fascism and
communism had come in a short time to be its own worst enemy. Communism was dead,
Washington to rejuvenate the American economy in a way that rejuvenated its democracy.

but 4Lfree-market democracy" was proving to be a much weaker blueprint for world order than had only recently
been anticipated. As Machiavelli had counseled in his Discourses, "Men always commit the error of not knowing
where to limit their hopes, and by trusting to these rather than to a just measure of their resources, they are
generally ruined/ One scenario for the future was bleak. It foresaw economic chaos as feeding on itself; more selfdefeating military interventions being undertaken; and all the while the banner of freedom and democracy being
lifted at the very moment that self-government was being undermined at home by vested interests and delusional
thinking undcrgirding an imperial presidency. So Michael Dcsch referred to l4the seeds of illiberal behavior
contained within liberalism itself, as it attributed a moral superiority to its ways of being while seeing al-ternative
systems both as morally inferior and as necessarily menacing. Whatever the reversal suffered by the

the Bush Doctrine, its essential message of the virtues of

"benign hegemony"' or altruistic imperialism continued to typify a
liberalism that engaged in perpetual war for the sake of perpetual peace.3
implementation of

Liberalism may have been its own worst enemy, but there were other forces that challenged its future role as well.
As the fate of the Rose Revolution of 2003 in Georgia, of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2(X)4-5, and of the
Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in 2{K)5 all illustrated, transitions from authoritarian government were often quite
difficult to accomplish. More critically, the model of state capitalism in conjunction with authoritarian states was

giving increasing evidence that it might prove more successful in creating national power than the free-market
democratic blueprint prevalent in the West. Not only China but also Russia had deep-set cultural and political forces
resisting the liberal appeal. More ominously, there w as increasing reason to think that in time authoritarian state
capitalism might consolidate itself in a way that could markedly increase the national power of China and Russia
relative to the West and Japan, and this in a fashion that diminished the international standing of the United States
while breaking the hack of the unity that had held together the world of free-market democracies.4 Perhaps this
pessimism characteristic of 201 1 was exaggerated. The June Democracy Movement of 1987 had led to the
establishment of what subsequently appeared to be a solid democracy in South Korea, as did a plebiscite in Chile
in 1988 and one in Slovenia in 1990, Poland and the Czech Republic were among the countries that moved with

In the case of Brazil, the most

important of Latin American countries, the presidency of Fernando Alfonso
Coll or de Mello beginning in 1990 (the first directly elected chief
executive since the period of military government that began in J964),
followed by Fernando Henriquc Cardoso (1995- ?001), Luiz lnacio Lula da
Silva (2003-10), and then Dilma Roussef (2011) demonstrated the ability
of a country outside the perimeter of American hegemony to combine
responsible government with strong economic growth and successful
projects of social justice. The Brazilian model had obvious relevance for all
of Latin America, with the potential to displace the appeal of the illiberal"
variant of democracy, such as was evident in the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez and its imitators in parts of
Latin America/ So, too, the Arab world was finally in movement in the aftermath
of the Tunisian uprising that began late in 2010. giving birth to the Arab
Spring. Stirred by the success of popular democracy movements in
Tunisia and Egypt that resulted in the fall of long-term dictators in January and February 2011, a
popular revolt began in Libya, one that Moammar Gadhafi moved savagely to repress. In March, the
relative ease to democracy once the Soviet empire collapsed.

Arab League and the UN Security Council voted to sanction intervention to stop the threat of mass murders by
government forces in eastern Libya. On March 19 (the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq), American and
British Tomahawk cruise missiles fell on Libyan government forces that Trench and British war planes were attacking

Nonviolent mass protests started by politicized youths

explicitly demanding democratic government (and to all appearances uninterested in the
rhetoric of Islamic fundamentalism) demonstrated the weakness of brutal and
inefective authoritarian government and the appeal of constitutional order, with its emphasis
simultaneously.

on transparent and accountable government capable of providing a tangible margin of freedom,, prosperity, and
national dignity. The Wilsonian promise appeared to be bearing fruit where few had thought to see it appear so

There were those who reacted to these developments by claiming

that the Bush Doctrine, with its call to end tyranny around the globe, was
finally being vindicated. Yet such assertions overlooked the objection that
the invasion of Iraq had made it more problematic than would otherw ise
have been the case for the moderate forces in favor of democratic
government in the Arab world to survive a struggle between a military
elite and a religious fundamentalist movement. The Iraq and Afghan wars,
as well as the blank check Washington extended to Israel, had not so
much promoted the movements demanding freedom in the Arab world
but instead rendered them less likely to succeed. More, claims that the Bush Doctrine
robust K\

was vindicated by the calls for democracy in the Arab world were also likely to have to face up to seeing many of
these movements fail. If Tunisia had the good fortune to possess most of the ingredients for successno serious
ethnoreligious cleavages; a well-organized, moderate trade union movement; a large, educated middle class; a
small military; a moderate mainstream Islamist movement; and no oil or gas resources to fund a state
independent of popular willnowhere else in the Arab world (allowance perhaps made for the monarchies in
Jordan and Morocco, while some held out hope for Syria or Lebanon) was there the same likelihood of making a
transition to democracy/' That said, the Turkish modelwhere responsible government, economic growth, Islamic
secularism, and social justice were emerging with a character that was indigenousmight have influence in many
countries where historically the Ottoman Empire has left its mark. Just as it was possible that liberal

internationalism's dedication to democracy promotion might still have life whatever the reversals in Iraq and
Afghanistan, so too was economic reform possible whatever the damage inflicted by the crisis that began in 2008.
For it is in the interest of capitalism to be regulated; effective markets cannot exist without the same kind of
accountability and transparency we expect from democratic governments. More, supranational institutions may
experience growth as they take on the task of supervising at regional or international levels reforms that will also
involve increased political harmonization, if not integration. While the hold of corporate influence on political elites
in the United States and national differences in the European Union could block the very changes that it would be
to their long-term benefit to have, perhaps dramatic innovations could be adopted, should the Democrats insist on
thoroughgoing reforms in the spirit oi the Progressive Era or the New Deal when this party gave critical leadership,
or should the European Union manage not only to survive the challenges to the unity of the Euro zone but actually
to grow politically in the process.

2NC

Solvency Extension
The counterplan solves democracy promotion comparatively
better than the plan without linking to our US-specific turns
Stuenkel, PhD Political Science, 13 (Oliver Stuenkel holds a PhD in
political science from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, and a Master in
Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where
he was a McCloy Scholar. He is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at
the Getlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in So Paulo, where he coordinates the So
Paulo branch of the School of History and Social Science (CPDOC) and the executive
program in International Relations. He is also a non-resident Fellow at the Global
Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin and a member of the Carnegie Rising
Democracies Network. His research focuses on rising powers; specifically on
Brazils, Indias and China's foreign policy and on their impact on global governance,
Rising Powers and the Future of Democracy Promotion: the case of Brazil and
India, Third World Quarterly 34:2 p. 339-355, 2013)
Yet when speaking about US foreign policy, democracy promotion is generally regarded as more than a fig leaf that
merely exists to disguise true US national interests. Rather, democracy promotion is part of a greater American

US culture is thus an important

factor in explaining democracy promotion.26 Thomas Carothers confirms this by referring to
the inherent assumption that the United States is especially qualified to
promote democracy, 27 recommending that US foreign policy makers get over the tendency to see
narrative, an important element of the USAs mission in the world.25

democracypromotionas the special province of the United States. 28 In addition, Rick Travis argues that
promoting democracy strengthens democracys identity and, in the case of the USA, helps it reconnect with its core
historical traditions. 29 There seems to be a strong collective conviction that US democracy remains one of the
most advanced in the world.30 Similar observations can be made about European democracy promotion. This may

the main problems of both US and European democracy programmes

is that they seek to recreate the world in their own image, rather than
accepting that democracy may look diferent in diferent places.31
Practical experience also has a strong influence on the debate, and
evidence suggests that eforts to strengthen democracies often have
limited success.32 Those engaged in democracy promotion on the ground often complain that, while costs
are immediate, effects are uncertain and often take decades to appearif they appear at all.33 For example,
the objective of establishing a liberal democracy in Afghanistan has been
quietly substituted with simply leaving behind a stable central
government that can defend itself against the Islamic insurgency , after even
the keenest optimists can see very little progress. Ten years after the fall of the Taliban,
Afghanistan can hardly be considered a stable democracy.34 As scholars warn,
competitive elections may lead to sectarian violence and deepen animosities in ethnically divided societies. 35
explain why one of

Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi are examples where elections have indeed unleashed inter-ethnic violence.36 For
decades the USA has worked to strengthen civil society capacity building and political party development in the
Arab World, but little suggests that the uprisings that have shaken the latter over the past months are in any way
the result of Western democracy promotion.37 The opposite is at times true: being associated with Western
organisations is often a burden for opposition groups; in June 2009, for example, the Iranian opposition explicitly
distanced itself from the West to prevent a loss of credibility and legitimacy.38 An additional critique of democracy
promotion used frequently is that democracy is a contested concept, 39 and difficult to measure, making it at

US or
European democracy promotion is often based on an idealised Western liberal
democratic model, which is difficult to apply anywhere in the world,
including in the West itself.41 People who work in democracy promotion usually know what it means
times hard to decide whether certain countries (such as Venezuela, Iran or Russia) are democratic or not.40

to live in a democracy, but they have rarely experienced democratisation in their home countries, thus often having
little practical understanding of the process. In addition, seeking to emulate specific characteristics of US or

it does not allow for local

peculiarities: Many Americans confuse, one specialist writes, the forms of
American democracy with the concept of democracy itself. 42 In order to emulate
European democracy may have negative consequences as

Western-style voting cycles, democracy promoters are often in favour of rushing to an election, even in post-conflict
societies. Yet elections can have an inherently disruptive effect, in particular in winner-takeall scenarios.43 As
Carothers points out, being impatient to organise elections reflects the tendency of the international actors
engaged in aiding the conflict resolution to view elections as a strategy for an early exit. Yet at least sometimes,
early elections can be a recipe for failure. 44 The next section analyses which of the arguments laid out here are
used by rising democracies, and how this informs their foreign policy. Do rising democracies promote democracy?

Western democratic governments and organisations

spend billions of dollars every year on democracy-related projects, 45 turning
them into the dominant actors in the field of democracy promotion. Yet a notable shift of power is
taking place towards countries that are more hesitant when it comes to
systematic democracy promotion. Have Brazil and India promoted democracy in the past? How
The case of Brazil and India

do analysts and policy makers in emerging democraciesusing Brazil and India as an example in this analysis
think about democracy promotion? How can we characterise their arguments in relation to the critiques cited

Brazil accounts for over half of South Americas

wealth, population, territory and military budget, which suggests that it is
relatively more powerful in its region than China, India and Germany are in
above? Brazil and democracy promotion

their respective neighbourhoods.46 Yet, despite this dominant position, it shied away from intervening in its
neighbours internal affairs before the 1990s. The preservation of national sovereignty and non-intervention have
always been and remain key pillars of Brazils foreign policy,47 so any attempt to promote or defend selfdetermination and human rights abroada commitment enshrined in Brazils 1989 constitution48stands in
conflict with the principle of non-intervention.49 The tension arising from these two opposing visionsrespecting
sovereignty and adopting a more assertive pro-democracy stance, particularly in the regionis one of the
important dilemmas in Brazilian foreign policy of the past two decades. In fact, particularly during the 1990s, Brazil
abstained several times from promoting or defending democracy. In 1990, under President Fernando Collor de Mello
(199092) and largely because of economic interests, Brazil blocked calls for a military intervention in Suriname
after a military coup there. A year later it opposed military intervention to reinstall President Aristide in Haiti. In
1992 it remained silent over a political crisis in Ecuador. In 1994when a member of the UN Security Councilit
abstained from Security Council Resolution 940, which authorised the use of force in Haiti with the goal of
reinstating President Aristide, who had been removed from power in 1991 through a coup.50 However,

contrary to what is often believed, Brazil has defended democracy abroad

in many more instances, and over the past two decades its views on intervention have become decidedly
more flexible.51 Even under indirectlyelected President Jos Sarney (198589), the first president after
democratisation, Brazil supported the inclusion of a reference to democracy in a new preamble to the Organization

Brazil
intervened in neighbouring Paraguay in 1996 to avoid a military coup there
working through Mercosur and the OAS to obtain higher leverage, and ultimately convincing
General Lino Oviedo not to stage a coup dtat against then President Juan Carlos Wasmosy.53 The Brazilian
president again played an important mediating role during political crises
in Paraguay in 1999 and 2000.54 When then Peruvian President Fujimori falsified the election
of American States (OAS) Charter.52 Under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (19952002),

results in 2000, Brazils President Cardoso refused to criticise him and Brazil was the major obstacle to US and
Canadian efforts to condemn Peru at the OAS General Assembly.55 Yet, in an important gesture, President Cardoso
stayed away from President Fujimoris inaugural ceremony, and a year later Brazil supported the Inter-American

Following
the coup in Venezuela Brazil has assumed a more assertive prodemocracy
stance in the region. In 2002 it actively engaged in Venezuela when a
group sought to illegally oust Hugo Chavez, who was reinstated 48 hours
later.57 Looking back over the past decade, Santosi argues that Brazil has played
an exemplary and fundamental role in strengthening democratic norms
and clauses across the region.58 In his memoirs Cardoso reflected on the issue by saying that
Democratic Charter, largely aimed at Fujimori, which includes the norm of democratic solidarity.56

Brazil always defends democratic order. 59 Burges and Daudelin argue that one can say that Brazil has been

quite supportive of efforts to protect democracy in the Americas since 1990. 60 This tendency has been further
strengthened in the 21st century. In 2003 President Lula (2003 2010) swiftly engaged to resolve a constitutional
crisis in Bolivia and, in 2005, he sent his foreign minister to Quito to deal with a crisis in Ecuador. In the same year
Brazil supported the OAS in assuming a mediating role during a political crisis in Nicaragua, including financial
support for the electoral monitoring of a municipal election there. In 2009 the international debate about how to
deal with the coup in Honduras was very much a result of Brazil and the USA clashing over the terms of how best to
defend democracy, rather than whether to defend it.61 Over the past two decades Brazil has systematically built
democratic references and clauses into the charters, protocols and declarations of the subregional institutions of
which it is a member. The importance of democracy in the constitution and activities of the Rio Group, Mercosur and
the more recent South American Community of Nations (Unasul) can to a large extent be traced back to Brazils

At the same time Brazil has sought to ensure that the protection
of democratic rule be calibrated with interventionism, combining the
principle of non-intervention with that of non-indiference. 63 This terms policy
activism.62

relevance remains contested, yet it symbolises how much Brazils thinking about sovereignty has evolved. For
example, when explaining why Brazil opposed a US proposal to craft a mechanism within the OASS Democratic
Charter, which permits the group to intervene in nations to foster or strengthen democracy, Celso Amorim

argued that there needs to be a dialogue rather than an intervention,

adding that democracy cannot be imposed. It is born from dialogue. 64 It
thus positions itself as an alternative and more moderate democracy defender in
the hemisphere than the USA, and one that continuously calibrates its interest in defending
democracy with its tradition of non-intervention. Brazils decision to lead the UN peacekeeping mission, Minustah, in
Haiti, starting in 2004, cannot be categorised as democracy promotion per se, yet the missions larger goal did
consist in bringing both economic and political stability to the Caribbean Island, which has been the target of US

Brazils ongoing involvement in

Guinea Bissau, a member of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) proved to be
a yet another important moment for Brazils role as a promoter of peace
and democracy.66 Brazil had provided some electoral assistance to Guinea-Bissau from 2004 to 2005 and it
American democracy promotion for years.65 In the same way

continued to support efforts to stabilise the country by operating through the UN peacekeeping mission there.67
During a CPLP meeting in 2011 Brazil signed a memorandum of understanding to implement a Project in Support of
the Electoral Cycles of the Portuguese-speaking African Countries and Timor-Leste.68 In addition, in the lead-up to
the anticipated elections in April 2012, Brazil made further financial contributions to the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP) basket fund in support of the National Electoral Commission for assistance in the
execution of the election.69 Brazils pro-democracy stance became most obvious in 2012, when President Dilma
Roussefftogether with the leaders of Uruguay and Argentinasuspended Paraguay from Mercosur after the
impeachment of Paraguays President Fernando Lugo, which most governments in the region regarded as the
equivalent of a coup dtat or a parliamentary coup. 70 The Brazilian government thus set a clear precedent that
anti-democratic tendencies in the region would cause a rapid and clear reaction from leaders in Braslia. President
Rousseffs decision to work through Mercosurrather than the OAS is consistent with a growing preference to use
local regional bodies, possibly in an effort to strengthen projection as a regional leader. Yet there are also critical
voices. Summarising Brazilian foreign policy over the past two decades, Sean Burges argues that Brazil has not
behaved consistently in support of democratic norm enforcement, 71 and that decisive action to preserve
democracy has been tepid. 72 Ted Piccone reasons that when it comes to wieldinginfluence in support of
democracy in other countriesBrazil has been ambivalent and often unpredictable. 73 Both these evaluations were
made before Brazils assertive stance in Paraguay in 2012. Nevertheless, despite this strategy, the term democracy
promotion is not used either by Brazilian policy makers or by academics when referring to Brazils Paraguay policy.
In the same way Brazil does not promote any activities comparable to those of large US or European
nongovernmental organisations, whose activities range from political party development, electoral monitoring,
supporting independent media and journalists, capacity building for state institutions, and training for judges, civic

Brazil is increasingly assertive in its

region, and willing to intervene if political crises threaten democracy. Brazil is
group leaders and legislators. This brief analysis shows that

most likely to intervene during constitutional crises and political ruptures, and less so when procedural issues
during elections may affect the outcomeas was the case during Hugo Chavez re-election in 2012, when several
commentators criticised Brazils decision not to pressure the Venezuelan government to ensure fair elections.74 Yet,

the consolidation of democracy in the region

has turned into one of Brazils fundamental foreign policy goals.
despite this distinction, it seems clear that

Transition Wars Scenario

Even if they win that the af spreads democracy, U.S. policies
are disproportionate guarantees transition wars
Goldsmith, Harvard Senior Fellow, 8 (Arthur A. Goldsmith was (when he
wrote this) a Senior Research Fellow at the Intrastate Conflict Program/International
Security Program of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He now serves as a Professor of
Management at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Making the World Safe for
Partial Democracy?: Questioning the Premises of Democracy Promotion,
International Security, Volume 33, Number 2, Fall 2008, pp. 120-147)
Neoconservatives tout the transformative power of
democratization to protect U.S. interests by establishing zones of peace
around the world. To anyone who suspects that the global democracy promotion project is overreaching or
Conclusion

utopian, Robert Kagan and William Kristol posed the following question in 2000: How utopian is it to imagine a
change of regime in a place like Iraq? Based on the growth in the ranks of democratic countries in the 1980s and
1990s, they went on to say, We ought to be fairly optimistic that such change can be hastened by the right blend
of American policies.59 Many liberal internationalists have been in basic agreement with these hopeful premises of
neoconservatism, much as they may try to distance themselves from the particular blend of policies represented by
President George W. Bushs freedom agenda.60 Whether the generic optimistic case for democracy promotion

contemporary quantitative
research cited in this article suggests a more skeptical assessment for the
future. The rationale for blanket democratization is mistaken on two counts: it fails to differentiate sufficiently
seemed plausible in 2000, as Kagan and Kristol asserted, the

between partial and full democracy, and it glosses over the challenge of helping authoritarian countries avoid the
first and obtain the latter. At issue is not the goal of expanding the number of constitutional representative political

the preponderance of empirical

evidence shows that means do not exist to produce more of this type of
government consistently from outside. Awareness about the alternative
likelihood of harmful consequences, especially in the short and medium
term, is critical. Democracy promotion will probably always remain an element of U.S. foreign
policy for the historical and political reasons stated at the beginning of this article. But in the future,
policymakers should focus less on democratic peace theory to design their pro-democracy
strategy, and pay greater attention to the literature on democratic transitions, which
clearly underscores the difficulty of democratic regime change and the risks of halfway
democratization, such as sectarian conflict, local human rights abuse,
dislocated populations, territorial disputes, and transnational terrorism. In
systems in the world. Such systems are fine in concept, but

particular, more thought needs to be given to how to deal with the prevalence of mixed regimes in the Greater
Middle East and to the security problems that this creates, with less reliance on a universal remedy of more
democracy to treat these ills. The quantitative studies reviewed here suggest three broad lessons for policymakers.
First, only under the rarest of circumstances should military pressure be employed preemptively to advance
democracy. In some situations military intervention may be unavoidable, leaving the United States and its allies
little choice except to try to help another country construct or reconstruct its public institutions. But it would be a

U.S. foreign
policy needs to be adapted better to particular countries individual
circumstances. This is already being done in the Middle East, according to a recent Congressional Research
fallacy to assume that the result will usually be a moderate pluralistic political system. Second,

Service study.61 But rather than an ad hoc approach, which is at odds with leaders rhetoric about democracy and
exposes the United States to charges of hypocrisy and doubledealing, it would be best to confront the issue of
mixed regimes openly. Organizational support and electoral assistance could help to consolidate a new democracy,
for instance, but be wasted effort or counterproductive in a semidemocracy, where a more effective approach could
be to stress the establishment of stronger international linkages that could serve as the base for democratization
over the long term. Putting the emphasis on cultural and economic ties is also a more promising way to engage
authoritarian regimes compared to menacing them with regime change. Again, this sort of constructive

engagement does happen on an improvised basis, but it could be done better with coordination and an
acknowledgment of the theoretical foundation for doing so. In general, this approach will not produce quick payoffs,
but because potentially productive regime transitions can occur suddenly and unpredictably, the United States still

the United States

should adopt a lower profile. This means limiting the self-righteous
oratory about freedom, because it triggers a defensive response in many
corners of the globe that damages U.S. standing and influence. There should be
must be prepared to adjust its bilateral strategies as circumstances dictate. Third,

a subtle shift in orientation, from campaigning for democracy to supporting it, taking cues from local democratic

avoiding one sided eforts to push democratization in directions a

foreign country is unprepared to go. A lower profile also means reducing expectations for U.S.
forces and

citizens so they do not turn against democracy promotion programs that may work at the margins, such as

In the end, rule-bound

democracy is largely produced from within, not spread from the outside in
a standardized manner. Blustering, all-embracing democracy promotion is
not a way to enhance national security because it wastes U.S. resources
and can prove counterproductive in furthering the ultimate goal , which is to add
technical assistance for governance reform in certain countries.

to the world population of pluralistic majoritarian states. The empirical research on this issue demonstrates that
textured support for government reform has a much better chance of serving U.S. national interests than does an
all-inclusive freedom agenda.

China War Scenario

Doesnt link to the counterplan Brazil has strong BRICS and
trade ties with China
Choi 14 (Kelwin Choi is an editorial assistant at The Diplomat, China and Brazil
Seek to Boost Ties, http://thediplomat.com/2014/07/china-and-brazil-seek-to-boostties/, July 17, 2014)
Xi Jinping is seeking to boost ties with Brazil with a state visit to the
country this week. While in the country for the BRICS summit, Xi is making
a state visit to Brazil where he will meet with Brazilian President Dilma
Roussef. This is Xis first visit to Brazil since becoming president (he visited the
country as vice president in 2009), and comes as China and Brazil celebrate their
40th anniversary of bilateral ties. Before leaving for Brazil, Xi stated in a written
interview that he attaches great importance to growing the global
strategic partnership with Brazil and believes China is ready to work
with Brazil under the principle of mutual benefit to promote sustained
two-way trade. He explained that during his trip, he and Brazilian leaders
will be discussing to further strengthen exchanges and cooperation in all
aspects of Sino-Brazilian relations. Xi reiterated his goal of improving ChinaBrazil relations shortly after landing in the country, when he told reporters that he is
looking forward to conducting wide exchanges with Brazilian leaders and people
from all walks of life, focusing on common development, boosting practical
cooperation and accelerating the development of China-Brazil comprehensive
strategic partnership. One of Xis goals this week will be to find new opportunities
to boost Chinas investment in Brazils infrastructure. Modernizing Brazils
transportation and energy infrastructure presents a win-win scenario for
Brazil and China. Indeed, modernizing infrastructure will substantially reduce the
transportation costs, which will benefit Brazils entire economy even as it makes it a
more profitable trade partner for China. Beijing also has deep expertise in this area
owing to its own development as well as its efforts in other parts of the world like
Africa. On other hand, Brazil will use Xis state visit to try and reduce its trade
imbalance with China. In 2012, Brazil imported almost $19 billion more from China
then Beijing imported from Brasilia. Brazil will also use Xis trip this week to try and
rebalance its exports to China away from raw materials, like soybeans and iron ores,
and towards more manufactured goods. Brazil is trying to move its economy up the
value chain and breaking into the Chinese market will be essential for achieving this
goal. Bilateral ties between China and Brazil have increased substantially
in recent years, going above and beyond their joint membership in the
BRICS bloc. In 2012, China and Brazil agreed to establish a comprehensive
strategic partnership, and bilateral trade topped $80 billion last year. As a
result, China surpassed the United States as Brazils top trading partner
back in 2009, and Brazil is currently Chinas 9th largest trading partner. In another
sign of their intentions to boost bilateral trade, Brazil and China signed a $30 billion
currency swap last year.

US Promotion CPs

Advantage CP

1NC
Text: the United States Federal Government should focus
democracy promotion eforts on countries which are
sufficiently stable and feature pro-democratic reform coalitions
that can be empowered by democratic conditionality and
assistance and assist target states in reducing their
asymmetric interdependence on illiberal regional powers.
CP resolves problems with democratization builds credibility
Brzel 15 [2015. Tanja A. Brzel holds the chair for European Integration at the
Freie Universitt Berlin. She received her PhD from the European University Institute
in Florence, Italy in 1999. From 1999 to 2004, she conducted her research and
taught at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, the
Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin and the University Heidelberg. The noble west and
the dirty rest? Western democracy promoters and illiberal regional powers
Democratization, 22:3, 519-535]
Exploring and comparing the interactions between Western democracy promoters, illiberal regional regimes, and
target countries provides a fruitful approach to studying international democracy promotion and challenges some
conventional wisdoms in the state of the art. First, rather than intentionally promoting autocracy or blocking
democracy,

illiberal powers seek to countervail Western democracy promotion

to protect their economic, geostrategic, or political interests, which
are not so diferent from those of Western democracy promoters. Where the
two differ is that illiberal regional powers do not have to balance security and
stability against democracy and human rights. Second, this democratizationstability dilemma undermines the efectiveness of Western democracy
promotion more than the countervailing strategies of nondemocratic regional powers. True, if democracy
promotion threatens their geopolitical and economic interests or regime survival, Russia, China, and
Saudi Arabia seek to undermine democratic processes to the extent that they unfold.
in order

They offer non-democratic regimes economic, political, and military assistance and threaten democracy-minded
ruling elites to withdraw it. Moreover, they may undermine the capacity of government to introduce democratic

by destabilizing the country. Yet, with the exception of Ukraine and Georgia,
democratic processes are not promoted by Western powers but mostly
endogenously driven. More often than not, the EU and US share the interest of
illiberal regional powers in the stability and security of a region. Not only
did they fail to develop a coherent approach on how to support the Arab
Spring, they were also silent on the military coup against a democratically elected
government in Egypt, tolerated the Saudi-led military intervention of the Gulf
Cooperation Council that assisted Bahraini security forces in detaining thousands of protesters,
and stood by the massive human rights violations committed by the Assad regime in Syria. These
two findings do not only challenge the admittedly stylized juxtaposition of the
noble West promoting democracy, and the dirty rest promoting
autocracy. They also yield some important policy implications, particularly for the EU and the US. For actors
changes

whose foreign policy is not only oriented towards geostrategic interests but which also seek to promote moral goals,

The more unstable a target state is and the less

democratic, the more dif- ficult it will be to reconcile the protection and
promotion of human rights and democracy with ensuring security and
all good things seldom go together.81

stability. The democratization-stability dilemma seems to be somewhat

unavoidable and undermines the capacity of Western democracy
promoters to design credible democracy promotion policies based on
consistent criteria and reliable rewards. However, democratic external actors
should at least acknowledge the dilemma and develop strategies on how
to balance the diferent goals. Otherwise reproaches of double standards
and hypocrisy will continue to undermine their credibility and legitimacy .
Moreover, democracy promotion should focus on countries like Tunisia, which
are sufficiently stable and feature pro-democratic reform coalitions that
can be empowered by democratic conditionality and assistance. Where such
conditions are absent, democracy promotion usually fails. Besides empowering liberal forces, Western
democracy promoters should assist target states in reducing their
asymmetric interdependence on illiberal regional powers.82 Georgia used
its approximation with EU energy policies to diversify its energy supply .83
Likewise, the EU has been trying to compensate for the energy cuts imposed by Russia on Ukraine. Finally,

stabilizing autocratic regimes by providing aid and trade should find its
limits where dictators engage in massive human rights violations. For all the
criticism of the EU and the US for supporting Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Ben Ali of Tunisia, both treated Muammar
al-Gaddafi of Libya and Bashar al-Assad of Syria as pariahs. Only in the case of Libya did they intervene militarily,
while they did little to remedy the massive human rights violations by the Assad regime. Overall, the findings of this
special issue confirm the limits of what Western democracy promoters are willing and able to do, particularly if their

Rather than blaming their failure to support

democracy on illiberal powers, they should develop strategies to balance
their diferent foreign policy goals.

geostrategic interests are at stake.

Democracy Promotion Bad

Generic

Terror

Generic
Emerging democracies breed terrorism
Piazza 8 (James Piazza, Department of Political Science, University of North
Carolina at Charlotte, Do Democracy and Free Markets Protect Us From Terrorism?,
International Politics, 2008, 45, (7291), http://www.palgravejournals.com/ip/journal/v45/n1/full/8800220a.html, mm)
Non-partisan, academic studies of the relationship between politically and
economically closed societies and terrorism generally do not support the
model Muravchik outlines. In fact, most empirical studies of terrorism tend to
demonstrate a positive relationship between political democracy and
terrorism . The relationship between terrorism and macroeconomic policies of states whether they are
liberal or state-dominated has not been empirically analyzed and so much less is known about how promotion of
economic freedom might affect terrorism. Eubank and Weinberg (I994, 200i) and Schmid (1992) argue that rather

democratic governance exacerbates terrorist

activity by providing a wide range of avenues through which radicals can
advance their political agendas through, propaganda by deed . Schmid (I992)
explains that an open and free media a central quality of democratic governance facilitates
the communication objective that all terrorist groups have while the
system of legal rights institutionalized in most democracies more
efectively shield terrorist suspects and perpetrators from detection,
apprehension and prosecution. Democracies also facilitate the
unrestricted and unmonitored movement of people, creation of free
associations and acquisition of weapons; all of which assist terrorist
groups. More- over, the legitimacy of democratic government rests ultimately on the publics perception of how
than serving as a bulwark against terrorism,

well it can protect its citizens, and in a democracy citizens can punish elected officials at the ballot box for failure to

quality of public responsiveness makes democracies more

willing to negotiate with terrorists. In two statistical studies of the presence of terrorist groups
protect the public. This

in countries, Eubank and Weinberg (1994, 200i) validated these propositions in observing that from World War II to

more terrorist groups were found in democracies than in nondemocracies. The researchers also found that no matter how durable or
stable the democracy in question is, it is more likely to have terrorist
activity in it than a non-democracy. Compatible results were produced by Piazza (2007) in a
I987,

time-series analysis of Middle Eastern states and to an extent by Li (2004), although his study did find that while
specific components of democracy, such as government executive constraints, increased the probability of
terrorism, democratic participation reduced it. Eyerman (1998) adds complexity to the question in his empirical
study of terrorist acts from 1968 to 1986. Using a series of statistical analyses, he found that two types of states
were most impervious to terrorist attacks, well-established democracies and entrenched dictatorships. However,

new non-consolidated democracies were actually more likely to experience

terrorism in Eyermans study, producing a nonlinear relationship between terrorism and degree of democracy
and dictatorship.

Promoting democracy increases terrorsim

Piazza 8 (James Piazza, Department of Political Science, University of North
Carolina at Charlotte, Do Democracy and Free Markets Protect Us From Terrorism?,
International Politics, 2008, 45, (7291), http://www.palgravejournals.com/ip/journal/v45/n1/full/8800220a.html, mm)

the analysis fails to provide clear

evidence that the promotion of democracy and free market economics is a
potential panacea for terrorism. In fact, in validating previous empirical analysis on the subject it
provides evidence that promoting democracy might even increase the incidence of
terrorist attacks in some countries. The study also unearths no evidence that promotion of free
These results yield five interesting conclusions: First,

market economic reform will have any substantial effect on terrorism. Second, countries with a majority or plurality
of Muslims are more likely to be plagued by terrorist attacks. This is a result that requires further study possibly a
fuller consideration of the role that region and Huntingtonian civilizations play as predictors of terrorism before
any concrete conclusions can be reached about it. Third, while it makes theoretical sense that a countrys ability to
project internal repression plays an important role in determining the degree to which it experiences terrorism
that is to say countries with small populations and small geographic areas that are governed by states with larger
military assets should be best endowed to resist terrorist attacks the results fail to provide support for this
supposition. The Repression Capacity Index is not significant in any of the models and while population is a

level of economic
development appears to be unrelated to terrorism . This is a reproduction of findings by
significant predictor across all of the models, geographic area is not. Fourth,

several previous studies and underscores the idea that poorer and lesser developed countries are no more likely to
experience terrorism than developed countries. Economic development is a worthy goal that undoubtedly yields
many, many positive results. There is no evidence that reduction of terrorism is one of them.

Credibility

Middle East
Lack of US credibility deters democratization only focused on
US interests
Hinnebusch 15 [March 24, 2015. Raymond Hinnebusch is a Professor at the
School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. Globalization,
democratization, and the Arab uprising: the international factor in MENA's failed
democratization Democratization, 22:2, 335-357]
The Bush administration announced an end to tolerance of
authoritarianism after 9/11 on the grounds that it was the root cause of
terrorism, hence that Western security required democratization.
Washington launched new democracy promotion campaigns without
consulting pro-US regimes , as if, declared Egypts Mubarak, MENA states had no
sovereignty .52 Coming in parallel with the war on Iraq and a sharp US tilt
toward Israel, the initiative triggered a strong negative reaction by Arab
commentators and journalists, congruent with public opinion, among whom it was seen as
serving Israels interests by debilitating Iraq and a means of pressuring regimes
to be more cooperative on Palestine and Iraqs occupation. The US calls for human
rights while ignoring Palestinian rights had no credibility ; also the Gulf oil
regimes were always exempted. Many intellectuals and civil society groups were pulled
between their nationalist rejection of Western interference and fear that
democracy would not come without some outside pressure; in Egypt, Western
pressures opened limited space that allowed the strongly antiMubarak Kefiya movement to emerge. The
technical approach of the West, notably the stress on elections and on
fostering civil society was widely criticized; and, despite the emphasis on elections, when
Hamas won a free election in Palestine, the West refused to recognize or deal with it and the fear of Islamist

US support for Israel

and antagonism to Iran so alienated regional publics that US regional
influence depended on marginalization of publics by authoritarian
regimes; it was no surprise that Bush soon abandoned democracy promotion. The Western export
of democracy to the region was widely seen to fail, indeed, to deter
democratization in spite of considerable leverage and a reasonable level of linkage. It was seen as an
instrument of US hegemony; as Teti 55 argued, it put the West in a privileged position
to judge governance in MENA states and the Wests insistence on secular
liberal versions of democracy combined with neo-liberal economics, while
marginalizing Islamic versions of democracy and discouraging redistributive measures, had
limited appeal in MENA. The democratization promoted by the West was of
the thin variety compatible with neo-liberal globalization. While as an ideology democracy made
gains in the region, it faced too much competition from counter ideologies to be hegemonic, and the balance
of social forces produced by the articulation of global neo-liberalism with MENA crony capitalism was
most compatible with hybrid regimes and at best with low intensity
democracy (Tunisia, Lebanon).
victories eased the pressure on regimes for elections.53 Lynch54 argued that

Democracy promotion in the Middle East fails the war on

terror has destroyed US credibility in the region
Durac and Cavatorta 09 [Dr Vincent Durac lectures in Middle East Politics
and Development in the University College Dublin School of Politics and
International Relations. Dr Francesco Cavatorta, School of Law and Government,
Dublin City University. Strengthening Authoritarian Rule through Democracy
Promotion? Examining the Paradox of the US and EU Security Strategies: The Case
of Bin Alis Tunisia British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, April 2009 36(1), 319.
Note Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) Broader Middle East and North Africa
Initiative (BMENA)]
There is then considerable consensus that the events of September 11, 2001, have led to new thinking on political
reform in the Middle East and an entirely new set of political and policy dynamics.20 However, not everybody

Neeps
study of the workings of the MEPI has characterized it as incoherent in
approach; supportive of regime-led economic development .21 Secondly, despite
the stated intention of the framers of the MEPI, the vast majority of grants (over 70%) were
directed towards programs that either directly benefited Arab government
agencies or provided training and seminars for government officials. Only
18% of funds went to Arab or Arab nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The authors of the study
suggest that, as a result, the MEPI is efectively choosing to support the existing
Arab regimes chosen strategy of controlled liberalization . However, the
greatest obstacle to efective promotion of democratic reform identified in the
report is the continued lack of high-level policy support from senior officials
across the Administration.22 The Broader Middle East and North Africa initiative, although less
clearly focused than the MEPI, has also come in for stringent criticism. The initiative like the MEPI, was
trumpeted as giving substance to the Bush administrations call for a
democratic transformation of the Middle East. While the MEPI related specifically to US activities in
the region, the BMENA sought to bring together the US, Europe and the
broader Middle East, including Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and Turkey, as well as the Arab world.
But, like the MEPI, the BMENA initiative is deeply flawed, so much so that it has
been characterized as hollow at the core .23 The key difficulty with the
initiative is that security issues have been kept of the table . The
background document of the Sea Island Summit, at which the BMENA was launched,
acknowledges that the resolution of the IsraelPalestine conflict is an important element of progress in
the region. But, regional conflicts must not be an obstacle for reforms .24 However,
as Ottaway and Carothers note , the decision to keep the ArabIsraeli issue out of the
initiative does not make it go away and the attempt to launch a major
political initiative about Middle Eastern political transformation, without
discussing the peace process is fundamentally flawed .25 However, the
incoherence of the MEPI and BMENA are no more than symptomatic of much deeper
and more significant contradictions in US policy on democracy promotion
which are not, and perhaps cannot be, addressed in official pronouncements. Some of these
contradictions are expressed in the implicit belief that the US can
somehow engage as a neutral actor in relation to political change in the
region.26 This is related to the official refusal to recognize the extent to
shares such benign view of the new initiatives and a range of criticisms has been directed at them.

which American policies are themselves part of the problem in the Middle East. But
refusal to recognize the relevance of US policies in relation to the Israel
Palestine question, the war on Iraq, and the war on terror has the consequence that
US policy-makers fail, or refuse, to see the extent to which the credibility of the US as an agent
of democracy promotion in the Middle East is called into question , both within the region and
without. Yet, as Neep observes, the US has lost all moral standing in the eyes of
most Arabs following its uncritical support for Israeli repression of the
Palestinians, its invasion of Iraq, and the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.27 However, the
greatest difficulty US policy on democracy promotion faces in the post-September 11, 2001, era stems
from the logic of the war on terrorism . The National Security Strategy of the US from the
outset identifies the need to strengthen alliances to defeat global terrorism.28 However, herein lies the problem.

the most obvious beneficiaries of political

liberalization in the Middle East would be Islamist , and to a lesser extent, nationalist
Most commentators are agreed that

opposition forces. For example, Gause argues that further democratization in the Middle East would most likely
generate Islamist governments less inclined to cooperate with the United States on important policy goals ... 29

However, these are precisely the forces that would oppose not only the US
war on terrorism but also many other aspects of US foreign policy in the
region, not least the American position on Palestine. This means that there is a gaping
contradiction at the heart of US democracy promotion in the Middle East.
Successful promotion of democratic political reform clearly will benefit the
enemies of the war on terror and the war on terror is a non-negotiable
element of the foreign policy of this US administration. The necessary tension
between maintaining the global coalition against terrorism and the democracy imperative was recognized early by
some. In a reflection on the implications of the events of September 11, 2001, for the future direction of US foreign

that because the United States needs help from a

number of states and groups with poor human rights records ... the war on
terrorism will require it to downgrade its concern for human rights
policy, Stephen Walt argued

temporarily.30 One of the results of this is what has been characterized as the instrumentalization of democracy in

Rather than being interested in democratic reform for its own

sake, the US propounds democracy in the hope and expectation that it will
deliver outcomes which the US desires. Dennis Ross, former Special Middle East Coordinator
US foreign policy.

under Bill Clinton, advocates the promotion of democratization in the Middle East because only the proponents of

This inevitably raises the suspicion that

democracy will be acceptable only if it delivers the right kind of Islamists
to power.32 The US reaction to the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian
elections makes this point only too obviously.
moderate Islam can discredit the radical Islamists.31

Russia Backlash

Threat
Russia uses military, economic, and energy threats to counter
US democracy promotion eforts leads to conflicts like
Ukraine
Babayan 15 [Nelli Babayan is a senior researcher at the Center for
Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy at the Otto Suhr Institute of
Political Science, Freie Universitat Berlin. The return of the empire? Russia's
counteraction to transatlantic democracy promotion in its near abroad
Democratization, 2015 Vol. 22, No. 3, 438 45]
How did Russia counteract EaP in Armenia? Since its independence from the Soviet Union, Armenia has welcomed
democracy promotion efforts and committed to the regional policies of the EU and the US, including democracy
promotion. The expulsion of Russian military bases from Georgia after the 2008 conflict and their move to Armenia
made the latter last remaining stronghold of Russian military power in the region. The entire spectrum of Russia's
instruments in counteracting democracy promotion or for that matter any EU/US policy deemed as challenging were
particularly evident in the case of Armenia's 2013 U-turn59 from the EU AA to Russia's Customs Union. The case

Russia is most prone to counteract the EU and the US

when faced with imminent efectiveness of democracy promotion
supported by local actors or when faced with challenges to its
geostrategic interests. As Delcour and Wolczuk show in this special issue, this logic also
applies to Russia's actions in Georgia and Ukraine . By the employment of
economic and military instruments and through the promotion of
alternative regional institutions, Russia counteracted EU policy, which has
also been supported by the US. Thus, Russian efforts for counteracting the initiatives within the EaP
of Armenia demonstrates that

peaked with success in September 2013: Armenia turned to the Eurasian Customs Union and in November 2013

Energy,
more specifically gas, and the protracted conflicts are the main pressure
points used by Russia in Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus. Devoid of
Ukraine withdrew from initialling the AA despite a wave of domestic protests in both countries.60

natural energy resources and with a protracted conflict at hand, Armenia makes a compliant target for Russia's
energy and military pressures. In the mid-2000s Russia successfully blocked the diversification of Armenia's gas
sources by imposing restrictions on the pipeline from Iran.61 Regular Armenian concessions in terms of
infrastructure and cooperation with other neighbours secured comparatively lower gas prices. However, after

Russia
threatened to increase gas prices by 60%, while suggesting that the costs may be subsidized
Armenia concluded the sixth round of DCFTA negotiations leading to the initialling of the AA, in July 2013

and not increase in the next five years should Armenia join the Customs Union.62 Consequently, Armenia entered
negotiations for an 18% rise. It allowed Russian gas-monopoly Gazprom to acquire the remaining 20% of shares of
the gas procuring company ArmRusGazprom, which had previously belonged to the Armenian government. Russian
media, which is also widely viewed in Armenia, publicized a number of preferential agreements and possible
subsidies promised by Putin to Armenia's President Serzh Sargsyan in return for joining the Customs Union. In

Russia promised larger investments into prolonging the exploitation

of the Armenian nuclear power plant and other factories, regarded as
obsolete or environmentally hazardous by the EU and the US.63 Besides economic
addition,

threats, Russia has also been taking advantage of the protracted conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over

While Azerbaijan's energy industry has allowed it to

exponentially multiply its military budget, Armenia has been largely
reliant on Russia for its security against possible military actions by
Azerbaijan. While Armenia showed growing interest in its partnership with
the EU and did not attend a June 2013 meeting of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization,
Russia subsequently increased its arms export to Azerbaijan by US$1 billion.64 This
Nagorno Karabakh region.

move served as a clear warning to Armenia that Russia may no longer

support it in the framework of the conflict. Regularly playing two sides of
the conflict against each other using the promise or threat of arms sales ,
Russia has managed to keep the South Caucasus divided and hindered
regional projects of the EU and the US. Armenia backpedalled on AA after two years of preparations
and previously expressed confidence by the Armenian authorities that the AAs with some partner countries,
including Armenia, will be initialled in November 2013.65 The EU delegation in Armenia confirmed that the latter
was on track for signing the AA. Former Prime Minister Tigran Sarkisian also repeatedly argued against Armenian
entry into the Customs Union, due to the lack of common borders with Russia, Belarus, or Kazakhstan.66 Thus, the
decision to reject initialling the AA bewildered both the EU and the Armenian public, which took to the streets in
protest (even if with limited coverage by Western media). Given the pressures coming from the Kremlin, Armenian
officials attempted to frame the decision in pragmatic terms, calling Russia the military security choice and the
DCFTA the economic choice, since in terms of security, Armenia is tied to Russia.67 However, while the
Armenian government and the Kremlin have attempted to present the Customs Union as a better economic and
trade choice for Armenia,68 the benefits of joining it are hardly identifiable. Due to its closed borders with
Azerbaijan and Turkey, and lack of a border with Russia, Armenia conducts most of its trade through Georgia. Since
Georgia signed the DCFTA in summer 2014, these two neighbouring countries will now have to abide by different

The stagnation of
democracy in post-Soviet countries has been the result of a set of factors,
such as low resonance of democracy, high adaptation costs to democracy, protracted conflicts, weak
institutions, or illiberal elites. Yet, through economic sanctions, military threats,
and even through such formal institutions as the Eurasian Union, Russia
has contributed to the stagnation of democratization in its near abroad. It
counteracted democracy promotion or, for that matter, any other Western policies, which it
considered a threat to its geostrategic interests and ambitions for
restoring its great power status. At the same time, even if the level of democracy in its near abroad has
tariffs and agreements, further straining Armenia's already weak economy.

gradually deteriorated, there is no evidence of Russia promoting autocracy or any other regime alternative to democracy.

Russia's actions are hardly surprising. For centuries under the direct influence of Russia, the regions of
Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia did not only constitute parts of the Russia-led Soviet Union but also of the

The exposure to Western principles (along with material incentives) and

democratization under the guidance of the EU or the US may potentially steer
the allegiance of its near abroad away from Russia. Moreover, just as the EU and the US have
continuously preferred stability over democracy,69 Russia has also strived to maintain the
status quo and safeguard its interests in its own neighbourhood . At the same
time, the EU and the US currently do not match either the level of political prowess borderline blackmail
or the type of economic or security pressures employed by Russia in its near
earlier Russian Empire.

abroad.

Trade Conflict
Russia feels threatened by democracy promotion leads to
intervention, military threats, and trade wars
Babayan 15 [Nelli Babayan is a senior researcher at the Center for
Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy at the Otto Suhr Institute of
Political Science, Freie Universitat Berlin. The return of the empire? Russia's
counteraction to transatlantic democracy promotion in its near abroad
Democratization, 2015 Vol. 22, No. 3, 438 45]
the resonance of
promoted democratic rules among domestic elites and the population , the
economic and military importance, and to some extent cultural/historical proximity to an illiberal power are
likely drivers for counteraction of democracy promotion . This section considers these
This special issue has suggested that from the perspective of target countries,

assumptions by overviewing Russia's actions in EaP countries and proceeds to more detailed discussion of Russia's
strategies in counteracting democracy promotion using the example of Armenia's withdrawal from initialling the

While not a frontrunner in democratization, Armenia has

endeavoured to develop closer relations with both Russia and the EU,
being particularly enthusiastic about new targeted policies. Precisely this
endeavour to integrate into European structures rather than to
democratize induces Russia to counteract Western policies . To reinforce the
EU's AA.

argument that counteraction to democracy promotion is a byproduct of Russia protecting its strategic interests, the
article briefly refers to Russia's relations with Azerbaijan and Belarus. Due to their already consolidated
authoritarian regimes and disregard of European shared values, Azerbaijan and Belarus are least likely to be
pressured by Russia because of their possible democratic aspirations. However, their interactions with Russia show
that the latter used the same instruments toward these countries whenever the latter ignored its interests.
Realizing that the previously forced allegiance of Eastern Europe had moved to the EU, president Putin prioritized
the post-Soviet countries in Russia's foreign policy.45 Along with its historical ties,

Russia has vested

economic and security interests in all EaP countries. Thus in terms of the drivers for
possible counteraction to democracy promotion (see the introduction to this issue by Risse and Babayan) all three
apply to Russia's near abroad, though to different extents depending on the country. While geographic proximity
and shared history apply to all six EaP partners, resonance of democracy among local political actors is most
pronounced in the cases of Georgia and Ukraine (see Delcour and Wolczuk in this special issue).

Economic

and military interests and leverage are emphasized in the cases of Armenia a host to
the only Russian military base in an EaP country and Azerbaijan a potential though smaller rival in energy
exports to Europe. While both Armenia and Azerbaijan are democratic laggards, the rhetorical resonance of
democracy and the willingness to participate in EU policies is more pronounced among Armenian political elites and
the population.46 Apart from democracy indices such as Freedom House, frequent and tolerated criticism of the

These factors
and the argued attractiveness of the EU's incentives have induced Russia
to realize that democratization of these countries may result in their
closer partnership with the EU and the US at the expense of Russia's own
regional interests. Thus, democracy promotion policies have been viewed by
Russia as contradicting its own interests in the region . By pressuring its
neighbouring countries through military power and economic investments
or sanctions , Russia has, perhaps, inadvertently countered democracy
promotion and stabilized authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet space .
To extend its influence and to counter the policies of the EU and the US even
before the launch of the EaP in 2009, Russia had forgiven debts in exchange for
military-industrial enterprises and purchased large shares in
authorities in the media, and the visibility of opposition parties'47 support this observation.

telecommunications, energy, electricity networks, and banking

industries.48 Thus, it inter alia engaged in specific business development based
on its own strategic interests, however, framing those as serving the
development of its neighbours. This strategy has underlined the
employment of non-military instruments in reinforcing Russia's policies and
obtaining a dominant status in the economies of its former satellites . It has
also presented the post-Soviet countries with potentially less cumbersome
opportunities for economic gains: unlike EU and US policies, Russia's
cooperation has not been tied to domestically costly political reforms or
lengthy harmonization processes. Russia considered its growing regional dominance to be
challenged when in 2010 the European Commission started negotiations on Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade
Agreements (DCFTA) with EaP countries. Despite the reassurances from the former EU foreign policy chief Javier
Solana that the EaP had not been designed against Russia, foreign minister Sergey Lavrov interpreted the choice
given to EaP partners as either being with Russia, or with the European Union. Russia inter alia reacted by urging
EaP countries to join its Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan a precursor to Putin's envisaged Eurasian
Union. The EU has repeatedly stated that signing any customs agreements with Russia would endanger the AA,
since the prerequisites of Russia's aspiring Eurasian Union contradicted the EU-offered DCFTA. Russian Prime
Minister Dmitry Medvedev also underlined the incompatibility of the two structures.49 However, the Customs Union
has been viewed not only as another alternative agreement but also as possible leverage over the EU's neighbours,

Russia did apply pressure, including: misuse of energy

pricing; artificial trade obstacles such as import bans of dubious World Trade
Organization (WTO) compatibility and cumbersome customs procedures;
military cooperation and security guarantees; and the instrumentalization
of protracted conflicts .50 To minimize the impact ofnew ties with the EU,51 Russia took
more substantial measures when it engaged in trade wars with the
countries which were most enthusiastic about their European aspirations .
since, as expected,

While Moldova repeatedly stated that signing of the AA would not damage its export prospects and economic
relations with Russia, the latter banned the import of Moldovan wine.52 Largely viewed as retaliation against a proEU Ukrainian businessman later Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko Russia banned imports of a Ukrainian

The coordinated action by the

EU and the US guided Georgia and Ukraine to the signing of the AA in June
2014; however, the determination of Russia to prevent shifts in its
regional dominance persisted. Under admitted Russian pressure and
threats of asymmetric measures in response to Western sanctions, in
September 2014 the EU suspended the enforcement of DCFTA with
Ukraine and postponed it from November 2014 to December 2015.54 In this
chocolate brand in July 2013 and dairy products in April 2014.53

special issue Delcour and Wolczuk discuss interactions between Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, and democracy promoters

these
instruments do not aim to restrict democratization per se but to punish
incompliance with the Kremlin's interests . Russia has employed similar
strategies against long-time partners, who do not even welcome
democracy promotion. Trade wars between Belarus and Russia and Russia's mass
purchase of Azerbaijani energy are cases in point. Given the resistance of the Belarusian regime to
democratization and the string of EU and US sanctions,55 trade and cooperation with Russia
are vital for Belarus. Nevertheless, on several occasions President Alexander Lukashenko denounced
Russia's dominance in their relations. In response, Russia imposed various sanctions at the end
in more detail. Yet, not only EU-enthusiasts may be targeted by trade sanctions, showing that

of the 2000s and early 2010s, including banning import of Belarusian food products and flights of the Belarusian
national carrier. Similarly, Azerbaijani authorities display no willingness to democratize or to integrate into European

Russia is interested in curtailing the

supply of Caspian gas to the EU, since that would hinder Russia's
structures but they welcome business opportunities. Thus,

economic interests56 and to some extent compete with Russia's gas

exports. Russia promised Azerbaijan serious consequences for its
participation in the EaP and the Nabucco pipeline project and by buying the gas intended for Nabucco
basically left the pipeline without supply.57 While seemingly a more profitable deal for Azerbaijan, selling
large amounts of gas to Russia has the potential of endangering the
former's export diversification plans and decreasing its bargaining power
against Russia.58

China Backlash

CCP Collapse
CCP backlashes against democratization eforts- belligerent
nationalism
Chen and Kinzelbach 15 [Dingding Chen- assistant professor of Government
and Public Administration at the University of Macau, Katrin Kinzelbach- associate
director of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin, March 2015,
Democracy promotion and China: blocker or bystander?
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13510347.2014.999322, mm]
In the period covered by this special issue (20112014),

pro-democracy activism in China has been

small in scale overall and only loosely organized . At the same time, the resilience
of authoritarian rule in China has been tested by economic development trends, changes in
Chinese political culture, competition among Chinese leaders, and the effects of globalization.4 Andrew Nathan observed in 2013
that consensus was stronger than at any time since the 1989 Tiananmen crisis that the resilience of the authoritarian regime in the
People's Republic of China (PRC) is approaching its limits.5 Minxin Pei postulated in the same year that a transition to democracy

CCP's April 2013

communiqu on the state of the ideological sphere, essentially provides the same analysis,
but with a view to stalling democratization pressures . It warns that
democracy promotion is an attempt to undermine the current leadership
and the socialism with Chinese characteristics system of governance .7 In
addition to ideological challenges, the CCP also grapples with an increase
in larger-scale protests around bread and butter issues, such as grievances about
in China in the next 10 to 15 years is a high probability event.6 It is striking that Document No. 9, the

working conditions and salary levels, but also land grabbing and environmental degradation. Demonstrations, some of which turn
violent, are said to continue to grow in frequency, and while there is a lack of clarity on the exact figures, public security spending

system of so-called social stability management

(weiwen) was set up to deal with these pressures and to undermine
organizations that could compete with the authority of the party-state .9
According to Xie Yue, a political science professor at Tongji University in Shanghai, weiwen seeks to reduce
social and political instability by enhancing coercive capacity rather than
by moving forward to the rule of law and democracy.10 In the CCP's
orthodoxy, domestic challengers of one-party rule are not only antiChinese, they also play into the hands of China's international rivals that
seek to undermine China's rise , notably the US. That is, the CCP employs a
nationalist counter-discourse and it suggests that external actors (or rather:
global rivals) try to politically destabilize the People's Republic for strategic
reasons. According to Document No. 9, Western anti-China forces and all kinds of so-called citizens movements echo each
other and rely on each other's support to squeeze the Party out of leadership.11 Finally, it concludes: In the face of
these threats, we must not let down our guard or decrease our
vigilance .12 Document No. 9 most likely spurred a number of recent arrests, notably of individuals belonging to the New
has been rising as a result.8 A sophisticated

Citizen Movement. For example, Xu Zhiyong, who gave the movement its name,13 received a four-year prison term in early 2014.
Three years earlier, in March 2010, China's State Administration of Foreign Exchange had already issued stricter rules on the receipt

increasing the party-state's control over

the flow of foreign resources to Chinese non-governmental organizations
(NGOs). Chinese organizations can now only receive foreign funds if they have a special foreign exchange account and after
of foreign donations by Chinese organizations, thereby

getting their grant agreements notarized. Due to this procedure, it has become very difficult if not impossible for the US and the EU
to make financial transfers to organizations that engage in democracy promotion in China. Therefore, foreign support for domestic
civil society actors is, more often than not, designed so as to dispel possible concerns, thereby restricting the flow of foreign
resources to activities that are palatable to the Chinese authorities. The US and the EU continue to support Chinese human rights
activists through financial grants, quiet diplomacy, and public statements, but both actors have scaled down their ambitions in

recent years. This is not only because financial regulations have changed.

China's rapidly increasing

international weight, which was further accelerated by the subprime mortgage crisis in the US and the sovereign
debt crisis in Europe, changed the dynamics of international politics, and
significantly decreased the party-state's vulnerability to international
pressure. Accordingly, high-ranking leaders in Beijing now dismiss Western
criticism of China's governance model rather confidently. For example, according to
confidential accounts of EU officials, Wu Hailong (since 2014 China's Representative at the UN in Geneva) noted repeatedly in

China was no longer willing to be lectured on human rights

and democracy because times have changed.14 As this brief summary shows, the
Chinese party-state has sought to countervail external and domestic
democracy promotion by using a wide range of tactics, ranging from
domestic repression , counter-discourse at home and abroad, to sticks
and carrots at the international level. To what extent this policy extends beyond the borders of
closed-door meetings that

mainland China will be discussed in the following two sections on Myanmar and Hong Kong.

CCP will block democratization- risks war/internal instability

Chen and Kinzelbach 15 [Dingding Chen- assistant professor of Government
and Public Administration at the University of Macau, Katrin Kinzelbach- associate
director of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin, March 2015,
Democracy promotion and China: blocker or bystander?
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13510347.2014.999322, mm]
People's Republic of China is both a decisive blocker as well as an
indiferent bystander of democratization. In this article, we looked at whether and how China
countervails EU and US democracy promotion at home and in its immediate neighbourhood. In terms of domestic politics, the
CCP is clearly determined to withstand, repress, outperform, and
outsmart home-grown as well as external pressures for democratization . It
The

is impossible to predict how long this approach will be sustainable. With regard to China's foreign policy, we tested the hypothesis
that geostrategic interests or a perceived risk of regime survival at home will lead the People's Republic to countervail democracy

a perceived risk of regime

survival leads Beijing to countervail US and EU democracy support outside
the Chinese mainland. Although the scope of this article did not allow for additional case studies, we consider it
likely that the CCP's focus on regime-survival at home does not only trump the
one country, two systems doctrine, but ultimately also Beijing's
declared non-interference principle in foreign policy. Yet, the fact that Beijing does not
promotion outside its own borders as well. The case of Hong Kong confirms that

seem to use its significant leverage over Myanmar to hinder democracy support is an empirical challenge to the common
proposition that authoritarian

China is likely to export or protect autocracy,

especially in its near-

abroad. Given that we view Myanmar as the most likely case with respect to strategic interests, we suggest with considerable
certainty that Beijing will only counteract democratization, including US and EU democracy support, where it perceives a challenge
to the CCP's survival. Where this is not the case, Beijing is likely to focus on protecting its economic and strategic interests abroad,
regardless of regime type. While this finding might be taken to suggest that a focus on China's international influence should not be

China's economic performance has not

only granted the CCP legitimacy domestically, it has also made China's
development path economic liberalization without political reform appear desirable further
afield. And the recent economic troubles in Europe and the US, in turn, have
challenged the thus far common perception that democracy was required
for prosperity. As democracy promoters, both the US and the EU should therefore ensure that the very real governance
a priority for democracy supporters, we remain more cautious.

shortcomings in China, beyond as well as within the economic sphere, are publicly identified for what they are. Without such

China will continue to be looked at as an alternative development model,

thereby challenging democracy's power of attraction.
concerted efforts, it is likely that authoritarian

Maintains Authoritarianism

Tunisia
US maintains authoritarian regimes in power regardless of
their ability to be democratized Tunisia proves
Durac and Cavatorta 09 [Dr Vincent Durac lectures in Middle East Politics
and Development in the University College Dublin School of Politics and
International Relations. Dr Francesco Cavatorta, School of Law and Government,
Dublin City University. Strengthening Authoritarian Rule through Democracy
Promotion? Examining the Paradox of the US and EU Security Strategies: The Case
of Bin Alis Tunisia British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, April 2009 36(1), 319.]
The contradictions and the complementary strategies of both the EU and
US foreign policies towards democracy promotion are in evidence when it
comes to the case of Tunisia. At first glance, the country seems to ofer the best
potential for democratization in the entire Middle East and North Africa ,
which would lead one to assume that external forces might make a considerable difference in pressuring the
leadership to end authoritarianism while, at the same time, promoting potential opposition actors.

Tunisia has

a number of advantages over other countries in the region . Lebanon and Yemen
might also be considered good candidates, but Lebanon is still plagued by sectarianism and foreign destabilizing
interventions (both Israel and Syria directly interfere in Lebanese politics), while Yemen suffers from poorer socio-

Such advantages consist of the following: (a) its

limited size and population mean that the country per se is not a key strategic asset for Western
powers (unlike Morocco); (b) the absence of significant natural resources further decreases its
economic indicators than Tunisia.

strategic value and therefore meddling from external actors with a high degree of dependence on current ruling

the relative lack of regional standing and

cultural influence do not make Tunisian politics as internationally relevant as Egyptian politics; (d) the
absence of a credible Islamist threat would seem ideal for the opening up of the political
elites (unlike the Gulf States or Algeria); (c)

system given that the Tunisian Islamists had been interlocutors of Bin Alis during his first year as President56; and

recent solid economic growth has contributed to the rise of a

moderately wealthy middle class and created a potentially vibrant civil society. All this
should represent a clear advantage on all the other countries in the region
and it would therefore seem that if both the EU and the US were seriously
promoting democracy, Tunisia would be the perfect target country on
which to apply pressure for change. However, not only this does not happen,
but over the course of the last decade the rule of Bin Ali has been
strengthened and, paradoxically, his police state has come to represent
the paradigm of what other countries in the region should aspire to in
order to satisfy the governance requirements of the US and the EU.
(e)

Short term goals override long term beliefs making democracy

promotion impossible Tunisia
Durac and Cavatorta 09 [Dr Vincent Durac lectures in Middle East Politics
and Development in the University College Dublin School of Politics and
International Relations. Dr Francesco Cavatorta, School of Law and Government,
Dublin City University. Strengthening Authoritarian Rule through Democracy

Promotion? Examining the Paradox of the US and EU Security Strategies: The Case
of Bin Alis Tunisia British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, April 2009 36(1), 319]
The EU has been traditionally more reluctant to co-operate openly
and directly when it comes to hard security issues, but the terrorist attacks of 11
Security First

September, the Djerba tragedy, and the numerous arrests all over Europe have triggered an intense debate in
Europe about internal and external security measures in the fight against terrorism. In this context, Tunisia is a
primary ally because of the expertise of its secret police and its ability in dismantling its own domestic Islamist

the EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator announced

much tighter co-operation with all the North African governments .68 While
this might make sense from a strictly security-related point of view in the
short-term, it should not be forgotten that it is precisely the Tunisian security and intelligence
services that are to blame for their hold on the political system and their
repression of all domestic opposition, thereby undermining the long-term
democratization requirements the EU purports to promote. On its part, the US has been much
network. It is therefore no surprise that

more active in deepening the links with the Tunisian regime with a view to strengthening its coalition against terror.
The threat of Islamism in Tunisia does indeed exist, but not in the extremist and violent forms that make the

the US supports the heavyhanded practices of Bin

Ali and Tunisia has become an important ally in the war on terror . Since 11
September 2001, contacts between the two countries have reached
unprecedented depth, with Former Secretary of State Powell visiting Tunisia in 2003 and Tunisian
Foreign Minister visiting Washington in 2004. During that visit the US State Department declared
that Tunisia has been a voice for moderation. Tunisia has been a voice for
regional harmony. Tunisia has been a voice for putting eforts and
resources into development.69 On its part, the Tunisian government asserts that Tunisia and
the US have been strengthened within the framework of common
adherence to the values of liberty, democracy and free enterprise .70 The
headlines these days. In spite of this,

strength of these days was confirmed when Bin Ali visited Washington in February 2004 and President Bush lauded

democratization of the country

should be at the heart of US-Tunisian relations because, according to the
Bush doctrine, it is only through democracy that terrorism will be
ultimately defeated. In fact, co-operation occurs in the military and intelligence domains,72 while
MEPI funding does not appear to make any impact on the Tunisian political
system . Again, short-term goals override such long-term beliefs. The EU and
the US share the same objective and therefore their democracy promotion
strategies are bound to fail . The maintenance of the international status
quo , the enforcement of neo-liberal economic arrangements and the
absolute control over the definition of what constitutes security make it
impossible for these two actors to credibly promote democracy as the probable
him for his efforts in the fight against terrorism.71 As we can see,

outcome is likely to throw up parties and movements that would contest precisely such objectives. Previous
experiences are not encouraging in this sense. The FIS victory in the Algerian election in December 1991 were
greeted with stunned preoccupation in Western capitals and the subsequent military coup depriving the FIS of

The more recent case of the

shunning of Hamas obeys to the same logic of boycotting what
democracy in the region produces because it does not conform to the EU
and US vision of international peace and security. Thus, in terms of obtaining both
power was hailed in the West as the means to save democracy.73

security and material gains, Tunisia provides the perfect paradigmatic partner: economically integrated, but nonthreatening (unlike the Asian tigers), co-operative on security matters, but not devious (unlike Saudi Arabia or

Pakistan), militarily weak and accommodating, but sufficiently strong to withstand potential Islamist pressure, and
finally, docile when it comes to the ArabIsraeli conflict. If only the whole of the Arab world could be just like Tunisia

Backsliding

Generic
Backsliding will produce electoral authoritarianism, not
dictatorshipits the new norm.
Shirah 12 [Ryan Shirah, Fellow @ Center for the Study of Democracy @ UC
Irvine, Institutional Legacy and the Survival of New Democracies: The Lasting
Effects of Competitive Authoritarianism,
http://www.socsci.uci.edu/files/democracy/docs/conferences/grad/shirah.pdf, mm]
Contemporary authoritarian regimes sport an impressively diverse array
of political institutions. Nominally democratic institutions like elected legislatures and political parties are now a
common feature of nondemocratic politics (Schedler 2002). While a significant amount of work has been put into understanding the
causes and consequences of this institutional variation, many questions have not yet been adequately addressed. In particular, as
Brownlee (2009a) points out, comparativists have delved less deeply into the longterm and post regime effects of electoral
competition (132). Building upon previous work on unfree elections and democratization (Brownlee 2009b, Schedler 2009, Lindberg

this study examines

how the adoption of competitive elections prior to a democratic transition
afects prospects for longterm democratic stability and consolidation . 1 I
2006a, Lindberg 2006b, Lindberg 2009a, Howard & Roessler 2002, Hadenius & Teorell 2007),

engage the literature on hybrid regimes and political institutions under dictatorship in order to draw out implications for how the
institutionalization of competitive elections prior to democratization might impact the stability of a democratic successor regime.

An event history analysis of

74 new democracies that transitioned from authoritarian rule between
1975 and 2003 shows that institutional legacies significantly afect
prospects for democratic consolidation. Specifically, competitive
authoritarian regimes tend to make for longerlived democracies following
a democratic transition than regimes without minimally competitive
elections. 2 The idea that political institutions have significant and
independent efects is hardly controversial in comparative politics. What
has been less broadly accepted is the notion that nominally democratic
institutions are anything but window dressing in regimes that do not allow
for meaningful challenges to authority. By the late 1980s, a series of observed transitions led to the
conclusion that there was no sustainable form of electoral authoritarianism.
Previously unaddressed implications of two competing arguments are presented.

Huntington (1991) famously declared that liberalized authoritarianism is not a stable equilibrium; the halfway house does not

regimes that adopted nominally

democratic institutions did not represent a new variety or subtype of
authoritarian regime, they were instead considered transitory states
stand (1745). Others had already begun drawing the same conclusion;

(ODonnell & Schmitter 1986, DiPalma 1990, Przeworski 1991). For a decade, the literature on democratization treated dictatorships
with electoral institutions as semidemocracies or states in the process of full liberalization. But by the turn of the century the

Dictators remained in power alongside

legislatures, political parties, and electoral systems that they had created
or inherited. It became clear that electoral authoritarianism was not an
ephemeral and unstable state; it was a new kind of nondemocracy, and it
was quickly becoming the norm (Schedler 2002)
observed facts made this a diffcult position to maintain.

Democratization fuels elites and creates conflict

Brzel 15 [2015. Tanja A. Brzel holds the chair for European Integration at the
Freie Universitt Berlin. She received her PhD from the European University Institute
in Florence, Italy in 1999. From 1999 to 2004, she conducted her research and
taught at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, the

Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin and the University Heidelberg. The noble west and
the dirty rest? Western democracy promoters and illiberal regional powers
Democratization, 22:3, 519-535]
The EU and US failed at promoting democracy when they supported
authoritarian elites in Tunisia and Egypt before they were swept away by
the Arab Spring, remained silent when a democratically elected
government was overthrown by the military in Egypt, and stood by when
authoritarian regimes violently suppressed political opposition in Bahrain
and Syria . This failure cannot be attributed to Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China promoting autocracy or
blocking democracy. It results from the democratization-stability dilemma, where
democracy promotion requires a transition of power that entails political
uncertainty about the outcomes and often involves conflict . This dilemma
is the more pronounced, the more fragile the target state is. Where the
democratization-stability dilemma is less pronounced, the effectiveness of Western democracy
promotion hinges on other domestic factors.64 Differential empowerment requires the
existence of reform coalitions that have internalized liberal norms and values and are strong enough to use Western

empowering domestic
reformists is not enough if actors lack the necessary resources to
introduce domestic change. Statehood is not only a question of administrative capacity but is often
further undermined by the contestedness of borders and political authority.66 Finally, Western actors
require legitimacy to promote democratic change.67 EU and US democratic
demands meet with public resentment whenever they clash with
nationalist or religious beliefs, for example regarding the role of
minorities, or are perceived as attempting to control the country . Domestic
conditions severely limit the efectiveness of Western democracy
promotion. This special issue shows how countervailing strategies of illiberal powers can further undermine
trade, aid, and political support to push for democratic change.65 Moreover,

the chances of Western democracy promotion by subverting the statehood of target states or undermining the

Western
democracy promotion, rather than being futile, can have the opposite
efect enhancing or stabilizing autocracy. The causal mechanism is domestic empowerment,
legitimacy of Western democracy promoters. The various contributions also show that

however, Western aid, trade, and security cooperation may empower both liberal and illiberal forces. What has been
largely overlooked by the democratization literature is that non-democratic regimes also use Western democracy
promotion to advance their power and interest.68 The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) is a case in point. From
its very inception, the ENP has focused on building and strengthening state institutions which are capable of
fostering legal approximation with EU rules on trade, migration, or energy.69 By promoting effective government
rather than democratic governance, the EU helped stabilize non-democratic and corrupt regimes in its Southern and
Eastern neighbourhood rather than transforming them.70 Incumbent elites have aligned their political survival
strategies with the EUs demand for domestic change. They fought corruption, for instance, where it helped to oust
political opponents, reward political allies, deflect international criticism, and attract foreign assistance and

The US has been less state-centred, supporting free and fair

elections, an independent media, and a stronger civil society .72 But like the
EU, the US has only reluctantly backed democratic protest movements if
its geostrategic interests have been at stake and refrained from putting
pressure on incumbent regimes for human rights violations or democratic
back-sliding.73 Moreover, US democracy assistance is security driven
prioritizing fragile states.74 In short, Western democracy promotion can have
unintended and negative efects on democratic change in target states . It
does not only empower liberal reform coalitions, to the extent that they exist in the first
investments.71

but can also boost or stabilize the power of incumbent autocratic

elites. Likewise, illiberal powers may not only fail in pulling transition or
democratizing countries away from Western democracy, they may end up
pushing them in this very direction . Russias countervailing strategies have empowered proplace,

Western democratic forces in Ukraine and Georgia and facilitated compliance with EU demands for economic and
political reforms. Putins attempts to destabilize the two countries through economic sanctions and military support
for secessionist regions made the US and the EU step up their economic and political support for democratization
leading to more rather than less engagement in Russias near abroad.75

Autocracy Good

Prevents Conflict
Party-based autocracy best prevents civil conflict through a
balance of coercion and co-optation
Fjelde 2010 [Hanne Fjelde, Senior Researcher, PRIO; Assistant Professor,
Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, Generals,
Dictators, and Kings: Author- itarian Regimes and Civil Conflict, 19732004, Conflict
Management and Peace Science 27.3, mm]
The last decade has seen an increase in literature that examines how political institutions influence the risk of civil conflict.

Existing literature has centered on the finding that inconsistent regimes,

that is, autocratic regimes that also display some seemingly democratic
institutions, run a higher risk of civil war than either consistent
autocracies or democracies. Recent research has questioned this finding
on empirical grounds by showing that the Polity dataset , on which most of the evidence
is based, partly defines inconsistent regimes by the presence of political
violence (Strand, 2007; Vreeland, 2008). Once the endogenous aspects of the Polity data are removed, the evidence
of a higher risk of conflict associated with inconsistent regimes is no
longer robust, nor does there seem to be any other clear association
between political institutions and civil war. These findings suggest that
the frequently used Polity index is unsuitable for studies of civil conflict ,
because the Polity score is not independent from the observation of
conflict. Moreover, they illustrate that current knowledge of the political determinants of conflict to a large extent builds on
aggregate data sources that mask substantial information about actual regime characteristics in the polities we study. Over a
decade ago, Gleditsch and Ward (1997) noted that since a countrys value on the Polity scale is an aggregation of the value on

users of
this dataset thus risk conflating very diferent types of polities over time
and across space. Since then, however, the effort to further unfold the authority patterns of the aggregate regime
individual indicators, vastly different institutional configurations can underlie the same Polity score. They warned that

categories in studies of civil conflict has, with the exception mentioned above, exclusively dealt with institutional differences among
democracies (c.f. Reynal-Querol, 2002, 2005). Authoritarian regime type remains a residual category. This article theoretically and

to stay in power and avoid

rebellion aimed at overthrowing the regime, dictators have two principal
instruments: coercion , that is, to forcefully marginalize or eliminate
political opponents, or co-optation , that is, to transform opponents into
supporters through ofers of spoils such as power positions or rents . The
empirically unpacks the authoritarian regime category. 1 It suggests that

capacity for both efficient coercion and co-optation is conditioned by the regimes institutional infrastructure. I argue that

dictators who govern through political parties are more able to forcefully
control and buy of opposition than dictators who either rely on the military to stay in power, or who
coordinate their rule through the royal family. Authoritarian regimes thus exhibit predictable
diferences in their ability to avoid organized violent challenges to their
authority. To examine this argument, the articles uses a new dataset by Hadenius and Teorell (2007b) to study the risk of civil
conflict in four types of authoritarian regimesmilitary regimes, monarchies, single-party regimes, and multi-party electoral

The
study shows that the emerging view, that political institutions are not a
significant determinant of civil conflict, results from treating a
heterogeneous set of authoritarian regimes as homogenous. When differentiating
between them, I find that both military regimes and multi-party electoral autocracies
have a higher risk of conflict than single-party regimes, which on the other
hand seem to possess institutions that make them particularly resilient to
autocraciesfrom 1973 to the present, and in doing so, contributes to the literature on political institutions and conflict.

armed challenges to their authority. Exploring these results further, however, I find that
multi-party electoral autocracies have minor conflicts but tend to avoid
large-scale civil wars. One explanation is that the need for electoral support in these regimes restrains the
dictators use of force. Lastly, I find that the efect of political transitions in
authoritarian regimes is more complex than assumed by previous
research, and conditioned by the type of regime taking power. For military regimes, the risk is
lowest immediately after a regime change and then increases over time.
The opposite seems to be the case for multi-party electoral autocracies.

Party autocracy utilizes the best balance of coercion and cooptationthey can channel dissent while also monitoring
opposition and cracking down when necessary.
Fjelde 2010 [Hanne Fjelde, Senior Researcher, PRIO; Assistant Professor,
Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, Generals,
Dictators, and Kings: Author- itarian Regimes and Civil Conflict, 19732004, Conflict
Management and Peace Science 27.3, mm]
The literature on political institutions and civil conflict portrays coercion as the key instrument by
which authoritarian governments avoid rebellion (Hegre et al., 2001; Henderson and Singer, 2000;
Muller and Weede, 1990). When contrasted with democracies, this assumption is not unreasonable.

All autocratic leaders use some coercion to stay in power. Policies that ban
political associations opposed to the government and intimidate, arrest,
torture, or kill opponents who violate these restrictions are microfoundations of authoritarian rule (Wintrobe, 1998). Still, an overwhelming use
of coercive force is a costly strategy with a high risk of backfiring . It depletes
bases of support and strengthens the cause of potential conspirators to depose the dictator. It also
creates incentives to hide such conspiracies and feign loyalty in order to avoid retaliation. Dictators
that purge indiscriminately heighten everyones sense of uncertainty, including their own (Haber,
2006; Tullock, 1987; Wintrobe, 1998). This observation points to the relevance of the

dictators institutional infrastructure. An intrusive societal organization

reduces the cost of repression by providing dictators with information that
allows them to identify conspirators and selectively target collusion .
Moreover, it channels political mobilization into pro-regime organizations .
It is the politically insulated regimes that will be forced into relying on overt brutality. This
argument identifies single-party regimes as having the most powerful
instrument to systematically marginalize opposition and eliminate rivals .
The party organization constitutes a potent institutional infrastructure to
monitor societal groups. A decentralized party organization can absorb
and thus control the political energies of the population, channeling them
into pro-regime activities (Linz, 2000). With regard to already mobilized groups, the party
provides the dictator with a venue to control the challenges: access is restricted, and political
aspirations and demands from competing factions can be discussed without challenging the
foundations of the regime (Gandhi and Przeworski, 2006). This institutional apparatus

also
increases the regimes ability to detect and selectively target subversive
elements that could become viable rebel groups . Single-party regimes
have been very successful in subordinating the military to political control
(Peceny et al., 2002). Equally important, they also tend to have large nonmilitary intelligence organizations with far-reaching tentacles into society

The intrusiveness of the party institution into

all aspects of civil, military, and political life makes it extremely difficult to
mobilize an efficient rebel force able to overthrow the government. It
provides single-party regimes with a forceful infrastructure to suppress
opposition within the wider society, and within the state apparatus itself
(Brooker, 2000; Lai and Slater, 2006).

(Slater, 2003).

Prevents Terror
Autocracies key to combat terrorism- democracies not efective
Wilson and Piazza 13 [Matthew C. Wilson, James A. Piazza, Pennsylvania
State University, Autocracies and Terrorism: Conditioning Effects of Authoritarian
Regime Type on Terrorist Attacks, American Journal of Political Science 57.4. , mm]
Terrorism poses a unique challenge to state security that is quite unlike those posed by
armed civil conflicts or in- terstate wars.2 It refers to the strategic use of violence by clandestine and relatively few nonstate actors
to attract at- tention, convey a political message, or influence (Lacquer 1977; Ross 1993; Schmid and Jongman 1988). Terror- ists are
difficult to identify, do not have a fixed location, and are more indiscriminate in the application of violence (Jackson 2007; Lacquer
1977; Ross 1993; Sanchez-Cuenca and de la Calle 2009). Unlike rebel groups in a civil war or countries prosecuting interstate wars,

terrorist movements are not focused on gaining and controlling territory

or achieving a conventional battlefield victory, as they have relatively
weak capacity to project force (Sanchez- Cuenca and de la Calle 2009). Because of this weakness, terrorism
is a strategy employed by dissidents that makes use of asymmetrical threat advantages vis-a`-vis the gov- ernments they oppose.
The determinants of terrorism are thus likely to be different from the determinants of civil wars or interstate wars.3

Terrorisms distinctive featuresthe strategic use of violence as a political message, civilian targeting,
clandes- tine perpetrators, the inability to control territory, and asymmetrical threats make it particularly
sensitive to regime type. While a states ability to respond to security threats posed by civil or interstate war is
primarily de- termined by its capacity to mobilize and project physical force to defend its institutions, territory, and people,

successful management of the threat of terrorism requires a mix of

physical force and political and economic tools to monitor and channel
dissent into behaviors that reinforce state control. Terrorism is a faceless form of po- litical
violence that requires disproportionate intelligence and some level of community sympathy or support fueled by underlying

State response to terrorism must

therefore be a careful balance of coercive and non- coercive strategies
aimed at gathering intelligence about the terrorists, securing the
cooperation of citizens in areas where terrorists operate, and, where
possible, channeling dissidence into behaviors and structures that can be
con- trolled by the state. There is some indirect empirical evidence for these as- sertions. Walsh and Piazza (2010)
grievancesin order to be effective (Crenshaw 1981; Ross 1993).

determined that states employing strategies that abuse physical integrity rights of citizens are more likely to be attacked by
terrorists, suggesting the limitations of a coercion-only counter- terrorism strategy. In their landmark empirical study of over 700
terrorist movements, Jones and Libicki (2008) determined that nearly half of all terminations of terrorist campaigns globally have
involved bringing terrorists into a political process to air their grievances and to negotiate a settlement with the state; the remainder

Empirical research by Li (2005)

supports a more nuanced relationship between democracy and terrorism.
He finds that constraints on executive power in democracies, which
hampers the ability of officials to repress terrorist activity, boosts
terrorism ; political participation, which aids government ability to co-opt
and manage extremism and dissent, reduces terrorism. These findings
suggest that the capacity for a state to deploy multiple types of
responses is important for explaining why some states are better at
avoiding terrorism. If the range of state response to terrorismthe flexibility to use both
coercive state power to crush or disrupt terrorist movements and the
capacity to co-opt would-be terroristsis salient to explaining terrorism , it
is crucial to understand the regime types that have a wider range of
counterterrorism strategies. We theorize that there are three categories of responses a state can pursue in the
of termina- tions has involved either military defeat or factionaliza- tion.

face of terrorism: (1) mobilize coercion or repression against terrorists and their supporters or sympathizers; (2) co- opt terrorists
and their supporters or sympathizers; and (3) pursue a mix of both coercion and co-optation. Coercion, or repression, involves the
use of sanctions to impose a cost on an individual or a group to deter specific activities and beliefs (Davenport 2007; Goldstein
1978). Specific examples might include arrest and im- prisonment, physical abuse, assassinations, curtailment of political
participation or personal autonomy, surveil- lance, harassment, and threats. A consistent finding is that authorities generally employ

some form of repression to counter or eliminate threats (Davenport 2007). Re- ported findings on the effects of repression on dissent
are highly inconsistent, however (Choi 2008; Francisco 1996; Gupta and Venieris 1981; Gurr and Moore 1997; Hibbs 1973; Lichbach
and Gurr 1981; Moore 1998; Muller 1985; Piazza and Walsh 2010; Rasler 1996; Walsh and Piazza 2010; Ziegenhagen 1986). On the

repression can raise the costs of collective action by threatening

livelihood or life itself, thereby preventing potential recruits from
becoming terrorists. On the other hand, repression increases the ideological benefit of fighting against the state
one hand,

(Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005). It also has a nega- tive impact on the economy, making the opportunity cost of becoming a

Leaders can also use positive

reinforcements to buy of or co-opt potential opposition. An extreme example of the
terrorist lower (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005; Siqueira and Sandler 2006).

former type is President Joseph Mobutu in the now Democratic Republic of Congo, who handed out cash in exchange for political
support (Le Billon 2003). Lead- ers who need cooperation can simply purchase it with rewards, perks, and privileges (Gandhi and
Przeworski 2006). Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) demonstrate that the size of the winning coalition relative to the selec- torate
must be sufficiently large for the leader to choose to distribute goods publicly rather than privately. Below a certain threshold, it is
more expedient to distribute rents to a select few to maintain office. On their own, however, rent-sharing systems are long-run
inefficient and can re- tard economic growth (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2006; Haber 2006). Thus, in addition to sharing material
spoils, a leader can induce cooperation by providing policy con- cessions, which involves the creation of forums for nego- tiating
oppositional demands (Acemoglu and Robinson 2005; Gandhi and Przeworski 2006). Offering a space for limited deliberation and
rep- resentation encourages potential oppositional groups to negotiate their interests within the legal boundaries of the state.

The

creation of institutions such as a legislature, political parties, and

bureaucratic offices generates positions that elites and opposition
members can be used to fill, which is another form of co-optation (Brownlee 2007;
Gandhi 2008).4 Political office provides direct and indirect benefits to working with the regime for potential opposition members. In
turn, their involvement helps to preserve the regime by forcing them to invest in it, so long as they value their positions and their

Deliberative organizations also

neutralize potential opposition by afecting the costs of coordination . For
example, a strong party can be used to co-opt by distributing benefits and
offices to elites and regularizing uncertainty regarding their positions,
keeping them in the fold (Cox 2009; Gandhi 2008; Haber 2006).
stake in the game (Aksoy, Carter, and Wright 2012; Gandhi 2008).

Transition War

Generic
Transition to democracy is worse than transition to autocracydemocratization results in war
Mansfield and Snyder 2 [Edward Mansfield- Hum Rosen Professor of Political
Science and Co-Director of the Christopher H. Browne Center for International
Politics @ Upenn, Jack Snyder- Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International
Relations @ Columbia University, Democratic Transitions, Institutional Strength,
and War, International Organization Journal, vol 56, issue 2, mm]
we aim here to identify more precisely the
conditions under which democratization stimulates hostilities . We find that
the heightened danger of war grows primarily out of the transition from
an autocratic regime to one that is partly democratic . The specter of war
during this phase of democratization looms especially large when
governmental institutions, including those regulating political
participation, are especially weak. Under these conditions, elites commonly employ
nationalist rhetoric to mobilize mass support but then become drawn into
the belligerent foreign policies unleashed by this process. We find, in contrast, that
transitions that quickly culminate in a fully coherent democracy are much less perilous. 8 Further, our results refute the view that transitional
democracies are simply inviting targets of attack because of their temporary weakness. In fact, they tend to be the
initiators of war. We also refute the view that any regime change is likely
to precipitate the outbreak of war. We find that transitions toward
democracy are significantly more likely to generate hostilities than
transitions toward autocracy . [End Page 298] The early stages of democratization
unleash intense competition among myriad social groups and interests. Many
transitional democracies lack state institutions that are sufficiently strong
and coherent to efectively regulate this mass political competition . To use Samuel
Employing a more refined research design than in our prior work,

Huntington's terminology, such countries frequently suffer from a gap between high levels of political participation and weak political institutions. 9

The weaker these institutions, the greater the likelihood that warprovoking nationalism will emerge in democratizing countries . 10 Belligerent
nationalism is likely to arise in this setting for two related reasons. The first and more
general reason is that political leaders try to use nationalism as an ideological
motivator of national collective action in the absence of efective political
institutions. Leaders of various stripes find that appeals to national sentiment are essential for mobilizing popular support when more routine
instruments of legitimacy and governanceparties, legislatures, courts, and independent news mediaare in their infancy. Both old and new elites share

such appeals depend for their success on

exaggerating foreign threats. Allegations that internal foes have treasonous ties to these external enemies of the nation
help the regime hold on to power despite the weakness of governmental institutions. At the outset of the French
Revolution, for example, mass nationalism was weak, but soon the leaders of
various republican factions found that the rhetoric of war and treason was
indispensable to their political survival in the revolutionary institutional wasteland. 11 Newspapers tied to
political factions inflamed public opinion with the paired themes of war and treason . A second reason democratization often fosters
belligerent nationalism is that the breakup of authoritarian regimes threatens powerful
interests , including military bureaucracies and economic actors that derive a parochial benefit from war and empire. To salvage
their position, threatened interests frequently try to recruit mass support,
typically by resorting to nationalist appeals that allow them to claim to rule in the name of the people, but
this incentive to play the nationalist card. Often

without instituting full democratic accountability to the average voter. Exploiting what remains of their governmental, economic, and media power,

these elites may succeed in establishing terms of inclusion in politics that

force opposition groups to accept nationalism as the common currency of
public discourse. For example, Bismarck and his successors in Prussia and
Germany used nationalist, military, and colonial issues to rally middle
class and rural voters against the working classes while perpetuating a system of rule that kept the
power to name [End Page 299] government ministers in the hands of the hereditary Kaiser rather than the elected legislature. 12 Moreover, while

federalism may generate certain benefits for mature democracies, the decentralization and fragmentation of power in newly
democratizing regimes is likely to exacerbate the problems attendant to
democratic transitions. As the bloody breakups of Yugoslavia and the
Soviet Union show, divisive nationalism is especially likely when the
state's power is dispersed among ethnically defined federal regions . Hence, none
of the mechanisms that produce the democratic peace among mature democracies operate in the same fashion in newly democratizing states. Indeed, in

newly democratizing countries often

experience a weakening of central state institutions because their old institutions have eroded and
their new ones are only partially developed. Autocratic power is in decline vis--vis both elite interest groups and mass
groups, and democratic institutions lack the strength to integrate these
contending interests and views. Not all newly democratizing states suffer from institutional weakness, but for those that
their imperfect condition, these mechanisms have the opposite effect. In short,

do the resulting political dynamic creates conditions that encourage hostilities. In the face of this institutional deficit, political leaders rely on expedient
strategies to cope with the political impasse of democratization. Such tactics, which often include the appeasement of nationalist veto groups or
competition among factions in nationalist bidding wars (or both),

can breed reckless foreign policies and the

resort to war .

Democratic Transitions escalate to transition wars

Mansfield 9 [Edward D, Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics,
University of Pennsylvania, Jack Snyder, Department of Political Science, Columbia
University, Pathways to War in Democratic Transitions, International Organization,
Volume 63 , Issue 02, April 2009, pp 381-390, Cambridge Journals, mm]

democratic transition
increases the risk of international and civil war in countries that lack the
institutional capacity to sustain democratic politics. The combination of
increasing mass political participation and weak political institutions
creates the motive and the opportunity for both rising and declining elites
to play the nationalist card in an attempt to rally popular support against
domestic and foreign rivals. Vipin Narang and Rebecca Nelson, in their critique of Electing to Fight, agree that
We have argued in Electing to Fight and other writings that an incomplete

incompletely democratizing countries with weak institutions may be at greater risk of civil war, but they are
skeptical that this extends to international war except when opportunistic neighbors invade failing states.1 Whereas

nationalism is a key causal mechanism linking incomplete

democratization to both civil and international war, they conjecture that weak
we argue that

institutions and state failure are probably sufficient to explain why such countries may be at greater risk of armed

weak political institutions generally have little

efect on a state's risk of involvement in external war when considered
separately from incomplete democratization.2 We welcome the opportunity to advance this
conflict. In contrast, we have found that

important debate by highlighting relevant portions of our previous research and summarizing some new findings on

Support for our argument rests on statistical tests and

extensive case studies that trace causal processes in detail. We have
presented statistical results showing the greater likelihood of war
international and civil wars.

involvement for incompletely democratizing states with weak political institutions between
1816 and 1992, the greater propensity of democratizing states to engage in
militarized interstate disputes, and the increased risk of civil war in
incompletely democratizing states. We have also published case studies of all of the
democratizing great powers since the French Revolution, all the democratizing initiators of interstate war in our
statistical study, all the post-Communist states, paired comparisons of postcolonial states, and several wars

elections have
heightened identity politics and fueled cross-border violence in weakly
institutionalized regimes in Georgia, Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian
territories.
involving democratizing states in the 1990s.3 Since we published Electing to Fight in 2005,

Russia
Democratizers participate in intense nationalism sparks
international wars and adventurism specifically Russia
Mansfield 9 (Edward D, Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics,
University of Pennsylvania, Jack Snyder, Department of Political Science, Columbia
University, Pathways to War in Democratic Transitions, International Organization,
Volume 63, Issue 02 , April 2009, pp 381-390, Cambridge Journals, mm)
Our theory distinguishes between two kinds of incompletely democratizing states: (1) those that have generally
weak political institutions and (2) those that have strong administrative institutions but weak institutions for

democratizers with weak institutions are

prone to belligerent ethnic nationalism or sectarianism that induces
neighboring states to attack. In such settings, moves to expand popular political
participation often spur the nationalism of ethnic minorities, which see a
chance to escape domination by culturally alien groups that control the
state. At the same time, ethnic or statist nationalism of dominant groups is also
likely to intensify in an efort to regain control .11 International violence
may arise because politically mobilized ethnic populations straddle
international borders and because nationalism makes the diplomacy of the
democratizing state rigid or belligerent. Recent cases showing this pattern
include the triggering of Russian attack by democratizing Georgia 's rival
nationalisms and Hezbollah's provocation of Israel's attack on democratizing Lebanon. A
diferent pathway to war is more common among incomplete
democratizers with strong administrative institutions but weak or biased
representative government.10 Incomplete

representative ones, such as Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm. Such states are

They
develop what we called counterrevolutionary nationalism . In
this pattern, ruling elites are struggling to retain power in the face of rapid
social change. Nationalist ideology ofers them an attractive alternative to
class-based appeals, and the exaggeration of foreign threats and rivalries
can help them rally popular support. Strong military institutions provide a
tempting tool to reinforce this strategy of rule. This kind of democratizer
is less likely to be the target of attacks than those with generally weak domestic institutions and more likely to
initiate wars, in the narrow sense of crossing the border first with their regular army.12 Examples discussed
more likely to have fairly advanced economies, differentiated social class structures, and strong militaries.
are also more likely to

in detail in Electing to Fight include nineteenth-century France as well as Prussia/Germany. More recent examples
include states that alternate between military and civilian regimes such as postWorld War II Turkey and Argentina.

Middle East
Empirics Prove Democratic Transitions lead to transition wars,
Mid-east war, and proliferation
Mansfield 9 (Edward D, Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics,
University of Pennsylvania, Jack Snyder, Department of Political Science, Columbia
University, Pathways to War in Democratic Transitions, International Organization /
Volume 63 / Issue 02 / April 2009, pp 381-390, Cambridge Journals, mm)
Narang and Nelson argue that recent history offers few, if any, examples that support our theory. To address this

we consider the set of wars that have broken out since 1992 , the last year
This analysis indicates that a sizable portion
of these conflicts has involved a democratizing country . In Electing to Fight, we
issue,

of our statistical analysis in Electing to Fight.

analyzed data on war onset compiled by the Correlates of War (COW) Project. These data extend only until 1997.
However, the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset covers the period through 2007 and lists three interstate wars

the 1998 war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, (2) the 1996 conflict
between India and Pakistan that culminated in the 1999 Kargil War, and (3) the 2003 Iraq War.4 The
first two episodes were wars of democratization. Based on the Polity IV data, Ethiopia experienced
since 1992: (1)

an incomplete democratic transition in the decade prior to war.5 Eritrea might also be considered incompletely
democratizing, having just ratified but not implemented a democratic constitution on the eve of war. As we argued

this case exemplifies our theory's causal mechanisms of

nationalism, factionalism, and foreign scapegoating .7 Pakistan's attack on
Indian Kashmir in the 1999 Kargil War followed constitutional changes
strengthening the elected civilian leader's authority over the military, coded by
in Electing to Fight,6

Polity as a democratic transition. The military schemed to attack Kashmir in an attempt to recapture its nationalist
luster. While Polity data on institutional strength and coherence are not available after 1994, contemporary
observers agree that Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Pakistan suffered significant institutional deficits in the period leading up

In addition to these purely interstate wars, the

period since 1992 has witnessed thirteen internationalized civil wars; that is, wars between a
to the outbreak of these wars.8

country's government and a group or set of groups within the same country, with other countries assisting either or
both combatants. Of these internationalized civil wars, Polity IV provides the data needed to code the regime type

Of these eight cases, six took place in

a country that experienced an incomplete democratic transition over the
five- to ten-year period leading up to conflict. In three of these eight cases, both the
of the country where the conflict occurred in eight cases.

country where the war was waged and the intervening country had recently experienced such a transition. In
Electing to Fight, we presented brief case studies of a number of these episodes, including Bosnia in 1993 and
Kosovo in 1999. We also examined the 1993 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, an event listed by UCDP/PRIO
for which Polity does not provide data on the combatants' regime types. Our argument helps to explain each of

In our writing on current afairs, we have noted that incompletely

democratizing Middle Eastern countries that lack strong liberal
institutions have recently elected ethnic militants, sectarian extremists,
terrorists, Holocaust-deniers, and nuclear proliferation advocates, which
has contributed to both civil and international conflict.9 Of course, numerous
these cases.

countries have democratized peacefully over the past two decades in Eastern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and
South Africa. Consistent with our theory, these countries have generally enjoyed favorable domestic conditions,
including a reasonably advanced economy or relatively strong institutions at the transition's outset. Taken together,

democratization occurring in
the face of weak institutions continues to be a potent source of foreign
policy belligerence and war.
the cases discussed in this section provide substantial evidence that

Democracy in the middle east is inefective for checking

conflict
Hirsh 1/15 (Michael Hirsh, chief correspondent for National Journal with expertise
on the war on terror, including on-the-ground reporting, When Democracy Doesn't
Work, 1/15/14, http://www.nationaljournal.com/defense/when-democracy-doesn-twork-20140115, mm)
the ball of liberty is looking pretty deflated these days, especially in the
Mideast. Despite much editorializing that holds a neo-isolationist Obama responsible for this, the trend has little
to do with U.S. policy. It has far more to do with the emerging reality that not only isn't democracy a panacea,
it sometimesapostasy alert!doesn't work well at all. Indeed, in some unready parts of the
globe like the Arab world, democracy may not be the best way forward , at least
right now. That is especially true in countries where tribal and sectarian
politics still rule the national sensibility, and the groups that win elections
are mainly interested in stifling, disenfranchising, or even killing their outballoted rivals, as in Egypt, Iraq, and very likely Syria. Plainly, the Obama administration has adapted its
But

policy accordingly. We are thus at a high tide of realpolitik.

AT: Studies Flawed

Ottoman Empire proves transition wars doesnt make studies
flawed
Mansfield 9 (Edward D, Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics,
University of Pennsylvania, Jack Snyder, Department of Political Science, Columbia
University, Pathways to War in Democratic Transitions, International Organization,
Volume 63, Issue 02 , April 2009, pp 381-390, Cambridge Journals, mm)
Narang and Nelson's principal critique of our statistical analysis is that four
cases of incomplete democratization and war involvement by the Ottoman Empire in 1877, 1911, 1912,
and 1913 are statistical outliers that exert disproportionate leverage on our
results. They assert that these observations are inconsistent with the Mansfield and Snyder theory, since in
each case the Ottoman Empire was being repeatedly attacked and amputated by other powers.13 In fact,
as we show below, the Ottoman cases conform extremely well to the causal
pathways to war that we expect for incomplete democratizers with weak
institutions. As such, there is no reason to discard these cases. Statisticians have
distinguished between two types of outliers: (1) discordant observations, which are discrepant or surprising, and (2)
contaminant observations, which are products of a different data-generating process than the remaining
observations in a sample.

Statisticians and methodologists are virtually unanimous

in recommending against discarding an observation unless a researcher is
absolutely sure that the observation is a contaminant. Moreover, they agree
that this evaluation can only be conducted with considerable substantive
knowledge about the matter at hand.14 The historical record reveals that
these cases are not contaminant observations. The Ottoman cases
exemplify the dangers of incomplete democratization when institutional
weaknesses create the motive and the opportunity for ethnic minorities
and state elites to mobilize popular support through nationalist appeals.
The Ottomans' democratizing reforms gave minorities a chance to organize around ethnic identities and to link up
with culturally similar groups abroad. At the same time, the reforms were designed to rationalize, strengthen, and
centralize state power in the hands of Turkish nationalists, which threatened the minorities' autonomy and
motivated them to rebel. Repeatedly, the Turkish nationalists responded by repressing the minorities and fought
wars with their foreign supporters.

In addition to four international wars, the Armenian

genocide and the expulsion of the Greeks after World War I were part of
this overall process. Because this history has an eerily contemporary resonance, we will recount the highlights. The Ottoman
Empire, competing with modernizing great powers, was compelled by its British ally to undertake state-rationalizing reforms on the Western model in
1839. These Tanzimat reforms, which yielded a state structure that was an awkward hybrid of proto-liberal and traditional forms, failed to revitalize the
state and the economy, and had the unintended effect of unleashing a struggle among religious and ethnic minorities for privileges, tax relief, and
autonomy.15 Facing a debt crisis in 1876, the Ottomans gambled on additional reforms, including the introduction of a parliamentary system with press
freedoms and civil rights.16 The short-lived constitutional reform produced exactly the pattern of politics that our theory expects when institutions are
weak: self-assertion by ethnic and religious groups, factionalism in the state and its representative institutions, inability to compromise or formulate a
coherent policy, brutal state actions to subjugate restive minorities, and external military intervention on the pretext of restoring human rights. The
Ottomans enjoyed a thirty-year period of relative stability with the reestablishment of autocracy between 1878 and the Young Turk revolution from
above of 1908. The Young Turk reformers reintroduced the 1876 constitution, held multiparty parliamentary elections, increased press freedom, and
replaced the millet system of self-governing religious groups with uniform Ottoman citizenship. This reform created both threats and opportunities for
neighboring states and internal nationalities. In the short run, the revolution weakened the Ottoman state, allowing the Austrians, the small Balkan states,
and Italy to act forcefully to achieve their aims in Bosnia, Macedonia, and Tripoli. Likewise, religious and ethnic minorities inside the Ottoman Empire took
advantage of the newly granted latitude to carve out spheres of autonomy or pursue their narrow interests. But weakness was not the only goad to
violent action. Also important was the potential threat posed by the Young Turks' state-building project. The democratic, centralizing revolution, if
successful, could strengthen the empire vis--vis external foes and internal minorities. Shaw, a leading historian of this period, claims that the Ottoman
empire was attacked, not really because of its weakness, but rather in spite of its increased strength and perhaps in fear of it.17 Hall explains that the
celebration of Ottoman nationhood raised concerns in Balkan capitals that the Balkan populations in a reformed Turkey would be less susceptible to their
nationalistic blandishments.18 For example, the Albanians were initially pleased by the Young Turk revolution, which they saw as giving them a license to
run their own affairs. By 1910, however, the Albanians were in revolt against the centralizing efforts of the Young Turk government to collect taxes and
disarm local fighters.19 The combination of the Young Turks' short-run weakness and their long-term ambition for centralized control created the motive
and the opportunity for internal minorities, including Macedonians and Montenegrins, to join forces with external foes in the Balkan League.20 Rising
Turkish nationalism and factionalism hamstrung Ottoman diplomatic efforts to head off wars with Italy and with the Balkan League. Helmreich, the
authority on this topic, writes that bitter political dissention in Turkey checkmated any real policy, and many officials were foolish enough to believe
that the problem might be solved by undertaking a war. He quotes the German ambassador's report that a war party in the army charged the
government with cowardliness and treason. Cowed by street demonstrations, the grand vizier promised that he would not draw back from war with the
Balkan states. The first consequence of the victory of the nationalistic movement was the fear of the cabinet that the conditions of peace with Italy, which

they had agreed to, might be turned into a noose for themselves. While the excited mob in the streets called for war, the ministerial council revised the
peace formula.21 Narang and Nelson suggest that the 1911, 1912, and 1913 wars should be collapsed into a single case. However, standard historical
studies and databases all list them as distinct wars. The three wars had different initiators, alliances, and outcomes. In the First Balkan War, Serbia,
Bulgaria, and Greece attacked and defeated the Ottomans. After a ten-week gap filled with unsuccessful negotiations over the spoils of victory, Bulgaria
attacked Serbia to initiate the Second Balkan War. The Ottomans then attacked Bulgaria, expelled non-Muslim populations from various towns and cities,
retook the city of Adrianople, even invaded the territory of Bulgaria proper, and retained many of these gains in the postwar settlement.22 In short ,

the Young Turk period, as with its precursor in 1876, illustrates many of
the causal mechanisms of our theory. Incomplete democratization
occurring in the face of weak institutions deepened political factionalism,
pushed state elites to use nationalist appeals to legitimate and strengthen
their rule, touched of a competition between nationalisms propounded by
new and old elites, created incentives for internal groups to link up with
external foes, and triggered ethnic violence, genocide, and war. Since
these are precisely the causal mechanisms that link incomplete
democratization and cross-border violence in various contemporary cases
including Georgia, Pakistan, and the Middle Eastthe Ottoman cases are
exemplary, not outliers to be discarded.

Prefer our ev their studies ignore democratic war

Geis 13 (Anna, professor of political science at Otto-von-Guericke University, and
Harald Muller, Executive Director and Head of Research Department at Peace
Research Institute Frankfurt, Oct 10, 2013, The Militant Face of Democracy: Liberal
Forces for Good, mm)
The relationship between democracy and war is thus delicate: Western democracies
possess overwhelming material capabilities to fight wars, but the use of force is restrained by numerous legal
provisos and by norms and values deeply rooted in their societies. The preference for peaceful conflict resolution,
respect for human rights, fear of casualties and high material costs are among the norms inherent in political
liberalism. According to normative variants of DP theory, such features help to explain the peace-proneness of

increasing liberal interventionism following the end of

the Cold War has thrown the militant side of democracies - acknowledged
but neglected by mainstream DP research - into sharp relief. Although
dyadic DP research is well aware of this Janus face of democracies (RisseKappen 1995: 492), its work has been mainly dedicated to explaining the
peaceful relations among democracies rather than to investigating the
militant side. As a consequence, studies on the separate democratic peace abound and have been
liberal democracies. However,

celebrated as a rare example of a progressive research programme in International Relations (Chernoff 2004),

complementary research on the external use of force by

democracies has remained comparatively scarce. [T]he democratic peace
proposition by itself does not deal with the issue of how democra- cies get
into war with nondemocracies (Moore 2004: 13). Addressing this lacuna, we pursue a research
whereas

agenda on democratic wars that is designed to complement DP research, not to dismiss it. Such an approach is
overdue. Indeed, liberal interventionism and recent liberal wars have attracted enhanced attention from scholars
outside the DP community (e.g. Freedman 2005, 2006; Shaw 2005; Vasquez 2005; Chandler 2006, 2010).

The

debate on liberal wars should thus be integrated into a contextualised DP theory as it

illuminates neglected aspects of democratic violence . Developing the concept of democratic war as the flipside of democratic peace also ties in
with accounts of the ambivalence of liberalism throughout its
philosophical and political history (e.g. Doyle 1983a, 1983b; Owen 1997; Peceny 1999; Barkawi
and Laffey 2001; MacMillan 2004, 2005; Jahn 2005; Desch 2007/8).

Wars are even more likely in the future fourth wave will
involve ideological challenges
Mansfield 5 (Edward D, Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics,
University of Pennsylvania, Jack Snyder, Department of Political Science, Columbia
University, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War, 2005, p.10,
mm)
There is little reason to believe that the longstanding link between democratization and nationalist war is becoming obsolete . On the contrary, future
transitions may be even more difficult and dangerous. The "third wave of
democratization in the 1980s and 1990s consolidated demo- cratic regimes mainly in the richer countries of Eastern

A fourth wave would involve more

challenging cases: countries that are poorer, more ethnically di- vided,
ideologically more resistant to democracy, with more entrenched
authoritarian elites, and with a much frailer base of governmental institutions and citizen-skills. Botched democratizations in such settings could
give rise to grave threats to international peace and security . Wars of dernocratization are therefore likely to remain a central problem of international relations in the coming years.
Europe, Latin America, Southern Africa, and East Asia.

Emerging Democracy Wars

Israel
Regional democracy draws Israel into war destroys peace
talks
Fawcett 13 (Louise, Associate Professor of Politics, Wilfrid Knapp Fellow, St
Catherine's College, March 21, 2013, International Relations of the Middle East,
Google Books, mm)
the Palestinian question may become central to the
continued normalization of relations between Israel and those Arab states
with which it has peace treaties, rather than the potential for peace treaties. The Western media
may focus on Israel and Iran, but the Arab public has now found a voice in several
states via the recent upheavals and elections, as have occurred in Tunisia and Egypt. The
spread of democracy to Arab states will likely push new governments to
demand greater Israeli concessions, rather than to acquiesce to US-led
peace eforts that have failed. Such a change in relationships has al- ready occurred between Israel and
As a result of the Arab Spring,

Turkey, which has cut military ties to Israel over an Israel commando assault on relief ships heading to Gaza from
Turkish ports in 2009. Arab media already compare Israel's repression of Palestinian protests to the Assad regimes
crushing of demonstrations in Syria. The situation is far more fluid than the apparent standoff between Israel and
the Palestinians would suggest, primarily owing to major changes in Arab state systems, as witnessed by Egypt's

As this situation develops, its outcome admittedly

uncertain, the USIsraeli links regarding the peace process, bound in part by
their democratic political systems, may find themselves challenged by the
rise of democracy elsewhere in the region. The age of compliant Arab
dictators bowing to Washingtons will on the ArabIsraeli peace process,
as well as other issues. ,may be on the verge of disappearing.
Muslim Brothers calling for IIamas moderation.

Generic
Emerging democracies go to war- assumes their warrants
Manan 2015 [Munafrizal- Professor of IR @ University of Al Azhar Indonesia,
Hubungan International Journal, cites a bunch of profs and scholars of DPT, The
Democratic Peace Theory and Its Problems,
http://journal.unpar.ac.id/index.php/JurnalIlmiahHubunganInternasiona/article/view/1
315, mm]
A third problem with the democratic peace is it is not supported by the
case of states in the early phases of transitions to democracy . As Mansfield and
Snyder argue, these states are more likely become involved in war than other
states due to weak political institutions (such as an effective state, the rule of law, organized parties
that compete in fair election, and professional news media) which are needed to make democracy
work. 199 The advocates of the democratic peace theory are inclined to deny
the importance of political institutions because they are likely to believe
that the best way to build democracy is just start. For Mansfield and Snyder, this
argument is incorrect and dangerously so because ill-prepared attempts
to democratize weak statessuch as the cases of Yugoslavia, Pakistan,
Rwanda, and Burundimay lead to costly warfare in the shot run, and may
delay or prevent real progress toward democracy over the long term. 200
They conclude that in the short run, however, the beginning stages of transition to democracy often give rise to war rather than
peace. 201 The path of democracy is not an easy way, indeed. The failure of new emerging democratic countries to achieve a

Since
the French Revolution, the earliest phases of democratization have
triggered some of the world's bloodiest nationalist struggles . Similarly,
during the 1990s, intense armed violence broke out in a number of regions
that had just begun to experiment with electoral democracy and more
pluralistic public discourse. In some cases, such as the former Yugoslavia,
the Caucasus, and Indonesia , transition from dictatorship to more
pluralistic political systems coincide with the rise of national
independence movements, spurring separatist warfare that often spilled
across international borders. In other cases, transitional regime clashed in
interstate warfare. Ethiopia and Eritrea , both moving toward more
pluralistic forms of government in the 1990s, fought a bloody border war
from 1998 to 2000. The elected regimes of India and Pakistan battled
during 1999 in the mountainous borderlands of Kashmir. Peru and
Ecuador , democratizing in fits and starts during 1980s and 1990s,
culminated a series of armed clashes with a small war in the upper
Amazon in 1995.202 Mansfield and Snyder observe that the elite in newly democratizing
states often use nationalist appeals to attract mass support without
submitting to full democratic accountability and that the institutional
weakness of transitional states creates the opportunity for such war
causing strategies to succeed.203 For this reason, the establishment of political institutions is needed before
consolidated democracy has a historical root and hence it is not new phenomena. As Mansfield and Snyder explains:

promoting democracy in autocratic countries. In the words of Mansfield and Snyder, before pressuring autocrats to hold fully
competitive elections, the international community should first promote the rule of law, the formation of impartial courts and
election commissiion, the professionalization of independent journalist, and the training of competent bureucrats. Beside, economic

democracy in itself is not

able to lead to a democratic peace unless such factors have fulfilled in
advance. In this regard, it has been found that economically developed democracies have been far more likely than poor
and social modernization is also important in order to build democracy. As Gat shows,

democracies to be peaceful toward one another.205 Similar to Mansfield and Snyder, Meierhenrich also has the same conclusion.
He argues that the

new millennium saw further evidence of the dangers of

democratization. The pro-democratic intervention in Afghanistan, following
the attacks of 11 September 2001, has spurred insurgent warfare not only
in that country, but in neighbouring Pakistan as well . 206 Therefore,
democracy, if not handled with care, can underwrite democratic war
rather than democratic peace and democratic rights become democratic
wrongs, and policies of perpetual peace become prescriptions for
perpetual war. 207 In short, some cases have shown that the logic of democratic peace
does not work appropriately. In the words of Snyder, none of the mechanisms that produce the democratic
peace among mature democracies operate in the same fashion in newly democratizing states. 208

Democratization produces belligerent nationalism- risks war

Mansfield and Snyder 2 [Edward Mansfield- Hum Rosen Professor of Political
Science and Co-Director of the Christopher H. Browne Center for International
Politics @ Upenn, Jack Snyder- Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International
Relations @ Columbia University, Democratic Transitions, Institutional Strength,
and War, International Organization Journal, vol 56, issue 2, mm]
Even if elite coalitions worry that the costs and risks of their belligerent foreign policies are beginning to get out of hand, they can

To survive in an era
of democratization, these elite interests must attract a degree of popular
support, often through the use of nationalist rhetoric . Elite control over a dependent,
unprofessional news media may provide a ready vehicle for this campaign of persuasion. However, rising alternative
elites may seize on this rhetoric and try to turn it against the old elites,
triggering a nationalist bidding war . Prior to World War i, for instance, German middle-class nationalist
find themselves locked into these policies by the tactics they have used to recruit mass support.

groups such as the Navy League argued that if Germany was really encircled by national enemies, as the ruling elites claimed, then
the government's ineffectual policies were endangering the nation. The old elite should step aside, they argued, and let the more
vigorous middle classes reform Germany's army, toughen its foreign policy, and use coercion to break up the encircling alliance of
France, Russia, and England. The "iron and rye" government felt compelled to outbid these nationalist critics. In an attempt to gain
nationalist prestige in the eyes of the domestic audience, the German government trumped up a series of international crises, such
as the showdowns with France over control of Morocco in 1905 and 1911. This reckless and counterproductive strategy served only
to tighten the noose around the neck of the German elites and pushed them toward a decision to launch a preventive war in 1914.

This argument has some points in common with so-called diversionary

theories of war , which contend that regimes sometimes attempt to use
rivalry abroad to strengthen their shaky position at home. Such theories
invoke two rather diferent causal mechanisms. The first asserts a
psychological propensity for out-group conflict to increase in-group
cohesion. If such a mechanism exists, however, research shows that it is likely to come into play only if the group
28

demonstrates considerable cohesion before the conflict breaks out, the external threat is seen as endangering the in-group as a
whole, and the instigators of the conflict are seen to be the outsiders rather than the leadership of the in-group. 29 Our argument

these conditions might be created in newly democratizing states

through the development of a nationalist ideology , which constitutes a set of ideas for
interpreting conflict with out-groups. [End Page 303] A second set of causal mechanisms is
rationalistic. Alastair Smith speculates that international assertiveness helps domestically hard-pressed regimes to
demonstrate their competence by achieving foreign policy successes. 30 Unlike mature democracies, however, newly
democratizing states are not particularly good at choosing wars that are
suggests how

easy to win and cheap to fight. A more plausible rationalistic argument for their wars is that elites in
transitional states are "gambling for resurrection," that is, taking a risk at
long odds that foreign policy confrontations will help them avoid losing
power. Deductive arguments of this type propose that elites' informational advantages relative to their mass audience help
them carry out such gambles. 31 Empirical research suggests that the strength of the incentive for downwardly mobile elites to
gamble depends on the regime type and on the elites' ability to use their influence over the media to make the reckless strategy

the motive and opportunity to use

this strategy are especially likely to be present when incomplete
transitions to democracy occur in states with weak institutions . In short, elites
in newly democratizing states typically face the difficult political task of cobbling together a heterogeneous
seem plausible to their constituents. 32 Our argument explains why

coalition of elite and popular supporters in a context of weakly developed democratic institutions. Many of the expedients that they
adopt, such as logrolled overcommitments and nationalist outbidding strategies,

conflict.

heighten the risk of external

These outcomes are most likely when threatened elites' interests cannot be easily adapted to a fully democratic

setting and when mass political participation increases before the basic foundation for democratic institutions is firmly in place.
Under such conditions, political entrepreneurs have both the incentive and the opportunity to promote conflict-causing nationalist
myths. We focus on two distinct phases in the process of democratization: the transition from autocracy to a partially democratic
regime and the shift to a fully institutionalized democracy. As we explain further below, these phases are measured using several

We expect
the likelihood of war to be particularly pronounced in the first phase of
democratization, during which old elites threatened by the transition still
tend to be [End Page 304] powerful and the institutions needed to regulate mass
political participation are often very weak. As in prior research on the initial stages of democratic
indicators of regime type derived from the Polity III database developed by Keith Jaggers and Ted Robert Gurr. 33

transitions, we include in this category cases in which elites conclude bargains involving limited political liberalization and cases in
which most elites consider voting to be only a temporary expedient. 34 In many of these cases, the rhetoric of popular sovereignty

examples of war-prone
countries making a transition from autocracy to a mixed (or "anocratic") regime
are Prussia/Germany under Bismarck, France under Napoleon III, Chile
shortly before the War of the Pacific in 1879, Serbia's multiparty
constitutional monarchy before the Balkan Wars, Pakistan's militaryguided pseudo-democracy before its 1965 war with India, and the regime
that assumed power in Islamabad before the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war . 35 In
is grandiloquent, but the power of voters to control government policy is weak. Some

certain instances (for example, Argentina just before the Falklands War), Jaggers and Gurr's Polity data indicate that a transition to a
mixed regime occurred before elections were held, based on such developments as increased press freedom and the legalization of
political parties in the expectation of impending elections. 36 While some of these regime changes may not correspond to how other
studies have defined democratization, all of them are valid for our purposes insofar as they reflect the causal mechanisms
highlighted in our theory, such as the use of nationalist rhetoric to cement a heterogeneous domestic coalition or elite gambling for
resurrection in the face of popular demands. Further, in those types of cases where shifts from autocracy to a mixed regime based
on the Polity codings may not reflect the mechanisms of our theoryespecially instances involving communist countries and those
associated with involvement in world warswe check to ensure that the statistical findings presented below are robust with respect

We ofer a brief sketch of the War of the Pacific to

illustrate how incomplete democratization increases the risk of war,
especially when governmental institutions are very weak.
to the inclusion of such cases. 37

Democracy in the middle east escalates to conflict

Mansfield 5 (Edward D, Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics,
University of Pennsylvania, Jack Snyder, Department of Political Science, Columbia
University, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War, 2005, Google
Books, p.10, mm)
Islamic public
opinion in the short run is, in most places, hostile to the United States,
reluctant to condemn terrorism, and supportive of forceful measures to
Although democratization in the Islamic world might contribute to peace in the very long run,

achieve favorable results in Pales- tine, Kashmir, and other disputed areas .
Although much of the belliger- ence of the Islamic public is fueled by resentment of the U.S.-backed au- thoritarian

simply renouncing these authoritarians and

pressing for a quick democratic opening is un- likely to lead to peaceful
democratic consolidations. On the contrary, un- leashing Islamic mass opinion
through a sudden democratization could only raise the likelihood of war .
All of the risk factors are there: the me- dia and civil society groups are
inflammatory, as old elites and rising oppositions try to claim the mantle
of Islamic or nationalist militancy. The rule of law is weak, and existing
corrupt bureaucracies cannot serve a democratic administration properly .
The boundaries of states are mis- matched with those of nations, making any push for national
self- determination fraught with peril.
regimes under which many of them live,

Democratic transitions in the Middle East escalate to war

Fawcett 13 (Louise, Associate Professor of Politics, Wilfrid Knapp Fellow, St
Catherine's College, March 21, 2013, International Relations of the Middle East,
Google Books, mm)
Optimism that the establishment of liberal democracy would bring peace
to the Middle East might well be tempered by quantitative studies that
investigate the likelihood of war during the initial stages of
democratization. Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder (1995) show that, even
though mature democracies seem to have no chance of going to war with one
another, states that are just starting to democratize face intense pressure
to act belligerently. And if things were not already murky enough, the
quantitative literature also demonstrates that dictatorships are just as
likely to keep the peace among themselves as are democratic regimes
(Peceny and Beer 2002).

Market Reform Middle East

Networks of Privilege
Forced democratization re-entrenches networks of privilege,
combining with lack of US credibility to undermine
democratization
Hinnebusch 15 [March 24, 2015. Raymond Hinnebusch is a Professor at the
School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. Globalization,
democratization, and the Arab uprising: the international factor in MENA's failed
democratization Democratization, 22:2, 335-357]
Globalization in MENA was not, therefore, associated with democratization. Rather ,
authoritarian power persisted but was now used, not to attack
inequalities, as in the populist period, but to reconstruct and protect the new
inequalities unleashed by the regions opening (infitah) to the global
economy. Under this new post-populist authoritarianism, regimes restructured their social bases. Thus,
privatization provided regime elites with new patronage resources to
foster and co-opt a supportive crony capitalist class .41 This new class base
was, contrary to globalization discourse, incompatible with democratization : crony
capitalists would be threatened by democratic transparency but also even
productive capitalists wanted rule of law for themselves but not rights for
workers. Rather than a hegemonic bourgeoisie capturing the state and instituting limited
democracy for itself, much of the bourgeoisie became dependent on the state
for contracts, business opportunities, rent and the disciplining of labour, allowing rulers to play off rival business

While capitalism is said to empower bourgeoisies and working

classes who combine to force democratization, in MENA economic
liberalization and privatization obstructed such a democratic coalition and
was used to build anti-democratic coalitions networks of privilege 42
re-empowering authoritarianism . At the same time, reviving capitalism meant
investors had to be favoured over the mass public through reduction of labour rights
and wages while IMF structural adjustments contracted populist welfare, producing food riots
across the region (while leaving intact military purchases from Western arms dealers). Enforcing
this required the old popular constituencies be demobilized; hence
democratization, which could empower them to resist neo-liberalism, could not be promoted .
Moreover, rollbacks of the populist social contract on which regimes had initially built their
cliques.

legitimacy and abdication of their developmental and welfare roles to the private sector and religious charity

networks made regimes vulnerable to the rise of Islamic opposition , that

powerfully attracted the marginalized strata victimized by neo-liberal policies and were well poised to win elections,

should regimes democratize.

Rulers, on the other hand, could hardly expect to win a democratic

election when they were forcing austerity unequally on the majority and violating peoples sense of moral economy,
excluding, not including them, as the populist regimes had initially done. Contrary to mainstream globalization

neo-liberalism, reinforcing rather than diluting regional neopatrimonialism, posed a major obstacle to democratization . As such,
globalization was paralleled by a move toward hybrid regimes via
lopsided political liberalization , in which greater access was accorded the
beneficiaries of post-populism: the interest groups of the bourgeoisie were
given greater corporatist and parliamentary access to power and more rule of law. Elections
discourse,

were manipulated to empower bourgeois parties supportive of neo-liberalism and

marginalize populist ones, with safety valve opposition parties for the middle class tolerated only within strict limits;
and corporatist arrangements, which in the populist era had allowed mass organizations access to decisionmakers,

It was against this postpopulist authoritarianism that the Arab intifada of 2011 mobilized. Authoritarian
persistence was reinforced by the role of the region in the world system. Democracy develops when
governments need their citizenry to pay taxes or to fight in wars but in the
Middle East many states depended on the outside: on rents (oil revenues or foreign
aid) in lieu of taxes and on foreign bases and security treaties instead of citizen
armies. Democracy achieves hegemony when associated with nationalism ,
as in the French and American revolutions; but MENA regimes forfeited nationalist
legitimacy through their alignment with the US , which was, with Israel, the most
unpopular state in Middle East public opinion.44 Thus, where democratization even partly
proceeded in MENA, it unleashed antiWestern or anti-Israeli sentiments
that challenged regimes Western-aligned foreign policies and which
Islamic movements exploited, prompting a halt or reversal of these
experiments. The case of Jordan shows most dramatically how a regimes
responsiveness to Western demands for peace with an Israel unwilling to concede Palestinian
rights was necessarily paralleled by a contraction of domestic
democratization. Conversely, the war on terror cemented new political
alliances between the US, Britain and France and MENA authoritarian regimes
becoming instruments for disciplining and demobilizing mass strata.43

against the common threat from radical Islam. In some cases (Syria), authoritarian upgrading took advantage of a
certain authoritarian solidarity (Russian or Chinese support) and in some cases also the use of anti-Western
nationalism to discredit democracy discourses. Both threats from the West and from Islamists were used to
securitize politics.

US democratization locks in neoliberalism and causes limited

political pluralism with doses of authoritarian power
Hinnebusch 15 [March 24, 2015. Raymond Hinnebusch is a Professor at the
School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. Globalization,
democratization, and the Arab uprising: the international factor in MENA's failed
democratization Democratization, 22:2, 335-357]
Democratic uprisings do not guarantee democratic consolidation: the two
regional states with the least fragmented societies and most developed
institutions, hence the best prospects for democratization, faced a political
economy stacked against consolidation. The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia
were a reaction against the acute social inequalities resulting from neo-liberalism, but
the revolutions remained purely political , with no attempts to attack
unjust economic inequalities. This was because enduring dependencies on
the Western-centred international financial system locked them into neoliberal practices. Indeed, because the uprisings has actually worsened economic
growth, hence prospects for addressing unemployment, by deterring investors and tourism, they were
more dependent on Western IFIs. Particularly in Egypt IFIs tried to exploit the
post-uprisings economic crises by making loans conditional on further opening to
international finance capital, notably privatizations that would allow Western and Gulf

investors to buy up prime parts of Egypts infrastructure and public services.65 In this context,
the least bad outcome was the low intensity democracy that appeared
possible in Tunisia where long-term Western cultural penetration may indeed have assisted democratic
consolidation ironically, even when the West supports the authoritarian leader , as
was the case with Ben Ali. If democracy is consolidated in Tunisia, it will be because moderates were able to reach a
pact to marginalize the radicals on both sides, despite the French supporting anti-clericalists and the Gulf

even in Tunisia, nostalgia set in for the stability and

relative prosperity of the Ben Ali period; all that had changed for the
unemployed was increased political freedom to express their frustrations.
In Egypt, where political competition was diverted from economic injustice
to identity issues framed in destabilizing zero-sum terms and backed by competitive
interference from the US, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the result was a hybrid regime: mixing
limited political pluralism with doses of authoritarian power needed to
manage identity conflicts and turn back demands for social justice that
could not be accommodated in a global neo-liberal economic order.
supporting Salafists. But

Neo-Authoritarianism/Neoliberalism
Forced democratization by the US leads to neoauthoritarianism and a de-politicized society
(note this card says neoliberalism is bad)

Hinnebusch 15 [March 24, 2015. Raymond Hinnebusch is a Professor at the

School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. Globalization,
democratization, and the Arab uprising: the international factor in MENA's failed
democratization Democratization, 22:2, 335-357]
Democratization, in the neo-Gramscian view, must be understood within the
framework of economic globalization, a process constituted by the internationalization of
production and the dominance of Western finance capital and a Westcentric transnational corporate class. The
globalization of capitalism requires the sustained agency of the global hegemon of the age, now t he

US,

empowered by the dominance of its finance capital2 and working through international
financial institutions, to promote disciplinary neo-liberalism3 manifest in international contractual arrangements
such as the World Trade Organization. Especially in the world periphery, the hegemon

plays a key role in

forcing open markets to Western penetration, using economic crises and debt relief to enforce neoliberal measures such as Anglo-American legal practices, tariff removal, privatization and structural adjustment.4

With the
demise of Soviet countervailing power, this US project acquired enhanced
leverage; for example, war could again be used to force open the most
recalcitrant and lucrative periphery markets, notably oil-rich Iraq .6 At the levels
The hegemon seeks thereby to transform states into transmission belts of global neo-liberalism.5

of institutions and ideology, sociological institutionalists (world polity theory) see a parallel process in which a world
culture of capitalist democracy is diffused outward from core to periphery.7 Buzan and Little noted that the
expansion of European international society through imperialism globalized a formally Westphalian states system
and stimulated an internalization of Western norms of sovereignty and nationalism, that made denial of the
independence of the periphery too costly.8 In a geopolitical dynamic recognizable to realists whereby the
international system shapes the states, via socialization and emulation, a convergence in governance took place:
since the capitalist national state is best able to mobilize power in international competition, all states emulated
this model through defensive modernization.9 In the era of de-colonization, these twin dynamics propelled a real
diffusion of power to the periphery; however, Clark showed that, to compensate, the core engineered the
globalization of neo-liberal practices, creating an international society of only semi-sovereign states in the

What is the link between neo-liberal globalization and

democratization? While globalization created a capitalist global political
economy that ostensibly facilitated democratization, Western states also
actively manipulated it to export democracy. As theorized notably by Levitsky and Way,11
globalization gave Western states leverage over weaker less developed
countries (LDCs) via sanctions, diplomatic pressures, conditionality and
intervention. However, their pressures were most efective where paralleled
by linkage: socio-economic penetration and interdependencies resulting from economic integration.
Linkage, via diasporas, media penetration and the internet could tilt the internal power
balance toward democratization, by creating and empowering constituencies pressing for it:
periphery.10

Western- financed transnational non-governmental organization (NGO) networks built up civil society, and emergent
regional elites were socialized through educational exchanges. Solingen12 saw responsiveness to Western
democracy promotion as advanced by the rise inside non-democratic regimes of business-dominated
internationalist coalitions at the expense of statist-nationalist ones, a function of the move from bi-polarity, when
authoritarian national security states had been fostered by super-power patrons, to a US-centric neo-liberal world
empowering Western-linked bankers, finance ministers, and trading bourgeoisies. Finnemore and Sikkink13 showed

states were socialized into standards of civilized international

society notably by international organizations and NGOs that linked
external and internal liberal norm entrepreneurs, such as democratization
that

activists, to spread norms domestically. Huntington14 identified a snowballing effect in

which the de-legitimation of authoritarian governance made democracy
appear to be the only legitimate form of rule and Rosenau15 stressed how transnational
linkages encouraged anti-authoritarian movements to spill across borders, as was famously the case in the Arab
spring. The dominant ideology was that economic success required democratization, which alone had the
legitimacy, predictability and informational advantages needed to encourage investors and innovation while
authoritarian regimes fostered economically counterproductive rent seeking. In parallel, as reflected in World
Society16 approaches, there was a normative shift from an international society based on sovereign equal states
to one wherein sovereignty was made conditional on good governance and states fulfilment of their
responsibility to protect, with human rights violations justifying intervention all as judged and implemented by
the great powers, above all the US hegemon. The export of the non-violent resistance paradigm, popularized by
Gene Sharp and theorized by Stephan and Chenoweth17 publicized the techniques by which activists could use
non-violent protest to provoke the collapse of authoritarian regimes; this is said to have played some role in
inspiring the techniques of the Arab uprising. Less often observed was, as Ayoob and Lustick18 suggested, how
human rights and democratization campaigns aimed to deprive late developing states, for better or worse, of the
tools of violence earlier used in the consolidation of core states, hence perpetuating state weakness in the
periphery that sustained core dominance over it. These one-way diffusionist models capture important tendencies,
but greatly oversimplify reality, in neglecting three important counter-realities. Firstly, there is arguably a
contradiction within the norm package exported by globalization that works against smooth norm diffusion. Thus,

even as globalization appears to be an engine in the horizontal

spread of democratization, it paradoxically also dilutes it: in locking
states into trade pacts that remove much economic policy , particularly
economic rights, from political contestation, democracy is hollowed out as
the economic policies of all political parties converge on the neo-liberal
consensus, big money and big corporate media manipulate elections and
electorates are de-politicized or set against each other over race and
immigration issues. The function of states changes from the provision of
social needs to disciplining their societies as needed to attract global
finance capital via a race to the bottom; the state becomes more
accountable to transnational capital and less to its citizenry . In the periphery,
the consequences have been particularly damaging. While in the core, Sorensen
paradoxically,

observed,19 democratic consolidation was normally accompanied by periods of growing affluence and equality,

globalization produces inequality on a world scale 20 and, as Boix21 found, this

high inequality undermined democratization in the periphery. What the
West exported to the periphery was democratic procedure without the
substance of political equalization or, in Robinsons words, low intensity democracy.22 For
Huntington, unless economic development consolidated new democracies, a reverse authoritarian
wave was likely ;23 and, as Petras and Veltmeyer24 argued, globalization often generated
some hybrid form of electoral or neo-authoritarianism.

Democracy doesnt solve radical Middle Eastern Governments

Greenfield 13 (Daniel, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center,
March 15, 2013, Democracy Is Not the Answer, Front Page Magazine,
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/democracy-is-not-the-answer/ mm)
The Arab Spring has taught us to question the idea that democracy is an
absolute good. Initially the outcome of the Palestinian Arab elections that rewarded Hamas was thought not
to apply to the wider region. That assumption proved to be wrong. We now know that Hamas victory
foreshadowed the Muslim Brotherhood's victory. And we know that Islamists

have the inside track in elections because they represent a familiar

ideology that has not been discredited in the minds of a majority of
Muslims. We can no longer aford to be bound by a Cold War argument
against Communism that has outlived its usefulness, especially once liberals turned left and defected
from a national security consensus. Universal democracy has proven to be about as
universal a panacea as international law or the United Nations.

Middle Eastern democratic transition leads to regional

instability
Peter 12 (Rada, PhD in International Relations, and an MA in diplomacy and
security policy from the Corvinus University Budapest. He is associate professor at
the Budapest College of Communication and Business and the ELTE University,
Rethinking the democratic peace theory: turbulent democratization in North
Africa and the Middle East and the external dimension, 2012,
http://cenaa.org/analysis/rethinking-the-democratic-peace-theory-turbulentdemocratization-in-north-africa-and-the-middle-east-and-the-external-dimension/,
mm)
It is not surprising that the choice from the different options is not easy for the Transatlantic community. In this
sense, the immediate outcome of the Arab spring is definitely dangerous .

The Transatlantic
community needs to measure the pros and cons whether the security of
stability or the insecurity of democracy is better. Even though democracy is in line
with our values and with our long term interests, the Arab spring created a highly versatile
geopolitical situation. The democratic peace theory may be non falsifiable
here but it is clear that the transitions are a turbulent and messy interplay
of external and domestic factors. As Michael Totten argued recently on the pages of the World
Affairs, the likelihood of genuine liberal democracies as a consequence of the Arab spring
is close to zero, and the only common feature of the processes is that all
the countries are in turmoil. (Totten, 2012, p. 23) The problem is that the Transatlantic community
cannot step back to the old policies of supporting liberal dictators, that is those authoritarian regimes which
definitely did not serve the fulfillment of the Western values but at least did not threaten the Western interests
directly in the short term. The lslamist takeover was feared before the fall of the old regimes, and after the elections
lslamists gain in power was not a surprise as they were the most (if not the only) organized political forces in the

The political turmoil decreases the ability of the new regimes to

maintain security domestically and consequently the stability of the
region. The new and week regimes may divert public attention by initiate
unpredictable foreign policy steps . (lnbar, 2012) Furthermore, even without direct decisions the
region.

events have negative consequences. For instance, Libya and Yemen are on the edge of collapse and the weapons,
especially from Libya, have dispersed in the region.[3] The turbulent events of the Arab spring definitely threaten

Stability has been our goal

in the region which in many times collided with the values of a liberal
Western democracy: freedom, rule of law and respect for human rights. Now, democratic
opening may bring new scenarios in which the new democracies are not in
line with the Western values, consequently it is difficult to judge whether
the democratic peace theory is still applicable.
the interests and indirectly the security of the Transatlantic community.

Conflict of Interests

Generic
Democratization fails illiberal regional powers and security
dilemma
Brzel 15 [2015. Tanja A. Brzel holds the chair for European Integration at the
Freie Universitt Berlin. She received her PhD from the European University Institute
in Florence, Italy in 1999. From 1999 to 2004, she conducted her research and
taught at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, the
Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin and the University Heidelberg. The noble west and
the dirty rest? Western democracy promoters and illiberal regional powers
Democratization, 22:3, 519-535]
Exploring and comparing the interactions between Western democracy promoters, illiberal regional regimes, and
target countries provides a fruitful approach to studying international democracy promotion and challenges some
conventional wisdoms in the state of the art. First, rather than intentionally promoting autocracy or blocking
democracy,

illiberal powers seek to countervail Western democracy promotion

in order to protect their economic, geostrategic, or political interests, which
are not so diferent from those of Western democracy promoters. Where the
two differ is that illiberal regional powers do not have to balance security and
stability against democracy and human rights. Second, this democratizationstability dilemma undermines the efectiveness of Western democracy
promotion more than the countervailing strategies of nondemocratic regional powers. True, if democracy
promotion threatens their geopolitical and economic interests or regime survival, Russia, China, and
Saudi Arabia seek to undermine democratic processes to the extent that they unfold.
They offer non-democratic regimes economic, political, and military assistance and threaten democracy-minded
ruling elites to withdraw it. Moreover, they may undermine the capacity of government to introduce democratic

by destabilizing the country. Yet, with the exception of Ukraine and Georgia,
democratic processes are not promoted by Western powers but mostly
endogenously driven. More often than not, the EU and US share the interest of
illiberal regional powers in the stability and security of a region. Not only
did they fail to develop a coherent approach on how to support the Arab
Spring, they were also silent on the military coup against a democratically elected
government in Egypt, tolerated the Saudi-led military intervention of the Gulf
Cooperation Council that assisted Bahraini security forces in detaining thousands of protesters,
and stood by the massive human rights violations committed by the Assad regime in Syria. These
two findings do not only challenge the admittedly stylized juxtaposition of the
noble West promoting democracy, and the dirty rest promoting
autocracy. They also yield some important policy implications, particularly for the EU and the US. For actors
changes

whose foreign policy is not only oriented towards geostrategic interests but which also seek to promote moral goals,

The more unstable a target state is and the less

democratic, the more dif- ficult it will be to reconcile the protection and
promotion of human rights and democracy with ensuring security and
stability. The democratization-stability dilemma seems to be somewhat
unavoidable and undermines the capacity of Western democracy
promoters to design credible democracy promotion policies based on
consistent criteria and reliable rewards.
all good things seldom go together.81

Democratic and non-democratic regimes will come in conflict

with their interests
Brzel 15 [2015. Tanja A. Brzel holds the chair for European Integration at the
Freie Universitt Berlin. She received her PhD from the European University Institute
in Florence, Italy in 1999. From 1999 to 2004, she conducted her research and
taught at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, the
Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin and the University Heidelberg. The noble west and
the dirty rest? Western democracy promoters and illiberal regional powers
Democratization, 22:3, 519-535]
After the big bang enlargement of the EU, which marked the end point of the successful democratization of postcommunist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, optimism about Western democracy promotion quickly started
to fade. The post-Soviet area, which became the target of EU and US efforts at democracy promotion, has not made
any significant progress towards democracy. The so called newly independent states seem to have developed
rather stable hybrid regimes in the gray zone between democracy and autocracy,10 which have been referred to
as semi-authoritarianism,11 electoral authoritarianism,12 or competitive authoritarianism.13 The Arab

Yet, the
EU and the US were clearly taken by surprise by the recent developments
and have only reluctantly endorsed democratic change. Their support for
the new regimes has done little to foster democracy ; Tunisia is the only country which
has seen some significant improvements in the democratic quality of its regime.14 US and EU attempts
at promoting democracy and good governance in Sub-Sahara Africa have
proven equally futile .15 While the democratization literature has always been sceptical about the role
Spring challenged the long-time persistence of authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa.

of external actors in promoting democratic transition and consolidation, the ineffectiveness of their attempts is
often blamed on the presence of powerful spoilers in the region that oppose democracy.16 However, this special

illiberal states do not make autocracy promotion

an integral part of their foreign policies in the same way as the US and EU
have done it with democracy promotion. Nor do they see Western
democracy promotion in third countries necessarily as a threat they have
to counter. While Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia quell external and domestic attempts at democracy
issue convincingly demonstrates that

promotion at home, the contributors to this special issue find little evidence that they seek to promote their own or
any other non-democratic regime type beyond their own borders. They do not use their economic and military
capabilities to induce autocratic reforms in other countries. Interestingly, illiberal states do engage in governance
export at the regional level. Regional organizations can promote autocracy by boosting the legitimacy and
sovereignty of their autocratic members.17 Moreover, the Council of Independent States, the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization, the League of Arab States, and the Gulf Cooperation Council explicitly prescribe and actively promote
and protect the building, modification, and respect of governance institutions in their member states. In addition,
they do so by referring to democracy, human rights, or rule of law. The regional commitment of illiberal powers to
liberal norms and values serves to prevent political instability in the region, attract foreign aid and trade, or deflect
attempts at governance transfer by Western actors.18 Such signalling is strategic and aims at stabilizing rather
than transforming autocracy at home. However, such regional commitments would lose their credibility if illiberal
powers promoted autocracy abroad.19 Furthermore, regional organizations can also restrict illiberal powers in
promoting autocracy and resisting Western democracy promotion. Russias threat to punish Ukraine for entering a
Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with the EU by economic retaliation runs against the decisionmaking rules of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) according to which Russia cannot impose any trade restrictions
against Ukraine unilaterally. The two other members of the EEU, Belarus and Kazakhstan, have already refused to
support Russia in a trade war against Ukraine.20 Like their commitment to liberal norms and values in regional
organization, responses of illiberal regional powers to Western democracy promotion are motivated by regime
survival, rent-seeking, and the protection of economic and security interests.21 The findings of this special issue
largely confirm this argument. Saudi Arabia supported the violent suppression of political protest in Bahrain for fear
of democratic spill-over.22 The 2011 and 2012 elections in Russia, which were widely perceived as fraudulent,
heightened Putins concerns about the survival of his regime due to possible contagion effects emanating from
public uprisings in Ukraine.23 He has been even more concerned about the Westernization of Ukraine, Georgia,

Democratization is a
precondition for closer economic and security relations with the West, of
Moldova, and Armenia pulling out of Russias traditional sphere of influence.24

which membership in the EU and NATO is the biggest incentive the EU and
US have on ofer for promoting democracy. Countervailing EU and US democracy promotion
in its near abroad is, hence, Putins strategy to defend Russias sphere of influence against what he perceives as an
expansion of the Western sphere of influence into the post-Soviet area.25 Defending Russias power over the region
also helps to ensure the survival of Putins regime by boosting his approval rates through a foreign policy that

Chinas
indiference towards EU and US democracy promotion in Sub-Sahara Africa
and Myanmar confirms the finding that illiberal regional powers do not
take issue with Western democracy promotion as long as their strategic
interests are not at stake. Angola and Ethiopia are too far away, while Myanmar is too small and too
claims to restore Russia as a great power and containing the risk of democratic spill-over.

poor to have a negative effect on Beijings geostrategic interest or regime survival. Hong Kong, by contrast, may
turn into an attractive alternative model to the autocratic rule of the Chinese Communist Party threatening its

While it is unclear to what extent and how actively

the US and EU seek to promote democracy in Hong Kong, Beijing argues
that the West supports democratic protesters to reaffirm its influence in
the region against Chinas rising power.26 Saudi Arabia saw the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt as a potential threat, whose model of a
democratically elected Islamist regime could have challenged the
legitimacy of the Saudi kingdom as the protector of Islam .27 How far Saudi support
exclusive grip on power at home.

for the Egyptian military has undermined US and EU democratization and liberalization strategies is not clear given
the latters uneasiness over the Muslim Brotherhood and their tacit approval of the military assisted coup detat.

the EU and the US have shared Saudi Arabias preference for

stability and security in the Gulf region. Their response to Saudi financial and military
Likewise,

assistance to the Bahraini al-Khalifa regime in suppressing Shia protests was at best timid.28 Since more than
70% of Bahrainis are Shia, the overthrow of the Sunni monarchy fuelled fears of Iran escalating violence to enhance

democratic and nondemocratic actors equally pursue geostrategic interests. These interests
often conflict with international democracy promotion making Western
actors compromise their eforts and illiberal powers resist them. Yet, rentits influence in the Gulf region and undermining its stability. In sum,

seeking and securing spheres of influence may also concur with democratic change promoted by the West. Russia,
for instance, welcomed the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan as a chance to expand its influence in Central Asia.29 In
the end, countervailing strategies appear to depend on whether democratic and non-democratic powers pursue
competing interests in a region.

EU Model Fails Middle East

Economic Focus
Economic interests perpetuate authoritarianism without
leading to reform
Durac and Cavatorta 09 [Dr Vincent Durac lectures in Middle East Politics
and Development in the University College Dublin School of Politics and
International Relations. Dr Francesco Cavatorta, School of Law and Government,
Dublin City University. Strengthening Authoritarian Rule through Democracy
Promotion? Examining the Paradox of the US and EU Security Strategies: The Case
of Bin Alis Tunisia British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, April 2009 36(1), 319]
one of the pillars of European democracy promotion in the
region has been economic integration. While not offering the prospect of membership, the
EU believes that pro-market economic reforms will have beneficial
repercussions in terms of democratization on authoritarian regimes . The logic
As mentioned earlier,

therefore of partnership prevails among EU policy-makers who claim that it is through economic engagement that

grants and aid are ofered to the target

country to make the reforms necessary to be able to integrate the
regional economic exchanges. Such logic is based on the theory that
economic advantages, which will inevitably occur in the target country after a period of adaptation ,
will create new centres of independent power that will make demands on
the political system to reform and accommodate through democratic
procedures the demands of new sectors of society. The EU links with Tunisia, which have seen the two actors
political developments will occur. In this context,

sign an Association Agreement, have partially reflected the validity of such a theoretical construct. In the decade
from 1995, Tunisia has made considerable economic progress and most economic indicators are better than for
most of its regional neighbours. Valentin Mbougueng, who argued in 1999 that we were witnessing the arrival on
the world scene of the desert tiger, has examined Tunisian economic success in some detail.63 With respect to the

EU
investment has led to higher level of total investment in the country and a
development of greater economic activity .64 This economic development
has however not generated significant repercussions at the political level
in terms of credible democratization or even liberalization . The recent
creation of a second chamber devoid of any power seems to have been
executed simply to satisfy the need for the EU to tick a box when it
comes to highlighting democratic improvements in a partner country. If anything, the
newfound economic success has led Bin Ali to further restrict political
access to diferent groups in society in order to negate the possibility of
debating the important social and economic issues that the boom has
created. For instance, much of the improved economic indicators fail to
highlight the unfair distribution of wealth, which sees those close to the regime benefiting
support and crucial role of the EU in terms of fostering Tunisian economic success, Testas argues that

from rents to the detriment of large sectors of the work force. In addition, access to consumer goods has certainly
led to a higher standard of living, but with very heavy personal levels of debt. This risks becoming a problem in case
of economic downturn, something that is already occurring in light of higher energy prices and de-localization away

All these issues have therefore

become a potential bone of contention for the regime and the political
opposition in all its guises, which leads the regime to crack down harshly
and impedes any movement away from authoritarian rule as the theory
predicted. The EU however is not disturbed and continues to praise Bin Ali
from Tunisia to other more profitable parts of the world.

and his eforts to modernize the country. The very logic of a neo-liberal economic integration
that strongly favours European businesses over Tunisian ones (agriculture is excluded from the Association
Agreement) and the enforcement of rules/regulations that are perceived to be unfair by sectors of Tunisian society
make an alliance with Bin Ali necessary. There is very little incentive for the EU to use the human rights clauses that
are present in the agreement to punish Tunisia because the economic benefits that the EU now derives from the
relationship might be jeopardized with a change at the top. Some data will suffice to highlight the positive outcomes
that exist for the EU when it comes to economic exchanges with Tunisia. The EU represents by far the largest
market for Tunisian goods (78.6% in 2002 rising to 84% in 2005) and the EU is also the primary exporter to Tunisia
with 70.3% of goods in 2002, rising to 72% in 2005, coming from EU countries. The balance of payments heavily
favours the EU, which had a surplus of almost 4 million Tunisian dinars in 2002. In addition, it should be highlighted
that the EU also donates 78.4% (2002) of all foreign aid to the country.65 The EU itself states that Tunisia is one of
the key beneficiaries of financial co-operation in the Mediterranean, because, thanks to its absorption capacity, it
has received around 13% of the MEDA budget while having only 4% of the population of the Mediterranean
region.66 Finally, it should be noted that while Tunisia is highly dependent on the EU, Tunisian goods represent a

It is
therefore all the more surprising, if we are to take the EU rhetoric at face value regarding
democratization and human rights, that the EU is incapable of pressurizing Bin Alis
regime into promoting serious liberalizing and democratizing reforms. A
more convincing explanation for the absence of pressure rests on the EUs interest
to fully integrate Tunisia in the economic region the EU is building in the
risible percentage of EU imports. All this shows how strong the hand of the EU is vis-a`-vis Tunisia.

Mediterranean. This region sees the EU itself as the central actor and main beneficiary of the liberal reforms
occurring in third countries. It is again no surprise that in the National Indicative Programme for Tunisia published by

the vast bulk of the money the EU provides (48.6%) is destined to

strengthen economic reforms and market economy institutions , with the rest
going to human resources development (such as vocational training) and to economic infrastructure. There is
almost nothing in the Indicative Programme about human rights and
democratization aside from a brief statement about the EUs belief in the promotion of democracy and
respect for human rights as core objectives. In its 2006 report on Tunisia, Amnesty International for
example indicates the following: (a) Freedom of expression remained severely
curtailed; (b) Human rights defenders continued to face harassment and
sometimes physical violence, and (c) judges activities and right to freedom of expression were
the EU in 2005,

further restricted.67 At the more general political level, Bin Alis control over the political system has allowed him
to modify the constitution to enable him being re-elected to the post of President despite an original ban on more

Opposition parties are not permitted and the popular Islamist

party is still outlawed. All this occurs despite the legal obligations in the Association Agreement with
the EU to respect human rights and promote democratization. The EU has never punished
Tunisia by enforcing the human rights clauses present in the Agreement. EU policy-making
towards Tunisia indicates quite clearly that material interests are more
important than democratization and human rights despite the rhetorical
commitment to it in both the European Security Strategy and the regionspecific initiatives such as the recently launched European Neighbourhood
Policy.
than two mandates.

Bottom-Up Approach
EU democracy promotion relies on the US but is substantially
weaker
Durac and Cavatorta 09 [Dr Vincent Durac lectures in Middle East Politics
and Development in the University College Dublin School of Politics and
International Relations. Dr Francesco Cavatorta, School of Law and Government,
Dublin City University. Strengthening Authoritarian Rule through Democracy
Promotion? Examining the Paradox of the US and EU Security Strategies: The Case
of Bin Alis Tunisia British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, April 2009 36(1), 319]
the rhetoric of the EU in this area is
belied by practice and the EMP also has been the object of very significant
criticisms. Its development into the European Neighbourhood Policy seems equally unable
to deliver on its promises. In the first place, a number of writers have observed
on the lack of coherence that characterizes European interventions in this
But, as with American policies on democracy promotion,

area. Despite attempts since the 1990s to forge a common European foreign and security policy, the reality is that
Europe is still far from being a unitary actor .40 Policy-making in these areas remains, for
the most part, the preserve of the national governments of EU member states, which opens the way for separate

The complex decision-making

structures and processes of the EU further complicate eforts to achieve coherence
and consistency in foreign policy matters. Gorm Rye Olsen points out that, at various levels, the Council,
actions by individual members parallel to common policies.

the Commission and to some extent the Council of the EU each have a remit in the area of foreign policy.41 On a
deeper level, EU policy in this area is confronted by a dilemma similar to that faced by the US in the form of the

If there is a conflict
between the promotion of democracy and security, the EU will give the
highest priority to security. The clearest example of this came at a time when common EU policies in
this area were just beginning to be formulated. The military coup in Algeria in 1992, which
ended the process of democratization there, came just two months after
the EU set respect for democracy and human rights as conditions for the
receipt of aid. Despite this, EU member states remained silent as to the
rights and wrongs of the military intervention. Moreover, at the behest of France, the EU
actually increased its aid to Algeria.42 Gillespie and Whitehead have observed that EU policy towards
the Mediterranean is primarily driven by security objectives, which tends
to lead to accommodation of authoritarian regimes rather than eforts to
undermine them . Thus far, European policy-makers have acted as if,
whenever the spectre of radical Islam could be invoked, that justified
back-pedalling on political reform.43 A critical difficulty for the EU is that it has limited
resources at its disposal to compel compliance with its requirements in
relation to political reform. In Southern and Eastern Europe the inducement of eventual membership
tension between the objectives of promoting democracy and ensuring security.

of the EU could be held out. However, when Morocco applied for EU membership in 1987, the response was that this
was impossible on geographical grounds. It seems that Europe could extend eastwards to the former Soviet Union
and beyond, and south-west to the Turkish frontier with Iraq, but it cannot incorporate Casablanca or Tangier.44 Nor,
unlike, the US, does the EU possess a significant common European and defence competence. Even if non-military
instruments are held to be more relevant to the nature of the challenges at issue, the possibility of the US in
extremis backing up its objectives with effective force account for its being a far more potent influence in world
affairs than the EU.45 A number of significant consequences flow from this. In the first place, the EMP places great
emphasis on building partnerships with governments in the region.

Because, the EMP extends to

so many areas where enhanced cooperation is sought it becomes very

difficult to develop a democracy promotion strategy that does not conflict
with eforts that require consent and collaboration in other areas.46 This, in
turn, leads to a preference for a cautious bottom-up approach to political
change which is expressed in support for civil society organizations. However, the limitations of a
bottom up, gradualist approach have been made clear . EU strategy in this
regard has been criticized for its flawed conception of civil society in the Middle East
which is usually limited to secular, liberal groups, excluding those inspired
by religious faith and the willingness to limit civil support to partners that
are known to and approved of by partner governments.47 One of the primary
consequences of this approach is that the EU, like the US, is exposed to the charge of
double standards . Chourou argues that after sifting through all the rhetoric, one can identify Europes
three real concerns in the Mediterranean: oil, markets and immigration.48 However, even if the EU managed to
overcome problems of coherence and consistency in its promotion of democracy in the Middle East,

it is

doubtful that EU policy has the potential to ofer any significant

alternative to that of the US in the short to medium term. Despite some points of
difference, usually expressed through rhetoric rather than actions , between the EU and the US on
aspects of foreign policy in the region, there is little evidence of either the
desire or the capacity on the part of the EU to do more than assert its
right to a greater role in the region, in partnership with, rather than in
opposition to the US. As a result, the major powers [including European ones] and their policies are
perceived by most Muslims as being primarily responsible for keeping Muslim societies in the sad plight they are in
today.49 Writing in 1998, Perthes noted that, in the past, Europe critiqued US policy on the Middle East on a
number of points, including the American tendency to demonize certain actors in the region, its failure to act in an
even-handed fashion in relation to Israel and Palestine, and its assumption that only one external player, namely
the US itself, could play a political role in the region. Nonetheless, he argued that, contrary to some Arab hopes,
the

EU and the majority of European policy makers have no intention of

counterbalancing US policies in the Middle East.50 This is confirmed in policy documents
and official statements. The European Security Strategy commits the EU to an international order based on effective
multilateralism, but multilateralism in this context places a particularly high value on the EUs good relations with
the United States. As the ESS notes: One of the core elements of the international system is the transatlantic
relationship.51 The strategy document implicitly recognizes some of the relative weaknesses of the EU in foreign
policy matters in asserting that a more capable Europe is within our grasp, though it will take time to realize our full
potential, and in acknowledging the challenge to bring together the different instruments and capabilities of the
EU and its members in order to promote security and development.52 The important, if unintended effect of this, as

that the ESS illustrates that the EU will continue to rely on US

agenda setting .53 More recently, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the EU Commissioner for External Relations and

Toje points out, is

European Neighbourhood Policy, has reiterated the commonality of American and European policies on the Middle
East. ... the truth is EUUS diferences are routinely exaggerated and our common
objectives stay on the plate.54 At the same press conference, President of EU Commission, Jose Barroso,
emphasized the complementarity of EU and US approaches: Does anyone really think that the United States alone
or Europe alone can meet the global challenge? Its impossible ... So lets work together because the basic values
are the same ... 55

Democracy Promotion Bad US

Transition Fails

Destabilization Middle East

Forced democratization leads to backlash and drawing in of
outside powers, further destabilizing the region
Hinnebusch 15 [March 24, 2015. Raymond Hinnebusch is a Professor at the
School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. Globalization,
democratization, and the Arab uprising: the international factor in MENA's failed
democratization Democratization, 22:2, 335-357]
In short, while the global hegemony of Westcentric international financial capital has reconstituted massive economic inequality on a
global scale, the core simultaneously exports the formal procedures of democracy (elections, independent judiciaries) but emptied

democratization is a
power struggle, and hence depends on the power of the global hegemon,
backed by a Westcentric collective hegemon, that promotes it. The legitimacy of the US hegemon is,
however, strongest in the core and weakest in the periphery and the less legitimacy it enjoys, the more it must
rely on more costly hard power to enforce democratic capitalism. As Hegemonic Stability Theory acknowledges, such liberal
imperialism makes the hegemon very vulnerable to imperial overreach
which damages its economy and encourages rising alternative powers to
of its substance political equality. Second, the diffusionist narrative obscures the fact that

contest its hegemony;25 while the US was, in the 1990 2002 period, largely unconstrained by such countervailing power,
beginning

with the highly contested Iraq war, other powers began to soft-balance
against Washington and after the failure of the Iraq intervention and the global financial crisis, the US retreated to
offshore balancing in the Middle East. After Iraq, authoritarian regimes were able to
undermine the legitimacy of democracy-promotion by depicting it as
American interventionism. Also, as Levitsy and Way26 acknowledged, Western leverage was
diluted when applied to larger states that the West could not aford to
destabilize (Saudi Arabia) or ones with alternative global patrons (Iran); indeed,
Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRICS) had coalesced to soft balance against the US. They aimed to promote
a global power balance supportive of a renewed plurality of global norms and a
return to the primacy of state sovereignty in international society. Democracy
promotion had provoked a backlash by the second half of the 2000, with a growing
number of governments expelling Western NGOs and prohibiting local
groups from taking foreign funds.27 In these new conditions, when
democratic revolts took place, rather than provoking a global consensus
against authoritarian regimes, they were more likely to become a matter of
international power contestation , with pro-democracy intervention
countered by non-democratic or neighbouring states fearful of the demonstration effect or the
threat to the regional power balance.28 Contesting sides inside states undergoing revolt
sought to draw in outside powers on their side, further destabilizing rather
than democratizing them.

US intervention is inversely correlated with efective

democratization the result is intensified destabilization and
failed states
Hinnebusch 15 [March 24, 2015. Raymond Hinnebusch is a Professor at the
School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. Globalization,

democratization, and the Arab uprising: the international factor in MENA's failed
democratization Democratization, 22:2, 335-357]
The West has certainly left a profound impact on MENA but it has not been benign and has
therefore inevitably generated resistance. In a first wave of globalization the West imposed
an arbitrary and flawed states system made up of fragile regimes wherein early
liberal experiments rapidly failed and more indigenous hybrids of neo-patrimonialism and populism
became the main state building formulas. The second wave of globalization at the end of the Cold War
exposed these regimes to the powerful homogenizing material forces
(finance capital, markets), triumphant liberal ideology (via transnational linkages and
the new globalized communications technology) and the dominance of a liberal global hegemon,
the US, which increasingly penetrated the region. However, rather than these reinforcing each other , the
incongruence in the Western project prevented achievement of hegemony
over the region. The cores export of democracy sufered, first of all, from a builtin contradiction between the global inequality generated by neo-liberalism
and the democratic norm of equality. The US hegemon cannot bridge this
contradiction because it lacks both the hard and soft power to control the
region and provokes anti-hegemonic balancing by global and regional powers. The
incoherence of global liberalism inevitably generates regional backlashes,
with counter-ideologies, nationalist populism and Islamism, retaining remarkable power in
MENA; the latter remains the only credible counter-hegemonic ideology opposing triumphant world liberalism.
Moreover, pre-Arab uprising regimes proved extremely resilient in the face of globalization, and indeed adept in

In the oil-poor republics, regimes, such

as the Tunisian and Egyptian ones, selectively exploited global neo-liberal
pressures to reconstitute statist authoritarian regimes in inegalitarian crony
capitalist forms quite resistant to democratization . In parallel, the Arab regimes
most incorporated into Westcentric global financial networks , the Arab Gulf state
were the least democratic , not only internally, but also in their use of finance capital to promote antidemocratic forces. To be sure, the vulnerabilities of the authoritarian republics were
exposed in the Arab uprising, when communications globalization, enabling
the export of democratization discourses pushing for the empowerment of populations
even as regional incarnations of neo-liberalism generated grievances among them precipitated the
Arab revolt, profoundly destabilizing the region. The Arab uprisings were both
a symptom of globalization and a backlash against it, a continuation and
intensification of struggle between those seeking to make regional states
transmission belts of neo-liberalism and those wanting to protect the indigenous
moral economy. In spite of the opportunity presented by the uprisings to tilt internal power balances,
Western and regional intervention in the Arab uprisings states promoted not
democratization but intensified destabilization . Neither leverage or
linkage gave the West the influence to peacefully promote
democratization while militarized intervention proved disastrous in Libya, as it had
earlier been in Iraq, with the state demolished, empowering militias and trans-state jihadists
rather than democrats; even when intervention was expected but not delivered, as in Syria, it
using global resources investment, arms, technology to adapt.

encouraged rebellion and with similar results. Further diluting any democratizing normative impetus was the global
norm fragmentation deepened by the Arab uprising, pitting the Wests liberal imperialist humanitarian
interventionism against Russian and Chinese defence of sovereignty in which each checkmated the other rather
than cooperating to facilitate a stable regional transition. Similarly, at the regional level, uprising states became
targets of competitive interference by rival powers backing opposing forces and also largely checkmating each

other. Even the presence of an aspirant liberal Islamic hegemon, Turkey, was unable make democracy normatively
hegemonic. Rather, external intervention (sanctions, arms supplies) in internal power struggles (Syria, Libya)
magnified and prolonged a deepening destabilization of states that was profoundly inhospitable to democratization.

As regional states fractured under the efect of internal revolt , contrary

norms were wielded in domestic power struggles between middle class liberal
activists, deep state establishments and rival versions of Islamism that either
rejected or selectively embraced aspects of Western defined democratic norms.
Democrats proved inferior to statist authoritarians and Islamist radicals
who had either more guns, money or ideological motivation and much of it came
from external sources. Indicative of the negative impact of external global and regional
interference in the Arab uprising states was the inverse relation between
the likelihood of democratization and the intensity of external competitive
interference: where it was most intense, the result was failed states (Libya, Syria);
where it was significant, Bonapartist restoration (Egypt); and only where it was most muted did low intensity
democracy result (Tunisia).

The expectation of US intervention on behalf of

democratization shapes strategies and eventually leads to
stalemates and overly violent conflicts Syria proves
Hinnebusch 15 [March 24, 2015. Raymond Hinnebusch is a Professor at the
School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. Globalization,
democratization, and the Arab uprising: the international factor in MENA's failed
democratization Democratization, 22:2, 335-357]
In Syria, the uprising began as a mobilization of protestors demanding
democratization against a repressive authoritarian regime, arguably a test
of the non-violent resistance model which anticipates the use of violence
against mass non-violent protest will precipitate either defections in the security forces
or external sanctions and intervention. Indeed, the possibility of external military
intervention shaped both opposition and regime strategies . Western
funded Syrian expatriates, young cosmopolitans that were instrumental in initiating and
internationalizing the uprising, understood that they could not succeed without
external intervention to restrain the regimes repressive options. External
activists told those on the ground, pointing to the Libya no-fly zone, that the
international community wont sit and watch you be killed. They claimed
that another Hama was not possible because Everything is being filmed
on YouTube, and theres a lot of international attention on the Middle East.63
This encouraged Syrian activists to risk their lives and to eschew the
compromise with the regime needed for a pacted transition. The Libyan intervention
gave decisive momentum to the uprising.64 The regime, for its part, having survived several
decades of Western isolation, had always seen itself as besieged by foreign enemies; the role played by
external exiles and internet activists abroad in provoking or escalating the uprising was
congruent with its perceptions of conspiracy and tarnished the indigenous opposition with
the suspicion of treasonous dealings with foreign enemies, justifying the resort to repressive
violence. The regime tried to calibrate its violence within limits that would

not trigger an international bandwagon toward intervention, although over time

this bar was steadily raised . Later yet, it felt the need to quickly smash
resistance so as not to lose control of territory that could be used to stage intervention as
had happened in Libya, thus precipitating a transition from the security solution
to the military solution. This did not precipitate Western intervention for,
in contrast to Libya, the consensus behind humanitarian intervention had been
destroyed by Western-led regime change in Libya. Repression did precipitate some defections from the
Syrian military, not enough to precipitate regime collapse but enough that the regime lost control of
wide swathes of the northeast of the country to armed insurgents . The
struggle for Syria became a regional and international proxy war ; regionally,
with Turkish, Saudi and Qatari support for the opposition being ofset by
Iranian, Hizbollah and Iraqi support for the regime; and internationally, through
American and European support for the uprising ofset by Russian and
Chinese support for the regime. Iran proved a tenacious power balancer: on the defensive, Tehran
sought to create a protective land belt from Iraq (where post-US occupation, the move of the Maliki regime against

These external involvements,

each blocking the other, contributed to the stalemating of the Syrian
conflict , especially as the insurgents began to fight among themselves, pitting more moderate Syrian rebels
against transnational Al-Qaeda avatars, Jabhat al-Nursa and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). With
rising levels of jihadist involvement, the West became more concerned
with the international war on terror than with the Responsibility to
Protect.
Sunni rivals made it more dependent on Iran) to Syria, and Hizbollah.

War Generic
US democracy promotion incites violence and backlash,
entrenches bad regimes
Smith, Econ Professor at Yale, 12 (Tony Smith is Professor of Economics
and Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Economics at Yale,
America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy
(Expanded Edition),
http://site.ebrary.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umich/detail.action?docID=10594477,
Princeton University Press, February 2012)
The irony of American liberal internationalism by late 2011 was that a
framework for policy that had done so much to established Americas
preeminence in world afairs between 1945 and 2001 should have
contributed so significantly to its decline thereafter. Following 1945, American control
over West Germany and Japan had allowed it to transform these two lands politically and economically, integrating
them into Washingtons orbit in a manner that gave the free world a decisive advantage over its Soviet and
communist rivals. If containment had been the primary track for U.S. foreign policy during the cold war, a secondary
track, consolidating the political and economic unity of the liberal democratic countries through multilateral
organizations under American leadership, had had decisive influence over the course of the global contest. The
power advantage the United States enjoyed was basic, to be sure, as were the personalities of Ronald Reagan and

Woodrow
Wilsons hope to make America secure by making the world peaceful through the
expansion of what by President Bill Clintons time was called free-market democracies
Mikhail Gorbachev, who brought the contest to a successful conclusion that very few anticipated. But

meant that liberal internationalisms contribution to the outcome had shown itself to be fundamental. Yet during the
first decade of the twenty-first century, the very forces that had allowed America to win the cold war had

created the illusion that with relative ease history could now be controlled
and international afairs fundamentally restructured by the expansion of the freemarket democratic world into an international order of peace. Under
neoconservative and neoliberal auspices, democracy was believed to have
a universal appeal with peace-giving qualities of benefit to all peoples.
A market economy both domestically and globally would compound the
process of political stabilization. Under the terms of the responsibility to
protect,1 progressive imperialism became a form of just war" and the
American military that President George W. Bush announced was "beyond
challenge" was tasked with ushering in a new dawn of freedom worldwide.
For a " unipolar world1 a global mission was conceived, as in neoliberal and neoconservative hands neo-Wilsonian
ism evolved into a hard ideology, the equivalent in conceptual terms to Marxism-Leninism, with a capacity to give
leaders and people a sense of identity and worldwide purpose to a degree that liberalism had never before

fueled not only by ideology but also by a will to power after triumph in
the cold war, all the earlier reservations about the difficulties of nationand state-building abroad that had been discussed over the preceding half century were
disregarded, so that even after policymakers understood that democracy did not grow spontaneously
in many places, they were reassured by authoritative studies put out by institutions like
the RAND Corporation and the Army and Marine Corps that such missions could be
accomplished. As a consequence, although it was widely recognized that the failure to plan
properly for Iraq after Baghdad had been captured was a fundamental error, very few voices in
positions of power were heard saying that the democratization of Iraq and
Afghanistan (or the thought of working with '"democratic Pakistan) was likely a fools errand
from the start. Instead, efforts to rectify the failures at conceptualizing state- and nation-building turned out
possessed. In this march of folly,

publications that only prolonged and deepened a misplaced

American self-confidence that it was possible 10 use the window of opportunity at the country s
to be how ton' or llcan do

disposition as the world"s sole superpower to changc the logic of international relations forever. Much the same

arrogance, self-interest, and self-delusion characterized the

arguments underlying the Washington Consensus which boldly saw the key to world
mixture of

prosperity and peace in the interdependence generated by economic globalization with its trinity of concepts
privatization, deregulation, and openness. To be sure, economic interdependence was indeed capable of delivering
on its promise, as the integration of the European Union and the growth in world trade and investment centered on
the free-markct democracies so powerfully demonstrated for half a century after World War II. However, a serious
problem lay in the inability of political forces, either nationally or internationally, to control the capitalist genie
once let out of its bottle. For in due course, deregulation turned against the very system that had given birth to it,
unleashing a flight of technology, capital, and jobs to countries in Asia especially and permitting the irresponsible
banking practices that engendered in the United States and the European Union (after having affected Mexico,
Russia, Southeast Asia, and Argentina more than a decade earlier) an economic crisis second in its devastation only
to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The result in the United States was not only the decimation first of the
working and then of the middle classes as the top 10 percent of the nation (and especially the top 1 percent)
monopolized virtually all the gains of economic openness for a period of more than two decades but also a decline

For all the talk

by President Barack Obama about the example the United States should
set for the sake of democracy promotion abroad, the first three years of
his administration did not meaningfully address the deep-seated
underlying problems of economic growth and inequality in this country,
nor the control by corporations of the nations political life, nor concerns
about national power based on an economy in decline. As a result, liberal economic
in national power as technology, capital, and jobs moved abroad and as China grew apaceJ

doctrine and practice were undermining democratic government as well as national power. Aspects of the liberal
agenda once too easily assumed to be automatically mutually reinforcing were coming to be increasingly at odds
with one another. Woodrow Wilson had recognized just such a possibility a century earlier when he chastised the
greed and incompetence of the nation's monopoly capitalists and asked for their regulation for the sake of the
common good. Despite similar public utterances by President Obama a century later, there was no follow-through
with respect to asserting Washingtons power over corporate interests as had occurred when Wilson became
president. For Wilson and his fellow progressives, the question had been how to recover representative
government, not supersede it. For his day, Washington's main duty was 6tto prevent the strong from crushing
the weak,"' and he left no doubt but that it was the captains of industry who were the greatest threat to the
democratic life of early-twentieth-ccntury America. Wilson introduced antitrust laws, child labor laws, a federal
income tax, and the Federal Reserve System, among other reforms that made capitalism a more effective
economic system as well as one that reinforced democratic government.2 In 2011 the question was whether a
similar resolve could be found in Washington to rejuvenate the American economy in a way that rejuvenated its

The Wilsonian tradition thus found itself in crisis. Within onlv two decades
liberal internationalist overconfidence in the universal
appeal of democratic government and in the blessing of free-market capitalism
had combined to reduce the efectiveness of mullilateral institutions and
the capacity of the United States to provide leadership in settling the
problems of world order. A liberal order capable of withstanding the challenges
of both fascism and communism had come in a short time to be its own worst
enemy. Communism was dead, but 4Lfree-market democracy" was proving to be a much weaker blueprint for
democracy.

after the cold war,

world order than had only recently been anticipated. As Machiavelli had counseled in his Discourses, "Men always
commit the error of not knowing where to limit their hopes, and by trusting to these rather than to a just measure of
their resources, they are generally ruined/ One scenario for the future was bleak. It foresaw economic chaos as
feeding on itself; more self-defeating military interventions being undertaken; and all the while the banner of
freedom and democracy being lifted at the very moment that self-government was being undermined at home by
vested interests and delusional thinking undcrgirding an imperial presidency. So Michael Dcsch referred to l4the
seeds of illiberal behavior contained within liberalism itself, as it attributed a moral superiority to its ways of being
while seeing al-ternative systems both as morally inferior and as necessarily menacing. Whatever the reversal

the Bush Doctrine, its essential message of the

virtues of "benign hegemony"' or altruistic imperialism continued to
typify a liberalism that engaged in perpetual war for the sake of perpetual
suffered by the implementation of

peace.3

Liberalism may have been its own worst enemy, but there were other forces that challenged its future
role as well. As the fate of the Rose Revolution of 2003 in Georgia, of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2(X)4-5,
and of the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in 2{K)5 all illustrated, transitions from authoritarian government were
often quite difficult to accomplish. More critically, the model of state capitalism in conjunction with authoritarian
states was giving increasing evidence that it might prove more successful in creating national power than the freemarket democratic blueprint prevalent in the West. Not only China but also Russia had deep-set cultural and
political forces resisting the liberal appeal. More ominously, there w as increasing reason to think that in time
authoritarian state capitalism might consolidate itself in a way that could markedly increase the national power of
China and Russia relative to the West and Japan, and this in a fashion that diminished the international standing of
the United States while breaking the hack of the unity that had held together the world of free-market
democracies.4 Perhaps this pessimism characteristic of 201 1 was exaggerated. The June Democracy Movement of
1987 had led to the establishment of what subsequently appeared to be a solid democracy in South Korea, as did
a plebiscite in Chile in 1988 and one in Slovenia in 1990, Poland and the Czech Republic were among the countries
that moved with relative ease to democracy once the Soviet empire collapsed.

In the case of Brazil,

the most important of Latin American countries, the presidency of Fernando Alfonso Coll
or de Mello beginning in 1990 (the first directly elected chief executive since the period of military government
that began in J964), followed by Fernando Henriquc Cardoso (1995- ?001), Luiz lnacio Lula da Silva (2003-10), and

Roussef (2011) demonstrated the ability of a country outside the

perimeter of American hegemony to combine responsible government with
strong economic growth and successful projects of social justice. The
Brazilian model had obvious relevance for all of Latin America, with the
potential to displace the appeal of the illiberal" variant of democracy, such as was
evident in the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez and its imitators in parts of Latin America/ So, too, the Arab
world was finally in movement in the aftermath of the Tunisian uprising
that began late in 2010. giving birth to the Arab Spring. Stirred by the
success of popular democracy movements in Tunisia and Egypt that resulted in
the fall of long-term dictators in January and February 2011, a popular revolt began in Libya, one
then Dilma

that Moammar Gadhafi moved savagely to repress. In March, the Arab League and the UN Security Council voted to
sanction intervention to stop the threat of mass murders by government forces in eastern Libya. On March 19 (the
eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq), American and British Tomahawk cruise missiles fell on Libyan

Nonviolent mass
protests started by politicized youths explicitly demanding democratic
government (and to all appearances uninterested in the rhetoric of Islamic fundamentalism)
demonstrated the weakness of brutal and inefective authoritarian
government and the appeal of constitutional order, with its emphasis on transparent and accountable
government forces that Trench and British war planes were attacking simultaneously.

government capable of providing a tangible margin of freedom,, prosperity, and national dignity. The Wilsonian

There were
those who reacted to these developments by claiming that the Bush
Doctrine, with its call to end tyranny around the globe, was finally being
vindicated. Yet such assertions overlooked the objection that the invasion
of Iraq had made it more problematic than would otherw ise have been the
case for the moderate forces in favor of democratic government in the
Arab world to survive a struggle between a military elite and a religious
fundamentalist movement. The Iraq and Afghan wars, as well as the blank
check Washington extended to Israel, had not so much promoted the
movements demanding freedom in the Arab world but instead rendered
them less likely to succeed. More, claims that the Bush Doctrine was vindicated by the calls for
promise appeared to be bearing fruit where few had thought to see it appear so robust K\

democracy in the Arab world were also likely to have to face up to seeing many of these movements fail. If Tunisia
had the good fortune to possess most of the ingredients for successno serious ethnoreligious cleavages; a wellorganized, moderate trade union movement; a large, educated middle class; a small military; a moderate
mainstream Islamist movement; and no oil or gas resources to fund a state independent of popular willnowhere
else in the Arab world (allowance perhaps made for the monarchies in Jordan and Morocco, while some held out
hope for Syria or Lebanon) was there the same likelihood of making a transition to democracy/'

That said,

the Turkish modelwhere responsible government, economic growth,

Islamic secularism, and social justice were emerging with a character that
was indigenousmight have influence in many countries where
historically the Ottoman Empire has left its mark. Just as it was possible that liberal
internationalism's dedication to democracy promotion might still have life whatever the reversals in Iraq and
Afghanistan, so too was economic reform possible whatever the damage inflicted by the crisis that began in 2008.
For it is in the interest of capitalism to be regulated; effective markets cannot exist without the same kind of
accountability and transparency we expect from democratic governments. More, supranational institutions may
experience growth as they take on the task of supervising at regional or international levels reforms that will also

the hold of corporate

influence on political elites in the United States and national differences in the
European Union could block the very changes that it would be to their longterm benefit to have, perhaps dramatic innovations could be adopted, should the Democrats insist on
involve increased political harmonization, if not integration. While

thoroughgoing reforms in the spirit oi the Progressive Era or the New Deal when this party gave critical leadership,
or should the European Union manage not only to survive the challenges to the unity of the Euro zone but actually
to grow politically in the process.

Transition wars US democracy promotion fuels violence and

instability
Goldsmith, Harvard Senior Fellow, 8 (Arthur A. Goldsmith was (when he
wrote this) a Senior Research Fellow at the Intrastate Conflict Program/International
Security Program of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He now serves as a Professor of
Management at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Making the World Safe for
Partial Democracy?: Questioning the Premises of Democracy Promotion,
International Security, Volume 33, Number 2, Fall 2008, pp. 120-147)

Neoconservatives tout the transformative power of

democratization to protect U.S. interests by establishing zones of peace
around the world. To anyone who suspects that the global democracy promotion project is overreaching or
Conclusion

utopian, Robert Kagan and William Kristol posed the following question in 2000: How utopian is it to imagine a
change of regime in a place like Iraq? Based on the growth in the ranks of democratic countries in the 1980s and
1990s, they went on to say, We ought to be fairly optimistic that such change can be hastened by the right blend
of American policies.59 Many liberal internationalists have been in basic agreement with these hopeful premises of
neoconservatism, much as they may try to distance themselves from the particular blend of policies represented by
President George W. Bushs freedom agenda.60 Whether the generic optimistic case for democracy promotion

contemporary quantitative
research cited in this article suggests a more skeptical assessment for the
future. The rationale for blanket democratization is mistaken on two counts: it fails to differentiate sufficiently
seemed plausible in 2000, as Kagan and Kristol asserted, the

between partial and full democracy, and it glosses over the challenge of helping authoritarian countries avoid the
first and obtain the latter. At issue is not the goal of expanding the number of constitutional representative political

the preponderance of empirical

evidence shows that means do not exist to produce more of this type of
government consistently from outside. Awareness about the alternative
likelihood of harmful consequences, especially in the short and medium
term, is critical. Democracy promotion will probably always remain an element of U.S. foreign
policy for the historical and political reasons stated at the beginning of this article. But in the future,
policymakers should focus less on democratic peace theory to design their pro-democracy
strategy, and pay greater attention to the literature on democratic transitions, which
systems in the world. Such systems are fine in concept, but

democratic regime change and the risks of halfway

democratization, such as sectarian conflict, local human rights abuse,
dislocated populations, territorial disputes, and transnational terrorism. In
clearly underscores the difficulty of

particular, more thought needs to be given to how to deal with the prevalence of mixed regimes in the Greater
Middle East and to the security problems that this creates, with less reliance on a universal remedy of more
democracy to treat these ills. The quantitative studies reviewed here suggest three broad lessons for policymakers.
First, only under the rarest of circumstances should military pressure be employed preemptively to advance
democracy. In some situations military intervention may be unavoidable, leaving the United States and its allies
little choice except to try to help another country construct or reconstruct its public institutions. But it would be a

U.S. foreign
policy needs to be adapted better to particular countries individual
circumstances. This is already being done in the Middle East, according to a recent Congressional Research
fallacy to assume that the result will usually be a moderate pluralistic political system. Second,

Service study.61 But rather than an ad hoc approach, which is at odds with leaders rhetoric about democracy and
exposes the United States to charges of hypocrisy and doubledealing, it would be best to confront the issue of
mixed regimes openly. Organizational support and electoral assistance could help to consolidate a new democracy,
for instance, but be wasted effort or counterproductive in a semidemocracy, where a more effective approach could
be to stress the establishment of stronger international linkages that could serve as the base for democratization
over the long term. Putting the emphasis on cultural and economic ties is also a more promising way to engage
authoritarian regimes compared to menacing them with regime change. Again, this sort of constructive
engagement does happen on an improvised basis, but it could be done better with coordination and an
acknowledgment of the theoretical foundation for doing so. In general, this approach will not produce quick payoffs,
but because potentially productive regime transitions can occur suddenly and unpredictably, the United States still

the United States

should adopt a lower profile. This means limiting the self-righteous
oratory about freedom, because it triggers a defensive response in many
corners of the globe that damages U.S. standing and influence. There should be
must be prepared to adjust its bilateral strategies as circumstances dictate. Third,

a subtle shift in orientation, from campaigning for democracy to supporting it, taking cues from local democratic

avoiding one sided eforts to push democratization in directions a

foreign country is unprepared to go. A lower profile also means reducing expectations for U.S.
forces and

citizens so they do not turn against democracy promotion programs that may work at the margins, such as

In the end, rule-bound

democracy is largely produced from within, not spread from the outside in
a standardized manner. Blustering, all-embracing democracy promotion is
not a way to enhance national security because it wastes U.S. resources
and can prove counterproductive in furthering the ultimate goal , which is to add
technical assistance for governance reform in certain countries.

to the world population of pluralistic majoritarian states. The empirical research on this issue demonstrates that
textured support for government reform has a much better chance of serving U.S. national interests than does an
all-inclusive freedom agenda.

Terror

Middle East
Terror turn Americas democracy promotion in the Middle
East fuels terrorism
Piazza, PhD Politics and IR, 7 (James A. Piazza holds a PhD in Politics from
NYU and an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan. He was,
when this study was published, an Assistant Professor on the tenure track at the
University of North Carolina Charlotte and he is now an Associate Professor and
Director of Graduate Studies at Penn State University, Draining the Swamp:
Democracy Promotion, State Failure, and Terrorism in 19 Middle Eastern Countries,
Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 30:6, 521-539, April 27, 2007)
Will promoting democracy in the Middle East reduce terrorism , both within MiddleEastern countries and among countries that are potential targets of Middle Easternbased terrorist groups ? The 11
September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and
Pennsylvania have led to a dramatic re-orientation of United States
foreign policy toward the Middle East. Predicated on the hypothesis now the
dominant foreign policy paradigm within the Bush administration that terrorism is a product of
nondemocratic governance, a new idealistic interventionism has replaced
the legacy of Cold War realism, culminating in the 2003 invasion of Iraq for
the purposes of draining the swamp; that is to say removing the
conditions that foster terrorism, namely dictatorship. How might promotion of democracy
and civil freedoms in the Middle East reduce terrorism? Proponents of democracy promotion view the climate of unfreedom that
pervades most Middle-Eastern countries as a dangerous precipitant to extremist thought and behavior that results in terrorist
activity.1 The repression, violence, and systematic humiliation used by Middle Eastern regimes like Iraq or Syria as tools of popular
control foster public rage and increase the appeal of fanaticism. In the absence of a free press or freedom of public expression,
proponents of democracy promotion argued, an epistemological retardation pervades political discourse fostering a mood of
paranoia and giving credence to conspiracy stories in which the United States and its allies, namely Israel, are perpetual villains.
Also, in these nondemocracies, public grievances are not addressed and are allowed to fester, providing extremist groups with
material for propaganda, facilitating their recruiting efforts and legitimizing their acts of political violence. Finally, the nature of
nondemocratic regimes retards the public virtues of political moderation and compromise, which are necessary ingredients of
nonviolent political expression (Muravchik 2001). Jennifer L. Windsor, executive director of the Washington, D.C.based nonprofit
Freedom House, articulates a similar vision of the relationship between democratic governance and the reduction of terrorism in the
Middle East: The underlying logic is that democratic institutions and procedures, by enabling the peaceful reconciliation of
grievances and providing channels of participation in policymaking, can help to address those underlying conditions that have fueled
the rise of Islamist Extremism. ... More specifically, promoting democratization in the closed societies of the Middle East can provide
a set of values and ideas that offer a powerful alternative to the kind of extremism that today has found expression in terrorist
activity, often against U.S. interests. (Windsor 2003, 43) Democracy, Civil Liberties, and Terrorism: Political Access versus Strategic
Targeting By and large, scholarly research on the relationship between terrorism, dictatorship, and democracy does not lend
empirical support to the argument that there is a linear relationship between democratic governance or protection of civil liberties

scholars have proposed the opposite: that

democracies are more conducive to terrorist activity than are
dictatorships (Schmid 1992; Charters 1994; Eubank and Weinerg 1994, 1998 and 2001). Other research indicates that the
and the incidence of terrorism. Traditionally,

relationship between democracy and terrorism is either mixed and qualified (Li 2005) or nonlinear (Eyerman 1998). Recent research
by Li (2005) finds that although democratic participation is a negative predictor of the incidence of international terrorism within a
country, government constraints in the form of institutional limitations to executive power found in most democracies increases
terrorism in countries. Li further illustrates that various electoral institutions within democraciesfor example, proportional verses
first-past-the-post systemsare also positive and negative predictors of the incidence of terrorism. In his seminal study Eyerman
(1998), using the assumption that terrorist groups, like all political groups, seek to maximize their rational utility and weigh the costs
against the benefits associated with each terrorist act, observes that there are two theoretical schools of thought regarding the
relationship between democracy and terrorism. The first, termed the political access school, holds that by providing multiple
avenues by which actors can advance their political agendas, democracies increase the utility of legal political activity for all
political actors, including terrorists. Within democracies there is more political space available than in dictatorships, so there is room
within the system for actors who subscribe to anti-status quo or non-mainstream opinions. It is important to note that the access

democracy provides
greater opportunities for terrorists to join mainstream politics. This is in contrast to
school is a political actor-focused conceptual framework, meaning that it argues that

consumer-focused conceptions that argue that democracy makes extremists who may engage in terrorism less appealing to the

public. One would therefore expect democracies to have fewer terrorist attacks, as would-be terrorists merely pursue legitimate
political activities to achieve their goals (Crenshaw 1990; Denardo 1985). The second, termed the strategic school, maintains that

democracies are more tempting targets for terrorism than are

dictatorships because their respect for civil liberties constrain them from
more efective antiterrorism eforts such as surveillance, control over
movement and personal ownership of weapons, associational life, and
media. These same restrictions of executive and police power that are features of democracy also make democratic countries
good hosts for terrorist groups. Moreover, the legitimacy of democratic government
rests ultimately on the publics perception of how well it can protect it
citizens, and in a democracy citizens can punish elected officials at the
ballot box for failure to protect the public. This quality of public
responsiveness makes democracies more willing to negotiate with
terrorists, thus increasing the potential benefits reaped for extremist
groups by terrorist action (Charters 1994; Schmid 1993; Eubank and Weinberg 1992). Eyerman (1998) and a
new generation of scholars find empirical support for both the access and strategic schools. In his own study, Eyerman found that

New
democracies possess all of the liabilities inherent in democracies in
general, making them tempting targets for terrorists as expected by the strategic school,
but they are not as able as established democracies to provide to
terrorists benefits that consistently outweigh the costs of engaging in
political violence as opposed to legal political action because they lack
strong and durable political institutions. Similar results are found by Abadie (2004) and Iqbal and
although democracies overall did exhibit fewer terrorist acts, new democracies were more prone to terrorism.

Zorn (2003), that nonconsolidated democracies are more likely to exhibit terrorism and political violence, and are consistent with
earlier empirical work by Gurr (2000, 1993), which finds that democratization itself can promote political violence because powerful
actors may seek to preserve their authority in the midst of uncertainty fostered by the democratic process. The findings produced in
these studies linking new democracies to terrorism, however, are limited by several design and theoretical qualities. First, with the
exception of Li (2005), they employ rather limited time-framesmost are confined to one or two decades of events or lessand
therefore might be distorted by medium-term episodic rises or falls in general levels of political violence. This is a limitation given
that some scholarship has indicated terrorism occurs in waves that coincide with longer-term changes in global political and
economic trends (Bergensen and Lizardo 2004). The exception is Iqbal and Zorn (2003), but their study is limited only to
examination of predictors of assassinations of heads of state from 1946 to 2000 rather than general incidents of terrorism. Second,
all but one of the studies (Abadie 2004) considers only international terrorist acts, where the perpetrators and the victims or targets
are of different nationalities, rather than both domestic and international incidents, and all of the studies code their dependent
variable (terrorism) based on the country where the incident took place. These design features not only eliminate a rather large
number of events from the studies, but also severely impair any examination of both the access school and the neoconservative
hypothesis on the causes of terrorism. In the post-911 context, in which policymakers speculate that political conditions, namely the
lack of democracy, in the home countries of the terrorist perpetrators themselves (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, and the United
Arab Emirates) are important causes for attacks, it seems particularly important to be able to consider the regime typology of the
country from which the perpetrators are based and to consider all manifestations of terrorism, including the most common
manifestation: domestic terrorism. Finally, with the exception of Iqbal and Zorn (2003) who include a variable for civil wars, none of

The shift in Washington toward democratic

state-building as a means to reduce terrorism has been accompanied by a
much less pronounced discussion among foreign policymakers about the
appropriate timeframe for the withdrawal of United States troops from
Iraq. Within this discussion lies the question of whether or not Iraq is
becoming a failed state: a society experiencing severe political
instability in which the state is unable to provide basic political goods to
its citizens such as personal security. This raises a second foreign policy conventional wisdom, though
one that is much less vociferously articulated by the Bush administration, that failed states like Colombia, Somalia, or
Indonesia (or potentially Iraq) are incubators for terrorist groups and terrorist activity
(Campbell and Flourney 2001). U.S. Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel explains that these types of states pose the
most severe threat to U.S. security at home and abroad because, Terrorism finds sanctuary in failed or
the studies control for domestic political instability.

failing states... (Hagel 2004, 65), Terrorism and State Failure There is a small body of literature on the relationship between failed states and terrorism, but it is theoretical or qualitative
case studyoriented rather than empirical (Rotberg 2002, 2003; Kahler 2002; Takeyh and Gvosdev 2002). The relationship has two mutually reinforcing features: (1) state failure helps to
create the conditions that create terrorists and (2) failed states provide crucial opportunities for already existing terrorist groups. First, by failing to provide for basic human needs and
lacking functioning governing institutions, failed states cannot adequately manage conflicts in society or provide citizens with essential public goods such as security, education, or
economic opportunity. This damages the legitimacy of the state and of mainstream, legal political behavior, thus propelling individuals into extralegal action such as terrorism. Failed
states are also characterized by predatory political elites that prey on citizens and damage the governments ability to manage social strife. The result is that significant proportions of

the population reject the authority of the central government, providing a wider recruiting pool for terrorist groups and a citizenry that will tolerate, if not aid, them. Second, state failure
erodes the ability of national governments to project power internally, creating a political space for non-state actors like terrorist groups, and creates the conditions under which state
agents may provide organizational and financial assets to terrorists. Terrorists can rely on large amounts of territory to base operations such as training, communications, arms storage,
and revenue generating activities that go beyond the much more limited network of safe houses they are limited to constructing in countries with stronger states. Frequently, political
elites within failed states are willing to tolerate the presence of large-scale terrorist operations within national borders in exchange for material compensation, political support or
terrorist services during times of political turmoil. Failed states lack adequate or consistent law-enforcement capabilities, thus permitting terrorist organizations to develop extra-legal
fundraising activities such as smuggling or drug trafficking. However, failed states are recognized nation-states within the world community and therefore retain the outward signs of
sovereignty (Tadekh and Gvosdev 2002, 100), thus providing terrorist groups with the necessary legal documentation, such as passports or end user certificates for arms acquisition,
and protection from external policing efforts. The Middle East Although the Middle East is the primary laboratory for testing the utility of democracy promotion as anti-terrorism policy
exemplified by the 2003 war and occupation in Iraq and ruminations of the use of military force against Syria and Iranthe states of the Middle East provide a useful universe to
empirically test the relationship between (lack of) democracy, civil liberties, state failure, and terrorism. Table 1 illustrates that the states of the Middle East afford researchers with a
large number of illiberal political regimes as well as significant numbers of states that have experienced state failures, making the region central to the discussion of regime type and
political stability as determinants of terrorism. The Middle East is arguably the least democratic region of the world. Freedom House notes that in 2003, only 5.6 percent of Middle Eastern
and North African states could be considered free in terms of political rights or civil liberties, placing it behind every other developing world area including Sub-Saharan Africa.
Moreover, the Middle East is bucking the trend of democratization in the world. The Freedom in the World 2004 report issued by Freedom House notes that while every other region
has increased the number of states considered to be freethe so-called Third Wave of democratizationthe Middle East has actually seen a reduction in the number of free states since
the mid-1990s. Only two democracies exist in the Middle East: Israel and Turkey. While the former, Israel, guarantees democratic freedoms only for Israeli citizens, who are roughly 65
percent of the population of the total territory Israel administers, the latter, Turkey, is an incomplete and unconsolidated democracy where elected civilian government is regularly
punctuated by military rule. A second strata of statesAlgeria, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, and Kuwaitare all nondemocracies, but have at times experimented with limited political and civil
liberalization. The remaining states are solid dictatorships, one group of whichEgypt, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, and Yemenare bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes characterized by
one-party rule and personalistic dictators and another groupBahrain, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emiratesare autocratic monarchies. Next to SubSaharan Africa, the Middle East is the region exhibiting the largest percentage of states that suffer from state failures from 1998 to 2003, although all of the regions of the world
dominated by developing or transitional states besides Latin America have relatively high levels of state failure. What makes the Middle East unique, and what is not captured by the
figures in Table 1, is the intense and chronic nature of state failure exhibited in some states in the region. Several statesLebanon from 1975 to 1991; Israel from 1987 to 2004; Iraq
from 1980 to 1998; and Turkey from 1984 to 2000have experienced prolonged periods of armed ethnic conflict, civil war, and widespread political insurgency. Others suffer from
prolonged but low-grade insurgencies such as the Saharawi insurrection in Morocco 1975 to 1989 or the Dhofar tribal insurgency in Oman from 1970 to 1976, or from short but intense
bouts of large-scale conflict such as the Syrian confrontation with Islamist guerrillas in 1982 or the suppression of a separatist insurgency by Yemen in 1993. Like many African states,
Middle Eastern states suffer from what Kahler (2002) refers to as stateless areas, a condition linked to the incubation of terrorism where the central government is unable to project its
power in substantial regions of the country controlled by insurgents or regional actors. A report on terrorism in Yemen by the International Crisis Group faults the weakness of Yemeni
political institutions, poverty and the inability of the state to extend its authority to more remote tribal regions as precipitants of domestic terrorism (International Crisis Group 2003).
Kahler does allow for a non-spatial variant of the stateless area condition in the case of Saudi Arabia, arguing that the Saudi government was not able to penetrate powerful civil society
and parastatal institutions, namely Muslim charities, that provide material sustenance to groups like Al Qaeda. Lebanon from 1975 to 1982 (and possibly later) also fits the bill as failed
state suffering from stateless areas, which permitted the Palestine Liberation Organization to base its operations in Beirut and Southern Lebanon. Analysis This study seeks to add to th e
discussion of dictatorship and state failures as root causes of terrorism by conducting a cross-national, pooled, time-series statistical regression analysis on the incidence of terrorism in

The analysis is limited to the Middle East, specifically the

cases of Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, IsraelPalestine, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia,
Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, in order test the contention that democracy is a panacea for terrorism in
19 Middle Eastern states from 1972 to 2003.

the region of the world that U.S. foreign policymakers have chosen as
their laboratory for their counterterrorism policy model

and to also provide an empirical base to the largely

descriptive and theoretical body of scholarship on terrorism produced by Middle Easternists2 (see, for example, Zunes 2003; Khashan 1997; Lewis 1987; Martin 1987; Amos 1985). There are three hypotheses tested in the analysis,
using 16 negative binomial regression models on a total of 493 observations: Hypothesis 1: Democratic governance and state protection of civil liberties in the Middle East are negatively related to the incidence of terrorism.
Hypothesis 2: Democratic governance and state protection of civil liberties in the Middle East are positively related to the incidence of terrorism. Hypothesis 1 captures the expectations of the political access school of thought
regarding terrorism where one would expect more politically liberal states to be equipped to integrate the political expectations of would-be terrorists into a legal rather than extra-legal framework. The result would be fewer terrorist
attacks both at home and abroad. Hypothesis 2 captures the expectations of the strategic school of thought, which argues that democracies are both particularly vulnerable to attack from domestic and or international terrorists and
may find themselves hosts to terrorist groups because their antiterrorism policies are constricted by the rights protections inherent in all democratic societies. The states of the Middle East also provide a wide range of state failures
to examine as predictors of terrorist activity. Controlling for democratic governance and other socioeconomic variables, a third hypothesis is also studied: Hypothesis 3: State failures, measured in the aggregate, are positively related
to the incidence of domestic and international terrorism in the cases examined. Because of the nature of the dependent variable in the study, a Poisson distribution is more appropriate that an ordinary least squares (OLS) statistical
regression model to analyze the data. The study seeks to explain change or variation in the incidence (frequency) of terrorist incidents, sorted by country targeted by the attacks and the country that is the host of the group
launching the attacks. Terrorist attacks are sporadic and concentrated in certain countries or at certain time periods, and therefore from a quantitative perspective cannot be expected to be conform to a normal distribution. Also, an
event count of terrorist incidents cannot produce negative count data for any given observation; the lowest value of any observation is a zero, indicating that no terrorist attacks have occurred in that country in that year. Both of
these qualities violate basic assumptions of OLS regression analysis and recommend a Poisson distribution instead. Furthermore, given that the individual event counts used in the study are not theoretically independent of each
othera country may very well experience a rash of attacks spread out across multiple years by the same terrorist groupa negative binomial Poisson distribution is most appropriate. It produces the same mean as a basic Poisson
distribution, but is better suited to data exhibiting a wider variance, thus reducing standard errors and netting less biased estimators (Brandt et al. 2000; Cameron and Trivedi 1998; King 1989). In the study the state of Israel and the
occupied Palestinian territories are operationalized as one aggregated case, though this may be a controversial methodological decision. There are two justifications for aggregating these two entities into one case: First and
foremost, the two entities are highly interconnected in terms of political, economic, and social life. The political conflict that produces terrorism within both of the entities was produced by the political conflict originating in the 1967
occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem by Israeli forces that continues to this day. Moreover, nationals of both political entities reside throughout Israel proper and the occupied territories, and until recently,
Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank regularly commuted into Israel for employment. Second, the state of Israel has effectively controlled public policy within the occupied territories since 1967, and this has meant that the Israeli
government has helped to determine the shape of political and economic development both for Jewish residents of Israeli proper and Palestinians living in the territories. This poses a simple methodological problem: there is no
independent government, or economy, on which to base measurements of variables for the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. Although a semi-independent Palestinian National Authority was created in 1994, it still lacks
sovereignty, the quintessential quality of all nation-states. To remedy this, all variables for the case IsraelPalestine are operationalized as indexes of population-weighted averages that include the State of Israel and the occupied
Palestinian territories, producing aggregate measures of the regime type, economy, and demographic structure of the populations of both entities. However, this methodological decision could potentially bias the study and is
vulnerable to charges of subjectivity on the part of the researcher. Therefore, a separate set of statistical models are run that exclude IsraelPalestine as a case to determine the dependence of models on the total 19 cases on
inclusion of IsraelPalestine. The source for yearly terrorist incidents by casethe unit of analysis for the studyis the data collected by the Rand Corporation and collated by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of
Terrorism, which operationally defines terrorism as: ...violence, or the threat of violence, calculated to create an atmosphere of fear and alarm. These acts are designed to coerce others into actions they would not otherwise
undertake, or refrain from actions they desired to take. All terrorist acts are crimes. Many would also be violation of the rules of war if a state of war existed. This violence or threat of violence is generally directed against civilian
targets. The motives of all terrorists are political, and terrorist actions are generally carried out in a way that will achieve maximum publicity. Unlike other criminal acts, terrorists often claim credit for their acts. Finally, terrorist acts
are intended to produce effects beyond the immediate physical damage of the cause, having long-term psychological repercussions on a particular target audience. The fear created by terrorists may be intended to cause people to
exaggerate the strengths of the terrorist and the importance of the cause, to provoke governmental overreaction, to discourage dissent, or simply to intimidate and thereby enforce compliance with their demands.3 To fully test the
two hypotheses, especially in order to examine both the access and strategic schools, and to make appropriate use of the MIPT data, terrorism is operationalized as four dependent variables which are run in separate models: (1)
international terrorist incidents sorted by the country targeted from 1972 to 1997; (2) international and domestic terrorist incidents sorted by the country targeted from 1998 to 2003; (3) terrorist incidents sorted by country or
countries that serve as the base for terrorist attacks abroad from 1972 to 1997; (4) terrorist incidents sorted by country or countries that serve as the base for terrorist attacks both domestically and abroad from 1998 to 2003. The
first distinction, between international and international and domestic incidents, is one driven by the data available from MIPT. Although it is methodological desirable to consider both domestic and international attacks combined
incidents committed where the perpetrator and the target or victim may or may not be nationals of the same countryfor the entire time-series, aggregation of incidents in this way is only available post 1998.4 Prior to 1998, data is
only available for international incidents. Terrorists incidents are also sorted both by target, the country and year within the time-series in which the terrorist act occurred, and by source, the country or countries per year that
serve as bases of operation for terrorist groups that engage in operations, as defined by the MIPT database of terrorist organizations. Targeted countries and source countries are analyzed in separate dependent variables. Examining
both states targeted by terrorism and states that are sources for terrorist groups facilitates a more confident evaluation of both the access and strategic schools as well as the role played by state failures because it paints a complete
picture of the domestic vulnerability of the state to terrorist attacks and the domestic political conditions that may breed terrorists. The analysis contains no incidents that occurred across two different countries, thereby yielding two
target countries. However, as is often the case, terrorist groups base their operations in more than one state. For the analysis, each state that is the host of the terrorist group perpetrating the act in question is allocated an equal
count of the event. As an example, because the Black September Organization, a Palestinian militant group active in the 1970s and 1980s, is listed by MIPT as having bases of operation in Jordan, Lebanon, and in the Palestinian
Occupied Territories during its active period, a terrorist act committed by Black September in a given year will be recorded as one incident for Jordan, Lebanon, and IsraelPalestine. This is an imperfect methodology because it
equally weights three states as sources for terrorism though in reality the stateless area afforded Black September by civil-war wracked Lebanon in the 1980s or the lack of political freedom that plagues Palestinians living in Jordan
or the limitations to counterterrorism efforts placed on the Israeli state by its democratic process and legal institutions might play a disproportionate role in fueling terrorist incidents. However, data do not permit fine-tuning of this
nature and this is the least-subjective method of distribution of acts by source country. Table 2 lists all variables used in the models as well as their operationalization. To test the hypotheses, three independent variables are used:
one that measures the degree of democratic governance in each case per year, Democracy (Polity IV); another that measures the degree of civil liberties protections in each case per year, FH Civil Liberties; and the other
measures the presence and intensity of state failures in each case per year, State Failures. The first independent variable is operationalized as the yearly POLITY measurement from the Polity IV database. This measurement is an
index ranging from -10, signifying a complete autocracy, to 10, signifying a complete democracy. The expectation, given the two-tailed nature of the first hypothesis, is that Democracy (Polity IV) will either be a positive or negative
predictor of the incidents in terrorism, measured all four ways in the statistical models. The second independent variable is operationalized as annual index of civil liberties protections coded by the independent nongovernmental
agency Freedom House in its annual publication Freedom in the World. The Freedom House civil liberties index is an ordinal measure between 1, which would indicate a status of the highest protection of civil liberties such as
freedom of speech, conscience or association, and 7, which would indicate a status of the lowest protection of aforementioned rights. As with Democracy (Polity IV), the expectation given the two-tailed nature of the first hypothesis
is that FH Civil Liberties will either be a positive or negative predictor of the incidents in terrorism, measured all four ways in the statistical models. The third independent variable is operationalized as a measure of aggregate state
failures suffered by a given case in a given year. All data for state failures is taken from the State Failure Task Force database, collected by researchers associated with the Center for International Development and Conflict
Management (CIDCM) at the University of Maryland. The CIDCM State Failure Task Force defines state failures as episodes of extreme political instability that test the ability of the state to preserve order and identifies four major
types of state failure: ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, genocides and politicides, and adverse regime changes. The variable State Failures in this analysis is an additive index ranging from 0 to 16 of the intensity levels of all four
types of state failure, which themselves are coded by the State Failure Task Force as measures of intensity where 0 indicates no state failures and 4 indicates highly intense manifestations of state failures. The expectation is that
State Failures will be a positive predictor of the incidence of terrorism across all of the models. The models control for several socioeconomic features. The first is Area, or the total surface area contained within the recognized
boundaries of each state, and the second is Population, or the yearly total population count in millions. Eyerman (1998) notes that geographically large countries have higher policing costs and are therefore more susceptible to
terrorist attacks. Likewise, populous countries also raise the costs associated with counterterrorism efforts as terrorist groups can more easily obscure their activities and escape detection. Gross domestic product (GDP), measured
yearly in millions of $U.S., is a control used by Abadie (2004) and Eyerman (1998) in their respective studies and measures the total resources available to enhance state policing and or repressive measures. It is something of a
conventional wisdom that poverty and poor economic development are root causes of terrorism, although this has not been validated by a slate of recent empirical studies (Piazza 2006; Abadie 2004; Krueger and Maleckova 2003),
though Li and Schaub (2004) in their statistical study of 112 countries from 1975 to 1997 did find that a countrys GDP was a negative predictor of terrorism, positioning level of economic development as an interaction variable
linking international economic openness to lower levels of terrorism. It is nonetheless considered as a control and is expected to be a negative predictor of terrorism across the models, if significant at all. Finally, a variable measuring
the total years that the current political regime has been in place in each observation, labeled Regime Durability, is also included in the analysis. Regime Durability is operationalized by inserting the value for Durable coded in the
Polity IV dataset. It is expected that more durable regimes are less likely to experience terrorism. (Li 2005) Sixteen statistical models are run in all. The nucleus of the analysis is contained in models 1 through 8 to accommodate four
dependent variablesthe two measures of terrorist incidents, international and international and domestic attacks, each of which is sorted into attacks by target and attacks by sourceand to accommodate two independent
variablesboth Democracy (Polity IV) and FH Civil Libertieswhich are run in separate models. Furthermore, models 1 through 8 are run yet again omitting IsraelPalestine as a case as models 9 through 16 to control for the outlier
effect that those observations may contain. Finally, two features are added to the models to correct for autocorrelation and multicollinearity errors. A 1-year lagged dependent variable [B1Incidents(t-1)j] is inserted after the intercept,
as is appropriate in time-series multiple regression analysis, and a collinearity test is run on all of the independent variables. Results Table 3 presents the results of the first four models, which examine the effects of the independent
variables on the incidence of terrorism by target country in the Middle East The results of models 1 through 4 lend partial support to the strategic school, rather than the political access school, as it applies to Middle Eastern states. In
Models 1 and 3, which examine international terrorist attacks only, specifically where the perpetrator and the target or victim are of different national origins, Democracy (Polity IV) is a positive predictor of terrorism whereas FH Civil
Liberties is a negative predictor. This suggests that terrorism is more likely to occur in Middle-Eastern states that are political democracies and that protect civil liberties. (Note that the operationalization of FH Civil Liberties is
invertedregimes that protect civil liberties are scored low on the scaleso results are interpreted using the opposite sign of results for Democracy [Polity IV]). However, when terrorism is measured as both domestic and
international attacks by target, neither Democracy (Polity IV) nor FH Civil Liberties are signfiicant. This is an interesting result because the two measurements of terrorism are logically and quantitativelythere are more total attacks
coded per year when using the international and domestic aggregationdifferent. However, it is also possible that the different results found in models 1 and 3 and models 2 and 4 are due to the very different time-series used: the
26-year series (1972 to 1997) for international only verses the six year series (1998 to 2003) for the international combined with domestic. A more comparable span of data would be desirable, although presently unobtainable.

However, across three of the first four models, State Failures is a strong, significant, and positive predictor of terrorism, regardless of how terrorism is measured. This suggests that Middle-Eastern states that suffer from state failures
are more likely to both host groups that will commit terrorist acts at home and abroad and are also more likely to be the target of terrorist groups from other states. Moreover, in three of the four models, the coefficient for State
Failures is the largest in the model, and the coefficients are significant at the highest (.000) level. Few of the control variables are significant across models 14, and there are two surprising results. Population is a significant predictor
in models 1 and 3, as expected, but GDP is a significant positive predictor of terrorism in models 2 and 4 whereas Regime Durability is a significant negative predictor in model 2. The results for GDP and Regime Durability run counter
to expectations, but it is telling that these counterintuitive results occur in the models with the shorter time series, as previously found. Table 4 presents the results of models 5 through 8, in which the dependent variable, terrorism,
is sorted by source country among Middle-Eastern states. As in models 1 through 4, models 5 through 8 provide partial vindication for the strategic school at the expense of the political access school but leave some nagging
questions. In Table 4, Democracy (Polity IV) is a consistent, significant positive predictor of terrorist attacks; however, FH Civil Liberties is not. That is to say that more politically liberal regimes in the Middle East, as measured by
Polity IV, are more prone to harbor terrorist groups that commit terrorist acts either at home or abroad than are politically illiberal regimes. However, Middle-Eastern states that respect civil libertiesthe very same freedoms that
pose barriers to state actors who may seek to apprehend terrorists or quash terrorist networksare no more likely than Middle-Eastern states with poor civil liberties protections to host terrorist groups. This is difficult to reconcile
within the confines of the strategic school and either prompts a consideration of Middle-Eastern exceptionalism or a re-conceptualization of the relationship between the self-imposed limitations within democracies fighting terrorism.
It may be possible that within the Middle East, mass political participation serves to inhibit governmental efforts to arrest terrorists and disrupt terrorist networks because the significant segments of the public regards them as having
a legitimate political agenda. A cases in point would be Yemen, where Al Qaeda militants might enjoy some sympathy from a public that is permitted to participate in albeit incomplete elections. Or, a second possibility is that in
countries where public outrage against terrorists has prompted an over-zealous antiterrorism policy from the government that itself fuels terrorist activity and recruitment. The case here would be Turkey, where public outrage against
Kurdish Worker Party (PKK) attacks in the 1980s and 1990s facilitated a harsh antiterrorism policy that included torture, arbitrary arrest, detention, and sentencing, and direct military reprisal against Kurdish civilians. These measures
on the part of Turkish government security forces enhanced Kurdish support for the PKKs objectives, thus assisting PKK recruitment, organization of safe houses, and procurement of supplies. Again, in models 5 through 8 state
failures is a significant, at times highly significant, positive predictor of the incidence of terrorism. This illustrates that regardless of whether or not the Middle-Eastern state in question is considered to be a target of terrorist attacks or
a source of terrorist attacks, terrorists thrive in countries beset with state failures. A few control variables are significant, and again yield results that counter expectations. GDP is a negative predictor of international terrorism in
model 5, but is a positive predictor of terrorism in model 8, as is regime durability. Again, it is possible that sample size is responsible for these differences. Finally, all models are re-run omitting the potentially problematic case of
IsraelPalestine, producing the results shown in Table 5: Roughly the same results are obtained in the modified data set analyzed in models 9 through 16. Democratic governance seems to be a somewhat consistent positive predictor
of terrorism, while in at least one model (model 11), civil liberties protections are a positive predictor of international terrorism by sourcegiven the negative relationship between FH Civil Liberties, an indicator where states
exhibiting poor protections of civil rights are scored higher. Some support for the strategic school is found, although no support is evident for the political access school. And State Failures is a nearly perfectly consistent positive
predictor of terrorism, regardless of how terrorism is measured or how terrorist attacks are sorted. Population, as a control variable, is significant in two of the models (9 and 11) and is a positive predictor, as expected. However, GDP
and Regime Durability continue to exhibit inconsistent and counterintuitive results. Overall, models 9 through 16 dispel the possibility that the results found in Tables 1 and 2that state failure is the most significant predictor of the
incidence of terrorism, while democracy and civil liberties are more weakly associated with terrorist incidentsare a mere product of the inclusion of a set of observations from an outlier case: a combined Israel and Palestine.

Conclusion The results of this study are preliminary, but they do not lend support to
the hypothesis that fostering democracy in the Middle East will provide a
bulwark against terrorism. Rather, the results suggest the opposite: that
more liberal Middle-Eastern political systems are actually more
susceptible to the threat of terrorism than are the more dictatorial
regimes, as predicted by the strategic school approach to the relationship between democracy and terrorism. Furthermore,
the result of the study do lend empirical support to the descriptive literature linking failed states to terrorism: those Middle-Eastern
states with significant episodes of state failures are more likely to be the target of and the host for terrorists. Because the study
examines multiple measurements of terrorism, by target and by source, multiple measures of political liberalization, democratic
processes and civil liberties, and includes what is strangely overlooked by other studies of democracy and terrorism, the role played
by state failures, it contributes to scholarly understanding of the relationship between terrorism, democracy, and political stability

The
results suggests that a foreign policy toward the Middle East constructed
around democracy promotion, or around widening of civil liberties, will not
reap a significant security dividend in terms of terrorism. Rather, it may
exacerbate the problems of terrorism, both within Middle-Eastern states
and for other countries targeted by terrorist groups based in Middle-East
states. These findings potentially dampen the enthusiasm of some
scholars of the Middle East who have hoped that stalled (or nonexistent) eforts at
democratization or the widening of rights through the creation of civil society in the Middle East
would be revived as the beneficiaries of a new U.S. foreign policy
imperative toward the region. For much of the past ten years, the Middle East has lagged far behind every
while assessing the potential effectiveness of current antiterrorism policy. These findings have significant policy implications.

other world region in terms of democratization, as noted previously, and the field of Middle East Studies has vainly searched for
signs of nascent democratization among civil society actors in Middle-Eastern countries. This study is the first to lend empirical
support to a criticism of democracy-promotion already present within the field of foreign policy research. In his December 2003
article in Foreign Affairs (2003), director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project for the Carnegie Endowment for International

the Bush administration emphasis on democracybuilding in the Middle East as a means to preventing terrorism. Although lionizing the principle of promoting
Peace Thomas Carothers critiques

democracy in a region so characterized by dictatorial rulebut seriously questioning whether or not the new policy really will really
prove to be a departure from the Cold War policy of supporting pro-U.S. dictatorships in the region out of self-interest in the final
analysisCarothers warns that democracy might not prove to be the solid bulwark against terrorism that it is fashioned to be. He

relies too heavily on what is essentially a

fairly simplistic modernization theory conception of Islamic radicalism,
that it is a manifestation of traditional society that can be eradicated
through more modern and Western political and social engineering. The
roots of radical Islamist movements, on the contrary, are complex, varied
and multifaceted Carothers argues, and democracy is not likely to be the cureall. Moreover, borrowing a page from the strategic school, Carothers warns that democratization might
widen the political space for radicals in the Middle East and he regards the histories of
notes that democracy-promotion policy in the Middle East

newly democratized states as a cautionary tale to those who see rapid democratization as a stabilizing force in Islamic societies.
Finally, Carothers observes that democracy, itself is not always a simple panacea for terrorism outside of the Middle East. He
specifically notes Spain as a case study: it is a consolidated, though newer, Western democracy that is the target of regular and
violent terrorist attacks from the Basque separatist movement, ETA. One could add a host of other established democracies to the
list of countries that are either sources for or targets of terrorism: Great Britain, India, Italy, Greece, and the United States.

Election Focus

Generic
Democratization fails focuses only on elections
Levitsky and Way 05 [Steven Levitsky is assistant professor of government
at Harvard University. Lucan Way, assistant professor of political science at Temple
University, is a visiting scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area
Studies. International Linkage and Democratization Journal of Democracy, Volume
16, Number 3, July 2005, pp. 20-34]
Western leverage may be defined as authoritarian governments
vulnerability to external democratizing pressure. International actors may
exert leverage in a variety of ways, including political conditionality and punitive
sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and military intervention. The impact of such
measures (or even the threat of them) on authoritarian governments is greatest in regimes over which Western
leverage is high. The level of Western leverage is determined by at least three factors. The first and most important
is states raw size and military and economic strength. Weak states with small, underdeveloped economies
including much of sub-Saharan Africaare far more vulnerable to external pressure than those with substantial
military or economic power. In larger, more powerful countrieslike China, India, and Russia sanctions, threats,
military force, or other instruments of external pressure are less likely to be employed, and when they are
employed, they are less likely to be effective. The second factor is the existence of competing issues on Western

Leverage may be limited, and regimes less vulnerable to

external democratizing pressure, in countries where Western governments
have important economic or security interests at stake, as in much of the
Middle East and East Asia. In these regions, Western powers are less likely to
maintain a consensus behind demands for political reform, thereby
limiting the efectiveness of those demands. Finally, Western leverage is reduced in cases
foreign policy agendas.

where governments have access to political, economic, or military support from an alternative regional power.
Russia, for example, has provided critical support to autocrats in Armenia and Belarus, and South African assistance
to Zimbabwe enabled the government of President Robert Mugabe to weather intense international democratizing

In Central Europe and the Americas, by contrast, no

alternative regional power exists, leaving the EU and the United States as
the only game in town. Leverage raises the cost of repression, electoral
fraud, and other government abuses. Where Western powers exert substantial leverage, as in
pressure between 2000 and 2005.

much of sub-Saharan Africa, Central Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean, international pressure has
played an important role in deterring or ending full-scale authoritarian rule. During the 1990s, for example, Western
intervention helped thwart or roll back military coups in Ecuador, Haiti, Guatemala, and Paraguay, and external
pressure was critical in forcing autocrats to cede power or hold multiparty elections in such countries as Benin,
Georgia, Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia. Nevertheless ,

Western leverage over electoral

authoritarian regimes is rarely sufficient to convince them to democratize.
Even during its heyday during the 1990s, Western pressure for democratization was
inconsistent and often inefective.4 With the exception of the EU enlargement process, the
instrument of political conditionality generally proved too blunt to achieve
complete democratization. International actors focused mainly on
elections, often neglecting such essential components of democracy as civil liberties and
a level political playing field. Countries often slipped out of the Western
spotlight once elections had been held, even when elections failed to
bring democracy (as in Zambia, Kenya, and Peru during the 1990s). As a consequence,
although blatantly authoritarian acts such as military coups or the cancellation of elections often triggered strong

Western pressure routinely failed to

deter more subtle abuses of power, including government control and
manipulation of the media, harassment of the opposition, and significant levels of electoral fraud.
international reactions during the postCold War period,

Credibility

Generic
US democracy promotion incites opposition past actions and
perception as regime change
Carothers 06 [March/April 2006. Thomas Carothers is the vice president for
studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he founded and
currently directs the Democracy and Rule of Law Program. The Backlash Against
Democracy Promotion Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/200603-01/backlash-against-democracy-promotion]
The backlash against democracy aid can be understood as a reaction by
nondemocratic governments to the increasingly assertive provision of
such aid. But it is also linked to and gains force from another source: the broader public
unease with the very idea of democracy promotion, a feeling that has spread
widely in the past several years throughout the former Soviet Union, western
Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. President Bush, by embracing
democracy promotion in the way he has, is largely responsible for this discomfort. Washington's use of
the term "democracy promotion" has come to be seen overseas not as the
expression of a principled American aspiration but as a code word for "regime change " -namely, the replacement of bothersome governments by military force or
other means. Moreover, the Bush administration has also caused the term to be closely associated with U.S.
military intervention and occupation by adopting democracy promotion as the principal rationale for the invasion of

The fact that the administration has also given the impression that it is
interested in toppling other governments hostile to U.S. security interests, such as in Iran
and Syria, has made the president's "freedom agenda" seem even more
menacing and hostile. This is especially so since when Bush and his top advisers single out
"outposts of tyranny," the governments they invariably list are those that
also happen to be unfriendly to the United States. Meanwhile, friendly but
equally repressive regimes, such as that in Saudi Arabia, escape mention.
This behavior has made many states, nondemocratic and democratic alike, uneasy with
the whole body of U.S. democracy-building programs, no matter how
routine or uncontroversial the programs once were . It also makes it easier
for those governments eager to push back against democracy aid for their own
reasons to portray their actions as noble resistance to aggressive U.S.
interventionism. And the more President Bush talks of democracy promotion as his personal cause, the
Iraq.

easier he makes it for tyrannical leaders to play on his extraordinarily high level of unpopularity abroad to disparage
the idea. The Bush administration has further damaged the credibility of U.S. democracy advocates by generally

Even as the
president has repeatedly asserted his commitment to a "freedom agenda,"
he has struck blow after self-inflicted blow against America's democratic
principles and standards: through the torture of prisoners and detainees at U.S.-run
facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan; the holding of hundreds of persons in legal limbo at Guantnamo Bay,
undermining the United States' status as a symbol of democracy and human rights.

Cuba; the rendition of foreign detainees (sometimes secretly abducted abroad) to foreign countries known to
practice torture; the establishment of a network of covert U.S.-run prisons overseas;
eavesdropping without court warrants within the United States; and the astonishing resistance by the White House
last year to a legislative ban on cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of any person in U.S. custody anywhere.

these actions have inflicted incalculable harm to the United

States' image in the world. This fact is plainly and painfully evident to anyone who spends even

Taken together,

modest amounts of time abroad. Yet it is one about which President Bush and his team, with the possible exception

the damage has made it

all too easy for foreign autocrats to resist U.S. democracy promotion by
providing them with an easy riposte: "How can a country that tortures
people abroad and abuses rights at home tell other countries how to
behave?
of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, appear unaware or unconcerned. Yet

Democratization wont be efective US is unwilling to use the

full range of options
Brzel 15 [2015. Tanja A. Brzel holds the chair for European Integration at the
Freie Universitt Berlin. She received her PhD from the European University Institute
in Florence, Italy in 1999. From 1999 to 2004, she conducted her research and
taught at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, the
Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin and the University Heidelberg. The noble west and
the dirty rest? Western democracy promoters and illiberal regional powers
Democratization, 22:3, 519-535]
The EU and the US made democracy promotion an explicit goal of their
foreign policy. Yet, they also pursue other goals, such as political stability,
economic growth, energy supply, or security. While in principle these goals
are seen as complementary, the democratization of (semi-)authoritarian
countries entails the risk of their destabilization at least in the short run. The more
unstable and the less democratic the target state is, the more difficult it is
to reconcile democracy promotion with ensuring security and stability .30
This democratization-stability dilemma largely confirms the second hypothesis of the editors that Western
democracy promoters only react to countervailing policies by nondemocratic regional power if they prioritize democracy and human rights
goals over stability and security goals. 31 The prioritizing explains why the
US and the EU ignored attempts of Saudi Arabia to undermine
democratization processes in Arab Spring countries and the Gulf region .32
Liberal and illiberal regional powers equally prioritize stability and security.33 Ukraine is one of the few cases in
which the EU and US have sought to counter the countervailing strategies of the illiberal regional power, arguably
because of Russias attempts to destabilize the country. Thus, rather than prioritizing democracy over stability,
Putins strategy of managed instability34 has driven the EU and the US to step up their efforts at democracy
promotion supporting democratic political forces that have the greatest potential to politically and economically

interdependent
relationships with illiberal regional powers, particularly with regard to
energy and security, also make Western democracy promoters more likely
to compromise their eforts at democracy promotion and tolerate
countervailing strategies of illiberal regional powers. 36 The EU and US
have not been prepared to make full use of sanctions in order to counter
Russias violations of Georgias and Ukraines territorial integrity in 2008
and 2014, respectively.37 While Ukraine and the EU signed the Association Agreement in August 2014,
stabilize Ukraine.35 In accordance with the second hypothesis of the editors,

the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) has been suspended for a year amid Russias threats
of retaliatory measures against both Ukraine and the EU. The EU also signalled that is was prepared to revise parts
of the DCFTA to accommodate Russias concerns.38 In a similar vein ,

the US has been unwilling to

risk its alliance with its most important allies in the region over Saudi

Arabias assistance in suppressing the Shia uprising in Bahrain. 39 Finally,

China is too important for both the EU and the US to openly support Hong
Kongs umbrella revolution in its protests against Beijings efforts to compromise the one country
two systems doctrine by curbing political freedoms.40 In sum, if illiberal powers only
counteract Western democracy promotion if their economic or security
interests are at stake, Western democracy promoters only respond to such
countervailing strategies if they see their geopolitical interests
challenged.

Middle Eastern democracies would only be more anti-american

wouldnt support Western democratic ideals
Jones 13 (Seth, associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy
Center at the RAND Corporation, as well as an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins
University's School for Advanced International Studies, Jan/Feb2013, Foreign Affairs,
Vol. 92 Issue 1, p55-63., The Mirage of the Arab Spring, , mm)
the cold reality is that some democratic governments in the Arab
world would almost certainly be more hostile to the United States than
their authoritarian predecessors, because they would be more responsive
to the populations of their countries, which are largely anti- American .
According to a 2012 Pew Research poll, the United States image in several countries in
the Muslim world has deteriorated sharply over the past several years .
In fact,

Before the Arab uprisings, for example, 27 percent of Egyptians and 25 percent of Jordanians polled had favorable
attitudes toward the United States. By 2012, those numbers had dropped to 19 percent and 12 percent,

The September 2012 anti-American demonstrations in the region, which

spread from Egypt and Libya throughout the Middle East, provided yet another reminder that
anti-American and anti-Western sentiments still exist in the Muslim world .
respectively.

Market Reform

Generic
Modernisation is the dominant strategy the US uses to
democratize nations this leads to market oriented reforms
which fail to produce democracy
Berger 11 [Lars Berger obtained his PhD from the Friedrich Schiller University in
Jena (Germany) in 2006 and is currently a Lecturer in Politics and Contemporary
History of the Middle East in the School of English, Sociology, Politics and
Contemporary History at Salford University. The Missing Link? US Policy and the
International Dimensions of Failed Democratic Transitions in the Arab World
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011 VOL 59, 3855]
After the events of 11 September 2001, leading US diplomats admitted that decades-old policies which had
subordinated the goal of expanding the ThirdWave of democratisation to the Middle East to safeguarding other
perceived national interests (Anderson, 2001; Berger, 2009) were partly to blame for sustaining the regions
democratic exception (Haass, 2002).

When

Secretary of State Colin

Powell unveiled the so-called

Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington DC as the main

he bemoaned the condescending notion that

freedom could not grow in the Middle East. Declaring that Any approach to the Middle
vehicle to address these shortcomings,

East that ignores its political, economic, and educational underdevelopment will be built on sand(Powell,2002),

he

made clear that the state department-led eforts on political reform in the
Arab world would be informed by the analysis of the modernisation school. First propagated by
Seymour Martin Lipset, this approach emphasises the structural preconditions for
democracy and quantifiable indices, such as wealth measured in per capita income,
industrialisation, urbanisation and education (Lipset, 1993). In his classic assessment of
the preconditions for Middle Eastern democracy Charles Issawi therefore deemed nothing less than a
great economic and social transformation which will strengthen society
and make it capable of bearing the weight of the modern State to be a
necessary, if not a sufficient, condition for the establishment of genuine
democracy (Issawi, 1956, p. 41). Obviously such grandiose prescriptions can easily
justify external support for authoritarian regimes on the grounds that the
relevant country has demonstrated insufficient socioeconomic
development (Grugel, 1999). At least they explain why those interested in whether or not the United States
can actually promote democracy deemed the modernisation literature curiously unsatisfying (Allison and Beschel,
1992, p. 85).3 The decision to put MEPIs management under the leadership of Deputy-Assistant Secretary of State
Liz Cheney, daughter of then Vice-President Dick Cheney, and into the hands of the state departments Near East

70 per cent of all grants went directly to Arab

governments and only 17.5 per cent to representatives of Arab civil society (Carothers,
2005; Wittes, 2004b).4 The tendency of MEPI officers to seek approval for their projects from
respective Arab governments further limited the programmes efectiveness
in promoting genuine political reform (Wittes and Yerkes, 2006): In the words of one friend in
the White House, the typical aid recipient in the Middle East is the son of an
ambassador, with a German mother, who happens to run an ngo (Alterman,
bureau meant that, initially,

2004). With MEPI quickly becoming a vehicle for the authoritarian upgrading of Arab regimes (Heydemann, 2007),

a free trade zone with the region (Wayne, 2003) and privileged bilateral trade
agreements or World Trade Organisation (WTO) membership for peaceful countries (Zoellick, 2003)
the promise of

constituted another pillar of the Bush administrations attempts to apply the modernisation schools concepts. It

followed the hypothesis attractive to policy makers looking for a loftier framing of the parochial
interest in the spread of free market economies that capitalism contributes to

democratisation by requiring the rule of law to function properly (Deudney and

Ikenberry, 2009) as well as by creating demands for political participation from a
skilled workforce used to independent thinking and articulation (Inglehart and Welzel, 2009). As a
comparatively rich country with a per capita GDP of roughly US$20,000 in 2008 Saudi Arabia
challenges the conventional wisdom that posits a direct link between
economic wealth and democracy. In fact, if one accepts that post-materialist
liberty aspirations increase the likelihood of authoritarian failure (Welzel and
Inglehart,2005), then the largest of the oil-rich countries of the Arab peninsula would be
a prime candidate.5 Yet in Saudi Arabia supposedly reform-conducive social orientations
contrast with a political reality where resource-based external rents and the associated segmented
clientelism (Hertog, 2005) have prevented the emergence of a politically
engaged bourgeoisie. Apart from Vietnam, Saudi Arabia was the only country out of 72 covered in the
2000 wave of the WorldValues Survey that had achieved a score indicating slight emphasis on self-expression
values vis--vis survival values without achieving at least partly free status in the 2009 Freedom House Index
(Freedom House, 2009a; World Values Survey, 2009).6 Saudi Arabias rankings are not surprising to those who see
economic growth as a precondition, not for the establishment, but for the political stability of a democracy

light of the postulate that

integration into the global economy increases potentially reform-inducing
linkages and decreases an authoritarian regimes ability to curtail them
(Levitsky and Way, 2005; Way and Levitsky, 2006), a free trade approach might expand the
still limited Western leverage over Saudi Arabia. In fact, reflecting a broader change in business culture in
(Dorenspleet, 2004; Pevehouse, 2002; Przeworski and Limongi, 1997).7 In

the Arab Gulf region which some regard as a possible step towards greater political transparency (Ehteshami and
Wright, 2007), representatives of the countrys business elite have already moved closer into the current centre of
decision making and even felt emboldened to push for a modernisation of the curriculum (Glosemeyer, 2004, pp.
1436). Yet sceptics warned that while the promise of WTO membership provided King Abdullah with political cover
for his cautious attempts to tackle the widespread corruption within the extended royal family,8 such developments
might only lead to a highly truncated version of the rule of law aimed at enhancing a regimes domestic position
(Carothers, 2007, pp. 156).9 The observation that the link between economic growth and democratic transitions is
stronger in poorer countries (Brinks and Coppedge, 2006; Przeworski and Limongi, 1997) would appear to make

USEgyptian
relations constitute in many ways a particularly striking example of how the
modernisation school can provide a rationale for government friendly
mechanisms that end up supporting an (increasingly) authoritarian status
quo . In a pre-9/11 example typical of the Clinton administrations approach, both governments set up a bilateral
Egypt an easier candidate to apply the insights of the modernisation school. In reality, however,

private-sector Presidents Council which was charged with supporting the implementation of market reforms in
Egypt. Led by Hosni Mubaraks son Gamal on the Egyptian side, it served as an important additional stabiliser of the
regime by increasing the number of contacts for Egyptian businessmen among the Egyptian and, equally important,
US political elite (Alterman, 2000; Momani, 2003). It thus further cemented a situation where political change
threatens the interests of those capitalists who owe their economic status to the regime (Richter, 2007; Sfakianakis,
2004).10 When the Egyptian Centre for Economic Studies, which many of Gamal Mubaraks closest associates
continue to dominate (King, 2007), became a recipient of National Endowment for Democracy funds from 1993 to

US democracy assistance even ended up supporting the domestic

and international networking of the heir apparent of Egypts authoritarian
ruler. US policies thus played a significant role in facilitating Cairos shift from the allocation of rent income to
2002,11

broad segments of society to co-opting business interests a policy necessitated by the structural readjustment
programmes demanded by international donors in the 1980s and 1990s (Albrecht and Schlumberger, 2004; King,
2007). By helping pre-empt the emergence of alternative power centres among the Arab worlds business
elites,Washington strengthened what comparative studies have described as an important contributor to the
stability of authoritarianism in the region (Bellin, 2004; Kamrava and OMora, 1998; Langohr, 2004). In addition,

the long-standing US approach to free trade might even intensify the

regions social problems as long as transnational investors can easily exploit
existing social structures (Moore and Schrank, 2003). The associated increase of
inequalities in income distribution further exacerbates what, as the modernisation

a serious obstacle to democracy (Issawi, 1956; Lipset, 1993) and

explains Egypts return to an era of political de-liberalisation as the direct
outcome of the regimes attempts to exclude the losers of economic
liberalisation from the political process (Kienle, 2001).12
approach admits, constitutes

NED

NED Bad
US democracy promotion occurs through NED funded by
Congress
Scott and Steele 05 [December 2005. James M. Scott is Professor and Chair
of the Department of Political Science, Indiana State University, USA. Carie A. Steele
is a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois. Assisting democrats or resisting
dictators? The nature and impact of democracy support by the United States
National Endowment for Democracy, 199099 Democratization. Volume 12, Issue
4, 2005.]
the United States expanded its eforts in a number of areas
in order better to promote democracy through a range of bilateral and multilateral efforts,
political, economic and military elements, and public, quasi-public and
private approaches.12 One approach has been through the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), a political foundation similar to organizations in such countries
as Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom.13 The NED was established in 1983 and, during the 1990s,
was funded by the US Congress to the tune of around $3035 million per year.14 In its efforts, the
NED works to promote democracy primarily through four core institutes: (a) the
International Republican Institute (IRI), loosely affiliated with the Republican Party;15 (b) the
National Democratic Institute for International Afairs (NDI), the Democratic Party's
counterpart to IRI;16 (c) the American Center for International Labor Solidarity
Consistent with these conclusions,

(ACILS), which consists of the international institutes of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial
Organizations (AFLCIO) who support foreign labour unions through finance, training and services;17

and

(d)

the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), a US Chamber of Commerce

institute that promotes the development of market-oriented economies and free enterprise-friendly legal and

About 60 per cent of NED's grants are channeled through

these four institutes. As detailed elsewhere,19 the NED engages in several major
activities to promote and assist democracy. The most important of these activities are the
NED's grants to democratizers around the world. Overall, foundation grants support such
purposes as elections, institution-building, civil society, and market
reforms. Additionally, the NED houses a research armthe International Forum for Democratic Studies,
institutional structures.18

established in April 1994to fund and engage in research and analysis of democratization. This publishes the
highly regarded quarterly Journal of Democracy. The NED also builds networks among democracy-oriented groups,
for example through a World Movement for Democracy.

NED fails to increase democratization worsens situations

Scott and Steele 05 [December 2005. James M. Scott is Professor and Chair
of the Department of Political Science, Indiana State University, USA. Carie A. Steele
is a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois. Assisting democrats or resisting
dictators? The nature and impact of democracy support by the United States
National Endowment for Democracy, 199099 Democratization. Volume 12, Issue
4, 2005.]
the most critical characteristic regarding the democracy-promotion
eforts of the NED concerns the activities that are funded by the grants or,
Perhaps

these
grants are directed toward (a) promoting and supporting worker rights and political
participation (26.3 per cent); (b) building and supporting civic participation and education
(25.3 per cent); (c) promoting human rights (10.9 per cent) and market reforms (10.8 per cent);
(d) developing building political institutions such as parliaments and political parties (9.9 per
cent); (e) developing the institutions and activities of a free press (8.9 per cent); (f )
elections (6.0 per cent); and (g) basic conflict resolution in societies suffering from such
instability (2.0 per cent). This distribution represents a broad range of purposes generally consistent
with what Carothers has characterized as the democracy template embraced by US
democracy promoters .54 However, it is noteworthy that more than half of the NED's
assistance is directed toward civic and labour organizations to assist such
groups to organize and participate in the political process. Overall, then, NED
put simply, the elements of democratization supported by the NED. As indicated by the data in Table 3,

assistance in the 1990s was broadly distributed to countries in every region of the world, in the form of grants
channeled through a variety of recipient organizations to support a range of purposes consistent with a typical
model of democratization and democracy promotion. But what impact has NED had? Our two hypotheses posit
alternative models of the impact of democracy support, which we now examine. The first survey of the data
conducted simple bivariate correlations to explore the relationship between NED grants and democracy (as
measured by Freedom House). Table 4 presents the results of this first cut. As the table indicates, for the overall
relationship, although the sign of the Pearson's R (0.014) is positive and thus consistent with our hypothesized

there is no
statistically significant relationship between aid and democracy . However, as

relationship, it is extremely small and not statistically significant. Hence, for the entire dataset,

the remainder of the table indicates, these results vary by region. In Latin America and East Asia, there is a modest,
positive, statistically significant relationship between aid and democracy (Pearson's R at 0.195 and 0.198
respectively): more aid is associated with better democracy scores. In Central and Eastern Europe, the sign of the
Pearson's R is positive, but the significance level fails to meet the standard 0.05 cut-off (it meets the marginal 0.10

In all other regions, the relationship between the two variables is

negative and statistically insignificant, contrary to our hypotheses (the Middle

level).

East and North Africa also meet the marginal 0.10 level). Consequently, our first cut using simple correlations
provides mixed results, with only limited evidence in support of the hypothesized relationships. The next step, then,
is to move on to multiple regression analyses testing each of our hypotheses. Table 4THE RELATIONSHIP

Our
democracy promotion hypothesis suggested that NED grants should result
in progress toward democracy in recipient countries. The first regression
equation tests this hypothesis, controlling for culture and socio-economic
factors. Table 5 presents the results, with our dependent variable (democracy, as measured by Freedom House)
leading our independent variables by two years. As in the simple correlations of our first cut, our results
here do not support the democracy promotion hypothesis. Table 5OLS
BETWEEN DEMOCRACY AND NED GRANT SUPPORT BY REGION, 19902000 CSVPDFDisplay full size

ESTIMATES, DEMOCRACY PROMOTION, 199099 CSVPDFDisplay full size As Table 5 indicates, the overall model is
significant at the 0.000 level. Additionally, the adjusted R2 of 0.273 indicates that our model displays a moderate
fit; we can explain about 27 per cent of the variance in democracy scores. With respect to the democracy promotion

NED grants are not

statistically significant, and the sign of the coefficient is not in the
expected direction. Clearly, this evidence discredits the democracy promotion
hypothesis. As we expected, countries in the Islamic and Confucian civilizations tend to have lower
hypothesis, the results shown for our central variableNED grantsare surprising.

democracy scores. Both of these civilization variables display a statistically significant but negative relationship to

Islamic and Confucian countries score about 2.25 and 2.8

points lower on the 14-point democracy scale respectively than other
countries. A country's trade liberalization is not a statistically significant factor, although the sign of the
coefficient is in the expected direction. US military intervention within the previous five years has a
statistically significant but negative efect on democratization : countries
the democracy measure:

experiencing US military intervention score about 1.4 points lower on the democracy scale two years after the

intervention than other countries. Interestingly, the only statistically significant positive factor in democratization is
also the most powerful explanatory variablethe HDI scores. While being part of the Confucian or Islamic
civilizations and experiencing a US military intervention decrease progress toward democracy (as measured by
Freedom House scores), and NED grants and trade liberalization are statistically insignificant factors, progress in
human development (defined as education, health and wealth) is associated with progress toward democracy two
years later. As the coefficient indicates, moving 0.5 up the HDI scale (01) is associated with about a 3 point

Rather than
promoting democracy, NED grants seem to be associated with worsening
situations (in terms of democracy ); certainly assistance in the form of NED grants is not a good

increase in democracy score. Hence, these results tend to reject our first hypothesis.

predictor of democratization. Instead, the most significant finding of the model concerns the impact of socioeconomic factors, as measured by HDI, on democratization. Thus far, of all the explanations, improvements in
human development are the most promising contributor to progress toward democracy.

NED programs do not aid democratization

Scott and Steele 05 [December 2005. James M. Scott is Professor and Chair
of the Department of Political Science, Indiana State University, USA. Carie A. Steele
is a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois. Assisting democrats or resisting
dictators? The nature and impact of democracy support by the United States
National Endowment for Democracy, 199099 Democratization. Volume 12, Issue
4, 2005.]
The findings lead to three primary conclusions about the role of NED grants in democratization, and they suggest

the preceding analysis casts

doubt on the efectiveness of NED grants as an instrument of democracy
promotion per se. As the data show, the democracy promotion hypothesis that
suggests that allocation of NED funding results in greater democratization
is firmly rejected. Likewise, the data display equally negative results for the democracy consolidation
hypothesis. NED aid neither produces democracy nor follows democratization .
The rejection of these hypotheses, made even more emphatic by the
negative relationship between grants and democracy scores shown in the data,
serves as an important counter to the optimistic assessments of the NED's
impact that were noted earlier in the article. When combined with the negative
relationship between NED grants and democracy, our rejection of both the democracy promotion and the
democracy consolidation hypotheses suggests a new hypothesis concerning the relationship between NED
assistance and democracy: a Dictatorship Resistance hypothesis . Whereas the democracy
paths of future research regarding aid and democratization. First,

consolidation hypothesis suggests that democratization movements attract NED funding, the dictatorship resistance
hypothesis suggests that NED funding will be attracted by poor democracy ratings or by reversals of progress
toward democracy, in an effort to mobilize resistance against anti-democratic regimes and to sustain threatened or
faltering democracies.

Defense of Model
Logic regressions are used to come to efective conclusions
regarding democracy promotion
Scott and Steele 05 [December 2005. James M. Scott is Professor and Chair
of the Department of Political Science, Indiana State University, USA. Carie A. Steele
is a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois. Assisting democrats or resisting
dictators? The nature and impact of democracy support by the United States
National Endowment for Democracy, 199099 Democratization. Volume 12, Issue
4, 2005.]
The analysis first presents key descriptive data on NED assistance, and
then examines the relationship of that aid to democratization in developing
countries from 1990 to 1999. For our descriptive summary of NED aid, we utilize a data-set of
the grants awarded by the NED from 1990 to 1997. The key variables into
which we code this sample, which includes 1,754 grants collected from the NED's annual reports and Democracy
Grants Database, include region; type of recipient (government, political party, labour
organization, business organization, think-tank or educational institution, civic/citizen organization, media
organization); and purpose (elections/constitution-building; institution-building; human-rights development;
media/press freedom and development; promotion of labour development, rights and participation; promotion of
civic action, participation and education; promotion of market economics and reform; and conflict resolution). In

the
investigation uses both OLS and logistic regression on a dataset
composed of state years from 1990 to 1999. This data includes NED grants
and democracy scores as well as several control variables including
culture, military deployment, bilateral trade and alliance similarity. Our
analysis first examines the Democracy Promotion Hypothesis using an OLS
regression to examine the impact of NED grants on democratization in
developing states, relying on the following equation: where DEMOCRACY is a country's democracy score in
order to test the central hypotheses concerning the relationship between NED aid and democratization,

a given year, AID is NED assistance, HDI is a country's Human Development Score in a given year, ISLAM is a
measure identifying those countries in Huntington's Islamic civilization, SINIC is a measure identifying those
countries in Huntington's Sinic/Confucian civilization, TRADE is a measure of a country's integration in the world
economy, and MILINT is a measure identifying those countries experiencing a US military intervention. We go on to
examine the Democracy Consolidation Hypothesis in two stages, following the characterization of a two-stage
decision process for aid allocation offered by Cingranelli and Pasquarello. Logistic

regression is used
to examine the relationship between a state's behaviour and the likelihood
of it being a recipient of grant aid (gatekeeping decision), in the following equation using a
dichotomous variable (aid, no aid) as the measure for NED aid: where AID is NED assistance, DEMOCRACY is a
country's democracy score in a given year, HDI is a country's Human Development Score in a given year, ISLAM is a
measure identifying those countries in Huntington's Islamic civilization, SINIC is a measure identifying those
countries in Huntington's Sinic/Confucian civilization, USEXP is a measure of US exports to a given country, MILPRES
is a measure of the US military presence in a country, and INTERESTS is a measure of US foreign-policy interests in

OLS regression is used to examine the impact of progress

toward democracy on the total amount of NED aid received among
recipient states (level decision). To do so, we use the previous equation, substituting NED aid amounts for
a given country. Then,

the dichotomous NED aid variable.

DPT Wrong

Bad Models

Epistemologically Flawed
Their studies are epistemologically flawed- undermine the
robustness of DPT
Manan 2015 [Munafrizal- Professor of IR @ University of Al Azhar Indonesia,
Hubungan International Journal, cites a bunch of profs and scholars of DPT, The
Democratic Peace Theory and Its Problems,
http://journal.unpar.ac.id/index.php/JurnalIlmiahHubunganInternasiona/article/view/1
315, mm]
there has been a debate among social scientist,
especially political scientists, about what democracy really is as well as
which countries should be called democratic and which types of
democracies are more peaceful. Speaking generally, the experts agree that the
democratic theories can be grouped into two broad paradigms. The first is
elitist, structural, formal, and procedural. It tends to understand democracy in a relatively
minimalist way. A regime is a democracy when it passes some structural threshold of free and open elections,
In the literature of democracy,

autonomous branches of government, division of power, and checks and balances. This state of affairs precludes a tyrannical

The second
paradigm, which is called 'normative', 'cultural', 'deliberative democracy',
and 'participatory democracy', tends to focus on other issues and to
demand much more of democracy. First, the emphasis is on the society and the individual citizens, not the
concentration of power in the hands of the elites. Once this structure is in place, a regime is a democracy.

political system and the regime. Second, there is also a demand for the existence of democratic norms and democratic culture. This
implies, among other things, political rights, tolerance, openness, participation, and a sense of civic responsibility. Nevertheless,

there is no a consensus among the democratic peace theoreticians about

the nature of democracy in relation to the democratic peace theory . If the
democratic peace theory is based on the first paradigm, then there are many countries should be called democratic.

Democracy in such a paradigm is relatively easy to build, but also

relatively easy to dismantle it.167 It seems that the democratic peace
theory is not strongly supported by the structural paradigm of democratic
theory because interstate wars or at least armed conflicts remain taking
place in countries that committed to this structural paradigm. The armed
conflicts between Russia and Georgia as well as Thailand and Cambodia in
2008, for example, which were triggered by border disputes, strengthen
such a view. Within this context, Chan argues that although a large number of countries
have recently adopted democratic structures of governance (for instance, universal
suffrage, multiparty competition, contested elections, legislative oversight), it is not evident that their
leaders and people have internalized such democratic norms as those
regarding tolerance, compromise, and sharing power.168 Conversely, if it is
based on the second paradigm, then there are only a few countries should
be classified democratic. It is likely to focus merely on mature democratic
countries especially in the regions of North America and West Europe. A s a consequence, numerous
cases of warring democracies will be excluded. 169 It means that the democratic peace theory
is only relevant to countries in this region and hence it cannot be applied to other countries. In other words, the
proponents of the democratic peace theory do not have a justifiable
reason to spread democracy around the world in order to enforce
international peace. Like democracy, the definition of war is also

contested by scholars. The proponents of the democratic peace theory who argue that democratic countries have
not involved in wars against each other have tended to rely on the definition most widely used in academic research on the causes

War is defined as, according to that definition,

no hostilityqualified as an interstate war unless it led to a minimum of
1,000 battle fatalities among all the system members involved. 171 Such
a definition excludes the wars that do not fulfil the 1,000 battle-death
threshold and hence minimizes the number of cases that can be
categorized war. As Ray observes, in any case, there are not numerous incidents having just below 1,000 battle deaths
that would otherwise qualify as wars between democratic states.172 Moreover, it allows democratic peace
proponents to exclude some troublesome cases.173 The case of Finland is
one of examples for this. The case suggests that although democratic
peace proponents code Finland as a democracy, Finlands alliance with
Germany in World War II is summarily dismissed because fewer than 1,000
Finns were killed in armed combat. 174 Another example is the 1967 Six
Day War between Israel and Lebanon in which Lebanon only sent a few
aircraft into Israel air space and sustained no casualties. 175Obviously,
such an old definition is not adequate to explain the changing character of
war in the contemporary era. 176 In addition, by using historical analysis Ravlo, Gleditsch and Dorussen show
that the claim of the democratic peace theory that democratic states never
get involved in a war against each other is undermined by historical
evidence . Their finding demonstrates that most of extrasystematic wars have been fought by democracies 177 and only in
the postcolonial period are democracies less involved in extrasystemic war.178 But in the colonial and imperial
periods, wars occurred among democracies . Similar to democracy and war,
the definition of peace is also debated by scholars. Put it simply, according to the realists,
peace can be defined as the absence of war. As Waltz argues, the chances
of peace rise if states can achieve their most important ends without
actively using force.179However, the absence of war is something temporary and therefore peace is no
more than a transient lack of war.180 For realists, the absence of war does not simply mean that there
of war in the last two or three decades. 170

will be no war in the future and they ridicule people who are happy with such a peace. Realists believe that war is the common and
unavoidable feature of international relations and it means that peace as dangerous as war. 181 In the view of Waltz, in an anarchic
realm, peace is fragile. 182 Thus, for realists, peace is a period to prepare war. Other definitions of peace highlight different
aspects. Brown defines international war as violence between organized political entities claiming to be sovereign nation.183
Boulding who rebuts the realist definition of peace defines peace as a situation in which the probability of war is so small that it
does not really enter into the calculations of any of the people involved.184According to Boulding, peace should be a real peace
which means a stable peace. Boulding rejects the realist definition of peace since it is an unstable peace.185

Their models and studies have incredible amounts of bias

Gibler 12 (Douglas M, Professor in the Department of Political Science and
Leadership Board Fellow in the Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama, and
Alex Braithwaite, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at University College
London, Dangerous Neighbours, Regional Territorial Conflict and the Democratic
Peace, British Journal of Political Science, Volume 43, Issue 04, pp 877-887, October
2012, mm)
While many regions seem to have been pacified, the likelihood of conflict
remains high in other areas. Most dyadic studies of conflict sufer from
omitted variable bias because they do not directly model this spatial
variation.2 We argue that this bias is especially severe for democratic peace

studies , due to the endogeneity between democracy and peace. In standard studies of the influence of joint
democracy on conflict outcomes, the estimated efects are likely to be overstated
because models typically pay no regard to how peace and territorial
settlements (both at home and in the near neighbourhood) influence the prospects for
democracy at home in the first place. Territorial disputes tend to recur,
and are more likely than other issues to cause regimes to centralize, which
is why unstable regions tend to be associated with border disputes and
autocratic states. Absent territorial issues, however, regimes are not prone to the centralizing forces of
external threats, and those states that are able to democratize do so. This pattern creates a
correlation between peace and democracy, both of which are symptoms of
prior territorial settlements. Although there is growing support for this argument,3 no study
has yet examined the efects of joint democracy after controlling for
regional stability. If our argument is correct, we would expect to find that the relationship between joint
democracy and peace is conditioned by the presence of regional territorial stability. That is, dyadic
democracy reduces the likelihood of conflict only if the dyadic partners
reside in peaceful neighbourhoods.

Economic Norms Theory

Democratic peace models are flawed- they dont take into
account economic norms theory
Mousseau 13 [Michael Mousseau, political scientist and prof at Koc University
and research fellow at the Belfer Center International Security Program- Harvard,
2013, International Studies Quarterly vol 57 issue 1, The Democratic Peace
Unraveled: Its the Economy,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/10.1111/isqu.12003/pdf, MM]
The results of this study must be made very clear:

There is no justification for inferring or

implying any evidence herein, direct or indirect, as corroborating the
causation from democracy to peace. Democracy is not merely insignificant: Standard measures of
democracy were shown to have positive impacts on the odds of fatal militarized conflict in every model of fatal conflict that

it is now
clear that there is little correlational evidence of democracy causing
peace , whether we gauge peace with wars, fatal and nonfatal militarized
interstate conflicts, or interstate crises. I do not expect this to be the last word in the democratic
peace research program, but as this controversy unfolds, it would be useful for all of us to give
careful consideration to Lakatosian insights on how research programs
progress and degenerate (Lakatos [1970]1978). Dafoe has expressed the view that as the number of studies
supporting the descriptive inference of the democratic peace continues to grow, the probability of a future
study overturning this finding becomes increasingly less likely (2011:14; see also
controlled for contract flows. In conjunction with prior related studies (Mousseau 2009; Mousseau et al. 2013),

Dafoe and Russett 2013). This statement is not scientifically correct: As far as I know, Dafoe has no special powers in divining what
future studies will show; and repeated studies with specification bias do not render a finding any more accurate than a single one. If
it did, then the progress of knowledge would collapse into a race of competing viewpoints over publication numbers; editors, rather
than evidence, would emerge as the arbiters of truth, and popular and academic culture and intuition would trump the progress of

While numerous studies have corroborated the democratic peace,

most of these employed almost similar statistical models, indicators, and
data (Reuveny et al. 2011:764), and not a single one controlled for contractintensive economy , a proven powerful variable predicted by a new and
highly corroborated theory. New ideas can always emerge, and there is no logic in resisting them simply
knowledge.14

because a prior view was widely accepted as fact: The world is not flat. Lakatos ([1970]1978:72) also observed that defenders of
the defeated program may offer a shrewd ad hoc reduction of the [new] program to the defeated one. In response to the
economic challenge to the democratic peace research program, defenders have already expressed the view that the world is one of
complex causal relationships with endogeneities where liberal influences interact and strengthen one another (Russett 2010:203),
and that it is naive to think that we can easily parse out and estimate the effects of these many potential causes of peace (Dafoe
and Russett 2013:121). No one ever said it was easy, but it is not any harder to parse out democracy from economy now than it was
a decade ago when democracy reigned unchallenged, and as discussed above, half of all democratic nation-years lack

More importantly, the mere existence of multiple

uncorroborated theories ofering multiple paths of causation among
multiple liberal variables does not mean that these proposed multiple
paths are correct: The progress of knowledge is not reached
democratically, with every imagined theory automatically given a seat at
the explanatory table. A seat at the table has to be earned with substantial corroborated evidence, and the
wider stream of evidence at this writing strongly supports causation from
market norms to both democracy and peace, and comparatively far less
support for most of the alternative potential causes of the peace. The invocation
contractintensive economies.

of Lakatos is not meant to imply that ergo the economic norms challenge must be rightthat too would be wrong. Rather,
Lakatosian method is useful for directing us toward the next appropriate research tasks. First and foremost, as with all strong claims,
the results here must be given careful scrutiny. Any error found is trivial, however, unless it is shown that, when corrected,
democracy returns to significant and substantive, and this is achieved in a theoretically informed model (Ray 2003). More
importantly, all research must be assessed in the larger context with which it is embedded (Lakatos [1970]1978:8788).

Compared with most theories of democratic peace, economic norms theory

has a much larger repertoire of explanatory value and predictive
successes, crossing multiple levels of analyses. 15 Causation has also been traced in case
studies, such as the Greek transition to contract-intensive economy, and related changes in its domestic and foreign politics, in the
1990s (Mousseau 2009:7681); and Argentine and British motives to fight the Falklands Malvinas War in this mixed-economic dyad

Second, it would be useful to pit specific measures from the

most promising democratic peace theories against contract-intensive
economy. For instance, selectorate theory (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999) may still be robust, when selectorates are
measured directly, against contract-intensive economy. Also, settled borders and an overall secure
environment may promote both democracy and peace (Rasler and Thompson 2005;
Vasquez 2011), and these factors may yet be found robust after consideration of
impersonal economy. A territorial peace may even promote contract-intensive economyand thus has the potential
(Mousseau 2012b).

to render the economic peace spurious. Finally, some other third variable could cause both impersonal contract flows and peace. All

the primary evidence for

causation from democracy to peacethe democratic peace correlation
appears spurious ; all things considered, contract-intensive economy is
the more likely cause of both democracy and the peace. If the democratic
peace correlation is not revived in a theoretically justified model, then the
time-tested rules of scientific progress mandate that the democratic peace
research program undergo a substantial transformation. In Lakatosian terms, the
that can be said as of this writing is that the cumulative state of knowledge is that

economic norms peace can be viewed as an emendation to the democratic peace research program, adding heuristic power through
its explanation of the causes of both democracy and peace, while receiving both corroboration of its novel content and excess
corroboration over previous explanations. Lakatos ([1970]1978) explicitly identifies examples of inconsistent theories being grafted
onto existing research programs, eventually overtaking the original programs. This is constitutive of a progressive problem-shift,
while in some interpretations it could even be conceived of as an ideal form (Ungerer 2012:23). With such a shift, there is potential
for a great deal of progress, with a wide open frontier of promising research needed on the possible causes of both contractintensive economy and its precise linkages with both peace and cooperation, within and among nations; the field is also wide open
for modeling strategic interactions in various economic kinds of dyads and, among nations with contract-intensive economies,
collective action problems in their management and preservation of the global market order. Finally, this study carries direct

If democracy is not a cause of peace, then there is no

point in promoting democracy with the goal of achieving peace, as did
both the Clinton and W. Bush US Administrations. Instead, peace follows
from contractintensive economythe condition when most citizens in a
nation regularly use the impersonal marketplace, rather than personal
ties, for obtaining incomes, goods, and services. This means the contract-intensive
implications for public policy:

democracies are best advised to go back to the policies the Truman Administration adopted intuitively for post-World War II Europe:
helping most citizens obtain a stake in the impersonal market by making opportunities in it widely available. In this way,

economic norms theory informs us that it is politics that drives economics,

and it is up to political leaders to make the decisions to do whatever it
takes to make sure most citizens can normally find jobs in the
marketplace. Wherever this is achieved, the evidence informs us,
democracy and peace will follow.

Peace is a result of contract-intensive economies- the

democratic peace correlation is wrong
Mousseau 13 [Michael Mousseau, political scientist and prof at Koc University
and research fellow at the Belfer Center International Security Program- Harvard,
2013, International Studies Quarterly vol 57 issue 1, The Democratic Peace
Unraveled: Its the Economy,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/10.1111/isqu.12003/pdf, MM]
The democratic peace correlationthe observation that democratic nations rarely, if ever, fight each other, even though they often
fight nondemocratic nationsis at the core of what is probably the most important research program in the study of international

For all the

multiplicity of studies reporting the democratic peace correlation,
however, we have precious little evidence that democracy is the cause of
it. No theory to explain the correlation has accrued substantial and thus
widely convincing evidence, and there is no logical basis for discounting
the probability that some new factor may arrive at any time that accounts
for both democracy and the peace. In recent years, a new factor has surfaced in
the democratic peace research program: contract-intensive economy . About a
politics, with over three hundred books and articles published on the subject over the past two decades.

decade after the democratic peace correlation emerged as a stylized fact, I offered an explanation for it that pinpoints causation in
impersonal contract flows within nations, and showed how these flows can cause both democracy within nations and peace among
them (Mousseau 2000). In time, direct data on impersonal contract flows became available, and the initial supposition was
corroborated in analyses of wars and fatal militarized interstate conflicts (Mousseau 2009), followed by interstate crises (Mousseau,

This new economic peace not

only appears to account for the democratic peace correlation, but is also
far more substantial : While the democratic peace achieved fame with its
claim of an absence of wars among democratic nationswith wars
defined as militarized conflicts with at least one thousand battlefieldconnected fatalitiesthe economic peace boasts an absence of wars and
even the absence of a single battlefield-connected fatality among nations
with contract-intensive economies. Importantly, the accumulated evidence for
economic norms theory is now quite strong, seeming to surpass other
theories in the democratic peace research program.2 The implications of economic norms
theory for the democratic peace research program are far from trivial: It seems that the democratic
peace may at last have a credible explanation and that the source of the
peace is not in governing but in economic institutions . This is a strong claim, and it is
Orsun, and Ungerer 2013; Mousseau, Orsun, Ungerer, and Mousseau 2013).

therefore appropriate that it be treated skeptically and examined thoughtfully. All of the challenging issues that have been raised so
far in the literature have focused on the democratic peace correlation as the primary evidence for causation from democracy to
peace, seeking to save this correlation by altering third measures, adding third variables, trying more precise tests of insignificance,
and adopting more stringent measures of democracy (Russett 2010:201; Dafoe 2011:3; Dafoe and Russett 2013)

Democratic peace theory is flawed transitions dont ensure

liberal norms and sample size is insufficient to prove
democratic peace
Banai 13 (Hussein, Assistant Professor of International Relations at Occidental
College, Democratic solidarity: Rethinking democracy promotion in the New Middle
East, Security Dialogue, October-December 2013 vol. 44 no. 5-6 411-429 , Sage
Journals, mm)

this crucial aspect of Kants cosmopolitan scheme for perpetual

peace is often overlooked in the literature on democracy promotion. A
republican form of government alone will not necessarily help the cause of
peace; governments can be representative of their citizens beliefs and interests but
still lack the liberal principles of respect and equality required to create lasting bonds
based on friendship and trust with other liberal nations in international society. Indeed, the latter
observation is borne out in the case of emerging or transitional
democracies, where the absence of widely shared liberal values among
those coming to power through hastily arranged elections or referenda
increases the likelihood of war (Linz and Stepan, 1996; Mansfield and Snyder, 2005). What this
However,

suggests, then, is that the focus on democracy promotion, absent a concurrent effort to promote liberal values, will

the appeal of the democratic

peace theory rests entirely on a small universe of cases compared to the quite
substantial range of international outcomes explained using realist arguments (Layne, 1994). This is largely
due to the historical fact that there simply are very few examples of a
cohort of countries satisfying Kants constitutional and cosmopolitan criteria for
perpetual peace, whereas there are countless examples of non-democratic
countries waging wars as well as maintaining long periods of peace (Spiro, 1994).
not necessarily produce a durable and stable peace. Furthermore,

Therefore, while there are stronger causal links between the breakdown of regional alliances and the outbreak of

the liberal take on democratic peace

is merely based on a correlation between cultural-normative factors and
peace. Where does this leave us with respect to democracy promotion? At the very least, it ought to
temper the certainty behind the instrumental argument that democracy
can be a means toward world peace. As the costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate
war as in the case of World War I as per realist theory,

both of which have at various times been justified through reference to the core tenets of the Bush-era freedom

looking at democracy solely through the lens of international

security can have dire consequences for stability and peace . This is precisely the
agenda

kind of faux idealism that is most disturbing to realists, and that over the past two decades has degraded the
otherwise worthy pursuit of affirming the near-universal appeal of democratic values by reducing it to a mere tool of
statecraft.

Democratic Peace Research is flawed it cant explain variance

in democratic reactions
Geis 13 (Anna, professor of political science at Otto-von-Guericke University, and
Harald Muller, Executive Director and Head of Research Department at Peace
Research Institute Frankfurt, Oct 10, 2013, The Militant Face of Democracy: Liberal
Forces for Good, Google Books, mm)
Like mainstream DP research, liberal war studies neglect an import- ant fact that adds to the puzzle about the

democracies go to war with significantly diferent

frequency. The formula democracies never fight wars with each other but conduct armed con- flicts with nondemocracies as frequently as autocracies is thus not sufficiently precise: a small group of
democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France,
Australia, India and Israel have been involved comparatively often in
military conflicts, while some democracies take part rather rarely and others abstain altogether (Miiller
2004a: 494-7; Chojnaclti 2006: 21). Neither liberal DP research nor the critics of
liberalism can consistently explain within their theoretical frameworks
why all liberal democracies do not behave in the same manner, if the
assumption is valid that certain institutional and normative causal
mechanisms should take efect in an average democratic polity, or that
liberalism should produce an invariable dichotomy of friends (fellow liberals) and
democratic Janus face:

enemies (non-liberals) (Muller and Wolff 2006). In order to understand democratic war, we also have to understand
this variance.

Diversionary War

Generic
DPT justifies interventions and wars in the name of promoting
peace
Manan 2015 [Munafrizal- Professor of IR @ University of Al Azhar Indonesia,
Hubungan International Journal, cites a bunch of profs and scholars of DPT, The
Democratic Peace Theory and Its Problems,
http://journal.unpar.ac.id/index.php/JurnalIlmiahHubunganInternasiona/article/view/1
315, mm]
The second problem with the democratic peace theory is it is inclined to
justify pro-democratic intervention . In this sense, this thesis can fuel a spirit of
democratic crusade and be used to justify covert or overt interventions
against each other. 186 The U.S. foreign policy is the best example to see
this case. The faith of democratic peace theory has been expressed
aggressively by the US foreign policy which believes that the promotion of
democracy around the world is not only useful to enforce international
peace, but also give a positive result on the US national security . This is a reason
why the promotion of democracy, genuine and otherwise, has been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy for much of the twentieth
century.187 In addition, promoting democracy is a vital interest of the United States that justifies that use of force.188 The
importance of the promotion of democracy has been supported strongly by political leaders from both Republican Party and
Democratic Party such as the US Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. As Chan notes, their
statements often suggest that democracy is the best antidote to war. 189 President Wilson who well known as the liberal
internationalism believed that a steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic
nations and the world must be made safe for democracy. 190 Similarly, President Clinton assured that the best strategy to ensure
our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere. Democracies dont attack each

President Bush who is often called the neoconservative internationalism stated firmly
that the reason why Im so strong on democracy is democracies dont go
to war with each otherIve got great faith in democracies to promote
peace. 192 Such statements has been used by President Wilson to justify
war against Imperial Germany in 1900s, by President Clinton to justify aid
to Russia and intervention in Bosnia and Haiti in 1990s , 193 and by
President Bush to justify war against terrorism by invading Afghanistan
and Iraq in the early 2000. Also, under the Administration of Obama the US democracy promotion tradition in
other.191 Likewise,

foreign policy remains pivotal, although its application using somewhat different approaches compared to his predecessors. As
Bouchet says, for the Obama administration as for its predecessors, Americas security, prosperity and predominant international
status are all viewed as going hand in hand with democratization abroad. 194 All this clearly show that, using the words of Doyle
liberal

peace is definitely part of the rhetoric of foreign policy . 195 In fact, the
promotion of democracy by force has encouraged war rather than
resulted in peace . Some studies have succinctly shown that the attempts to
create democracies by external force have often failed. Based on their empirical analysis,
Gleditsch, Christiansen and Hegre concludes that in the short term democratic intervention is indeed able to promote

some cases showed clearly that it often created an unstable

democratizing country due to internal violence in the form of serious
human rights violations or civil wars and therefore in the long run it
brought dangerous consequences. 196 According to Mierhenrich, the result of prodemocratic intervention is democratic war , internal and otherwise. 197
Mierhenrich identifies that pro-democratic intervention causes war in two ways : (1 ) by
waging war and (2) by provoking war . 198 Thus democracy by external force is
democratization, but

counterproductive for peace. Perhaps what has been occurring in Iraq today shows the truth of such a
conclusion.

Rising Power Promotion Good

Generic

Credible Model
Only emerging democracies provide a credible model
Schnwlder, PhD Political Science, 14 (Gerd Schnwlder holds a
Ph.D. in political science from McGill University and until December 2012, he was
Director of Policy and Planning at the International Development Research Centre
(IDRC). Dr. Schnwlder is a visiting fellow at the German Development Institute
(DIE/GDI) in Bonn, Germany, Promoting Democracy What Role for the Democratic
Emerging Powers?, German Development Institute Discussion Paper, February
2014)
reluctance on the part of the democratic emerging powers to
become more deeply involved in the afairs of neighbouring countries may
have deprived them of what is perhaps their greatest asset, namely, the
ability to bring their own experience in building democratic political
systems to bear on ongoing democratisation processes there. For
example, there have been few, if any, deliberate attempts to make use of
Indias or South Africas experience in building multi-ethnic and multi-racial
democracies, Brazils considerable track record in opening its political
system to popular participation,49 or Tur- keys long-running experiment in marrying Islam with
representative democracy.50 As to furthering alternative, more context-sensitive forms of
democracy that would go beyond the standard model of western-style
representative democracy, the cases studies yielded hardly any evidence at all.51 Changes to the
present status quo, and a shift to a more proactive stance on external democracy
promotion, could come from a variety of internal and external sources ,
In fact, the

which, taken together, could provoke a shift in state preferences as explained above. As to domestic factors,
greater pressure from domestic pro-democracy constituencies and more transparency in foreign policymaking,
obliging governments to lay open the calculations behind their foreign policy decisions, would militate in favour of a

There are promising signs pointing in

this direction witness the recent popular protests against deficiencies in
domestic political systems in Brazil or India.52 At the same time, there are worrying trends
more proactive stance on external democracy promotion.

pointing the other way: the clampdown by the Turkish government on the Gezi Park protests may indicate a
hardening of the regime, while growing governance deficits in South Africa could signal a weakening commitment of
the regime to democratic rules and principles. On the external front, changes in both regional and global contexts
are presenting the democratic emerging powers with some critical choices as to how to fill their new regional and
global leadership roles. Within their own regions, they need to decide if they want to pursue their own interests first
and foremost, becoming new regional hegemons,53 or instead take on the role of regional representatives and
champions. Defining and defending regional interests, including those of smaller, less powerful states, and of
disadvantaged populations within them, has not been an overriding objective for the democratic emerging powers
to date. Much the same can be said about the forging of stronger links among the democratic emerging powers
themselves, where few advances have been made (Alden / Vieira 2005; Graham 2011; Stephen 2012).

Globally, the democratic emerging powers need to decide how they see
their relationship with the West, and how they want to relate to other emerging
powers, especially authoritarian ones such as China. Their reluctance to make
common cause with the West is understandable, especially since
promoting democracy was used as a pretext to justify the illegal war in
Iraq. But in their efforts to differentiate themselves, the democratic emerging powers have also made some
troubling choices, particularly regarding their voting behaviour on human rights issues in the context of the UN or in
turning a blind eye to human rights violations and anti-democratic actions in neighbouring states, in the name of
south- ern solidarity. These choices, which have sometimes blurred the line between emerging democracies and
emerging autocracies, carry significant risks as well, notably that of undermining the democratic emerging powers
claim to democratic legitimacy.54 These issues are critically important since they provide an important source of

Arguably, these countries are too weak to

impose their leadership in their respective regions not to mention at the
global level simply by projecting their economic or military might. As
emerging economies, their capacity to provide direct material benefits to
others is likewise rather limited.55 In these circumstances, they need to
rely on other resources to ensure their legitimacy. One such resource is
precisely their standing as emerging democracies, resulting in a kind of
legitimacy that is rooted not just in the continuing appeal of the
democratic idea as such, but also in a demonstrated capacity to better
address developmental challenges and resolve internal tensions and
conflicts of interests by way of democratic governance. A key diference to
authoritarian development models, building and nurturing this capacity is
critical for the democratic emerging powers ability to lead by example,
and to ofer assistance to others in building more democratic systems.
legitimacy for the democratic emerging powers.

Brazil

Better than US
Brazil and India are key to global demo promo US and EU fail
Stuenkel, PhD Political Science, 13 (Oliver Stuenkel holds a PhD in
political science from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, and a Master in
Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where
he was a McCloy Scholar. He is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at
the Getlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in So Paulo, where he coordinates the So
Paulo branch of the School of History and Social Science (CPDOC) and the executive
program in International Relations. He is also a non-resident Fellow at the Global
Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin and a member of the Carnegie Rising
Democracies Network. His research focuses on rising powers; specifically on
Brazils, Indias and China's foreign policy and on their impact on global governance,
Rising Powers and the Future of Democracy Promotion: the case of Brazil and
India, Third World Quarterly 34:2 p. 339-355, 2013)
Conclusion As the analysis makes clear, a realist approach is best at accounting for rising democracies behaviour.
Brazil and India promote democracy as long as doing so is aligned with their overall strategic and economic
interests, and if they are willing to adopt democracy promotion as means to legitimise their growing influence. In

promoting democracy may

endanger Indias foreign policy goal of maintaining regional stability, it is increasingly aligned with
Brazils national interests as a regional hegemon. Given that autocratic
leaders are more likely to endanger Brazilian investments in the region, for
example by expropriating Brazilian investments, democracy promotion has become a key
tool with which to contain threats against the legitimacy of the established order and to defend
Brazils growing economic presence in South America. Yet rising
democracies fundamentally difer from established actors in that they rarely justify
this respect their approach is similar to the Western practice. While

their democracy-related activities in the context of the larger liberal narrative often used by European and US policy

Brazil and India remain suspicious of the at times sweeping Wilsonian

rhetoric and concepts used by European and US democracy
promoters, a rhetoric which policy makers in Braslia and New Delhi
consider to be both inefective and smacking of cultural imperialism. It is
makers. Both
liberal

worth noting that, despite their democracy-related activities, no Indian and Brazilian policy maker or civil society
representative describes these as democracy promotionvery much contrary to Europe and the USA, were the
term is common. Therefore it is no surprise that neither Brazil nor India has embraced US ideas such as the League
of Democracies. As a consequence, observers in Europe and the USA have generally seen the scope for
cooperation with rising democracies on democracy-related activities as limited. Nevertheless comparisons between
Western and non-Western views about democracy promotion often overlook the fact that there is ample room for
cooperation. Emphasising the more technical termssuch as good governancerather than the ideology-laden
liberal democracy promotion may be an important step to facilitate cooperation, particularly on the multilateral
level. In this context the European approach, which often seeks to avoid the term democracy promotion in order
not to estrange the host government105 (for example by promoting good governance or by strengthening civil
society 106), may provide more room for collaboration between established democracy promoters and rising
democracies. For example, when US President Barack Obama visited India, the USA and India signed an Open
Government Partnership to start a dialogue among senior officials on open government issues and to disseminate
innovations that enhance government accountability.107 These less visible approaches are likely to be more
acceptable to rising democracies than being asked to join established powers in condemning autocrats openly.

Emerging powers position matters greatly because they are located in

regions of the world where democracys footing is not yet firm. In
addition, there are indications that Brazils and Indias credibility among poor
countries may exceed that of the rich worldperhaps precisely because
they are rarely perceived as overly paternalistic or arrogant. Perhaps most

importantly Brazils and Indias societal structureshigh inequality, a high

degree of illiteracy (in Indias case) and pockets of povertyare similar to those in
many countries that are struggling to establish democracy. Seen from this
perspective, Brazilian and Indian policy makers have much more experience in
making democracy work in adverse environments. In Brazils case an
additional asset is a very recent experience of successful transition to
democracy. Emerging power such as Brazil and India are therefore in a
much better position to share their experience of democracy than Europe
or the USA, whose democratisation lies in the distant past, and whose
societies look very diferent from those in the rest of the world. Finally, in
a world where an increasing number of national leaders look to China as
an economic and political model to copy, India and Brazil provide powerful
counter-examples that political freedom is no obstacle to economic
growth.108 In this sense, as Pratap Mehta points out, Brazils and Indias
own success may do far more for democracy promotion than any overtly
ideological push in that direction could ever hope to accomplish.109

Brazil is comparatively better at promoting democracy than

the US
Stuenkel, PhD Political Science, 13 (Oliver Stuenkel holds a PhD in
political science from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, and a Master in
Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where
he was a McCloy Scholar. He is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at
the Getlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in So Paulo, where he coordinates the So
Paulo branch of the School of History and Social Science (CPDOC) and the executive
program in International Relations. He is also a non-resident Fellow at the Global
Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin and a member of the Carnegie Rising
Democracies Network. His research focuses on rising powers; specifically on
Brazils, Indias and China's foreign policy and on their impact on global governance,
Rising Powers and the Future of Democracy Promotion: the case of Brazil and
India, Third World Quarterly 34:2 p. 339-355, 2013)
Yet when speaking about US foreign policy, democracy promotion is generally regarded as more than a fig leaf that

democracy promotion is part of a

greater American narrative, an important element of the USAs mission in
the world.25 US culture is thus an important factor in explaining
democracy promotion.26 Thomas Carothers confirms this by referring to the inherent
assumption that the United States is especially qualified to promote
democracy, 27 recommending that US foreign policy makers get over the tendency to see democracy
merely exists to disguise true US national interests. Rather,

promotionas the special province of the United States. 28 In addition, Rick Travis argues that promoting
democracy strengthens democracys identity and, in the case of the USA, helps it reconnect with its core historical
traditions. 29 There seems to be a strong collective conviction that US democracy remains one of the most

This may
explain why one of the main problems of both US and European democracy
programmes is that they seek to recreate the world in their own image,
rather than accepting that democracy may look diferent in diferent
places.31 Practical experience also has a strong influence on the debate,
advanced in the world.30 Similar observations can be made about European democracy promotion.

and evidence suggests that eforts to strengthen democracies often have

limited success.32 Those engaged in democracy promotion on the ground often complain that, while costs
are immediate, effects are uncertain and often take decades to appearif they appear at all.33 For example,
the objective of establishing a liberal democracy in Afghanistan has been
quietly substituted with simply leaving behind a stable central
government that can defend itself against the Islamic insurgency, after
even the keenest optimists can see very little progress. Ten years after
the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan can hardly be considered a stable
democracy.34 As scholars warn, competitive elections may lead to
sectarian violence and deepen animosities in ethnically divided
societies.35 Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi are examples where elections have indeed unleashed inter-ethnic
violence.36 For decades the USA has worked to strengthen civil society capacity building and political party
development in the Arab World, but little suggests that the uprisings that have shaken the latter over the past
months are in any way the result of Western democracy promotion.37 The opposite is at times true: being
associated with Western organisations is often a burden for opposition groups; in June 2009, for example, the
Iranian opposition explicitly distanced itself from the West to prevent a loss of credibility and legitimacy.38 An

democracy is a contested
concept, 39 and difficult to measure, making it at times hard to decide
whether certain countries (such as Venezuela, Iran or Russia) are
democratic or not.40 US or European democracy promotion is often based on
an idealised Western liberal democratic model, which is difficult to apply
anywhere in the world, including in the West itself. 41 People who work in democracy
additional critique of democracy promotion used frequently is that

promotion usually know what it means to live in a democracy, but they have rarely experienced democratisation in

In addition, seeking
to emulate specific characteristics of US or European democracy may have
negative consequences as it does not allow for local peculiarities: Many
Americans confuse, one specialist writes, the forms of American
democracy with the concept of democracy itself. 42 In order to emulate Western-style
their home countries, thus often having little practical understanding of the process.

voting cycles, democracy promoters are often in favour of rushing to an election, even in post-conflict societies. Yet
elections can have an inherently disruptive effect, in particular in winner-takeall scenarios.43 As Carothers points
out, being impatient to organise elections reflects the tendency of the international actors engaged in aiding the
conflict resolution to view elections as a strategy for an early exit. Yet at least sometimes, early elections can be a
recipe for failure. 44 The next section analyses which of the arguments laid out here are used by rising
democracies, and how this informs their foreign policy. Do rising democracies promote democracy? The case of

Western democratic governments and organisations spend

billions of dollars every year on democracy-related projects, 45 turning them into
the dominant actors in the field of democracy promotion. Yet a notable shift of power is taking
place towards countries that are more hesitant when it comes to
systematic democracy promotion. Have Brazil and India promoted democracy in the past? How
Brazil and India

do analysts and policy makers in emerging democraciesusing Brazil and India as an example in this analysis
think about democracy promotion? How can we characterise their arguments in relation to the critiques cited

Brazil accounts for over half of South Americas

wealth, population, territory and military budget, which suggests that it is
relatively more powerful in its region than China, India and Germany are in
their respective neighbourhoods.46 Yet, despite this dominant position, it
shied away from intervening in its neighbours internal afairs before the
1990s. The preservation of national sovereignty and non-intervention
have always been and remain key pillars of Brazils foreign policy, 47 so any
above? Brazil and democracy promotion

attempt to promote or defend self-determination and human rights abroada commitment enshrined in Brazils
1989 constitution48stands in conflict with the principle of non-intervention.49 The tension arising from these two
opposing visionsrespecting sovereignty and adopting a more assertive pro-democracy stance, particularly in the
regionis one of the important dilemmas in Brazilian foreign policy of the past two decades. In fact, particularly

during the 1990s, Brazil abstained several times from promoting or defending democracy. In 1990, under President
Fernando Collor de Mello (199092) and largely because of economic interests, Brazil blocked calls for a military
intervention in Suriname after a military coup there. A year later it opposed military intervention to reinstall
President Aristide in Haiti. In 1992 it remained silent over a political crisis in Ecuador. In 1994when a member of
the UN Security Councilit abstained from Security Council Resolution 940, which authorised the use of force in
Haiti with the goal of reinstating President Aristide, who had been removed from power in 1991 through a coup.50

However, contrary to what is often believed, Brazil has defended

democracy abroad in many more instances, and over the past two decades
its views on intervention have become decidedly more flexible. 51 Even under
indirectlyelected President Jos Sarney (198589), the first president after democratisation, Brazil supported the
inclusion of a reference to democracy in a new preamble to the Organization of American States (OAS) Charter.52

Brazil intervened in neighbouring

Paraguay in 1996 to avoid a military coup thereworking through
Mercosur and the OAS to obtain higher leverage, and ultimately convincing General Lino Oviedo not to
stage a coup dtat against then President Juan Carlos Wasmosy.53 The Brazilian president again
played an important mediating role during political crises in Paraguay in
1999 and 2000.54 When then Peruvian President Fujimori falsified the election results in 2000, Brazils
Under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (19952002),

President Cardoso refused to criticise him and Brazil was the major obstacle to US and Canadian efforts to condemn
Peru at the OAS General Assembly.55 Yet, in an important gesture, President Cardoso stayed away from President
Fujimoris inaugural ceremony, and a year later Brazil supported the Inter-American Democratic Charter, largely

Following the coup in

Venezuela Brazil has assumed a more assertive prodemocracy stance in
the region. In 2002 it actively engaged in Venezuela when a group sought
to illegally oust Hugo Chavez, who was reinstated 48 hours later.57
Looking back over the past decade, Santosi argues that Brazil has played
an exemplary and fundamental role in strengthening democratic norms
and clauses across the region.58 In his memoirs Cardoso reflected on the issue by saying that
aimed at Fujimori, which includes the norm of democratic solidarity.56

Brazil always defends democratic order. 59 Burges and Daudelin argue that one can say that Brazil has been
quite supportive of efforts to protect democracy in the Americas since 1990. 60 This tendency has been further
strengthened in the 21st century. In 2003 President Lula (2003 2010) swiftly engaged to resolve a constitutional
crisis in Bolivia and, in 2005, he sent his foreign minister to Quito to deal with a crisis in Ecuador. In the same year
Brazil supported the OAS in assuming a mediating role during a political crisis in Nicaragua, including financial
support for the electoral monitoring of a municipal election there. In 2009 the international debate about how to
deal with the coup in Honduras was very much a result of Brazil and the USA clashing over the terms of how best to
defend democracy, rather than whether to defend it.61 Over the past two decades Brazil has systematically built
democratic references and clauses into the charters, protocols and declarations of the subregional institutions of
which it is a member. The importance of democracy in the constitution and activities of the Rio Group, Mercosur and
the more recent South American Community of Nations (Unasul) can to a large extent be traced back to Brazils

At the same time Brazil has sought to ensure that the protection
of democratic rule be calibrated with interventionism, combining the
principle of non-intervention with that of non-indiference. 63 This terms policy
activism.62

relevance remains contested, yet it symbolises how much Brazils thinking about sovereignty has evolved. For
example, when explaining why Brazil opposed a US proposal to craft a mechanism within the OASS Democratic
Charter, which permits the group to intervene in nations to foster or strengthen democracy, Celso Amorim

argued that there needs to be a dialogue rather than an intervention,

adding that democracy cannot be imposed. It is born from dialogue. 64 It
thus positions itself as an alternative and more moderate democracy defender in
the hemisphere than the USA, and one that continuously calibrates its interest in defending
democracy with its tradition of non-intervention. Brazils decision to lead the UN peacekeeping mission, Minustah, in
Haiti, starting in 2004, cannot be categorised as democracy promotion per se, yet the missions larger goal did
consist in bringing both economic and political stability to the Caribbean Island, which has been the target of US

Brazils ongoing involvement in

Guinea Bissau, a member of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) proved to be
a yet another important moment for Brazils role as a promoter of peace
American democracy promotion for years.65 In the same way

and democracy.66 Brazil had provided some electoral assistance to Guinea-Bissau from 2004 to 2005 and it
continued to support efforts to stabilise the country by operating through the UN peacekeeping mission there.67
During a CPLP meeting in 2011 Brazil signed a memorandum of understanding to implement a Project in Support of
the Electoral Cycles of the Portuguese-speaking African Countries and Timor-Leste.68 In addition, in the lead-up to
the anticipated elections in April 2012, Brazil made further financial contributions to the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP) basket fund in support of the National Electoral Commission for assistance in the
execution of the election.69 Brazils pro-democracy stance became most obvious in 2012, when President Dilma
Roussefftogether with the leaders of Uruguay and Argentinasuspended Paraguay from Mercosur after the
impeachment of Paraguays President Fernando Lugo, which most governments in the region regarded as the
equivalent of a coup dtat or a parliamentary coup. 70 The Brazilian government thus set a clear precedent that
anti-democratic tendencies in the region would cause a rapid and clear reaction from leaders in Braslia. President
Rousseffs decision to work through Mercosurrather than the OAS is consistent with a growing preference to use
local regional bodies, possibly in an effort to strengthen projection as a regional leader. Yet there are also critical
voices. Summarising Brazilian foreign policy over the past two decades, Sean Burges argues that Brazil has not
behaved consistently in support of democratic norm enforcement, 71 and that decisive action to preserve
democracy has been tepid. 72 Ted Piccone reasons that when it comes to wieldinginfluence in support of
democracy in other countriesBrazil has been ambivalent and often unpredictable. 73 Both these evaluations were
made before Brazils assertive stance in Paraguay in 2012. Nevertheless, despite this strategy, the term democracy
promotion is not used either by Brazilian policy makers or by academics when referring to Brazils Paraguay policy.
In the same way Brazil does not promote any activities comparable to those of large US or European
nongovernmental organisations, whose activities range from political party development, electoral monitoring,
supporting independent media and journalists, capacity building for state institutions, and training for judges, civic

Brazil is increasingly assertive in its

region, and willing to intervene if political crises threaten democracy. Brazil is
group leaders and legislators. This brief analysis shows that

most likely to intervene during constitutional crises and political ruptures, and less so when procedural issues
during elections may affect the outcomeas was the case during Hugo Chavez re-election in 2012, when several
commentators criticised Brazils decision not to pressure the Venezuelan government to ensure fair elections.74 Yet,

the consolidation of democracy in the region

has turned into one of Brazils fundamental foreign policy goals. This
despite this distinction, it seems clear that

development must be seen in the context of Brazils attempt to consolidate its regional leadership. In the 1980s
Brazilian foreign policy makers perceived the need to engage with the countrys neighbours, principally its rival
Argentina, a trend that continued and strengthened throughout the 1990s. At the beginning of Cardosos first term,
the president began to articulate a vision that fundamentally diverged from Brazils traditional perspectivea vision
that identified South America as a top priority.75 This trend has continued ever since, and was intensified under
Cardosos successor, Luiz Incio Lula da Silva. Over the past few years, as Brazils economic rise has caught the
worlds attention, the region has firmly stood at the centre of Brazils foreign policy strategy.76 This trend continues
under Brazils current administration, with a focus on reducing a growing fear in the region that Brazil could turn
into a regional bully; over the past few years anti-Brazilian sentiment has been on the rise in South America.77 Yet,
while Brazil may de facto defend democracy with frequency in the region, it rarely engages in the liberal rhetoric so
common in Europe and the USA. It may be precisely because of Brazils traditional mistrust of the USAs attempts to
promote freedom that Brazilian policy makers refrain from using similar arguments. Rather, Brazil can be said to be
defending and promoting political stability above all else, a key ingredient of Brazils interest in expanding its
economic influence on the continent. Rather than the strength of its neighbours, it is their weakness that is now a
threat, as weak nations may not be able to provide basic levels of public order. For example, the violence and chaos
that ensues in Bolivia could spill into Brazilian territory, and it may scare away investors who are contemplating

Brazil is strong and getting strongerbut its neighbours are

weak and some appear to be getting weaker. It is within this context that
Brazil faces its biggest security challenges. 78 While Brazil usually acts swiftly in face of
engaging in Brazil.

political instability, it is far more reluctant to intervene in places where democracy suffers from procedural problems
such as in Venezuela, where President Chavez used the state apparatus to promote his campaign, leading to an
uneven playing field between him and his opponent, Henrique Capriles. One way to explain Brazils reluctance to

Democracy
promotion can thus be seen not necessarily as an end in itself, but rather as an important
element of Brazils strategy to strengthen its growing economic presence
in the region. Similarly to the USA, democracy promotion thus largely
aligns with Brazils national interests as an emerging power.
intervene in such cases is that they do not affect Brazils economic interests in the region.

EU

Political Conditionality
EU use of political conditionality aids democratization
Schimmelfennig and Scholtz 08 [2008. Frank Schimmelfennig is Professor
of European Politics at the Center for Comparative and International Studies (CIS).
Hanno Scholtz is a Senior Researcher at the Sociological Institute, University of
Zurich. EU Democracy Promotion in the European Neighbourhood; Political
Conditionality, Economic Development and Transnational Exchange European
Union Politics. Volume 9 (2): 187215.]
In using political conditionality, the EU sets the adoption of democratic
rules and practices as conditions that the target countries have to fulfil in
order to receive rewards such as financial assistance, some kind of institutional
association or ultimately membership. EU conditionality is mainly positiv e, that is,
the EU ofers and withholds carrots but does not carry a big stick (Smith, 2001;
Youngs, 2001: 192). Countries that fail to meet the criteria are simply denied
assistance, association or membership and left behind in the competition for EU
funds and the regatta for accession. The EU generally does not inflict extra
punishment (in addition to withholding the conditional reward) on non-compliant governments. Nor does it give
extra support to those that fail to meet the conditions . Rather, it regularly exhorts the
target governments that it is their own responsibility to create the conditions to be rewarded. The most general
political conditionality hypothesis can be stated as follows: The level of democracy in the neighbouring countries of
the EU increases with the size and the credibility of the EUs conditional incentives. In general,

adopting

liberal political norms (such as human rights, democratic elections, open contestation for office and the
rule of law) constitutes a loss in autonomy for the target governments . These
political costs need to be balanced in kind by tangible incentives such as
military protection or economic assistance to improve the security and the welfare of the
state. In addition, efectiveness will increase with the size of the incentives .
Accordingly, the promise of enlargement should be more powerful than the promise of association or assistance,
and the impact of the EU on candidates for membership should be stronger than that on outside states, which are

Only the highest international rewards those

associated with EU membership can be expected to balance substantial
domestic power costs. Finally, conditionality needs to be credible, with regard to
not considered potential EU members.

both the EUs threat to withhold the rewards in case of non-compliance and, conversely, the EUs promise to deliver

the credibility of the threat has always been

present in the relations between the EU and its neighbourhood .
Interdependence is highly asymmetrical in favour of the EU. Whereas the
neighbouring countries are of only marginal importance to the EU economy, they are often
heavily dependent on the EU market and will benefit much more strongly
from their association and accession than the EU member states (Moravcsik and Vachudova,
the reward in case of compliance. In general,

2005: 201). On the other hand, however, the EU must be able and willing to pay the rewards. The higher the costs
of the rewards to the EU are, the more doubtful their eventual payment to the target countries will be. On the basis
of this reasoning, assistance and association have generally been more credible rewards than accession because
the commitment on the part of the EU is low. By contrast, Eastern enlargement involves substantial costs to the
organization, which although far from being prohibitive are likely to exceed the marginal benefits to most
member states (Schimmelfennig, 2003: 5266). Indeed, it took several years to overcome the reticence and
opposition of a majority of member governments and to commit the EU firmly to enlargement. It was not until 1993
that the EU made a general decision to accept new members from the transition countries, and it was not until
1997 that the EU opened accession negotiations with the democratically most consolidated states among them.

These decisions greatly strengthened the credibility of both the promise to enlarge and the threat to exclude reform
laggards and the impact of political conditionality on those countries that were not allowed to participate in the

that the impact of the EU on democratization

in the neighbouring countries will be a function of the size and credibility
of the rewards the EU ofers in return for increased democratization .
first round of negotiations. In sum, we claim

EU conditional threats are credible and have a strong impact

on democratic change
Schimmelfennig and Scholtz 08 [2008. Frank Schimmelfennig is Professor
of European Politics at the Center for Comparative and International Studies (CIS).
Hanno Scholtz is a Senior Researcher at the Sociological Institute, University of
Zurich. EU Democracy Promotion in the European Neighbourhood; Political
Conditionality, Economic Development and Transnational Exchange European
Union Politics. Volume 9 (2): 187215.]
Is EU democracy promotion in its neighbourhood relevant and effective and if so, under what conditions? This
study started from core findings established by recent comparative analyses of EU democracy promotion in the

the EU has successfully promoted democracy in its neighbourhood ;

it owes its success to the use of political conditionality ; and that the
efectiveness of political conditionality depends on a credible membership
perspective for the target countries. It has been the main purpose of this study to put these
CEECs: that
that

findings to a demanding test, first by controlling for economic development and transnational exchanges as
alternative mechanisms of democratization and second by increasing the number of observations to a large number
(36) of target countries in the European neighbourhood and across a long time period (13 years). In addition, the
study was motivated by the question of how effective EU democracy promotion would remain after the completion

the political conditionality

hypothesis has passed the test but needs to be qualified . Only EU political accession
of the Fifth Enlargement. We conclude from our analysis that

conditionality has met the theoretical expectations. Across a variety of model specifications and estimations, and
with plausible alternative factors of democratization controlled for ,

it has proven to be a robustly

significant, strong and positive correlate of democratization in the
European neighbourhood. Even when the membership incentives lacked
credibility , i.e. when the membership promise was uncertain and accession
was distant, the impact of EU political conditionality was statistically
strong and robust (albeit less so than in the case of a highly credible membership perspective). Not any
kind of conditionality works, however. Short of a membership perspective, association and partnership
conditionality did not perform consistently better than no or weak conditionality credible association conditionality
being a borderline case. In addition, we did not find the hypothesized linear relationship between the size and
credibility of incentives and democracy below the level of credible association conditionality. Finally, the impact of
EU political conditionality varies across levels of democratization. It is smallest in autocratic countries and,
unsurprisingly, in countries that have already achieved a high level of democracy. By contrast, it is most effective in
promoting democractic consolidation in countries that have already experienced some democratization. The
alternative mechanisms of democratization were included in the analysis as controls rather than as test variables in
their own right. The results should therefore not be interpreted as substantive findings on the causal relevance of
economic development or transnational exchange. In view of the overwhelming empirical evidence in support of
wealth (GDP per capita) as a factor of democratization, however, its statistical performance in our analysis was less
than impressive. By contrast, life expectancy proved highly robust. This might indicate that, rather than pure
income, quality of life more broadly defined may be more relevant in the region. The geographical proxies for the
intensity of transnational transactions performed reasonably well overall. The highly varied kinds and impacts of
transnational exchange that are covered by these proxies would need to be disentangled and analysed separately,
however, in future research. The same is true for trade, which failed completely as an explanatory variable when
aggregated but showed interesting and strong effects when imports and exports were distinguished.

Our final

conclusions pertain to policy and the prospects of EU political

conditionality. Although the European Neighbourhood Policy, which became operative only in 2005, and
general developments since the completion of the Fifth Enlargement have not been a subject of the analysis, the
findings may be extrapolated with some caution. According to our typology, the ENP would generally be classified
as a low-credibility association policy because it explicitly excludes a membership perspective for the ENP countries
and does not set high political standards for participation. It would thus not differ qualitatively from the European
Mediterranean Policy (EMP). If the EMP experience and our analysis have any predictive value, the ENP will have at
best uncertain and inconsistent effects as a policy of democracy promotion (Kelley, 2006; Maier and
Schimmelfennig, 2007; see also Tovias and Ugur, 2004, for similar findings on economic policy reform in the
Mediterranean countries). The counterfactual conclusions that could be drawn from this analysis require even more

our findings seem to suggest that the EU could have a

stronger impact on democratic change in its neighbourhood if it offered more

caution. On the one hand,

neighbouring countries a membership perspective and if it made the political conditionality component of the ENP
more credible (even without offering membership). On the other hand, the EU might be well advised to give up any
political conditionality below the level of credible association conditionality, because it does not seem to have any
systematic impact other than undermining the credibility of the EUs political conditionality and complicating
negotiations and cooperation with the neighbouring countries.

Impacts

Middle East

War
Middle East war is probable and devastating strong U.S.
involvement is needed to prevent nuclear escalation.
London 10 Herbert I. London, President of the Hudson Institutea non-profit think tank, Professor
Emeritus and former John M. Olin Professor of Humanities at New York University, holds a Ph.D. from New York
University, 2010 (The Coming Crisis In The Middle East, Gatestone Institutea non-partisan, not-for-profit
international policy council and think tank, June 28th, Available Online at
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/1387/coming-crisis-in-the-middle-east, Accessed 08-10-2013)

The coming storm in the Middle East is gaining momentum ; like conditions
prior to World War I, all it takes for explosive action to commence is a
trigger . Turkey's provocative flotilla, often described in Orwellian terms as a humanitarian mission, has
set in motion a gust of diplomatic activity: if the Iranians send escort vessels for the next round of
Turkish ships, which they have apparently decided not to do in favor of land operations, it could have presented a casus belli. [cause
for war] Syria, too, has been playing a dangerous game , with both missile deployment and rearming
Hezbollah. According to most public accounts, Hezbollah is sitting on 40,000 long-, medium- and short-range missiles, and Syrian
territory has been serving as a conduit for military materiel from Iran since the end of the 2006 Lebanon War. Should Syria move its

a wider regional war with Israel

could not be contained . In the backdrop is an Iran, with sufficient fissionable
material to produce a couple of nuclear weapons. It will take some time to weaponize the missiles, but
own scuds to Lebanon or deploy its troops as reinforcement for Hezbollah,

the road to that goal is synchronized in green lights since neither diplomacy nor diluted sanctions can convince Iran to change

all political eyes are on Iran, poised to be "the

hegemon" in the Middle East; it is increasingly considered the "strong horse" as American forces incrementally
retreat from the region. Even Iraq, ironically, may depend on Iranian ties in order to maintain internal stability. For Sunni
nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, regional strategic vision is a
combination of deal-making to ofset the Iranian Shia advantage, and
attempting to buy or develop nuclear weapons as a counterweight to
Iranian ambition. However, both of these governments are in a precarious state;
should either fall, all bets are of in the Middle East neighborhood . It has long
been said that the Sunni "tent" must stand on two legs: if one, falls, the tent collapses. Should this tent collapse, and should
Iran take advantage of that calamity, it could incite a Sunni-Shia war . Or feeling
empowered, and no longer dissuaded by an escalation scenario, Iran, with
nuclear weapons in tow , might decide that a war against Israel is a
distinct possibility. However implausible it may seem at the moment, the possible annihilation of
Israel and the prospect of a second holocaust could lead to a nuclear
exchange . The only wild card that can change this slide into warfare is an
active United States' policy. Yet, curiously, the U.S. is engaged in both an emotional and physical retreat from the region.
course. From Qatar to Afghanistan

Despite rhetoric which suggests an Iran with nuclear weapons is intolerable, the U.S. has done nothing to forestall this eventual
outcome. Despite the investment in blood and treasure to allow a stable government to emerge in Iraq, the anticipated withdrawal
of U.S. forces has prompted President Maliki to travel to Tehran on a regular basis. Further, despite historic links to Israel that gave
the U.S. leverage in the region as well a democratic ally, the Obama administration treats Israel as a national security albatross that
must be disposed of as soon as possible. As a consequence, the U.S. is perceived in the region as the "weak horse," the one
dangerous to ride. In every Middle East capital the words "unreliable and United States" are linked. Those individuals seeking a
moderate course of action are now in a distinct minority. A political vacuum is emerging, one that is not sustainable and one the

It is no longer a question of whether war

will occur, but rather when it will occur, and where it will break out. There
are many triggers to ignite the explosion, but not many scenarios for
containment. Could it be a regional war in which Egypt and Saudi Arabia watch from the sidelines, but secretly wish for
Iranian leadership looks to with imperial exhilaration.

Israeli victory? Or will this be a war in which there aren't victors, only devastation? Moreover, should war break out, what does the

U.S. do?

This is a description far more dire than any in the last century

and, even if

some believe that it is overly pessimistic, Arab and Jew, Persian and Egyptian, Muslim and Maronite tend to believe in its veracity -a truly bad sign.

Middle East war will escalate strategic instability risks

miscalculation and nuclear war.
Russell 9 James A. Russell, Senior Lecturer in the Department of National
Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, 2009 (Strategic Stability
Reconsidered: Prospects for Escalation and Nuclear War in the Middle East,
Security Studies Center, Spring, Available Online at
http://www.ifri.org/downloads/PP26_Russell_2009.pdf, Accessed 08-10-2013, p. 41)
Strategic stability in the region is thus undermined by various factors : (1)
asymmetric interests in the bargaining framework that can introduce unpredictable
behavior from actors; (2) the presence of non-state actors that introduce
unpredictability into relationships between the antagonists; (3) incompatible assumptions
about the structure of the deterrent relationship that makes the bargaining framework
strategically unstable; (4) perceptions by Israel and the United States that its window of
opportunity for military action is closing, which could prompt a preventive attack; (5) the prospect
that Irans response to pre-emptive attacks could involve unconventional weapons, which could prompt escalation by Israel and/or

the lack of a communications framework to build trust and

cooperation among framework participants. These systemic weaknesses in the coercive bargaining
framework all suggest that escalation by any the parties could happen either on purpose
or as a result of miscalculation or the pressures of wartime circumstance. Given these
factors, it is disturbingly easy to imagine scenarios under which a conflict
could quickly escalate in which the regional antagonists would consider
the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons . It would be a mistake
to believe the nuclear taboo can somehow magically keep nuclear
weapons from being used in the context of an unstable strategic
framework. Systemic asymmetries between actors in fact suggest a certain increase
in the probability of war a war in which escalation could happen quickly and
from a variety of participants. Once such a war starts, events would likely
develop a momentum all their own and decision-making would consequently be
shaped in unpredictable ways. The international community must take this
possibility seriously , and muster every tool at its disposal to prevent such
an outcome, which would be an unprecedented disaster for the peoples of
the region, with substantial risk for the entire world .
the United States; (6)