The Power Politics Behind Deciding Who’s a Democracy

A decade after the end of the Cold War, the world’s democracies are planning a big bash in Europe. But this spring fling convened by the United States, the old boy, and Poland, the new kid on the block, is looking less and less like a celebration, and more and more like the familiar diplomatic conclave it was destined to be. With at least 100 foreign ministers set to roam the halls in Warsaw next week, sweet odes to democracy will surely include a few verses of self-justification sung to the dark melody of power politics.

When democracy is in the air, things can get complicated. The Warsaw attendance list offers an important lesson in splitting hermeneutical hairs. Clearly, the invitation committee was burdened by what literary critics call over-interpretation and politicians call pragmatism. Iran is out--overriding U.S. interests, despite recent political reforms--and Russia is in--overriding European interests, despite political decay. The old generation of once-upon-a-time populists has overstayed its welcome: Zimbabwe can’t come because President Robert Mugabe stole land, and Peru’s President Alberto Fujimori may have to relinquish his invite because he stole an election. Should Persian Gulf sheikdoms, with mock parliaments, be invited? How about Kuwait, where women can’t vote? Or transitional states--Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, for instance--that mimic democratic ritual but ignore its substance?

Mixing the imperatives of idealism with many categories of realism isn’t easy: The Warsaw agenda is a carefully honed effort to reinforce democracy among states that thought ideology died when the Berlin Wall fell. Not a bad thing--there are worse organizing principles for politics than those dedicated to the rule of law and popular participation. But with due deference to Poland, this is a U.S. show, about building U.S. alliances. It’s a chance to anchor North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion with political values; bypass the European Union’s imminent enlargement as former communist states join its fold; and drape rare moments of Third World political hope in the cloth of mercantile advantage. And, critically, it’s about crafting a diplomatic legacy for the Clinton administration before it uses up all its time.

Washington wants to accomplish many things in one meeting. It believes democracies share common interests that can be furthered by working together. It hopes to stabilize shaky democracies by shielding fence-sitting politicians from the twinned lures of avarice and authoritarianism. But it also wants to reinforce its own superpower status--not so popular among Western allies--to anchor a world whose center of gravity is still shifting long after balance-of-power politics have faded out. It’s trying to encourage global stability and prosperity by promoting an idea of democracy that, at its best, should encourage dissidence, dynamism and vibrant unpredictability.

Sound like selling snake oil? This end-of-term agenda is actually consistent with views President Bill Clinton has been pushing since his first days in office. The collapse of communism in Europe allowed “new Democrats” to think big and jettison old diplomatic divides. Nixon conservatives had staunchly asserted that alliances were based on common foreign-policy interests, domestic politics be damned. Carter liberals believed in a foreign policy of values, and tried to organize U.S. policy, in part, by promoting the rights of man. Neither model worked perfectly: President Richard M. Nixon’s legacy brought us a generation of Latin dictators and Third World proxy wars; President Jimmy Carter’s efforts failed to persuade world leaders that doing the right thing for the right reasons would lead the world to respect rights. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush transformed the use of force into a moral doctrine and then basked in the Soviet empire’s decline.

Enter Clinton, president of the club of multiple convergence. He has pursued peace through force, ethnic harmony through partitioned separatism, democracy through markets. Under this administration, the United States often can’t find words to condemn inconveniently tainted elections in important countries, embraces dictators to manage wars and endlessly recalculates its own interests. It accepts conventional wisdom--democracies rarely fight one another, democracy mitigates the worst of economic and social hardship--but rarely picks up the shards of broken adages. Check the disenfranchised victims of democratic Ethiopia’s war with democratic Eritrea and you’ll see starvation; examine U.S. policy in Sierra Leone and you’ll see democrats disheartened by Western disregard wherever diamonds are found. For most of the world, this realpolitik shadows democratic dreams.

Clinton’s vague internationalism, refracted through sturdy bilateral lenses, is also often parochial. By willfully removing itself from the judgments of international courts, and refusing to ratify the human-rights treaties it insists are vital to strengthen democracies elsewhere, Washington is losing the right to determine what a multilateral summit on democracy can say, or tell others to do.

This contradictory foreign policy is one reason the main show in Warsaw may be elsewhere. While foreign ministers gather for formal statements, the nongovernmental organizations and political parties vital to the world’s democracies will be meeting across the street. This, too, is realism: the power of the state versus the power of the people, the power of the purse versus the power of politics, the potential power of right to decide the meaning of might. Not a populist roar, this other meeting may mime official proceedings rather than copy the antics of soggy demonstrators in Seattle. But it’s a critical reminder that democracy is about citizens who voluntarily empower governments to help organize their lives.

Domestic politics--democratic politics--can be helped along when diplomacy doesn’t contradict its efforts. A solid basis of human rights offers citizens the capacity to claim accountable, representative government. But when they do so, they need foreign powers to validate their rights to change policy. Of course, democracies enfranchise many different opinions--and the U.S. may not like all of them. That’s where toleration comes in: When a superpower can share the power of its ideals, it sets the stage for real democracy.

Poets sometimes clarify what diplomacy muddles. “Whatever you say reverberates, whatever you don’t say speaks for itself,” cautions Poland’s Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel prize for literature. “So either way you’re talking politics.”

Poland’s post-Cold War history teaches cautious respect for state power, humility in the face of complex democratic transition and one key fact: Firm principles only enter policy by means of open politics. Protecting that political space may be the most important agenda for Warsaw’s nascent community of democracies. That’s what talking politics means.