Democracy promotion

Democracy promotion is the range of policies, assistance, external organizations and even military action that contribute to the formation of democratic societies in previously authoritarian states. While democracies obviously formed in the 18th century, the deliberate creation of a democracy, or the reversal of a possible trend away from democracy, is much more recent. The first examples dealt with reconstruction of Germany and Japan from fascist rule. Next, there was a concern, largely clandestine, that some democracies, such as Italy, might become Communist after World War II. There has been another surge, in Eastern Europe, since the fall of the Soviet Union, with Polish Solidarity (solidarnosc) being one of the most indigenous and visible. Most recently, it has been a neoconservative belief that displacing totalitarian regimes in the Middle East will lead quickly to liberal democracy.

Fukuyama agrees that there is a broad societal trend toward liberal democracy, but insists that institutions must be in place before a democracy can emerge in a specific time and place. He also observes that good governance is even more important than abstract democracy.

There are world, regional, and national democracy promotion organizations; they may be governmental, QUANGO, or nongovernmental. At the official world level, there is the United Nations Development Programme.

Institutions
Fukuyama argues that where democracy did emerge, it had external support that focused on building institutions. In Serbia, for example, opposition groups were aided by the National Endowment for Democracy, as had been the institutions in Ukraine. Successful democracy promotion requires, in his view:
 * An initiative from within
 * Sufficient freedom to organize, which did not exist in Saddam's Iraq
 * A type of nationalism conducive to external engagement, such as the Eastern European countries eager to join Western Europe, rather than tribes forced together by a colonial power

He agrees with the principle that there is a moral imperative to liberate population under tyranny, while the classic realist regards the internal character of a state as its own concern. This imperative goes well back in American tradition; the motto of United States Army Special Forces is de oppresso liber, which they translate as "to liberate the oppressed."

Cautioning that effective democracy depends on both economic development and social institutions, he points out, agreeing with an argument from Fareed Zakaria that a rule of law is more important to economic development than pure democracy. It may, in some cases, be more important to modernize the institutions of authoritarian societies than immediately moving to "feckless democracy". Doing so, however, is not a generally useful strategy; liberal authoritarianism tends to be rare, mostly seen in East Asia.

WWII Occupation
A structural model that did work came from the Federal Republic of Germany, which created "party foundations", called Stiftungen. each associated with a political party but receiving government funding, both to remove Nazi vestiges and to spread democratic models. , each aligned with one of the four German political parties, received funding from the West German treasury. "In the 1960's they began assisting their ideological counterparts abroad, and by the mid-70's were playing an important role in both of the democratic transitions taking place on the Iberian Peninsula."

The Stiftungen model became the prototype, in 1977, for a proposed foundation based on the U.S. Democratic Party and the U.S. Republican Party, which was founded in 1980 as the American Political Foundation. The APF received funding from the Agency for International Development to design a more general model.

Europe
Europe has created a number of democracy promotion organization. At the formal level, among the largest is the European Endowment for Democracy and Human Rights of the European Union. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has an Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.

Latin America
Ending the Cold War also led to democratization in formerly authoritarian states in Latin America. Not only had states run nondemocratic governments based on arguments of national security, there was intergovernmental cooperation under Operation Condor. There are democracy promotion initiatives under the Organization for American States.

Middle East
A different aspect of neoconservatism cautions against social engineering, and changing societies in overly ambitious ways. He cites the "broken windows" urban policing model of James Q. Wilson: reducing crime starts with enforcement of minor social breakdown, rather than directly addressing societal issues such as poverty and racism. In the context of foreign policy, direct democratization of Arab societies might be overly ambitious. In the case of the Iraq War, Vice President Cheney told interviewer Tim Russert "I really believe we will be greeted as liberators."

Fukuyama points out that the neoconservatives that pressed for the Iraq War ignored the mechanisms of building democratic institutions, such as the Agency for International Development or the World Bank. Instead, the Kristol and Kagan book Present Danger emphasized military power projection and ballistic missile defense, while it was the editorial policy of the Weekly Standard, during the Clinton Administration, to encourage U.S. defense spending.