Abstract
Timothy M. Gill writes to add context to the Summer 2018 issue’s policy brief and urge an interrogation of assumptions that democracy assistance is a benign form of foreign policy.
The Imperial Nature of U.S. Democracy Assistance
In the summer 2018 issue of Contexts, I was thrilled to see that Theodore Gerber wrote a piece on U.S. democracy assistance. Although there is a base of existing knowledge, democracy assistance is an often neglected dimension of U.S. foreign policy. I had imagined that Gerber might discuss at least some of the existing sociological literature that critically examines the nature and goals of these U.S. efforts abroad. Besides a brief recognition of some general critiques, though, nothing of the sort emerged. Instead, we’re left with a rather Pollyannaish portrait of U.S. state practices.
As an initial note, Gerber correctly traces the development of U.S. democracy assistance to the 1980s, but he fails to note that the CIA formerly provided “democracy assistance”—or U.S. funding and training for political parties, NGOS, and other civil society actors—that is, before former President Reagan created the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in the early 1980s and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) developed its own political aid programs thereafter.
What does sociological work on contemporary U.S. efforts tell us?
William Robinson’s Promoting Polyarchy remains the most prominent sociological treatment of U.S. democracy assistance. Robinson (1996) looked at U.S. efforts in, for example, Chile, Haiti, and Nicaragua, at the end of the Cold War. Through analysis of NED and U.S. state documents, he finds that U.S. efforts privilege center-right parties that support neoliberal economic policies. While the United States contends that this practice remains neutral and non-partisan, Robinson shows that the practice is highly partisan and serves to tilt electoral playing fields in favor of center-right parties and to the detriment of left-wing groups.
But that was the Cold War. Have things changed?
Updating Robinson’s findings, my own work has shown that in recent years these efforts have deliberately aimed to undermine elected governments in Latin America, particularly Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. In Venezuela, NED funding flowed to actors pursuing violent regime change efforts throughout the early 2000s. In addition, NED representatives continually strategized with the opposition concerning how they might outcompete former President Hugo Chávez at the ballot box. And the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), for its part, developed an explicit policy of pulling supporters away from Chávez by creating faux-community groups in working-class neighborhoods with the help of opposition political parties, who then freely disseminated anti-Chávez propaganda through these seemingly neutral organizations. When these efforts failed, USAID thrust its efforts behind anti-Chávez student groups during the mid-to-late 2000s.
I appreciate Gerber’s intentions to involve sociologists within the world of democracy assistance. Maybe we could do some good. It’s troubling, though, that he shows no serious understanding of the deeply partisan and imperial nature of this practice.