Our world is becoming less democratic every year. The number of countries that maintain high-quality democracy continues to fall, while the number of people living under forms of authoritarian rule continues to increase. Given that current trends show no signs of abating, this democratic recession is set to continue well into the future. How should pro-democracy states—countries that believe themselves to be democratic at home, and at least profess to promote democracy abroad, though they often fail on both counts—respond?
It has become increasingly common for researchers and commentators to argue that, although the rising tide of authoritarianism is alarming, pro-democracy governments should not try to interfere in the domestic politics of other countries. There are a number of good reasons to be pessimistic about the claims of democratic states to be able to strengthen democracy abroad. Many are Western states that grew rich by exploiting people and resources in other countries and have yet to fully reckon with that history. All are countries that regularly trade off democracy against other goals, such as national security, economic trade, and global stability. From the way the United States has meddled in Latin America to try to place allied leaders in power to the close ties between the United Kingdom and authoritarian states such as Saudi Arabia, it is clear that Western states that preach democracy often sacrifice it in many of their relations abroad. To add to this, many of these democratic states face their own domestic challenges to democracy. The most obvious case is the Donald Trump presidency in the United States, which culminated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Against this background, many are asking how the United States and the United Kingdom can promote democracy abroad if they cannot even maintain it at home.
Yet while this skepticism is understandable given the checkered and often self-serving nature of international intervention, our new report for the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, “How (Not) to Engage With Authoritarian Regimes,” suggests that butting out is not an option.1 We do not argue this simply because the growth of global authoritarianism may represent an existential threat to democracy everywhere if it continues unabated—though many would consider that to be a powerful reason in and of itself. Instead, we demonstrate that even the most innocuous and routine ways in which pro-democracy states engage with authoritarian states can help to sustain highly repressive regimes. Given that these kinds of engagement are fundamental to the international political system and are not going to end any time soon, ceasing to promote democracy will not usher in a new era of international neutrality—rather, it will lead to a situation in which democratic states do considerable harm around the world.
If we are serious about getting to a situation in which democratic countries at the very least do no harm, democracies—and those who study them—need to take two critical steps. The first step is to understand how everyday forms of engagement sustain authoritarian rule, even in cases where pro-democracy states are not actively seeking to place security above democracy. The second step is to develop new strategies that either reshape everyday engagement or offset its problematic impacts. As part of this process, democratic governments will need to step up and adopt a more coherent and holistic approach to foreign policy that is more honest about their own priorities and more realistic about their impact around the world.
Why Everyday Engagement Sustains Authoritarian Rule
The problem with the idea that pro-democracy states should simply butt out of political trends beyond their borders is that they are actively engaged in shaping those trends in a much deeper and more pervasive way than is often recognized. Even if we leave foreign aid to one side, there is a remarkably broad range of activities that regularly bring democratic and authoritarian states together, including:
- Routine diplomatic relations with partners, whether bilaterally or through international organizations
- Trade deals and economic relations
- Joint programs and technical collaboration to tackle common issues such as transnational crime or health threats
- Joint security projects in the partner country or in third countries, such as anti-terror programs
- Agreements on visa and immigration processes
These forms of everyday engagement are routine precisely because they are integral to the way the system of global politics functions. They will therefore not cease any time soon. This is important because in different ways all of these activities can help to sustain authoritarian governments and make it harder for democracy activists to transform their own countries.
Take Western efforts to tackle terrorism. This is a laudable goal, but it often involves supporting the security forces and information-gathering capacity of another government. When that government is democratic, this may be relatively benign. When it is authoritarian, there is a serious risk that the skills and equipment that are passed on will subsequently be used not only against those involved in terrorist activities, but also against opposition leaders and supporters. Less dramatically, security and economic arrangements can contribute to the consolidation of power in the hands of an authoritarian leader, because international deals are often signed without any legislative scrutiny. Favorable trade deals, meanwhile, along with large amounts of foreign aid, can provide much-needed economic assistance to dictators, making it easier for them to overcome domestic opposition. Such deals can also contribute to authoritarian leaders’ international prestige and to normalizing democracies’ relations with governments that commit the most heinous human rights abuses.
In other words, even the most routine forms of international engagement can help to sustain and strengthen authoritarian rule. Pro-democracy states cannot avoid harm by simply leaning out.
The Technocratic Fallacy
The tendency to overlook the political impact of everyday engagement is related to and illustrated by another challenge: the technocratic fallacy, namely the belief that it is possible to provide technical support and advice to help governments be more efficient and effective in a way that has no political implications. Technical development assistance, such as funding external experts to provide advice, or running training programs and funding improvements in administrative capacity, is often favored by pro-democracy donors in places where it is difficult to engage with the host government for two reasons. First, there is a need to secure measurable results, and in an old-fashioned understanding of development, a lack of key goods and services is seen as a technical issue that can simply be resolved by the provision of greater expertise and investment. Another reason is that technical programs are considered less disagreeable to authoritarian governments and less controversial for democratic governments to participate in.
More than twenty years of research, however, has demonstrated that purely technical approaches are neither feasible nor desirable, even if donors are not seeking to promote democracy and focus only on development. There are two main components to this. First, technical assistance programs are rarely politically neutral—at the very least, they typically enhance a government’s capacity and hence can strengthen its grip on power. The belief that it is possible to do no democratic harm by bracketing out political issues, by working with either technical sectors of the state or purportedly apolitical actors, is therefore flawed. Second, a growing body of policy work and academic research has demonstrated that the pursuit of “apolitical” approaches, whether to the delivery of development or to the delivery of democracy aid, has been one of the main reasons for the failure of international programs. Many of the most important barriers to development are not technical but political, and must be treated as such.
The potential danger of ignoring the impact of everyday engagement, and falling foul of the technocratic fallacy, is well demonstrated by the cases of Pakistan and Rwanda. Both the United Kingdom and United States say that they are committed to promoting democracy in Pakistan. To this end, both have programs that channel tens of millions of dollars to enhance “democratic, citizen-centered governance and respect for human rights.” Yet this has been dwarfed by the military aid provided by the United States, ostensibly to enable the Pakistani military to more effectively pursue joint security goals. This empowered the military by making it one of the best-funded parts of the state and enhancing its status. This process is problematic because it “strengthens the hand of the military in comparison to Pakistan’s fledgling, emerging, democracy.”
In Rwanda, pro-democracy donors have been willing to back one of Africa’s most repressive governments in the belief that this is necessary for stability, and because it has recorded impressive improvements in development and economic growth. One way democratic states have sought to bridge the gap between their rhetorical commitment to human rights and providing support to a regime that clearly does not respect them is by focusing on more technocratic programs that seem likely to promote efficiency and good governance. Yet, even in these cases, pro-democracy countries have ultimately ended up reinforcing and strengthening the government’s authoritarian foundations.
Take donors’ support for decentralization. Focused on making lower administrative levels hubs for governance, decentralization reforms were sold as ensuring greater local accountability by instituting performance contracts for local administrators. However, while donor support to these policies has been sold as a means to bring effective governance closer to Rwandans and to facilitate service delivery, it has also served to strengthen the government’s presence and control locally. In turn, this has both enabled national leaders to enforce greater discipline on their local counterparts and made it easier to deflect criticism for policy failures away from the central government and onto lower-level politicians and bureaucrats.
As the numerous examples provided in our report demonstrate, the negative impact of everyday engagement and the technocratic fallacy is felt by citizens all over the world. Even in countries where pro-democracy states invest heavily in democratic programs, the positive effect of these efforts can be undermined by seemingly innocuous programs in other sectors. In order to avoid doing this kind of harm, democratic countries need to adopt a more realistic and holistic approach to their foreign relations and engagement—and they can only do that if they “lean in.” This means making the protection of democracy a top priority over the next decade, and radically remodeling how they engage with authoritarian states.
Remodeling Engagement with Authoritarian States
If pro-democracy governments are serious about resisting the global authoritarian turn, they need to change their approach, and they need to change it now.
Our report outlines seven key recommendations for how to do this, but many of them are underpinned by three core points. First, it is implausible to expect democratic governments to cease to engage with authoritarian states, and so the only feasible way forward is to change the nature of this engagement—it is not going to simply end. Second, pro-democracy states need to recognize that there is no such thing as a purely technical project, and that all forms of engagement, including the most routine, have the potential to consolidate authoritarian rule. Third, they will need to adopt a much more holistic approach to engaging with non-democratic states, considering the sum total of their investments and relations across all sectors, in order to develop an honest and accurate perception of the risk of harm. Democratic donors—and those who care about democracy and human rights—will therefore need to develop new strategies to try to offset the negative implications of international engagement and maintain space for democratic actors.
This is a big agenda and it requires bold and urgent action, but there are already a number of promising examples of how pro-democracy states could move in this direction. One is the decision of some Western agencies engaged in development and democracy support to adopt a human rights–based approach (HRBA) to their work. HRBAs essentially involve putting human rights at the heart of development activity and have been adopted by, for example, the Swedish International Development Agency. This approach features a number of elements that, if deepened and broadened, could be usefully adopted much more widely. Critically, HRBAs require all programs to be evaluated in terms of the extent to which they could enhance or undermine the rights of different groups. They therefore challenge the assumption that technical programs are apolitical, and they focus attention on developing a rounded understanding of the impact of a particular engagement. If such approaches could be broadened to consider democracy in addition to human rights and made more inclusive so that they are also used to evaluate economic and security relations—as opposed to the current tendency to focus on aid—pro-democracy states could take the first step toward doing no harm.
This will mean little, of course, if democratic states do not also operate more consistently in line with democratic principles both at home and abroad. The Westminster Foundation for Democracy report lists the numerous failings of established democracies over the last ten years and how they have undermined the reputations, and hence influence, of Western states and democracy itself. As a recent report from the Independent Commission for Aid Impact on the democracy and human rights strategy of the UK government concluded, the absence of a clear and consistent approach in this area has undermined the ability of the United Kingdom to play a constructive role in global politics. Fully accounting for the impact of engagement with authoritarian states will achieve little if it does not go hand in hand with a less self-serving and disjointed foreign policy. Pro-democracy governments should be honest and upfront, for example, about the fact that they do not always promote democracy and should only embark on efforts to strengthen democracy around the world when they have launched programs of democratic renewal at home.
It is important to note that a call for pro-democracy governments to think much more carefully about how they operate, and to do so more consistently and honestly, is not a call for widespread and knee-jerk intervention to force democracy on other states. As the examples of Afghanistan and Iraq have painfully demonstrated, democratic government only endures when it has domestic roots. Democratic resilience comes from the memory of great victories—and, sadly, often sacrifices—and so cannot be externally engineered. The role of pro-democracy governments should only be, and can only be, to help to maintain the space for domestic democrats and human rights activists to fight and win their own battles. It is for that reason that whatever one thinks about the motivations and capacity of democratic states, there should be consensus on the imperative of adopting new strategies that, at the very least, do no harm.
Nic Cheeseman (@fromagehomme) is a professor of democracy and the director of the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) at the University of Birmingham.
Marie-Eve Desrosiers (@DesrosiersME) is the chairholder of the International Francophonie Research Chair on political aspirations and movements in Francophone Africa and associate professor at the Graduate School in Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.
This article is part of the European Democracy Hub initiative run by Carnegie Europe and the European Partnership for Democracy.
This document was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the authors and can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.
Note
1 Unless otherwise sourced, the material presented here is based on the research in the Westminster Foundation for Democracy report.