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Abstract
Most sub-Saharan African countries are neither liberal democracies, nor fully authoritarian. Officials from Western governments that provide assistance to these ‘hybrid regimes’ often become apologists for their lack of democracy. Rather than cogently arguing why democracy promotion activities should not be a priority, such donor officials frequently claim either that their host country is more democratic than it actually is, or that it could not be any more democratic for the time being. Drawing on some 70 interviews with donor officials in three African countries – Kenya, Malawi and Rwanda – over a period of more than a decade, this paper examines numerous individuals' common use of three methods to deflect criticism of the democratic credentials of their host countries: (1) focusing on election day, rather than the campaign and conditions as a whole; (2) setting the standard very low (do not expect too much); and (3) setting a long time horizon (do not expect it too soon). Perhaps equally important, the paper also explores the various reasons why these donor officials make such excuses for authoritarian practices.
Acknowledgements
The various research trips (1997–2010) upon which this paper draws extensively were made possible by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, the University of Ottawa, the International Peace Academy, the Academic Council on the United Nations System, the Institute for the Study of World Politics, and the Quebec government's Fonds pour la Formation des Chercheurs et l'Aide à la Recherche, to whom I owe many thanks. This paper has benefitted from numerous helpful comments and suggestions received at the conference on Democratization in Africa, held at the University of Leeds, 4–5 December 2009, as well as from Gabrielle Lynch and two anonymous reviewers. I am also grateful to Rosalind Raddatz for valuable research assistance.
Notes
See Brown, ‘Foreign Aid and Democracy Promotion’. In fact, as Julia Leininger (‘Bringing the Outside In’, 76–7) notes, ‘the intense interaction between donors and local actors[…] may undermine or even prevent democratization’.
See, for instance, Carothers, ‘The “Sequencing” Fallacy’; Mansfield and Snyder, ‘The Sequencing “Fallacy”’.
Namely Benin, Botswana, Cape Verde, Ghana, Lesotho, Mali, Namibia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Seychelles and South Africa (Freedom House, ‘Electoral Democracies 2009’).
van de Walle, ‘Africa's Range of Regimes’, 68.
See Collier and Levitsky, ‘Democracy with Adjectives’; Bogaards, ‘How to Classify Hybrid Regimes?’.
With one exception, a Western ambassador to Malawi speaking under Chatham House rules at a workshop in his home country's capital city. All interviewees agreed to their comments being cited, though many preferred not to be identified by name. In most cases, the interview was the occasion on which I met the official for the first time. I had met a few of the officials prior to the interview, but they were merely casual acquaintances.
See Barkan, ‘Kenya’; Barkan and Ng'ethe, ‘Kenya Tries Again’; Brown, ‘Authoritarian Leaders and Multiparty Elections in Africa’; Holmquist and Ford, ‘Kenya’; Rutten, Mazrui and Grignon, Out for the Count; Southall, ‘Re-forming the State?; Throup and Hornsby, Multi-Party Politics in Kenya.
Brown, ‘Quiet Diplomacy and Recurring “Ethnic Clashes” in Kenya’.
Murunga and Nasong'o, ‘Bent on Self-Destruction’.
Brown, ‘Donor Responses to the 2008 Kenyan Crisis’.
Cheeseman and Tendi, ‘Power-sharing in Comparative Perspective’.
See Brown, ‘Born-Again Politicians Hijacked Our Revolution’, 713–7; Englund, A Democracy of Chameleons; Phiri and Ross, Democracy in Malawi.
Smiddy and Young, ‘Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in Malawi’, 663.
Lemarchand, ‘Consociationalism and Power Sharing in Africa’, 4–7.
Reyntjens, ‘Rwanda, Ten Years On’, 186.
US Department of State, ‘Rwanda’, n.p.
Rwandan National Election Commission, ‘Presidential Elections of August 9, 2010’, 1.
Beswick, ‘Managing Dissent in a Post-genocide Environment’, 236–41; Reyntjens, ‘Rwanda, Ten Years On’, 184.
See Brown, ‘The Rule of Law and the Hidden Politics of Transitional Justice in Rwanda’; Hayman, ‘Going in the “Right” Direction?’; Reyntjens, ‘Rwanda, Ten Years On’ and ‘Post-1994 Politics in Rwanda’; Silva-Leander, ‘On the Danger and Necessity of Democratisation’.
Author's interview with a Western embassy official, Kigali, Rwanda, August 2007.
Karl, ‘Imposing Consent?’, 34.
See Carothers, ‘The Observers Observed’, 22, 30; Elklit and Svensson, ‘What Makes an Election Free and Fair?’, 36, 38.
For a more systematic examination of how elections are rigged, see Calingaert, ‘Election Rigging and How to Fight It’.
Author's interview with two Western officials, Nairobi, Kenya, March–June 1998.
Author's interview with a Western embassy official, Nairobi, Kenya, March 1998.
Gisela Geisler (‘Fair?’, 628) cites the US ambassador saying the same thing immediately after the 1992 elections and argues that that is beside the point, since ‘monitors…ought surely to have called a flawed election a flawed election’.
Author's interview with a former Western aid official, Nairobi, Kenya, July 1998.
Author's interview with a Western embassy official, Nairobi, Kenya, May 1998.
Brown, ‘Authoritarian Leaders and Multiparty Elections in Africa’.
Brown, ‘Theorising Kenya's Protracted Transition to Democracy’.
Carothers, ‘The Observers Observed’, 25.
Autesserre, ‘Hobbes and the Congo’.
Author's interview with a Western official, Nairobi, Kenya, January 2010.
Donor officials, as Carothers (‘The Observers Observed’, 25) argues in the case of international observers, will ‘soft-pedal their findings’ if they believe a more honest condemnation ‘could precipitate serious violence or political instability’.
Author's interview with a Western aid official, Lilongwe, Malawi, November 1997.
Author's interview with a Western ambassador, Lilongwe, Malawi, February 1998.
Author's interview with a Western aid official, Lilongwe, Malawi, November 1997.
Author's interview with a Western aid official, Lilongwe, Malawi, October 1997.
Author's interview with a Western embassy official, Lilongwe, Malawi, November 1997.
Author's interview with a Western embassy official, Nairobi, Kenya, March 1998.
Abbink, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Democratization and Election Observation’, 11–12.
Author's interview with a Western embassy official, Nairobi, Kenya, March 1998.
Quoted in Foeken and Dietz, ‘Of Ethnicity, Manipulation and Observation’, 146.
Hayman, ‘Going in the “Right” Direction?’, 72. Like the other two cases, it is not clear that Rwanda is actually liberalizing.
Moreover, Abbink (‘Introduction’, 12) argues that such statements of ‘qualified support’ constitute ‘an effort in self-delusion and of justifying the effort of funding and observing itself: a form of damage control (if not downright cynicism in the eyes of voters in those countries)’. However, Elklit and Svensson (‘What Makes an Election Free and Fair?’, 43) appear to condone using this criterion in assessing an election's acceptability.
Author's interview with a Western embassy official, Nairobi, Kenya, June 2003.
Brown, ‘Donor Responses to the 2008 Kenyan Crisis’; Throup, ‘The Count’. On the enduring problems of democratization in Malawi, see Brown, ‘Transitions from Personal Dictatorships’. Rakner, Rocha Menocal and Fritz (‘Democratisation's Third Wave and the Challenges of Democratic Deepening’, 20–1) make a stronger case on the decline of Malawi's democratic institutions.
Author's interview with a Western embassy official, Nairobi, Kenya, March 1998.
Brown, ‘Authoritarian Leaders and Multiparty Elections in Africa’, 734.
Carothers, ‘The Observers Observed’, 29. See also Kelley, ‘D-Minus Elections’.
Author's interview with a Western embassy official, Nairobi, Kenya, March 1998.
Author's interview with a Western aid consultant, Nairobi, Kenya, April 1998.
The beginning and the end of a transition are often hard to identify and thus the duration of the process as well (Brown, ‘Theorising Kenya's Protracted Transition to Democracy’). The British transition to democracy could be said to span over 600 years, from the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 to the promulgation of the Reform Act in 1832. The timeframe in other European countries, such as France, was much shorter. Germany and Italy, important European democracies, did not even exist as countries until the nineteenth century. India required no transition period after decolonization and has been democratic since it achieved independence in 1947 (arguably with the exception of the 1975–1977 state of emergency). Several Eastern and Central European countries, such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, democratized very quickly and rather successfully after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989–1990.
Schmitter and Karl, ‘What Democracy Is…and Is Not’, 80.
Carothers, ‘Democracy Assistance’, 4.
For a discussion of sequencing and the case of Kenya, see Branch and Cheeseman, ‘Democratization, Sequencing, and State Failure in Africa’.
Bunce and Wolchik, ‘Favorable Conditions and Electoral Revolutions’.
Author's interview with a Western aid official, Nairobi, Kenya, April 1998.
Discussions with a Western ambassador to one of the three hybrid countries discussed in this paper, held in his capital city, October 2008.
Lipset, ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy’.
Przeworski et al., ‘What Makes Democracies Endure?’.
Author's interview with a multilateral organization official, Lilongwe, Malawi, January 1998.
Author's interview with a multilateral organization official, Lilongwe, Malawi, November 1997.
Author's interview with a Western aid official, Lilongwe, Malawi, December 1997.
Author's interview with a Western embassy official, Lilongwe, Malawi, November 1997.
Author's interview with a multilateral organization official, Lilongwe, Malawi, July 2003.
Author's interview with a Western embassy official, Kigali, Rwanda, August 2007.
Author's interview with a Western embassy official, Kigali, Rwanda, August 2007. The US Department of State (‘Rwanda’, 47) reported ‘a contraction in civil and political space’ after the 2003 elections, suggesting that the country was becoming more authoritarian, rather than more democratic.
Kelley, ‘D-Minus Elections’. Joel Barkan (‘Kenya’) was a more generous marker than Kelley and gave Kenya's 2002 elections the grade of C-minus.
These include Brown, ‘Foreign Aid and Democracy Promotion’; Brown, ‘From Demiurge to Midwife’; Carothers, ‘The Observers Observed’; Crawford, ‘Foreign Aid and Political Conditionality’; Elklit and Svensson, ‘What Makes an Election Free and Fair?’; Geisler, ‘Fair?’; and Kelley, ‘D-Minus Elections’.
See Brown, ‘Authoritarian Leaders and Multiparty Elections in Africa’; Brown, ‘Quiet Diplomacy and Recurring “Ethnic Clashes” in Kenya’; Brown, ‘Foreign Aid and Democracy Promotion’, 187–9; Crawford, ‘Foreign Aid and Political Conditionality’; Hook, ‘“Building Democracy” through Foreign Aid’; Olsen, ‘Europe and the Promotion of Democracy in Post Cold War Africa’, 366–7; Rose, ‘Democracy Promotion and American Foreign Policy’, 189.
Carothers, ‘Democracy Assistance’, 14.
Whitehead, ‘Losing “the Force”’, 234; Kelley, ‘D-Minus Elections’, 778.
Democracy promotion has differing degrees of importance from donor to donor, but this has had little or no impact on the observable behaviour of donor officials. Where democracy promotion is important rhetorically but less so de facto (for example, the United States), officials may be hard pressed to ‘explain away’ the democratic deficiencies so as to not appear to be in contradiction with donor's institutional priorities. This can be done by either arguing that the country is reasonably democratic or, acknowledging that it is not, that there are more pressing priorities (economic reform, stability, security, etc.). Where democracy promotion is more important de facto (for example, in Scandinavian countries), donor officials can feel strong pressure to become apologists for the host country to justify their being there. They can set the bar low, invoke long timeframes, etc., but they find it more difficult to make the argument for other, more important priorities, since their employer does not do so, at least not publicly. These are theoretical arguments or maybe even assumptions. As noted above, I did not in fact observe any difference from one donor official to the next.
Leininger, ‘Bringing the Outside In’, 74.
Author's interview with a Western aid official, Lilongwe, Malawi, October 1997.
Author's interview with a Western aid official, Nairobi, Kenya, April 2001.
See Brown, ‘From Demiurge to Midwife’; Hempstone, Rogue Ambassador.
The full text of his speech is available on BBC News Online, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3893625.stm. It is not clear whose footwear he was referring to, donor officials' or Kenyans'.
Author's interview with a Western aid official, Lilongwe, Malawi, October 1997.
Author's interview with a Western aid official, Lilongwe, Malawi, December 1997.
Hayman, ‘Going in the “Right” Direction?’, 72, 74.
Author's interview with a Western aid consultant, Nairobi, Kenya, April 1998.
Carothers, ‘The Observers Observed’, 29.
Author's interview with a Western official, Nairobi, Kenya, January 2010.