COSTLY DEMOCRACY

Peacebuilding and Democratization after WarBy Christoph Zürcher Carrie Manning Kristie D. Evenson Rachel Hayman Sarah Riese Nora Roehner

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8197-8

Contents

Preface……………………………………………………………vii1 Introduction……………………………………………………..12 Leverage, Adoption Costs, and the Peacebuilding Game………………….203 The Legacy of War…………………………………………………354 The Mission Footprint……………………………………………..575 Aid……………………………………………………………..826 Neighborhood……………………………………………………..1127 Conclusion: Explaining Postwar Democratic Transitions…………………131Notes……………………………………………………………..155Bibliography……………………………………………………….163The Authors………………………………………………………..175Index……………………………………………………………..177

Chapter One

Introduction

Peacebuilding missions can bring peace to war-torn countries, but they seldom bring democracy. Why do countries so rarely emerge from civil wars as democracies? And what is the role of peacebuilders in both failed and successful postwar democratic transitions? These questions lie at the heart of the collective research effort presented in this volume.

The evidence for successful postwar democratic transitions is not encouraging: Since 1989, the international community has launched nineteen major peacebuilding operations (see Table 1.1). These operations were reasonably successful in securing peace but much less successful in establishing democratic regimes. Five years after the operations began, only two countries were rated “free” by Freedom House and qualified as “liberal democracy”; that is, as a regime that “extends freedom, fairness, transparency, accountability, and the rule of law from the electoral process into all other major aspects of governance and interest articulation, competition, and representation.” Also, no recent missions of significant size—including those in East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan—have resulted in the establishment of a liberal democracy.

It is unrealistic, perhaps, to expect a liberal democracy to emerge from the ashes of war. But even when we apply a lower and less ambitious threshold for success, such as an electoral democracy (that is, according to Freedom House’s definition, a regime that holds elections but provides less protection for civil liberties than a liberal democracy), we still find that just nine out of the nineteen countries that hosted major peacebuilding missions qualify. Among those governments that miss the mark, three are classified as fully authoritarian and four as electoral authoritarian—that is, ruled by autocrats who allow some form of multiparty elections that they almost certainly win by a comfortable margin. Given the vast amount of resources and hopes that are invested in liberal peacebuilding, these are sobering results.

Scholars have offered several explanations as to why postwar democracy is so difficult to establish. To start with, some scholars argue that bringing democracy to a war-torn country is simply the impossible dream born of Western hubris; it is unreasonable, they say, to expect peacebuilders to socially engineer a society capable of producing and maintaining a liberal democratic regime in a matter of years, and they point to the fact that the emergence of social structures that enabled democracies to grow in Western Europe was a process that took centuries.

Other scholars take a less radical stance but maintain that democratization after war is an extraordinarily rare event because most postwar societies lack the capacities to implement and sustain the complex and costly political institutions required for democratic and accountable governance. This echoes Seymour Martin Lipset’s famous “social requisites of democracy” argument, which states that low economic development and a small middle class negatively affect democratization.

A third explanation focuses on the geostrategic location of a country and states that the threat of violent spillovers from adjacent countries may discourage leaders from steering a more democratic course or that support from an authoritarian leader in a neighboring country reduces the international pressure on elites for democratic reforms in a postwar country.

Lastly, perhaps the most prominent strand in the peacebuilding literature centers on the cooperation problem between the warring parties and argues that the most obvious factor that hinders the emergence of democracy after war is war itself. Civil wars, especially when they are long, highly destructive, and fought between identity groups, can reduce a society’s capacity for a stable and democratic peace because they create highly divided societies and elites who deeply mistrust one another. Under such circumstances, actors may lack the capacities to overcome the cooperation problem and be unable to engage in a meaningful peace process or to accept the bounded uncertainty that comes with democratic rules. For all of these reasons, countries emerging out of war find it difficult to democratize.

And yet modern peacebuilding missions are designed precisely to address these challenges. They are launched to help domestic elites overcome the many difficulties presented by postwar democratic transitions. Peacebuilders bring tremendous resources to the table with budgets that frequently dwarf those of host governments, as we have seen in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor. They deploy civilian personnel who assume vital administrative functions and military personnel to guarantee security. Peacebuilders also bring economic aid, which frequently becomes the single most important source of government income. Aid is directed toward state institutions, election processes, and civil society. This assistance is usually committed over years rather than months, all of which has a tremendous impact on the economic, social, and cultural fabric of the intervened-upon society but has, apparently, only a weak effect on postwar democratization, as Table 1.1 shows. What explains the limited impact of external actors and their resources on postwar democratization?

Beyond the aforementioned difficulties of democratic transitions, some scholars assume that poor implementation is also at the root of mission failure. Often, time and resource constraints are thought to doom democratization efforts. The assumption is that missions with a larger footprint in terms of financing, personnel, and mandate could perhaps achieve better outcomes. Lack of coordination between peacebuilders and an inability to learn from past mistakes are also cited as potential obstacles. Critics lament that peacebuilders rarely adapt strategies to specific contexts but tend to apply a cookie-cutter approach to their democratization efforts, which prioritizes political and economic liberalization over the construction of effective political and economic institutions.

We do not discard any of these arguments, and we think that all of them encapsulate some of the aspects that explain why postwar democratic transitions rarely result in the liberal democracy that serves as the blueprint (at least in rhetoric) for all post–Cold War peacebuilding operations. However, we take issue with these existing approaches on two grounds.

First, we feel that these approaches, whether they refer to the general difficulties of postwar democratic transitions or to their faulty implementation, do not add up to a systematic explanation of the causes for success and failure of postwar democratic transitions. They may well explain success or failure in a specific case, but none of the previously mentioned arguments is systematically associated with success or failure across a substantial number of cases.

Applying the establishment of an electoral democracy as our threshold for success, we find, for example, that some peacebuilding operations were successful in poor countries lacking domestic capacity (such as Mozambique and East Timor), whereas others failed in richer countries with higher levels of development as well as viable administrative structures (such as Bosnia and Kosovo). Some robust and highly intrusive operations failed (Afghanistan, for example), and some succeeded (East Timor). The reverse is also true, with some relatively small, unintrusive peacebuilding operations meeting success (Namibia) and others ending in failure (Tajikistan and Rwanda). Some missions brought democracy despite a long and bloody war (Mozambique), while others did not, despite relatively brief periods of hostility (Kosovo). These few examples (the list goes on) underscore that none of the factors that are thought to explain failure or success are consistently and systematically associated with a particular outcome. It is quite apparent that we lack a consistent and parsimonious explanation of postwar democratic transition.

Related to this is our second concern: We think that existing approaches to postwar democratic transitions suffer from the fact that they ignore one of the most important and consequential aspects of contemporary peacebuilding, namely that peacebuilding is an interactive process not only between former adversaries but also between peacebuilders and the victorious elites of a postwar society, and that this interaction decisively shapes the process of peacebuilding and its outcomes. By ignoring the interactive quality of peacebuilding, much of the literature seems to implicitly assume that the interests of peacebuilders and of host country governments are typically aligned and therefore assumes that the peacebuilding process is a problem of capacity and coordination rather than one of cooperation.

We part with this assumption. We are convinced that one of the major determinants of peacebuilding is indeed the differing priorities of peacebuilders and domestic elites. Put simply, domestic elites may wish to benefit from the resources—both material and symbolic—that peacebuilders have to offer. However, for various reasons, they may resist some or all of the democratic policies that peacebuilders prescribe. They may perceive a democratic opening as being risky and as endangering their security. Or they may fear that democratization endangers their formal or informal grip on political power. Predatory elites in postwar countries may be reluctant to adopt democratic governance because this may endanger their rent-seeking strategies, and elites who rely on patronage may worry that democratic reforms may undermine their informal networks of power. In sum, domestic elites may think that adopting democracy could entail high personal and/or political costs. The higher they perceive these adoption costs to be, the less willing they will be to accept the peacebuilders’ democratic prescriptions.

Peacebuilders, on the other hand, expect democratic reforms in exchange for the considerable resources they expend in a postwar country, and they may press domestic political actors to adopt these reforms. As a result, peacebuilders and domestic elites will engage in an informal bargaining process. The outcomes of peacebuilding, we argue, depend to a large extent on the outcome of the informal bargaining by which peacebuilders and domestic elites try to sort out their differences and agree (or fail to agree) on the kind of democratic peace they intend to build.

In this book, we argue that in important ways democratic peace depends on whether adopting democracy is in the interest of domestic elites. While this is likely also true for peace alone, it is even more essential to an understanding of democratic outcomes in peacebuilding cases. Democracy, unlike simple peace, requires the active cooperation and participation of domestic elites. Moreover, because democracy is a long-term process built around regular, periodic elections and the construction of self-sustaining, participatory institutions such as political parties and legislatures, it offers many opportunities for elites to go back on an initial commitment to democracy, to undermine democratic institutions, or to withdraw from the process.

Finally, democracy requires local actors to build trust in one another and the political institutions they are building. External guarantors may be important in the early years, but over the long term democracy cannot survive without at least an instrumental commitment to democratic rules of the game by domestic elites themselves. Depending on their circumstances at the time of peace, domestic elites stand to lose or gain in various ways by committing to democratic politics, and the stakes may be considerable. In addition, domestic elites have varying degrees of power and will to resist, ignore, or otherwise subvert the democratic peacebuilding agenda.

This book advances an understanding of the peacebuilding process that emphasizes the interests and preferences of both peacebuilders and domestic elites. Our focus on the interaction between peacebuilders and domestic elites is not intended to replace existing theories of postwar democratic transitions. Rather, we increase the purchasing power of existing approaches by factoring in an understanding of peacebuilding as an intense interaction between domestic and external actors. This interaction, which can be depicted as an informal bargaining process, is contingent on other factors, some of which are structural, while others stem from policy choices. We examine four sets of factors. These are the following: the legacies of war, the footprint of the peacebuilding mission, the impact of aid, and the geostrategic location of the country. We investigate whether and how these factors shape the interaction between peacebuilders and domestic elites and to what extent they contribute to the outcome of postwar transitions.

The next chapter (Chapter 2) develops an illustrative model of peacebuilding that is informed by our guiding assumption that the preferences of peacebuilders and domestic elites are not necessarily aligned and that the higher the perceived adoption costs, the more reluctant domestic elites will be to adopt democracy. Peacebuilding then becomes an interactive process in which each side tries to protect its key interests by mustering its resources and capacities. We use this model as the analytical lens through which we capture the impact of other factors.

In Chapter 3 we take a closer look at the legacy of civil war. We argue that the calculation of adoption costs is to a large extent shaped by the war and how it ended. The literature has identified a number of war-related factors that are assumed to shape a country’s transition from war to peace. Among them are the intensity and duration of conflict, the number of hostile factions, whether battles were fought along ethnic divides, whether the war ended in military victory for one side or in a negotiated agreement, and whether there were provisions for power sharing. Our empirical evidence suggests, perhaps surprisingly, that none of these factors is directly or consistently linked with a democratic or nondemocratic outcome. Instead, we find that the impact of these factors is mediated by their influence on local political actors as they weigh the perceived adoption costs of democracy. We are most likely to witness a democratic outcome where domestic political actors depend on external actors to support their goals (for example, sovereignty, domestic legitimacy, preservation of political power) and where embracing the democratic agenda is, in their eyes, unlikely to derail these goals. Conversely, a democratic outcome is less likely where domestic political actors think that democratization may endanger their security or otherwise threaten their primary objectives. Hence, we find that it is not war characteristics per se that influence democratic outcomes but rather how war changes domestic elites’ calculation of the costs of adopting democracy. In other words, peacebuilding outcomes depend to a large extent, though not exclusively, on the incentives facing domestic political actors. These incentives are also shaped by war and its settlement but not in a mechanical and direct way, as much of the relevant literature assumes.

Incentive structures are not fixed, however. When external peacebuilders intervene in postconflict situations, their actions can change the calculations and decisions made by domestic political actors. In Chapter 4 we turn to the scope of peacebuilding operations. Peacebuilders bring resources, civilian experts, and soldiers to foster social change and establish peace and democracy. One of the few robust insights of existing peacebuilding scholarship is that well-resourced and well-staffed UN peacebuilding missions significantly increase the odds that a country remains at peace. In a groundbreaking study, Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis showed that multidimensional peacekeeping operations (missions with extensive civilian functions, economic reconstruction, institutional reforms, and election oversight) are significantly and positively associated with securing peace. Yet while robust peacebuilding can be successful at ending war, it is much less successful at bringing peace and democracy.

In this chapter, we systematically investigate the impact of peacebuilding operations on both war and democracy. One important question is whether “more is better”: Do well-resourced, intrusive operations produce more democracy than smaller operations? To tackle this question, we first develop a framework that allows us to measure the footprint of the mission. Applying this measure to our empirical material, we find that the democratic outcome of peacebuilding missions is not consistently associated with the mission footprint. Hence, more intrusive, better-resourced, and longer missions do not lead to more democracy.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from COSTLY DEMOCRACYby Christoph Zürcher Carrie Manning Kristie D. Evenson Rachel Hayman Sarah Riese Nora Roehner Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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