The closing space for democracy and human rights support cannot be attributed to the paranoia of a few authoritarian leaders.
The growing distrust for Western democracy promotion actors has much deeper roots according to SPP visiting professor and Carnegie Endowment vice president for studies Thomas Carothers who gave a public lecture at SPP on October 24 entitled Closing Doors and Closing Minds: The Shrinking Space for International Democracy and Human Rights Support.
A growing number of developing and post-communist countries have partially or sometimes even fully closed their doors to international democracy and rights-assistance actors over the last decade. Foreign funding for NGOs has been restricted or banned in many countries, narrowing the allowed space for independent civil society, prompting the harassment or expulsion of some international NGOs and official aid actors. A growing number of governments vilify foreign democracy support, branding it as attempted political subversion.
Following a period during the 1990s during which Western democracy assistance groups were welcomed in many developing and post-communist countries, a backlash against such organizations began around 2003. Vladimir Putin was an early exponent of the backlash and was quickly joined by leaders in Central Asia, South America and elsewhere. The decision by the Bush administration to hold out the US-led intervention in Iraq as a pro-democracy missing associated the concept of democracy promotion in many people's minds with U.S. geo-strategic assertiveness, discrediting many pro-democracy support activities on the ground around the world that had nothing to do with U.S. counterterrorism policies.
The end of the Bush administration and the election of President Obama seemed to signal the end to this backlash as Obama stated that the US would no longer seek to impose Western style democracy on other countries. However, the space for democracy and rights support has continued to shrink with the spread of efforts around the world to restrict civil society assistance through the passing of laws to bar outside funding of civil society groups, resistance to election monitoring, and the barring of external assistance for political parties. This trend has now spread throughout the former Soviet Union as well as to parts of Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. 50 states have now passed laws to restrict foreign civil society support. Whereas the resistance was first limited to authoritarian governments, it is now also coming from semi-authoritarian and partially democratic regimes as well as democratic governments such as Peru, Nicaragua, India and Bangladesh, and it is a resistance not just to political organizations but to development organizations too.
Carothers contends that this trend cannot simply be put down to the personalities of a handful of authoritarian leaders fearful of losing their grip on power, as it was when the trend first emerged. Several factors are now clearly at play. Among these is the loss of democratic momentum which has been experienced so far this century; despite the push for democracy promotion the overall number of democracies has not increased. Instead many partially democratic, partially authoritarian governments have surfaced which have allowed just enough freedom to maintain a good international standing. Closing off the space for democracy support or restricting its influence is an integral part of the balancing acts which these regimes must perform in order to stay in power.
Many governments have also begun to view civil society as the true form of their political opposition in the absence of any strong opposition parties, and in some cases have reached an exaggerated conclusion concerning the actual power of civil society assistance to lead to the downfall of their regimes. Carothers cited the belief by many governments outside Egypt that the uprising against Hosni Mubarak was a movement instigated by the US rather than a popular movement of the Egyptian people as one case of this exaggerated belief.
The closing space trend is also a symptom of more general geo-political rivalries and resistance to Western influence and globalization around the world. Carothers refers to this as "the new normal", the situation in which democracy and rights assistance now operates and is likely to operate for the foreseeable future.
Reactions by democracy and rights support groups include sometimes working 'off shore' by setting up offices in neighboring countries or providing assistance in a less direct way by channeling funding through regional partners which might have a different political profile which makes their presence less sensitive. Other organizations have worked to develop protective technologies which can help civil society groups to protect their data and resist government surveillance. Others have restricted their own work through a type of 'self censorship', curtailing that work which has attracted negative attention and focussing on the areas where they can work with fewer restrictions. The response by the assistance community and, diplomatically, from Western governments has been growing over the last year, Carothers explained with the US State Department and USAID forming working groups to focus on the 'closing space' issue, and consultations between Europe and US addressing the issue.
The response has been fragmented though, with the official reaction to assistance restrictions varying from country to country depending on strategic relationships, leading to a failure at times to strongly articulate and advocate for the principles at stake and tension between communities in the assistance world who blame one another for rocking the boat, with the development groups blaming the political groups for causing trouble for everyone.
Carothers closed by explaining that this situation is not a problem that will be solved, but one which must be managed. It should not be viewed as exceptional or greeted with surprise. It was the open environment of the 1990s which was in fact exceptional. The assistance community needs to accept this situation and recalibrate its ways of working to fit within this framework.