The elephant in the room
Tuesday, Carl Gershman (President, National Endowment for Democracy (NED)), Andrew Wilson (Executive Director, Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE)), Daniel Twining (President, International Republican Institute (IRI)), Kenneth Wollack (President, National Democratic Institute (NDI)), and Shawna Bader-Blau (Executive Director, Solidarity Center) convened at CSIS to discuss “Promoting Democracy in Challenging Times.” Daniel Runde (Senior Vice President; William A. Schreyer Chair and Director, Project on Prosperity and Development, CSIS) moderated the panel.
In recent years, the world has experienced a democratic recession. Civil societies have suffered amidst authoritarian resurgences in countries that previously displayed shifts towards democracy. Established democracies have also endured setbacks amidst populist groundswells that enabled the rise of authoritarian-friendly leaders like Trump. From the outset, Runde made it clear that Trump’s recent cozying up to totalitarian leaders would not feature prominently in the discussion, imploring the panelists to “tell him something they are optimistic about” in their democracy promotion work.
With this in mind, Gershman opened by pointing out that NED was founded in the midst of Huntington’s third wave of democratization in the 1980’s. In this sense, the democratic backsliding of the last 12 years should be seen less as a permanent phenomenon and more as a temporary setback. Despite this challenging environment for democracy promotion, however, Gershman highlighted that NED enjoys unprecedented bipartisan congressional support. Abroad, recent democratic gains in The Gambia, Colombia, Malaysia, Armenia, and Tunisia reveal that democracy remains an appealing option worldwide. Gershman reminded the audience to never underestimate the power of the people, pointing to the January protests in Iran as evidence that citizens there are tired of their country’s “failed system.”
Bader-Blau said her organization’s efforts to stand in solidarity with workers around the world recently convinced the ILO to enshrine freedom from harassment at work as a human right. The Solidarity Center’s efforts have also led to the unionization of 200,000 garment workers in Bangladesh. Wilson highlighted CIPE’s recent progress in Bangladesh. The creation of the Bangladesh Women’s Chamber of Commerce with CIPE’s help allowed 10,000 women in that country to receive loans to start or expand their businesses. CIPE’s work has also encouraged international corporations to look beyond profits and place more importance on their role in society, particularly in the developing world.
For Twining, a major source of optimism lies in IRI’s work to strengthen governments in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Balkans. Beyond addressing the institutional vacuums that foment violent extremism, Twining revealed that this work also strengthens societies to prevent destabilizing refugee flows from occurring. Twining also emphasized IRI’s positive influence in Europe, where its efforts to expose foreign influence in domestic politics are helping to curb Russian disinformation campaigns in the region.
Wollack also chose to focus on the Middle East, highlighting positive developments in Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon, and Tunisia. For him, reforms among these Middle Eastern “liberalizers, reformers, and transformers” continually prove that they can handle economic and political problems better than autocrats. Another source of optimism is the fact that NED and its affiliates exist today, in contrast to 35 years ago, when no funds for democracy promotion existed in OECD countries.
The five panelists agreed that the work of democracy promotion matters because people, if given a realistic choice, will choose this system of government because they want to be free. After all, this is the premise upon which the NED and its four affiliates were founded during the Cold War. However, what happens when that choice is eroding in the United States, the country historically seen as the beacon of democracy?
The erosion of democratic norms in America has turned what Gershman described as a recession into a democratic crisis that severely erodes the credibility of the NED family of organizations abroad. President Trump counters and corrupts the efforts of NED and its affiliates every day, both outside and inside the United States. IRI’s efforts to counter Russian disinformation campaigns are undermined when the president attacks the free press. Things could get worse if Putin begins using force to pick off countries at the periphery of NATO with the confidence that mutual defense has become obsolete. Further, Trump’s performance in Helsinki raises the question of whether the US president has been co-opted by the very country that threatens these nations.
Wollack revealed that NDI was founded based on the principle that “if democratic politics fail, the entire democratic system is put in jeopardy.” This rings true today, though in a way that NDI’s founders would probably never have imagined. The democratic system’s legitimacy is threatened by our president, the elephant in the room. The NED organizations do not have the authority to act here at home, but an intervention is badly needed. Let’s hope that it comes through the power of the people this November.
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