The “world’s democratic movement” is not another one of the transnational citizens’ movements, like the anti-globalization or anti-war movements, that prides itself on having no central structure, no dogma, or even an office.
This movement is highly organized, better funded, and even has its own “secretariat.” Unlike other leaderless but world-shaking transnational citizens’ networks that emerged after the end of the Cold War, the “world’s democratic movement” is not a product of global civil society but a quasi-governmental initiative based in Washington, DC.
Carl Gershman, the longtime president of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) where the movement is headquartered, says that the U.S.-government-backed World Movement for Democracy is “an imaginative new mechanism that can facilitate networking, sharing, and solidarity among democrats around the world.”
The leading voice of this “movement” is President George W. Bush. Celebrating the 20 th anniversary of the neoconservative-led National Endowment for Democracy on November 6, 2003, President Bush said, “We’ve reached another great turning point [in history], and the resolve we will show will shape the next stage of the world democratic movement.”
Whereas the democratization strategy that President Ronald Reagan launched in 1982-83 targeted the Soviet Union and its “evil empire,” Bush has said that his administration’s democratization initiative would focus first on the Middle East, and that the “establishment of a free Iraq will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”
In the first State of the Union address of his second term, Bush took America’s self-imposed mission to spread democracy and freedom to new heights of idealism, committing the United States to the tasks of spreading democracy around the globe and “ending tyranny in our world.”
In keeping with the radical thrust of Bush’s foreign policy, the president often refers to this movement in military terms—“forward strategy of freedom” and “global democratic revolution.” Calling for a doubling of NED’s budget for its democratization work in the Middle East, the president declared, “The advance of freedom is the calling of our time. It is the calling of our country.”
NED and USAID Provide Political Aid
Together with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy has functioned as an instrument of the U.S. government’s democratization strategy over the past
two decades. Whereas USAID is an agency of the State Department, quasi-governmental
NED is organized as a nonprofit but funded almost entirely by the U.S.
government.
Since 1982, when President Reagan launched what he called a “crusade” to
foster “free market democracies” and spread the a neoliberal
version of the “magic of the marketplace,” both USAID and
NED have channeled U.S. government development and public diplomacy funding
into the democratization programs of the international institutes of
the Republican and Democratic Parties, the AFL-CIO, and the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce, as well as a wide range of institutes, political parties,
and nongovernmental organizations abroad.
As part of the Cold War, the U.S. government in 1947 began channeling
political aid through the CIA to political parties, publications, policy
institutes, academic institutions, and other nongovernmental actors.
After Congress prohibited such covert funding in the 1970s, a U.S. government-funded
task force called the Democracy Program, which was directed largely by
neoconservatives, proposed a new political aid program that would overtly
support the type of nongovernmental entities that previously received
CIA funding.1
Soon after Ronald Reagan took office, the new administration put this
proposal into action, assigning the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) and
USAID as the chief sources of political funding. But rather than channeling
the aid directly to foreign actors, the Reagan administration decided,
in line with the Democracy Program proposal, that the “democracy-building” aid
would flow through U.S. private organizations, mainly the newly created
National Endowment for Democracy and its affiliates in the two political
parties, labor, and business.
NED and other components of the Reagan administration’s democratization
strategy were an attempt to revive the post-WWII international networks
of congresses, publications, and intellectuals funded by the CIA, such
as the Congress on Cultural Freedom, in which many neoconservative forerunners
like Irving
Kristol and Melvin Lasky were leading figures.
Since its first years NED’s “democracy-building” initiatives
have had two main thrusts—one to promote U.S.-allied political
actors against political parties and governments not closely aligned
with the United States (such as Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, and Venezuela),
and another to promote “free market democracy” in countries
regarded as having an overly large government presence in the economy,
notably in the “transitional” states of the former Soviet
Union. As in the 1980s, when the U.S. government deployed NED to support
surrogate “freedom fighters” in Asia, Africa, and Latin America,
NED today is a central player in the new U.S.-led “global democratic
revolution.”
The U.S. government’s funding for “democracy building” is
closely tied to U.S. foreign policy priorities and generally goes to
groups who fall in line with or at least do not oppose U.S. economic,
diplomatic, and military initiatives.
“Network of Networks”
In the mid-1990s, the U.S. government and NED concluded that the democracy-building
strategy needed an overhaul. Taking its cue from the anti-globalization
and other transborder citizens’ movements, NED began to establish
networks of center-right foundations, research institutes, youth groups,
parliamentarians, and nongovernmental organizations. In 1999 NED, with
U.S. government and U.S. foundation support, organized the founding assembly
of the World Movement for Democracy in New Delhi.
In the age of globalized communication and transnational cyber-networking,
as exemplified by the anti-free trade movement, NED decided to start
its own global citizens’ movement. Rather than just channeling
U.S.-government funds to disparate groups, NED’s president Carl
Gershman in 1999 established his office as the “secretariat” for
a World Movement for Democracy.2
The movement’s objective is to “offer new ways to give practical
help to democrats who are struggling to liberalize authoritarian systems
and to consolidate emerging democracies.”3
According to NED, “The World Movement helps to fulfill one of
the objectives of NED’s most recent strategic plan, namely ‘to
create a community of democrats, drawn from the most developed democracies
and the most repressive autocracies as well as everything in between,
and united by the belief that the common interest is served by the gradual
expansion of systems based on freedom, self-government, and the rule
of law’.”
Just as the citizens’ global anti-globalization movement often
described itself as a “movement of movements,” NED describes
the World Movement for Democracy as a “network of networks,” that
functions as an umbrella organization for an array of affiliated international
networks of citizens’ groups, parliamentarians, research institutions,
business groups, and foundations. What distinguishes this movement from
citizens’ networks is that it was created as a U.S. government-supported
initiative.
U.S. taxpayer revenues cover the cost of having NED function as the
logistical and infrastructural secretariat for this multifaceted democracy
movement. Annual State Department allocations cover the four NED staff
members who oversee the network from their positions in the office of
NED’s president. Most of the project funding for NED’s WMD,
however, comes from right-wing foundations in the United States, led
by the Bradley
Foundation, which has provided the start-up and general support funding
for an array of other neoconservative foreign policy projects, including
the Project for
the New American Century.
Although the World Movement for Democracy states that it “does
not advocate positions on particular political issues,” the network’s
website and publications, such as its ezine DemocracyNews, largely
reflect the U.S. government’s foreign policy positions with respect
to countries such as Venezuela and Cuba.
NED has created regional portals for participants in the network. For
example, for Latin America and the Caribbean there is the “Portal
de la democracia de las Américas,” which opens to the webpage
of the Red Ciudadana por la Democracia en las Américas (Citizens’ Network
for Democracy in the Americas).4
In addition to its regional portals to “citizens’ networks,” NED
through the World Movement for Democracy has established regional forums
with more restricted participation, such as the Democracy Forum in East
Asia and the Africa Democracy Forum.
Also under the umbrella of the World Movement for Democracy are several
other global “pro-democracy” networks that NED has been developing
over the past decade, including International Movement of Parliamentarians
for Democracy, Network of Young Democracy Activists, Democracy Information
and Communications Technology Group, and the Network of Democracy Research
Institutes. The latter, which includes as members think tanks and policy
institutes throughout the world, receives research and technical assistance
from NED’s Democracy Resource Center.
As part of its effort to function as a nexus for a “network of
networks,” NED in 1995 convened a meeting in Taipei, Taiwan in
conjunction with Taiwan’s Institute for National Policy Research
that aimed to spark the creation of “democracy foundations” around
the world. In 2003, Taiwan, “following a period of consultation
with NED,” created the Taiwan Democracy Foundation.5
The Institute for National Policy Research is a think tank that is closely
associated not only with NED but with the American
Enterprise Institute, the premier neoconservative think tank. Today,
there are three dozen foundations that participate in the NED-initiated
World Conference of Democracy-Support Foundations.
One of the most recent movement-building exercises of NED is the Movement
of Parliamentarians for Democracy, founded in Washington in February
2003. Among the main congressional supporters of this NED networking
were Christopher
Cox (R-CA) and Eliot Engel (D-NY), both closely associated with numerous
neoconservative organizations.
A Neocon Product
Neoconservatives inside and outside the Bush administration have been
central players in an array of government-backed initiatives such as
the World Movement for Democracy and the Community of Democracies, as
well as in such strictly private democratization programs as that of
the neocon American Enterprise Institute.
In early 2005 President Bush tapped neoconservative ideologue Elliott
Abrams—infamous for his key role during the Reagan administration
in the NED-funded efforts to support the Nicaraguan Contras—to
direct his Global Democracy Initiative.
Penn
Kemble, a longtime associate of Carl Gershman and Elliott Abrams
and who, like Gershman, has his political roots in the Trotskyist Social
Democrats/USA, served as deputy director of the now-defunct U.S.
Information Agency, a stronghold of neoconservatives since the early
1980s. In 1999 President Clinton named Kemble the State Department’s
special representative for the U.S.-led Community of Democracies Initiative,
which established the Community of Democracies at a June 2000 meeting
in Warsaw.
NED and the World Movement for Democracy are also promoters of the Community
of Democracies—which has been greeted with widespread skepticism
by many European nations who regard it as a U.S. strategy to skirt UN
authority. Addressing the meeting of the Community of Democracies last
April, Condoleezza
Rice said that this forum with its commitment to “principled
multilateralism” was creating a “balance of power that favors
freedom.”
NED’s new democracy initiatives aim to foster a transnational
citizens’ network funded and guided by the U.S. government and
right-wing foundations that will counter the anti-free trade and anti-imperialist
citizens’ networks that have emerged in this age of globalized
communications.
The close identification of the U.S.-sponsored democracy movement with
U.S. foreign and military policy has made great strides forward in incorporating
hundreds of citizens’ groups around the world.
Already there signs that the movement may prove counterproductive in
the region that is the main target of NED’s democratization agenda.
Throughout the Middle East, as in Cuba and Venezuela, democracy-building
is getting a bad name since it is so closely associated with U.S. “regime-change” efforts
by undemocratic means.
End Notes
- The Democracy Program, an extension
of a USAID-funded organization called the American Political Foundation
included business and USIA officials, but its key movers were the neoconservatives:
Eugenia Kemble (sister of Penn Kemble), George Weigel (later with the
Ethics and Public Policy Center and a signatory of the founding statement
of the Project for the New American Century), Raymond Gastil of Freedom
House, and Allen Weinstein (member of neocon-led Coalition for Democratic
Majority and later president of the NED-funded Center for Democracy).
- “Building a Community of
Democracies,” NED
http://www.ned.org/about/building.html
- World Movement for Democracy
http://wmd.org
- World Movement for Democracy,
Portal de la democracia en las Américas
http://www.wmd.org/lan/participants/country.html
- David Lowe, “Idea to Reality:
NED at 20,” NED, 2003. Lowe is a NED vice president, specializing
in government and external relations.
Tom Barry is the policy director of the International Relations Center (IRC), online at www.irc-online.org.
