By Jack Snyder
Realists
never miss a chance to criticize neoconservatives' noisy, sometimes violent support
for democratization abroad. With a Pew
survey showing that Americans rank democracy promotion abroad dead last in
importance among fifteen major public issues, the realists would seem to have
prevailed on this battlefield of ideas. Though the US still makes clients like
Hamid Karzai hold elections, Hillary Clinton winks and is prepared to call just
about anything free and fair. Even President Obama proclaims Reinhold Niebuhr
one of his favorite authors.
But
not so fast. Colin Dueck's Reluctant Crusaders reminds us that
realist interludes in American foreign policy are short-lived. Liberal internationalism, steeped in the
mission of making the world safe for democracy, is America's default setting. Realists, being above all realistic, need to
accept this and think about pragmatic steps to advance what will inevitably be
a liberal global agenda.
A
brilliant new book by Barnard Professor Séverine Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo (Cambridge,
2010), can help us think this through. Luminaries'
sizzling blurbs on the back cover call it "a magnificent accomplishment," a
"disturbing book" that international peacemakers will read with
"trepidation." Autesserre blames the
failure of peace-building in Congo on the national-level "election fetish" of
international aid culture. Instead, she
says, security problems are mainly local and need to be solved by corralling
spoilers, strengthening local capacity, and setting up working legal
institutions at the grass roots level. These
moves aren't a substitute for the strong national institutions that will eventually
be needed to make democracy work, she says, but the bottom-up spadework needs
to be done first.
My
own research with Dawn Brancati, a professor at Washington University in St.
Louis, points in a similar direction. Quick
elections where conditions for democracy are not yet ripe often lead back to
war, we find, but elections that come at a later stage in the transition are more
likely to be compatible with stability. The key is to get the sequence right.
Brancati
has put together a unique database of all the first post-civil-war elections
since 1945. Statistical tests she
designed show that the earlier a country holds its first post-conflict
election, the more likely that the vote will be a revolving door spinning the
country back into violence. Elections
that happen before rebels are disarmed and before administrative and legal
institutions are improved are especially likely to lead back to war. What makes
this finding even more disturbing is that, since the end of the Cold War, the
election fetish of international donors has cut in half the time from a peace
deal to the first election.
The
good news is that the international democracy promoters that are helping to
cause this problem can also contribute to solving it. Our results show that early elections are much
less dangerous when international actors provide peacekeeping, facilitate rebel
disarmament, help build institutions of governance and law, and encourage power
sharing that limits the cost of losing an election. For two papers detailing
these results, "Rushing to the Polls" and "Time to Kill," please go to http://brancati.wustl.edu/Research.htm.
Realists
with a pragmatic sensibility have a huge contribution to make to the idealistic
liberal agenda, which is an inevitable part of the baggage that America brings
to its engagement with the world. In the
twenty-first century, realism can no longer mean a crabbed sense of the narrow national
interest. Instead, it must increasingly
mean figuring out clear-eyed ways, attuned to realities of power and interest,
to make the liberal project work.
Jack Snyder is the Robert and Renée
Belfer Professor of International Relations in the political science department
and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia
University. His books include
to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to
War (MIT Press, 2005), co-authored with Edward D. Mansfield.
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