Ever thus

Last Thursday afternoon’s star-studded academic panel at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) convened to “reconsider” democratic transitions focused mainly on the Arab uprisings since early 2011.  The only solid conclusion–offered with a smile and a nod to NED President Carl Gershman in the front row–was that NED should get more money, which wasn’t surprising given the its strong links to the panelists and moderator Marc Plattner.  But the discussion raised lots of issues, as academics like to do.

Donald Horowitz, now at NED as a fellow, views “transition” not as a paradigm or a model but rather as a category.  Quick to say “pactology,” the dependence of transitions on political pacts, had been carried too far, he underlined two propositions:

1. The “tyranny of starting conditions”:  the course of transitions depends a great deal on the context in which they occur;
2. The “fortuity of early institutional choices”:  this is in a way a corollary of the first proposition that underlines the importance of first elections, like the Egyptian presidential runoff won by Morsi, or the underrepresentation of Cyrenaica in Libya’s Grand National Congress.

Predictions, Horowitz suggested, are bound to be lousy because of the difficulty of understanding all the many variables involved in determining the course of a transition, including the starting conditions.  Standard “best practices” like transparency and public participation in constitution-making (in favor of which there is not a scintilla of evidence), are also a mistake, because context matters.

Stanford’s Larry Diamond was keener on the importance of political pacts and less keen on the importance of starting conditions.  As Burma suggests, the only real precondition for a democratic transition is a set of elites who want it for the state they control.  Yemen is moving in the right direction with a lot of UN support.  Egypt might benefit from a neutral mediator who is able to convince the conflicting elites there to abandon their “winner take all” approach.  The focus in transition should be on the capacity to deliver services to the population, whose commitment to democracy is an important factor in driving a transition in that direction.  Consolidation is an important idea, but it does not rule out decay.  There are democracies that deteriorate, so continued assistance is necessary, beyond what is normally done.  American leadership is important, but it should be more often embedded in a multilateral context like the Community of Democracies.

Frank Fukuyama, also Stanford, thought consolidation not a useful concept.  Decay is always possible.  What counts is institutionalization.  In the early stages, formal constraints on power are not as important as those imposed by social mobilization.  Democracy assistance like that provided by NED should focus less on civil society and more on building up political parties and the public administration, which do not emerge magically out of the kind of mass movements that have produced recent transitions.  US influence is decreasing because our own democracy is in trouble and not producing the kind of demonstration effect that it once did.

Striking to observers was the wide gap between this academic discussion and a morning session with greater practitioner involvement.  The prominent professors focused on ideas.  Practitioners have more questions about how to make things work and produce desirable outcomes.  I suppose it will ever be thus.  Much as I enjoyed the professorial discussion (I count as one of them these days) I like to think that the gap could be narrowed a bit more than it was.