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Strategic Democracy Building: How U.S. States Can Help
- The Washington Quarterly
- The MIT Press
- Volume 25, Number 4, Autumn 2002
- pp. 153-168
- Article
- Additional Information
The Washington Quarterly 25.4 (2002) 153-168
[Access article in PDF]
Strategic Democracy Building:
How U.S. States Can Help
Bill Owens and Troy A. Eid
[Tables]
The war on terrorism provides an unprecedented opportunity for the United States and its supporters to influence—and ultimately to help reform—countries that harbor terrorists or seek to develop or obtain weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and to influence them in ways that more closely align with vital U.S. national interests. Republicans and Democrats alike need to get beyond the current debate over nation building—a term so politically loaded that it is now virtually useless except as a partisan wedge—and move forward together to promote a carefully targeted and sustained policy of strategic democratization.
The United States cannot unilaterally impose democracy on other countries, nor can it dictate the types of governmental institutions that other people choose to adopt—if they are able to choose at all. Political reform must come from within. Encouraging such fundamental reforms in other nations will certainly not come quickly or easily. In some cases, positive change may not happen at all, at least not in this lifetime. Strategic democracy building aims to reinforce the development of democratic institutions in strategically important nations—helping their own reformers to help themselves and their people—and seeks to cultivate new U.S. allies and coalition partners.
Although the context after September 11 may be new, such a strategic approach has already proven successful through programs such as the State Partnership [End Page 153] Program (SPP). This program, which now spans three U.S. presidential administrations, began a decade ago under President George H. W. Bush as a joint experiment by the Departments of State and Defense to accelerate the integration of former Eastern bloc nations into NATO. The SPP has since evolved beyond NATO and now includes 34 nations in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Central Asia, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. The SPP pairs the senior military and political leaders of these nations with senior officers in the U.S. National Guard, state governors, and other high-ranking political officials from 34 states, 2 U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia. Thanks to the SPP, most state governments are helping Washington add to the list of potential allies and coalition partners with which the U.S. government can collaborate politically and militarily in the future. The result is a bipartisan success story that can serve both as a foundation and as a model for other strategic democracy-building initiatives.
The State Partnership Program
The SPP's quiet achievements during the past decade have gone largely unnoticed by many foreign policy specialists in Washington. Perhaps the leading study of the states' involvement in U.S. foreign policy devotes just one sentence to the SPP. 1 The changing nature of the program may explain this oversight at least partially. What was initially conceived primarily as a way to help reform the armed forces of former Eastern bloc nations—and incidentally as a way to strengthen the effectiveness of state National Guard organizations through professional contacts and exchanges—steadily expanded to a more comprehensive set of military and political relationships between states and their partner nations.
As the early 1990s unfolded in Central and Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union prompted NATO to contemplate eastward enlargement into several former Warsaw Pact members that were already well on the road to becoming peaceful and stable democracies. Yet, the escalating violence in the Balkans, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina, throughout the decade also demonstrated that the democratic transformation of Eastern Europe was by no means automatic or preordained. The drive toward NATO enlargement, and more generally the attempt to accelerate the democratization of Central and Eastern Europe, prompted the United States to consider practical democracy-building measures, prior to extending offers of NATO membership, to encourage grassroots political and military reform throughout the former Eastern bloc.
In mid-1992, the Bush administration and NATO officials specifically began exploring ways to support the...