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Religious Surveillance Aff Updates
Religious Freedom Adv
Aff Key to Global Religious Pluralism
American religious pluralism spreads globally due to electronic globalization and
international migration
Carroll, 12- Ph.D., Cornell University
(Bret E Carroll, “Worlds in Space: American Religious Pluralism in Geographic Perspective”, 5/11/12, JSTOR)//Yak + Jmoney
Geographic perspectives on American religious pluralism are by no means confined to the local, regional, and
national levels. We have become increasingly aware in recent years of several new approaches and developments that challenge us to stretch our thinking in new
directions. We shall close with a brief survey of some of these emerging avenues for exploration.
One particularly important new approach, apparent throughout American studies, calls our attention to the nation’s place in wider transnational and global communities and
networks. American
religious pluralism has always pointed beyond the nation, for its sources have been from the
outset as much international as domestic. Such internal factors as the First Amendment and the identity movements of the
1960s have powerfully shaped its contours, of course, but religious life, Peggy Levitt has recently reminded us, regularly crosses borders
and is not limited by geographic distances and boundaries (Levitt 2007b). Developments since 1965 have
underscored her point, greatly amplifying the degree to which American religious space is part of, and participant in,
global space. Contemporary American immigrants integrate into the United States just as their forebears did, yet the dynamic of immigration has also changed
dramatically. Transnationalism, increasingly convenient global travel, an emergent global media, and new
telecommunications technologies have made possible to an unprecedented extent immigrants’ continuing
attachment to sacred places and religious communities outside the country; their ongoing interaction with
fellow emigrants who settle in other parts of the United States; their maintenance of distinctive beliefs,
practices, and values; and the solidification of global religious communities—Muslim, Hindu, Pentecostal and evangelical
Christian, and others—in which they and other Americans can and do take part. It is with these developments in mind that scholars have increasingly
spoken of “diasporic” religion, an increasingly common phenomenon in which the dispersal of peoples and their religions across the globe
from a particular geographic point of origin transforms and generates new forms of religious community,
ideology, and practice (Tweed 1997; Warner and Wittner 1998; see also Tweed 2006). Transnationalism and diaspora have made
“American religious pluralism and the globalization of religious life . . . part and parcel of the same dynamic”
(Levitt 2007b: 107). National frameworks are becoming increasingly inadequate for fully understanding American religious lives. More than ever
before, American religious worlds and American religious pluralism reach outside the nation’s geographic
boundaries and into transnational spaces (Stump 2001, 2008: 379–383; Chidester and Linenthal 1995: 29–30; Eck 2001: 5; Machacek 2002: 8;
McAlister 2005; Levitt 2007a).
Nowhere is this reality more evident than in the nation’s cities. Urban
anthropologists speak of “world cities,” places closely
connected to other urban centers by the constant movement of people, ideas, and artifacts into and out of
them made possible by rapid transportation, instantaneous communication, and global media. The result is what Ulf
Hannerz has called an “intercontinental traffic in meaning” (Hannerz 1993: 68–69), a system in which religious worlds, less
bound than previously to geographically specific locales considered definitive “homes,” can achieve
transnational scope and interact at once in local, national, and global arenas (Hannerz 1987; Orsi 1999a,1999b: 36).
Further complicating spatial considerations of American religious pluralism is the advent of virtual space. We have barely begun to examine, let alone comprehend, the
implications of cyberspace and the Internet for the formation and encounter of religious worlds, though it is already
clear that those implications are profound. In religion, as in other areas of human endeavor, interpersonal interactions become disembodied as they become
electronic, raising the question not only of how to conceptualize this space in geographic terms but also of what electronic technology means for current notions of and
actions in space (Kong 2001: 221–222). Whatever the implications of this new spatial frontier for the way we think about conventional geographic space, recent events in
Winter, Wisconsin, where the school board in 1998 blocked access to electronic information about Buddhism and Wicca (Eck 2001: 304), suggest that struggles over
space—religious
worlds making spaces, seeking legitimation of their presence, facing attempted exclusion—have
carried over into it. American religious pluralism in all its complexity has entered cyberspace (Williams 2002b: 250; see also Cowan
2005).
Globalization, international travel, and electronic communications have all had the effect of erasing
determinate, particular space and contributed to a new pattern of community formation recently identified by
geographers: heterolocalism (Zelinsky and Barrett 1998). The term refers to the possibility that ethnic or religious communities can maintain
close ties without spatial propinquity, scattered instead over large urban, national, or international domains. Surely this
emerging sociospatial phenomenon, by changing the way that religious worlds locate themselves in and relate themselves to
space, will affect the geographic dynamics of religious pluralism. Indeed, Barbara Metcalf, surveying changes in Islam as its
adherents have become globally dispersed, has proposed the term “postmodern pluralism” to describe these developing heterolocal realities (Metcalf
1996: 22). At least one study suggests that these new patterns have amplified the importance of buildings among groups seeking to establish religious communities in
America (Bhardwaj and Rao 1998). But because they also challenge the notions of determinate and particular space on which our models of pluralistic engagement have so
far been grounded, the precise contours of this new pluralism remain unclear (Zelinsky and Lee 1998; Zelinsky 2001: 132–151).
Solving religious persecution domestically and fundamentally changing our religious
mindset is key to achieving our foreign policy objectives
Farr 08 --- PHD in History from the University of North Carolina, Visiting Associate Professor of Religion and International Affairs at the Edmund A. Walsh
School of Foreign Service, Georgetown Unviersity. He directs the Religious Freedom Project and the Program on Religion and US Foreign at Georgetown’s Berkley Center
for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, where he is a senior fellow (Thomas F., “Diplomacy in an Age of Faith: Religious Freedom and National Security”, Foreign Affairs
Vol. 87 No.2 pp. 110-120, 122-124, Jstor)//Jmoney+Yak
But the
world today is, as the sociologist Peter Berger puts it, "as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so
than ever." Berger was one of the first scholars to challenge "secularization theory," which holds that religion will wither as modernity advances. In fact, over the past
several decades, the opposite has happened. Faith, far from exiting the world's stage, has played a growing role in human affairs, even as
modernization has proceeded apace. Iran's Shiite revolution in 1979, the Catholic Church's role in the "third wave" of democratization, the 9/11 attacks--all illustrated just
how important a global force religion has become. For the most part, however, analysts and policymakers have remained either ignorant or baffled. Scholars
are
now scrambling to reexamine the question of faith in international affairs--its "return from exile," as one study puts it.
Unfortunately, policymakers are lagging even further behind, and the implications for U.S. national interests are troubling.
To the extent that U.S. analysts and policymakers have registered the resurgence of religiosity at all, they have it viewed as a problem for U.S. foreign policy. Such concern is
misguided. The United States should not see global desecularization in strictly defensive terms; it is as much an opportunity as it is a threat. Rather than being inimical to the
advance of freedom, as many secularists assume, religious
ideas and actors can buttress and expand ordered liberty. For much of the
world, the religious quest lies at the heart of human dignity. History, moreover, suggests that protecting religious freedom and harnessing it for
the common good are vital if democracy is to endure. Social science data show strong correlations between religious freedom and social,
economic, and political goods.
Accordingly, U.S.
diplomacy should move resolutely to make the defense and expansion of religious freedom a
core component of U.S. foreign policy. Doing so would give the United States a powerful new tool for
advancing ordered liberty and for undermining religion-based extremism at a time when other strategies have
proved inadequate. One week before the presidential election in November, the landmark International Religious Freedom Act
will have its tenth anniversary. That law mandated that the promotion of religious liberty be a central element
of U.S. foreign policy. But neither Democratic nor Republican administrations, nor the U.S. State
Department, have seen the IRF Act as a broad policy tool--indeed, as anything more than a narrow humanitarian
measure unrelated to broader U.S. interests. A new policy on religious freedom can begin by tapping the law's
considerable potential. But long-term success will require a significant broadening of the current emphasis on
opposing religious persecution and getting religious prisoners out of jail. An effective IRF policy must also address the balance between
the overlapping authorities of religion and state, in particular the critical question of how religiously grounded norms might
legitimately influence public policy.
DESECULARIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
THE REAPPEARANCE of public religion on the world stage has complex implications. Religion has both bolstered and under-mined stable self-government. It has
advanced political reform and human rightsbut also induced irrationality, persecution, extremism, and terrorism. Radical Islam may dominate the headlines, but the
importance of religion is hardly confined to Muslim-majority countries or the Muslim diaspora. An explosion of religious devotion among Chinese citizens increasingly
worries communist officials. Religious ideas and actors affect the fate of democracy in Russia, relations between the nuclear powers India and Pakistan, and the
consolidation of democracy in Latin America. Even in western Europe--which has seen itself as a laboratory for secularization--religion, in the form of Islam and pockets of
Christian revival, simply will not go away.
The world is overflowing with religious communities, theologies, and movements--with very public consequences. And there is little reason to believe that this state of
affairs will change anytime soon. Polls from across the globe show a growth in religious affiliation and in the desire for religious leaders to be more involved in politics. Two
leading demographers of religion, Todd Johnson and David Barrett, have concluded, "Demographic trends coupled with conservative estimates of conversions and
defections envision over 80 percent of the world's population will continue to be affiliated to religions200 years into the future."
The central U.S. national security issue is Islamist terrorism, fed by radical interpretations of Islam. Wahhabism, which has provided much of the theological oxygen for al
Qaeda, is still dominant in Saudi Arabia and has been exported to Sunni communities internationally. But Osama bin Laden and Wahhabism are hardly the only examples of
"political Islam" that have major implications for U.S. security. In Iraq, Shiite doctrines and leaders are a major factor in determining whether Iraqi democracy will survive.
In Iran, a central question is whether religious actors can reform the revolutionary Shiism bequeathed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Across the Middle East, the SunniShiite divide is of growing importance.
Elsewhere in the Muslim world, religion drives powerful political forces in countries central to U.S. interests. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood represents a strain of
Islamism that has spawned or nourished radicals from Sayyid Qutb to Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin Laden, although it now operates as a democratic political party. An
offshoot of the Brotherhood, Hamas, gained power in Palestinian elections and has put Islamist extremism at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hezbollah has
emerged as a major player in Lebanese politics, even as it is funded from Tehran and continues to threaten Israel.
There are also encouraging developments in the Muslim world. In Turkey, the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a decisive victory in parliamentary
elections last year despite deep-seated fears of political Islam among wide swaths of a Turkish society weaned on Kemalist imposed secularism. The AKP is demonstrating
that religious parties need not veer into fanaticism; it has succeeded with good governance, good economic policies, and the development of an Islamic governing
philosophy that contains significant liberal elements. Polls show that Turks are becoming more religious and, at the same time, more opposed to extremist sharia laws. In
Indonesia, Islamic communities are resisting extremism and making significant contributions to civil society and democratic governance. While Freedom House ranks
Turkey and Indonesia high on political freedom and civil liberties, both remain weak on religious freedom. The consolidation of democracy in each will require progress on
that front. Interestingly, that prospect seems to be increasing, not decreasing, with the democratic involvement of Islamic communities.
The response of U.S. diplomacy to the religious scaffolding that bestrides the international order has been at best inconsistent and often incoherent. A recent study by the
Center for Strategic and International Studies concludes, "U.S. government officials are often reluctant to address the issue of religion, whether in response to a secular U.S.
legal and political tradition ... or simply because religion is perceived as too complicated or sensitive. Current U.S. government frameworks for approaching religion are
narrow, often approaching religions as problematic or monolithic forces, overemphasizing a terrorism-focused analysis of Islam and sometimes marginalizing religion as a
peripheral humanitarian or cultural issue."
Ambivalence toward religion in general and Islam in particular has been a profound weakness in the U.S. strategy to counter Islamist extremism. In regard to public and
private diplomacy and foreign-aid and democracy programs, U.S. policy has been plagued by confusion about what role, if any, should be played by Islamic communities. In
deciding how to "drain the swamps" of the social, political, and economic pathologies that feed Islamist extremism, U.S. officials have never arrived at an overarching policy
toward Islam--or even decided what, exactly, a "moderate Muslim" is. U.S. dollars for democracy promotion have flooded the Middle East since 9/11, but the resulting
programs as a rule have not addressed the main drivers of culture, politics, and civil society there--Muslim religious communities and Islamist political parties.
Various strategies for engaging Muslims have been floated and withdrawn, from the ill-fated Shared Values Initiative to the Muslim World Outreach program. Some
reflected the United States' own moral confusion and poll-driven culture. Attempts to "reach out" to Muslim youth have often centered on American pop music; a chair of
the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors once solemnly declared that the pop star Britney Spears "represents the sounds of freedom." Assessing the performance of the
departing public diplomacy czar, Karen Hughes, the political scientist Robert Satloff observed that she saw her job as increasing U.S. poll numbers, not engaging in Islam's
war of ideas.
THE SECULARIST BLIND SPOT
THE PROBLEM is rooted in the secularist habits of thought pervasive within the U.S. foreign policy
community. Most analysts lack the vocabulary and the imagination to fashion remedies that draw on religion, a shortcoming common to all the majors schools of
foreign policy. Modern realists see authoritarian regimes as partners in keeping the lid on radical Islam and have nothing to say about religion except to describe it as an
instrument of power. Liberal internationalists are generally suspicious of religion's role in public life, viewing religion as antithetical to human rights and too divisive to
contribute to democratic stability.
Neoconservatives emphasize American exceptionalism and the value of democracy, but
most have paid little serious attention to religious actors or their beliefs. The U.S. "freedom agenda" has been
seriously weakened as a result.
The persistent belief that religion is inherently emotive and
irrational, and thus opposed to modernity, precludes clear thinking about the relationship between religion
and democracy. Insufficient policy attention is paid to the work of social scientists, such as Brian Grim and Roger Finke, that suggests religious
freedom is linked to the well-being of societies. Most U.S. officials were weaned on a strict separation-of-church-and-state philosophy and simply
There is widespread confusion over the proper role of religion in public policy.
resist thinking about religion as a policy matter. (In the late 1990s, a memorandum to the secretary of state on the subject of religion was returned by a senior official with a
stern note saying that this was not an appropriate subject for analysis.) Although some U.S. actions in the realm of religion may raise constitutional issues, the
U.S.
Constitution neither mandates ignorance about religion nor proscribes its public practice. What it
unambiguously requires is the defense of religious freedom.
Such disarray cuts across the conventional left-right divide. The left's strict separationist instincts dictate that religion should be a private matter, but liberal multiculturalism
pushes in a different direction. Some on the right want their religion in the public square, but not Islam, which they view as theologically flawed and a launching pad for
extremism. In this sense, conservatives' views on political Islam coincide with those of liberal secularists.
Unduly influenced by such thinking, U.S.
foreign policy does not seek to advance religious freedom in any systematic way.
The State Department has made modest efforts to fight persecution, but U.S. denunciations seldom have much impact. And even if
they did reduce persecution, that alone would not constitute religious freedom. In a press conference to announce the governments that are considered, under the IRF Act,
to be the worst religious persecutors, a State Department spokesperson said that U.S. policy goals were "to oppose religious persecution, to free religious prisoners, and to
promote religious freedom." That summary exemplifies what has gone wrong. The first two goals have been so dominant that the third has been all but lost.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Religious persecution is generally associated with egregious abuse--torture, rape, unjust imprisonment--on the basis of religion. A political order centered on religious liberty
is free of such abuses, to be sure, but it also protects the rights of individuals and groups to act publicly in ways consistent with their beliefs. Those rights
include,
most importantly, the freedom to influence public policy within the bounds of liberal norms. Addressing this
aspect of religious liberty is a critical step in creating stable self-government in societies with powerful
religious groups--a step that current U.S. policy ignores.
After the United States deposed the Taliban in 2001, the Afghans elected a democratic government and ratified a democratic constitution, and the terrible religious
persecution of Afghan women and minority Shiites slowed dramatically. But these developments did not bring about religious freedom. The Afghan government no longer
tortures people on the basis of religion, but it continues to bring charges against apostates and blasphemers, including officials and journalists seeking to debate the
teachings of Islam. Instead of seeing such cases as serious obstacles to the consolidation of Afghan democracy, the State Department has treated them as humanitarian
problems. It declared victory when U.S. pressure sprang the Christian convert Abdul Rahman from an apostasy trial (and from certain execution), permitting him to flee the
country in fear of his life.
Afghanistan's democracy is unlikely to endure
unless it defends the right of all Afghan citizens to full religious liberty, especially the right of Muslims to
debate freedom and the public good, the role of sharia, and the religion-state nexus. This kind of sustained discourse is vital
to the success of any Islamic democracy and to overcoming Islamist radicalism. U.S. IRF policy should be confronting this problem in
Afghanistan and elsewhere, but it lacks the resources, the bureaucratic clout, and the policy mandate to do so.
But the Rahman case was actually a defeat for U.S. IRF policy, because it ignored the real problem:
The IRF Act created an office in the State Department, headed by an ambassador at large, to monitor religious persecution around the world, to issue an annual report on
religious freedom, and to produce an annual list of the worst persecutors. When a country appears on the list, the secretary of state must consider taking some punitive
action, such as imposing economic sanctions, against it. This framework has had some modest successes. IRF ambassadors have headed off the passage of some bad laws
and achieved the release of some religious prisoners. The current ambassador has negotiated with governments on the fist, most notably Vietnam and Saudi Arabia, over
what they must do to be taken off.
Unfortunately, the effort against religious persecution is generally considered little more than an isolated humanitarian gambit. Most foreign governments view it as a matter
of "America management." In the State Department, IRF policy is functionally and bureaucratically quarantined. Both the Clinton and the Bush administrations nested the
IRF ambassador and his office in the human rights bureau, itself outside the mainstream of foreign policy. This means, among other things, that the ambassador is
subordinate to a lower-ranking official and, unlike other ambassadors at large, does not attend senior staff meetings. When senior meetings are held on U.S. policy in China
or Saudi Arabia--or even on engaging Islam--the IRF function is not considered relevant. This may seem trivial to those outside the State Department. Inside, it
communicates a deadly message: IRE is not a mainstream foreign policy issue and can safely be ignored.
Some of these problems are slowly being addressed. U.S.-funded programs, especially those administered by the Asia Foundation, are paying dividends in Indonesia, where a
moderate understanding of sharia appears to be developing. The U.S. embassy in Nigeria has gotten Muslims and Christians thinking together about the religious benefits of
democracy. But such programs are underresourced and are operating without any clear policy mandate.
The situation will truly improve only if Washington more fully integrates religious considerations into its
foreign policy. The message cannot be carried by one ambassador in one small office in the State Department who is unfortunately perceived as the representative
of a special interest. This must be addressed within the department by, among other things, elevating the ambassador's authority. But much more will be required than
bureaucratic reshuffling. Major policy changes will be necessary if religious freedom is to contribute to U.S. national security.
DESECULARIZING DIPLOMACY
HOW CAN a new strategy on religion and religious freedom lend consistency to U.S. foreign policy while advancing U.S. security interests in the Muslim world and
Policymakers should approach
religion much as they do economics and politics--that is, as something that drives the behavior of people and
governments in important ways. Like political and economic motives, religious motives can act as a multiplier of both destructive and constructive
elsewhere? First, by adopting an overarching principle: religion is normative, not epiphenomenal, in human affairs.
behaviors, often with more intense results. When faith is associated with social identity, ethnicity, or nationality, it becomes all the more important as a focus of foreign
policy.
The problem is most urgent in the greater Middle East. At least five states in that region--Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt--are of critical importance to U.S.
national security, because each is a major source of Islamist extremism. The consolidation of democracy in any one of them would provide a boost to reform in nearby
countries, but each presents distinct, formidable obstacles. The United States' current IRV policy is seen by reformers in these countries as U.S. unilateralism and cultural
imperialism. A refurbished policy could help overcome such fears, encourage religious actors to embrace democratic institutions, and lead over the long term to religious
freedom and durable democracy.
Iraq's quasi-liberal constitution and elections have both demonstrated how Iraqi political culture is driven by religion. It is now clear that the United States did not pay
sufficient attention to this factor, along with many others, in its planning for Iraq. A lasting solution in Iraq will require the involvement of religious actors who can speak
from the heart of their respective communities. U.S. diplomacy, accordingly, should work to empower religious leaders such as the influential Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani and his Sunni counterparts. The Iraq Study Group's recommendation for an American Shiite envoy to Sistani should be adopted, but he should not be treated
as simply one among other sectarian leaders in Iraq. Sistani's brand of Shiism, which is open to democratic and, to some extent, liberal norms, could be instrumental in
consolidating Iraqi democracy. It could provide a theological warrant for tolerance and, over time, religious freedom. It could also play a positive role in Iran, where Sistani
was born and educated and where he now has many followers.
Iran has substantial democratic potential, and not simply among the 30-something secular modernists who are the hope of Western analysts. A little-studied path to
democratic reform in Iran lies with Iranian jurists who might be diverted from the Khomeini model of clerical despotism, some of whom are interested in the Sistani
experiment. For the time being, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, despite popular dissatisfaction with the current government, have
succeeded in connecting dissent with treason. But U.S. policymakers should still find ways to work with Iranian religious scholars in Qom and elsewhere. Among other
things, this means dearly communicating that the United States is interested in, and open to, Shiite reformers. For example, the Catholic University of America's
Interdisciplinary Program in Law and Religion has yielded substantive exchanges with Iranian jurists on topics such as family law and weapons of mass destruction. By
judiciously supporting such efforts, the United States can encourage internal reform that rejects both theocracy and terrorism as inimical to Shiism.
Saudi Arabia is the most difficult of the Muslim states to envision as a democracy, notwithstanding mild reformist tendencies shown by King Abdullah. The Wahhabi
establishment and its pernicious political theology remain deeply rooted, and no political or social institution has been effective in countering its influence. Wahhabi-blessed
candidates would very likely dominate national elections. U.S. diplomacy should be working to change this dynamic--for example, by pressing Abdullah to permit the
development of national Islamic political parties, both Sunni and Shiite, that are open to democracy. Washington should urge the disbandment of the mutawiyin (religion
and morals police), which is currently under unusual scrutiny for its usual extremist activities, and support the emergence of a non-Wahhabi Islamic polity that is capable of
developing liberal norms. This could take several forms, including a constitutional monarchy.
Pakistan's nuclear weapons capability, its status as a safe haven for Islamist extremists, and its instability in the wake of the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir
Bhutto make the country an exceptionally important case. Pakistan's military, like that of Turkey, has played a critical role in the development of the state's political culture.
Unlike the secular Turkish military, however, Pakistan's military (including former General Pervez Musharraf) has supported extremist Islamist parties as a means of
retaining power. But radical Islamists have not achieved electoral success on their own in Pakistan. Historically, their popularity has increased with authoritarianism and
decreased with free and fair elections. The United States should adopt a broader antiradical agenda in Pakistan. It should certainly encourage a return to democracy, the
development of a moderate political center, and more effective action against Islamist extremists. It should also support religious actors who are capable of undermining
extremism by developing a more liberal political theology, sustaining madrasah reform, and conducting a public debate over Islam and democracy.
Egypt arguably has the greatest potential for lasting democratic reform. It is the largest of the Arab states and the traditional center of Sunni jurisprudence. Despite half a
century of authoritarian regimes, it has some experience with constitutional rule, the beginnings of a civil society, professional and entrepreneurial classes, a fairly
independent judiciary, and a Christian Coptic community that accounts for 10-15 percent of the population. Over the years, the United States has paid Cairo more than $50
billion to buy stability and predictability and keep the lid on radical Islam. According to Hosni Mubarak's government, if the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist opposition
movement, were to gain power, it would revoke the Camp David accords, precipitate war with Israel, and work to restore a caliphate.
U.S. aid has helped, but it has prevented neither the growing appeal of radical Islam in Egypt nor its continued export, both of which are increased by Mubarak's policies. If
free elections were held, the Muslim Brotherhood would very likely win. Unfortunately, the United States has little idea what this would mean. Despite indications that some
Brothers are adopting liberal norms, Washington refuses to talk to them officially and rejects opportunities to influence their political evolution. Its policy is to support the
Mubarak regime and hope for the best.
This is the logic that led to 9/11. The United States cannot eradicate Islamist radicalism through unconditional support for authoritarian regimes. Even in Iraq, assuming the
continued success of U.S. military strategy, extremism and terrorism can in the final analysis only be defeated by Muslims speaking from the heart of Islam. And the only
means of affording them the opportunity is durable democracy grounded in religious freedom for all--especially Muslims.
In Egypt, the United States should adopt a policy of engaging all religious and political communities, including the Muslim Brotherhood. But it should not assume that the
Brothers are liberals aborning. To the contrary, it must find out precisely what they are and whether they are capable of political and theological evolution. The United States
must not repeat the mistakes it made in Iran during the late 1970s, which led to its waking up one morning to face an Islamist group in power without any secure
understanding of its vocabulary, let alone its goals.
The objective should be to encourage the Brotherhood to explain publicly what Islamic democracy would mean in Egypt. Handled correctly, this would force the
organization to clarify its understanding of religious freedom and, necessarily, of pluralist democracy. Does the understanding include, for example, the right to debate
Islamic teachings in public, to demand full equality under the law for women and religious minorities, to change religions? It is by no means inevitable, but certainly possible,
that nascent liberals would be empowered by such a discourse. At the very least, it would increase U.S. understanding of what the Brotherhood in power would mean.
This strategy of discovery could include several elements adaptable to a global IRF policy. What the Brotherhood says in private must be said publicly, in Arabic, in Egypt.
U.S. diplomats must speak not only the Brothers' Arabic language but their religious language as well. Training at the Foreign Service Institute should be revamped. The
self-defeating instruction to U.S. diplomats "Avoid using religious language," which was presented in the 2007 public diplomacy strategy paper, should be reversed.
Washington should support the development of Islamic feminism, a potentially fruitful skirmish in the Muslim war of ideas. A privately funded Islamic Institute of
American Studies on U.S. soil could bring the best jurists and religious leaders from across the Muslim world to study U.S. history, society, politics, and--most important-religion.
REDISCOVERING THE AMERICAN MODEL
DESPITE THE failure of U.S. foreign policy to understand and address religion, the U.S.
system of religious freedom remains vigorous and
adaptive. American history should itself be instructive as U.S. policymakers seek to adjust their bearings in an
age of faith. In the 1660s, colonial Congregationalists tortured and hanged Quakers on Boston Common. A century later, Americans embraced a system of religious
liberty that remains unsurpassed in history. This system was not the result of the Enlightenment alone or of separating religion from society or politics. It was the result of
theology and politics developing in tandem. Surely that system has contributed to the fact that American Muslim communities, despite being subject to Wahhabi influences
for decades, have not been radicalized in the way that many of Europe's Muslim communities have. The Economist noted the irony: "The strange thing is that when
America has tried to tackle religious politics abroad--especially jihadist violence--it has drawn no lessons from its domestic success. Why has a country so rooted in pluralism
made so little of religious freedom?"
As the United States commemorates the tenth anniversary of the IRF Act, its
foreign affairs scholars and foreign-policy makers must
retrieve one of the nation's founding beliefs: religious freedom means much more than the right not to be
persecuted for one's religion or the right to worship as one pleases in private; religious liberty protects human
dignity and bolsters civil society. It means the durable and mutual accommodation of religion and the state
within the boundaries of liberal democracy. And this accommodation matters not only for humanitarian reasons. It will also give the United
States a new and powerful tool for addressing national security threats and foreign policy challenges that have so far
proved confounding to a foreign policy establishment blinded by secularism.
Judicial Independence Adv
1ac Judicial Independence Adv --- Africa Scenario
Global democracy is on the brink – strong commitment from the US key to prevent
backsliding
Diamond 15 [Larry, founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International
Studies at Stanford University, and director of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law; January, 2015; Facing Up to the Democratic Recession;
Project Muse; 7/12/15; jac]
The Democratic Recession: Breakdowns and Erosions The
world has been in a mild but protracted democratic recession since
about 2006. Beyond the lack of improvement or modest erosion of global levels of democracy and freedom,
there have been several other causes for concern. First, there has been a significant and, in fact,
accelerating rate of democratic breakdown. Second, the quality or stability of democracy has been
declining in a number of large and strategically important emerging-market countries, which I call “swing
states.” Third, authoritarianism has been deepening, including in big and strategically important countries. And
fourth, the established democracies, beginning with the United States, increasingly seem to be
performing poorly and to lack the will and self-confidence to promote democracy effectively abroad. I
explore each of these in turn. First, let us look at rates of democratic breakdown. Between 1974 and the end of 2014, 29 percent of all the democracies in the world broke
down (among non-Western democracies, the rate was 35 percent). In
the first decade and a half of this new century, the failure rate
been substantially higher than in the preceding fifteen-year period (12.7 percent). Alternatively, if we
break the third wave up into its four component decades, we see a rising incidence of democratic failure per
decade since the mid-1980s. The rate of democratic failure, which had been 16 percent in the first decade of the third wave (1974–83), fell to 8 percent in
(17.6 percent) has
the second decade (1984–93), but then climbed to 11 percent in the third decade (1994–2003), and most recently to 14 percent (2004–13). (If we include the three failures of
2014, the rate rises to over 16 percent.) Since 2000, I
count 25 breakdowns of democracy in the world—not only through
blatant military or executive coups, but also through subtle and incremental degradations of democratic rights
and procedures that finally push a democratic system over the threshold into competitive authoritarianism (see
Table). Some of these breakdowns occurred in quite low-quality democracies; yet in each case, a system of reasonably free and fair multiparty electoral competition was
either displaced or degraded to a point well below the minimal standards of democracy. One methodological challenge in tracking democratic breakdowns is to determine a
precise date or year for a democratic failure that results from a long secular process of systemic deterioration and executive strangulation of political rights, civil liberties, and
the rule of law. No serious scholar would consider Russia today a democracy. But many believe that it was an electoral democracy (however rough and illiberal) under Boris
Yeltsin. If we score 1993 as the year when democracy [End Page 144] emerged in Russia (as Freedom House does), then what year do we identify as marking the end of
democracy? In this case (and many others), there is no single obvious event—like Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori’s 1992 autogolpe, dissolving Congress and seizing
unconstitutional powers—to guide the scoring decision. I postulate that Russia’s political system fell below the minimum conditions of electoral democracy during the year
2000, as signaled by the electoral fraud that gave Vladimir Putin a dubious first-ballot victory and the executive degradation of political and civic pluralism that quickly
For a number of years now,
Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been gradually eroding democratic pluralism and
freedom in the country. The overall political trends have been hard to characterize, because some of the AKP’s changes have made Turkey more democratic
followed. (Freedom House dates the failure to 2005.) The problem has continuing and quite contemporary relevance.
by removing the military as an autonomous veto player in politics, extending [End Page 145] civilian control over the military, and making it harder to ban political parties
that offend the “deep state” structures associated with the intensely secularist legacy of Kemal Atatürk. But
the AKP has gradually entrenched its
own political hegemony, extending partisan control over the judiciary and the bureaucracy, arresting journalists and intimidating dissenters in the press and
academia, threatening businesses with retaliation if they fund opposition parties, and using arrests and prosecutions in cases connected to alleged coup plots to jail and
remove from public life an implausibly large number of accused plotters. This has coincided with a stunning and increasingly audacious concentration of personal power by
Turkey’s longtime prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was elected president in August 2014. The abuse and personalization of power and the constriction of
competitive space and freedom in Turkey have been subtle and incremental, moving with nothing like the speed of Putin in the early 2000s. But by now, these trends appear
to have crossed a threshold, pushing the country below the minimum standards of democracy. If this has happened, when did it happen? Was it in 2014, when the AKP
further consolidated its hegemonic grip on power in the March local-government elections and the August presidential election? Or was it, as some liberal Turks insist,
several years before, as media freedoms were visibly diminishing and an ever-wider circle of alleged coup plotters was being targeted in the highly politicized Ergenekon
trials? A similar problem exists for Botswana, where a president (Ian Khama) with a career military background evinces an intolerance of opposition and distaste for civil
society beyond anything seen previously from the long-ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP). Increasing political violence and intimidation—including assaults on
opposition politicians, the possible murder of a leading opposition candidate three months before the October 2014 parliamentary elections, and the apparent involvement
of the intelligence apparatus in the bullying and coercion of the political opposition—have been moving the political system in a more authoritarian direction. Escalating
pressure on the independent media, the brazen misuse of state television by the BDP, and the growing personalization and centralization of power by President Khama (as
he advances his own narrow circle of family and friends while splitting the ruling party) are further signs of the deterioration, if not crisis, of democracy in Botswana.7
Again, Levitsky and Way had argued a number of years ago that Botswana was not a genuine democracy in the first place.8 Nevertheless, whatever kind of system it has
been in recent decades, “respect for the rule of law and for established institutions and processes” began to diminish in 1998, when Khama ascended to the vice-presidency,
and it has continued to decline since 2008, when the former military commander “automatically succeeded to the presidency.”9 There are no easy and obvious answers to
the conundrum of how to [End Page 146] classify regimes in the gray zone. One can argue about whether these ambiguous regimes are still democracies—or even if they
ever really were. Those who accept that a democratic breakdown has occurred can argue about when it took place. But what is beyond argument is that there is a class of
regimes that in the last decade or so have experienced significant erosion in electoral fairness, political pluralism, and civic space for opposition and dissent, typically as a
result of abusive executives intent upon concentrating their personal power and entrenching ruling-party hegemony. The best-known cases of this since 1999 have been
Russia and Venezuela, where populist former military officer Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) gradually suffocated democratic pluralism during the first decade of this century.
After Daniel Ortega returned to the presidency in Nicaragua in 2007, he borrowed many pages from Chávez’s authoritarian playbook, and left-populist authoritarian
presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador have been moving in a similar direction. In their contribution to this issue, Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal
Pérez-Liñán assert that democratic erosion has occurred since 2000 in all four of these Latin American countries (Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Ecuador) as well as in
Honduras, with Bolivia, Ecuador, and Honduras now limping along as “semidemocracies.” Of the 25 breakdowns since 2000 listed in the Table, eighteen have occurred
after 2005. Only eight of these 25 breakdowns came as a result of military intervention (and of those eight, only four took the form of a conventional, blatant military coup,
as happened twice in Thailand). Two other cases (Nepal and Madagascar) saw democratically elected rulers pushed out of power by other nondemocratic forces (the
monarch and the political opposition, respectively). The majority of the breakdowns—thirteen—resulted from the abuse of power and the desecration of democratic
institutions and practices by democratically elected rulers. Four of these took the form of widespread electoral fraud or, in the recent case of Bangladesh, a unilateral change
in the rules of electoral administration (the elimination of the practice of a caretaker government before the election) that tilted the electoral playing field and triggered an
opposition boycott. The other nine failures by executive abuse involved the more gradual suffocation of democracy by democratically elected executives (though that too
was occurring in several of the instances of electoral fraud, such as Ukraine under President Viktor Yanukovych [2010–14]). Overall, nearly one in every five democracies
since the turn of this century has failed. The Decline of Freedom and the Rule of Law Separate and apart from democratic failure, there has also been a trend of declining
freedom in a number of countries and regions since 2005. The most often cited statistic in this regard is the Freedom House [End Page 147] finding that in each of the eight
consecutive years from 2006 through 2013 more countries declined in freedom than improved. In fact, after a post–Cold War period in which the balance was almost always
highly favorable—with improvers outstripping the decliners by a ratio of two to one (or greater)—the balance simply inverted beginning in 2006. But this does not tell the
the declines have tended to crystallize over
time. Thus, if we compare freedom scores at the end of 2005 and the end of 2013, we see that 29 of the 49
sub-Saharan African states (almost 60 percent) declined in freedom, while only fifteen (30 percent) improved
and five remained unchanged. Moreover, twenty states in the region saw a decline in political rights, civil liberties, or both that was substantial enough to
whole story. Two important elements are noteworthy, and they are both especially visible in Africa. First,
register a change on the seven-point scales (while only eleven states saw such a visible improvement). The larger states in sub-Saharan Africa (those with a population of
more than ten million) did a bit better, but not much: Freedom deteriorated in thirteen of the 25 of them, and improved in only eight. Another problem is that the
pace
of decay in democratic institutions is not always evident to outside observers. In a number of countries where
we take democracy for granted, such as South Africa, we should not. In fact, there is not a single country on the
African continent where democracy is firmly consolidated and secure—the way it is, for example, in such
third-wave democracies as South Korea, Poland, and Chile. In the global democracy-promotion community,
few actors are paying attention to the growing signs of fragility in the more liberal developing democracies,
not to mention the more illiberal ones. Why have freedom and democracy been regressing in many countries?
The most important and pervasive answer is, in brief, bad governance. The Freedom House measures of political rights and civil
liberties both include subcategories that directly relate to the rule of law and transparency (including corruption). If we remove these subcategories
from the Freedom House political-rights and civil-liberties scores and create a third distinct scale with the
rule-of-law and transparency scores, the problems become more apparent. African states (like most others in
the world) perform considerably worse on the rule of law and transparency than on political rights and civil
liberties.10 Moreover, rule of law and political rights have both declined perceptibly across sub-Saharan Africa since 2005, while civil liberties have oscillated somewhat
more. These empirical trends are shown in Figure 2, which presents the Freedom House data for these three reconfigured scales as standardized scores, ranging from 0 to
1.11 The biggest problem for democracy in Africa is controlling corruption and abuse of power. The decay in
governance has been visible even in the best-governed African countries, such as South Africa, which suffered [End Page 148] a steady decline in its score on rule of law and
transparency (from .79 to .63) between 2005 and 2013. And as more and more African states become resource-rich with the onset of a second African oil boom, the quality
of governance will deteriorate further. This has already begun to happen in one of Africa’s most liberal and important democracies, Ghana. The problem is not unique to
Africa. Every region of the world scores worse on the standardized scale of transparency and the rule of law than it does on either political rights or civil liberties. In fact,
transparency and the rule of law trail the other two scales even more dramatically in Latin America, postcommunist Europe, and Asia than they do in Africa (Figure 3).
Many democracies in lower-income and even middle- or upper-middle-income countries (notably, Argentina) struggle with the resurgence of what Francis Fukuyama calls
“neo-patrimonial” tendencies.12 Leaders who think that they can get away with it are eroding democratic checks and balances, hollowing out institutions of accountability,
overriding term limits and normative restraints, and accumulating power and wealth for themselves and their families, cronies, clients, and parties. In the process, they
demonize, intimidate, and victimize (and occasionally even jail or murder) opponents who get in their way. Space for opposition parties, civil society, and the media is
shrinking, and international support for them is drying up. Ethnic, religious, and other identity cleavages polarize many societies that lack well-designed democratic
institutions to manage those cleavages. State structures are too often weak and porous—unable to secure order, protect rights, meet the most basic social needs, or rise
above corrupt, clientelistic, and predatory impulses. [End Page 149] Democratic institutions such as parties and parliaments are often poorly developed, and the bureaucracy
lacks the policy expertise and, even more so, the independence, neutrality, and authority to effectively manage the economy. Weak economic performance and rising
inequality exacerbate the problems of abuse of power, rigging of elections, and violation of the democratic rules of the game. Political Rights, Civil Liberties, and
Transparency/Rule of Law, 2013 Source: Freedom House raw data for Freedom in the World, 2013. The Strategic Swing States A
different perspective on
the global state of democracy can be gleaned from a focus not on regional or global trends, but on the
weightiest emerging-market countries. These are the ones with large populations (say, more than fifty million)
or large economies (more than US$200 billion). I count 27 of these (including Ukraine, which does not quite reach either measure, but is of immense strategic
importance). Twelve of these 27 swing states had worse average freedom scores at the end of 2013 than they did
at the end of 2005. These declines took place across the board: in fairly liberal democracies (South Korea,
Taiwan, and South Africa); in less liberal democracies (Colombia, Ukraine, Indonesia, Turkey, Mexico, and
Thailand before the 2014 military coup); and in authoritarian regimes (Ethiopia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia).
In addition, I think three other countries are also less free today than they were in 2005: Russia, where the noose
of repressive authoritarianism has clearly been tightening since Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in
early 2012; Egypt, where the new military-dominated government [End Page 150] under former general Abdel
Fattah al-Sisi is more murderous, controlling, and intolerant than even the Mubarak regime (1981–2011); and
Bangladesh, where (as noted above) democracy broke down early in 2014. Only two countries (Singapore and Pakistan) are freer
today (and only modestly so) than in 2005. Some other countries have at least remained stable. Chile continues to be a liberal-democratic success story; the Philippines has
returned to robust democracy after an authoritarian interlude under President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (2001–10); and Brazil and India have preserved robust democracy,
albeit with continuing challenges. But overall, among the 27 (which also include China, Malaysia, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates) there has been scant evidence of
democratic progress. In
terms of democracy, the most important countries outside the stable democratic West have
been either stagnating or slipping backward. The Authoritarian Resurgence An important part of the story of global democratic recession has been
the deepening of authoritarianism. This has taken a number of forms. In Russia, space for political opposition, principled dissent, and civil society activity outside the
control of the ruling authorities has been shrinking.13 In China, human-rights defenders and civil society activists have faced increasing harassment and victimization. The
(mainly) postcommunist autocracies of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, centered on the axis of cynical cooperation between Russia and China, have become much
more coordinated and assertive. Both countries have both been aggressively flexing their muscles in dealing with their neighbors on territorial questions. And increasingly
they are pushing back against democratic norms by also using instruments of soft power—international media (such as RT, Russia’s slick 24/7 global television “news”
channel), China’ss Confucius Institutes, lavish conferences, and exchange programs—to try to discredit Western democracies and democracy in general, while promoting
their own models and norms.14 This is part of a broader trend of renewed authoritarian skill and energy in using state-run media (both traditional and digital) to air an
eclectic mix of proregime narratives, demonized images of dissenters, and illiberal, nationalist, and anti-American diatribes.15 African autocrats have increasingly used
China’s booming aid and investment (and the new regional war on Islamist terrorism) as a counterweight to Western pressure for democracy and good governance. And
they have been only too happy to point to China’s formula of rapid state-led development without democracy to justify their own deepening authoritarianism. In Venezuela,
the vise of authoritarian populism has tightened and the government’s toleration (or even organization) of criminal violence to demobilize middle-class opposition has risen.
The [End Page 151] “Arab Spring” has imploded in almost every country that it touched save Tunisia, leaving in most cases even more repressive states or, as in the case of
Libya, hardly a state at all. The resurgence of authoritarianism over the past eight years has been quickened by the diffusion of common tools and approaches. Prominent
among these have been laws to criminalize international flows of financial and technical assistance from democracies to democratic parties, movements, media, election
monitors, and civil society organizations in authoritarian regimes, as well as broader restrictions on the ability of NGOs to form and operate and the creation of pseudoNGOs to do the bidding (domestically and internationally) of autocrats.16 One recent study of 98 countries outside the West found that 51 of them either prohibit or
restrict foreign funding of civil society, with a clear global trend toward tightening control; as a result, international democracy-assistance flows are dropping precipitously
where they are needed most.17 In addition, authoritarian (and even some democratic) states are becoming more resourceful, sophisticated, and unapologetic in suppressing
Perhaps the most worrisome
dimension of the democratic recession has been the decline of democratic efficacy, energy, and selfconfidence in the West, including the United States. There is a growing sense, both domestically and
internationally, that democracy in the United States has not been functioning effectively enough to address
the major challenges of governance. The diminished pace of legislation, the vanishing ability of Congress to pass a budget, and the 2013 shutdown of
Internet freedom and using cyberspace to frustrate, subvert, and control civil society.18 Western Democracy in Retreat
the federal government are only some of the indications of a political system (and a broader body politic) that appears increasingly polarized and deadlocked. As a result,
The ever-mounting cost of election campaigns, the
surging role of nontransparent money in politics, and low rates of voter participation are additional signs of
democratic ill health. Internationally, promoting democracy abroad scores close to the bottom of the public’s
foreign-policy priorities. And the international perception is that democracy promotion has already receded as an actual priority of U.S. foreign policy. The
both public approval of Congress and public trust in government are at historic lows.
world takes note of all this. Authoritarian state media gleefully publicize these
travails of American democracy in order to discredit democracy in general and
immunize authoritarian rule against U.S. pressure. Even in weak states,
autocrats perceive that the pressure is now off: They can pretty much do
whatever they want to censor the media, crush the opposition, and perpetuate
their rule, and Europe and the United [End Page 152] States will swallow it. Meek verbal
protests may ensue, but the aid will still flow and the dictators will still be welcome at the White House and
the Elysée Palace. It is hard to overstate how important the vitality and self-
confidence of U.S. democracy has been to the global expansion of democracy
during the third wave. While each democratizing country made its own transition, pressure and
solidarity from the United State and Europe often generated a significant and even crucial enabling
environment that helped to tip finely balanced situations toward democratic change, and then in
some cases gradually toward democratic consolidation. If this solidarity is now greatly diminished, so will be the near-term global
prospects for reviving and sustaining democratic progress. A Brighter Horizon? Democracy has been in a global recession for most of the
last decade, and there is a growing danger that the recession could deepen and tip over into something much
worse. Many more democracies could fail, not only in poor countries of marginal strategic significance, but also in big swing states such as Indonesia and Ukraine (again).
There is little external recognition yet of the grim state of democracy in Turkey, and there is no guarantee that
democracy will return any time soon to Thailand or Bangladesh. Apathy and inertia in Europe and the United
States could significantly lower the barriers to new democratic reversals and to authoritarian entrenchments in
many more states. Yet the picture is not entirely bleak. We have not seen “a third reverse wave.” Globally, average levels of
freedom have ebbed a little bit, but not calamitously. Most important, there has not been significant erosion
in public support for democracy. In fact, what the Afrobarometer has consistently shown is a gap—in some African countries, a chasm—between the
popular demand for democracy and the supply of it provided by the regime. This is not based just on some shallow, vague notion that democracy is a good thing. Many
Africans understand the importance of political accountability, transparency, the rule of law, and restraint of power, and they would like to see their governments manifest
these virtues. While
the performance of democracy is failing to inspire, authoritarianism faces its own steep
challenges. There is hardly a dictatorship in the world that looks stable for the long run. The only truly reliable
source of regime stability is legitimacy, and the number of people in the world who believe in the intrinsic
legitimacy of any form of authoritarianism is rapidly diminishing. Economic development, globalization, and the information revolution
are undermining all forms of authority and empowering individuals. Values are changing, and while we should not assume any teleological path toward a global
“enlightenment,” generally the movement is toward greater distrust of authority and more [End Page 153] desire for accountability, freedom, and political choice. In the
coming two decades, these trends will challenge the nature of rule in China, Vietnam, Iran, and the Arab states much more than they will in India, not to mention Europe
and the United States. Already, democratization
is visible on the horizon of Malaysia’s increasingly competitive electoral
politics, and it will come in the next generation to Singapore as well. The key imperative in the near term is to
work to reform and consolidate the democracies that have emerged during the third wave—the majority of
which remain illiberal and unstable, if they remain democratic at all. With more focused, committed, and
resourceful international engagement, it should be possible to help democracy sink deeper and more enduring
roots in countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa, and Ghana. It is possible and urgently important to help
stabilize the new democracies in Ukraine and Tunisia (whose success could gradually generate significant diffusion effects throughout the Arab world). It might be possible
to nudge Thailand and Bangladesh back toward electoral democracy, though ways must be found to temper the awful levels of party polarization in each country. With time,
the electoral authoritarian project in Turkey will discredit itself in the face of mounting corruption and abuse of power, which are already growing quite serious. And the oilbased autocracies in Iran and Venezuela will face increasingly severe crises of economic performance and political legitimacy. It
is vital that democrats in
the established democracies not lose faith. Democrats have the better set of ideas. Democracy may be
receding somewhat in practice, but it is still globally ascendant in peoples’ values and aspirations. This creates
significant new opportunities for democratic growth. If the current modest recession of democracy spirals
into a depression, it will be because those of us in the established democracies were our own worst enemies.
Judicial independence is the cornerstone of democracy --- essential step in forming
new democracies
Gardbaum 15 [Stephen, MacArthur Foundation Professor of International Justice and Human Rights, University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law;
01/20/15; “Are Strong Constitutional Courts Always a Good Thing for New Democracies?”; Social Science Research Network; 07/07/15; jac]
III. INDEPENDENCE OF THE JUDICIARY: THE MOST ESSENTIAL GOAL FOR COURTS IN NEW DEMOCRACIES The premise of my argument in this
Article is that, as far as courts are concerned, the
most important, basic, and essential goal for new democracies in their
transition to becoming stable ones is not establishing the power of one or more courts to invalidate legislation, but establishing and
maintaining the overall independence of the judiciary. Judicial review may or may not be (instrumentally or
normatively) necessary for the rule of law and constitutional democracy,89 but the independence of the
judiciary undoubtedly is, and securing the latter must be the top priority if and to the extent there is any practical tension or conflict between them.90 While
certainly among stable, established democracies there are several well-known examples of countries that long rejected judicial review, and a few that still do, there are none
that do not adhere to the basics of an independent judiciary.91 Moreover, although
there is a robust academic debate within
constitutional/democratic theory between proponents and opponents of judicial review, no one, to the best of my
knowledge, argues against the central importance of judicial independence.92 It is true that the classical notion of separation
of powers between three of the major functions of government—making, executing, and adjudicating the law—has been under almost permanent siege ever since it was
fully formulated by the end of the eighteenth century. The perceived necessity of the institutional separation between the executive and legislative branches (King and
Parliament) was undermined first by the subsequent birth of parliamentary government in the nineteenth century that famously “fused” them93 and then by the growth of
modern political parties as the central locus of political competition in both parliamentary and presidential systems.94 The later development of the administrative state and
its increasing functional independence of the executive challenged the “holy trinity” of government branches.95 But what has not changed or come under siege is the
perceived importance of the institutional separation of the judicial function from the others— usually referred to as the independence of the judiciary. This independence
was first achieved in England by the 1701 Act of Settlement, granting life tenure to His Majesty’s judges during good behavior (removable only on proof to the contrary by
parliamentary impeachment) and ending royal assertions of a power to dismiss.96 To be sure, such separation does not require that courts be hermetically insulated from the
other branches. Judicial
independence does not—and has never been understood to—mean complete judicial
autonomy or self-governance. For just under three hundred years, members of the independent judiciary in England were appointed in the monarch’s name
by the Lord Chancellor, who served simultaneously as head of the judiciary and as a senior cabinet minister.97 Among established democracies, judicial
autonomy
currently varies in degree from the near-total self-governance of Higher Judicial Councils in Italy and Spain
and the collegium system in India, to independent judicial appointment commissions on which judges are
usually in a minority, as in the United Kingdom, to the more traditional roles of ministers of justice in
promotion decisions as mostly in Germany and France.98 Legislatures typically play a significant role in the appointment of constitutional
court judges.99 As is well known, the independence of the judiciary has two key elements. First, judges should be free
from government control, pressure, or influence in performing their adjudicatory functions .100 The situation in China,
where the work of judges is closely supervised by both local governments and the Communist Party with direct power over salaries and promotions, may serve as a
paradigm of non-independence in this regard.101 Second, judges
should perform these functions impartially, without political,
partisan, or personal bias, and according to the law and facts.102 Here, for example, the election and re-election of state court judges in
the United States, especially where campaign contributions by potential litigants are involved, raise concerns about this second dimension of independence. Of course, the
first element is one of the preconditions of the second: freedom from government control enables judges to adjudicate impartially—although it does not guarantee it. My
claim is that
both elements of the independence of the judiciary are more likely to be placed under stress when
courts have and exercise strong-form judicial review powers than when they do not. That is, there may be a
practical tension and conflict between the independence of the judiciary and judicial review resulting in
additional—and, from a rule of law/constitutional democracy perspective, unnecessary—pressures and
strains in an already difficult context. Unnecessary because just as judicial independence is not equivalent to and does not require full autonomy from
the other branches of government,103 so too it is not equivalent to and does not require judicial supremacy over them. In other
words, although there is no single model for ensuring judicial independence,104 there may be a single model for endangering it in the particular context of new and
transitional democracies.
Privileging of national security interests in the U.S. is destroying democratic
modeling in African countries
Schmitter 15 [Philippe, Emeritus Professor of the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute; Crisis and Transition, But
Not Decline; 01/15; Journal of Democracy Volume 26, Number 1, January 2015; Project Muse; 07/05/15; jac]
Finally, the
illiberal acts of the United States and other Western democratic nations in the post-9/11 global “war
on terror” have given Africa’s elected autocrats easy justification for their own retreat from the principles and
practices of democratic accountability. African political elites opportunistically cite U.S. actions such as the
rendition or waterboarding of suspected terrorists as examples to justify their own privileging of nationalsecurity interests over citizens’ rights. Similarly, Africa’s elected autocrats are finding great comfort in the
resurgence of authoritarian and illiberal role models provided by China, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and others.
Nigeria models U.S. separation of powers
Mwalimu, 5 --- Senior Legal Specialist at Law Library of Congress (The Nigerian Legal System: Public Law, Pg. 6)
Nigeria is a country of special significance to the United States. The
Nigerian constitutional system is patterned after that of the
United States. From the point of view of influence of the American Constitution on Nigerian constitutional
practices, this author has postulated that this impact is discernible and encompasses the whole regime of the political
function in Nigeria during the period of civil rule. This feature of Nigerian constitutionalism, based on the United States
model, finds particular expression in the constitutions of 1963 to 1999. These instruments are predicated on the
presidential system of government guided by principles of separation of powers. More than any other
factor, this consideration merits an in-depth exposition of the law of Nigeria as a testimony to this special
affinity in constitutional formulation between the United States and Nigeria.
Nigerian democratic collapse spills over to overall African democratization
Diamond 8 [Larry, founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International
Studies at Stanford University, and director of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law; April, 2008; “The Democratic Rollback”; Foreign
Affairs; 07/13/15; jac]
Where democracy survives, it often labors under serious difficulties. In most regions, majorities support democracy as the best form of government in principle, but
substantial minorities are willing to entertain an authoritarian option. Furthermore, in much of the democratic world, citizens lack any confidence that politicians, political
parties, or government officials are serving anyone other than themselves. According to surveys by Latinobarómetro (a Santiago-based corporation conducting public
opinion surveys throughout Latin America), only one-fifth of the Latin American population trusts political parties, one-quarter trusts legislatures, and merely one-third has
faith in the judiciary. According to similar surveys conducted by the Scotland-based New Democracies Barometer, the figures are even worse in the new democracies of
eastern Europe. Public
confidence in many civilian constitutional regimes has been declining. The Asian Barometer
(which conducts public opinion surveys throughout Asia) found that the percentage of Filipinos who believe
democracy is always the best form of government dropped from 64 percent to 51 percent between 2001 and
2005. At the same time, satisfaction with democracy fell from 54 percent to 39 percent, and the share of the
Filipino population willing to reject the option of an authoritarian "strong leader" declined from 70 percent to
59 percent. The Afrobarometer (which conducts similar surveys in African countries) uncovered even sharper
decreases in Nigerians' public confidence in democracy between 2000 and 2005 and also found that the
proportion of the Nigerian public that felt the government was working to control corruption dropped from
64 percent to 36 percent. This is no surprise: during this period, President Olusegun Obasanjo saw many of his
laudable economic reforms overshadowed or undone by continuing massive corruption, by his obsessive bid
to remove a constitutional term limit on his presidency, and by the gross rigging of the 2007 elections on
behalf of his ruling party. Electoral fraud and endemic corruption have once again ravaged a promising democratic experiment. If Nigeria reverts
to military rule, descends into political chaos, or collapses, it will deal a harsh blow to democratic hopes
across Africa. Indeed, the many African countries that remain blatantly authoritarian will never liberalize if the
continent's new and partial democracies cannot make democracy work.
Nigerian democracy is key to survival of Nigeria
Leadership 13, Nigeria’s “Most Influential Newspaper”, Oct 1, 2013, http://leadership.ng/news/011013/democracy-has-stabilised-nigeria-babatope
Former Transport Minister, Chief Ebenezer Babatope, on Tuesday, said democracy has stabilised Nigeria.
Babatope said in Yenagoa that the positive impact of democratic rule in governance had helped the country to stabilise the polity.
He made the remark at the 17th Anniversary Public Lecture organised by the Bayelsa government, in commemoration of the 17 years of the state’s creation.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the anniversary lecture has ``Good Governance as Panacea for Promoting Stable Democracy and Sustainable
Development'' as its theme.
The ex-minister said that in
spite of its challenges, Nigeria recorded great feats as a nation under democracy.
``Nigeria is a multi-tribal and multi-religious nation. Our delicate balancing of the operations
of these essential features of our socio-political lives had helped tremendously in ensuring the triumph
of democracy in our nation.
``Though we have conflicts, our nation has not gone under because no matter our faults, we have not
allowed the basic tenets of democracy and democratic governance to be subverted in our country.
``Democracy, therefore, has gone a long way to stabilise our nation.''
Babatope noted that the
current challenges facing the country centered on how to make democracy work and survive.
According to him, it is clear that democracy
Nigeria as a nation.
is the only form of government that can guarantee the survival of
That destabilizes Africa — refugee flows will be massive
Buhari 4 – Former Head of State of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (Muhammadu, “Alternative Perspectives on Nigeria’s Political
Evolution”, http://www.dawodu.com/buhari1.htm, April 8th, 2004, KTOP)
You are perhaps not all aware of the current state of affairs in Nigeria,
characterized as they are by a failure of political leadership and
failed governance. Nigeria, the largest and potentially the wealthiest country in sub-Saharan Africa, is today a basket case, confronted by
problems that threaten not only its nascent democracy, but its very existence. The country's sheer size and complexity, its rich
human and vast material endowments, provide both an opportunity and a challenge, depending on the attitude of Nigerians and their friends and partners, especially the
U.S. It is worth observing that ignoring Nigeria and Nigerians by the U.S. or the world will have far-reaching negative consequences for the region and beyond.
An
unstable Nigeria driven by internal wars, insurrections, or other manifestations of a failed state
has the potential to destabilize the whole continent of Africa. The common symptomatic phenomena of internal disarray by way of civil
wars and refugees and internally displaced persons have been dealt with by the world with varying successes in the past. The two world wars in the last century and
developments in their wake, the collapse of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East and the Balkans, have produced millions of refugees - which
But the break-up of Nigeria with a population of 130 million willproduce a refugee crisis
of unimaginable proportions. African countries will be overwhelmed and both Europe and Asia will be under
severe strain. The highest number of refugees the world has had to deal with has never exceeded 25 million,
with another 30 million or so displaced persons. This is about one third of the refugee potential of a war torn Nigeria. The
were and still are unacceptable.
international community, especially the U.S. will see it in their interest to forestall this major tragedy for Africa and for the world. Since independence in 1960, Nigeria has
gone through many crises including a bloody civil war that lasted from 1967 to 1970, and cost nearly a million lives, with attendant destruction, hunger, disease and massive
population movements. The Nigerian military has, like its Turkish and Pakistani counterparts, deemed it prudent to intervene in the politics of Nigeria for reasons I will not
want to delve into, in this submission. As a rule most of such interventions, even when adjudged necessary and or appropriate, have done permanent damage to the
military's espirit de corps, professionalism and preparedness, and have more often than not, done permanent damage to political institution building and emergent
consensus creation and articulation - so necessary to security, progress and prosperity, in a nation with such diverse and multifarious socio-economic and political
constituencies. The Nigerian military have been compelled to surrender power and return to the barracks by the imperatives of political reality and the heavy, definitely
unbearable toll on the institution.
Nigeria is once again at a crossroad, at a defining moment in its history and the history
of Africa.
That causes global war
Glick 7, Middle East fellow at the Center for Security Policy, Condi’s African holiday,http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2007/12/condis-african-holiday.php?pf=yes
The Horn of Africa
is a dangerous and strategically vital place. Small wars, which rage continuously, can easily escalate into
big wars. Local conflicts have regional and global aspects. All of the conflicts in this tinderbox, which controls
shipping lanes from the Indian Ocean into the Red Sea, can potentially give rise to regional, and indeed global conflagrations
between competing regional actors and global powers
XT: US Signal Key
A strong US signal and internal checks and balances are key to a successful
democracy
Diamond 14 [Larry, Senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University;10/24/14; “Chasing Away the
Democracy Blues”; Foreign Policy; 07/10/15; jac]
So what is to be done? We need to begin by disaggregating the problem. Let’s start at the top of the hierarchy of democratic development and work down. I used to add at
we can’t be credible and effective in promoting
democracy abroad if we don’t reform and improve its functioning at home.That was usually the last imperative I
the end of this kind of lecture a reflective caveat, “Physician, heal thyself.” In other words,
I am increasingly alarmed by how
pervasive and corrosive is the worldwide perception — in both autocracies and
democracies — that American democracy has become dysfunctional and is no
longer a model worth emulating. Fortunately, there are many possible models, and most American political scientists never
recommended that emerging democracies copy our own excessively veto-ridden institutions. Nevertheless the prestige, the desirability,
and the momentum of democracy globally are heavily influenced by
perceptions of how it is performing in its leading examples. If we do not mobilize institutional reforms
mentioned. Now it needs to be the first. Like many of you who travel widely,
and operational innovations to reduce partisan polarization, encourage moderation and compromise, energize executive functioning, and reduce the outsized influence of
money and special interests in our own politics, how are we going to be effective in tackling these kinds of challenges abroad? Second, we need to be absolutely sure that we
have harvested and preserved the low-hanging fruit. That is, we must truly help to consolidate incipient or assumed success stories. One of the biggest mistakes the global
democracy promotion community has made over the last thirty years is to cross too many countries off the list of democracy assistance recipients, because once the
transition is completed and the new democracy lifts off in a middle-income country, we assume it can take care of itself. Or we believe that ten or twenty years of
democratic assistance and engagement should be enough. This is all summed up in the term, “graduation.” In my profession, we prefer the term “commencement” to
“graduation.” Sometimes our graduates still need and deserve our help in certain areas. A
strong and capable state; a genuine rule of law,
buttressed by a neutral and capable judiciary; effective institutions of horizontal accountability; competent and honest local administration; a
pluralistic and resourceful civil society; a culture of tolerance, vigilance, and civic responsibility — these and other foundations of a secure liberal
democracy do not get constructed overnight. Many of them emerge gradually with economic development. In
more mature economies, they can develop more quickly. But even many of the countries listed as “upper
middle income” by the World Bank remain well within the danger zone of democratic decay — as were
Russia and Venezuela a decade and a half ago. The list of upper middle income countries includes Argentina, which is going
through a profound economic and political crisis; Turkey, where the AKP has become a hegemonic party, the
press functions in a state of fear, and the opposition parties are in disarray; Romania, an EU country where
endemic corruption continues to undermine the health of democracy and governance; South Africa, where a
corrupt leadership exhibits visibly declining commitment to the rule of law and liberal values; Thailand, which
is now in the grip of a nasty military dictatorship that is not at the moment behaving as if it is transitional;
Libya, which had a revolutionary uprising against Qaddafi, and then a state collapse; and Tunisia, which could
become the one success story of the Arab Spring, but still faces serious political, economic, and security
challenges. A long-term strategic approach to promoting democracy would make the following resolution: Once a country (and especially a middle-income country)
achieves or renews democracy, we should do everything possible to help lock it into place for the long run, to
consolidate it. Once a country (and especially a middle-income country) achieves or renews democracy, we should do everything possible to help lock it into place
for the long run, to consolidate it. That means that when a new, fragile Libyan transitional government appeals to us for security assistance (assistance, not occupying
troops) we don’t say, “sorry pals, we helped you get there, now let somebody else help you stay there.” It means that we need to go to the new democratically elected
Tunisian government after these approaching elections and ask them what it needs. What can we do to help revive the economy and rejuvenate flows of tourism and
investment? Beyond our existing programs of party training, election observation, and other assistance, what can we do to support new civil society monitoring and training
initiatives, to strengthen independent journalism and policy think tanks, to advance democratic civic education in the schools and the media, to support women’s groups,
student groups, human rights groups, and many other initiatives to build a culture and civic infrastructure to sustain democracy? If
we want to promote
democracy in the Arab world for the long run, we should invest very heavily in Tunisia in every possible way,
because what the Arab world most needs now is one example of a decent, functioning democracy that can
serve as a lesson, an inspiration, and a point of diffusion for the region. The same goes for Ukraine, though it is not as
economically advanced. Ukraine is at a pivotal point in its history. It cannot afford another democratic regression, or
an authoritarian, xenophobic Russia may swallow up the rest of it. It is struggling mightily with entrenched patterns of corruption, bad
governance, and weak institutions. But it has some remarkable actors in the party system, the mass media, and civil society organizations. We need to invest heavily in these
people and institutions, and in economic reform, revival, and integration with the West. It should be one of the major priorities for democracy assistance for the next decade
or two. And
we need to sustain these investments over an extended period of time in all three critical sectors:
The state, the party and representative institutions, and civil society.
Improving the U.S. democratic model key to reverse global decline in democracy
Diamond 14 [Larry, Senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University; 11/24/14; “Is Democracy in Decline?”;
http://nextgenerationdemocracy.org/624/; 07/10/14; jac]
The Decline of Freedom and the Rule of Law There has also been a trend of declining freedom since 2005. In
each of the last eight years more
countries have declined in freedom than have improved, usually by a factor of two to one or more. Since 2005, 29
of the 49 sub-Saharan African states (almost 60 percent) declined in freedom, while only fifteen countries (30 percent) improved. The trend of erosion in
freedom and accountability is not always evident to outside observers. In a number of countries where we
take democracy for granted, such as South Africa, we should not. In fact, there is not a single country on the African continent where
democracy is firmly consolidated and secure today—the way it is, for example, in such third-wave democracies as South Korea, Poland, and Chile. In the global democracypromotion community, few
actors are paying attention to the growing signs of fragility in some more liberal
developing democracies, not to mention the more illiberal ones. Why have freedom and democracy been regressing in many countries?
The most important and pervasive answer is bad governance. If we reorganize the Freedom House data into three scales—political rights,
civil liberties, and transparency and the rule of law—we find that every region performs worse on transparency than on political rights and civil liberties. The
deterioration in transparency and rule of law since 2005 has been particularly visible, even in a supposedly
liberal democracy such as South Africa. As more and more African states become resource-rich, with the
onset of a second African oil boom, the quality of governance will deteriorate further. This has already begun
to happen in one of Africa’s most liberal and important democracies, Ghana. Around the world, democracies are
struggling with the resurgence of what Francis Fukuyama calls “neo-patrimonial” tendencies. Leaders who
think that they can get away with it are eroding democratic checks and balances, overriding term limits and
normative restraints, violating opposition rights, and accumulating power and wealth for themselves and their
families, cronies, clients, and parties. Space for opposition parties, civil society, and the media is shrinking,
and international support for them is drying up. Ethnic, religious, and other identity cleavages polarize many societies that lack well-designed
democratic institutions to manage those cleavages. State structures are too often unable to secure order, protect rights, meet the most basic social needs. Democratic
institutions such as parties and parliaments are often poorly developed, and the bureaucracy lacks the policy
expertise, and even more so the independence and authority, to effectively manage the economy. Weak economic
performance and rising inequality exacerbate popular disaffection. Another recent blow has been the crushing or implosion of Arab movements for democratic change.
Levels of freedom are actually lower in most Arab countries today than they were at the end of 2010, and nowhere has the resurgence or reinvention of authoritarianism
been more evident than in Egypt, where the military has given a thin electoral façade to a regime more repressive and intolerant than the worst days of Hosni Mubarak’s
rule. The Authoritarian Resurgence The
resurgence of authoritarianism in the Arab world has been part of a recent global
trend. In Russia, space for political opposition, principled dissent, and civil society activity outside the control
of the ruling authorities has been shrinking. In China, human rights defenders and civil society activists have faced increasing harassment and
victimization. The autocracies of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization have become much more coordinated and assertive. Russia and China have both been aggressively
flexing their muscles on territorial questions. And increasingly they are pushing back against democratic norms by also using instruments of soft power to try to discredit
democracies while promoting their own models and norms. This is part of a broader trend of renewed authoritarian skill and energy in using state-run media (both
traditional and digital) to air an eclectic mix of proregime narratives, demonized images of dissenters, and illiberal, xenophobic diatribes. The resurgence of authoritarianism
has been quickened by the diffusion of common tools, such as laws to criminalize international flows of financial and technical assistance from democracies to democratic
parties, movements, media, election monitors, and civil society organizations in authoritarian regimes. There have also been broader restrictions on the ability of NGOs to
form and operate and the creation of pseudo-NGOs to do the bidding of autocrats. In addition, authoritarian (and even some democratic) states are becoming more
resourceful, sophisticated, and unapologetic in suppressing Internet freedom and using cyberspace to frustrate, subvert, and control civil society. Western Democracy in
Retreat Perhaps
the most worrisome dimension of the democratic recession has been the decline of democratic
efficacy, energy, and self-confidence in the West, including the United States. We in the U.S. and in parts of the EU have some
The
lackluster performance of democracy in the West, most of all the US, is hurting
its cause globally. As a global democratic community, we also need to recover our energy, and our confidence in
hard reform work ahead to reduce polarization, foster better policymaking and diminish the corrupting influence of money in electoral politics and lobbying.
our own values. If we do not undertake more rapid, resourceful, coordinated, and explicit actions to confront
the resurgence of authoritarianism, the mild democratic recession of the past decade will mutate into
something far worse. It is vital that the established democracies not lose faith. Democrats have the better set of ideas.
Democracy may be receding somewhat in practice, but it is still globally ascendant in peoples’ values and
aspirations. This creates significant new opportunities for democratic growth if we can restore the global
normative climate of vigorous democratic solidarity and assistance.
Democracy must be constantly reaffirmed to prevent global backsliding
Kagan 15 [Robert, Senior fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution in Washington; January 2015; “The Weight of
Geopolitics”; Project Muse; 07/12/15; jac]
Democracy, Autocracy, and Power What about today? With
the democratic superpower curtailing its global influence, regional
powers are setting the tone in their respective regions. Not surprisingly, dictatorships are more common in
the environs of Russia, along the borders of China (North Korea, Burma, and Thailand), and in the Middle
East, where long dictatorial traditions have so far mostly withstood the challenge of popular uprisings. But even
in regions where democracies remain strong, authoritarians have been able to make a determined stand while
their democratic neighbors passively stand by. Thus Hungary’s leaders, in the heart of an indifferent Europe, proclaim their love of illiberalism
and crack down on press and political freedoms while the rest of the European Union, supposedly a club for democracies only, looks away. In South America, democracy is
engaged in a contest with dictatorship, but an
indifferent Brazil looks on, thinking only of trade and of North American
imperialism. Meanwhile in Central America, next door to an indifferent Mexico, democracy collapses under
the weight of drugs and crime and the resurgence of the caudillos. Yet it may be unfair to blame regional powers for not doing what
they have never done. Insofar as the shift in the geopolitical equation has affected the fate of democracies worldwide, it is probably the change in the democratic
superpower’s behavior that bears most of the responsibility. If
that superpower does not change its course, we are likely to see
democracy around the world rolled back further. There is nothing inevitable about democracy. The liberal
world order we have been living in these past decades was not bequeathed by “the Laws of Nature and of
Nature’s God.” It is not the endpoint of human progress. There are those who would prefer a world order different from the liberal one.
Until now, however, they have not been able to have their way, but not because their ideas of governance are impossible to enact. [End Page 29] Who is to say that Putinism
in Russia or China’s particular brand of authoritarianism will not survive as far into the future as European democracy, which, after all, is less than a century old on most of
the continent? Autocracy in Russia and China has certainly been around longer than any Western democracy. Indeed, it
is autocracy, not democracy, that
has been the norm in human history—only in recent decades have the democracies, led by the United States,
had the power to shape the world. Skeptics of U.S. “democracy promotion” have long argued that many of the places where the democratic experiment
has been tried over the past few decades are not a natural fit for that form of government, and that the United States has tried to plant democracy in some very infertile
soils.
Given that democratic governments have taken deep root in widely varying circumstances, from
impoverished India to “Confucian” East Asia to Islamic Indonesia, we ought to have some modesty about
asserting where the soil is right or not right for democracy. Yet it should be clear that the prospects for
democracy have been much better under the protection of a liberal world order, supported and defended by a
democratic superpower or by a collection of democratic great powers. Today, as always, democracy is a fragile
flower. It requires constant support, constant tending, and the plucking of weeds and fencing-off of the
jungle that threaten it both from within and without. In the absence of such efforts, the jungle and the weeds
may sooner or later come back to reclaim the land.
XT: Judicial Influence Key to Democracy
Judicial Independence is key to separation of powers which prevents collapse of
emerging democracies
Issacharoff 7 [Samuel, Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU; 04/2007; “FRAGILE DEMOCRACIES”; JSTOR; 07/07/15; jac]
Across the range of cases in which democratic regimes have sought to prevent antidemocratic elements from securing the advantages of the electoral arena, three forms of
procedural concerns emerge. Although there is no judicial discussion (that I am aware of) setting out these considerations in comprehensive fashion, taken together they
highlight some of the primary protections against the potential misuse of viewpoint-based suppression of political activity. The
first and undoubtedly most
significant procedural safeguard is the concentration of the power to suppress away from self-interested
political actors. In all these cases, the judiciary acts based on the government's petition or the public
prosecutor's charges,202 but it acts as an independent arbiter of the legitimacy of the government's professed
need to suppress an antidemocratic threat. Independent judicial review takes on particular significance in
parliamentary systems. There is an ever-present risk in democratic systems that the claimed exigencies necessitating the use of emergency powers, including the
power to suppress antagonistic political speech, will become the rule that swallows the exception. Too many putative democracies, particularly in
the immediate post-colonial world, have succumbed to one-party rule under the claimed necessity of
domestic emergencies for any prescriptive account to ignore this threat. The common feature of fledgling
democracies that collapse into strongman regimes is the concentration of unilateral power in the executive, an
inherent risk whenever there is a claimed threat to national security. In the United States, the separation between presidential and legislative election allows the Congress to
play a checking role on claims of unilateral presidential authority, even over the nation's response to military threats. Indeed, the role of the courts in American national
security cases has largely been to ensure that the executive not act beyond the scope of congressional authorization.203 Because parliamentary systems vest executive power
in representatives of the legislative majority, such separation of powers is not likely to have the same force as in presidential systems. But separation
of powers
remains a critical protection in preventing the use of extraordinary powers for quotidian political gain. Requiring
that there be an independent source of legislative authority for the prohibition of a political party and that there be a source of review independent of the executive provides
a check on the misuse of this dangerous power. Perhaps
the clearest example is the use of international tribunals, such as the
European Court of Justice, to review party prohibitions. Such crossnational bodies are removed from any
immediate accountability to domestic political processes and are unlikely to respond narrowly to partisan or
sectional interests. Even at the domestic level, the requirement of independent review of such charged decisions as a ban on a political party may be thought of as
a form of "constrained parliamentarianism" that protects democratic integrity by "insulating sensitive functions from political control."204 Germany provides
the best example of the role of independent judicial review within a national setting, beginning with the
seminal cases after World War II. The German Basic Law accepts both the importance of political parties in a democratic order and the need to ban
those that seek to destroy democracy from within, a necessarily perilous line to draw. Under the German constitution, however, an important procedural protection for
political parties is that only the Federal Constitutional Court can declare a political party unconstitutional.205 The court addressed this topic in the Socialist Reich Party
Case, stating that the framers of the German constitution, in deciding to limit the freedom of parties "seeking to abolish democracy by using formal democratic means," had
to consider "the danger that the government might be tempted to eliminate troublesome opposition parties."206 Therefore, the framers committed the decision on
unconstitutionally to the Federal Constitutional Court. The court distinguished Article 9(2), which allows the executive to ban "associations whose purposes or activities ...
are directed against the constitutional order."207 Precisely "[b]ecause of the special importance of parties in a democratic state," they could not be banned under the general
executive powers of Article 9(2), and could be declared unconstitutional only bv the Federal Constitutional Court.208 Later cases confirmed the court's exclusive jurisdiction
to determine the constitutionality of political activity. The reasoning of the German Constitutional Court in the Radical Groups Case, which struck down a decision of state
radio and television stations denying airtime to radical left-wing parties, is instructive.209 The court held that so long as an advertisement was related to the election, and so
long as the party had not been declared illegal by the court, contentbased interference with expression was beyond the power of the broadcast media or the government. An
organization acquires rights of expression as a political party, and only the court has the authority to rule on the constitutionality of a party: " The
jurisdictional
monopoly of the Federal Constitutional Court categorically precludes administrative action against the
existence of a political party, regardless of how anticonstitutional the party's program may be."210 A similar form of
procedural protection emerged in France after World War II, in the Fifth Republic. By contrast to the concentration of power in the legislature under the Fourth Republic,
the post- 195 French
constitutional order hewed much more closely to a formal recognition of separation of
powers in which judicial oversight emerged as an additional source of power211 - a surprisingly late
development in the land of Montesquieu.212 Perhaps the most significant decision of the Conseil
Constitutionnel in establishing the principle of independent judicial oversight came in 1971, precisely in the
area of the banning of political parties.213 The Conseil declared unconstitutional a law that would have vested in the executive branch the authority to
prohibit the formation of a political party, a power it had previously denied to the legislature acting on its own accord.214
Rule of law and the legitimacy of the government are key to long term democratic
transitions
Fukuyama, 15 [Francis, Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford; January, 2015; “Why Is
Democracy Performing So Poorly; Project Muse; 07/12/15; jac]
The Necessity of Enforcement The United States had one important advantage, however, that is lacking in many of today’s new democracies.
It always had
strong police power and could enforce the laws that it passed. This capacity was rooted in the Common Law,
which the colonies inherited from England and had become well-institutionalized before their independence.
American governments at all levels always maintained relatively strong police power to indict, try, and convict
criminals at various levels of government. This coercive power was backed by a strong belief in the legitimacy
of law, and was therefore converted into genuine authority in most places. The capacity to enforce constitutes an area where state
capacity overlaps with the rule of law, and it is critical in dealing with a problem like corruption. The behavior of public officials depends on incentives—not just getting
adequate pay for doing their jobs, but the fear of punishment if they break the law. In very many countries, taxes are not paid and bribes are collected because there is very
little likelihood of lawbreakers going to jail. Effective enforcement was central to the success of one of the most notable recent efforts to improve public-sector
performance, that of Georgia. Following the 2003 Rose Revolution, the government of Mikheil Saakashvili cracked down on corruption on a number of fronts, tackling the
traffic police, tax evasion, and the pervasive operations of criminal gangs known as the “thieves-in-law.” While some of this was done through transparency initiatives and
positive incentives (for example, by publishing government data online and by increasing police salaries by an order of magnitude), effective enforcement was dependent on
the creation of new police units that did things like making highly publicized arrests of high-ranking former officials and businessmen. By the end of the Saakashvili
administration, this enhanced police power had come to be abused in many ways, setting off a political reaction that led to the election of Bidzina Ivanishvili and the
Georgian Dream party.11 Such abuses should not obscure the importance of the state’s coercive power in achieving effective enforcement of the law. Controlling
corruption requires the wholesale shifting of a population’s normative expectations of behavior—if everyone around me is taking bribes, I will look like a fool if I do not
participate as well. Under these circumstances, [End Page 18] fear is a much more effective motivator than good intentions or economic incentives. Prior to the Rose
Revolution, Georgia had the reputation of being one of the most corrupt places in the former Soviet Union. Today, by a number of governance measures, it has become
one of the least corrupt. It is hard to find examples of effectively governed polities that do not exert substantial coercive power. Contemporary efforts to promote good
governance through increased transparency and accountability without simultaneously incorporating efforts to strengthen enforcement power are doomed to fail in the end.
In Political Order in Changing Societies, Samuel Huntington argued that the political dimensions of development often fail to keep pace with social mobilization and thus
lead to political disorder. There can be a corresponding failure of state institutions to keep up with the development of democratic ones. This
conclusion has a
number of important implications for the way in which the United States and other democracies pursue
democracy promotion. In the past, there has been heavy emphasis on leveling the playing field in
authoritarian countries through support for civil society organizations, and on supporting the initial transition away from
dictatorship. Creating a viable democracy, however, requires two further stages during which the initial mobilization against tyranny gets institutionalized and converted into
durable practices. The first is the organization of social movements into political parties that can contest elections. Civil society organizations usually focus on narrow issues,
and are not set up to mobilize voters—this is the unique domain of political parties. The failure to build political parties explains why more liberal forces have frequently
failed at the ballot box in transitional countries from Russia to Ukraine to Egypt. The second required stage, however, concerns state-building and state capacity. Once
a
democratic government is in power, it must actually govern—that is, it must exercise legitimate authority and
provide basic services to the population. The democracy-promotion community has paid much less attention
to the problems of democratic governance than it has to the initial mobilization and the transition. Without the
ability to govern well, however, new democracies will disappoint the expectations of their followers and delegitimate themselves. Indeed, as U.S. history shows,
democratization without attention to state modernization can actually lead to a weakening of the quality of government.
XT: Democracy Brink
United States democracy efforts are in retrenchment-causes global democratic
backsliding-pre-WWII Europe proves
Kagan 15 [Robert, Senior fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution in Washington; January 2015; “The Weight of
Geopolitics”; Project Muse; 07/12/15; jac]
These are relevant questions again. We
live in a time when democratic nations are in retreat in the realm of geopolitics,
and when democracy itself is also in retreat. The latter phenomenon has been well documented by Freedom
House, which has recorded declines in freedom in the world for nine straight years. At the level of
geopolitics, the shifting tectonic plates have yet to produce a seismic rearrangement of power, but rumblings
are audible. The United States has been in a state of retrenchment since President Barack Obama took office
in 2009. The democratic nations of Europe, which some might have expected to pick up the slack, have instead turned inward and all but abandoned earlier dreams of
reshaping the international system in their image. As for such rising democracies as Brazil, India, Turkey, and South Africa, they
are neither rising as fast as once anticipated [End Page 21] nor yet behaving as democracies in world affairs.
Their focus remains narrow and regional. Their national identities remain shaped by post-colonial and nonaligned sensibilities—by old but carefully nursed resentments—
which lead them, for instance, to shield rather than condemn autocratic Russia’s invasion of democratic Ukraine, or, in the case of Brazil, to prefer the company of
Venezuelan dictators to that of North American democratic presidents. Meanwhile, insofar
as there is energy in the international system, it
comes from the great-power autocracies, China and Russia, and from would-be theocrats pursuing their
dream of a new caliphate in the Middle East. For all their many problems and weaknesses, it is still these autocracies and these
aspiring religious totalitarians that push forward while the democracies draw back, that act while the
democracies react, and that seem increasingly unleashed while the democracies feel increasingly constrained.
It should not be surprising that one of the side effects of these circumstances has been the weakening and in
some cases collapse of democracy in those places where it was newest and weakest. Geopolitical shifts among
the reigning great powers, often but not always the result of wars, can have significant effects on the domestic
politics of the smaller and weaker nations of the world. Global democratizing trends have been stopped and
reversed before. Consider the interwar years. In 1920, when the number of democracies in the world had doubled in the aftermath of the First World War,
contemporaries such as the British historian James Bryce believed that they were witnessing “a natural trend, due to a general law of social progress.”1 Yet almost
immediately the new democracies in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland began to fall. Europe’s democratic great powers, France and Britain, were suffering the effects of
the recent devastating war, while the one rich and healthy democratic power, the United States, had retreated to the safety of its distant shores. In the vacuum came
Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy in 1922, the crumbling of Germany’s Weimar Republic, and the broader triumph of European fascism. Greek democracy fell in 1936.
Spanish democracy fell to Franco that same year. Military coups overthrew democratic governments in Portugal, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Japan’s shaky democracy
succumbed to military rule and then to a form of fascism. Across three continents, fragile
democracies gave way to authoritarian forces
exploiting the vulnerabilities of the democratic system, while other democracies fell prey to the worldwide
economic depression. There was a ripple effect, too—the success of fascism in one country strengthened
similar movements elsewhere, sometimes directly. Spanish fascists received military assistance from the fascist
regimes in Germany and Italy. The result was that by 1939 the democratic gains of the previous forty years
had been wiped out. [End Page 22] The period after the First World War showed not only that democratic gains
could be reversed, but that democracy need not always triumph even in the competition of ideas. For it was not just
that democracies had been overthrown. The very idea of democracy had been “discredited,” as John A. Hobson observed.2 Democracy’s aura of
inevitability vanished as great numbers of people rejected the idea that it was a better form of government.
Human beings, after all, do not yearn only for freedom, autonomy, individuality, and recognition. Especially
in times of difficulty, they yearn also for comfort, security, order, and, importantly, a sense of belonging to
something larger than themselves, something that submerges autonomy and individuality—all of which
autocracies can sometimes provide, or at least appear to provide, better than democracies. In the 1920s and 1930s, the
fascist governments looked stronger, more energetic and efficient, and more capable of providing reassurance
in troubled times. They appealed effectively to nationalist, ethnic, and tribal sentiments. The many weaknesses
of Germany’s Weimar democracy, inadequately supported by the democratic great powers, and of the fragile
and short-lived democracies of Italy and Spain made their people susceptible to the appeals of the Nazis,
Mussolini, and Franco, just as the weaknesses of Russian democracy in the 1990s made a more authoritarian
government under Vladimir Putin attractive to many Russians. People tend to follow winners, and between the wars the democraticcapitalist countries looked weak and in retreat compared with the apparently vigorous fascist regimes and with Stalin’s Soviet Union.
There is a significant risk of global democratic backsliding --- the window of
opportunity is closing to reverse the trend in the short term
Diamond 14 [Larry, Senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University;05/02/14; Democracy's Deepening
Recession; http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/the-deepening-recession-of-democracy/361591/; 07/10/15; jac]
While the world’s attention has been riveted on Ukraine and what move an emboldened Vladimir Putin will make
next, diverse threats to democracy have intensified on other fronts as well. The story is not new. According to Freedom House,
2013 was the eighth consecutive year in which more countries experienced declines in political rights or civil
liberties than improvements. Since 2005, democracy has ceased its decades-long expansion, leveling off at
about 60 percent of all independent states. And since the military coup in Pakistan in 1999, the rate of democratic
breakdowns has accelerated, with about one in every five democracies failing. The downfall of several
Arab autocracies in 2011 seemed to augur a new burst of democratic progress, but that progress has not
materialized. While Tunisia has emerged as the first Arab democracy in 40 years, Egypt is more repressive now than at any time in the last decade of Hosni
Mubarak’s rule. Since the end of 2010, more Arab countries have regressed in freedom and political pluralism than have advanced. The democratic recession we’re
witnessing has been particularly visible in big “swing states”—the non-Western countries with the largest populations and economies. Since
the late 1990s,
democracy has broken down in Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela, the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand,
and Kenya. The Philippines is the one relative bright spot in the group today, with a democratically elected president, Benigno Aquino, committed to serious
governance reforms. Russia has become not just a venal and despotic state, but a neo-imperial menace to its neighbors as well. Nigeria has reverted back to
tragic levels of political kleptocracy and fraud, feeding political polarization, ethnic resentment, citizen
alienation, and an increasingly virulent Islamic terrorist movement in the north. The grip of “Bolivarian
socialism” has weakened in Venezuela as governance has deteriorated, violence has exploded, and the
opposition has unified behind a liberal challenger first to Hugo Chávez and then to his designated successor.
But it will be a pyrrhic victory for democrats if the Chavista regime falls and social order collapses alongside
it. In January, democracy in Bangladesh suffered a major setback when the principal opposition party boycotted
parliamentary elections after the ruling party abandoned neutral arrangements for electoral administration,
and trust between the two parties collapsed. While Freedom House judges that democracy has returned to Pakistan, Kenya, and Thailand, these
governments are so illiberal and corrupt that it is difficult to say what exactly they are. In Thailand, enmity between the “yellow shirt” urban,
middle-class backers of the monarchy and the “red shirt” partisans of populist former Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra has paralyzed the government and increasingly veered toward violence. Instability has been a chronic issue since
the military ousted Thaksin in 2006, suspending the country indefinitely between resilient majority support for Thaksin’s party and the yellow-shirt camp’s continuing
control of key levers of the “deep state.” Since November, more than 20 people have been killed and over 700 injured in fevered street confrontations between the two
camps. And the worst may be yet to come. In January, one Red Shirt militant vowed, “I want there to be lots of violence to put an end to all this…. It’s time to clean the
country, to get rid of the elite, all of them.” As
in Nigeria, renewed military intervention won’t solve the country’s problems.
Yet if things continue to degenerate, the military is waiting in the wings. During his 11 years in power, Turkey’s
domineering prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has managed to politically neutralize the military and the
independent press, along with many other countervailing forces in politics and society. Those who hoped his authoritarian
drift might be slowed by local elections in late March were severely disappointed, as his Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a convincing victory across Turkey’s
municipalities. Erdogan’s victory speech that night was anything but magnanimous. He threatened those who had exposed the mounting corruption of his government (and
reportedly his own family), assured his supporters that “we are the owners of this country,” and portrayed his victory as a “full Ottoman slap” to all his opponents. As
Erdogan prepares to run either for prime minister or president (if he can amend the constitution to enhance the latter’s powers), Turkey is in deepening trouble. Journalists
fear to report the truth, and with good reason; more of them are jailed in Turkey than in any other country. Businesses fear to support opposition parties, judges fear to rule
against the ruler, and the AKP—long hailed in the West for its success in reconciling Islam and democracy—is increasingly looking like an old-fashioned hegemon bent on
securing its dominance. With every passing day, Turkey looks more like the fake democracy of Malaysia than any real democracy in Europe. Meanwhile, Malaysia failed to
record the democratic breakthrough many expected in 2013. Even though the opposition, led by Anwar Ibrahim, won a clear majority of the vote in general elections,
brazen gerrymandering and over-representation of ruling-party strongholds nullified the preference of most Malaysians. The Democracy Report Nor should we take India,
the world’s biggest democracy, for granted. In the parliamentary elections that are rolling across the sub-continent between early April and mid-May, a great pageant of
democratic choice and accountability is once again unfolding on a scale never before seen in human history. It is happening largely free of violence, and with impressive
administrative skill. And it will do what democracy should: Punish the corrupt, under-performing incumbents by evicting them from power. But the
likely victory
of the opposition BJP will bring to power a paradox. In his 12 years as chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi has not only
delivered vigorous economic development, but also a style of politics so intolerant of criticism, so demanding
of fawning obedience, that many Indian liberals now shudder at the prospect of his becoming prime minister.
The news is not all bad. 2014 is a year of critical elections in many places. In Indonesia, many democrats are pinning their hopes on the dynamic reformist mayor of Jakarta,
Joko Widodo, who is the odds-on favorite to win the presidency. In South Africa, the spiraling corruption and lackluster performance of the ANC and its leader, President
Jacob Zuma, is spawning more pluralistic politics and growing support for the liberal opposition, the Democratic Alliance. Even Afghanistan seems to be in the midst of a
reasonably credible and popular electoral process that will produce a significantly more purposeful president than Hamid Karzai. In the long run, economic development,
globalization, and the growth of civil society will induce democratic change in a number of autocracies, including China and Vietnam, and, well before them, Singapore and
Malaysia. But
if democracy cannot be reformed and revived in the world’s key swing states, the “long
run” will be a lot further off than it need be—and the near term won’t be hospitable to the advance of
freedom.
Democracy is in retreat-- increased involvement by successful democracies is key
Diamond 14 [Larry, Senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University; 11/24/14; “Is Democracy in Decline?”;
http://nextgenerationdemocracy.org/624/; 07/10/14; jac]
And then, around
2006, the expansion of freedom and democracy in the world came to a prolonged halt. Since
2006, there has been no net expansion in the number of electoral democracies, which has hovered around 60
percent of the world’s states. And since 2006, the average level of political rights and civil liberties in the
world has deteriorated slightly. One could see the past decade as a period of equilibrium. Given that democracy expanded to a number of countries with
weak facilitating conditions (such as poverty or an authoritarian neighborhood), it is impressive that democracy survived (or revived) in so many places. It’s hard to argue
that the state of democracy globally is not so good, but also not so bad. Yet the
world has been in a mild but protracted democratic
recession since 2006. Beyond the stagnation or modest erosion of global levels of democracy and freedom,
there have been several other causes for concern. One has been a significant and accelerating rate of
democratic breakdown. Second, the quality or stability of democracy has been declining in some large and
important emerging-market countries, like Turkey, Thailand, and Bangladesh. Third, authoritarianism has been
deepening. And fourth, the established democracies have been performing rather poorly and seem to lack the
will and self-confidence to promote democracy effectively abroad. Let me try briefly to touch on each of these. If we break the third
wave up into its four component decades, we see a rising incidence of democratic breakdown per decade since the mid-1980s. The rate of democratic failure, which had
been 16 percent in the first decade of the third wave (1974–83), fell to 8 percent in the second decade (1984–93), but then climbed to 11 percent in the third decade (1994–
2003). In this most recent decade, the rate has jumped back up to 16 percent. One
in six of all the democracies that has existed since 2004
has failed. Since 2000, I count 25 breakdowns of democracy in the world—not only through blatant military
or executive coups, but also through incremental degradations of democratic rights and procedures that
finally push democracy over the threshold into authoritarianism. It is sometimes difficult to assign a particular date to the latter form of
failure, since there is no sharply disruptive single act, like Alberto Fujimori’s autogolpe. But just as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez gradually
strangled democracy in Russia and Venezuela, I think Prime Minister, now President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AK Party
have by now done so in Turkey. Some of the AKP’s changes have made Turkey more democratic by removing the military as an autonomous veto player
in politics. But the AKP has gradually entrenched its political hegemony, extending partisan control over the judiciary and the bureaucracy, arresting journalists and
intimidating dissenters in the press and academia, threatening businesses with retaliation if they fund opposition parties, and using prosecutions in cases connected to alleged
coup plots to jail and remove from public life an implausibly large number of accused plotters. This has coincided with a stunning and increasingly audacious concentration
of personal power by President Erdoğan. Following the Hugo Chavez playbook, Daniel
Ortega has quashed democracy in Nicaragua, and
many worry that the populist presidents in Bolivia and Ecuador are dragging their country in the same
direction. In Botswana a president with a career military background evinces an undemocratic intolerance of opposition and distaste for civil society. There are
growing warning signs of the demise of this, Africa’s longest-standing democracy. These include increasing
political violence and intimidation, escalating pressure on the independent media, the brazen misuse of state
television by the ruling party, and the growing personalization and centralization of power by President Ian
Khama. Only eight of the 25 democratic breakdowns since the year 2000 came as a result of military intervention. The majority resulted from the abuse of power and
the desecration of democratic rules by democratically elected rulers. Any international actor that seeks to stem the decline of democracy must find ways to confront this
challenge of executive abuse in timely fashion.
Democracy is in decline-autocrats are seizing power because of the perception that
they can get away with it
Diamond 14 [Larry, Senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University;10/24/14; “Chasing Away the
Democracy Blues”; Foreign Policy; 07/10/15; jac]
This article is based on the keynote address from the conference “Does Democracy Matter?” co-sponsored by the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Kennan
Institute in Washington, D.C., on October 20. This
is an important and volatile time for democracy in the world. Many people
are questioning the viability of democracy and the wisdom of trying to promote it. The fashionable mood these days is
skepticism, if not downright pessimism, about the near-term prospects for democracy. The fashionable mood these days is skepticism, if not
downright pessimism, about the near-term prospects for democracy. We tried to do too much, one argument goes, and we should
scale back our expectations. It’s still popular to think that these people in Africa, the Arab world, or Russia, weren’t ready for democracy, don’t value it culturally, and don’t
have the social conditions to make it work. Some believe democracy promotion was always a fool’s errand. Others contend that we did what we could and should now pull
back. Or that after 30 years of intensive democracy promotion, we still don’t know how to do it effectively, except in places where democratic progress would have
happened anyway. And finally (for now) there is the view that we have more important issues to deal with, like ISIS, Ebola, a rising China, a marauding Putin, a nuclearweapons chasing Iran, drug violence in Mexico, child mortality among the bottom billion, and so on.I wish I had an hour just to rebut all these currents of pessimism,
determinism, and despair. But since I don’t, let me begin by trying to set the record straight on where we are and where I think we have come in terms of global democracy.
My analysis is not rosy, but I don’t think anything close to despair is warranted either. Then I’ll come to some of the challenges and opportunities for democracy promotion,
especially by the United States, at this critical juncture for democracy globally. Yes, it’s
a difficult and messy time for democracy and
freedom around the world. We have been in a global democratic recession for something like a
decade. In each one of the last eight years, as Freedom House has documented, the number of countries
declining in political rights or civil liberties has outpaced (by at least two to one) the number of countries
gaining in freedom. And this has come after 15 post-Cold War years when precisely the reverse was true. There have been a lot of democratic breakdowns in this
new century. In fact, the rate of democratic breakdown in these last thirteen years has been 50 percent higher than in
the preceding period. Since the third wave of global democratic expansion began forty years ago, one-third of
all the democratic regimes have failed. Since the third wave of global democratic expansion began forty years ago, one-third of all the democratic
regimes have failed. And half of these failures have been just in the last thirteen years. Many of these breakdowns have come in big and
strategically important states, like Russia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Venezuela. In some cases, like the Philippines,
democracy has been restored. In others, like Thailand, which recently suffered its second military coup in a decade, democracy has broken down repeatedly. In others,
like Pakistan and Kenya and Turkey, the regime seems to occupy a gray zone somewhere in between electoral
democracy and electoral authoritarianism. But in countries like Turkey, the authoritarian drift has been so
steady, so serious, and so prolonged that an authoritarian threshold appears to have been crossed. This has long
since happened in Sri Lanka and Nicaragua, and it seems to be approaching in Bolivia and Ecuador as well. Moreover, instead of confronting or at least condemning the
godfather regime of creeping authoritarianism in the Andes, Venezuela, most Latin American democracies have turned a blind eye toward its abuses, even supporting it to
obtain a seat on the UN Security Council. Democracy
has also eroded quite significantly in Africa, where many elected
leaders think China’s booming aid and investment gives them an alternative to Western conditionality, while
the new war on terror gives them additional leverage as well. There is also the crushing implosion of the Arab
Spring; the growing self-confidence, assertiveness, and cooperation of authoritarian states like China, Russia, and their club of fellow autocracies, the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization; the mounting legal assaults and constraints on civil society; the sharing and development of tools of Internet censorship and suppression; and the
If you care about democracy in the world,
we are in trouble. But this is not the whole story. We are in a prolonged political recession, not a depression. We have
not yet seen the onset of “a third reverse wave.” The extraordinary expansion in the number of democracies essentially halted around 2005.
poor performance of many of the most advanced democracies, beginning with the United States.
Since then, it has not significantly increased, but neither has it substantially diminished. Globally, average levels of freedom have ebbed a little bit, but not calamitously. Most
importantly, there has not been significant erosion in public support for democracy. In fact, what [the African opinion survey
project] Afrobarometer has consistently showed is a gap — in some African countries, a chasm — between the popular demand for democracy and the regime supply of it.
And this is not just some shallow, vague notion that democracy is a good thing. Many
Africans understand political accountability,
transparency, the rule of law, and restraint of power. And they would like to see their government manifest
these virtues. One problem is that the pace of decay in democratic institutions is not always clearly visible. A number of countries we take for granted, such as South
Africa, we should not. In fact, there is not a single country on the African continent where democracy is firmly
consolidated and secure the way it is, for example, in some third-wave democracies such as Korea, or Poland,
or Chile. Add new oil wealth to the mix, as in Ghana, and you have a major new challenge to the quality of
governance. In the global democracy promotion community, few actors are paying attention to the growing
signs of fragility in the more liberal developing democracies, not to mention the more illiberal ones. Broadly, we know why democracy and
freedom are slipping back. What Francis Fukuyama calls “neo-patrimonial” tendencies are resurgent. Leaders who think they can get away with it
are eroding democratic checks and balances, hollowing out accountability institutions, overriding term limits
and normative restraints, and accumulating power and wealth for themselves and their families, cronies,
clients, and parties. Space for opposition parties, civil society, and the media is shrinking, and international support for them is drying up. Space for opposition
parties, civil society, and the media is shrinking, and international support for them is drying up. Ethnic, religious, and other identity cleavages
polarize many societies that lack well-designed democratic institutions to manage those cleavages. State structures are
too often weak and porous, unable to secure order, protect rights, meet the most basic social needs, or rise above corrupt, clientelistic, and predatory impulses.
Democratic institutions — parties and parliaments — are often poorly developed, and the bureaucracy lacks
the policy expertise, and even more so the independence, neutrality, and authority, to effectively manage the
economy. So weak economic performance, and certainly rising inequality, is added to the mix. It isn’t easy to develop
democracy in poor countries and weak states. And there is a significant failure rate even in middle-income countries. But if we don’t become more focused, more creative,
more determined, more resourceful, and less apologetic in promoting democracy, the democratic recession is going to mutate into a wave of democratic regression, a bleak
period for freedom, political stability, and the American national interest.
XT: African Democracy Declining Now
African Democracies are tenuous
Gyimah-Boadi 15 [E., Director of the Center for Democratic Development Ghana; 01/15; “Africa’s Waning Democratic Commitment”;
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/v026/26.1.gyimah-boadi.html; Journal of Democracy Volume 26, Number 1, January 2015;
07/05/15/; jac]
In the early 1990s, a wave of democratization (and, in some cases, redemocratization) began to unfold in sub-Saharan Africa. In the years since, a majority of the continent’s
citizens have come to view democracy as the ideal political regime, and many African countries made considerable strides up through the mid-2000s in liberalizing their
political systems and establishing democratic institutions. But for nearly a decade now, that progress has slowed and in some places reversed. Foremost
among
the obstacles to democracy on the continent is the waning commitment to the democratic project on the part
of political elites. Moreover, the supply of democratic goods—in particular, government responsiveness and
accountability—has become increasingly scarce. Even in Ghana, a country held up as one of Africa’s star
democratizers, there has been a recent spate of corruption scandals and, despite strong whistleblower
protections, subsequent government reprisals against those who expose wrongdoing. While popular aspirations for
democratic governance have gone largely unmet, citizens’ desire for democracy is deepening. What is causing democratic progress to falter on the continent, and what are
the prospects for democratic development in the future? Over the past several decades, most African countries have seen the development of four major democratic trends:
the embrace of elections; the acceptance of constitutional norms; the emergence of free media and an active civil society; and the establishment of regional prodemocratic
conventions and protocols. To begin with, the ballot box has replaced the military coup as the chief instrument for changing governments and electing political leaders. The
holding of regularly scheduled and increasingly competitive elections has become the norm in most of Africa. [End Page 101] The number of multiparty elections for the
executive has risen significantly over the past two decades, from an average of slightly less than one a year (1960–89) to around seven per year (1990–2012), and just over a
fifth of these contests have led to a change in leadership.1 Indeed, the number of “electoral democracies” in sub-Saharan Africa has risen from just a handful in the early
1990s to 19 of the region’s 49 countries, according to the Freedom House rankings for 2013.2 Most African countries are now governed by constitutions that are—at least
on paper—more or less democratic. Many of these charters mandate some degree of separation of powers and include a bill of rights that anchors independent judiciaries,
ombudsmen, human-rights and anticorruption commissions, and election-management bodies. The imposition of presidential term limits in a number of countries (ranging
from two four-year terms, as in Ghana, to two seven-year terms, as in Senegal) may be the most important indicator of how entrenched constitutionalism has become in the
new era on a continent notorious for its de jure and de facto “presidents-for-life.” Moreover, parliaments have been flourishing, making at least some legislative oversight of
the executive increasingly common in sub-Saharan Africa today (at least in the minimalist terms of approving the annual budget and public accounts, presidential
nominations to ministerial positions, and legislation initiated by the executive). Since the mid-1990s, an ever-expanding network of private FM radio, free-to-air and cable
television, newspapers, and magazines has reduced states’ monopoly over print and electronic media. Most African governments have relaxed official censorship, making
possible the practice of real investigative journalism and the occasional discovery and exposure of government malfeasance by local media. Associational freedoms have
been expanding as well. As a result, civil society organizations have multiplied and are now undertaking (often with financial, technical, and moral support from the
international community) a vast array of activities—including the promotion of social, economic, and political inclusion as well as human rights, equity, clean elections, and
governmental transparency and accountability—to countervail state power. Yet another measure of the embrace of democratic norms in the region, even if largely symbolic,
may be found in the raft of prodemocracy agreements adopted by the African Union (AU) and the various subregional organizations.3 In the early postindependence
period, military despots were common figures at African summit meetings. The AU, by contrast, denies official recognition to governments and leaders who ascend to
power through “unconstitutional” means.4 In accordance with prodemocracy conventions and protocols, both the AU and the Economic Community of West African
States (ECOWAS) denied official recognition and suspended the memberships of Togo in 2005, Mauritania in 2005–2007 and 2008–2009, Guinea in 2008–2009, Niger
[End Page 102] in 2009–2011, Côte d’Ivoire in 2010–2011, and Mali in 2012. Beyond these symbolic gestures, the AU now routinely deploys teams to monitor elections in
member states and, through the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), assesses members’ progress and performance on democratic governance. Shortcomings and
Deficiencies The progress of democracy chronicled above describes the general trend during the first decade and a half of the democratization process in the region.5
Hardcore authoritarian rule gave way to electoral democracy in many countries, and African citizens began to enjoy much greater voice than at any time in the
postindependence era. While there have been instances of democratic backsliding, there has not yet been a case of permanent reversal to the status quo ante of robust
authoritarianism. With the benefit of hindsight, however, these achievements can be seen to represent the harvest of African democratization’s “low-hanging fruit.” The
Democracy has
substantively improved in only a minority of sub-Saharan countries so that barely one in five qualified as Free
in Freedom House’s 2014 rankings.6 The growing acceptance of the ballot box as the sole means by which political power can legitimately be acquired is
march of democratic progress in Africa that received such fanfare seems to have been succeeded by a long phase of stagnation.
undermined by the intensity of the conflict and violence that so often accompany the electoral process. Candidates, parties, and their supporters often treat elections as door-die affairs, and election
campaigns tend to be as acrimonious and violent as they are colorful. It is not uncommon
for parties and candidates to resort to all manner of vote-rigging schemes in their quest to keep or take power.
Ruling presidents and parties flagrantly exploit the advantages of incumbency, abuse resources, and unleash physical intimidation on voters in the pursuit of victory (as did
Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU-PF in 2008, for example), while defeated candidates and parties have been known to deny the legitimacy of the vote (as when Malawi’s President
Joyce Banda unsuccessfully attempted to annul the 2014 election, citing irregularities, after coming in a distant third). Conflict over Côte d’Ivoire’s 2010 presidential election
degenerated into a bitter civil war that lasted more than a year. Violence also plagued polls in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2011, Gabon in 2009, Kenya
in 2007, Nigeria in 2003, 2007, and 2011, and Togo in 2005, among others. Once elections have been held, the next task is to improve democratic quality—in particular, to
render Africa’s elected governments and officials rule-bound, accountable, and responsive to citizens. This has proven extremely challenging. Citizens regularly voice outrage
over the [End Page 103] scandalous deeds of their elected and appointed officials, and bemoan government incompetence and underperformance. Allegations of gross
official corruption and abuse of power feature constantly in African and international news.7 But significant sanctions rarely are imposed on officials implicated in these
scandals, nor are the governments in which they serve often punished at the polls as a result of their misdeeds. For example, most of the African National Congress (ANC)
officials allegedly involved in a massive arms-procurement scandal in 1999 have gone unpunished. Similarly, the top government officials behind the multimillion-dollar
Anglo Leasing scam in Kenya, which was exposed in 2004 and continues to vex the country to this day, have yet to be held accountable. In sum, African citizens are
experiencing “voice without accountability.” Nepotism has also been widespread and corrosive. It is not just old-school autocrats like former presidents Omar Bongo (d.
2009) of Gabon and Francisco Macías Nguema (d. 1979) of Equatorial Guinea or Angola’s current president José Eduardo dos Santos (in power since 1979) who have
favored close family members with state appointments and patronage. Extensive and poorly regulated presidential powers in supposedly democratic states have enabled
Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s three sons, Fomba, Charles, and Robert, to secure top state positions (head of the national-security agency, deputy-governor of
the central bank, and chairman of the national oil company, respectively), and the 25-year-old daughter of South African president Jacob Zuma to be appointed chief of
staff of that country’s department of telecommunications and postal services. Democratic constitutions have done little to restrain African presidents and political elites
from wanton displays of impunity. Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan was able unilaterally to sack Lamido Sanusi, governor of the central bank. Jacob Zuma has gotten
away with spending an astonishing US$24 million in unauthorized public funds on his Nkandla homestead. And Ghana’s government airlifted more than $4 million in cash
to the World Cup games in Brazil in order to pay Ghana’s soccer team and Ghana Football Association officials. In addition, in many places the media and civil society still
operate under constant threat of closure or severe constriction. In the last few years, a number of countries, including Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Uganda, Zambia, and
Zimbabwe, have considered or enacted legislation, adopted policies, or otherwise taken measures to limit the space for media and civil society. Recent efforts to constrain
domestic civil society have included criminalizing unregistered associational activity (as in Uganda and Zambia), imposing burdensome registration requirements on civil
society organizations (as in Sierra Leone and Mozambique), subjecting NGOs to political litmus tests (as in Nigeria), and severely restricting their access to foreign funding
(as in Ethiopia). [End Page 104] Other
pernicious government regulations involve invasive government supervision and
monitoring of civil society organizations’ activities, including the requirement to secure government
authorization for operations and programs. Under Zambia’s Non-Governmental Organisations’ Act (2009), for instance, an operator of an
unregistered NGO can be fined or imprisoned up to three years; and Zimbabwe’s Interception of Communications Act (2007) authorizes the issuance of a warrant to
intercept mail, phone calls, and emails “to prevent a serious offence by an organized criminal group” or that concern a “potential threat to public safety or national
security.”8>> Although legal restrictions on the media have been relaxed in many places and the number of media outlets has increased, reporters still face serious risks.
Journalists continue to suffer intimidation, harassment, violence, and even assassination.9 Media operators must tread cautiously even in African countries that normally win
plaudits for allowing a free press. In Ghana in recent years, reporters have been detained for refusing to disclose their sources; members of the press have been jailed for
making critical comments about televised judicial proceedings; and reporters have been accused by the government of seeking “regime change” for having doggedly
investigated and reported on government corruption. In South Africa in 2013, despite vehement opposition from media and civil society activists, the ANC-dominated
parliament passed the Protection of State Information Bill (the “Secrecy Bill”), regulating the classification of state information and allowing prison terms of up to 25 years
for those who disclose such material. The bill’s opponents fear that it will empower the government to crackdown on whistleblowers and impede anticorruption
investigations. President Zuma refused to sign the bill in 2013 and it remains in limbo.
African democratic progress is stalling now
Schmitter 15 [Philippe, Emeritus Professor of the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute; Crisis and Transition, But
Not Decline; 01/15; Journal of Democracy Volume 26, Number 1, January 2015; Project Muse; 07/05/15; jac]
What’s Stopping Democracy in Africa? The obstacles to Africa’s democratic progress are legion. Their origins are both domestic and international. To begin with,
despite the restoration of formal constitutional rule, many African countries remain bereft of the spirit of
constitutionalism.10 Even in the few decent constitutional democracies, such as Botswana, Ghana, and South Africa, political, economic, and
symbolic power continues to be concentrated in the executive and, arguably, the ruling party (which often is
the president’s party). The broad discretion in the exercise of authority enjoyed by presidents and their
appointees effectively negates the voice of the people, as expressed via elections, print and electronic media, and even lawsuits. More than
anything, the unwillingness of political elites—particularly presidents—to relinquish authoritarian control has
stymied democratic [End Page 105] progress on the continent. Leaders tend to be either uninterested in or hostile toward
reforms that might rein in their power, strengthen institutional checks and balances, or mandate compliance
with transparency and accountability obligations (such as freedom of information laws or the mandatory disclosure of public office-holders’
assets). It is not only presidents who have discarded their military uniforms and donned civilian clothes (such as Ghana’s Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings) or who practically
inherited the presidency from their military-ruler fathers (such as the DRC’s Joseph Kabila and Togo’s Faure Gnassingbé) who refuse to submit fully to democratic control.
And it
is not only crusty autocrats like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and the Republic of Congo’s Denis SassouNguesso who have cunningly managed to regain the autocratic controls that they had been forced to cede
early in the era of democratization. Even presidents such as Zambia’s Frederick Chiluba (1991–2002) and Malawi’s Joyce Banda (2012–14), who rode
the wave of democratization to power, have proven equally resistant to implementing reforms that would have compelled them to be responsive and accountable to the
public. Moreover, aging authoritarians such as Cameroon’s Paul Biya and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni have not been the only ones to launch brazen campaigns seeking to
end or weaken constitutional limits on presidential tenure. Even presidents who were touted in the late 1990s and early 2000s as committed democrats—for example, South
Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo, and Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade—later embarked on escapades of their own to extend presidential term limits.
Another hurdle obstructing democratization in Africa is the domestic political economy. African economies have posted
high growth rates in recent years. The regional average for the last ten years was 5.08 percent; in 2013, Côte d’Ivoire’s GDP grew by 8.9 percent, Angola’s and the DRC’s by
8.2 percent, and Ghana’s by 8 percent; only
nine of the region’s 49 economies grew less than 4 percent.11 Yet that growth has not been
benefits have not been shared evenly among citizens.12 The masses of poor people who
have been left behind economically are susceptible to vote-buying and cooptation through political patronage,
and this presents a mortal danger to democracy on the continent. State dominance over the formal economy has
remained largely intact [End Page 106] despite the economic liberalization of the 1980s and 1990s and the sway of
globalization. The domestic private sector typically is weak and small (though much larger today than it was in the first two decades
of independence).13 This leaves the state as the key source of formal-sector employment, the chief dispenser of
coveted land, mineral, forestry, and other natural resources, and the source of lucrative construction and
supply contracts. The extremely limited opportunities available outside the state sector for accumulating personal wealth and influence make the capture of the
matched by more jobs, and its
state and the economic, political, and social resources that it controls the main object of electoral competition. This dynamic is a key driver of the clientelization of
democratic politics in Africa. Unchecked
state power is also a source of the pervasive fear among Africans of
government reprisal, which leads to a great deal of self-censorship. Democratization’s progress in Africa is
also hampered by a lingering authoritarian political culture rooted in the status quo ante of precolonial,
colonial, and postcolonial Africa. Even where the formal processes of democracy have been put in place, the internalization of liberal
values is lagging. Africa’s traditional communitarian values continue to clash with liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights. Consequently, citizens
and the press cheer as governments in Uganda and Zambia pass legislation criminalizing homosexuality
because they believe that such laws protect religious and community values. Furthermore, in countries that
gained independence through armed struggle (especially where the national-liberation party is still in power, as in Angola, South Africa, and
Mozambique) or that have recently emerged from civil war (such as South Sudan) or genocide (such as Rwanda), reverence for the
liberation movement and its heroes, as well as vigilance against enemies—internal or external, real or
imagined—are emphasized over “critical citizenship.”14 Although not all the news has been bad—in 2012, for example, 55 percent of
Afrobarometer survey15 respondents reported joining others to raise an issue in the previous year—there clearly remains room for improvement with regard to the
development of democratic citizenship in Africa. That same year (Round 5 of the survey), about 4 in 7 respondents (or 57 percent) said that they found politics and
government too complicated to understand, and fewer than 1 in 4 believed that citizens are responsible for monitoring the performance of elected officials. Furthermore,
Round 4 (2008) of the survey found that three-fifths of Africans saw the relationship between citizen and government as one not between boss and employee but instead
between child and parent.16 Moreover, the
embrace of democratic ideals by African regional bodies and some members of
the political elite in the early 2000s was short-lived. The APRM, which had been lauded as an example of a new prodemocratic model of
African leadership, seems to have lost steam. The promise of peer appraisals of countries’ achievements and shortcomings [End Page 107] according to shared benchmarks has degenerated into what is increasingly a meaningless
charade. APRM assessment standards and protocols have been progressively diluted in order to
accommodate the continent’s aging autocrats and reluctant democrats. Worse still, there is a growing list of
incumbent presidents who are currently trying to extend constitutional term limits, including Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi,
Joseph Kabila of the DRC, Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of Congo, Omar al-Bashir of Sudan. Previously, there was Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso, whose lateOctober 2014 attempt to change the country’s constitution via referendum provoked huge popular protests and ultimately led to his ouster. The
lack of
commitment to democratic principles also is reflected in the recent AU vote to amend the AU Protocol on
the Statute of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights. The amendment gives “serving heads of state”
and “senior government officials,” while they are in office, blanket immunity from prosecution for crimes
against humanity and genocide in the AU’s own court and allows them to evade other international courts.
Democracy Key to Peace
Perception of democratic stability key to peace, perception of stasis in a regime is the
controlling factor in use of force
Poznansky 15 [Michael, re-doctoral research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government;
03/17/15; “Stasis or Decay? Reconciling Covert War and the Democratic Peace”; Wiley Online Library; 07/05/15; jac]
The Case for a Dynamic Democratic Peace This section outlines the basic contours of the stasis-decay framework. After unpacking the causal logic of the theory, I
demonstrate how incorporating expectations about regime trajectory, such as a state's future status as a democracy, helps existing theories of the democratic peace account
for covert intervention. Aside from some important work on the unique conflict dynamics of transitioning democracies (Mansfield and Snyder 2005), the existing literature
on democratic peace operates under an implicit assumption that once a state achieves the status of a democracy—that is, a regime that allows for regular, competitive
elections and protects basic civil and political liberties (Lipson 2003:18)—it will remain as such into the future. This assumption is particularly pronounced for consolidated
democratic regimes. The
main explanatory variable examined here, an expectation of stasis or decay, forms any time
one democratic regime assesses the viability of democracy in another state. By expectations of stasis, I mean
the belief that democracy is likely to persist; expectations of decay refer to the belief that democracy is likely
to erode. While expectations of stasis allow the usual restraint found between democracies to flourish,
expectations of decay work insidiously to erase the constraints that would otherwise obtain were these
institutions expected to persist. Existing arguments overlook this variation by invoking snapshots of regime type, assessing whether a state is presently
democratic or nondemocratic. By introducing a dynamic element, we can more accurately model how democratic decision makers act
on the basis of expected regime trajectory. As with most perceptual variables, it is necessary to ensure that the beliefs of
decision makers are not simply endogenous to strategic interests. Providing an objective basis for
expectations of stasis and decay—the perceptual variable under consideration—is thus a critically important
undertaking. To the extent that expectations reflect observable political developments within the target state in question, our confidence in their validity increases. Barbara
Farnham's work on democratic peace and threat perception is instructive in this regard. According to Farnham (2003:402), Roosevelt took Hitler's blatant disregard for
norms of political accommodation during the Munich crisis “to be a sign of unlimited aims which could never be satisfied by normal diplomatic means.” The coupling of
threat perception to observable developments increases our confidence that Roosevelt's assessments of Hitler had a firm basis in objective, exogenous events. For our
purposes, expectations
of decay can form in response to a wide range of political developments, including the assumption of power by leaders
espousing an anti-democratic ideology, alterations to democratic institutions that could be exploited to consolidate a leader's
hold on power, the presence of weak leaders who risk losing power to more radical alternatives, and so forth. The causal logic of the stasisdecay framework is predicated on the assumption that democratic regimes treat fellow democracies
differently depending on whether they are expected to remain in their current form or backslide into
authoritarianism. When regimes are expected to remain democratic into the future, they enjoy the benefits of mutual restraint in their relations with other
democracies; the normal constraints of democratic peace hold. When expectations of democratic decay set in, however, these
constraints atrophy. Although the decaying democracy is perceived as democratic at time t, the anticipation of
dealing with an autocratic regime at time t + 1 changes the prospective intervener's decision-making calculus.
Democracies expected to backslide into authoritarianism are treated as though they were functionally
nondemocracies in the present. In short, the separate peace forged between democratic regimes functions
only when both states are expected to remain democratic into the foreseeable future (Doyle 1983:324–325). On their own, expectations of
stasis and decay do not provide a self-sufficient explanation for forcible intervention between democracies. Instead, expectations about regime
trajectory mediate how democratic states pursue their political, economic, and military interests with respect to other
democracies in the present. When democratic regimes have a strong interest in the policies another
democracy has adopted (e.g., geopolitical, economic, ideological) and view their regime as relatively stable, the restraints of
democratic peace should operate normally, thereby lowering the probability of covert forcible regime change
to zero; the need for covert democracy promotion is nil. The decision-making calculus changes, however, when we introduce a
moderate threat of democratic decay in a state of some strategic importance: H1: As expectations of stasis move from high to
moderate, democratic interveners are more likely to engage in covert activity intended to strengthen the regime and to weaken perceived opponents of democracy. It is only
when leaders believe that there is a strong probability that a target state will abandon democracy that the possibility of lethal action comes to the fore: H2: When
expectations of stasis are low—i.e. expectations of decay are high—prospective interveners are more likely to sponsor coups and otherwise engage in covert forcible regime
change against democratic targets. By highlighting the importance of regime trajectory,
the logic of stasis and decay refines our understanding
of how extant arguments for the democratic peace might account for covert intervention between
democracies. In terms of the rationalist accounts, perceptions of democratic decay mean that leaders will expect institutional and informational mechanisms to cease
in the future, thus removing the benefits associated with dealing with another democracy. At the very least, the effectiveness of such mechanisms in
restraining the use of force, either covertly or overtly, will atrophy as decision makers anticipate their
impending disappearance. The stasis-decay framework also helps to refine the sociocultural mechanisms. When expectations of decay obtain, sociocultural
factors will not only reduce in salience—insofar as leaders anticipate that the target country will no longer belong to the “we-group” and will feel less normatively
restrained—but also start to provide a rationale for intervention. In other words, the
restraint embedded in sociocultural mechanisms flips
from recommending “no intervention” to recommending “intervention”; what was previously a presumption of amity becomes a
presumption of enmity. However, some combination of uncertainty about regime trajectory and concerns about the reputational effects of overt intervention in another
democracy creates incentives for covert intervention, particularly when existing circumstances facilitate this option. Before proceeding, an important caveat is in order. The
reasons why a democratic intervener might choose to forcibly target another democracy covertly are most likely many and varied. Concerns about the reputational effects of
intervening overtly in another democracy and legitimation problems, both at home and at abroad, are each plausible candidates. Rather than taking sides, the logic of stasis
and decay is ultimately neutral as to why interventions are undertaken in secret rather than in public. Instead, the
most relevant consideration is that
an expectation of decay precedes the decision to use force. Contrary to the way in which the debate about covert action is currently framed,
then, it is not the publicity of an intervention that is most relevant for the democratic peace but rather the distinction between lethal and nonlethal intervention against
another democracy (Barkawi 2001:113; Barkawi and Laffey 2001:107).7 Expectations
of decay put the option of force on the table; the
rationale for using force covertly comes later.
Democracy key to international peace-liberal cooperation through global spread of
judicial independence key
Kersch 6 [Ken, founding director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy and associate professor of political science, history, and law at
Boston College; 06/22/06; “The Supreme Court and international relations theory.”; The Free Library; 07/10/15; jac]
B. Liberalism Liberal theories of international relations hold that international
peace and prosperity are advanced to the degree that
the world's sovereign states converge on the model of government anchored in the twin commitment to
democracy and the rule of law. (52) Liberal "democratic peace" theorists hold that liberal democratic states anchored in rule of law commitments are less
aggressive and more transparent than other types of states. (53) When compared with nonliberal states, they are thus much better at
cooperating with one another in the international arena. (54) Because they share a market-oriented economic model, moreover, international
relations liberals believe that liberal states hewing to the rule of law will become increasingly interdependent economically. (55) As they do so, they will come to share a
common set of interests and ideas, which also enhances the likelihood of cooperation. (56) Many
foreign policy liberals--sometimes referred to
as "liberal internationalists"--emphasize the role that effective multilateral institutions, designed by a club or
community of liberal-democratic states, play in facilitating that cooperation and in anchoring a peaceful and
prosperous liberal world order. (57) The liberal foreign policy outlook is moralized, evolutionary, and progressive. Unlike realists, who make no real
distinctions between democratic and non-democratic states in their analysis of international affairs, liberals take a clear normative position in
favor of democracy and the rule of law. (58) Liberals envisage the spread of liberal democracy around the
world, and they seek to advance the world down that path. (59) Part of advancing the cause of liberal peace and
prosperity involves encouraging the spread of liberal democratic institutions within nations where they are
currently absent or weak. (60) Furthermore, although not all liberals are institutionalists, most liberals believe that effective multilateral institutions play an
important role in encouraging those developments. (61) To be sure, problems of inequities in power between stronger and weaker states will exist, inevitably, within a liberal
framework. (62) "But international institutions can nonetheless help coordinate outcomes that are in the long-term mutual interest of both the hegemon and the weaker
states." (63) Many
foreign policy liberals have emphasized the importance of the judiciary in helping to bring
about an increasingly liberal world order. To be sure, the importance of an independent judiciary to the
establishment of the rule of law within sovereign states has long been at the core of liberal theory. (64)
Foreign policy liberalism, however, commonly emphasizes the role that judicial globalization can play in promoting democratic rule of law values throughout the world. (65)
Post-communist and post-colonial developing states commonly have weak commitments to and little
experience with liberal democracy, and with living according to the rule of law, as enforced by a (relatively)
apolitical, independent judiciary. (66) In these emerging liberal democracies, judges are often subjected to intense political
pressures. (67) International and transnational support can be a life-line for these judges. It can encourage their professionalization,
enhance their prestige and reputations, and draw unfavorable attention to efforts to challenge their
independence. (68) In some cases, support from foreign and international sources may represent the most important
hope that these judges can maintain any sort of institutional power--a power essential to the establishment
within the developing sovereign state of a liberal democratic regime, the establishment of which liberal
theorists assume to be in the best interests of both that state and the wider world community. (69) Looked at from this
liberal international relations perspective, judicial globalization seems an unalloyed good. To many, it will appear to be an imperative. (70) When
judges from well-established, advanced western democracies enter into conversations with their counterparts in emerging liberal democracies, they help enhance the status
and prestige of judges from these countries. This is not, from the perspective of either side, an affront to the sovereignty of the developing nation, or to the independence
of its judiciary. It is a win-win situation which actually strengthens the authority of the judiciary in the developing state. (71) In doing so ,
it works to strengthen
the authority of the liberal constitutional state itself. Viewed in this way, judicial globalization is a way of
strengthening national sovereignty, not limiting it: it is part of a state-building initiative in a broader, liberal
international order. (72)
Democracy Reduces Terrorism
Democratic rule of law has a dampening effect on homegrown terrorism-judicial
legitimacy key
Choi 10 [Seung-Whan, Department of Political Science University of Illinois; 11/25/10; Fighting Terrorism through the Rule of Law?; Sage Pub; 07/08/15; jac]
The Dampening Effect of the Democratic Rule of Law on Domestic and International Terrorist Incidents Before exploring the link between the rule of law and terrorism,
these two concepts must be clarified, as their definitions remain controversial. Terrorism is a particularly difficult concept to define because of its value-laden nature: one
country’s terrorist may be another country’s freedom fighter. For analytical clarity, I follow the definition of terrorism of LaFree and Ackerman (2009, 348) as ‘‘the
threatened or actual use of illegal force, directed against civilian targets, by non state actors, in order to attain a political goal, through fear, coercion or intimidation.’’4
Domestic terrorism includes incidents such as the Oklahoma City bombing since they arise only against domestic targets of the terrorists’ home country. International
terrorism, then, is a situation in which a terrorist incident in country A involves perpetrators, victims, institutions, governments, or citizens of country B (Enders and Sandler
2006, 7; Dugan 2010). These subtle differences are important, as they provide clarity to a discussion of terrorism in general. Like the concept of terrorism, the rule of law is
also ‘‘subject to various definitional and normative disputes’’ (O’Donnell 2004, 34). For analytical parsimony, I limit myself to two
fundamental
components that should be present in most democratic societies with a high-quality rule of law: (1) fair,
impartial, and effective judicial systems and (2) a nonarbitrary basis according to which laws and the legal
system as a whole can be viewed as legitimate.5 As legal scholar Joseph Raz (1977, 198-201) argues, fair and impartial judicial systems require at
least an independent judiciary branch with fair-minded judges, prosecutors and lawyers, as well as strong and stable law enforcement or police (for a similar view, see Fuller
1969). Institutionalizing an independent judiciary system reflects a strong commitment by government to the basic principle that all people are equal before the law and
Only when fair and independent judicial
bodies have been institutionalized are citizens able to have trust and confidence in legal norms,
procedures, courts, and the police. When this is the case, citizens are more likely to consult established
laws and legal procedures to reconcile political and personal differences rather than turn to physical violence
as a means of dispute resolution. Indeed, it is only when citizens believe in the likelihood of a fair and impartial
legal ruling in court that citizens are willing to turn to domestic justice systems. Undoubtedly, such a high level of citizen trust
those people deserve the opportunity to have their grievances and disputes heard and settled in court.
in the legal institutions of the state brings a beneficial degree of order to the political and social relations of a society (Hardin 2001; O’Donnell 2004). The Linkage between
the Rule of Law and Domestic Terrorism The above discussion leads to the inference that ordinary citizens have incentives to use political violence against other citizens,
political figures, institutions, or the government under three conditions: (1) when they hold grievances, (2) when they find no peaceful means of resolving these grievances,
exacerbating feelings of hopelessness, and desperation, and (3) when they view terrorist action as a legitimate and viable last resort to vent their anger and frustration. The
lynchpin of this line of reasoning is that as
long as ordinary citizens have access to a peaceful mechanism for conflict
resolution, they are less likely to contemplate terrorist violence as a practical option to settle disputes. Along this
line, I argue that since liberal democracies promote a high-quality rule of law system, which serves as an
effective conflict resolution mechanism, they are likely to experience fewer activities of domestic
terrorism. As a fundamental building block of democratic societies, a high-quality legal system ‘‘serves to protect people against anarchy as well as from [the] arbitrary
exercise of power by public officials and allows people to plan their daily affairs with confidence’’ (Wilson 2006, 153). Since liberal democratic judicial
systems ensure independent adjudication of legal rules, they create a fair chance for the interests at stake in
each case to be properly heard in efficient but inexpensive legal outlets. Thus, in the presence of an effective, independent judicial
system in liberal democratic societies, ordinary citizens do not need to resort to illegal terrorist measures to resolve their complaints and grievances. Eyerman (1998, 154)
makes a similar observation: since democracies
‘‘increase the expected return of legal activity and offer multiple channels
of non-violent expression without the threat of government retaliation,’’ they assuage potentially growing
bitterness and dissatisfaction that may turn ordinary people into terrorists (see also Frey and Luechinger 2003). In contrast, where
sound judicial systems are lacking, dissatisfied people are likely to embrace the principle of retributive justice and become more likely to initiate terrorist attacks.
Furthermore, since
democratic citizens are socialized to trust in the fairness and impartiality of the legal system in
times of disputes, they subscribe to established laws as a means to settle political grievances. From this
perspective, engaging in violence would be self-defeating behavior ultimately undermining a legal institution
seen as important and necessary. Furthermore, because democratic citizens see these institutions as both fair and
legitimate, citizens will tend to subscribe to the established legal order, even if they disagree with individual
legal statutes and rulings. Democratic citizens trust that legal adjudication produces a right and fair result,
even if it is not the result they might have wanted.6 It is then not hard to imagine why ordinary people in democratic countries would be less
likely to become perpetrators of domestic terrorism than those in nondemocratic countries, where the legal system is suited mainly for the rich and powerful: a nonarbitrary
creation of law and a dispassionate legal system that metes out appropriate punishment make extralegal violence untenable and/or undesirable. Because citizens who live in
countries without the rule of law view their own governments as illegitimate, public policy decisions as arbitrary, and peaceful participation futile, they are more likely to
in fighting domestic terrorism, lawabiding citizens in democratic societies are no less important than the actual presence of an independent
resort to attacks against domestic targets (or to support terrorist groups that do so). It is important to note that,
judiciary with fair-minded judges and law enforcement officials. As we have seen, judicial institutions alone cannot produce a highquality rule of law. Other factors within a society, especially the citizenry, must be actively involved. Exclusive reliance on legal authority is less likely to create and maintain
safe and healthy communities if democratic citizens do not willingly cooperate with judicial institutions to resolve grievances and if democratic citizens do not serve as
watchful eyes and ears against illegal activities of domestic terrorism (Hogg and Brown 1998; Hardin 2001). Alex P. Schmid (2005, 28), Senior Crime Prevention Officer of
the United Nations, presents a compelling argument relating to this point: ‘‘where the rule of law is firmly in place, it ensures the responsiveness of government to the
people as it enables enhanced critical civil participation. The more citizens are stakeholders in the political process, the less likely it is that some of them form a terrorist
organization. In this sense, it can be argued that the
rule of law has a preventive effect on the rise of terrorism’’ (emphasis added). In
people within democracies can resolve grievances through rule of law systems, which they have
trust in, thereby mitigating the likelihood that they will commit terrorist acts, and resulting in less politically
motivated violence.
sum, ordinary
Strong democracies check international terrorism
Choi 10 [Seung-Whan, Department of Political Science University of Illinois; 11/25/10; Fighting Terrorism through the Rule of Law?; Sage Pub; 07/08/15; jac]
The Linkage between the Rule of Law and International Terrorism It appears that existing studies of international terrorism suffer from two common misperceptions. First,
many studies put forward religious and ideological motives as the main causes of international terrorism (e.g., Reich 1990).7 Typically, the terrorist activities of Al-Qaeda and
the Taliban are seen as examples of organizations that advance their religious and ideological agenda. However, these studies overlook the fundamental question of what
causes ordinary people to become terrorists in the first place. Religion
and ideology, by themselves, do not necessarily drive ordinary
citizens to resort to terrorist violence. When ordinary citizens with grievances lack peaceful outlets of
conflict resolution, they tend to join radicalized terrorist groups that justify their violent actions through
the selective use of religion and ideology. Second, some students of terrorism tend to misperceive the nature of international terrorist incidents.
The international aspect of terrorism does not necessarily require the involvement of notorious international
terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda. As noted earlier, as long as the origin of victims, targets, or perpetrators in
political violence can be traced back to at least two different countries, this violence is regarded as
international terrorism. I argue that ordinary people have incentives to terrorize foreigners and foreign facilities
when two conditions are met: (1) when they hold grievances against foreigners who violate political and legal rights of
local citizens and (2) when these local people, due to poor-quality rule of law in the home country, do not
believe in the effectiveness of pursuing justice peacefully. Students of terrorism often fail to observe the fact that when local people have
grievances against Western foreigners, they have little chance of resolving them through the legal authority due to an omnipotent presence of foreign power or an unequal
international treaty in which foreigners’ crimes are immune from the domestic jurisdiction. This impotence of domestic justice systems makes local people feel helpless and
desperate. Consequently, disgruntled local people turn to terrorist violence as a last resort. There are several examples that illustrate how disgruntlement among locals later
transforms into violence at the hands of terrorists. In May 2006, several Iraqis abducted two U.S. soldiers at a checkpoint and they were subsequently murdered. The Iraqis
learned that the two soldiers raped and killed fourteen-year-old Abeer al-Janabi and committed the murder of her mother, father, and six-year-old sister in their home south
of Baghdad (Robertson and Kakan 2009, May 8). On January 12, 2009, several Pakistanis, who were displeased with America’s political support for Israel, terrorized the U.S.
consulate in Karachi rather than seek peaceful channels of conflict resolution (see http://chinaconfidential.blogspot.com/2009/01/pakistanistudents-storm-usconsulate.html). These two examples show how distressed local people are inclined to make use of terrorist violence against foreigners when they do not have an adequate
rule of law system to hear their grievances. There are four main archetypal narratives that can better illustrate and explain the causal mechanisms underlying the relationship
between the rule of law and international terrorism. The first causal mechanism involves situations where ordinary citizens within their own country feel hopeless and
desperate against foreigners who abuse fellow citizens’ legal rights at home or abroad and who exploit the home country’s political and economic interests. When foreigners
are not subject to domestic legal jurisdiction, or when they are unfairly protected by the home country’s justice systems, residents of the home country are likely to take
justice into their own hands through locally coordinated terrorist attacks against foreigners and foreign facilities. An example is the insurgency of Iraqi civilians against
armed privately contracted soldiers who operate not only with virtual immunity from Iraqi law but also from the laws of their own countries (see Broder and Risen 2007,
September 20). The
second causal mechanism is an extension of the first, where hopeless citizens become international
terrorists as a strategy to advance their domestic agendas. In this instance, discontented citizens who are frustrated
with a low-quality rule of law at home, go abroad to carry out their attacks against foreign targets of the
host country. These attacks represent an attempt to rectify foreign exploitation of their home country or to
undermine Western support for brutal regimes (e.g., in the Middle East). This is done either because foreign targets are
more vulnerable to attack or because there is some strategic advantage in putting the attack on an
international stage rather than on a domestic one. In the former case, foreign targets may be more subject to attack due to easy access (Enders
and Sandler 2006). In the latter case, the purpose of international terrorist attacks is to evoke domestic opposition in the host country, demanding the end of the foreign
presence (Pape 2005; Wade and Reiter 2007). The suicide car bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad on August 19, 2003, is an illustrative example. The followers of
the late Abu Musab alZarqawi, a Jordanian militant Islamist, intentionally targeted the United Nations and killed at least eight Iraqis and fourteen foreigners including
Se´rgio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian UN diplomat (Enders and Sandler 2006). The
third causal mechanism of international terrorism is one
in which discontented people are angry at politically influential foreign targets operating within their own
country. However, in these situations, citizens possess no readily available means to retaliate against those
foreigners or their well-guarded foreign facilities. In such cases, feelings of powerlessness among disgruntled
citizens may lead them to elicit the support of international terrorists because they see it as the best strategy to
redress their frustrations and grudges (Tessler and Robbins 2007). These circumstances provide ideal opportunities for international terrorist groups to
build inroads with the disaffected locals, giving these groups easy access to material resources, safe havens, and better channels through which to execute militant operations
against foreign targets in the host country (i.e., foreign terrorist attacks on some other foreign target). For example, many Iraqis welcome and support Al Qaeda operatives
from other countries, like Pakistan, to fight against U.S. forces. The
fourth causal mechanism involves situations where citizens have
grievances against their own government but have no avenue for redress because corrupt domestic justice
systems take the government’s side. This breakdown of the basic perceptions necessary for the rule of law to materialize allows for the possibility of
‘‘mob rule’’ and lawlessness. However, the citizens themselves are often too weak to revolt, which makes them likely to turn to outside sources such as international terrorist
groups to take action on their behalf (i.e., foreign terrorist attacks on a domestic target). Possessing global financial resources and disciplined members operating in
autonomous terrorist cells, international terrorists are capable of luring local people who feel alienated and disadvantaged, using them to help push forward and carry out
their own terrorist plots. For example, disgruntled Pakistani tribesmen joined together with foreign Al Qaeda members, Uzbek militants, and Taliban fighters to initiate
the rule of law reinforces a
political system’s legitimacy by protecting the rights of citizens and foreigners and by providing the means for
them to settle grievances in nonviolent ways. It thus acts as a cornerstone of liberal democracies, making it unnecessary for ordinary people to rely
terrorist attacks against the people and places attached to the Musharraf government (Masood 2008, January 18). To recap,
An independent judiciary with fair-minded judges
and police officers, who enforce the letter of the law, creates a nonviolent
environment in which the public recognizes established laws as a legitimate
channel to settle disputes peacefully. Thus, the combined impact of impartial judicial systems and
ordinary citizens’ recognition of the law as legitimate is likely to reduce all types of terrorism in democratic
countries.8 This leads to the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 1: The democratic rule of law has a dampening effect on domestic and international terrorism: fair
on terrorist violence as a last resort to resolve disputes.
and impartial judicial systems along with the public’s recognition of the law as legitimate will discourage any type of terrorist acts.
Non-democracies are more likely targets for terrorists
Abrahms [Max, doctoral candidate in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles; 06/06/07; “Why Democracies Make Superior
Counterterrorists”; Taylor and Francis Online; 07/08/15; jac]
***WITS= Workshop on Issues in the Theory of Security***
WITS, a
newly released U.S. government dataset, is not limited to international or suicide terrorist attacks and is
thus an unprecedented and superior resource for analyzing terrorist target selections. WITS contains events data of domestic
and international terrorist incidents from 1 January 2004 to 1 June 2005. Terrorism scholars have appealed for the creation of such a dataset not only to expand the sample
of terrorist events data, but also to blunt the distinction between domestic and international terrorist attacks, which has increasingly become regarded as a contrivance.
Nearly all domestic terrorist campaigns have an international dimension, with terrorist leaders devoting significant effort to securing external sources of money, weapons,
fighters, safe haven, and political support.37 According to Bruce Hoffman, the distinction between domestic and international terrorism has been “evaporating” since the
late 1990s. The majority of Aum Shinrikio’s members hailed from Russia, not Japan; the Oklahoma City bombers were allegedly linked with neo-Nazis in Britain and
Europe; networks of Algerian Islamic extremists have operated in France, Great Britain, Sweden, and Belgium; and alQaeda-affiliated movements have joined forces with
nationalist insurgencies in countries such as Iraq.38 Furthermore, according to a 2005 report by the State Department, twenty-seven of the fifty most active terrorist
organizations are comprised of or are supported by segments of ethnonationalist diasporas, which highlights the increasing difficulty, even obsolescence of separating
domestic and international terrorist attacks.39 Like
other studies testing the relationship between democracy and terrorism,
this study uses Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World” rankings to determine the regime types of the
target countries.40 Freedom House annually classifies countries as Not Free, Partially Free, or Free based on their commitment to political rights and civil liberties.
I used Freedom House’s 2004 rankings, rather than the 2005 rankings, to minimize the problem of endogeneity; the earlier rankings reduce any potential for the dependent
variable (terrorism) to influence the independent variable (regime type). The KruskalWallis test was used to compare the distribution of the average number of incidents and
fatalities among the three regime types. If the conventional wisdom is supported, we would expect to see a significantly greater number of terrorist incidents and fatalities
directed against Free countries. The
results did not, however, indicate a significant difference in the average number of
terrorist incidents among the three regime types.41 The average (SD) number of incidents was 55.7 (254.8), 30.8 (105.8), and 26.6 (116.8) for the
Not Free, Partially Free, and Free countries, respectively (P = 0.11). There was also no significant difference in the average number of fatalities among the three regime
types. The average (SD) number of fatalities was 161 (822), 53 (149), and 26 (134) for the Not Free, Partially Free, and Free countries, respectively (P = 0.068). According to
Cohen, small, medium, and large effect sizes for a one-way ANOVA are f = 0.1; f = 0.25; f = 0.4, respectively.42 The effect sizes for the average number of incidents (f =
0.08) and fatalities (0.13) were thus small. Therefore, contrary
to prevailing popular and scholarly opinion, when the universe of
terrorist attacks was included in the analysis, I did not find sufficient evidence that Free countries were
targeted more or suffered a greater number of fatalities than either Not Free or Partially Free countries. In fact,
the data suggest the exact opposite trend: Not Free countries had on average more than twice as many
incidents and six times as many fatalities as Free countries. The relative absence of fatalities in Free countries
was most evident among the most fatality-ridden countries, as only two of the ten most dangerous countries
were Free. TABLE 1 Top Ten Target Countries by Fatalities Rank Country Regime type 1 Iraq Not Free 2 India Free 3 Nigeria Partially Free 4 Nepal Partially Free 5
Afghanistan Not Free 6 Russia Not Free 7 Pakistan Not Free 8 Colombia Partially Free 9 Uganda Partially Free 10 Philippines Free ∗NCTC, WITS dataset, 1 January 2004
to1 June 2005. As we have seen, democracies supposedly attract terrorism because of their liberal constraints. Spearman’s rho correlation coefficient is used to test the
association between the civil liberty scores of the target countries and both the number of terrorist incidents and fatalities. Freedom House’s civil liberty index operates on a
seven point scale: countries with a score of one come closest to the ideal of permitting freedom of expression, assembly, association, education, and religion, while countries
with a score of seven permit “virtually no freedom.”43 If the conventional wisdom is supported, we would expect to see a negative association between terrorist activity and
the target countries’ civil liberty scores. The results, however, indicate a statistically significant, positive association between the number of terrorist attacks and the civil
liberty scores of the target countries rho = 0.18 (P = 0.015). There was also a statistically significant, positive association between the number of fatalities and the civil liberty
scores of the target countries rho = 0.22 (P = 0.002). There
was thus statistically significant evidence of greater terrorist activity
in countries with poorer civil liberties— even when Iraq was treated as an outlier and excluded from the analysis. The moderate positive association
between terrorist activity and illiberal countries found in this analysis understates the extent to which terrorism is aimed at illiberal countries. The NCTC warns
of “difficulty in gathering data on Iraq and Afghanistan” because of high levels of crime and sectarian
violence. Consequently, “the dataset does not provide a comprehensive account of all incidents in these two
countries.”44 Undercounting terrorist activity in illiberal countries is hardly restricted to these two illiberal countries. Political scientists have long noted that the
events data in illiberal countries are undercounted for five main reasons. First, collectors of events data depend on open, publicly available sources. In practice, this means
news sources, which are by definition less robust in illiberal countries. Second, the media in illiberal countries are often owned or controlled by the state, and authoritarian
regimes tend to conceal challenges to their rule, including terrorist attacks. Third, the international media do not devote equal coverage to all geographical regions. Laqueur
found that “while in Western societies even the smallest incidents are recorded, this is not so in other parts of the world ...”45 Fourth, the international media tend to report
only spectacular events. This poses a problem for data collectors where political violence has become the norm. Because political unrest is symptomatic of illiberal countries,
attacks on civilians by substate actors often go unreported. Fifth, and perhaps most important, terrorist incidents in illiberal countries are undercounted for reasons of
semantics. Terrorism typically refers to select incidences of violence. When the level of violence rises to a certain level, the campaign is generally reclassified as a civil war or
genocide. In the course of these intense and sustained campaigns, politically motivated attacks by substate actors against civilians are generally excluded from the terrorism
events data. Terrorist incidents in these countries are systematically undercounted because mass-based insurgencies are characteristic of illiberal countries. For all of these
reasons, it is reasonable to assume that the positive association between terrorist attacks and illiberal countries is significantly stronger than even the WITS data indicate.46
Indeed, in the only study to quantifiably assess the presumed underreporting bias of terrorism events data in illiberal countries, the authors conclude: “Underreporting is
indeed present . . . the databases used by applied researchers represent an understatement of true terrorist activity worldwide ... this understatement is not simply an overall
scaling-down effect randomly distributed across countries . . . it is highly concentrated in countries whose press is not free, which typically correspond to countries that lie
on low levels of the polity scale (nondemocracies) ... this has significant implications for issues such as constructing indices of terrorism risk on a country level ...”47
Democracy spread stops violent extremism from wrecking the world
Lagon ’11 --- adjunct senior fellow for Human Rights (Mark P, “Promoting Democracy: The Whys and Hows for the United States and the International
Community,” Council on Foreign Relations, February 2011, http://www.cfr.org/democratization/promoting-democracy-whys-hows-united-states-internationalcommunity/p24090)//Mnush
Markets and Democracy Briefs are published by CFR’s Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy initiative. They are designed to offer readers a concise snapshot of current
thinking on critical issues surrounding democracy and economic development in the world today. Stakes in Democracy Furthering democracy is often dismissed as
there are tangible stakes for the United
States and indeed the world in the spread of democracy—namely, greater peace, prosperity, and
pluralism. Controversial means for promoting democracy and frequent mismatches between deeds and words have clouded appreciation of this truth.
Democracies often have conflicting priorities, and democracy promotion is not a panacea. Yet one of the few truly robust
findings in international relations is that established democracies never go to war with one another. Foreign policy “realists” advocate working
with other governments on the basis of interests, irrespective of character, and suggest that this approach best
preserves stability in the world. However, durable stability flows from a domestic politics built on consensus and peaceful competition, which more often
than not promotes similar international conduct for governments. There has long been controversy about whether democracy
enhances economic development. The dramatic growth of China certainly challenges this notion. Still, history
will likely show that democracy yields the most prosperity. Notwithstanding the global financial turbulence of the past three years,
moralism distinct from U.S. interests or mere lip service to build support for strategic policies. Yet
democracy’s elements facilitate long-term economic growth. These elements include above all freedom of expression and learning to promote innovation, and rule of law to
foster predictability for investors and stop corruption from stunting growth. It is for that reason that the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the 2002 UN
Financing for Development Conference in Monterey, Mexico, embraced good governance as the enabler of development. These elements have unleashed new emerging
powers such as India and Brazil and raised the quality of life for impoverished peoples. Those who argue that economic development will eventually yield political freedoms
may be reversing the order of influences—or at least discounting the reciprocal relationship between political and economic liberalization. Finally, democracy affords all
groups equal access to justice—and equal opportunity to shine as assets in a country’s economy. Democracy’s
support for pluralism prevents
human assets—including religious and ethnic minorities, women, and migrants—from being squandered.
Indeed, a shortage of economic opportunities and outlets for grievances has contributed significantly to the
ongoing upheaval in the Middle East. Pluralism is also precisely what is needed to stop violent extremism
from wreaking havoc on the world
Judicial Independence Key to Economic Growth
Judicial independence solves economic growth in developing countries
Wright et al 15 [Joseph, Associate Professor, Pennsylvania State University; Simone Dietrich, Assistant Professor, University of Missouri; Molly Ariotti, Ph.D.
Student, Pennsylvania State University; 04/06/15; “Foreign Aid and Judicial Independence”;
http://aiddata.org/sites/default/files/wright_et_al_2015_aid_judicial_independence.pdf; 07/07/15; jac]
***this card has a lot of typos***
Many democracy scholars acknowledge the importance of the rule of law for democratic stability and consolidation (Elster and Slagstad, 1993; Linz and Stepan, 1996;
Maravall and Przeworski, 2003; Baylies and Szeftel, 1997; O’Donnell, 1998). Some
have explored the extent to which independent and
impartial judiciaries influence the balance of power within governments, finding, for example, that
independent courts decrease the chances of democratic backsliding (Gibler and Randazzo, 2011) and reduce instability (Esarey and
Sarkari, 2010).9 Judicial independence entails both autonomy from other political actors, particularly the executive,
as well as the expectation that court ruling are enforced by other actors in the state. It can arise from the duration of the
judicial appointment or executive control over judicial administration (Russell, 2001). The degree of independence may be associated with the size of the budget (Domingo,
2000), judges’ discipline (Hanssen, 1999), and the power of judicial review (Ginsburg, 2003; Hammergreen, 2007).10 Beyond its influence on democratic consolidation,
judicial independence shapes the prospects for economic growth.11 Many scholars in the institutionalist tradition concur that courts help secure property and contract
enforcement. By
increasing judicial independence, governments reduce the risk that governments expropriate
private property, which in turn enhances the government’s credibility vis-a-vis investors. This increase in
credibility leads to greater investment and economic development (Williamson, 1985; North, 1990; Acemoglu, Johnson and James,
2001; La Porta, Lopez-de Silanes and Pop-Eleches, 2004). Alternatively, judicial independence influences economic growth through the
mechanism of institutional checks. Henisz (2000) argues that independent courts serve as a veto player in the policy-making process, and finds that a
higher number of veto players leads to higher levels of economic growth. Finally, judicial independence imposes checks on corruption
insofar as it secures equal treatment and procedural fairness in interactions betweeen public and private actors
(Haber et al. 2003). Checks on corruption also directly increase the capacity of state institutions to to ensure long-time economic growth (Haggard and Tiede, 2011). A
growing number of scholars have found evidence that governments across different regime types, including
democracies and autocracies have incentives to establish independent judiciaries (Tate, 1993; Whittington, 2003; Ginsburg,
2003; Hirschl, 2004; Wright, 2009; VonDoepp, 2009; Yadav and Mukherjee, 2014). These incentives are derived largely from the economic
prospects associated with judicial independence. The literatures on judicial independence, democracy, and economic growth provide
policymakers in both donor and recipient governments with an incentive to promote judicial reform. In the donor community, representatives recognize the importance of
judicial independence, or the rule of law, more generally. As Lord Paddy Ashdown claimed in October of 2002 shortly after taking up the post of UN High Representative
for Bosnia and Hercegovina: “In Bosnia, we thought that democracy was the highest priority and we measured it by the number of elections we could organize. In
hindsight, we should have put the establishment of rule of law first, for everything else depends on it: a functioning economy, a free and fair political system, the
development of civil society, and public confidence in police and courts. We should do well to reflect on this as we formulate our plans for Afghanistan, and, perhaps,
Iraq.”12 Inspite of this awareness, little systematic evidence exists about the conditions under which donor efforts are successful in promoting judicial independence.
Drawing on case studies, some speculate that a need to satisfy external observers may influence the relationship between the judiciary and other branches towards greater
levels of independence (Tate, 1993; VonDoepp, 2009), while others claim more explicitly that states receiving foreign aid are more likely to be responsive to external
pressure to promote judicial independence (Hirschl, 2004; Bill Chavez, 2008). Skeptics, on the other hand, argue more generally that external democracy-promotion may
only play a supporting role in the instances where domestic actors are already acquiescent (Bratton and van de Walle, 1997; Carothers, 2007), which is an argument that
could apply to judicial reform. We contribute to this debate by presenting an argument that differentiates between the mechanisms of democracy promotion (conditionality
via economic aid and direct investment via democracy and governance aid) and political institutions in the aid-receiving country, with a particular focus on the election cycle
in aid-receiving countries. We specify when aid contributes to judicial independence and in doing so explain why donor efforts have fallen short of strengthening the
Judicial independence is
important for both democratic stability and improvement of the investment
climate or corruption control – both necessary to strengthen and sustain
economic growth. The respective literatures provide systematic evidence thereof, which serves as a basis for donor and recipient government policy
judiciary abroad during election times. Donor tactics, recipient politics, and the promotion of judicial independence
preferences. We posit that both donor and recipient governments recognize the benefits of judicial independence and seek its promotion. Indeed, since the mid-1990s, the
donor community has moved beyond its narrow focus on election day to champion the promotion of good goverance, which includes judicial reform. It has done so in two
ways: First, donor governments have expanded their use of governance-related conditionalities attached to economic aid in scope and depth. In 2000, Kapur and Webb
(2000, 4) present initial analyses on new trends in IMF conditionality, noting that the burden of governancerelated conditionality on borrowers, including judicial reform,
“has grown significantly. The average number of criteria for a sample of 25 countries having a program with the IMF in 1999, with programs initiated between 1997 and
1999, is 26. This compares to about six in the 1970s and ten in the 1980s.” Today IMF lending is infused with governance-related conditions, as are economic aid packages
of other multilateral and bilateral donors. Through conditionality, donor governments aim to extract reform concession from incumbents. Of these conditions, many
prescribe specific reforms in the rule of law sector but they do not spell out details as to how governments should go about pursuing these reforms. The conditionality
mechanism is therefore diffuse as recipient governments can choose among various policy strategies that entail political reform.13 Even within the area of judicial reform, as
Dallara (2014) notes, international donors do not necessarily share the same priorities. In her research on judicial reform in South-Eastern Europe, she shows that the
United States has tended to push for judicial independence across time while the European Union focused on strengthening judicial capacity. At the same time, donor
governments have increased their budgets for specific governance activities, in general, as captured through “democracy and governance aid,” and for judicial reform
activities, specifically. We claim that specific
investment in governance represents a different strategy of democracy
promotion, which differs from the conditionality-strategy in two ways: first democracy and governance aid
represents only a fraction of the total aid budget, while conditionality is associated with economic assistance in
general. Second, democracy and governance is earmarked for the promotion of specific judicial reform
activities, while conditionality prescribes reforms but does not specify the implementation of the reforms.
Across the world international donors have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on direct investment in democracy and governance activities. Over time an increasing
proportion of foreign aid has been directed at judicial reform. Donor governments’ judicial reform activities in Jordan serve as a case in point: like in many other countries,
Jordan’s judiciary was not guaranteed independence through the Constitution. In 2001, the adoption of legislation referred to as the “Law on the Independence of the
Judiciary” or “Indepdence Law” suggested some progress by declaring that judges were independent “except as specified by this law.” However, the law was limiting insofar
as it established a Judicial Council that had the power to appoint and dismiss judges, thus restricting the judiciary’s independence (Burgis, 2007). Over the course of the next
ten years, national efforts such as the “Royal Committee for Judicial Upgrade”14 aimed to further improve the judiciary branch by institutionalizing “independence of the
legal system” and by enhancing “the efficiency of the judicial inspection methodology as well as develop the institutional capacity of the Judicdial Council.”15 In 2013, this
effort resulted in an amendment to the judicial independence law that now allows the judiciary to operate without political interference. Examples of donor investment in
Jordan’s judicial reforms include the European Union’s 1.1 million Euro initiative, entitled “Technical Assistance for Institutional Strengthening of the Ministry of Justice,”
which trained judges, clerks and legal professionals, alongside efforts to build modern legal case management systems.16 USAID’s “Rule of Law Programme (MASAQ)” in
Jordan supports judicial indepdence through similar activities. The World Bank also contributed to donor efforts to foster judicial independence by conducting training
programs to upgrade Jordanian judges’ capabilites as well as the skills of prosecutors in Amman. The “Jordan Legal and Judicial Reform Learning Program” focused on
analyzing and discussing strategies to secure private property and oversee administrative agencies.17 All three projects are examples of targeted investments in the
strengthening of judicial independence. They are part of democracy and governance assistance. In addition, they were were supported by and conducted in collaboration
with the Jordanian Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation. As such, these programs were incorporated into a multi-year
government-led judical reform strategy. According to Burgis (2007) and independent news sources, the Jordanian government’s motive for promoting an indepdent judiciary
was economic. Indeed, King Hussein made this rationale explicit when he suggested that judical independence would “help translate the countrys reform plans into facts on
the ground, including economic reform and efforts to increase the countrys economic competitiveness.”18 When the 2013 amendment to the constitutional laws was
passed, the King praised it, suggesting that the amendment would further “reduce investors’ fears regarding the judiciary’s independence.” These anecdotes of donor
involvement in Jordan indicate that recipient governments recognize the economic benefits of judicial reform. While anecdotal, the Jordanian case suggests that the recipient
government recognizes the economic benefit of judicial independence, resulting in alignment of donor and government preferences in favor of implementing judicial reform
projects. This discusion generates two related hypotheses. • Hypothesis 1: Economic economic aid and democracy and governance aid increases judicial independence. •
Hypothesis 2: The positive effects should be stronger for targeted democracy and governance aid than for diffuse economic aid. We extend our argument by introducing an
important contextual factor, elections, that we argue conditions the relationship between foreign aid and judicial independence. So far, our discussion has focused on the
economic gains associated with judicial independence, which we expect the recipient government to recognize and pursue. Yet, this discussion masks concerns of recipient
judicial indepdence not only promotes economic
growth, but also helps secure freedom of expression for political opponents and strengthens checks on the
abuse of power by incumbents. Progress in strengthening judicial independence may therefore be particularly threatening during times when an incumbent
governments have about the potential political costs of judicial reform. Importantly,
government’s position of power is more uncertain, as it would be during times of election. Before and around election day, the judiciary can influence election outcomes in
multiple ways. During election campaigns, pro-incumbent courts can punish opposition and political mobilization by, for example, subduing the press, upholding jail
sentences for opposition leaders, or condoning unfair electoral rules. After election day, the judiciary can turn a blind-eye to election fraud or allegations of election-related
political violence. In contrast, an independent judiciary can prevent incumbents from punishing electoral opponents during campaigns and promote democratic
accountability after an election by settling vote-counting disputes or fraud allegations fairly. Courts can therefore directly influence the balance of political power in the aidreceiving country. While political economists have long recognized governments’ motivations regarding the timing of economic-policy activity (e.g. Golden and Poterba
1980, Price 1998) we argue that electoral motivations influence the incumbents timing for promoting judicial reform, in general, but also for implementing externally funded
governance projects, specifically. Because the lionshare of externally-funded governance projects are implemented in cooperation with the relevant Ministries in the recipient
country, the incumbent government has direct influence in the implementation process and can exert control.
Democracy Key to Asian Stability
Democracy promotion is key in Asia
VOA 15 (“Promoting Democracy in Asia,” Editorials – Asia, 6/30/15, http://editorials.voa.gov/content/promoting-democracy-asia/2842754.html)//Mnush
Promoting democracy and human rights in Asia is of crucial importance to the United States. In
testimony before Congress regarding the state of democracy in Asia, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Tom Malinowski and Principal
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Scot Marciel spoke of the crucial importance of promoting democracy
and human rights. Promoting Democracy in Asia Helping to further democratic governance is not only the
right thing to do, said Assistant Secretary of State Malinowski, it also advances our strategic interest by
building more stable societies; and, most importantly, “it aligns the United States with the aspirations of
everyday people across this region.” Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Marciel highlighted U.S. efforts to promote democracy in three very
different places: Cambodia, Thailand and Hong Kong. After the 2013 parliamentary election in Cambodia, the United States –- particularly through its embassy in Phnom
Penh -- worked to help bring the government and opposition together in direct dialogue to resolve a year-long standoff. Much work still remains, but now the two sides sit
in parliament together, said Mr. Marciel. Regarding Cambodia’s civil society, the
United States is connecting directly with a new
generation of leaders, and standing with Cambodians who are pushing for a voice as new laws are drafted. “This,” he said, “sends a
reminder that democracy isn’t only about free elections, it’s also about citizens’ ability to hold their governments accountable.” Thailand has long been a
friend and ally, and the United States has stood for democracy there through a decade of political turmoil. Our
message to the government since the 2014 coup, said Mr. Marciel, is that our bilateral relationship can be restored to its fullest only when democracy is reestablished. It is
critical for Thailand to have an inclusive political process and to fully restore civil liberties. Regarding Hong Kong, the United States has consistently voiced its core belief
that an open society respecting the rights of its citizens is essential to Hong Kong’s continued stability and prosperity. With respect to electoral reform, Mr. Marciel noted
the United States continues to affirm its long-standing position that the legitimacy of the chief executive and of Hong Kong’s overall governance can be enhanced through a
The work to promote good governance is
never complete, but the United States will continue to support efforts to build and strengthen democracy in
Asia.
competitive election that features a meaningful choice of candidates who represent the will of the voters.
Interdependence and historical trends indicate that future democratic transitions in
Asia will remain stable
Lind 11 [Jennifer, Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College; 05/09/11; “Democratization and Stability in East Asia”; Wiley Online Library;
07/08/15; jac]
Based on IR theory and evidence
from past democratization in the region, this article says yes: that China and Korea are unlikely to pursue
nationalistic, belligerent foreign policies during their future political transitions. This article examined theories making
competing claims about the stability of these upcoming transitions (theories within the “democratization and war” school and economic interdependence theory). In the
cases of previous East Asian transitions, process-tracing evidence shows that the destabilizing processes
expected by the broad version of democratization and war theory were not present. Politicians did not pursue prestige
strategies overseas in order to curry favor with a jingoistic public, and logrolls for hawkish policies did not form. Rather, consistent with the more recent
and narrower version of this theory within this school, domestic institutions were robust enough to manage
the demands of transition without unleashing nationalistic, belligerent foreign policies. Furthermore, each case exhibits the
The Economist has wondered whether in Asia, “economic integration will in the end restrain political hot heads?”43
pacifying role of economic interdependence. Economic actors served as restraining, moderating forces, and democratization only increased their influence in the policy-
foreign expansionism was not the preferred goal for
which business leaders would be willing to trade favors with coalition partners; quite the contrary, they
viewed international instability as a scenario to be avoided at all costs. As Solingen (1998:12) argues, the time at which these
making process. Because of the disruption costs associated with international strife,
transitions took place, which allowed the option of a trading state strategy, “produces a different set of actors and different proclivities among them than might have been
given the internationalist strategies pursued by
these states, the business community sought to avoid war and instead “logrolled for peace.” The Future East Asian
expected from existing coalitional frameworks, prominently that of Snyder.” In other words,
Transitions Many scholars have speculated that political transitions in China and Korea could lead to the stoking of xenophobic, jingoistic nationalism and the adoption of
hawkish foreign policies (Bachman 2000:209; Gilley 2004; Goldstein 2005:95; Mansfield and Snyder 2005; Bass 2006). To be sure, both countries have powerful grievances
that could fuel nationalistic mobilization. China is aggrieved about its “century of humiliation” vis-à-vis the great powers (Gries 2004: chapter 3; Schell 2008). Disputes with
the United States (the EP-3 incident, the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade) previously triggered widespread protests across China. Furthermore, the Chinese
resent Japan not only for its invasion and brutal occupation in the 1930s and 1940s, but also for Japan’s failure to candidly remember this period in its textbooks or
commemoration (Gries 2004; Shirk 2007; Wang 2008). Japan and China also have territorial disputes that could provide a causus belli for nationalistic sentiment.44 Koreans,
for their part, hold strong animosity toward Japan for its past aggression (Cha 1999:20–23; Lind 2008). They also resent China because of Chinese claims that Korea’s
ancient kingdom of Koguryo was part of China (Gries 2005). Many Koreans—both North and South—deeply resent the American role in Korea’s division (Harrison
2003:187). Korean resentment, or han, is characterized as the deep and accumulated resentment of people who feel their small nation is continually and helplessly pushed
around by larger countries. In the future, Korean politicians may be tempted to exploit such resentment for their own political gain. As many scholars have argued, both
The narrower version of democratization
and war theory (supported in the previous East Asian cases) does not expect that Chinese or Korean
transitions will trigger the onset of xenophobic nationalism and war. This theory holds that countries with relatively
robust domestic institutions can democratize without unleashing praetorian politics that lead to violence. This
model does not expect an elevated risk of war in the cases of either China or South Korea: using Gurr’s method for
calculating domestic concentration, both countries fall within the range of stronger domestic institutions, with China scoring a 5 and South Korea an 8. Therefore, the
model expects governments in China and Korea to be able to “manage the rivalry of elite factions and
minimize the adverse consequences of interest-group logrolling.” Mansfield and Snyder conclude that “with the stronger institutional
these cases appear to be fertile ground for nationalistic mobilization. This article suggests greater optimism.
resources of a more centralized and better regulated state at its disposal, the regime is likely to have less reason to rely on reckless nationalist appeals to consolidate its
authority” (2005:88). In sum, the narrow version of democratization and war theory borne out in the previous East Asian cases does not expect political transitions in China
and Korea to fuel more hawkish policies and interstate war. Second, economic
interdependence theory also predicts stability for these
transitions. Both countries lifted themselves from poverty to wealth through a strategy of global integration and export-led growth, and their continued prosperity
depends on access to export markets and international capital. China’s trade is 72% of its GDP; China receives more foreign direct investment than any other country in the
world, totaling $111 billion in 2008 (World Bank 2009).45 Its
ample foreign direct investment is often cited as a key engine of
Chinese economic growth and prosperity. South Korea is also highly economically interdependent, with trade
constituting 90 percent of its GDP (World Bank 2009). Furthermore, the countries with which friction might be expected
(because of territorial or historical disputes) are major economic partners. The United States is China’s No. 1 export
destination and its No. 3 source of imported goods; Japan is China’s No. 2 destination for exports and No. 1
source of imports (CIA 2009). Taiwan, the United States, Japan, and the ROK are also the largest sources of China’s FDI (Kang and Lee 2007). As Cheng
(2005:105) points out, Taiwanese firms operating in China not only provide China with its largest source of FDI, they export most of the goods they produce there,
accounting for more than a fifth of China’s total exports. Similarly, Seoul’s sometimes tense relations with Tokyo exist in the context of deep economic interdependence.
Japan is not only the ROK’s top source for FDI, it is also the ROK’s No. 3 destination for exports and ranks second as a source of imports (CIA 2009).46 In sum, China
and South Korea are two countries pursuing strategies of deep economic integration; the countries with which they might be most likely to conflict due to various disputes
are also those countries on which they depend for trade and capital. Economic interdependence theory thus would expect this to have a pacifying effect on their foreign
relations. Business
leaders in these countries are likely to pressure their governments for stable policies; they will
be unwilling to “logroll” with other coalition members if doing so leads to involvement in a costly war.
AT: Transition Wars
No empirical evidence for transition wars-policy makers have no incentive not to
promote democracy
Narang and Nelson 09 [Vipin, Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT; Rebecca, a Specialist in International Trade and Finance; April, 2009;
“Who Are These Belligerent Democratizers? Reassessing the Impact of Democratization on War”; Cambridge Journals; 07/08/15; jac]
Based on Mansfield and Snyder’s chosen measures for regime change and war, we therefore argue that there
is no empirical basis for the claim that
incomplete democratizations systematically unleash a wave of belligerent nationalism that results in external
war+ Not only is there a severe dearth of observations involving incomplete democratization, weak
institutions, and war, but we find that the main results hinge entirely on several unrepresentative observations
clustered around the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire+ Partly as a result, when we compare the full
Mansfield and Snyder model to a parsimonious controls model, we find that the former adds no predictive
power over the latter+ We note that it is entirely possible that the indicators that Mansfield and Snyder employ do not exactly operationalize the logic of the
theory+ Certainly, changes in the various Polity measures may not capture what they consider to be incomplete democratization, and the Correlates of War data set may be
given the best available measures for
the phenomena of interest, we find no systematic empirical support for the theory that incomplete
democratizers with weak institutions are more war-prone toward other states. Given the high-profile prominence and persistence
a blunt measure for “belligerence,” especially when the chosen measurement is simply war participation+ But
of the Mansfield and Snyder claim, these results bear on both academic and policy debates+ Academically, our findings help provide some intellectual housekeeping in the
debate between whether incomplete democratizers implode or explode+ In showing that there is a marked lack of empirical support for the relationship between these
states and war participation, let alone initiation, our conclusions strengthen the findings of the state-failure project which argues that this class of states is particularly
there is no empirical evidence
that incomplete democratizers pick fights with other states+ Indeed, the Ottoman Empire observations that provide the
entire statistical support for the Mansfield and Snyder results are more consistent with the state-failure
hypothesis since the series of wars launched against the Ottoman Empire were primarily about dismembering
it and parceling out its spoils, not about an incomplete democratizer with weak institutions engaging in
diversionary external wars+ Furthermore, the most salient contemporary cases of incomplete democratization—such as post-Cold War Russia, Rwanda, and
Yugoslavia—tended to invariably result in disintegration rather than external belligerence. Our findings are also relevant to policy debates
concerning the consequences and management of democracy promotion abroad+ Policymakers have invoked the finding that
vulnerable to internal—not external—conflict+ Though there can certainly be spillover effects from internal conflicts,
democratizing states are more likely to become war-prone members of the international system as a compelling argument against promoting democracy internationally+ In
The National Interest, Mansfield and Snyder caution that a democratizing China, with its nationalist “demand to incorporate Taiwan in the People’s Republic of China,
@and# its animosity toward Japan” could pose serious threats to regional and international security. 55 They suggest that the international community should be extremely
wary of a democratizing China and may need to take measures to contain potential Chinese belligerence during such a phase+ However, the
empirical
evidence implies that concerns that democracy promotion will trigger international conflict are
misplaced since, historically, movements towards democracy have not unleashed belligerent foreign policies+
As such, adopting containment policies toward incomplete democratizers—whether it be China or others such
as potentially Russia or Pakistan—in anticipation of aggression may be unnecessary and even possibly
counterproductive since they risk triggering con-flict through the creation of security dilemmas or other
pathways completely independent of democratization. We have thus shown that one concern about democracy promotion, that incomplete
democratizers have a higher propensity to instigate external wars, is empirically unfounded+ This is not to say that democratization is at all a smooth process; we do not
dispute that such transitions may be fraught with risks, and that the proper sequencing and pacing of the process is critical for full democratic consolidation+ But there
is simply no empirical basis to think, or adopt policies predicated on the fear, that incomplete
democratizers will be more belligerent members of the international system.
AT: Stealth Authoritarianism
Stealth authoritarianism is merely a stage in the development of democracies
Varol 15 [Ozan. O, Associate professor of law Lewis and Clark Law School ; 05/15; “Stealth Authoritarianism”; Lexis; 07/05/15; jac]
There remains, however, the possibility that the use of stealth authoritarianism can eventually usher in
democratization. The use of stealth authoritarian practices may mark the beginning of the end of a repressive government. n435 Stealth authoritarianism, in other
words, may represent a temporal snapshot in a regime's gradual transformation from a fully authoritarian government to a democracy. Although stealth authoritarian
practices are anti-democratic in effect, they might, in some cases, produce the conditions by which democracy can mature, even if it does so in a manner that, on the surface,
defies democracy. The
rejection of openly repressive authoritarian tactics, and the adoption of legal mechanisms that
exist in [*1741] democratic countries, can open up a democratic Pandora's box and foment further
democratic reforms. It may be possible for subsequent generations to breathe democratic life into formal legal mechanisms that were initially adopted or used for
stealth authoritarian purposes. As a result, even though formal legal mechanisms can provide the tools for stealth
authoritarianism, they can also, in some cases, produce democracy-enhancing benefits.
State Secrets Privilege Bad
Courts Key to Address State Secrets Privilege / AT: Intel Leaks
The judiciary is the best actor to rein in abuse of the state secrets privilege --- there is
minimal chance of intel disclosure
Windsor, 12
(J.D. candidate and Master of Security Studies candidate at Georgetown (Spring 2012, Lindsay, Georgetown Journal of International Law, “NOTE: IS THE STATE
SECRETS PRIVILEGE IN THE CONSTITUTION? THE BASIS OF THE STATE SECRETS PRIVILEGE IN INHERENT EXECUTIVE POWERS & WHY
COURT-IMPLEMENTED SAFEGUARDS ARE CONSTITUTIONAL AND PRUDENT,” 43 Geo. J. Int'l L. 897)
V. A CONSTITUTIONAL SAFEGUARD: REQUIRED JUDICIAL REVIEW OF STATE SECRETS INVOCATION
The state secrets privilege is within the scope of executive authority under the Constitution, but it has been extensively criticized for its potential for abuse by the executive
branch. n162 In light of this criticism, the Department of Justice (DOJ) recently established safeguarding procedures for the formal invocation of the privilege which echo
and [*921] extend the requirements under Reynolds. n163 The DOJ will only defend an assertion of state secrets in litigation when "necessary to protect against the risk of
significant harm to national security." n164 The regulations prohibit the Department from defending an invocation of the privilege
in order to (i) conceal violations of the law, inefficiency, or administrative error; (ii) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization or agency of the United States
government; (iii) restrain competition; or (iv) prevent or delay the release of information the release of which could not reasonably be expected to cause significant harm to
the national security. n165
Though these regulations establish a degree of safety to prevent abusive invocation of the privilege, the
oversight remains entirely within the executive branch, and an external check is needed to ensure the
privilege is properly used. Based on the constitutional separation of powers, the Court is better suited than Congress to
impose this check. Such a safeguard would limit the potential for abuse with minimal risk to national security.
A. Courts Should Standardize Review of Invocations of the State Secrets Privilege
Reynolds' only procedural requirement was that the privilege be invoked by the head of an agency after "actual personal consideration" of the privileged documents. n166
Even this requirement is not always enforced. n167 Further, judicial
review of the evidence argued to be privileged is occasional,
irregular, and non-standardized. n168
Courts must begin by enforcing the basic requirements of the [*922] privilege established in 1953 and affirmed
through half a century of jurisprudence. When a judge receives an affidavit asserting the privilege, the judge
could confirm the "actual personal consideration" requirement by inference, where the affidavit describes the
material with specificity and justification sufficient to satisfy the assertion of the privilege. If that is not sufficient,
accurate contact information for the head of the agency should be provided in the affidavit so an
unsatisfactory affidavit could garner prompt verification in a timely manner.
Additionally, in camera, ex parte judicial review of the evidence should be standard where the plaintiff shows "necessity" for the documents, as with claims concerning
alleged warrantless domestic surveillance, torture, extraordinary rendition, targeted killings, and similar cases where core constitutional rights are at stake. n169 Reynolds
recognized that the level of scrutiny for the privileged documents would vary based on the plaintiff's alleged causes of action. The
Court held the plaintiff's
necessity for the privileged material "determine[s] how far the court should probe in satisfying itself that the
occasion for invoking the privilege is appropriate." n170 Since these cases implicate important constitutional rights, they reasonably
require a closer level of scrutiny. Even simply routine judicial inspection of the material would likely
be sufficient to ensure the integrity of the privilege because it would verify proper invocation of the
privilege and thereby place an external check on the executive branch.
There are limitations on a court's ability to compel disclosure of the documents, however, based on the
separation of powers where national security matters are concerned. The Court has repeatedly
acknowledged that the authority to protect national security information is within the domain of the
Executive and is not something the courts have the expertise or the ability to override. n171 Therefore, a court could not require disclosure
of the documents if it finds the procedures were not followed or if it disagrees with the Executive's
decision that the material contains state secrets, since this would exceed the Judiciary's conceded constitutional authority.
Nonetheless, another remedy is possible if the court nonetheless disagrees with the government's assertion. After a refusal to accommodate [*923] a legitimate request for
in camera, ex parte review of the documents, or upon finding, after deferential review, that the documents did not meet the standard of "risk of significant harm to national
security," n172 the court could take the facts in favor of the plaintiff and proceed to the case on the merits . Louis Fisher
recommends this practice: "Disposing of a case in that manner may reward plaintiffs who have unproven cases, but it also puts the government on notice that asserting state
secrets comes at a price." n173 For extreme cases where the privilege assertion was unresolved between judicial and executive branches, this would be an effective check on
the Executive, would be within judicial discretion, and would provide plaintiffs a basis for relief in cases with core constitutional concerns.
B. The
Judicial Branch is Best Suited to Impose a Safeguard on the Privilege
"[W]hen individual liberties are at stake," wrote the Court in 2004, "[the Constitution] most assuredly envisions a role for all three branches." n174 Judicial
review in
an effective check on the Executive, and nonetheless maintains
the constitutional separation of powers required for an effective state secrets privilege.
the manner described above satisfies this requirement, provides
The courts are best suited to exercise a safeguard over Executive invocation of the privilege. Though the
courts do not have expertise in the field of foreign affairs, they do have expertise in matters of evidentiary procedures and thus can
make these determinations. n175 The risks of disclosing the privileged material to the court are minimal,
because the disclosure would be only to one judge. n176 In districts where national security cases routinely
arise, some judges have become accustomed to handling issues of national security and classified information
[*924] through extensive CIPA and FISA litigation. n177 Other courts frequently handle similar matters requiring government secrecy and
protection of sources in criminal prosecutions, such as sting operations in drug cases. Limited judicial review through inspection of the
privileged documents would verify the integrity of the privilege with minimal risk for public disclosure of the
information. n178
Moreover, the
judiciary is better suited than Congress to establish the requirement of judicial review of
the invocation of the privilege. As noted above, Congress has acknowledged the presidential powers in this area by codifying them through legislation
authorizing the President to establish regulations governing the classification procedures and access to classified material. n179 The Supreme Court
agrees that the authority to protect classified information is the Executive's; it does not fall within
the responsibility of the legislative branch. n180 In other words, the Executive's power is at its highest ebb
because he is acting pursuant to express and implied authorization by Congress, so he can rely on all the
inherent executive powers plus those Congress has delegated. n181
Thus, Congress
cannot constitutionally require the disclosure of classified information, even to a court,
so it has essentially no authority to change substantively the contours of the present privilege. n182 Since the privilege is constitutionally based in
executive powers, Congress cannot rely solely on its Article III powers merely to change a rule of [*925]
evidence. Congress might codify the existing law under Reynolds in combination with its Article III authority, but anything more would infringe upon clear executive
authority.
For those scholars who recognize a constitutional basis for the privilege, most acknowledge the Executive's clear authority in the area of state secrets. n183 However, these
scholars proceed to argue for an increased oversight role by Congress without adequately explaining the constitutional basis for Congress to exercise such a role. n184 The
impetus appears to be based on the importance of the legal issues arising in post-9/11 state secrets cases, but this does not constitute legal cause to expand Congress'
constitutional authority. Chesney and Frost asked what Congress can do to check the Executive and expand judicial oversight, but since
Congress has limited
authority where state secrets are concerned, the better question is what the courts can do more effectively to
exercise the oversight the Constitution has already given them.
The Court has authority to establish this judicial review as enforcer of evidentiary procedures for
federal cases and as arbiter of the constitutional separation of powers. n185 The Court created the
requirements for invoking the state secrets privilege in Reynolds, so amending that process would certainly be
within its purview. n186 Though Congress could codify the Reynolds privilege in statute, n187 the court is better
suited to establish further review procedures under its judicial review authority. n188 Standardizing in
camera, ex parte judicial review of the privileged material in this limited way would prevent Executive
abuses and add institutional legitimacy to the privilege. n189
SSP Undermines War on Terror
State secret privilege enables Executive’s abuses of power and prevent us from
fighting terrorism effectively
Fichera ’08 --- (Stephanie A, “Compromising Liberty for National Security: The Need to Rein in the Executive's Use of the State-Secrets Privilege in PostSeptember 11 Litigation,” University of Miami Law Review, 1/1/08, http://repository.law.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1295&context=umlr)//Mnush
The level of secrecy the state-secrets privilege affords to the Executive enables the Executive to abuse its power and
erode the values, rights, and protections that define the American system of government and way of life. Such
abuse of power divides the nation and hinders its ability to fight terrorism effectively because notions of
freedom, justice, and open, democratic government must be observed stringently at home in order for others
to struggle to adopt them abroad.
SSP Not Key to National Security / Undermines Executive
SSP guts public trust in the executive --- it’s not key to national security
Fisher, 14 --- scholar in residence at the Constitution Project, visiting professor at College of William and Mary Marshall-Wythe School of Law (3/10/2014, Louis,
The National Law Journal, “Government Errors Are Shrouded in Secrecy; The last two administrations have unfairly used state-secrets privilege to cover for their
mistakes,” Factiva)
A reliance
on the state-secrets privilege is enabling the government to draw a cover over its mistakes so that no
one can fully understand when it is at fault. Like all human institutions, governments make errors and injure innocent
individuals. Why not admit error and demonstrate integrity, honesty and fairness, and at the same time build public trust? The administration of President George W.
Bush invoked the statesecrets privilege repeatedly to prevent private litigants from challenging executive
actions that violated statutes, treaties and the Constitution. The lawsuits included warrantless surveillance by the
National Security Agency and the practice of "extraordinary rendition" that sent suspects to other countries for interrogation and torture. In
case after case, federal judges deferred to executive branch warnings that allowing a case to proceed would
do grave danger to the nation. As presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama criticized this emphasis on secrecy and
promised to promote a more transparent administration if elected. In a major speech in May 2009, he said the statesecrets privilege "has been overused" and remarked: "We must not protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or
embarrassment to the government." In September of that year, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the administration wound not
invoke the statesecrets privilege to "conceal violations of the law, inefficiency, or administrative error." Still, the
record of the Obama administration over the past five years on state secrets mirrors that of the Bush administration. Consider
the case of Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian Muslim pursuing graduate studies at Stanford University in construction, engineering and management. On Jan. 2, 2005, when she
presented her ticket at the San Francisco airport to fly to Malaysia, she discovered that her name was on the federal government's no-fly list. An agency that is a part of the
FBI compiles the names placed on the list. Although she was in a wheelchair recovering from a hysterectomy and recent complications, she was handcuffed and taken to the
police station. Two hours later, the FBI told the police to release her. It was an apparent mistake by the federal government—and a good time for an apology. Obviously,
the FBI did not regard her as a security risk because she was allowed to board a plane the next day to return to Malaysia. But there would be no apology from the federal
government, and the situation would grow worse. Ibrahim was scheduled to return to Stanford in March 2005 to complete her doctorate. When she went to Kuala Lumpur
International Airport to fly back, she was not allowed to board. She did not realize the government had revoked her student visa. Ibrahim filed a complaint in federal court
in January 2006 to challenge the government's action and seek damages. At trial, the government conceded that she had no criminal record or links to terrorist activity. In a
decision in December 2012, U.S. District Judge William Alsup was still unable to determine whether she was, or was not, on the no-fly list. The government wanted the case
dismissed on the basis of secret evidence to be shared with the judge ex parte, with the records taken back to Washington after the court's review. He found that procedure
unacceptable.¶ On April 23, 2013, Holder signed a declaration that claimed the state-secrets privilege over certain documents, warning that their disclosure "could
reasonably be expected to cause significant harm to the national security." Alsup examined classified documents and allowed Ibrahim's attorneys to take three depositions,
including of FBI Agent Kevin Michael Kelley. Only then did the government concede plain error. WHEN DID THE ERROR OCCUR? Alsup explained that Kelley in
November 2004 recommended that Ibrahim be placed on a number of federal watch lists. But because he did not understand the form he filled out, her name ended up on
the no-fly list. At trial, Kelley admitted he had checked the wrong box, filling out the form "exactly the opposite way" from the instructions given him. He said he did not
know of his mistake until deposed in September 2013. This part of the trial record does not make sense. The "truth" wasn't discovered in 2013. When the FBI in January
2005 ordered Ibrahim released from police custody at San Francisco, it knew it had erred. Ibrahim faced other problems. When she reapplied for a visa in 2009, it was
denied under the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that can refer to terrorism. In September 2013, she applied for a visa to attend her trial in California. That,
too, was denied. On January 14, 2014, Alsup ordered the government to remove all references to Kelley's mistaken designations, making clear they "were erroneous and
should not be relied upon for any purpose." Also, he ordered the government to inform her of the specific subsection of the act that rendered her ineligible for a visa in
2009 and 2013.¶ Following
the pattern of the Bush administration, Obama and the Justice Department have been
willing at every step to invoke the state-secrets privilege to prevent any type of judicial relief for individuals
wronged by the executive branch. It should not be difficult for the administration to admit error, issue an apology and
reparations, and stop hiding behind the state-secrets privilege. Nothing in the government's conduct in the Ibrahim trial adds
to national security. Instead, it merely builds greater distrust toward executive officials.
AT: Detention Good Impact
Detention and GTMO are ineffective – they undermine counterterror strategies and generate more terror than they prevent^
Douglas 14
(Roger Douglas is a Professor of Law at La Trobe University, “law, liberty, and the pursuit of terrorism”, Published September 2014, pg. 100, TMP)
The counterterrorist’s dream is that of a government with the capacity to track down prospective terrorists and
lock them away before they are able to execute their plans. The criminal law permits various forms of de facto preventive detention, but
posttrial detention is usually possible only after a court is satisfied that the detainee has committed a crime; that
the evidence proves the defendant’s guilt; and that on the facts before the court, a custodial sentence¶ is warranted. Otherwise defendants must go free, regardless of
in cases where proof of the relevant crime would require the disclosure of
state secrets, proof of guilt might be difficult if the government wishes to protect secrets from
disclosure. For reasons set out in the previous chapter, the seriousness of these problems can be exaggerated, especially given the
recently created precursor offences and the courts’ willingness to impose long sentences on people who did little to give effect to their plans. Moreover, if there is
insufficient evidence to support a conviction for a precursor offence, this may be because there is little
evidence that the suspect is indeed a potential terrorist. In addition, there are costs involved in detaining the
innocent. These include costs to the detainees, but even if one is indifferent to these, there are others. Detention is expensive. Detention of
the innocent is wasteful and involves the use of resources that could be used more profitably elsewhere: in
January 2012, detention at Guantánamo Bay cost $800,000 per detainee, and guarding each detainee required an
average of 17 soldiers. 3 Ill-tailored preventive detention can sometimes have the effect of generating
more terrorism than it prevents, by delegitimating governments and their counterterror policies. 2RPP Detention
without Conviction • 171 Yet the craving for certainty means that the authoritarian’s dream is capable of weaving its seductive web. There are precedents
for the detention of people based on nothing more than attributes that mean that they are slightly less
unlikely to constitute a threat than those without the attribute. An obvious example is provided by the
wartime detention of enemy aliens, some of whom no doubt hoped their homeland would win, but few of whom
ever seem to have done anything to further this end, either before or on release from detention. These precedents rightly stand as a warning as
whether they¶ pose a high actuarial risk. Further,
to the dangers of barely regulated detention. It is probably a warning heeded by modern governments and their judiciaries, but more by judiciaries than by governments
Religious Surveillance Neg Updates
Solvency
Circumvention
Government will circumvent the plan --- cite privileges to avoid accountability
Windsor, 12
(J.D. candidate and Master of Security Studies candidate at Georgetown (Spring 2012, Lindsay, Georgetown Journal of International Law, “NOTE: IS THE STATE
SECRETS PRIVILEGE IN THE CONSTITUTION? THE BASIS OF THE STATE SECRETS PRIVILEGE IN INHERENT EXECUTIVE POWERS & WHY
COURT-IMPLEMENTED SAFEGUARDS ARE CONSTITUTIONAL AND PRUDENT,” 43 Geo. J. Int'l L. 897)
B. The State Secrets Privilege in Context of Other Government Privileges
The Reynolds privilege is closely related to two other government privileges invoked by the executive branch. n41 The bar to litigation of espionage contracts and the
executive privilege protecting presidential deliberations form the two ends of a spectrum of executive privileges based on the inherent constitutional authorities of the
President.
1. The Bar to Litigation of Espionage Contracts
In Totten v. United States, the
Supreme Court established an absolute bar to litigation of contracts for espionage based
on rules of evidence and the inherent powers of the Executive. n42 When the estate of an individual who spied
for the Union during the Civil War sued the government for failure to pay for his contracted services, the
Supreme Court upheld dismissal of the suit on grounds that the contract itself was secret and not subject
to judicial review. n43 The Court found affirmative authority for the President to enter into such a contract based on the Commander-in-Chief power under the
Constitution. n44 However, comparing the confidentiality of this espionage contract to the protected
confidences of spousal or attorney-client communications, the Court reasoned that "public policy"
forbids disclosure in trial of "matters which the law itself regards as confidential." n45 The Court then held that
contracts for espionage cannot be litigated and barred [*905] further consideration of the claim. n46 Totten's reasoning was thus
founded both in the constitutional powers of the President and in evidentiary law.
Totten and Reynolds differ in three ways: whether
the government is necessarily a party to the suit, the effect of the
government's invocation of the privilege on the case, and the degree of judicial review over the invocation.
First, the Totten bar to suing the government for espionage contracts is implicitly based on the common law doctrine of sovereign immunity: the government is immune
from suit unless it waives this immunity. The
Tucker Act, for example, waives sovereign immunity with respect to claims over
contracts with the government. n47 The statute, though, requires that courts "give due regard to the
interests of national defense and national security" when exercising jurisdiction over these claims. n48 Therefore the
Totten bar still applies to contracts for espionage based on the inherent sovereignty of the government in matters of contracts for national security. n49 Unlike
claims against the government based on an espionage contract, the state secrets privilege can arise when the
government intervenes in a civil suit between two non-governmental parties in order to limit discovery of
privileged evidence. n50
Second, though Totten bars all further litigation of the issue, Reynolds allows cases to proceed when supported by other evidence. Totten held that a claim over an
espionage contract should be "dismissed on the pleadings without ever reaching the question of evidence" because "the very subject matter of the action . . . [is] a matter of
state secret." n51 In contrast, a case may proceed to the merits after the government's invocation of the state secrets privilege where other evidence substantiates the
plaintiffs case. n52 However, courts frequently dismiss
certain types of cases on the pleadings when the government
invokes state secrets, such as suits over domestic warrantless surveillance and extraordinary renditions when
it is clear no non-privileged evidence could substantiate the plaintiff's claim. n53 Reynolds has become, essentially, a [*906]
Totten ban for these types of cases where the very subject matter of the case is a state secret. n54
Third, Totten's bar to judicial inspection of the evidence n55 differs from Reynolds because Reynolds was ambiguous regarding when, if ever, the court could insist on
reviewing the evidence when the government invokes the state secrets privilege. Reynolds required a balancing of plaintiffs' necessity for the evidence with the government's
privilege. n56 "Where there is a strong showing of necessity, the claim of privilege should not be lightly accepted." n57 On the other hand,
"even the most compelling necessity cannot overcome the claim of privilege if the court is ultimately satisfied that military secrets are at stake." n58 Reynolds thereby left
open the possibility of a court requiring disclosure of evidence the government claims privileged where a plaintiff shows compelling necessity and the court does not believe
state secrets are involved. n59
They’ll use the “executive privilege” instead to circumvent the plan
Windsor, 12
(J.D. candidate and Master of Security Studies candidate at Georgetown (Spring 2012, Lindsay, Georgetown Journal of International Law, “NOTE: IS THE STATE
SECRETS PRIVILEGE IN THE CONSTITUTION? THE BASIS OF THE STATE SECRETS PRIVILEGE IN INHERENT EXECUTIVE POWERS & WHY
COURT-IMPLEMENTED SAFEGUARDS ARE CONSTITUTIONAL AND PRUDENT,” 43 Geo. J. Int'l L. 897)
2. The Executive Privilege
The executive privilege protects from disclosure another class of government information: confidential communications with the
President. n60 The reasoning is that presidential advisors must be free to explore alternatives--"even blunt or harsh
opinions"--in the process of decisionmaking, and that advisors are likely to be inhibited if they anticipate
their remarks will be later disclosed to others. n61 The executive privilege is invoked by the President
both in criminal n62 and civil [*907] court proceedings, n63 as well as vis-à-vis Congress. n64 In contrast, the state
secrets privilege is invoked primarily in civil cases. n65
The Supreme Court has held that executive privilege is based in the powers of the President under separation
of powers doctrine, but this privilege is not absolute. n66 In Nixon v. United States, the Court ordered Nixon to produce Oval Office tapes
and records, rejecting his invocation of the executive privilege. n67 The Court held that where the President asserts only a generalized
need for confidentiality and national security secrets are not at stake, the privilege must yield to the
demonstrated specific need of a criminal prosecutor. n68 Where the President relies only on his Article II powers, the privilege is outweighed
by "the primary constitutional duty of the Judicial Branch to do justice in criminal prosecutions." n69
Like the state secrets privilege, the executive privilege can arise in the national security context. n70 But
the executive privilege is not coextensive with the President's national security powers because it simply protects presidential
deliberations. n71 The Court noted that Nixon did not invoke "a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets," implying that
such a claim would be given greater weight under the separation of powers. n72
The executive privilege is the privilege with the least inherent [*908] government authority on the spectrum of
executive, state secrets, and Totten privileges. It is based on the confidentiality of executive deliberations
under the President's Article II powers, but this authority clearly yields to other government interests, such as
criminal justice, when state secrets are not at stake. The bar to litigation of espionage contracts in Totten is the strongest exercise of
government authority of the three privileges because it is based in inherent powers of government under the doctrine of sovereign immunity, it halts all further litigation of
the matter, and the very subject matter prohibits analysis of the evidence and requires dismissal of the case. In the middle, the state secrets privilege balances plaintiff's
necessity for the privileged material with the government interests, but it is stronger than the executive privilege because it is based, as described below, in the President's
national security powers and its invocation can effectively halt further litigation.
Judicial Independence Answers
No Modeling
There is a negative correlation between the US government model and the
implementation of judicial independence
Voigt and Hayo 14 [Stefan, Institute of Law & Economics, University of Hamburg; Bernd, professor of Macroeconomics, University of Marburg;
01/17/14; Mapping Constitutionally Safeguarded Judicial Independence—A Global Survey; Wiley Online Library; 07/07/15; jac]
Organizational Structure of the Judiciary An aspect related to legal origin is the underlying court model. There are various ways of designing constitutional review. (1)
Review power can be allocated to each and every court of the country, as in the United States, which does not have a specialized court. This system implies that
constitutional review is a posteriori, and uniformity is secured by the highest court of the country (in the United States, the Supreme Court). (2) The Austrian model, as
proposed by Hans Kelsen and implemented into the Austrian Constitution in 1920, is characterized by a specialized constitutional court dealing with constitutional matters.
This design can entail both abstract and concrete review, as well as ex ante and ex post review. (3) In the French model, constitutional matters are relegated to a special body
(e.g., the Conseil Constitutionnel in France) traditionally constrained to ex ante review (Harutyunyan & Mavcic 1999). Most, but not all, constitutional systems can be
grouped into one of these three designs. Additionally, Harutyunyan and Mavcic (1999) define a “New (British) Commonwealth Model” implemented by Mauritius, and a
“Mixed (American Continental) Model,” which can be found in a number of states, including Portugal, Columbia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Peru. 10 The cross-tabulation
between implementation of JI in the original constitution and court model in Table 14 shows that all mixed-type and French-type models include a relevant passage, and so
do a majority of countries adhering to the Austrian/Continental-European and U.S. types of court model. There
is a positive correlation between
the Austrian/Continental-European type of court model and the implementation of judicial independence
(0.29), which is significant at a 5 percent level. The negative correlation between the U.S. court model and judicial
independence (–0.39) is significant at all plausible levels of significance.
Circumvention
US democracy promotion fails --- serves as a cover for the rise of stealth
authoritarianism
Varol 15 [Ozan. O, Associate professor of law Lewis and Clark Law School ; 05/15; “Stealth Authoritarianism”; Lexis; 07/05/15; jac]
In that sense, democracy-promotion programs in the United States and elsewhere have achieved success by persuading authoritarians to adopt less morally questionable
practices. As discussed above, however, existing
democracy-promotion mechanisms have also facilitated a certain level of
authoritarian learning and created the very conditions in which stealth authoritarian practices thrive. Because
these mechanisms narrowly focus on detecting obvious democratic deficiencies, they are substantially less
effective in detecting the subtle erosion of political competition that stealth authoritarianism effectuates. That,
in turn, has provided significant incentives to authoritarians to replace transparently authoritarian mechanisms of
control with stealth authoritarian practices. In addition, a state that satisfies the applicable democracypromotion criteria is often bestowed with the label of "democracy," which can provide legal and political
cover to stealth authoritarian practices. What does the prevalence of stealth authoritarianism in an authoritarian or hybrid regime portend for the
regime's future? There are three primary paths: The regime can persist in its present form, decay into a more authoritarian
regime, or mature into a democracy. Although less insidious than traditional forms of authoritarianism, stealth authoritarianism may
also generate a more durable form of authoritarianism that allows the regime to persist in its present form or
become more authoritarian. In the post-Cold War era, the use of transparently authoritarian mechanisms can reduce
the lifetime of a repressive regime, whereas stealth authoritarianism can prolong it. As discussed above, the use of
stealth authoritarian mechanisms can allow the incumbents to retain power by appeasing both global and
domestic audiences, providing a limited space for the expression of discontent, and disabling political
opponents through seemingly legitimate means. Because it relies on formal legal mechanisms that exist in
regimes with favorable democratic credentials, stealth authoritarianism is more difficult to detect and
eliminate than its more [*1740] transparent counterpart, which can bolster its durability. Stealth
authoritarianism can also permit incumbents to retain their political monopoly even with the arrival of
democratic reforms. Even where it is possible to dethrone the incumbent regime, the replacement regime can rely on the same legal mechanisms and structures
set up by the incumbent to perpetuate its rule. n431 Newly elected political leaders often have little incentive to change a legal system that provides systematic advantages to
the incumbents. As Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way observe, numerous
electoral turnovers after the Cold War brought little
institutional change, and successor parties did not govern democratically. n432 In Russia, for example, the constitutional order
constructed by President Boris Yeltsin, with a strong executive and weak checking institutions, has allowed the persistence of a competitive authoritarian regime long after
Yeltsin's resignation. n433 Electoral
turnover in hybrid regimes can therefore permit the perpetuation of stealth
authoritarian practices. Stealth authoritarianism can also be pernicious because it can facilitate authoritarian learning and spread to
other regimes. n434 Stealth authoritarian practices that generate durability in one regime can be emulated in
others for anti-democratic purposes. Information that teaches incumbent officials how to retain political
power while appeasing domestic and global audiences can effectively spread across different legal regimes via
emulation or inter-regime dialogue, generating a stealth authoritarianism playbook.
Stealth authoritarianism uses the mechanisms of a democratic regime to prevent
political change --- the signal of the plan is effectively circumvented
Varol 15 [Ozan. O, Associate professor of law Lewis and Clark Law School ; 05/15; “Stealth Authoritarianism”; Lexis; 07/05/15; jac]
Stealth
authoritarianism refers to the use of legal mechanisms that exist in regimes with favorable democratic
credentials for anti-democratic ends. Although the various ends that incumbent officeholders pursue are not
always clear, anti-democratic ends, as used here, refer to the erosion of "partisan alternation," defined as the
cycling of political power among more than one party. n40 Turnover in government control is a core component of democracy and evinces
B. Stealth Authoritarianism I describe the mechanisms of stealth authoritarianism in the next Part, but the concept can be articulated here briefly:
an electoral system that responds to change in electoral preferences and confirms that "the incumbents ... can be dethroned." n41 The
erosion of partisan
alternation can, in turn, enable the creation of a political monopoly. Stealth authoritarianism undermines partisan alternation by
significantly increasing the costs of unseating the incumbent. Through the practices described below, stealth authoritarianism erodes mechanisms
of accountability, weakens horizontal and vertical checks and balances, allows the incumbents to consolidate
power, exacerbates the principal-agent problem n42 by curtailing the public's ability to monitor and sanction
government policies, and paves the way for the creation of a dominant or one-party state where the electoral
field is uneven and the incumbent enjoys systematic advantages. These practices make it significantly more difficult to dethrone the
incumbents and undermine a core component of democracy: free, fair, and contested elections and the resulting turnover in government control. In other words , as a
result of stealth authoritarian practices, partisan alternation might not occur even in the face of changing
political preferences by the electorate. [*1685] Stealth authoritarianism creates a significant discordance between
appearance and reality by concealing anti-democratic practices under the mask of law. In so doing, stealth
authoritarian practices avoid, to a great extent, the costs associated with transparently authoritarian practices
that are much more likely to draw the opprobrium of both the domestic and the international community.
Practices that appear clearly repressive in a transparently authoritarian regime appear more ambiguous in a
regime that employs stealth authoritarian practices. This is not to suggest that stealth authoritarian practices go completely unnoticed. As
discussed in Part III, some cases of stealth authoritarianism are not so stealthy in that they draw the attention and opprobrium of the relevant domestic and global actors.
The mechanisms of stealth authoritarianism are, however, relatively more difficult to detect than transparently
repressive authoritarian strategies. Because stealth authoritarianism relies on the exercise of legal mechanisms
that exist in regimes with favorable democratic credentials, it becomes more difficult to differentiate between
their abuse and legitimate application. Although stealth authoritarianism utilizes legal mechanisms that exist in
regimes with favorable democratic credentials, these mechanisms are not always verbatim replicas of their
democratic counterparts. In some cases, the relevant laws may be subject to subtle reconfigurations that deviate in meaningful ways from those laws typically
found in democracies. I examine these differences below in discussing the mechanisms of stealth authoritarianism. In some cases, however, the deviations from the typical
democratic laws also exist in one or more established democracies, so that the deviation does not appear transparently anti-democratic. For example, as discussed below,
Russia has criminalized defamation, which represents a deviation from the non-criminal nature of defamation
in most democracies. But criminal defamation laws also exist in a number of regimes with favorable democratic credentials, such as Canada, Italy, and the
United States. The criminalization of defamation by established democracies allows Russian officials to rebut any
criticism directed at their criminal libel laws by citing prominent democracies that also deviate from the norm.
Although underexamined in the literature, formal rules are not entirely foreign to authoritarian governance. Historically, authoritarian leaders used formal rules to constrain
rogue bureaucratic agents who operated the government. n43 They also used the legal system to maintain control over the populace. n44 In other words ,
laws were
deployed, not to regulate and constrain the government, but to enable it to constrain others and ensure their
[*1686] compliance with government authority. n45 Commentators have referred to this as the "rule by law"
tradition, in contrast to the "rule of law" tradition in modern democracies. n46 The formal rules in rule-by-law regimes typically
reflect their authoritarian nature with "brutal candor." n47 For example, the Saudi Arabian Constitution requires the media to "employ
civil and polite language" and conform their publications to state regulation. n48 Likewise, the first
constitution of the Soviet Union committed the state to "deprive[] individuals and sections of the community
of any privileges which may be used by them to the detriment of the Socialist Revolution." n49 Pre-modern China and,
to a lesser extent, pre-modern Korea are also good illustrations of a rule-by-law regime. n50 This Article's focus is different. Formal rules in rule-by-law regimes
transparently express their authoritarian nature. In contrast, the mechanisms described in this Article obscure anti-democratic practices under the appearance of legal
mechanisms that exist in regimes with favorable democratic credentials. Through
the more complex, and more interesting,
phenomenon of stealth authoritarianism, modern-day authoritarian practices are becoming increasingly more
difficult to detect and eliminate for both domestic and global actors. The full story, however, is more nuanced. Modern
authoritarian governments have not completely abandoned traditional, more transparent mechanisms of
authoritarian control. Even in the case studies I discuss in the next Part, stealth authoritarian mechanisms are
sometimes complemented by more transparently authoritarian strategies of control. Later in the Article, I analyze, drawing on
rational-choice theory, why political leaders may adopt stealth authoritarian practices, how they are able to do so, and which types of regimes are more likely to benefit from
the adoption of stealth authoritarian practices. But first, I discuss the mechanisms of stealth authoritarianism.
Judicial Independence Fails
Judicial independence gets undermined by judicial review and partisan
appointments --- shatters the brittle democracies they are supposed to sustain
Gardbaum 15 [Stephen, MacArthur Foundation Professor of International Justice and Human Rights, University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law;
01/20/15; “Are Strong Constitutional Courts Always a Good Thing for New Democracies?”; Social Science Research Network; 07/07/15; jac]
The basic reason is that judicial review has a tendency to result in the politicization of the courts in two ways that correspond to, and jeopardize, the two key elements of
judicial independence. On the first element, where a court has final authority on the validity of legislation—whether in the context of abstract review or concrete litigation—
it inevitably becomes a powerful political actor as a veto player (Kelsen’s “negative lawmaker”105), and so may come to be viewed as an opponent or potential rival of the
government. It may serve as an effective check on politics, but, in so doing, it may also trigger political attacks that threaten to reduce the judiciary’s independence. If, in one
sense, judicial review exhibits the independence of the judiciary to its greatest extent, for that very reason it also poses the greatest practical threat to such independence—
and in service of a function that is not an essential part of it. Just as the fusion of executive and legislative power in nineteenth century Britain initially seemed to manifest
parliamentary strength by confirming its primacy over the monarch, but eventually undermined the independence of Parliament, so too in the context of new and
transitional democracies the
partial fusion of judicial and legislative power that is judicial review may end up
undermining the independence of the courts. The pragmatic response to the fragility of judicial independence
in new democracies is to protect and nourish it by reducing the potential pressures it faces, not maximizing them.
Courts should not be cast in the role of the first or only line of defense. Exercises of judicial review can place
great strain on a fledgling or brittle democracy, as the examples of the Egyptian court closing the then-recently elected parliament and the Turkish
court’s insistence on its brand of secularism illustrate.106 From this perspective, strong-form judicial review may be a luxury rather than a
necessity for newer democracies, which must be able to walk with the ordinary judicial independence of a trial
court before they can run with the Bundesverfassungsgericht. On the second, more internal, element of judicial independence, the risk of
resulting politicization occurs in the following way. Because of the power they wield under judicial supremacy, the claim that constitutional court judges should be given
whatever partial or indirect democratic accountability they can be given is generally viewed as an irresistible one.108 As a result, judicial
appointments to
these courts become political appointments, and, while there are several well-known variations in the precise
mode of legislative/executive selection, in almost all forms political affiliation is known and taken into
account. As a result, appointments are not only made by politicians but are also made (at least in part) for political reasons.109 However, this often leads to
constitutional court judges deciding important and close cases along predictable party or ideological lines,
which threatens to undermine the second requirement of judicial independence: impartiality. Not in the sense of inputs
or pressure—as life tenure or a long, fixed, non-renewable term insulates appointees once in office110—but in terms of outputs, of how courts make
their decisions. As John Stuart Mill put it in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861): “While there are no functionaries whose special and
professional qualifications the popular judgment is less fitted to estimate [than judges], there are none in whose case absolute impartiality, and freedom from connection
with politicians or sections of politicians, are of anything like equal importance.”111 This political or output “connection,” in turn, may undermine their perceived legitimacy
and lead frustrated governments to accuse constitutional courts (particularly those with a majority of their predecessors’ appointees, as in Romania or Morsi-led Egypt) of
being political bodies rather than independent ones and of abandoning the mantle—and so the protection—of independence, and tempt them to attack the courts. It also
The judges appointed by the first government
may provide political insurance to its members once they are voted out of office by vetoing policies of the
second, but they may also be viewed by the second government as political opponents in robes lacking a
democratic mandate to obstruct. Of course, in addition to this perception problem, there may also be a more straightforward “reality” problem in that
points to the limitations of insurance theory from an ex post, rather than an ex ante, perspective.
political appointment processes more easily permit governments to fill court vacancies with their supporters and thereby undermine judicial independence directly. To be
sure, these same pressures exist wherever there is strong-form judicial review. It is almost always the controversial constitutional issues, rather than the non-constitutional
ones, that trigger calls for proactive measures against the courts. In the United States, it was the striking down of the New Deal legislation that triggered President Franklin
D. Roosevelt’s “court-packing plan.” Newspapers routinely print the names of federal judges followed by that of the President who nominated them as an assumed default
predictor of political position; “independent” judges are those who vote against the party line. But these pressures are far more dangerous in fragile new democracies where
the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary have far shallower roots, and the political costs of direct attack are likely to be lower.112 Here, compliance with court
orders cannot ordinarily simply be taken for granted. With respect to impartiality, many (mostly civil law) countries attempt to contain the damage by either or both having
(1) a centralized constitutional court, which leaves ordinary judges “untainted” by judicial review, and (2) supermajority requirements for political appointment of its judges,
which may reduce their partisanship.113 But containment is not necessarily a solution: Hungary had both but was not spared.
A strong judiciary just as likely to be coopted by the regime-modeling can’t solve for
any countries that weren’t democratic in the first place
Varol 15 [Ozan. O, Associate professor of law Lewis and Clark Law School ; 05/15; “Stealth Authoritarianism”; Lexis; 07/05/15; jac]
A. Judicial Review Judicial review is ordinarily assumed to be a check on the political branches of government. In this Subpart, I discuss three ways in which judicial review
may function as a tool of stealth authoritarianism. Specifically, I
analyze how judicial review may serve as a mechanism for
consolidating power, bolstering the democratic credentials of the incumbent regime, and allowing the
incumbents to avoid political accountability for controversial policies. 1. Consolidating Power Tom Ginsburg and Ran Hirschl have
set forth separate theories on why political elites may choose to create and empower autonomous courts. According to Professor Ginsburg's "insurance model" of judicial
review, if politicians drafting a new constitution "foresee themselves losing [power] in postconstitutional elections, they may ... entrench judicial review [in the constitution]
as a form of political insurance." n51 Even if the constitutional drafters lose the elections, another avenue - judicial review - remains available to challenge legislation passed
by their opponents. n52 Likewise, Professor Hirschl has argued that threatened
political elites transfer power from political institutions
to the judiciary to preserve their political hegemony and entrust their policy preferences to unelected judges
who share the elites' ideology and shield the elites' policies from the vagaries of domestic politics. n53 Even if
the political elites lose power, unelected judges continue to enforce the elites' policy preferences via
judicial fiat. n54 Unlike the elites in Ginsburg's and Hirschl's models who empower a judiciary because they may lose power, my focus is on elites who desire to
retain power indefinitely. At first blush, the creation of an autonomous judiciary may appear inconsistent with that quest. After all , the judiciary, [*1688]
empowered with judicial review, can strike down anti-democratic legislation and expand individual rights and
liberties related to the democratic process, thereby leveling, at least to some extent, the unlevel electoral
playing field that may be crafted by the incumbents. That account, however, underestimates the extent to which
judicial institutions can be structured to generate substantive outcomes that favor regime interests. The
structure of the courts, the appointments process, and the rules of access to judicial review can all be adjusted
to further the interests of the incumbents. The creation of the Turkish Constitutional Court is illustrative. The 15-member court was
created following a military coup in 1960. n55 The military leaders structured the appointments process to the
Court to ensure, to the extent possible, the appointment of justices favorable to their interests. n56 According to the
Constitution, which was drafted under military tutelage: Eight of the fifteen permanent members would be selected by other appellate courts (Council of State, High Court,
and Court of Accounts), three by the Parliament, two by the Senate, and two by the President of the Republic. The power to select a majority of the members on the
Constitutional Court was thus given to the unelected judiciary, whose members were more likely to be aligned with the military's policy preferences than were elected
political actors. n57 To be sure, judicial autonomy can be a double-edged sword for the incumbent regime. Judiciaries may disappoint the leaders that established them or
appointed their members. Judicial institutions can turn the relative autonomy provided to them against the political elites and challenge their policies and shed light on
stealth authoritarian practices. In addition, any regime attempts to penalize the judiciary for unfavorable rulings may backfire by damaging regime credibility. For example, in
Pakistan, Chief Justice Muhammad Chaudhry publicly resisted General Musharraf's attempts to remove him from office in 2007, damaging Musharraf's credibility and
legitimacy. n58 Likewise, the impeachment of Peruvian Constitutional Court judges for attempting to limit President Fujimori's third term in office sparked major protests
and drew the opprobrium of the international community. n59 [*1689] Although occasional judicial resistance remains a real possibility, consistent
counterestablishment jurisprudence is unlikely. n60 Judges are strategic actors. They do not operate in a vacuum. The
judiciary is influenced by the political environment in which it operates, and judges are unlikely to engage in a
sustained resistance effort against powerful incumbents. As Professor Hirschl explains, "When contemplating highly charged political
questions, constitutional courts - as a result of a combination of their members' ideological preferences and their own astute strategic
behavior - tend to adhere closely to prevalent worldviews, national meta-narratives, and the interests of
influential elites when dealing with political mega-questions." n61 The judiciary, whose structure may have been established or shaped by
the incumbents or many of whose members may have been appointed by them, may thus turn out to be a reliable partner on questions of particular importance in
protecting the political status quo. n62 For example, Vladimir Putin
deployed judicial review to help consolidate his power in Russia.
For the purported purpose of creating a unified political space, he authorized federal courts to nullify regional laws inconsistent with
the federal constitution. n63 That authorization appears, at least on its surface, to be nothing more than a
neutral, straightforward assertion of vertical federal supremacy and is consistent with the models in other
federal states, including the United States. According to Putin, the new federal judicial authority to strike down regional laws would thus merely reemphasize
"Russia's commitment to "legality and the state.'" n64 The Russian federal courts deployed their newfound power with zeal and
struck down thousands of regional laws. n65 The elimination of those regional laws allowed Putin to
centralize and consolidate his power and reduce the vertical checks on his power by regional governments.
n66 Putin also enlisted support from the Russian Constitutional Court and its chairman, Valery Zorkin. n67 Once "described as "Russia's answer to
Chief Justice John Marshall,'" Zorkin had unsuccessfully strived to preserve [*1690] constitutional legality during
the strife between Boris Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament. n68 The Zorkin court struck down as
unconstitutional Yeltsin's 1993 decree disbanding the Parliament, and Zorkin himself openly criticized Yeltsin
for his disregard of the rule of law. n69 After assuming the presidency, Putin commended the Zorkin court's decision against
Yeltsin, stating that the court had legitimately fought back against "politicians who appeal to political
expediency rather than the standards of law." n70 The current Russian Constitutional Court, chaired by Zorkin, paid back Putin's commendation
in spades. Recent Constitutional Court opinions upheld pro-government legislation, such as a law that gives the President the authority to appoint regional governors, on the
basis that Russia needs a strong executive amidst a fragile transition process to democracy. n71 To gain their acquiescence, incumbents may also strategically reward judges
with increased authorities, especially in areas of little importance to political control. For example, Zorkin's support for the Putin government has regained the court many
of its former authorities. n72 The same errant executive power against which Zorkin rallied in the 1990s became more palatable once the same power was exercised to
bolster the authorities of Zorkin and his court. n73 Judicial
review may also be established to maintain control over the state's
often unwieldy administrative hierarchy and mitigate principal-agent problems that arise when the lower-level administrative
agents fail to act in the best interests of the principal, the incumbent officeholders. n74 Avenues for judicial relief may permit challenges to
the actions of bureaucratic subordinates, n75 which serve two purposes. First, judicial review of
administrative actions provides a legitimizing function, especially in states where corruption or abuse of state
resources may be commonplace. Judicial review provides the appearance, if not the reality, of some level of relatively neutral checks on errant
administrative practices. Second, it also allows regime elites to monitor the actions of subordinate administrative agents
and discipline them where necessary, n76 thereby mitigating the principal-agent problem. [*1691] A relatively autonomous judiciary
may thus be helpful in consolidating authority and retaining political power. A judiciary so empowered can
safeguard the interests of the authoritarian elites even where the elites are deposed. For example, the Mubarak appointees in
Egypt's courts have rendered a number of decisions in the post-Mubarak era - such as a recent decision that bans the Muslim Brotherhood - that appear to promote political
configurations that existed during the Mubarak autocracy. n77 2. Bolstering Democratic Credentials In addition to enlisting the courts in order to consolidate control,
judicial review can also be used to bolster democratic credentials at home and abroad. Judicial review portrays
the constitutional framework to the world as one imbued with checks and balances on arbitrary rule, n78 especially
where the judiciary enjoys a better reputation than the political branches as a relatively neutral, impartial body. That, in turn, serves to promote the
regime's image before domestic and global audiences and allows the regime to cite independent judicial
review to rebut any criticism regarding anti-democratic practices. n79 For the judiciary to serve that legitimizing
function, it must enjoy relative autonomy from the political branches and must, at least occasionally, act
against the wishes of the incumbent regime. n80 Incumbents might thus tolerate, or perhaps even welcome,
adverse decisions by the judiciary to maintain the veneer of checks and balances, so long as the judiciary
does not pose a real threat to central areas of political control. For example, under Mubarak, the Egyptian judiciary enjoyed a large
measure of judicial independence until the early 2000s. n81 The court enjoyed structural autonomy from the political branches and also selectively wielded the power of
judicial review to expand and protect individual liberties. n82 The court also found electoral fraud in hundreds of elections and required judicial supervision of [*1692] the
2000 elections. n83 Remarkably, the
Mubarak government complied with these decisions. n84 At the same time, however,
it largely refrained from accepting any challenges to emergency laws or the trial of civilians in military
tribunals, which were the primary tools of authoritarian control in Egypt. n85 Likewise, the same Zorkin court that
upheld Putin's reform agenda, as discussed above, also accepted a number of constitutional challenges to
criminal laws and surveillance laws that target members of the opposition. n86 The legitimacy provided by
autonomous courts may also be helpful in attracting foreign investment and trade. n87 Judicial review can provide legal
assurances to foreign investors by protecting property rights and ensuring stability in the economic sphere, especially in regimes with some level of government corruption.
n88 For that reason, the World Trade Organization ("WTO")
requires judicial supervision in trade-related areas, the
establishment of which can convince a skeptical international community to invest in a state, despite any antidemocratic practices. n89 For example, the Egyptian Constitutional Court was provided interpretative power over the constitution in part to attract foreign
investment and assure international investors that the court would deter any changes to a free market economy. n90 3. Avoiding Accountability Judicial review
can also be established to avoid accountability by delegating controversial questions to the judiciary. n91 By
entrenching its policy preferences in a relatively autonomous judiciary, the regime can allow the judiciary to protect its interests,
authorize judges to issue controversial decisions that political elites approve but cannot publicly champion,
and insulate themselves from political accountability in the process. n92 For [*1693] example, in a series of controversial decisions,
the Egyptian Constitutional Court overturned socialist policies to the alacrity of the ruling elite, who avoided the
political backlash that would have resulted from the enactment of the contentious reforms through the
political process. n93
No Africa Democracy
No African Democratization-2008 global recession and growing influence of China
as a regional power
Schmitter 15 [Philippe, Emeritus Professor of the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute; Crisis and Transition, But
Not Decline; 01/15; Journal of Democracy Volume 26, Number 1, January 2015; Project Muse; 07/05/15; jac]
Global Influences As
the prodemocracy impetus that emerged from post–Cold War international developments has
receded in recent years, so too has the external aid that it generated for African prodemocracy movements and
processes (local Transparency International chapters, domestic election-watchdog organizations, and other public-accountability advocacy groups). This
unfavorable trend is being aggravated by a number of recent global developments. Key among them is the
2008 global financial crisis. The resulting squeeze on donor-country budgets has induced radical cuts in aid
that is considered “nonessential” (that is, not directly related to a donor country’s security or geostrategic
interests). Likewise, most Western aid agencies have been moving to cut personnel, management, and other costs.
In practice, this has accelerated a transfer of the grant-management load from donor-country aid agencies
such as USAID and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) to private
firms and international NGOs with large grant-management bureaucracies. The global financial crisis has also
spurred the trend of multidonor “basket funding” for African civil society groups and think tanks. Such
arrangements typically require grantee organizations to work together on specific sets of donor-determined
development priorities, ranging from transparency and accountability to poverty reduction, social protection,
and gender. Such arrangements can be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they provide sustained funding to qualifying NGOs. On the other hand, they
consume considerable administrative resources since stand-alone domestic agencies must often be created to
set national program [End Page 108] priorities and manage (under the supervision of an international accounting
firm) the funds. In addition, they foster “forced marriages” among NGOs and tend to lead to collectiveaction and free-loading challenges. The mammoth Strengthening Transparency, Accountability and Responsiveness in Ghana (STAR-Ghana) program is
one example of such an arrangement. STAR-Ghana is funded by DFID, DANIDA (Denmark’s development agency), the EU, and USAID, and is now the leading actor in
external support for Ghanaian think tanks and civic-advocacy groups. Another example is Uganda’s Democratic Governance Facility, funded by Austria, Denmark, Ireland,
the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the EU.17 Another
consequence of the 2008 financial crisis has been the return
of the World Bank and IMF as the principal institutions through which the G-7 states channel resources for
African development. This has unfortunate consequences for the African democracy and governance agenda,
since such multilateral development bodies tend to deal exclusively with governments, thereby foreclosing the
involvement of national legislatures and domestic nonstate actors. The emergence of China and other nontraditional partners as key
players on the global stage and as competitors for African commodities, markets, and loyalty is also undermining Africa’s democratic prospects, as countering the growing
The toxic mix of the new “scramble for Africa”
among the world’s big powers with Western security imperatives and antiterrorism efforts has, in turn, begun
to erode the liberal political values that have guided Western foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.
Faced with the prospect of losing the clout and influence they have traditionally enjoyed in Africa and with the need to counter terrorism, Western powers are
readjusting their established governance benchmarks in order to stay competitive in the contest for African
energy, markets, and other geostrategic advantages, even where incumbent African governments are
autocratic and nonreforming. Western donors demonstrate an increasing reluctance to press democratic governance reforms in misgoverned but oil-rich
influence of China, India, Brazil, and others has become a central goal of Western policy.
states such as Angola, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Sudan, and South Sudan. Unlike in the 2000s, when the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative and U.S.
Millennium Challenge Account were rolled out and direct budget support for selected African governments was the norm, democratic reforms now count for less in the
deployment of Western bilateral and multilateral assistance and other soft-power instruments. Worse still, countries
benefiting from new U.S.
programs such as Power Africa and the Young Africans Leadership Initiative include those with records of
poor governance and abysmal management of their economies (Ethiopia, for example, is one of Power
Africa’s six focus countries). The global extractive-commodity boom has also had a negative impact [End
Page 109] on democratization in Africa. First of all, it has increased the continent’s appeal to China and other
fast-growing non-Western economies that care little about accountable governance in their client states. The
vigorous courtship by these new patrons is providing African governments with alternative non-Western
markets, trade partners, and sources of military and development aid. With their national treasuries now flush
with revenue from oil, gas, and other extractive commodities, resource-rich African countries now depend
less on foreign (especially Western) aid, with all its conditions and demands for accountability. The governments of
these resource-rich African countries are also less reliant on taxation of their citizens, which typically
generates bottom-up demands for accountable governance.
Alt Cause
Can’t solve democracy --- concentrated wealth and power
Ringen 14 [Stein, emeritus professor at Oxford University; 03/28/14; “Is American Democracy headed to extinction?”;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/is-american-democracy-headed-to-extinction/2014/03/28/f8084fbe-aa34-11e3-b61e-8051b8b52d06_story.html; 07/06/15; jac]
Behind dysfunctional government, is democracy itself in decay? It took only 250 years for democracy to disintegrate in ancient Athens. A wholly new form of government
was invented there in which the people ruled themselves. That constitution proved marvelously effective. Athens grew in wealth and capacity, fought off the Persian
challenge, established itself as the leading power in the known world and produced treasures of architecture, philosophy and art that bedazzle to this day. But when
privilege, corruption and mismanagement took hold, the lights went out. It would be 2,000 years before democracy was reinvented
in the U.S. Constitution, now as representative democracy. Again, government by popular consent proved ingenious. The United States grew into the world’s leading power
— economically, culturally and militarily. In Europe, democracies overtook authoritarian monarchies and fascist and communist dictatorships. In recent decades,
democracy’s spread has made the remaining autocracies a minority. The second democratic experiment is approaching 250 years. It has been as successful as the first. But
the lesson from Athens is that success does not breed success. Democracy is not the default. It is a form of
government that must be created with determination and that will disintegrate unless nurtured. In the United
States and Britain, democracy is disintegrating when it should be nurtured by leadership. If the lights go out in
the model democracies, they will not stay on elsewhere. It’s not enough for governments to simply be
democratic; they must deliver or decay. In Britain, government is increasingly ineffectual. The constitutional
scholar Anthony King has described it as declining from “order” to “mess” in less than 30 years. During 10
years of New Labor rule, that proposition was tested and confirmed. In 1997 a new government was voted in
with a mandate and determination to turn the tide on Thatcherite inequality. It was given all the parliamentary power a
democratic government could dream of and benefited from 10 years of steady economic growth. But a strong government was defeated by a
weak system of governance. It delivered nothing of what it intended and left Britain more unequal than where
the previous regime had left off. The next government, a center-right coalition, has proved itself equally unable. It was supposed to repair damage from
the economic crisis but has responded with inaction on the causes of crisis, in a monopolistic -financial-services sector, and with a brand of austerity that protects the
privileged at the expense of the poor. Again, what has transpired is inability rather than ill will. Both these governments came up against concentrations of economic power
that have become politically unmanageable. Meanwhile, the
health of the U.S. system is even worse than it looks. The three
branches of government are designed to deliver through checks and balances. But balance has become
gridlock, and the United States is not getting the governance it needs. Here, the link between inequality and inability is on sharp
display. Power has been sucked out of the constitutional system and usurped by actors such as PACs,
think tanks, media and lobbying organizations. In the age of mega-expensive politics, candidates depend on sponsors to fund permanent
campaigns. When money is allowed to transgress from markets, where it belongs, to politics, where it has no business, those who control it gain power to decide who the
successful candidates will be — those they wish to fund — and what they can decide once they are in office. Rich
supporters get two swings at
influencing politics, one as voters and one as donors. Others have only the vote, a power that diminishes as
political inflation deflates its value. It is a misunderstanding to think that candidates chase money. It is money that chases candidates.
In Athens, democracy disintegrated when the rich grew super-rich, refused to play by the rules and
undermined the established system of government. That is the point that the United States and Britain have
reached. Nearly a century ago, when capitalist democracy was in a crisis not unlike the present one, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
warned: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t
have both.” Democracy weathered that storm for two reasons: It is not inequality as such that destroys democracy but the more recent combination of inequality and
transgression. Furthermore, democracy was then able to learn from crisis. The New Deal tempered economic free-for-all, primarily
through the 1933 Banking Act, and gave the smallfolk new social securities. The lesson from Athens is that success breeds
complacency. People, notably those in privilege, stopped caring, and democracy was neglected. Six years after the global
economic crisis, the signs from the model democracies are that those in privilege are unable to care and that our systems are unable to learn. The crisis started in out-ofcontrol financial services industries in the United States and Britain, but control has not been reasserted. Economic inequality has followed through to political inequality,
and democratic government is bereft of power and capacity. Brandeis was not wrong; he was ahead of his time.
USAID cuts prevent US from effectively promoting democracy
Carothers 14 [Thomas, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; 12/22/14; “Why is the United States shortchanging its
commitment to democracy”; http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/falling-usaid-spending-shows-a-lack-of-commitment-to-fosteringdemocracy/2014/12/22/86b72d58-89f4-11e4-a085-34e9b9f09a58_story.html; 07/06/15; jac]
U.S. assistance to advance democracy worldwide is in decline. Such spending has shrunk by 28 percent during
Barack Obama’s presidency and is now less than $2 billion per year. The decline has been especially severe at the U.S. Agency for International
Development, which traditionally funds the bulk of U.S. democracy assistance and established itself in the 1990s
as the largest source of such aid worldwide. According to data provided by the agency, USAID spending to
foster democracy, human rights and accountable governance abroad has fallen by 38 percent since 2009. The
drop-off affects almost every region to which such aid is directed. It has been largest in the Middle East — a startling 72 percent cut
that came just as much of the Arab world attempted a historic shift toward democracy. In Africa, a 43 percent
decline has left a paltry $80 million for democracy work for the entire continent outside of Liberia and South Sudan. Overall,
the number of countries where USAID operates dedicated democracy programs has fallen from 91 to 63. To
grasp just how unimpressive the U.S. commitment to aiding democracy abroad has become, consider this: Leaving aside Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan, USAID spending on democracy, rights and governance in fiscal 2014 — $860 million — totaled
less than what just one U.S. citizen, George Soros, spends annually to foster open society globally (full disclosure: I
chair an advisory board of one program of the Soros foundations). The main aid agency of the country that prides itself on being an unmatched force for democracy cannot
even match the financial commitment of one of its citizens? Of course aid is not the only means by which the United States seeks to foster democracy in the world. Skillful
diplomacy — resolving electoral standoffs, bolstering promising pro-democratic leaders and punishing toxic undemocratic ones — can accomplish much. But
democracy aid plays a distinctive role. It can be the glue that helps cement into place the foundational
elements — such as effective legal institutions, representative parliaments, pluralistic political parties, civil
society organizations and independent media — necessary to sustain democratic breakthroughs.
Shortchanging the aid side of democracy support ensures longer-term failures. Why this striking reduction in democracy aid?
It is not a product of a broader contraction of U.S. foreign aid spending, which remains robust overall. Rather, it is a policy
choice, reflecting both skepticism about the relative importance of democracy work by senior U.S. aid
officials and, more generally, the muted emphasis on democracy-building by the Obama foreign policy team.
Some might see the decline in U.S. democracy aid as an understandable response to the more unstable and conflict-prone world confronting policymakers. U.S. foreign
policy in such a convulsive climate, the thinking goes, should emphasize stability above all — democracy will have to wait. A tempting idea, perhaps, but a dangerously
wrong one. With the Middle East wracked by multiple civil wars, falling
back on the old habit of relying on authoritarian friends there
to help manage security challenges to the United States may look like an appealing option. But it was precisely
the festering sociopolitical and governance decay under stagnant dictatorial Arab governments that produced
the conditions underlying today’s civil conflicts and extremism. In Ukraine, the persistent failure over more
than two decades to establish the rule of law and consolidate an accountable democratic system has led to the
country’s periodic political meltdowns, endemic corruption and vulnerability to Russian meddling. The key to
resolving the security sinkhole that Ukraine has become for the West is finally taking seriously those institution-building goals. In West Africa, dec ades of
mercurial dictators scornful of basic institution-building produced a legacy of crippling state weakness that
left the region poorly prepared to deal with the Ebola crisis. No emergency health delivery measures, no matter how heroic
in the short term, will solve the deeper governance problem. Supporting democracy, human rights and better governance more
substantially and effectively will not produce instant solutions to these and other crises. But patiently and seriously pursued, such aid can be a
crucial part of the longer-term solutions we seek. Troubled though our democracy can seem at home, our
society still enjoys its unique stability and security thanks to its pluralistic, open political system rooted in
democratic accountability and the rule of law. That formula remains the right one for our pursuit of stability and security abroad.
Democracy Stable
No net democratic backsliding --- democracy is overall resilient
Levitsky and Way 15 [Steven, Professor of Government at Harvard University; Lucan, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
Toronto; January, 15; “The Myth of Democratic Recession”; Project Muse; 07/05/15; jac]
The Empirical Record A
look at the empirical record suggests little or no evidence of a democratic recession.
We compared the scores of four prominent global democracy indices: Freedom House, Polity, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and
the Bertelsmann democracy index.11 Table 1 shows each index’s mean level of democracy (on a normalized scale from 0 to 1) from 2000 to 2013. All four
indices’ mean democracy scores remained the same or increased during this period. According to leading
democracy indices such as Freedom House and Polity, then, the world is more democratic today than it was
in 2000 (and considerably more democratic than it was in 1990 or any year prior to that). Even if we take the mid-2000s—
often cited as the beginning of the democratic recession—as our starting point, three of the four indices show either no change or a slight improvement.12 Only Freedom
House shows a decline between 2005 and 2013, and that decline (from .63 to .62) is extremely modest. If we examine the overall number of democracies in the world, the
data similarly suggest stability rather than decline. Table 2 shows the four indices’ scores for the absolute number of democracies as well as the percentage of the world’s
regimes that were fully democratic between 2000 and 2013. Again, Freedom House and Polity show an increase in the number of democracies since 2000. Only if we look at
the 2005–13 period do we see any decline, and that decline is very modest. Freedom House shows a drop-off of one democracy between 2005 and 2013. The pattern is
similar with respect to the percentage of democracies in the world: Both Freedom House and Polity show a decline of one percentage point between 2005 and 2013. As an
additional measure, we examined all cases of significant regime change—defined as countries whose Freedom House scores increased or decreased by three points or
more—between 1999 and 2013. [End Page 46] Whereas 23 countries experienced a significant improvement in their Freedom House score between 1999 and 2013, only
eight experienced a significant decline. Even between 2005 and 2013, the number of significantly improved cases (10) exceeded the number of significant decliners (8).
Moreover, most
of the significant declines occurred not in democracies but in regimes that were already
authoritarian, such as the Central African Republic, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Jordan. Percentage and Absolute
Number of Democracies According to Four Surveys Click for larger view Table 2. Percentage and Absolute Number of Democracies According to Four Surveys Indeed,
what is most striking about the 2000–13 period is how few democracies actually broke down. Seven countries
that Freedom House classified as Free in the late 1990s are no longer classified as Free today: Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Mali, the Philippines, Thailand, and Venezuela.13
Of these seven cases, the scores for Ecuador, Bolivia, and the Philippines declined only marginally, and all three regimes remained borderline democracies in 2014 (indeed,
the Philippines has redemocratized; Freedom House’s decision to designate it as Partly Free appears to reflect problems of corruption, not violations of democratic rules of
the game). Honduras and Mali suffered military coups in 2009 and 2012, respectively, but both authoritarian turns were subsequently reversed.14 That leaves Thailand and
Venezuela as the only unambiguously democratic regimes that collapsed and remained authoritarian in 2014. The list of breakdowns could be expanded to include Nicaragua
and Sri Lanka, two near-democracies (classified as Partly Free by Freedom House in the late 1990s) that deteriorated into authoritarianism in the 2000s. One might also add
Hungary (still classified as Free by Freedom House in 2013), although it remains, at worst, a borderline case. Turkey, which is sometimes labeled a case of democratic
breakdown, underwent a transition from one hybrid regime to another. Although the AKP government has shown clear authoritarian tendencies, the regime that preceded
it—marked by vast military influence, restrictions on Kurdish and Islamist parties, and substantial media repression—was never democratic (in fact, Turkey’s Freedom
Even if we categorized all these cases as
democratic breakdowns, despite the fact that most of them are borderline cases (Bolivia, Ecuador, Hungary, the Philippines)
or cases in which authoritarian turns were subsequently reversed (Honduras, Mali, the Philippines), the number of
breakdowns is matched by cases of democratic advance. Eight countries—including some very
important ones—entered Freedom House’s Free category in the 2000s and remain there today: Brazil,
Croatia, Ghana, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, Senegal, and Serbia.15 This list does not include countries, such as Chile, that were already
House score in 2013 was better than it was prior to the AKP’s first election victory in 2002). [End Page 47]
classified as Free but experienced major democratic advances (in the Chilean case, the establishment of full civilian control over the military). Nor does it include countries
such as Nepal, Pakistan, and Tunisia, which became considerably more democratic after the mid-2000s but remained in Freedom House’s Partly Free category. The big
picture over the last decade, then, is one of net stability. Although it is certainly possible to identify cases of democratic backsliding, the existence of an equal or greater
number of democratic advances belies any notion of a global democratic “meltdown.” As Tables 1 and 2 make clear, the net change since the mid-2000s is essentially zero.
Thailand, Venezuela, and perhaps Hungary are suffering democratic recessions. But claims
of a worldwide democratic downturn lack
empirical foundation.
No democratic recession-their claims are based on false understandings of
geopolitics
Levitsky and Way 15 [Steven, Professor of Government at Harvard University; Lucan, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
Toronto; January, 15; “The Myth of Democratic Recession”; Project Muse; 07/05/15; jac]
A near consensus has emerged that the world has fallen into a “democratic recession.” Leading observers and democracy advocates characterize the last decade as a period
of democratic “rollback,” “erosion,” or “decline,”1 in which new democracies have fallen victim to a “powerful authoritarian undertow.”2 In an article entitled “The Great
Democracy Meltdown,” for example, Joshua Kurlantzick claims that global freedom has “plummeted.”3 Another observer suggests that “we might in fact be seeing the
beginning of the end for democracy.”4 The gloomy mood is made manifest in Freedom House’s yearly reports in the Journal of Democracy. Summarizing Freedom House’s
annual survey of freedom, Arch Puddington warned in 2006 of a growing “pushback against democracy,”5 characterized 2007 and 2008 as years of democratic “decline,”6
claimed that the democratic erosion had “accelerated” in 2009,7 and described global democracy as “under duress” in 2010.8 Following a brief moment of optimism during
the Arab Spring, Freedom House warned of a democratic “retreat” in 2012 and an “authoritarian resurgence” in 2013.9
This is a gloomy picture indeed. It is
not, however, an accurate one. There is little evidence that the democratic sky is falling or (depending on your
choice of fable) that the wolf of authoritarian resurgence has arrived.10 The state of global democracy has
remained stable over the last decade, and it has improved markedly relative to the 1990s. Perceptions of a
democratic recession, we argue, are rooted in a flawed understanding of the events of the early 1990s. The
excessive optimism and voluntarism that pervaded analyses of early post–Cold War transitions generated
unrealistic expectations that, when not realized, gave [End Page 45] rise to exaggerated pessimism and gloom. In fact,
despite increasingly unfavorable global conditions in recent years, new democracies remain strikingly robust.
No backsliding-they conflate autocratic decline with democratic transition
Levitsky and Way 15 [Steven, Professor of Government at Harvard University; Lucan, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
Toronto; January, 15; “The Myth of Democratic Recession”; Project Muse; 07/05/15; jac]
The Illusion of Backsliding Why do many observers perceive there to be a democratic recession when the evidence for such a recession is so thin? The
global
regime landscape looks darkened today because observers viewed the events of the initial post–Cold War
period through rose-tinted glasses. During the early 1990s, many observers slipped into an excessively optimistic—
even teleological—mindset in which virtually all forms of authoritarian crisis or regime instability were
conflated with democratization.16 The excessive optimism of the early 1990s was shaped, in part, by the extraordinarily successful democratizations of the
early “third wave” period (1974–89). In Southern Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal), South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay), and Central Europe (Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland), authoritarian crises consistently led to democratization. Initial authoritarian openings almost invariably escaped the control of regime
it is clear that
these early third-wave transitions differed markedly from later transitions in Africa and the former Soviet
Union. Transitions in Southern Europe, South America, and Central Europe occurred under conditions that favored successful democratization, including [End Page
48] relatively high levels of development, robust civic and opposition movements, functioning states, and extensive ties to the West. Yet observers generalized
from these cases, drawing at least two false lessons that powerfully shaped the way that they interpreted the
transitions of the 1990s.17 First, observers began to conflate authoritarian breakdown with democratization. The
elites and evolved into full-scale transitions. And when authoritarian regimes fell, they were almost invariably replaced by democracies. In retrospect,
collapse of a dictatorship may yield diverse outcomes, ranging from democracy (post-1989 Poland) to the establishment of a new authoritarian regime (post-1979 Iran) to
state collapse and anarchy (post-2011 Libya). Historically, in fact, most
authoritarian breakdowns have not brought
democratization.18 Thus, although the collapse of a dictatorship creates opportunities for democratization,
there are no theoretical or empirical bases for assuming such an outcome. Yet that is exactly what many
observers did in the 1990s. Wherever dictatorships fell and opposition groups ascended to power, transitions were described as democratization and
subsequent regimes were labeled “new democracies.” Second, all authoritarian openings were assumed to mark the onset of a
transition that would eventually lead to democracy. Thus even limited openings aimed at deflecting international pressure were expected to
escape the control of autocrats and take on a life of their own, as had occurred in countries such as Brazil, Chile, Hungary, Poland, and Spain. Such expectations
ignored the fact that autocrats may (and often do) undertake “window-dressing” reforms aimed at defusing
short-term crises, and then use their continued control of the army, police, and major revenue sources to
reconsolidate power once the crisis has passed. The tendency to conflate authoritarian crisis and democratic transition was powerfully reinforced
by the demise of communism. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union generated a widespread perception that liberal democracy was the “only game
in town.” Because all roads seemed to lead to democracy, observers
began to interpret all regime crises as incipient democratic
transitions. This excessively optimistic mindset led observers to mischaracterize many post–Cold War regime
crises. Although the 1990s are widely viewed as a decade of unprecedented democratization, they are more accurately described as a period of unprecedented
authoritarian crisis. The end of the Cold War posed an enormous challenge to autocrats. Both Soviet client states
and Western-backed anticommunist dictatorships lost external support. Western democracies emerged as the
dominant center of military and economic power, and the United States and the European Union began to
promote democracy to an unprecedented degree. At the same time, deep economic crises deprived autocrats of the resources needed to sustain
themselves in power. States were effectively bankrupted throughout much of Africa and the former Soviet Union, leaving governments unable to pay their soldiers, police,
and bureaucrats. In many cases (Albania, Benin, Cambodia, Georgia, Haiti, Liberia, Madagascar, Tajikistan, Zaire), states either collapsed or were brought to the brink of
collapse. [End Page 49] Conditions in the early 1990s thus amounted to a virtual “perfect storm” for dictatorships. Throughout Africa, the former Soviet Union, and
elsewhere, autocrats confronted severe fiscal crises, weak or collapsing states, and intense international pressure for multiparty elections. Lacking resources, external allies, or
reliable coercive institutions, many of these autocracies fell into severe crisis. The
result was widespread “pluralism by default,”19 in
which competition—and even turnover—occurred because governments lacked even rudimentary means to
suppress opposition challenges. Autocrats fell from power in Albania, Belarus, Benin, the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Georgia,
Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Moldova, Niger, Ukraine, and Zaire not because they faced robust democracy movements, but because they were bankrupt, their states were in
disarray, and in many cases they had lost control of the coercive apparatus. Likewise, governments in Cambodia, Cameroon, Gabon, Kyrgyzstan, Mozambique, Russia, and
These moments of authoritarian
weakness and instability were widely equated with democratization. Thus the ascent of noncommunists to
power in Russia and other post-Soviet states, as well as the fall of autocrats in Madagascar, Malawi, Niger,
Zambia, and other African states, were frequently characterized as democratic transitions. Similarly, the holding of
elsewhere tolerated competitive multiparty elections because they lacked even minimal capacity to resist them.
multiparty elections in Angola, Cambodia, Cameroon, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Mozambique, and Tanzania was said to mark the onset of democratic transitions,
however “flawed” or “prolonged.” Nearly
all these regimes were characterized as “new democracies” or, at minimum, some
diminished subtype of democracy (e.g., electoral, illiberal, unconsolidated).20 This optimism was shared by Freedom House,
which upgraded autocracies in Gabon, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and even totalitarian Turkmenistan
to Partly Free status in the early 1990s. Such evaluations were largely misguided. Many of the authoritarian crises of the early and
mid-1990s did not constitute meaningful movement toward democracy. Numerous autocracies broke down because states either collapsed (e.g., Azerbaijan, Georgia, Sierra
Leone, Tajikistan, Zaire) or weakened dramatically (e.g., Belarus, Madagascar, Malawi, Ukraine). State failure brings violence and instability; it almost never brings
democratization. Many other regime “openings” were, in reality, moments of extraordinary incumbent weakness, driven not by [End Page 50] societal pressure for
democracy but rather by severe fiscal crisis, state weakness, or external vulnerability. For example,
Russian politics were competitive in the early
1990s not because Boris Yeltsin presided over a democratic transition but rather because he presided over a
state in disarray, which left him unable to control his own security forces, bureaucracy, and regional
governments. Likewise, Cambodia’s competitive 1993 elections were a product of the virtual state collapse that followed Vietnamese and Soviet withdrawal.
Bankruptcy and international isolation compelled the Hun Sen government to cede control of the electoral process to the UN. Similarly, autocrats in Cameroon
and Gabon, facing severe fiscal crises, riots, and the specter of international isolation, were compelled to hold
unusually competitive elections in the early 1990s.
True democracy is stable --- their examples of vulnerable democracies are really just
weak authoritarian regimes
Levitsky and Way 15 [Steven, Professor of Government at Harvard University; Lucan, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
Toronto; January, 15; “The Myth of Democratic Recession”; Project Muse; 07/05/15; jac]
For observers who viewed these and other cases of pluralism by default as democratic transitions, the developments of the 2000s were bound to be disappointing. The
“perfect storm” conditions of the initial post–Cold War period eventually passed. For one, the economies of most developing countries improved during the 1990s and,
thanks to soaring commodity prices, many of them boomed in the 2000s. Consequently, governments that a decade earlier had lacked funds to maintain patronage networks
or even pay soldiers and bureaucrats were now flush with resources—helping to restore a minimum of state capacity. Second, autocrats
adapted to the
post–Cold War environment. Rulers whose ignorance of how to survive in a context of multiparty elections
nearly cost them power in the early 1990s eventually learned how to manage competitive elections, coopt
rivals and independent media, control the private sector, and starve civic and opposition groups of resources
without resorting to the kind of naked repression or fraud that could trigger a domestic legitimacy crisis and
international isolation.21 Third, the geopolitical environment changed. The extraordinary influence of the United States and the
EU, which had peaked in the immediate post–Cold War period, declined in the 2000s. At the same time, the
emerging influence of China, Russia, and other regional powers, together with soaring oil prices, created more
space for autocrats in Asia, the former Soviet Union, and Africa. By the 2000s, economic recovery, state-rebuilding, and a more
permissive international environment had reduced the level of authoritarian weakness and instability that had characterized much of Africa, the former Soviet Union, and
Asia during the initial post–Cold War period. Less vulnerable to international pressure, and with greater revenue and more effective states at their disposal, autocracies that
had been highly vulnerable in the 1990s were, in many cases, able to reconsolidate power. In Cambodia, for example, improved finances and fading international pressure
enabled the Hun Sen government to reestablish authoritarian dominance. Without the extreme fiscal and external constraints of the early 1990s, the ruling Cambodian
People’s Party was able to repress rivals and rig elections [End Page 51] with greater impunity. Likewise, Presidents Paul Biya in Cameroon and Omar Bongo in Gabon
reconsolidated power in the late 1990s and early 2000s, reversing earlier concessions—such as constitutional term limits—that many observers had interpreted as democratic
“openings.” Similar processes of authoritarian reconsolidation occurred in Algeria, Angola, Burma, Congo-Brazzaville, Mozambique, and elsewhere. Much the same pattern
could be observed in the former Soviet Union, where regimes that had been marked by weakness and instability during the initial postcommunist period consolidated during
the 2000s. In Russia, for example, state-rebuilding and soaring oil prices allowed the Putin government to coopt the private sector and media, repress opponents, and
manipulate elections to a degree that had been unthinkable a decade earlier.22 In Belarus, the government of Alyaksandr Lukashenka established vast control over the
economy during the second half of the 1990s, which allowed him to effectively starve his opponents of resources. Authoritarian regimes also consolidated in Armenia,
Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan. In sum, improved
finances, state reconstruction, and a less hostile international environment
enabled many authoritarian regimes that had been weak and unstable in the initial post–Cold War period to
stabilize and even consolidate in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Unsurprisingly, countries such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Cambodia, the Central African
Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, all of which Freedom House had
These transitions from weak or unstable
authoritarianism to more stable authoritarian rule are often viewed as cases of democratic failure and taken as
evidence of a democratic recession. Such characterizations are misleading. Many of these regimes were never remotely
democratic, and in some of them (e.g., Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan), democracy was never even seriously on the agenda.
optimistically upgraded to Partly Free status in the early 1990s, were downgraded to Not Free.
Just as authoritarian crisis should not be equated with democratic transition, authoritarian (re)consolidation
should not be equated with democratic rollback. In other cases, regime instability—often rooted in state failure—generated brief democratic
“moments” in which intense international pressure or the extreme weakness of all major political actors permitted competitive elections and turnover (e.g., Bangladesh 1991;
Haiti 1991; Congo-Brazzaville 1992; Belarus 1994; Niger 1999; Guinea-Bissau 2000; Madagascar 2002; Burundi 2005). Although
these cases may have
been minimally “democratic” on election day, they did not remain so after new governments took office—
and thus could not be described as democratic regimes. Indeed, turnover occurred under conditions that
overwhelmingly favored nondemocratic outcomes: Democratic institutions existed only on parchment (in many
cases, they had never been tested); states were weak or collapsing, resulting in pervasive neopatrimonialism and the absence [End Page 52] of rule of law; private sectors
were small and state-dependent; and civil societies and opposition parties were weak and disorganized. The combination of neopatrimonial states and impoverished societies
gave incumbents vast resource advantages from day one, and in the absence of functioning democratic institutions, civil society, or an organized opposition, constraints on
authoritarian abuse were minimal. Under
such conditions, new governments almost inevitably abuse power, triggering
either regime instability or another round of authoritarianism. “Democratic moments” thus proved
ephemeral, if not illusory, in each of the cases listed above. For example, Congo-Brazzaville experienced electoral turnover in 1992, but
new president Pascal Lissouba immediately dissolved parliament and held flawed elections that triggered an opposition boycott and an eventual descent into civil war and
dictatorship. Similarly, Burundi’s competitive elections in 2005 led Freedom House to label it an “electoral democracy,” but President Domitien Ndayizeye immediately
began to arrest opposition leaders and journalists, and subsequent elections were marred by fraud and repression. In Guinea-Bissau, the 1999 overthrow of João Bernardo
Vieira led to internationally sponsored elections won by opposition leader Kumba Yala (which led Freedom House to label the country an electoral democracy). But Yala
was as authoritarian as his predecessor, closing newspapers and arresting opposition leaders and the president
of the Supreme Court before his overthrow in a 2003 coup. Newly elected presidents also immediately
abused power in Bangladesh, Belarus, the Central African Republic, Haiti, Madagascar, Niger, and elsewhere.
These regimes were never democracies in any meaningful sense, for any meaningful period of time. To label
them as cases of subsequent “democratic breakdown” is, therefore, quite misleading. And yet most of the breakdowns cited
by proponents of the democratic-recession thesis are precisely of this type—take the list of 25 post-2000 breakdowns in Larry Diamond’s article in this issue (Table 1 on
page 144). Nearly
two-thirds of these breakdowns were of regimes that (at best) were no more than ephemeral
“democratic moments.” If we limit our analysis to actual democratic regimes—defined, say, as those in which at least one
democratically elected government held free elections and peacefully ceded power to an elected successor—16 of Diamond’s 25 “democratic
breakdowns” disappear. Of the nine cases of breakdown that remain, 23 only five still had authoritarian regimes in 2014, and one of those was a microstate.
Backsliding is false-they misread lack of progress as rollback
Levitsky and Way 15 [Steven, Professor of Government at Harvard University; Lucan, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
Toronto; January, 15; “The Myth of Democratic Recession”; Project Muse; 07/05/15; jac]
Non-Democratization in the 2000s Contemporary
pessimism about the fate of global democracy is also rooted in
excessive voluntarism. Many of those who argue that democracy is in retreat focus less on democratic
backsliding than on the absence of democratic progress. In effect, nondemocratization [End Page 53] in China, the Middle East, or Central
Asia is treated as a setback. For example, Puddington’s 2009 report in the Journal of Democracy claimed that “perhaps the most disappointing development” in Asia in
2008 was “the failure of China to enact significant democratic reforms . . . during its year as host of the Olympic Games.”24 The following year, he cited the Kazakh
government’s failure to undertake political reform as evidence of a “downward spiral” in Central Asia and pointed to the absence of political liberalization in Cuba as
evidence of “continued erosion of freedom worldwide.”25 Puddington’s
most recent Journal of Democracy report openly cites
unmet expectations—as opposed to actual rollback—as a source of democratic gloom, writing that although
observers had “predicted that China would rather quickly evolve toward a more liberal and perhaps
democratic system,” the government instead developed new strategies “designed to maintain rigid one-party
rule.”26 The failure of authoritarian regimes in China, the Middle East, or Central Asia to democratize should
not be taken as evidence of democratic retreat (doing so would be akin to taking a glass that is half full and declaring it not to be half empty but
to be emptying out). Nor should it surprise us. By the mid-2000s, nearly every country with minimally favorable conditions for democracy had already democratized. With a
handful of exceptions (e.g., Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, and now Venezuela), the low-hanging fruit had been picked. Today,
most of the world’s
remaining nondemocracies exist in countries that existing theory suggests are unlikely to democratize.27
According to a substantial body of research, stable democratization is unlikely in very poor countries with weak states (e.g., much
of sub-Saharan Africa), dynastic monarchies with oil and Western support (e.g., the Persian Gulf states), and singleparty regimes with strong states and high growth rates (China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore). Our own
research suggests that democratization is less likely in countries with very low linkage to the West (e.g., Central Asia,
much of Africa) and in regimes born of violent revolution (China, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, Laos, North Korea). If we take seriously
these lessons generated by several decades of research, relatively few countries today could be considered true democratic underperformers. While the recent
stagnation in the overall number of democracies in the world may be normatively displeasing, it is entirely
consistent with existing theory. Why, then, has the lack of democratic expansion since the mid-2000s triggered so much pessimism and gloom? One reason
is the unfounded expectations raised by the collapse of communism. After the extraordinary events of 1989–91, many observers simply assumed that the wave of
democratic advances of the 1980s and 1990s would continue. Another reason for contemporary disappointment is excessive voluntarism. The early third-wave
democratizations dealt a powerful blow to [End Page 54] the classic structuralist theories that had predominated in the 1960s and 1970s. These theories emphasized the
social, economic, and cultural obstacles to democratization in the developing and communist worlds. Democratization
in countries like Bolivia, El
Salvador, Ghana, and Mongolia made it clear that democratization was possible anywhere. Yet this healthy
skepticism regarding overly structuralist analysis evolved into exaggerated voluntarism. Evidence that
structural factors such as wealth, low inequality, or a robust civil society are not necessary for democratization
led many observers to conclude that they are causally unimportant. In other words, the important lesson that
democratization can happen anywhere was taken by some observers to mean that it should happen
everywhere. There are simply no theoretical or empirical bases for such expectations. A wealth of research has shown that
structural factors such as level of development, inequality, economic performance, natural-resource wealth,
state capacity, strength of civil society, and ties to the West continue to powerfully affect the likelihood of
achieving and sustaining democracy. It is no coincidence that most of the world’s remaining non-democracies are clustered in the Middle East, subSaharan Africa, and the former Soviet Union. Many countries in these regions are characterized by multiple factors that
scholars have associated with authoritarianism. One may hope (and work) for democratization in countries
like Cambodia, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Libya, or Iraq, but expectations that democratization will occur in such
cases lack theoretical or empirical foundation. And the dashing of unfounded expectations should not be confused with democratic recession.
Democracy is resilient- it has remained stable through immense difficulty and no
risk of backsliding
Levitsky and Way 15 [Steven, Professor of Government at Harvard University; Lucan, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
Toronto; January, 15; “The Myth of Democratic Recession”; Project Muse; 07/05/15; jac]
Democracy’s Surprising Resilience Disappointment over the lack of democratization in countries where it is unlikely to emerge should not obscure the extraordinary
democratic achievements of the last quarter-century. When the Journal of Democracy was launched
in 1990, there were 38 developing and
postcommunist countries classified as Free by Freedom House. In 2014, that number stood at 60. As impressive as
the breadth of the third wave has been its robustness. At the time of the Journal of Democracy’s inaugural issue, newly democratic regimes in Latin America and Central
Europe were widely viewed as precarious. Scholars of democratization were skeptical that many of them would endure. In their classic book on transitions from
authoritarian rule, for example, Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter characterized Latin American cases as “uncertain democracies.”28 Likewise, few scholars
expected that the 1989 transitions in Central Europe would produce almost uniformly stable democratic regimes. Yet with a few short-lived exceptions (e.g., Peru 1992–
2000), the [End Page 55] democracies that emerged in South America and Central Europe have now survived for a quarter-century or more. Moreover, they survived
despite severe economic crises and radical economic reforms that many scholars believed were incompatible with democracy. Between 1990 and 2000, several other
Although some of these new
democracies were marked by deep racial or ethnic cleavages, they too proved strikingly robust. These patterns did not
change substantially after 2000. Democratic breakdowns remained rare, often short-lived, and generally unrepresentative
of broader trends. Although democracy retreated in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Venezuela, it survived in a range
of important middle-income countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, India,
Indonesia, Mexico, Poland, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, and Taiwan. Democracy also survived in
several countries with strikingly unfavorable conditions, including Benin, the Dominican Republic, El
Salvador, Ghana, Guyana, Mongolia, and Romania. These were countries with little or no democratic
tradition, weak states, high levels of poverty and inequality, and in some cases deeply divided societies. Yet
their democracies endured, and some of them are now more than two decades old. In several important countries,
democracy not only survived but strengthened during the 2000s. In Brazil, which suffered severe governability problems in the 1980s
important countries democratized, including Croatia, Ghana, Indonesia, Mexico, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, and Taiwan.
and early 1990s, the stability and quality of democracy improved markedly in the 2000s; in India, expanding rates of participation, particularly among poorer and lower-caste
citizens, have created an increasingly inclusionary democracy; in Chile, a 2005 constitutional reform eliminated remaining authoritarian enclaves and established full civilian
control over the military; in Croatia, Ghana, Mexico, and Taiwan, former authoritarian ruling parties returned to power and governed democratically—a critical step toward
consolidation. And in Colombia and Poland, democratic
institutions effectively checked the ambitions of autocratic-leaning
presidents (Alvaro Uribe in Colombia, Lech Kaczyński in Poland). These were major democratic successes, many of which
occurred in large and influential countries. Yet they received far less attention than democratic backsliding in
Thailand and Venezuela and nondemocratization in China. These successes suggest an alternative way of viewing the events of the 2000s. Over the last decade, several
global developments posed a serious threat to new democracies. These included the severe post-2008 [End Page 56] economic crisis in Western democracies, the declining
influence of the United States and the European Union, the growing power and self-confidence of China and Russia, and soaring oil prices. Yet the
number of
actual democratic breakdowns has been strikingly low. Arguably, then, the real story of the last decade is not
democracy’s “meltdown,” but rather its resilience in the face of a darkening geopolitical landscape. This resilience
merits further study. Understanding its sources may help democracy advocates to prepare for the day when the wolf of authoritarian resurgence does, in fact, arrive.
State Secrets Privilege Good Updates
SSP Maintains Detention / Rendition
The State Secrets Privilege used to maintain extraordinary renditions, and preventive
detention programs
Goldstein ’11 --- writer and commentator whose work has appeared in the Guardian, the Washington Post, Salon, the Nation and National Public Radio
(Nancy, “The US national security smokescreen,” The Guardian, 12/8/15, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/dec/08/us-national-securitysmokescreen
Ben Wizner, the litigation director for the ACLU's national security project, cheerfully admits that its April 2011 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for 23 of the
very same US State Department diplomatic cables we all read this time last year, when WikiLeaks released them to five newspapers including the Guardian, was "cheeky" – a
way to foreground the "absurdity of the US secrecy regime". And so it has. Nearly eight months after the original FOIA request, the State Department has finally released
… 11 cables. Federal censors have helpfully redacted them, making it easy to see, by a simple act of comparison (which the ACLU performs for us, here), precisely which
sections the State Department wants hidden. Missing are a dirty dozen cables the government refused to release – despite those cables having already been leaked, published
and analysed in virtually every major national and international media venue – again, because they were classified as secret or deemed to contain sensitive information.
Administration officials unleashed plenty of hyperbole and hysteria when the cables were first published. But it turned out that none of the information in them actually
endangered American citizens, allies or informants. They did, however, prove embarrassing for the US and many foreign leaders. Because it
turned out that
claims about national security were often an excuse to prevent us from seeing our government engaged in unethical,
unconstitutional and, sometimes, illegal practices. These ran the gamut from extraordinary renditions, detentions and torture to shaking down
other governments in an attempt to influence their political processes and tamper with their criminal justice systems. We learned that the same Obama
administration that had refused to pursue the perpetrators of the Bush torture regime at home had also tried
to put its thumbs on the scales of justice in Spain – aggressively attempting to prevent a counter-terrorism judge
from trying the senior legal minds of the Bush administration for their part in the torture of detainees at
Guantánamo Bay. We learned about the US attempt to scuttle the case of German citizen Khaled el-Masri, the greengrocer mistaken for a senior al-Qaida official.
He was kidnapped, tortured, drugged, beaten and thrown into Afghanistan's CIA-run Salt Pit prison, until – oops – they realised they had the wrong guy and dumped him in
the Albanian outback. In public, Munich prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 13 suspected CIA operatives involved in his abduction and torture, and Angela Merkel's
office called for an investigation. In private, the German justice ministry and foreign ministry both made it clear to the US that they were not interested in pursuing the case,
emboldening the US to refuse to arrest or hand over the agents. If the first part of the ACLU's agenda in asking for the 23 already-leaked cables is to highlight what it calls a
the Bush and Obama administrations abuse the
state secrets privilege to keep illegal programs from being judicially reviewed. When the ACLU challenged the CIA on behalf of
"penchant for excessive secrecy in defiance of all reason", the second is to spotlight the way in which
el-Masri in 2005, a judge dismissed the case. The US government did not deny that he was wrongfully kidnapped. Instead, it successfully argued that his case be dismissed
because litigation of his claims would expose state secrets and jeopardise American security. This despite the fact that, as el-Masri pointed out, "President
Bush has
told the world about the CIA's detention program, and even though my allegations have been corroborated by eyewitnesses and other
evidence." First the Bush administration and then the Obama administration successfully evoked the state secrets
privilege to prevent the ACLU from filing a federal lawsuit against Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc, the folks who helped the CIA fly extraordinary
rendition victims to secret sites where they were detained, tortured and interrogated. Again, the government claimed that further litigation
would undermine national security interests, even though much of the evidence needed to try the case was
already available to the public. And again, it appears to have won. In the hall of mirrors that the US security regime has become, information that is not
officially acknowledged cannot be used to hold government officials responsible in the courts. And an administration that can evade charges of misconduct, including
torture, by hiding behind state secrets claims, even when all the details are publicly known, becomes the guardian of its own liability. That's bad news. Transparency and
accountability are the oxygen of democracy. But don't hold your breath waiting for this administration to respond to requests for either one.
Detention Good
Guantanamo is necessary – key to effective war on terror
Spencer et al, 5
(Jack Spencer oversees Heritage Foundation research on a wide range of domestic economic and trade issues Vice President for the Institute for Economic Freedom and
Opportunity.
Before his promotion to Vice President in January 2015, Spencer served as Director of the Roe Institute, where he spearheaded research initiatives on federal spending,
taxes, regulation, energy and environment. Previously, he specialized in nuclear energy issues in both the domestic and global arenas as Heritage’s senior research fellow in
nuclear energy policy. Spencer was Heritage’s go-to expert on nuclear waste management, technological advances, industry subsidies and international approaches to nuclear
energy, Ariel Cohen PhD, The Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation, James Phillips is the Senior Research Fellow for Middle
Eastern Affairs at the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation. He has written extensively on Middle Eastern issues and
international terrorism since 1978.
Although his prime research interests are Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Persian Gulf security issues, and Middle Eastern terrorism, Phillips also has written numerous articles on
the Arab-Israeli conflict, Islamic radicalism, Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, and Turkey. He
has testified numerous times before congressional committees on these issues.
Phillips wrote papers that predicted the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the Soviet defeat there, and the dangers arising from U.S. withdrawal from engagement in that
country, which contributed to the rise of the Taliban and the export of terrorism and Islamic radicalism. In 2000, he called for a comprehensive U.S. policy to support the
Afghan opposition and overthrow the ultra-radical Taliban regime, rather than narrowly focusing on Osama bin Laden, who was then based in Afghanistan . Since the Sept.
11 attacks, he has written extensively on the global war against terrorism and its implications for U.S. policy in the Middle East .
Phillips has frequently been interviewed on a broad range of subjects by U.S. and foreign media, including ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, FOX News, CNN, CSPAN, MSNBC, Sky News, Al Arabiya, Al Hurra, BBC Television, BBC World Service Radio, National Public Radio, and the Voice of America. He also has published
numerous articles in American newspapers, including The New York Times, Washington Times, Newsday , New York Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Baltimore Sun,
Chicago Tribune, and USA Today .
Phillips is a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, a prestigious bipartisan group dedicated to winning the war on terrorism. He also is a member of the Board
of Editors of Middle East Quarterly , the leading conservative journal of Middle Eastern policy studies.
Before joining Heritage in 1979, Phillips was a Research Fellow at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress and a former Joint Doctoral Research
Fellow at the East-West Center . He received a Bachelor's Degree in International Relations from Brown University as well as a Master's Degree and a M.A.L.D. in
International Security Studies from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, No Good Reason To Close Gitmo, Heritage Foundation,
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2005/06/no-good-reason-to-close-gitmo, TMP)
While billions are victim to the regular abuse and tyranny of governments such as those of Sudan and China, much
of the world's media and nonprofit "human rights" resources focus on the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Not a single
person has been killed at the facility since it opened, and yet the drumbeat of criticism grows by the day. Criticism and even calls to
close the base have come not just from President Bush's critics, but also from members of his own party. But a rhetorical barrage is no reason to shut a base. Those
who would close the detainment center have failed to articulate a reasonable rationale for doing so.
They also overlook a major challenge: there are few options, right now, to replace the detainment center. There are, however, many reasons to keep it open.
1. The function of Guantanamo Bay will be served somewhere. Closing Guantanamo will not relieve the
United States from needing a facility to house and interrogate suspected terrorists. Should Guantanamo close, the
government would have to relocate these functions. If there are problems with the detainment center, those problems should be transparently
addressed. The Pentagon has taken great pains to ensure that all appropriate domestic and international agencies
have adequate access to the facilities and has been responsive to credible allegations of abuse. Unlike in the
tyrannical or regimes of North Korea or China, for example, alleged abuses of prisoners are investigated and those
found guilty are held responsible. Moreover, there are established avenues by which Congress, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Red
Crescent, and the media exercise differing degrees of oversight in Guantanamo. Changing locations now would lead to a transition period during which these organizations
would have less access than they do today.
2. Closing Guantanamo Bay to placate critics is unjustified. It would be naive for the United States to
assume that the same unsubstantiated criticisms that now surround the Guantanamo Bay facility would not
be transported to the next one. The facility itself and what happens at it do not drive its critics, exactly; rather, their activism is motivated by how the
United States and its allies are conducting the war on terrorism in general. Critics of the war do not distinguish between the two. To appease the critics would require
policymakers should be aware that conceding on
Guantanamo, given the broad context of critics' complaints, would be tantamount to conceding the war
on terrorism itself.
changing how the United States fights the war on terrorism, which is unacceptable. American
statistics and rhetoric taken from the
broader campaign against terrorism to describe the actions and facility at Guantanamo Bay.[1] At one point in
the interview, he argued that at least 28 individuals have died in U.S. custody as a result of criminal
homicide. None of these deaths, however, occurred at Guantanamo. The implication was that whether these actions took place at
For instance, on a recent television interview a representative of a "human rights" organization manipulated
Guantanamo was irrelevant and that actions and events occurring at any point or place in the war on terrorism may be generalized to any specific place or event.
But the details do matter. According
to the Department of Defense, "The department works closely with the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and representatives visit detainees in our charge at their
discretion. There have been 187 members of Congress and congressional staff who have visited Guantanamo
to include (sic) 11 Senators, 77 Representatives and 99 Congressional staff members. There have also been some 400 media
visits consisting of more than 1,000 national and international journalists."[2] Even skeptics must admit that it would be hard to carry out any systematic abuse of detainees
under such intense and constant scrutiny.
3. Releasing the detainees now is not a realistic option. While holding detainees indefinitely is not likely,
releasing them now is not a realistic option. Many detainees released from Guantanamo Bay returned to
their home countries only to resume terrorist attacks against civilians. According to The Washington Post, at least 10
of the 202 detainees released from Guantanamo were later captured or killed while fighting U.S. and coalition
forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan.[3] Mark Jacobson, a former special assistant for detainee policy at the Department of Defense, estimated that as
many as 25 of the 202 had taken up arms again.
For example, Mullah Shahzada,
a former Taliban field commander who apparently convinced officials at
Guantanamo that he had sworn off violence, was freed in 2003, and immediately rejoined the Taliban. He was
subsequently killed in battle in the summer of 2004 in Afghanistan. Maulvi Ghafar, a Taliban commander captured in 2001, was
released in February 2004. He was subsequently killed in a shootout with Afghan government forces in September 2004. Abdullah Mesud, a Pakistani who was captured
fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, bragged that he was able to hide his true identity for two years at Guantanamo before being released in March 2004. He was
considered a low-risk security threat because of his artificial leg. After returning to Pakistan, Mesud led a group of Islamic militants-part of a campaign against the Pakistani
government-that kidnapped two Chinese engineers working on a dam. One of the engineers and several militants were subsequently killed in a government raid.[4] Mesud is
still at large.
Clearly, the detainees
kept at Guantanamo pose a significant threat to Americans, U.S. allies, and
civilians in their home countries. This threat must be weighed long and hard before any decision is made to
release an individual detainee or to change the system under which detainees are held.
4. Changing the physical location of the detainees is not legally significant. Neither the detainees nor the
United States stand to gain significantly in the legal arena if the detention center at Guantanamo Bay is closed.
The "illegal enemy combatants" held at the facility have access to U.S. courts (as held by the Supreme Court in Rasul v. Bush[5]).
Detainees have been making much use of their access to legal counsel, as evidenced, for example, by a November 2004 District Court opinion holding that the Bush
Administration had overstepped its authority in several areas.
Moving the detainees within the continental United States will not give them additional rights because
Guantanamo Bay is already considered sufficiently under U.S. control to provide rights to them.[6] After the Rasul
opinion, the detainees and the U.S. government will have the same legal advantages and disadvantages within the U.S. as they do at Guantanamo Bay. There are no
compelling legal reasons to move the detainees and close Guantanamo Bay.
5. Guantanamo Bay is no Gulag. Blinded by hatred of America and U.S. policies and seeking to shift the blame away from terrorist crimes, Amnesty International's
Secretary-General Irene Zubeida Khan recently called Guantanamo Bay detention camp the "Gulag of our times." She added, according to some reports, "Ironic that this
should happen as we mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz."It is not clear whether this was a statement of deep ignorance or deliberate deception. Ms.
Khan, though, is not alone in her criticism. Amnesty's Washington director, William Schulz, has said that Guantanamo's terrorist detention facility is "similar at least in
character, if not in size, to what happened in the Gulag."
Comparing Guantanamo's tropical Caribbean detention facility with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's frozen concentration camp empire makes about as much sense as calling
the London police "Nazis." Amnesty's gall in abusing the dead and trivializing their suffering for its own political purposes is appalling. Gulag (from "Main Directorate of
Camps" in Russian) began as an extermination machine for political opponents. It quickly became a meat-grinder in which tens of millions of innocent Soviets and citizens
of other countries perished. Islamists may manipulate some anti-American elements in the human rights community whom they consider, to borrow Lenin's phrase, "useful
idiots." This strategy has been surprisingly successful, perhaps due to the political inclinations of those who lead the major human rights groups in the U.S. today. For
whatever reason, Amnesty and Ms. Khan are ignoring real threats to human rights, especially those of women in the Islamic world, and are playing into the hands of
terrorists who are hell-bent on destroying the West. The human rights community's bizarre priorities are no reason, however, to close the detention facility at Guantanamo
Bay.
Conclusion
The debate over whether or not to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay is about much more then that facility itself. It
is a debate over how the
United States and its allies are conducting the war on terrorism. If the United States concedes that its
actions in Guantanamo Bay are such that they warrant closing the facility, how can the U.S. defend keeping
other facilities open? And if the United States cannot house and interrogate suspected terrorists, how can it
prosecute the Global War on Terrorism? The issue of whether the Gitmo detention facility should be closed should not be used as a proxy
referendum for the Bush Administration's war on terrorism.
Jack Spencer is Senior Policy Analyst for Defense and National Security, Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow, Jim Phillips is Research Fellow in Middle Eastern
Studies, and Alane Kochems is a Research Assistant, in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Guantanamo is good – treatment is humane and new facility would ignite more
extremism
Rogan, 12
(Tom Rogan is writer currently living in London, England. He recently completed a law course and holds a BA in War Studies from King’s College London and an MSc in
Middle East Politics from SOAS, London, “Why Guantanamo Bay should remain open”, The Daily Caller, http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/24/why-guantanamo-bayshould-remain-open/ TMP)
The recent death (a suspected suicide) of a prisoner at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has helped reignite the debate over whether the facility should be
closed. It’s a complex issue. However, I think Guantanamo should remain open.
As I see it, there are two major considerations that should drive the debate
whether keeping the facility open is the best way for the U.S. government to protect the American people.
about Guantanamo’s future. The first is
I think it is. It
offers several compelling advantages over the alternatives. For one, the detainees are guarded by
well-trained MPs, isolated from support and held in a place from which escape would be nearly impossible.
Remember, many Guantanamo detainees are resourceful, ideologically committed enemies of the United States
who have stated that they want to maim and kill Americans, so it’s important that they’re kept in a facility that’s as secure as possible.
Closing the Guantanamo facility and opening a new detention facility in the U.S. would pose profound
security risks. The new facility would become a beacon for extremists and an expensive, highly
complex challenge to secure. Just look at what happened when the Obama administration attempted to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York City
(an effort which it has since abandoned). And while many politicians love the idea of a domestic detention facility, few want one in their backyard.
Moreover, over
the years the government has invested an enormous amount of money in expanding the
Guantanamo facility’s support base. Inmates now have access to a well-stocked library, gym and soccer field.
These outlets don’t simply provide humane incarceration conditions and encourage rehabilitation; they also
directly serve our national security interests. If the detainees were transferred out of Guantanamo, the benefit of these outlets would be lost.
The second consideration that should drive the Guantanamo debate is whether keeping the facility open is
the best way to ensure justice for the detainees as well as the victims of terrorism
At the core here is a critical legal question: Are the Guantanamo detainees suspected illegal combatants subject to military authority, or are they suspected criminals and thus
subject to the civilian criminal court system? I support the prior understanding. The Guantanamo
detainees were captured while
engaged in armed hostilities against the United States. Their objectives in fighting the United States were
manifestly political — and their chosen mechanisms of action were undoubtedly military. Indeed, as criminalapproach advocates often neglect to mention, a substantial number of former Guantanamo detainees have returned to the battlefield.
Put simply, operating as part of organized groups like al Qaida, these detainees were at war. From my perspective, if the Guantanamo detainees are
criminal suspects, laws of war cannot exist in a compatible reality.
Next, let’s consider Guantanamo’s procedural justice. In the past, many Guantanamo detainees haven’t been given speedy trials. However, with President Obama having
finally re-authorized the military commission process, more progress toward bringing detainees to trial will be made. That progress will illustrate America’s commitment to
the rule of law and undercut negative perceptions about Guantanamo. Contrary
to popular opinion, anger toward Guantanamo
amongst Islamic populations is not driven by an inherent discomfort with military commissions, but rather by
the perception that Guantanamo is a black hole of permanent, un-reviewed detention.
Ultimately, the
detention facility at Guantanamo Bay provides an imperfect solution to a highly complex problem.
While 82% of all Guantanamo detainees have already been released, wherever possible the U.S. government should expedite this
process, repatriating those who are no longer believed to pose a substantial threat. At the same time, the accused should face military commissions. In the end, though,
considering the many interests at stake and absence of good alternatives, I believe that the Guantanamo detention
facility must remain open for the foreseeable future.
AT: SSP Misused / Overused
SSP is effective for national security – and multiple barriers check executive abuse
Nichols, 8 (Carl J Nichols served in the Department of Justice as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division's Federal Programs Branch, “
speech from, [Senate Hearing 110-923] [From the U.S. Government Printing Office] S. Hrg. 110-923 EXAMINING THE STATE SECRETS PRIVILEGE:
PROTECTING NATIONAL SECURITY WHILE PRESERVING ACCOUNTABILITY”, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-110shrg53360/html/CHRG110shrg53360.htm, TMP)
Mr. Nichols. Thank you very much. Chairman Leahy, Ranking Member Specter, and members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify concerning the
important subject of today's hearing, the state secrets privilege. Since March 2005, I have served in the Department of Justice as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for
the Civil Division's Federal Programs Branch. In that capacity I've been involved in the decision-making process regarding whether, and when, the executive branch will
assert the state secrets privilege in civil litigation. As the Committee is aware, the
state secrets privilege is a well-established legal
doctrine that plays a vital role in protecting the national security by ensuring that civil litigation does not
result in the disclosure of information that, if made public, would cause serious harm to the United States. This
privilege plays an important role in times of war and times of peace, has been asserted by the executive
branch, and has been recognized by the courts, since the 19th century, and is subject to review by the judiciary. While the
judiciary plays an important role in assessing any assertion of the state secrets privilege, the privilege does
have a constitutional pedigree. The Supreme Court made that clear in United States v. Nixon when it stated that ``a claim of privilege on
the ground that information constitutes military or diplomatic secrets''--that is,--the state secrets privilege-necessarily involves areas of Article 2 duties assigned to the President. It is important to emphasize-- however--I think it is very important to emphasize
that although the state secrets privilege emanates from the President's constitutional authority, the privilege
is neither limitless nor unchecked. It is also important to emphasize that the executive branch asserts the privilege
selectively, and when doing so details the specific harms to national security That would occur if sensitive
information is publicly revealed, and it is important to emphasize that not every assertion of the state
secrets privilege results in the dismissal of a pending case. Any assertion of the state secrets privilege
involves a rigorous procedural and judicial process to ensure that the privilege is not, in the words of the Supreme
Court, lightly invoked. To begin, several formal requirements apply to the privilege assertion. The privilege can be
invoked only by the United States, only through a formal claim of privilege, only by the head of the
department which has control of the matter, and only after that official has given actual personal
consideration to the question. Meeting these requirements typically requires several layers of substantive departmental
review and coordination, an important part of which is the agency head's--often Cabinet official's--personal review of various materials, including the
declaration or declarations that he or she must sign, under penalty of perjury, in order to assert the privilege. Once it has been decided that it is
appropriate to assert the privilege in a particular case, the judicial branch plays a vital role in
assessing whether the privilege will be upheld. Specifically, the court must decide whether the invocation of
the privilege is predicated upon a reasonable danger that disclosure of the information will harm national
security. In making that determination, a court often reviews not just publicly available materials, but also classified declarations and other information providing
further detail for the court's review. A common misperception is that classified information is never, or only rarely,
shared with the courts and that the courts are therefore asked to uphold the privilege based on trust and nonspecific claims of national security. That is simply inconsistent with our practice. In every case of which I am
aware, we have made available to the courts both unclassified and classified declarations that justify, often in
considerable detail, the bases for the privilege assertions.Once a court has concluded that the information
is privileged, the information is removed from the case and the court plays a second and equally important
role. It must decide whether, and if so how, the case can proceed without that information. Sometimes a case must
be dismissed because it is obvious that the case could not proceed without information that would
harm the United States. However, in other cases, and contrary to a popular misconception, the privileged
information is peripheral and the case can proceed without it. Thus, rather than playing a passive role in
accepting at face value blanket executive assertions of the state secrets privilege, courts play a vital role in
determining whether the privilege will be upheld and adjudicating how and when cases can proceed
if sensitive national security information is excluded. These dual roles underline the crucial role of the judiciary in checking assertions
of the state secrets privilege and assuring against the disclosure of national security that would cause serious harm to the United States.Mr. Chairman, I would like to
conclude with the following point. While
there may be disagreement as to when this privilege ought to be asserted, rigorous
executive branch safeguards and judicial review ensure that it is invoked and upheld only in
circumstances necessary to protect the national security of the United States. On this point there should be no
disagreement: such a privilege is not only desirable, but necessary to avert serious harm to national security. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the
Committee. I would be pleased to answer any questions you may have.
Safeguards prevent illegitimate overuse of state secrets privilege
Biskupic, 11
(1/17/2011, Joan, USA Today, “Cases challenge use of 'state secrets' shield ; Justices get rare chance to address exemption,” Factiva)
WASHINGTON -- In a post-9/11 world, the
federal government increasingly has invoked a "state secrets" argument to
keep sensitive information out of court, notably in disputes over warrantless surveillance and the secret
transfer of prisoners to foreign countries for interrogation.
Now, for the first time since the 2001 terrorist attacks and the first since the Supreme Court recognized the state-secrets exemption in 1953, the justices will hear a dispute
testing some dimensions of the privilege intended to protect national security.
The paired cases to be argued Tuesday involve a long-running, otherwise dry defense-contracting conflict over a canceled stealth aircraft. Yet they offer the justices a rare
chance to address the controversial privilege used to shut down litigation.
Most broadly at stake is the government's ability to shield information or win dismissal of a case based on a claim that the airing of sensitive material would hurt national
security.
"We hope the court will take the opportunity to revisit and reform the privilege that has become more important in this era," says Sharon Bradford Franklin, a lawyer with
the non-profit Washington, D.C.-based Constitution Project, which submitted a brief siding with the contractors that protests use of the state-secrets privilege.
Yet the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group that has challenged National Security Agency wiretap programs, has entered the dispute
(not on either side) to urge the justices to take a limited view and not delve into whether constitutional grounds exists for the state-secret privilege.
For years, the larger debate over the state-secrets privilege has played out in lower courts, in Congress and in the Bush and Obama administrations. Democrats. led by Sen.
Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., have proposed legislation to set uniform procedures for such cases and require judges faced with state-secret claims
to review in private evidence that the government says should be shielded.
More accountability sought
The Obama team generally has carried over Bush administration state-secrets arguments in lower-court cases.
But in September 2009, it issued new overall guidelines to try to ensure greater accountability in the use of the
privilege. Attorney General Eric Holder said it should be "invoked only when necessary and in the narrowest
way possible."
One high-profile case related to the issue has just arrived at the Supreme Court, although the justices are not likely to announce until early spring whether they would accept
Mohamed v. Jeppesen DataPlan.
It was brought by five men who say they were kidnapped by the CIA and flown to other countries by Jeppesen DataPlan, a subsidiary of Boeing, for harsh interrogation,
including torture.
A deeply split U.S. appeals court dismissed the case on state-secret grounds after the government intervened. The ACLU, which represents the men, filed an appeal last
month at the Supreme Court, arguing that the government is improperly using state-secrets privilege "to deny justice to torture victims." Responses from Jeppesen and the
U.S. government are due to the court in February.
In the dispute justices will hear this week, the paired cases of General Dynamics Corp. v. U.S. and Boeing Co. v. U.S. began with a quarrel over development of the A-12
Avenger aircraft. Unlike in the usual state-secrets situations, where the government is being sued, the government started this case.
The Navy contracted in 1988 with General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas Corp. (now Boeing) to develop the A-12, but after delays and conflicts over costs,
terminated the contract for default in 1991 and sought return of more than $1 billion paid. The defense giants brought their own claim, arguing they were stalled by the
government's reluctance to turn over secret technology needed for the project.
The government said that the main differences centered on costs, rather than access to certain information, yet invoked the state-secrets privilege to prevent disclosure of
what it deemed highly sensitive information.
Safeguards asserted
As the case wended its way through courts for nearly two decades, the companies contended that by raising
the state-secrets privilege and limiting access to documents, the government prevented them from proving
they were not responsible for delays and should not have to repay the money. Lower courts ruled for the government.
General Dynamics and Boeing say that while there
a litigation advantage.
are times the state-secrets privilege is legitimately invoked, in this case it was used for
Department of Justice lawyers, led by acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, defend the government's use of
the state-secrets privilege in the A-12 dispute and insist that sufficient "safeguards against capricious
invocation of the state-secrets privilege" exist.
No outside groups have joined the government's side. With the contractors, along with the Constitution Project, are business groups including the Chamber of Commerce.
They say the federal government should not be able to invoke the privilege to its financial gain.
Carter Phillips, who represents the chamber and will argue the case for the two big contractors, said, "What distinguishes this case from others is that the government ... is
trying to use the privilege as a mechanism to take away a contractor's ability to defend itself. This is not using it as a shield. This is unquestionably using it as a sword."