Not promoting, not exporting: India’s democracy assistance

Ian Hall, orfonline.org

Excerpt:

India is commonly — and rightly — considered as a reluctant democracy promoter. But while sceptical about the motives behind Western attempts to promote democracy and about the effects of their democracy promotion efforts, India has since the mid-2000s moved warily to involve itself in “democracy assistance”. This article argues that New Delhi has engaged in these activities in the context of a wider shift in strategy, in parallel with the forging of a strategic partnership with the United States and with growing concern about managing China’s influence in South Asia. It observes that India’s foreign policy elite still has considerable doubts about democracy promotion, both in terms of its inconsistency with basic international norms, especially state sovereignty, non-interference, and non-intervention, and in terms of its patchy recent record of success. It argues that India’s approach to democracy assistance, which involves a blend of multilateral and bilateral initiatives, most aimed at South Asia, and most in parallel with better-funded economic development projects, reflects these various pressures and concerns. ...

Democracy promotion covers a wide range of practices in contemporary international relations that aim to extend the institutions and norms of democratic government to hitherto non-democratic states. They include regime change by military intervention or political subversion, diplomatic engagement with elites, the manipulation of economic incentives, the use of public diplomacy or propaganda, and the setting of conditions in international agreements. ...

For a decade or so, democracy promotion through traditional and public diplomacy, aid and education programmes, and the wielding of economic sticks and carrots mostly paid off. Between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it helped consolidate the “third wave” of democratisation that saw political transitions from authoritarian rule to nascent democracy in Eastern Europe and significant parts of Africa and Asia, including in major states like South Korea and Indonesia . ...

By the 1970s ... India’s influence had deliquesced. Since then, successive governments have sought to reclaim the idea of India as a normative power, with pushes to improve its public diplomacy to acquire and use soft power . ...

India’s support for spreading and consolidating democracy internationally and in South Asia has a distinctive style best assessed in comparison with the better known US and EU models. The first — the US model — blends a “bottom-up” approach of nurturing pro-democratic civil society groups with the use of some coercive instruments wielded against anti-democratic elements in target states, with “top-down” diplomatic, economic, or even military pressure . ...This approach includes a range of activities – funding pro-democracy NGOs directly or through privately-funded foundations, providing education and training programs, organising visits and study tours for parliamentarians to Washington or other democratic state national capitals, providing legal advice on constitutions and legislation, targeting aid and assistance packages, and running pro-democracy public diplomacy campaigns – and a range of actors, mostly coordinated by the State Department and US Agency for International Development (USAID) . ...