Engineering Revolution. The Paradox of Democracy Promotion in Serbia

Marlene Spoerri has written a wonderfully clear analysis of democracy promotion, based on the case of Serbia. Soon after mass protests and the resignation of Slobodan Milošević in 2000, Serbia became a ‘democracy promotion legend’ (2). Scholars and policy makers alike assumed that ‘democracy aid could drive revolutionary change and that the lessons learned from Serbia were broadly applicable to other authoritarian and post-authoritarian contexts’ (173).

Questioning the self-congratulatory accounts of donor nations about their magically effective democracy-promotion programs, Spoerri explores whether such programs actually support and deepen democracy. To do so, she interviewed over 150 ‘activists and politicians, political party aid professionals, diplomats, and scholars’ and analyzed previously unreleased donor reports and FOIA-requested^[1] CIA documents (2). While continuing to agree with democracy promotion, Spoerri finds that its varied and often contradictory goals can undermine democracy, as it did in Serbia.

The first substantive chapter lays out the logic behind democracy promotion, and specifically foreign aid, to supportpolitical parties. This chapter in itself is a valuable resource that would be useful in a variety of courses. The following chapters examine aid to Serbian political parties, primarily by the United States and Germany, in the 1990s and then in the 2000s. While she periodically mentions other countries and a range of agencies, Spoerri focuses on the activities of specific agencies: the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and the International Republican Institute (IRI) in the United States; the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) and the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung (FNS) in Germany. In the beginning these countries did not provide aid to any political party. Instead, since they viewed the Serbian opposition as weak and problematic, they met primarily with Milošević and neglected the opposition. Then, in 1997, they began to provide aid to the opposition, with the specific goal of removing Milošević from power. After 2000, there was a democratic resurgence, followed by corruption, disorganization, and the rise of far-right parties. The countries supporting democracy promotion did not want to assist these parties and, in fact, organized increasingly anti-democratic activities to keep far-right parties out of power.

Spoerri argues that these donor countries would have improved democracy in Serbia if aid had been provided much earlier than 1997, and if in the post-2000 era they had limited themselves to ‘standard democracy aid’ (75), rather than partisan and polarizing tactics. However, given Spoerri’s account of the undemocratic activities of the US and other donors in the name of ‘democracy promotion,’ I am surprised that she endorses democracy promotion at all.

Spoerri’s discoveries about the actual activities of democracy-promotion organizations are highly significant.Here is just a sample of these ‘democracy promotion’ activities: providing opposition parties with cash through covert means; determining a common presidential candidate for the opposition; providing technical assistance through the Center for International Private Enterprise to develop liberal economic reforms; distributing heating oil to cities governed by opposition parties; paying tens of millions of dollars to keep the Montenegrin government afloat; reorganizing the Serbian political-ideological terrain with a clearly defined center-left and center-right; celebrating low voter turnout among far-right voters; encouraging parties to take polarizing positions; and limiting parties to speaking about pre-determined thematic agendas, such as support for the European Union, and not about other important issues. Other scholars of Eastern Europe—such as Agnes Gagyi and Zsuzsa Gille—have argued that similar polarizing and censoring activities have left only the racist, nationalist far-right to make a clear critique of neoliberal political parties and policies, not only in Serbia but also in other parts of Eastern Europe and, I would add, in the US as well.

While at times her analysis is quite critical, at other times it feels like propaganda for the democracy-promotion industry. This is in part because the book does not have a clear method to evaluate systematically whether democracy-promotion programs have been effective or whether the Serbian political sphere has become more, or less, democratic. Rather, the analysis rests, often uncritically, on quotations from interviews. For example, as evidence of the effectiveness of some forms of democracy promotion, Spoerri writes: ‘A former resident director of NDI who went on to work in Georgia maintains that NDI “had a significant impact on the development of Serbia’s democracy – not only in terms of parties but also civil society, development of youth and women, and the electoral process”’ (149).

Spoerri periodically accepts the judgments of her interviewees without comment or further analysis: for instance, that the Roma and Albanian parties, despite the efforts of the NDI and IRI, failed electorally because they ‘often proved more interested in securing access to state coffers and selfenrichment than in best representing their communities’ (156). It is one of the shortcomings of her analysis that she fails to interpret the claims made by her interviewees more contextually and critically.

Spoerri criticizes the blurring of democracy promotion, foreign-policy interests, and covert activities organized by intelligence agencies, as well as the sanctions on and the NATO bombing of Serbia, because they undermined democracy. In contrast, she supports ‘standard democratic aid,’ which remains undefined in the book. Yet it might be asked why political-party assistance became overt policy, and how it could ever be free of foreign-policy interests. Spoerri limits democracy promotion to those activities organized by, what some may call, mainstream US and European democracy-promotion agencies, especially the NDI, IRI, FES, and FNS. One might think of many other ways that political parties are strengthened. Have successful farright political parties in Serbia also received political-party assistance through other avenues, such as through racist, nationalist political parties from abroad working transnationally?

Engineering Revolution is very readable and demonstrates the deeply problematic nature of political-party assistance. Such a book could be used productively in undergraduate or graduate courses to explore development, the Color revolutions, or democracy promotion more generally.