Legitimizing Polyarchy Canada's Contribution To "Democracy Promotion"

Promoting Democracy through ‘Overt Operations’ “We’re engaged in almost missionary work…We’ve seen what the Socialists do for each other. We’ve seen what the Communists do for each other. And now we’ve come along, and we have a broadly democratic movement, a force for democracy.” So said Keith Schuette, head of the international arm of the U.S. Republican Party as he described the self-perception of his fellow practitioners in the emerging field of ‘democracy promotion’ to the New York Times in mid-1986.(1) The National Endowment for Democracy was created in 1982 by a "handful of powerful people," including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who undertook "skillful manoeuvrings"(2) to gain bipartisan acceptance for its vigourous pursuit of “an aggressive American policy in fostering a move toward democracy in the third world.”(3) Gone were the days of politically untenable support for military dictatorships, a strategy that was rigourously pursued throughout the region for most of the Cold War period by the U.S. security and intelligence apparatus. This period saw over two dozen separate U.S. military and Central Intelligence Agency-led interventions throughout Latin America.(4) David K. Shipler of the New York Times wrote that NED’s “program resembles the aid given by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s to bolster pro-American political groups.” Making once-covert activities overt had the benefit of “lending a novel flexibility to Government-aided efforts abroad, for doing what official agencies have never been comfortable doing in public.”(5) This important point was reiterated five years later in a Washington Post article, which characterized the NED as “The sugar daddy of overt operations.” One of the NED’s founders, Allen Weinstein, famously told the Post “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”(6) Writing in Covert Action Quarterly, James Ciment and Immanual Ness describe the nuance of NED’s interventions: “[T]he NED – though its funding remains a fraction of that still devoted to covert action by the CIA – offers a more subtle, sophisticated, and politically acceptable method for furthering U.S. foreign policy interests. Where the Cold War-era CIA once crushed genuinely democratic movements…the NED attempts to coopt them.”(7) A product of the waning Cold War period, the NED’s activities, which require State Department approval and are privy to Congressional oversight, helped “to reduce the fear of some leaders in Washington that friendly military dictatorships may give way to democratically elected governments prone to communist influence.” (8) Investigative journalist-turned-social theorist William I. Robinson has written about NED activities for nearly two decades. In his path-breaking analysis of U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era, Robinson describes the NED as being on the vanguard of ‘the new intervention,’: “The creation of the National Endowment for Democracy was part and parcel of the resurgence of intervention abroad and the development of low-intensity conflict doctrines.”(9) http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=102&ItemID=11290

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