Exploring Foreign Intervention and Reasons for it's Failure to Establish Democracy

Explanatory blog post on the reading "Forced to be free? Why foreign imposed regime change rarely leads to democratization." By Alexander B. Downes and Jonathan Monten.

Downes and Monten explores the issue of forced intervention and the likelihood of successful democratisation. With successful examples such as Japan and West Germany after World War II, and very unsuccessful examples of Iraq and Afghanistan more recently, there is concern in the international community that forced interventions are no longer effective.

When exploring past studies, Downes and Monten criticise past studies for not taking into account favourable conditions. Therefore, an important question in their work is "when democratization outcomes after intervention are the product of deliberate policy choice by interveners or a function of how hospital local conditions are to democratic change?"

Empirical finding suggest that there is little benefit of intervention and that successful democratisation depends on both strategy of the intervening country and domestic conditions. The conclusions on these findings are as follows:

1. The targeting of individual leaders is not sufficient for democratisation
2. Interveners need to focus on concrete, pro-democratic reforms with sponsored elections,when the state is in good conditions for democratisation to be successful
3. It is almost impossible for democratisation in unfavourable conditions when the state is           "economically underdeveloped, ethnically heterogamous, or lack prior experience with representative government"

Downes and Monten look at three viewpoints regarding intervention and the spread of democracy. These are optimists, pessimists and conditionalists.

The optimists are associated with people like George W Bush and a neoconservatist idelogy. Neoconservatism suggests that intervening states have a 'moral imperative' and 'strategic interest' in democratisation. Further there is a belief that democracy is transferable onto any culture. This has been criticised by the authors as democratisation has a 25% success rate.

The pessimists are associated with studies bone by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and George Down. They argue that there has been no "meaningful degree of democratisation" because interveners have no incentive to build democracies and it is cheaper and more efficient for interveners just to impose dictators that suit their needs. The authors criticise this argue by saying that there is plenty of incentive for democracy, and in this study intervention definition was too broad so their results were skewed.

The conditionalists argue that there are factors for successful democratisations. This is supported by a study by James Dobbins who argues that the most important variable is the effort by the United States and the international community. He cited the case of Germany who had the most troops per capita during the democratisation process. A study by James Meernki also states that pro-democracy intentions lead to higher success rates. Many different works cite target state conditions as also being important, focussing on wealth, social divisions, prior democracy and internal and external threats.  These studies have also been criticised by the author for being too short, US focussed or too focussed on a single study like Iraq.

The core of Downes and Monten's argument is summarised as "interveners ... must undertake democratic reforms, but these steps will falter where important preconditions for democracy are absent." They outline this argument into a two-step theory.

1. There must be favourable conditions. These are economic growth, lack of social and ethnic diversity and tension and experience with representative government.

 2. Intervener's strategy must be to overthrow and replace the state's institutions.

Downes and Monten, with in depth research and data analysis came to a few conclusions. Currently, policy makers are too optimistic about the democratisation process. They found that leadership foreign imposed regime change (i.e. changing the leader of the target state) had no effect on democratisation whether or not the conditions were favourable for democracy. They also found that institutional foreign imposed regime change (i.e. changing the institutions of the target state) was reliant on the favourable conditions of democracy. This conclusion is in line with 'the conditionalists' viewpoint outlined above.

Downes and Monten state that decapitation is an ineffective strategy that interveners should not use. This is because data proves it does not lead to democratisation and may increased chaos or trigger civil war. The authors refer to Syria as an example where this should not happen. 'Quick and easy regime change' does not happen by overthrowing a leader. There really is no quick and easy regime change. Further, Syria is in a bad position for institutional regime change because there are strong social divides and Syria has had no previous experience with democracy. This study should be evidence to the international community that leadership overthrows are ineffective for democratisation.

The authors also promote foreign imposed regime change for countries that have previously been democratic. This is because they are more likely to succeed because they have 'favourable conditions'. Therefore the authors suggest intervention is a more useful tool for 'safeguarding democracy' that has already been well-established in the past instead of using it as a tool to promote democracy elsewhere.

Finally, the authors emphasise the importance of both the interveners and the conditions of the target state. Interveners must be committed to actions to change the institutions but only when the conditions are favourable. No matter how committed the interveners are if the conditions are not favourable it is likely democratisation will fail. The authors conclude stating that when democracies are not in these favourable conditions, countries are better off trying to build a civil society through foreign aid and development assistance that try and proceed with democratisation.