I am not posting much these days because USAID’s expectations of what I am supposed to achieve in three weeks in Tanzania are completely unrealistic. So instead of witty insight from me today, you can read this.

Technically speaking, a plane trip. I am off to Tanzania tomorrow to do a Democracy and Governance assessment for USAID. Basically, I’ll be spending the next three weeks in Tanzania talking to politicians. I sense some good stories coming out of this.

The State Department needs to send some of its diplomats back to diplomat school.

Bill Easterly says aid workers need to pay more attention to democracy.

There was a coup in Niger yesterday. Yet not all coups are created equal. Democratically-elected Mamadou Tandja dissolved Parliament and the Supreme Court last year when they blocked his efforts to abolish term limits. While the subsequent Parliament ended term limits, its legitimacy is highly questionable as the opposition boycotted the election and voter turnout was just 5%. So while this is clearly a coup, is it a replacing a democratic or non-democratic government? Not clear. To add to the fun, not only is Niger one of the poorest countries in the world, Al Qadea and cocaine traffickers think it’s a great place as well.

Twenty years ago today, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. He had been in prison for 27 years, after being found guilty of treason as a result of his efforts to fight Apartheid. I think this is a good time to reflect on how far and how fast South Africa has come in the past two decades. Despite the problems South Africa faces today, such as crime, HIV/AIDS, and massive unemployment, it is important to note how much better off the country is today than seemed possible only two decades ago.

Read the rest of this entry…

Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua has been incapacitated in a Saudi Arabian hospital since November. One of his aides has announced that he will officially hand over power to the country’s Vice President, Jonathan Goodluck. In a consolidated democracy, this would be no problem, but Nigeria’s democracy is fledgling, at best. The turnover may create as many problems as it will solve. Due to Nigeria’s deep ethnic and religious tensions, it has been customary to balance power between the north (mainly Muslim) and the south (mainly Christian). Handing over power to Goodluck means that the presidency will go from a northern politician to a southern one.

Today’s editorial in The Punch, Nigeria’s most popular newspaper, warns that failure to handle the situation correctly could unleash a wave of instability. Governors in the North, for example, have already announced they are against the move. It also makes the correct point that institutions don’t enforce themselves, people enforce them. Putting pressure on leaders to respect democratic institutions in times of political crisis can mean the difference between democratic consolidation and democratic collapse. Leaders in the US, the EU, the African Union, and Africa’s democracies, such as Ghana and South Africa, can play that vital role now. Nigeria is edging towards a tipping point. It will be vastly easier to put pressure on politicians now than to clean up the wreckage of a flawed turnover in power. Preparing for the worst and hoping for the best is far better than the opposite.

In a bit of a shocker, Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), says the US should actively support regime change in Iran in Newsweek.

Haass starts the article by burnishing his credentials as a foreign policy realist who supports diplomatic engagement with Iran:

I am a card-carrying realist on the grounds that ousting regimes and replacing them with something better is easier said than done. I also believe that Washington, in most cases, doesn’t have the luxury of trying…

The incoming Obama administration…expressed a willingness to talk to Iran without preconditions…The other options – using military force against Iranian nuclear facilities or living with an Iranian nuclear bomb – were judged to be tremendously unattractive. And if diplomacy failed, Obama reasoned, it would be easier to build domestic and international support for more robust sanctions. At the time, I agreed with him.

He then explains why he has changed his mind:

The nuclear talks are going nowhere. The Iranians appear intent on developing the means to produce a nuclear weapon; there is no other explanation for the secret uranium-enrichment facility discovered near the holy city of Qum…

The authorities overreached in their blatant manipulation of last June’s presidential election, and then made matters worse by brutally repressing those who protested. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has lost much of his legitimacy, as has the “elected” president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The opposition Green Movement has grown larger and stronger than many predicted.

The United States, European governments, and others should shift their Iran policy toward increasing the prospects for political change.

Helpfully, Haass outlines what policies he would like to see the Obama administration enact:

…Iran’s Revolutionary Guards should be singled out for sanctions….

New funding for the project housed at Yale University that documents human-rights abuses in Iran is warranted…Such a registry might deter some members of the Guards or the million-strong Basij militia it controls from attacking or torturing members of the opposition. And even if not, the gesture will signal to Iranians that the world is taking note of their struggle.

It is essential to bolster what people in Iran know. Outsiders can help to provide access to the Internet…The opposition also needs financial support…

Just as important as what to do is what to avoid. Congressmen and senior administration figures should avoid meeting with the regime. Any and all help for Iran’s opposition should be nonviolent. Iran’s opposition should be supported by Western governments, not led. In this vein, outsiders should refrain from articulating specific political objectives other than support for democracy and an end to violence and unlawful detention. Sanctions on Iran’s gasoline imports and refining, currently being debated in Congress, should be pursued at the United Nations so international focus does not switch from the illegality of Iran’s behavior to the legality of unilateral American sanctions.

Haass ends by taking pre-emptive action against his likely critics:

Critics will say promoting regime change will encourage Iranian authorities to tar the opposition as pawns of the West. But the regime is already doing so.

Three points on the article. First, it is very well written. Second, the policies he recommends seem quite level-headed. Target the regime leaders for sanctions, support – but not lead – the opposition, and denounce the regime. Third, since Haass is the CFR’s president, this probably represents consensus (or near consensus) within the organization. I hope the Obama administration takes his suggestions seriously.

This week’s Economist has an outstanding article on Freedom House’s 2010 edition of Freedom in the World.

Freedom House…in its latest annual assessment that liberty and human rights had retreated globally for the fourth consecutive year. It said this marked the longest period of decline in freedom since the organisation began its reports nearly 40 years ago.

The author (I have no idea who because The Economist does not carry bylines), goes on to discuss the various causes of the latest democratic recession:

…the worrying thing is that the cause of liberal democracy is not merely suffering political reverses, it is also in intellectual retreat…

there are some obvious reasons why Western governments’ zeal to promote democracy, and the willingness of other countries to listen, have ebbed. In many quarters (including Western ones), the assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and its bloody aftermath, seemed to confirm people’s suspicion that promoting democracy as an American foreign-policy aim was ill-conceived or plain cynical.

In Afghanistan, the other country where an American-led coalition has been waging war in democracy’s name, the corruption and deviousness of the local political elite, and the flaws of last year’s election, have been an embarrassment. In the Middle East, America’s enthusiasm for promoting democracy took a dip after the Palestinian elections of 2006, which brought Hamas to office…

But perhaps the biggest reason why democracy’s magnetic power has waned is the rise of China – and the belief of its would-be imitators that they too can create a dynamic economy without easing their grip on political power.

The article then makes one of the most concise, clear, and convincing arguments the importance of supporting democracy I have read in a long time. It methodically addresses all of the criticisms leveled against democracy and shows why they are wrong.

So how does the case in defence of democracy stand up these days?…Democracy may not yield perfect policies, but it ought to guard against all manner of ills, ranging from outright tyranny (towards which a “mild” authoritarian can always slide) to larceny at the public expense.

… all but two of the 30 least corrupt countries in the world are democracies… Autocracies tend to occupy much higher rankings on the corruption scale…

What about the argument that economic development, at least in its early stages, is best pursued under a benign despot?…For every economically successful East Asian (former) autocracy like Taiwan or South Korea, there is an Egypt or a Cameroon (or indeed a North Korea or a Myanmar) which is both harsh and sluggish…

Believers in democracy as an engine of progress often make the point that a climate of freedom is most needed in a knowledge-based economy..It is surely no accident that every economy in the top 25 of the Global Innovation Index is a democracy, except semi-democratic Singapore and Hong Kong.

China, which comes 27th in this table, is often cited as a vast exception to this rule…The determination of China’s authorities to impose their own terms on the information revolution was highlighted this week when Google, the search engine, said it might pull out of China after a cyber-attack that targeted human-rights activists…

Admirers of China’s iron hand may conclude that it can manage well without the likes of Google…But in the medium term, the mentality that insists on hobbling search engines will surely act as a break on creative endeavour…

What about the argument that autocracy creates a modicum of stability without which growth is impossible?…On the State Fragility Index…democracies tend to do much better than autocracies…

At the very least, a culture of compromise – coupled with greater accountability and limits on state power – means that democracies are better able to avoid catastrophic mistakes, or criminal cruelty. Bloody nightmares that cost tens of millions of lives, like China’s Great Leap Forward or the Soviet Union’s forced collectivisation programme, were made possible by the concentration of power in a small group of people who faced no restraint.

Liberal democratic governments can make all manner of blunders, but they are less likely to commit mass murder autocracies may be faster and bolder. They are also more accident-prone.

For all its frustrations, open and accountable government tends in the long run to produce better policies…Above all, elections make the transfer of power legitimate and smooth. Tyrannies may look stable under one strongman; but they can slide into instability, even bloody chaos, if a transition goes awry. Free elections also mean that policy mistakes, even bad ones, are more quickly corrected…

I often describe democracy assistance as a harm reduction strategy. This is a crucially important point that the development first crowd does not seem to understand.