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April 26, 2005
Europe's Secret to Make Dictators Reform: Sometimes It Just Takes a Really Big Carrot
We keep doing nothing when faced with countries that are too troublesome to invade, like Iran or North Korea, or too officially friendly to bomb, like Egypt or Saudia Arabia. But just because we won't bomb doesn't have to mean we're powerless. While the United States has mostly relied on threats and military force to make countries change, the Europeans recently have managed to pull several ugly governments into reform without a single weapon threatened or fired. We need to get smart and learn to use our own peaceful leverage as well as the Europeans do.
This recent article on Serbia nicely illustrates how the Europeans use two strong simple tools: the levers of prestige and economic incentive. The European Union is a $10+ trillion a year behemoth, and when the Europeans make their markets and blessing seriously conditional on governments' reforming, the governments in question get serious about reform. Of course economic and prestige levers aren't a perfect tool for world-changing, any more than bombers and infantry are. But if America got as serious about using nonmilitary leverage as it is about using military power, we could prevent many of today's not-quite-outlaw governments from becoming the Irans and North Koreas of tomorrow -- and we could do it without firing a shot.
Europe's newfound peaceful influence is basically an accidental bonus of the expansion of the European Union. Membership in the European Union, or even "candidate for membership" status, gives a country a huge economic advantage over its neighbors, and gives a government a big boost to legitimacy with its people. While we love to make jokes about French posturing or German unemployment, most of the world would love to be as well-governed as those countries, and so a European endorsement carries real weight with local elites. And that same seal of approval, plus the possible trade and subsidy advantages of EU members, means that an approved candidate country can get investment -- and therefore jobs -- that would otherwise go elsewhere. So governments like Serbia's or Turkey's or Ukraine's, who want to keep power despite unreliable economies and unstable politics, find the rewards of European endorsement too good to pass up. In fact, almost all the Balkan and west central Asian governments have been moved significantly toward moderation and democracy by the dangling carrot of the EU. It's not coincidence that the former Soviet republics with the worst human rights records, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, are also among the most distant from Europe. And it's also not coincidence that when Turkey was pressed by the United States to allow troops to pass through to invade Iraq, and the French and Germans wanted Turkey to say no, Turkey sided with the Europeans. For all America's strong military alliance with Turkey, Europe's prestige and economic levers proved stronger than our military influence.
The United States could do something similar, and we wouldn't have to offer to admit countries as 51st or 52nd states; we would just need to get serious about linking economic and prestige ties with the USA to government reforms. Unfortunately, America usually ends up going for symbols instead of substance when we pressure allies (such as Egypt's recent token liberalization of its presidential pseudo-elections). It's just too hard for politicians to decide economic issues on the basis of anything other than jobs at home. It's worth noting that the European Union representatives who negotiate with countries like Turkey or Serbia on reform aren't elected officials; they're more like our Federal Reserve Board or the heads of the International Monetary Fund, a gang of appointees who are accountable to the European elected leaders but aren't on the leash of day-to-day politics. For that matter, the International Monetary Fund itself has a pretty good track record in getting governments to do things they don't like for the sake of economic incentives. If we ever want America to command that kind of peaceful leverage, we'll probably need a special organization to wield that leverage -- either that, or we'll have to somehow make the State Department into a trusted institution again. But as long as it takes the personal approval of the President and Congressional leaders to use serious economic or prestige levers on other countries, our nonmilitary influence will be pitiful next to the Europeans'.
And that's a pity, because the world-leading countries who made their power last have been the seducers, not the frighteners. Louis XIV of France invaded everybody until everybody ganged up on him; the Soviet Union's leaders threatened everybody until their most important Communist allies turned on them. In the end their armies weren't persuasive enough, because they couldn't afford to invade all the countries they needed to persuade. If we really want to make countries cooperate on terrorism, nuclear weapons, keeping the peace and the rest, we ought to learn from the "seducer" leaders. There's Great Britain, which used the sheer weight of tradition in its Commonwealth organization to get substantial cooperation from countries all over the world long after Britain lost its military power. There's the Roman Empire, which multiplied its strength by having a corps of officers skilled at raising local armies to fight in Roman causes, alongside a political system that rewarded foreign elites with Roman citizenship. And there's the United States itself, in our act of most extraordinary clever generosity, the Marshall Plan.
The Marshall Plan (and its counterpart effort in Japan) rebuilt Western Europe and Japan after World War II, and not only repaid itself in the form of new export jobs for Americans, but quite frankly bought Western Europe and Japan's loyalty for the next fifty years -- at a much cheaper price than the Soviets were paying to impose iron-fisted control over Eastern Europe. Like today's European Union leverage efforts and the IMF, the Marshall Plan was initiated by politicians but carried out by a professional organization, the Economic Cooperation Administration. And what the Europeans are doing to Serbia and Turkey today, the American efforts of fifty years ago did to Japan and Western Europe, tying them firmly into democracy, free markets, and American priorities. So we can do what the Europeans are doing; we've done it before.
(And fortunately, the going rate to buy democracy in a Serbia or Ukraine seems to be a lot lower than the cost we paid to rebuild Western Europe.)
Peaceful levers don't work on dictators who are both uncaring and secure in their power. But almost every dictatorship hits rough spots, simply because most dictators aren't very good at running their countries. When Kim Jong-Il of North Korea inherited his rule from his father, for a few years no one -- including the younger Kim -- knew whether he'd hold on to power. Iran today looks tolerably stable, if only because high oil prices are keeping the government rich, but that too may change. Most of all, peaceful levers are a tool we can use to stop countries from becoming tomorrow's Iran or North Korea. Iran was a cooperative repressive government under Shah Pahlavi before the 1979 revolution turned it into an implacably hostile repressive government; Iraq went through a series of only moderately bad rulers before Saddam Hussein took charge. Today, Venezuela or Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Nigeria could follow a similar slide. We aren't going to bomb these countries, so shouldn't we use our other tools well?
Ever since George Washington warned about "entangling alliances", we in America have been happy to think of all foreign policy as really military policy. That was not so bad in the 1800s, when we could mostly ignore the world; and it wasn't so bad in the Cold War, in which the top priority really was military deterrence. Now we've got enemies like terrorists that don't have governments to make war on, and problem states like North Korea (too dangerous to ignore yet too painful to invade) or China (too valuable to shut out, too opportunistic to trust). We really need some power over other countries that doesn't involve missile launches and troop landings. Yesterday's Marshall Plan and today's European example shows that we already have that kind of power -- if we can figure out how to use it.
[E1] Mudville OpenPostLink.
Posted by danielstarr at April 26, 2005 03:42 AM
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Comments
Despots cannot be bought. We have been throwing foreign aid at them for decades for their people ostensibly. Instead the despot only grew richer and more powerful.
We have no altruistic obligation to any nation. We need to act in our own selfish national interests. If that means eliminating a despot fine. If it means paying him off to behave, that is fine. The bottom line is what is in America's interest, not anyone else's.
Posted by: NOTR at April 27, 2005 01:03 AM