Democracy and world order: reflections on critical scholarship today
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117813489655e |
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| Author | Milja Kurki |
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Forum: democracy and world order |
Kurki et al. 253
Democracy and world order: reflections on critical
scholarship today
Milja Kurki
Aberystwyth University
The previous (re)-examinations of democracy promotion are underlined by an interest in
how democracy promotion has changed in the context of a changing world political (and
economic) order. This is an important question to examine today, for, if indeed democ-
racy promotion was and is a creation of a liberal internationalist ideology and world
order, democracy promotion’s fate is in many ways a key test case for the evolution of
the liberal world order. This order was firmly in place in the early 1990s when democ-
racy promotion became institutionalized as a foreign policy agenda, not only by the
United States but also by a number of international organizations, from the IFIs to the EU
and the United Nations. But given that many developments have taken place in this
world order, it is not insignificant to ask: what has changed, if anything, in the nature,
modes and motivations of democracy promotion and what does this tell us of the current
state and the future of the world order?
The authors come to somewhat different conclusions on this question. William Robinson
recognizes that some shifts have taken place in democracy promotion, but in essence holds
on to his view, described in detail in Promoting Polyarchy, that democracy promotion both
in the 1990s and today is a tool of consensual hegemony. He notes not only that this prac-
tice still seeks to de-radicalise and disenable meaningful grass-roots democratization but
also that it does so in order to stabilize a very specific kind of politico-economic order: a
neo-liberal one. In essence, despite pragmatic adjustments and inclusions, little has
changed. A capitalist project of consensual domination is played out through democracy
promotion – in Arab Middle East today just as in Nicaragua in the 1980s.
Although Robinson has not changed his view, Jeff Bridoux and Rita Abrahamsen
disagree with his reading. Bridoux notes that even in United States’ democracy promo-
tion, various different conceptual premises have been played out, reflecting the oscilla-
tions and variations in American thinking on what democracy promotion and indeed
‘democracy’ entail. Although the Bush and Reagan years saw the ascendancy of a neo-
liberal model of democracy and democratization, this model is not reflective in a straight-
forward way either of 1950s state-building projects in Germany or Japan, or today’s
Obama administration’s efforts to redirect both American domestic and foreign policy
thinking. Bridoux’s account raises questions as to the plausibility of Robinson’s reading
of American democracy promotion. It raises questions about the ‘firmness’ of the ‘lib-
eral’ conceptual foundations of it, and raises the possibility of different types of American
democracy support in the context of the current world order – one that is more sensitive
to the problems generated for democracy by capitalism. This is despite the fact that sta-
bility – if not unilaterally neo-liberal stability – is, Bridoux agrees, the end game of
United States’ democracy promotion.
Rita Abrahamsen notes some even deeper shifts in democracy support. She draws
attention to the shift towards new modes of democracy support altogether. The
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