Hariri, Jacob Gernerview Profile. British Journal of Political Science45.1 (Jan 2015): 53-71
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Democratic Transition à economic growth – Foreign Aided: Why Democratization Brings Growth When Democracy Does Not
Hariri, Jacob GernerView Profile. British Journal of Political Science45.1 (Jan 2015): 53-71.
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Brazil Counterplan
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The Federative Republic of Brazil should promote good governance in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.
The Counterplan solves democracy but the Aff doesn’t – a Brazilian campaign for good governance activates global modeling
Stuenkel, PhD Political Science, ‘13 (Oliver Stuenkel holds a PhD in political science from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, and a Master in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he was a McCloy Scholar. He is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in São Paulo, where he coordinates the São Paulo branch of the School of History and Social Science (CPDOC) and the executive program in International Relations. He is also a non-resident Fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin and a member of the Carnegie Rising Democracies Network. His research focuses on rising powers; specifically on Brazil’s, India’s and China's foreign policy and on their impact on global governance, “Rising Powers and the Future of Democracy Promotion: the case of Brazil and India,” Third World Quarterly 34:2 p. 339-355, 2013)
Conclusion As the analysis makes clear, a realist approach is best at accounting for rising democracies’ behaviour. Brazil and India promote democracy as long as doing so is aligned with their overall strategic and economic interests, and if they are willing to adopt democracy promotion as means to legitimise their growing influence. In this respect their approach is similar to the Western practice. While promoting democracy may endanger India’s foreign policy goal of maintaining regional stability, it is increasingly aligned with Brazil’s national interests as a regional hegemon. Given that autocratic leaders are more likely to endanger Brazilian investments in the region, for example by expropriating Brazilian investments, democracy promotion has become a key tool with which to contain threats against the legitimacy of the established order and to defend Brazil’s growing economic presence in South America. Yet rising democracies fundamentally differ from established actors in that they rarely justify their democracy-related activities in the context of the larger liberal narrative often used by European and US policy makers. Both Brazil and India remain suspicious of the at times sweeping Wilsonian liberal rhetoric and concepts used by European and US democracy promoters, a rhetoric which policy makers in Brasília and New Delhi consider to be both ineffective and smacking of cultural imperialism. It is worth noting that, despite their democracy-related activities, no Indian and Brazilian policy maker or civil society representative describes these as ‘democracy promotion’—very much contrary to Europe and the USA, were the term is common. Therefore it is no surprise that neither Brazil nor India has embraced US ideas such as the ‘League of Democracies’. As a consequence, observers in Europe and the USA have generally seen the scope for cooperation with rising democracies on democracy-related activities as limited. Nevertheless comparisons between Western and non-Western views about democracy promotion often overlook the fact that there is ample room for cooperation. Emphasising the more technical terms—such as ‘good governance’—rather than the ideology-laden liberal ‘democracy promotion’ may be an important step to facilitate cooperation, particularly on the multilateral level. In this context the ‘European approach’, which often seeks to avoid the term ‘democracy promotion’ in order not to estrange the host government105 (for example by promoting ‘good governance’ or by strengthening ‘civil society’ 106), may provide more room for collaboration between established democracy promoters and rising democracies. For example, when US President Barack Obama visited India, the USA and India signed an Open Government Partnership to start a dialogue among senior officials on open government issues and to disseminate innovations that enhance government accountability.107 These less visible approaches are likely to be more acceptable to rising democracies than being asked to join established powers in condemning autocrats openly. Emerging powers’ position matters greatly because they are located in regions of the world where democracy’s footing is not yet firm. In addition, there are indications that Brazil’s and India’s credibility among poor countries may exceed that of the rich world—perhaps precisely because they are rarely perceived as overly paternalistic or arrogant. Perhaps most importantly Brazil’s and India’s societal structures—high inequality, a high degree of illiteracy (in India’s case) and pockets of poverty—are similar to those in many countries that are struggling to establish democracy. Seen from this perspective, Brazilian and Indian policy makers have much more experience in making democracy work in adverse environments. In Brazil’s case an additional asset is a very recent experience of successful transition to democracy. Emerging power such as Brazil and India are therefore in a much better position to share their experience of democracy than Europe or the USA, whose democratisation lies in the distant past, and whose societies look very different from those in the rest of the world. Finally, in a world where an increasing number of national leaders look to China as an economic and political model to copy, India and Brazil provide powerful counter-examples that political freedom is no obstacle to economic growth.108 In this sense, as Pratap Mehta points out, Brazil’s and India’s own success may do far more for democracy promotion than any overtly ideological push in that direction could ever hope to accomplish.109
Net Benefit
U.S. democracy promotion destabilizes the international order and incites perpetual warfare – all democratic progress has occurred in spite of, and not because of America
Smith, Econ Professor at Yale, ’12 (Tony Smith is Professor of Economics and Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Economics at Yale, “America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy (Expanded Edition)”, http://site.ebrary.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umich/detail.action?docID=10594477, Princeton University Press, February 2012)
The irony of American liberal internationalism by late 2011 was that a framework for policy that had done so much to established America’s preeminence in world affairs between 1945 and 2001 should have contributed so significantly to its decline thereafter. Following 1945, American control over West Germany and Japan had allowed it to transform these two lands politically and economically, integrating them into Washington’s orbit in a manner that gave the free world a decisive advantage over its Soviet and communist rivals. If containment had been the primary track for U.S. foreign policy during the cold war, a secondary track, consolidating the political and economic unity of the liberal democratic countries through multilateral organizations under American leadership, had had decisive influence over the course of the global contest. The power advantage the United States enjoyed was basic, to be sure, as were the personalities of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, who brought the contest to a successful conclusion that very few anticipated. But Woodrow Wilson’s hope to make America secure by making the world peaceful through the expansion of what by President Bill Clinton’s time was called “free-market democracies” meant that liberal internationalism’s contribution to the outcome had shown itself to be fundamental. Yet during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the very forces that had allowed America to win the cold war had created the illusion that with relative ease history could now be controlled and international affairs funda¬mentally restructured by the expansion of the free-market democratic world into an international order of peace. Under neoconservative and neoliberal auspices, democracy was believed to have a “universal appeal’’ with peace-giving qualities of benefit to all peoples. A market economy both domestically and globally would compound the process of political stabilization. Under the terms of the responsibility to protect,’1 progressive imperialism became a form of “just war"’ and the American military that President George W. Bush announced was "beyond challenge" was tasked with ushering in a new dawn of freedom worldwide. For a " unipolar world’1 a global mission was conceived, as in neoliberal and neoconservative hands neo-Wilsonian ism evolved into a hard ideology, the equivalent in conceptual terms to Marxism-Leninism, with a capacity to give leaders and people a sense of identity and worldwide purpose to a degree that liberalism had never before possessed. In this march of folly, fueled not only by ideology but also by a will to power after triumph in the cold war, all the earlier reservations about the difficulties of nation- and state-building abroad that had been discussed over the preceding half century were disregarded, so that even after policymakers understood that democracy did not grow spontaneously in many places, they were reassured by authoritative studies put out by institutions like the RAND Corporation and the Army and Marine Corps that such missions could be accomplished. As a consequence, although it was widely recognized that the failure to plan properly for Iraq after Baghdad had been captured was a fundamental error, very few voices in positions of power were heard saying that the democratization of Iraq and Afghanistan (or the thought of working with '"democratic” Pakistan) was likely a fool’s errand from the start. Instead, efforts to rectify the failures at conceptualizing state- and nation-building turned out to be “how ton' or llcan do” publications that only prolonged and deepened a misplaced American self-confidence that it was possible 10 use the window of opportunity at the coun¬try s disposition as the world"s sole superpower to changc the logic of interna¬tional relations forever. Much the same mixture of arrogance, self-interest, and self-delusion characterized the arguments underlying the “Washington Consensus” which boldly saw the key to world prosperity and peace in the interdependence generated by economic globalization with its trinity of concepts—privatization, deregula¬tion, and openness. To be sure, economic interdependence was indeed capable of delivering on its promise, as the integration of the European Union and the growth in world trade and investment centered on the free-markct democracies so powerfully demonstrated for half a century after World War II. However, a serious problem lay in the inability of political forces, either nationally or in¬ternationally, to control the capitalist genie once let out of its bottle. For in due course, deregulation turned against the very system that had given birth to it, unleashing a flight of technology, capital, and jobs to countries in Asia espe¬cially and permitting the irresponsible banking practices that engendered in the United States and the European Union (after having affected Mexico, Russia, Southeast Asia, and Argentina more than a decade earlier) an economic crisis second in its devastation only to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The result in the United States was not only the decimation first of the work¬ing and then of the middle classes as the top 10 percent of the nation (and es¬pecially the top 1 percent) monopolized virtually all the gains of economic openness for a period of more than two decades but also a decline in national power as technology, capital, and jobs moved abroad and as China grew apaceJ For all the talk by President Barack Obama about the example the United States should set for the sake of democracy promotion abroad, the first three years of his administration did not meaningfully address the deep-seated underlying problems of economic growth and inequality in this country, nor the control by corporations of the nation’s political life, nor concerns about national power based on an economy in decline. As a result, liberal economic doctrine and practice were undermining democratic government as well as na¬tional power. Aspects of the liberal agenda once too easily assumed to be au¬tomatically mutually reinforcing were coming to be increasingly at odds with one another. Woodrow Wilson had recognized just such a possibility a century earlier when he chastised the greed and incompetence of the nation's monopoly capi¬talists and asked for their regulation for the sake of the common good. Despite similar public utterances by President Obama a century later, there was no follow-through with respect to asserting Washington’s power over corporate interests as had occurred when Wilson became president. For Wilson and his fellow progressives, the question had been how “to recover representative gov¬ernment, not supersede it.” For his day, Washington's main duty was 6tto pre¬vent the strong from crushing the weak,"' and he left no doubt but that it was the captains of industry who were the greatest threat to the democratic life of early-twentieth-ccntury America. Wilson introduced antitrust laws, child labor laws, a federal income tax, and the Federal Reserve System, among other re¬forms that made capitalism a more effective economic system as well as one that reinforced democratic government.2 In 2011 the question was whether a similar resolve could be found in Washington to rejuvenate the American economy in a way that rejuvenated its democracy. The Wilsonian tradition thus found itself in crisis. Within onlv two decades after the cold war, liberal internationalist overconfidence in the universal ap¬peal of democratic government and in the blessing of free-market capitalism had combined to reduce the effectiveness of mullilateral institutions and the capacity of the United States to provide leadership in settling the problems of world order. A liberal order capable of withstanding the challenges of both fascism and communism had come in a short time to be its own worst enemy. Communism was dead, but 4Lfree-market democracy" was proving to be a much weaker blueprint for world order than had only recently been antici¬pated. As Machiavelli had counseled in his Discourses, "Men always commit the error of not knowing where to limit their hopes, and by trusting to these rather than to a just measure of their resources, they are generally ruined/’ One scenario for the future was bleak. It foresaw economic chaos as feeding on itself; more self-defeating military interventions being undertaken; and all the while the banner of freedom and democracy being lifted at the very mo¬ment that self-government was being undermined at home by vested interests and delusional thinking undcrgirding an imperial presidency. So Michael Dcsch referred to l4the seeds of illiberal behavior” contained within liberalism itself, as it attributed a moral superiority to its ways of being while seeing al-ternative systems both as morally inferior and as necessarily menacing.