Political elites and democratic state-building efforts in Bosnia and Iraq

Democratization

Volumn 13, Issue 5, 2006, Pages 724-738

  Manning, Carrie ^a  

^a GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Bosnia; Iraq; Political elites; State building

Indexed keywords

DEMOCRACY; POLITICAL CHANGE; POLITICAL POWER; POLITICAL REFORM; STATE BUILDING;

ASIA; BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA; EURASIA; EUROPE; IRAQ; MIDDLE EAST; SOUTHERN EUROPE;

EID: 33845581020     PISSN: 13510347     EISSN: 1743890X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13510340601010602     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. One caveat is in order here. I do not want to suggest that the policies of international actors engaged in state-building in Iraq or Bosnia were necessarily consciously or consistently informed by any particular theory. Instead, I am arguing that by examining the actions taken by state-builders as well as their stated reasons for taking those actions, we can tease out their assumptions about how political change occurs. Nor do I want to suggest that everyone on the ground in either country was blind to the limitations of state-building policies as they were implemented. Larry Diamond's book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), for example, provides invaluable insight into the struggles of experts from within and outside the US government who had profound knowledge and experience of democratization elsewhere in the world to carry over what was learned from those experiences. This struggle was mostly unsuccessful as it clashed with the objectives of actors higher up in the US administration and as the insurgency in Iraq gathered strength.
2. See Carrie Manning, 'Elections and Political Change in Bosnia and Herzegovina', Democratization, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2004), pp. 60-86;
3. Roberto Belloni, 'Peacebuilding and Consociational Electoral Engineering in Bosnia-Herzegovina', International Peacekeeping, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2004), pp. 334-53;
4. Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, 'Travails of the European Raj', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2003), pp. 60-74.
5. This claim will be elaborated in more detail below, but it is supported by numerous recently published accounts by insiders, scholars, and journalists, including L. Paul Bremer with Malcolm McConnell, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006);
6. Diamond, Squandered Victory (note 1);
7. Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2005);
8. David Phillips, Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2005);
9. George Packer, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).
10. There is a rich literature addressing the tension between voluntaristic and more structuralist approaches to explaining democratic transition. For reviews of this debate, see Gerardo L. Munck, 'The Regime Question: Theory Building in Democracy Studies', World Politics, Vol. 54, No. 1 (2001), pp. 119-44;
11. Terry Lynn Karl, 'Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America', Comparative Politics, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1990), pp. 1-21;
12. Gerardo Munck and Carol Skalnik Leff, 'Modes of Transition and Democratization: South America and Eastern Europe in Comparative Perspective', Comparative Politics, Vol. 29, No. 3 (1997), pp. 343-62;
13. Michael McFaul, 'The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Noncooperative Transitions in the Post communist World', World Politics, Vol. 54, No. 2 (2002), pp. 212-44.
14. Vice President Dick Cheney, interview with Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press, transcript for 16 March 2003.
15. James Traub, 'Making Sense of the Mission', New York Times Magazine, 11 April 2004.
16. Cited in Daalder and Lindsay (note 3), p. 169.
17. Cited in Diamond, Squandered Victory (note 1), p. 33.
18. Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman, 'Confronting Iraq: US Policy and the Use of Force since the Gulf War', Rand (2000), Chap. 4, p. 8.
19. Washington Post, 12 August 2004.
20. 'Standing of Former Key US Ally in Iraq Falls to New Low', Washington Post, 21 May 2004.
21. Ibid.
22. Daalder and Lindsay (note 3), p. 164.
23. 'Standing of Former Key US Ally', Washington Post (note 11).
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. 'US Sidelines Exiles Who Were to Govern Iraq', Washington Post, 8 June 2003.
27. Phillips (note 3), p. 131.
28. 'US Sidelines Exiles Who Were to Govern Iraq', Washington Post (note 17).
29. He notes that 'although the political situation was unsettled and insurgency raged, factions were forming in Washington and at the United Nations that shared the goal of granting sovereignty prematurely to Iraq. In Washington, the "sovereignty now" campaign... seemed to be centered on Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith, and John Hannah in the vice president's office. They were close to Ahmad Chalabi', Bremer (note 3), p. 167.
30. Bremer (note 3), p. 89.
31. For a critical discussion of the CPA's concept of representation, see Christoph Wilcke, 'Castles Built of Sand: US Governance and Exit Strategies in Iraq', Middle East Report, No. 232 (Fall 2004), http://www.merip.org/mer/mer232/wilcke.html.
32. Coalition Provisional Authority website, www.iraq-cpa.org (accessed 1 February 2005).
33. For a good discussion on this issue, see Wilcke, 'Castles Built of Sand' (note 22)
34. UN Security Council Resolution 1500.
35. International Crisis Group, 'The Next Iraqi War? Sectarianism and Civil Conflict', Crisis Group Middle East Report, No. 52, 27 February 2006, p. 10.
36. Diamond, Squandered Victory (note 1), p. 82.
37. Larry Diamond, 'Building Democracy After Conflict: Lessons from Iraq', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 16, No. 1 (January 2005), p. 11.
38. Ibid. p. 12.
39. Cited in Peter Galbraith, New York Review of Books (April 2004).
40. 'The Man Who Would Succeed Saddam', Washington Post, 24 November 2003.
41. 'US, UN Seek New Leaders for Iraq', Washington Post, 24 April 2004.
42. International Crisis Group, 'The Next Iraqi War? Sectarianism and Civil Conflict', p. 11.
43. The PEC was replaced by a permanent electoral council when the country's first permanent electoral law was passed in the latter half of 2001.
44. In its 1997 Bonn meeting, the Peace Implementation Council gave the High Representative the authority to punish parties and individual party members for non-compliance with aspects of the Dayton peace process. See 'Bonn Peace Implementation Conference 1997: Bosnia and Herzegovina 1998: Self Sustaining Structures', 10 December 1997 in OHR, Bosnia and Herzegovina Essential Texts (3rd revised and updated edition, October 2000).
45. The use of such sanctions by OSCE over the years is well documented. See OSCE, Electoral Administration Supervisory Commission record of sanctions, 1996-2001.
46. Knaus and Martin (note 2), 'Travails of the European Raj';
47. Carrie Manning and Miljenko Antic, 'The Limits of Electoral Engineering', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2003), pp. 45-59. Republika Srpska is one of the two entities that make up the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the other being the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
48. Carrie Manning, 'Elections and Political Change in Bosnia and Herzegovina', Democratization, Vol. 11, No. 2 (April 2004), pp. 60-87.
49. Interview with Paddy Ashdown, the High Representative for BiH, Nezavisne Novine, Banja Luka, 12 November 2002.
50. Larry Diamond, 'What Went Wrong in Iraq', Foreign Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 5 (2004), pp. 34-56. Available at www.foreignaffairs.org (accessed on 15 February 2005).
51. Phillips (note 3), pp. 178-9.
52. Thomas Carothers, 'The End of the Transition Paradigm', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2002), p. 16.
53. This is clearest in Bosnia, where international authorities could remove elected officials from office if they deemed them hindrances to the Dayton Agreement. But in Iraq too the US government has exerted considerable effort to keep Sunnis, elected in miniscule numbers to the TNA and permanent assembly, from being shut out of the process by Shiite and Kurdish parties. In an effort to get the newly elected parties to form a government acceptable to all players, US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad warned the parties that 'the United States is investing billions of dollars' in Iraq's police and army. 'We are not going to invest the resources of the American people to build forces run by people who are sectarian' New York Times, 20 February 2006.
54. For details, see Diamond, Squandered Victory (note 1);
55. and David Chandler, Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton (London: Zed Books, 2000).
56. In their comparative work on transitions to democracy in Latin America and Eastern Europe, Geddes and Lijphart document the ways that political actors involved in negotiating transition tend to shape the new political institutions in ways that play to their own strengths.
57. Dankwart Rustow made this point long ago in his seminal piece, 'Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model', Comparative Politics, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1970), pp. 337-63.
58. Carothers, 'The End of the Transition Paradigm' (note 42), pp. 5-21.
59. Ibid., p. 7.
60. Ibid., p. 7.
61. The literature on democratization is enormous. For a recent sampling from diverse regions and approaches, see Leonardo Villalón and Peter VonDoepp, The Fate of Africa's Democratic Experiments: Elites and Institutions (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005);
62. Frances Hagopian, Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
63. Graeme Gill, The Dynamics of Democratization: Elites, Civil Society, and the Transition Process (New York: Palgrave, 2000);
64. John Dryzek and Leslie Holmes, Post-Communist Democratization: Political Discourses Across Thirteen Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
65. Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, 'Incomplete Democratization and the Outbreak of Military Disputes', International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 4 (2002), p. 529;
66. Edward Aspinall, Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance, and Regime Change in Indonesia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005);
67. Frances Hagopian and Scott Mainwaring The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America: Advances and Setbacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). There is also a lively and productive debate on 'qualified democracy' and how countries move from less democratic to more democratic electoral regimes.
68. For a sampling, see Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, 'The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2002), p. 59;
69. Andreas Schedler, 'Elections without Democracy: The Menu of Manipulation', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2002), pp. 36-49;
70. Richard Joseph, 'Africa: States in Crisis', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2003), pp. 159-70;
71. Andreas Schedler, 'Democratic Consolidation', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1998);
72. Carothers, 'The End of the Transition Paradigm' (note 42).
73. Indeed, Carothers' article inspired spirited rebuttals from organizations involved in executing democracy assistance programmes, such as the National Democratic Institute, arguing that they worked from a far more nuanced understanding of democratic transition and consolidation than his assertions suggested. See Kenneth Wollack, 'Retaining the Human Dimension', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2002), pp. 20-25;
74. Thomas Carothers 'A Reply to My Critics', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2002), pp. 33-8;
75. Gerald Hyman, 'Tilting at Straw Men', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2002), pp. 26-32;
76. Ghia Nodia, 'The Democratic Path', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2002), pp. 13-19;
77. Guillermo O'Donnell, 'In Partial Defense of an Evanescent "Paradigm"', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2002), pp. 6-12.
78. The defining early work on this was Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
79. See also Giuseppe di Palma, To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991).
80. Karin von Hippel, 'Democracy by Force: A Renewed Commitment to Nation Building', The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Winter 2000), pp. 95-112.
81. See Philippe C. Schmitter with Terry Lynn Karl, 'The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists and Consolidologists: How Far to the East Should They Go?', Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Spring 1994), pp. 173-85;
82. Valerie Bunce, 'Should Transitologists be Grounded?', Slavic Review, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 111-27.