The Inherent Tensions in International Democracy Promotion

What is it about?

The 1990s rise of democracy promotion as an aim and a strategy of the foreign and development policies of the established democracies in the global North-West was premised on the assumption that in supporting the global spread of democratic regimes, finally, ‘values and interests reinforce each other’, as Strobe Talbott put it in 1996. The ‘third wave of democratization’ and the end of the Cold War combined with paradigmatic shifts in academic and political debates to suggest that promoting democracy would contribute to a host of other goods, such as peace and stability, economic development and poverty reduction. Taking issue with the notion that, in democracy promotion, all good things go together, the chapter argues that the well-known dilemmas inherent to democratization imply that external democracy promotion is systematically confronted with conflicting objectives – conflicting objectives that concern both the overall business of democracy promotion and the specific field of civil-society support.

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