After three years of research, political scientist Diane
Éthier has found that programs to promote democracy
work better when they are combined with conditions. The
researcher compared the impact of the conditional strategy
to promote democracy in the context of the eastward expansion
of the European Union—which required that the 10 candidate
countries implement a set of reforms designed to strengthen
their democratic systems before joining—and the effects
of the incentive strategy of democratic development programs
used by aid agencies in seven donor countries (United Kingdom,
Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, Canada and the United
States) that give unconditional aid to developing countries
in order to encourage them to introduce or strengthen democracy.
She concludes from her survey that the European strategy
is effective, as eight candidate countries (Czech Republic,
Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia and
Slovenia) have introduced the required reforms, while programs
to promote democracy did not have a meaningful effect in
target countries in central Europe, Africa, Latin America
and Asia.
Since 1945, western governments and international organizations
have used various strategies—control, conditions and
incentives—to promote democracy. “Have these
strategies had an impact on the progress of democracy? This
is the question I wanted to answer,” explains Mrs.
Éthier, whose work is funded by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The specialist
did not study the “control” strategy—the
imposition of democracy by foreign occupation forces—because,
while it did prove effective in several countries immediately
after the second world war, it was later rejected by international
law in accordance with the principle of non-interference
in the domestic affairs of states.
The article she has written on this study, which will be
published in the spring of 2003 in the British journal Democratization,
concludes that the approach used by the European Union is
effective because “the more interdependent countries
are, the more likely they are to cooperate with one another.”
It is significant that on December 12, 10 countries were
officially accepted into Unified Europe, which now has 25
members. Membership for two candidate countries, Bulgaria
and Romania, was postponed, as they had failed to meet the
European Union’s requirements. The main reason why
Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Poland,
Hungary, Slovenia and Slovakia became democratic states
in less than five years is that these countries were more
than just encouraged to do so. As a condition, the European
union required clear and measurable changes: “Representatives
of these countries felt that their integration into Europe
was crucial, both for their future and for their security
and economic prosperity. As a result, they introduced fundamental
reforms, going so far as to adopt nearly one hundred new
laws in just one year,” Mrs. Éthier remarks.
Researcher: Diane Éthier
Telephone: (514) 343-5724
Email: diane.ethier@umontreal.ca
Funding: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada
