Engineering Revolution. Marlene Spoerri
party assistance—and democracy assistance more generally—worked in Serbia. Scholars, members of the media, Western governments, authoritarian leaders, and aid practitioners have overwhelmingly presumed this to be true. Moreover, they have often gone several steps further—assuming that Western aid was critical and even determinative for Milošević’s unseating and the rise of democracy in Serbia.
The evidence suggests otherwise. As the following chapters will show, democracy took root in Serbia not because of but, in large part, in spite of Western intervention. It is not just that party assistance—and democracy assistance more broadly—did not work. Rather, it is that foreign meddling often hurt Serbia, undermining the prospects for Milošević’s fall throughout the 1990s and lessening the chances that democracy would take hold in the years that followed his political exit.
The Argument
The following chapters put forward three main arguments. The first is that the aid enterprise in Serbia in 2000 rested on a single, clear goal: regime change. Engineering Revolution will show that, for a few short months, the world’s aid community was aligned along the singular goal of enabling Serbia’s opposition to unseat Milošević. Although the ambition to facilitate regime change may not, in retrospect, appear groundbreaking (particularly in the aftermath of the war in Iraq in 2003), it is difficult to underestimate precisely how significant it was at the close of the twentieth century.
Prior to Serbia, democracy assistance had been used in dozens of countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia to support civil society groups, election monitors, independent media, and more. Much of that work was modest and, ultimately, limited in impact (Carothers 1999). Serbia, however, represented a new direction for democracy assistance, the goal of which was not “democracy” as such but rather that of replacing a sitting head of state. Ultimately, Serbia would usher in a new era for a more politicized democracy assistance agenda in which aid providers were not merely neutral arbiters of a political process but active proponents working to advance a particular political outcome. The goal was regime change.
This brings us to this book’s second argument, which regards the effectiveness of the democracy assistance agenda in Serbia. Although Serbia is frequently heralded as the quintessential example of “aid done right,” the evidence offered in the following chapters points to a different conclusion. While modestly helpful in facilitating Milošević’s ouster in 2000, aid was not a determining factor in supporting democracy in Serbia. Most important, it was not an exclusively positive contributor to Serbia’s transition to democracy. To the contrary, especially in the post-Milošević period, democracy aid often conflicted with the needs of Serbian democracy. Although aid may at times have helped democracy, it also (and arguably, more often) hindered it.
Therein lies the third argument, which is related to the causes of aid’s varied outcomes. As will be shown, democracy assistance is frequently viewed from binary perspectives. On the one hand, advocates embrace democracy assistance as a tool through which established democracies selflessly work to support democracy abroad. On the other hand, critics see democracy assistance as a tool of Western imperialism, intent not on supporting legitimate democratic aspirations but on crafting political outcomes. This book argues for a more nuanced perspective. It shows that aid’s varied effects are in large part a consequence of its varied and, at times, incompatible goals: to facilitate democracy abroad and, simultaneously, to support the foreign policy interests of donor states. When these goals coincide, democracy assistance has the capacity to do real good. When they do not, however, democracy assistance can become subservient to the demands of foreign policy considerations. Unfortunately, this does not always work to democracy’s benefit. Nor does it bolster the perceived credibility of the democracy aid agenda as a neutral proponent of democracy everywhere.
Contribution to the Literature
The democracy assistance agenda is built on an important assumption: that external actors can influence democracy abroad for the better. Yet for all the millions of dollars devoted to democracy assistance, there is by no means a consensus on the validity of this assumption.
To the contrary, there is enormous dissension on this topic. For many decades it was presumed that external actors could do remarkably little good to support democracy abroad. Until the 1990s, scholars were convinced that democratization was an exclusively domestic affair, facilitated by factors like socioeconomic development, a strong middle class, or a participatory civic culture (see Almond and Verba 1963; Lipset 1959; Moore 1966; O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead 1986).
It was only with the end of the Cold War that scholars began to reassess such assumptions. Among the first to do so was Samuel Huntington. In The Third Wave, Huntington (1991: 85) concluded that “democratization in a country may be influenced, perhaps decisively, by the actions of governments and institutions external to that country.” Laurence Whitehead (1996: 3)—also a major thinker in the field of democratization studies—later made similar, albeit more modest claims, noting the powerful effects of international influences on all but a handful of contemporary democracies. More recently, Thomas Carothers, a leading authority on external influences on democratization, has argued that while in most cases external efforts to support democracy are marginal to political outcomes, in some—like Serbia’s—they can be more than that (Carothers 2001). Larry Diamond (2008a: 34), also a leading scholar on democracy, has stressed that “international factors can play an important role in facilitating democratization.” Bruce Russet (2008: 64) has taken this several steps further, arguing that “in particular instances international influences are important, and sometimes critical.”
Engineering Revolution contributes to the exploration of such influences by examining a case where external actors are perceived to have been critical toward the realization of democracy. In so doing, it seeks to help establish if and how external actors can support democracy abroad, for better or worse, through the delivery of assistance explicitly designed to bolster democracy. Yet this book distinguishes itself from past studies on democracy and aid in Serbia, in three major respects.9
First, Engineering Revolution focuses in large part on political parties. Although it was a politician who defeated Milošević at the ballot box in September 2000 and an eighteen-party political alliance that helped make that possible, the role of political parties have been largely overlooked in studies on democracy’s development in Serbia. In particular, many Western accounts of the fall of Milošević have focused on the role of the youth movement, Otpor, in mounting a massive get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaign in the months leading to Milošević’s fall.10 Although not discounting the significance of this bottom-up approach to helping explain the ouster of Milošević, this book argues that concentrating on youth alone greatly underestimates the multiplicity of actors—including political elites—that combined to facilitate democracy’s ascent in Serbia in 2000 and beyond. For better and for worse, political parties have been instrumental in Serbia’s political development throughout the postcommunist period. Their successes and failures have had a profound impact on the democratic trajectory that Serbia has followed and the troubles that continue to plague Serbian politics today. Understanding how external democracy aid has influenced such parties thus goes some way in understanding how foreign actors have influenced Serbian democracy.
This book’s second contribution is found in its time-frame. Most Western studies of Serbian democracy have focused on just a short time-frame—in most instances, the years or months leading up to Milošević’s fall in October 2000. This has caused scholars to overlook the events that occurred before and after aid’s most impressive accomplishments. Instead of focusing solely on the months immediately before Milošević’s resignation, this book offers an in-depth account of the decades that preceded and followed Milošević’s fall. In examining the years between 1990 and 2010, it avoids the habit of focusing only on success and offers a more nuanced analysis of aid done right and wrong.
This book’s third contribution is its comprehensive examination of all the actors involved in party aid in Serbia. To date, the majority of Western studies on Serbia have focused on American democracy assistance. The role of European assistance, through the work of FES or KAS, has received far less attention. Moreover, many of these studies have focused exclusively on the