After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communist regimes in Central Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western democracies launched large-scale aid programmes to promote democracy. The United States provided first aid to Hungary and Poland through the Support for East European Democracy (SEED) Act. Thirty years later, the question is still how effective that democracy assistance has been. Romanian Dispatch spoke with Thomas Carothers, interim president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C. Carothers is an authority on international support for democracy, human rights and the rule of law, good governance and civil society. He was one of the first democracy experts to evaluate the impact of that assistance; for his book Assessing Democracy Assistance: The Case of Romania (1996) he even learned Romanian.

Let me start with a hypothesis: the impact of democracy assistance is not very tangible, and very much dependent on political developments. But it does generally create a civil society, especially organisations and individuals that promote democracy, the rule of law and human rights.

Thomas Carothers (TC): I think that is an accurate hypothesis. Probably the greatest value of these programmes is their ability to change individual’s sense of empowerment and sense of understanding of politics. And those individuals, whether they’re in civil society or in some cases within government institutions, are able to do better things. As a result, it is hard to shape an institution per se, like for example the Romanian Parliament, because it’s made up of a constantly changing cast of characters and is governed by the political ambitions and interests and aspirations of all kinds of people. Whereas changing individual minds is easier. It’s just harder to point to how that aggregates in terms of specific effects. So that has been one of the dilemmas of democracy assistance: how to show that it is having some positive effects. Its main effect is quite dispersed.

Could you use the longevity of organisations as one indicator?

TC: Yes, you can certainly trace effects on civil society groups, many of which have fundamental depth to support from external sources – either because of just sheer financing or training of people or just access to information and ideas. It is fairly clear that the civil society sector in Eastern Europe wouldn’t be like it is today without all of that external support. It would still exist, but there is no question the external support expanded and empowered it.

In your 1996 book on Romania you already indicated that it is much harder to reform institutions. You just mentioned parliaments. Have you found over the years that there are some tricks, if you will, to try to nudge some of these institutions.

TC: Yes, institutional change is hard, because you can, for example, invest a lot in an anti-corruption commission for years. And then a new government can come along and undercut or disband the commission for their own political reasons. And all the effort you put into it. I was just talking with somebody who has worked in Indonesia for years on an externally funded anti-corruption commission training project and did all kinds of good work. And then the government decided to undercut the commission and basically ruin it. All of the work that they have done, went down the drain. So that’s a risk with institutions. Now, the work didn’t really go down the drain in the sense that probably all the people who got the training, still have it in their minds. Even though that commission no longer exists, those people experienced better ways to do things. And maybe when they go do something else, they will take those ideas with them. So, it is hard to change an institution, but not so hard to change an individual. And ultimately, institutions are made up of individuals. But there are some institutions that have persistent habits like parliaments and parties because of their interest in the power dynamics that make them especially resistant to change. So when we came in, as outsiders to Eastern Europe, and said: your party should have characteristics like being less personalistic or being less leader driven or less corrupt — we were swimming against pretty stiff waters. There were a lot of reasons why parties were like that. The Romanian Parliament hasn’t changed very much because of parliamentary training. But it has changed somewhat, because of anti-corruption organisations they were forced to have greater transparency in their operations. So early on we may have made a mistake by thinking that institution-building should just be focused on institutions rather than the root causes. What really changes institutions is more the context than the actual training of institutions.

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“What really changes institutions is more the context than the actual training of institutions.”

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My second general hypothesis for you is that democracy assistance can serve as kind of a buffer against shrinking civic space, especially in the past ten years. Assuming that countries don’t have an NGO law that prohibits NGOs accepting funding from abroad. Would you agree? Do you think that, particularly looking at Central Asia, some countries where, where assistance has been been reduced, which goes for most of Europe and Central Asia, that actually played in the hands of those that have been trying to restrict space for civil society?

TC: The only thing that’s going to stop a determined government, a government that really wants to shrink civic space — is either an awareness of the domestic political costs or the external political costs of doing so. And so, in either case, if you withdraw from civil society aid, you are probably reducing the pull, because you’re showing that you don’t really care. And second, there will be a weaker domain in the country that will have to be closed or punished in various ways. Now you could argue that is an exaggerated argument, but long before that aid to NGOs partly triggered the closing civic space phenomenon, because it aggravated government’s feeling that outsiders were meddling in their politics. But I think most governments would have done it anyway, and it would have been easier without foreign support to civil society. They are really against the principle of independent civil society, they have not used the foreign angle or they are really interested in expanding independent sources of power. So I don’t buy the argument that we provoked them by providing such assistance. Part of the strategy to counter shrinking civic space is to continue supporting that civic space.

There is also a tendency of NGOs to become too dependent on foreign funding, which is a danger both in terms of when governments push back against foreign funding, but also, of course, when funding dries up, and they become too reliant. And sometimes NGOs can be perceived as as being funded from abroad and therefore coming with a certain agenda as well. You have written about shrinking civil space quite extensively. Have you looked at this? The dilemma of organisations becoming too dependent on foreign foreign assistance, and what what could be some solutions?

TC: There has been a slow realisation in the donor community, starting in the late 1990s, to better be careful about creating this kind of dependence syndrome. But it has taken a long time to really develop alternatives, because it isn’t obvious what to do instead. Greater emphasis on local rootedness, local constituency building of such organisations; help stimulate domestic philanthropy within countries in different ways. Donors have also tried to create local foundations and to pass assistance through them. More flexible and fewer larger external grants and instead smaller, more flexible grants internally. But the unpleasant truth is that in a country like Cambodia or Moldova and even Romania, there aren’t that many sources of domestic support for independent organisations. Partly because they are still relatively poor countries. Traditions of centralisation of power and public skepticism play a role too. Truth is that we have an aspiration for countries to be democratic in ways that require means of support that they don’t really have yet. Hence there is a bit of a contradiction and a big challenge. We envision developing democracies with “vibrant civil societies”, but we don’t really know how that is going to work in a number of places. 

But fortunately there is a lot of local volunteerism. Not often around governmental transparency or monitoring elections. Volunteerism is more charitable, it is very local. But even societies that were as atomised and repressed as Romania in the 1970s and 1980s, there are signs of volunteerism and civic engagement and activism on many fronts. So even despite democratic setbacks in Eastern Europe significant progress has been made in the last thirty years — away from being what they were in the 1980s.

There is a theory in political science linking the level of GDP with democratisation. I believe Turkey just passed that threshold a few years ago. Have you done any quantitative research around this? Obviously, a lot of philanthropy depends on the middle class. In Romania I see a lot of volunteering and there’s quite a bit happening regarding corporate social responsibility. With incomes and GDP per capita increasing, would you expect a philanthropy sector to develop that can fund local NGOs, civil society organisations — and what would be a threshold for that?

TC: There isn’t really a sharp threshold. A country as rich as Japan doesn’t have much of tradition of that kind of giving whereas much poorer country like Peru does have a tradition of philanthropy. There is not a straight line relationship. Countries can be fairly wealthy and not have a lot of civil society support coming from businesses and wealthy individuals. Hence you cannot just say the richer a country gets the better off civil society will be. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple and depends more on traditions of how much value a country puts on independent civic organising, and how much power concentration you can have. Democracies like Japan have a highly concentrated political sector and little independent civil society. And so that is really the question. Fortunately, in most newer democracies, like in Central and Eastern Europe, that power concentration was somewhat broken up by the processes of the late 1980s, early 1990s. They are not like Japan, they don’t have the kind of coherence of party structures and coherence of the state the way that Japan and some other Asian democracies have. So it’s not too much of a danger. Eastern European democracies are fairly heterogeneous. These relationships between wealth and democratisation are guidelines and often somewhat true. In the 1990s magic threshold was put at US$ 6,000 per capita. No democracy with over US$ 6,000 per capita income had ever gone backward. In the last fifteen years we seen some of these democracies slide back. One could argue that they weren’t really consolidated democracies in the first place, but then that becomes a bit illogical. So they are guidelines that are helpful ways of thinking about things. And then you have countries like China that have crossed that threshold and have not shown any signs of democratisation. People used to say China is on the verge of that threshold. It’s actually exceeded that threshold now. But it’s not there yet, obviously, in terms of democratisation.

My final question is about Romania…

TC [interrupts]: I wish I’d been able to spend more time in Romania. There’s something about the country that always kind of pulled me in and I feel very drawn to the Romanian language. There is something heartfelt about the Romanian way of living, always kind of got under my skin. I studied Romanian so that I could do the interviews for the book in Romanian. 

I went back about three years ago, just to interview some people to think about what had changed and what had not changed. What was disappointing was the persistence of opaque forms of power, the persistence of the fear of the security establishment. It was disappointing to see how difficult it has been to rationalise the internal security sector in Romania; the continued the migration of the security into the business sector — and the corruption of the business sector — by elements in the intelligence services and is a huge problem in Romania. Looking back, I had no idea that was going to be so difficult. I think another thing Western assistance didn’t do well relates to the media sector. The commercialisation of the media sector has been very damaging for media with integrity. Most media, be it electronic media, television or radio, are not very good in terms of serving the public interest. There was a push towards deregulation of the media. Looking back, especially given the way the business sector works, it didn’t turn out very well. Not our fault, but I don’t think Western assistance did very much in retrospect to help counter the bad elements of that process. Political parties in general, and that’s not particular to Romania, proved a lot more resistant to reform than people might have hoped, particularly on the centre left, on both sides of the spectrum. The centre left never really rationalised in the way that people hoped and never became a cleaner centre left. Also, the expectation that EU integration was an inexorable process of rationalisation of power and economic structures was an illusion. You can be a member of the EU and get away with murder on all kinds of things, so to speak. I remember being in many arguments with German colleagues, who claimed that once states of the former Eastern bloc are in the EU, it will all get fixed. Look at Greece, which continues to have all kinds of problems, including corruption, while being an EU member state for decades.

So those were four big areas are problematic. On the other hand, the general raising of the level of consciousness of Romanians about politics and certain political values has been fairly good. Romania is alive as a country, it’s not dead inside. There is energy and there are ideas and people trying to do things and there are decent initiatives. Central Asia is not, that are just squished as the power structures were too strong. Those regimes managed to suppress the whole society. Romania has huge problems, but it is not an authoritarian state. It’s muddling along. The anti-corruption movement in Romania is impressive. I’m kind of a realist, don’t expect a rose garden. I look at the problems we have in the United States, Great Britain and other places — it is democratic decay and happen anytime, anywhere. Three days ago in Washington, there were 604 guys walking around with guns stabbing people on the streets of Washington marauding around the city. Well, that’s the capital of the richest democracy in the world.

There’s something about Bucharest that tugs at my heart. There are so many buildings that are decaying in the city. To me the city has a certain grandeur, a failed grandeur. It is heart rendering and I worry about the city, because I don’t know if it is gonna make it in fifty years in terms of basic infrastructure of the city and the buildings. As I walked around the city recently, I was just amazed how many buildings are in trouble and the ownership structures are unclear. That worries me, makes me sad. I met a woman, I think she’s British-Romanian, who works a lot on preservation of the city. She took me around and showed me things. And I thought, if I were a billionaire, I might try to fix up Bucharest, give money to some kind of fund that would invest in buildings and preservation.