Australasian Political Studies Association Conference 2003
Hosted by the School of Government
University of Tasmania

International Politics Stream

Democracy assistance and the Clinton administration’s strategy of selective opportunism

Daniel Baldino
School of International Studies, University of South Australia

Abstract:

This paper is focused on democracy promotion as a component of US post Cold War national security strategy. The breakup of the Soviet Union initiated an ongoing political and academic debate about US strategic options and the role the United States should play in a fluid, changing world order. In his State of Union message in January 1994, President Clinton declared that “Ultimately, the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere”. With the publication of A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (En-En) in July 1994, the Clinton administration promulgated that democratisation was a dynamic which offered a more stable and secure global arena in which to advance US objectives. The Clinton administration increased democracy assistance from about $100 million a year to more than $700 million by the end of the 1990s and raised democracy promotion to an explicit strategic element of the United States Agency of International Development (USAID) assistance program.

This paper contends that valuable lessons about the new realities in the international system can be drawn from an examination of the relationship between the study of US foreign policy and the study of democratic consolidation. In this context, the idea of democracy enlargement as a suitable and viable policy in the post-Cold War era to advance and protect US ideals and interests is examined. The En-En canvas was painted with a series of caveats in recognizing that democracy building would be a discerning, and therefore an awkwardly inconsistent, process of targeting particular states. Nonetheless, while many of the priority countries targeted by the Clinton administration for democracy assistance are neither broadly dictatorial nor democratic, the US has a limited but significant influence on transitional directions and outcomes.