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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Nobody wanted another Cold War. In the early 1990s, avoiding this possibility hinged on the security arrangements of the new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe. In a September 1995 speech, Russian president Boris Yeltsin made clear that European stability depended on the international institutions these states joined: "Those who insist on an expansion of NATO are making a major political mistake. The flames of war could burst out across the whole of Europe." In no set of states was this more evident than the Baltics, which had gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Bringing Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would place the Western alliance along Russia's border. As Ronald Asmus and Robert Nurick wrote in 1996 (121), "If mishandled, the Baltic issue has the potential to derail NATO enlargement, redraw the security map in northeastern Europe, and provoke a crisis between the West and Russia." Heurlin and Hansen (1998, 1) expressed a similar sentiment: "In spite of their smallness ... [the Baltics] have come to represent incarnations of several fundamental post-Cold War questions including: what are the new limits of the West? How does Russia react to international changes? ... What, in fact, does their international position tell us about the new world order?"
Europe sidestepped Yeltsin's "flames of war" when the Baltics, rather than seeking immediate NATO membership, instead formed their own organization: the Baltic Peacekeeping Battalion (BALTBAT). By providing training in peacekeeping and improving civil-military relations, BALTBAT signaled to the established Western democracies the Baltics' desire to become "part of the club" and acquire the public goods and expertise necessary to ensure the survival of their fledgling democratic regimes. This eventually opened the path to Baltic membership in NATO, which it acquired in 2004, uncontested by Russia. As a longtime member of the NATO Department of the Estonian Ministry of Defense writes, "The main objectives of the three countries in taking part in peacekeeping were thus to get noticed, and to gain a place among European democratic states by joining them in protecting peace ... they would demonstrate actively their ideological consistency with the West" (Paljak 2013, 206).
BALTBAT illustrates an important link between democracy and international organizations. Philosophers, poets, and policy makers have long seen international organizations as good for democracy. Domestic rule of law is ensured if similar processes unfold among sovereign nations. In The Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant (1795, 115) writes, "For the sake of its own security [as a republic], each nation can and should demand that the others enter into a contract resembling the civil one and guaranteeing the rights of each. This would be a federation of nations" (emphasis in original). Later, Lord Alfred Tennyson (1835, 119) remarks in Locksley Hall that a "federation of the world" would be necessary to ensure that "the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law." At the creation of the United Nations, Harry Truman (1946) remarked that "the United States believes that this Assembly should demonstrate the importance of freedom of speech" (emphasis added). Many international organizations recognize the protection of democracy as the core of their mission. The website of the Organization of American States lists "promoting democracy" as the first of its "pillars," while the NATO website asserts that "NATO promotes democratic values" and lists this as an essential purpose ahead of its military function.
Consistent with these claims, figure 1.1 suggests a relationship between international organizations (IOs) and democracy. It reports, in five-year intervals, the number of democracies and IOs in existence from 1900 to 2000. While the number of democracies ebbs and flows, it began a steady rise in the 1950s. Similarly, after holding steady throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the number of IOs rose dramatically beginning in the 1950s.
The number of democracies and IOs appears to increase concurrently, but what do we really know about this relationship? On the one hand, the relationship between IOs and the emergence of democracies might be spurious, meaning there is no causal relationship between the two. On the other hand, if the relationship is causal, how so and in which direction? In other words, does democratization — the process by which government institutions transition from authoritarian or foreign rule to self-governing democracy — induce the creation of IOs, or does increased global legalization, via IOs, create conditions ripe for democracy's emergence? Despite Huntington (1991, xiii) labeling democratization "an important — perhaps the most important — global political development of the late twentieth century" and scholars extensively studying the relationship between democratization and IOs (Whitehead 1996; Moravcsik 2000; Pevehouse 2005; Mansfield and Pevehouse 2006), the mechanisms underpinning the association remain unclear.
Our objective is to clarify these mechanisms. We argue that leaders in transitional democracies use, and often must create, IOs to consolidate democratic rule and improve their ability to distribute public goods to the populations under their rule. Public goods are broadly defined as policies that benefit large constituencies in society. Examples of public goods include internal and external security (Loader and Walker 2007; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999), public infrastructure that increases investment (Henisz 2002), free and fair elections (Donno 2010), reduction of corruption (Banerjee 1997), and environmental protection (VanDeveer and Dabelko 2001). Providing such goods is critical to the survival of leaders in democratizing states. But since autocratic developing countries havelittle need or capacity to improve the provision of public goods (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003; Wintrobe 1998), democratization leaves leaders in newly democratic regimes with a unique challenge: they face high expectations for public good provision, yet their administrative apparatus has little experience providing public goods (Haggard and Kaufman 1997). Therefore, newly democratic governments can benefit from outside expertise on public goods provision. Consider table 1.1. This table offers neither a comprehensive list of public goods nor of the IOs that can assist in their provision; however, it does illustrate how, regardless of the type of public good, there are IOs oriented toward assisting in its provision.
Unfortunately for democratizing states, existing IOs are often a poor "fit." Democratizing states must create domestic institutional capacity for providing public goods and implementing policy reforms. In contrast, many existing organizations were created by established democracies facing an altogether different set of problems. Hence, many existing organizations, while designed to assist in the provision of public goods, are not tailored to the particular needs of a given democratizing state or states. In addition, democratizing states must consider the "feasibility" of different institutional solutions. While some existing organizations promise valuable benefits, joining the most lucrative existing organizations is often not feasible for democratizing states. For instance, at the time of Baltic independence, Sir Garry Johnson, NATO commander of Allied forces in Northern Europe, remarked that the Baltic states "started from zero," and an unnamed retired US military officer said that the Baltic states "were at 1 on a 1–10 scale of military capabilities." Under such conditions, established democracies might hesitate to allow democratizing states to join a lucrative existing IO.
Given these constraints of fit and feasibility, we contend that democratizing states have a propensity to form new organizations rather than join existing ones. IOs have grown in number with the number of new democracies, as suggested by figure 1.1, because new democracies play an important role in the proliferation of new organizations. These new organizations, in turn, provide technical assistance and capacity building to leaders in new democracies, which can significantly improve the odds of a democratizing state achieving democratic consolidation, whereby democratic political competition is widely accepted as the "only game in town" and the risk of an authoritarian reversal reaches a negligible level (Linz and Stepan 1996; Przeworski et al. 2000; Svolik 2008). Hence, the consolidation of democratic rule is a key reason why democratizing states seek IO membership.
This is a book about both democratizing states and IOs: understanding one requires understanding both. We will explain throughout this book the key role played by democratizing states in the creation of many IOs. For now, consider table 1.2. The top section of table 1.2 lists the IOs formed since 1965 in which at least a quarter of the founding members were democratizing states. As the table shows, the IOs that include new democracies are a diverse group. However, most of the IOs are rather specialized, such as the subregional Baltic Environmental Forum and the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries. While most of these IOs have a relatively narrow focus, the same is also true of IOs formed by established democracies since 1965. The bottom section of table 1.2 lists the IOs formed since 1965 in which the original membership was 100 percent established democracies. This list is also populated by highly specialized and technical IOs, such as the Joint Nordic Organization for Lappish Culture and Reindeer Husbandry. In short, most IOs are not like the large and prominent instruments of global governance that are the United Nations, NATO, or the World Trade Organization (WTO). Instead, most IOs are designed to fulfill specific and highly technical tasks. This does not mean that most IOs are irrelevant, but it does mean that most IOs have a narrow focus that is likely tailored to the needs of the states that created the IO.
Summary of the Argument
Our argument explains both how democratization promotes IO formation and how IO membership, in turn, contributes to democratic consolidation. While we have introduced key elements of both arguments elsewhere (Poast and Urpelainen 2013, 2015), those papers treated the link between democratization and IO membership and the link between IO membership and democratic consolidation as separate phenomena. We show here how the two are linked in critical ways. We argue that leaders in transitional democracies use IOs to acquire resources for distributing public goods to their newly expanded electorates. This leads democratizing states to largely form IOs, as democratizing states face governance problems that are often not relevant to the existing IOs dominated by established democracies and stable autocracies. These new IOs, in turn, are particularly well suited to facilitating the process of consolidation.
For our purposes, the defining feature of a democratizing state is the immaturity of its democratic political institutions. It is common for democratic institutions to fail to take root in countries that have only recently left behind authoritarian rule (Huntington 1968). This is because a typical transitional democracy faces a host of governance issues that threaten the sustainability of democratic rule: weak de facto constraints on executive rule, citizens who may not agree on the value of democracy, and a nonnegligible possibility of a coup or revolution. Each of these will subject the political development of a transitional democracy to great uncertainty. Contrast this with established democracies. They are governed by stable institutions that essentially reduce to zero the relevance of nondemocratic political competition, such as coups and revolutions (Przeworski 2005). While such consolidation of democratic rule is not directly observable or verifiable (Svolik 2008), younger democratic regimes are generally less likely to have consolidated institutions.
We assume that leaders, regardless of regime type, desire to retain power and maintain their political support (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003). For an autocracy, this requires simply distributing private benefits to a chosen few key members of the military or bureaucracy. In a democracy, by contrast, retaining power requires the support of a large segment of society, commonly larger than can be obtained via the transfer of private benefits. This means that leaders in democratizing polities face a unique problem: they must shift the focus of governance from the distribution of private benefits to the provision of public goods.
Moreover, leaders in democratizing states must provide public goods to broad domestic constituencies against a backdrop of ineffective domestic institutions and inexperience with democratic governance (Haggard and Kaufman 1997; Keefer 2007). An inability to quickly shift from private good to public good provision contributes to democratizing states facing changes in leadership more frequently than established democracies. As Mansfield and Pevehouse (2008, 271) write, "The possibility of policy reversals is hardly unique to transitional regimes, but such regimes are often marked by political instability and considerable government turnover, which increases the odds of policy change." As Spiller and Tommasi (2007) argue, far from being innocuous, repeated leadership changes cause the public to become frustrated with democratic institutions, undermining their legitimacy. Moreover, rapid turnover of leadership can narrow actors' time horizons. Combined, the result is volatile and ineffective policies.
IOs can help governments of transitional democracies govern effectively and acquire the resources to supply public goods to the newly expanded electorate. IOs accomplish these ends in two ways.
First, IOs assist in highly technical tasks, including advising on governance capacity, monitoring elections, and facilitating learning about democratic institutions. For instance, IOs can build capacity for standard functions of electoral competition. In the right circumstances, IOs can help democratizing states implement fair and organized elections (Donno 2010; Hyde 2011). They can help in election monitoring, assist in writing legislation concerning political organizations, and allow inexperienced political groups to learn from established groups in other countries. Even if IOs cannot directly enforce free and fair elections, they can improve the legitimacy of elections by enhancing their implementation and, at least on the margin, reducing politicians' incentives to cheat.
Second, membership in IOs enables transitional democracies to burnish their credentials as members of the "democratic" international community in the hope that this will induce economic and military assistance from major Western powers. As noted by sociologists working on "world polity" theories, states tend to mimic globally legitimate or dominant organizational forms (Meyer et al. 1997). For democratizing states, the relevant sources of legitimacy are established democracies. Since established democracies operate some of the most successful IOs, membership in an IO, even a newly created one, allows the democratizing state to signal a desire to be "in the club" of established democracies. This should, in turn, enable the democratizing state to acquire access to much-needed resources for public good provision, such as foreign aid and markets for exports.
Despite these two benefits, democratizing states could face two limits to joining existing IOs. First, democratizing states might find it difficult to become members of some existing IOs. It is often not feasible for democratizing states to join existing IOs that offer the most benefits because established democracies might hesitate to allow democratizing states to join these IOs. Second, democratizing states could find membership in many existing IOs to be unhelpful. Since these IOs were created by established democracies that face an altogether different set of problems, existing IOs are often not the best solution to the democratizing state's problems. And in some regions of the world, few suitable IOs even exist. Stated differently, the "institutional fit" of existing IOs might be quite limited (Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2013).
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Excerpted from "Organizing Democracy"
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