FOR REFORM
Why do foreign reformers pick particular demands or recommendations? Understanding the origin of reformers’ proposed changes can help build confidence that these changes are indeed the cause of the success of reform efforts. There could potentially be some other factor determining both the success of reform efforts and foreign demands or recommendations. In practice, while factors such as international resources do shape the changes that foreign reformers propose, demands and recommendations are highly variable and generally unpredictable. Understanding the origin of demands and recommendations is also useful for gaining insight about how foreign actors can improve reform efforts in the future.
My experience in Ukraine, described in the previous chapter, demonstrates a common approach by which foreign reformers identify demands or recommendations, which is also reflected in other case studies. According to this approach, foreign reformers first analyze the problems with a state institution. Based on this analysis, they identify structures or practices from developed countries that, if put into practice, would correct these flaws. These structures or practices then become their demands or recommendations. Given that nationalist goals or the ruling elites’ patron-client networks may be the cause of flaws of a particular state institution, it is not surprising that reforms often threaten these interests and, hence, provoke domestic opposition.
Several works explain how particular ideas within the organizations that pursue intervention may lead reformers to take this approach without paying sufficient attention to local practices. Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock explain that international development efforts tend to adopt a strategy of “skipping straight to Weber,” meaning that they seek to “reach service delivery performance goals in developing countries by simply mimicking (or adopting through colonial inheritance) the organizational forms of a particular ‘Denmark,’ ” meaning a model developed country.2 Roland Paris similarly observes, “Without exception, peace-building missions in the post-Cold War period have attempted to ‘transplant’ the values and institutions of the liberal democratic core into the domestic affairs of peripheral host states.”3 Liberal ideas may shape demands in other ways.4 One core liberal idea is respect for human rights. Pursuing human rights may lead foreign actors to demand free and fair elections, the protection and inclusion of minorities and women, and the universal application of judicial procedures.5 Liberal values are also associated with integrative approaches to resolving ethnic conflict, including attempting to reduce the political importance of ethnicity, undermining segregation, and prioritizing individual over collective group rights.6 In societies where nationalist goals include political rights and privileges for a particular ethnic group, liberal values may thus lead foreign actors’ demands to threaten nationalist goals or perhaps patron-client networks.
Foreign missions with greater resources may be more likely to pursue ambitious demands or recommendations that threaten domestic interests. Officials within these missions may believe that their resources enable them to achieve greater change in state institutions. Higher resources, especially a stronger mandate, may lead foreign missions to formulate their desired changes as obligatory demands rather than as recommendations. There may also be pressure from the countries funding the mission for more rapid improvements in state institutions. However, foreign missions with higher resources do not consistently propose more threatening demands or recommendations, as indicated by the range of threats in the case studies (see table 1.2 in the previous chapter). Reforms that are framed as demands are also not necessarily more likely to be threatening or lead to opposition than those that framed as optional recommendations, as shown by opposition to defense reform in Ukraine, described in chapter 6.
Part of the reason for variation in the threat of reform is that different individuals leading or supervising foreign missions may adopt different strategies or priorities based on their own experience and perspective. There are also other political, bureaucratic, or cultural pressures within peace-building organizations that influence the choice of demands or recommendations. Lise Morjé Howard notes that UN organizations may have vested political interests in carrying out peacekeeping operations in certain ways or with particular goals in mind, which may not always maximize the potential success of state building.7 Astri Suhrke, for example, shows how the mandate for the peacekeeping mission in East Timor in 1999 developed from preexisting ideas about impartiality and the United Nations’ recent experience in developing the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo.8 Séverine Autesserre highlights how everyday practices and beliefs can undermine the effectiveness of interveners, especially by reducing their ability to understand and adapt to local circumstances. She notes that interveners tend to emphasize “thematic” or generally accepted technical knowledge over “local” knowledge about the society where they are active. This tendency can lead to a range of dysfunctional practices, such as a preference for “short deployments and rapid turnover” of personnel, which leads to a lack of institutional memory and knowledge of events in the society; the selective recruitment of local partners who may provide a biased perspective of events on the ground; and a tendency to adopt one-size-fits-all approaches across different societies.9 Assessments of US counterinsurgency and state-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are also critical of the problems of rapid rotation, lack of training in local languages, and a focus on general technical principles without attention to their applicability to local circumstances.10
In a given intervention, there are often three levels of authority: a foreign mission, a headquarters overseeing the mission, and the country or countries that provide funds and staff the mission. The varying objectives of these separate organizations can also lead to the selection of counterproductive demands or recommendations.11 The headquarters may, for example, have an incentive to demonstrate to the mission’s backers that the mission is abiding by liberal principles or other ideals, which may lead the headquarters to ask the mission to seek particular demands even if they are not achievable. For example, Reo Matsuzaki shows in the case of US colonial policy in the Philippines that policymakers in Washington preferred a concept of bottom-up democratization based on the American historical experience of small New England towns. This policy was inappropriate in the Philippines since the municipalities in the Philippines did not have the capacity or will to run effective local administrations.12 Alternatively, the headquarters may have an incentive to declare success even if the mission is not making progress and thus encourage skewed reporting.
Another possibility is that particular domestic actors are able to influence foreign actors’ demands or recommendations to suit their interests. Foreign actors must to some degree take into account the interests of domestic-interest groups and draw their insight about what is good for the society through discussions with domestic actors. Few foreign actors seek direct involvement in local political competition, even though they recognize that their intervention will have an impact on it. The influence of particular domestic actors may mean that reform poses less of a threat to domestic interests in general, or it may lead foreign actors to adopt demands or recommendations that threaten the interests of competing domestic parties or groups.
Some foreign actors are able to modulate their demands or recommendations to the particularities of domestic politics, without being captured by particular domestic-interest groups, and thereby maximize the success of reform. Indeed, foreign actors sometimes learn from their failure and achieve greater success in later stages of reform. Drawing from the observed cases of success below, the concluding chapter also observes that foreign officials who have greater knowledge of domestic politics and the autonomy to select demands tend to be better able to avoid domestic opposition.
NATIONALIST GOALS
Political mobilization in defense of nationalist goals is an underappreciated factor influencing the outcome of foreign-supported institution building. Public opposition based on the threat of reform to nationalist goals is a bottom-up process that may involve
