I conducted more than 150 interviews for the purposes of this research.11 This included interviews with both European and American aid providers, Serbian aid recipients, nonrecipient parties, journalists, and scholars. The book relies on the perspectives not only of party aid practitioners but also on those of diplomats, government officials, state security personnel, covert operatives, members of the European Commission (EC), and for-profit party consultants. It also draws on the public and internal documents of party aid providers, including the American party institutes, the German Stiftungen, and smaller European party foundations, like the Alfred-Mozer-Stichting (AMS). Where necessary, I used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to get the inside story on the aid that was and was not provided to Serbian democrats, whether through internal practitioner reports or CIA analyses.
In addition, I consulted party manifestoes and statutes, media reports, historical overviews, relevant memoirs, and academic literature concerning the time periods in question—the combination of which provide rare insight into the thoughts, concerns, objectives, and regrets of those involved in aiding Serbia’s political parties in the run-up to and aftermath of Milošević’s electoral defeat.
Chapter Overview
This book includes an overview of the literature on party aid, analysis of Serbia’s political landscape, and original empirical information. To set the stage for an analysis of party aid’s effects in Serbia, Chapter 1 examines the state of political parties and political party aid in new democracies and authoritarian states. Its ambition is to elucidate the link between party aid, political parties, and democracy in an effort to show how party aid attempts to influence not only political party development but also democratization processes more generally. After exploring the contributions political parties are thought to make to democracy and authoritarianism, Chapter 1 explores the world of political party aid, in particular what party aid is, who is involved, and the propositions that comprise what scholars know (or think they know) about party aid.
Most of the empirical research relating to party aid in Serbia is introduced in Chapters 2, 3, and 4. Each of these chapters hones in on a different period in political party aid history. Chapter 2 explores the absence of party aid between 1990 and 1996 and what this meant for Serbia’s opposition parties that had hoped to bring democracy to Serbia. Chapter 3 examines the initiation of political party aid in 1997 and its transformation in the months and years leading to Milošević’s ouster in October 2000 and the parliamentary victories of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) in December 2000. Chapter 4 traces the evolution of party aid in the aftermath of democracy’s onset in Serbia, from the beginning of democratic politics in 2001 to the acceptance of Serbia as a European Union (EU) candidate country in 2012. Each of these empirical chapters is divided into four sections: the first, outlining the contours of the political system during that period; the second, providing an analysis of the challenges afflicting the political party system at that time; the third, offering an in-depth examination of how donors and practitioners of party aid sought to respond to such challenges; and the fourth, analyzing the impact of aid during the period in question.
Chapter 5 provides an overarching analysis of party aid’s impact throughout the whole of Serbia’s postcommunist period. After introducing aid’s ambiguous record of achievement, it reflects on the implications of the achievements of political party aid. It concludes by looking beyond Serbia, in an attempt to draw lessons that might be applied to future interventions in other semi-authoritarian and newly democratic contexts.
CHAPTER ONE
Promoting Democracy and Aiding Political Parties Abroad
Writing in the years following the fall of Milošević, democracy aid scholar Sarah Mendelson (2004: 88) predicted that aid to Serbia’s democrats would make history. And so it would. Scholars and practitioners have celebrated Serbia as democracy promotion at its best. It has been seen to “reveal the hollowness of the cliché that ‘democracy can’t be imposed by outsiders.’”1 And its perceived success has given rise to an industry tasked with “exporting revolution” as a result of which, Serbia has gone on to influence cases of regime change spanning from Georgia and Ukraine to Egypt and Libya.
But if the promotion of democracy has been celebrated in Serbia, it was certainly not with precedent. To the contrary, governments have been promoting democracy (in name, if not in practice) for more than a century. Today democracy promotion serves as an integral component of foreign policy on both sides of the Atlantic. And although it has traditionally been the prerogative of large Western powers like the United States and Germany, in recent years the field of providers has widened to include smaller European states, such as Sweden, the Netherlands, and Slovakia; multilateral organizations, including the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the European Commission; and even large NGOs like George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and Freedom House.
Yet, although the promotion of democracy was not unprecedented in Serbia, the profound impact of democracy assistance was. Before Serbia, democracy aid was regarded as a helpful but largely benign tool that could help countries ease their way toward democracy. In Serbia, by contrast, democracy assistance was—for the first time—viewed as critical to the toppling of a dictator.
Like donors, authoritarian leaders from Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Belarus’ Alexander Lukašenko to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak took lessons from Milošević’s fall. One such lesson was that democracy assistance posed an existential threat to dictatorship.
To understand how this came to be, it is necessary to set the stage with a brief overview of democracy promotion’s place within foreign policy and the multibillion dollar industry known as democracy assistance.
Democracy Promotion and the Origins of Democracy Assistance
Few aspects of foreign policy have been as hotly contested in the post-9/11 era as that of democracy promotion. By its proponents, democracy promotion is lauded as “the right thing to do” (Fukuyama and McFaul 2007: 4), “vital” to Western interests (Roberts 2009: 18), and the product of “compelling … ideals” (Craner and Wollock 2008:10). Skeptics, by contrast, have dismissed the effort as no more than “a convenient tool used by different players for their own selfish reasons” (Houngnikpo 2003: 197) or, as Noam Chomsky puts it, the promotion of “rule by the rich and the powerful.”2
The controversy stems, in part, from the frequency with which the promotion of democracy has been used to rationalize major foreign policy decisions throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Democracy’s promotion is here defined as any effort undertaken by a government, an international institution, a nongovernmental organization, or an individual, with the stated ambition of supporting the emergence or the deepening, or both, of democracy abroad. It has been used by the United States and Western European states to legitimize a wide array of foreign policy interventions, including but not limited to, the 2003 intervention in Iraq, the economic and political sanctions imposed on Burma, and the diplomatic isolation of Belarus.
The tools through which democracy is promoted are thus varied. Among the most prominent are diplomatic engagement or nonengagement, military intervention, economic assistance or sanctions, democracy assistance, or the acceptance or denial of membership into a coveted club. Such tools may