Thank you. And thank you to the committee for having me.
I should just begin with a few words of background. I come to the question of democracy and democratization primarily from an international relations background. My main area of work over the last number of years has been in relation to international military operations, particularly concerning the United Nations and its involvement in conflict. So I come at the democracy question and the question of democratization in the same way the United Nations has, through the back door, in effect, as it has increasingly sought to deal with conflict within states, which is primarily but not exclusively a post-Cold War phenomenon.
The United Nations has increasingly had to come to grips with questions about what role democratization plays in these situations. Commensurate with an increased awareness, for example, that peace is more than the absence of war in these situations, there has been increased attention to how democracy affects the likelihood of long-term peace and stability in conflict situations and what relationship there is between democracy and other aspects of the post-conflict scenario. That's how I'm coming at the question, so my remarks reflect that.
I really just want to go over three points in that context. I'm focusing primarily on the role of democracy and democratization in post-conflict situations. The three points are essentially as follows. The first one is that the process of democracy in these situations is different from that in non-conflict scenarios. The second one relates to that, which is to say that there are situations in which democratization can be a conflict-producing syndrome. The third relates to that, which is to say that how and when we do things with respect to the democratization process matters. So I'll walk through those three points and talk about some of the issues that relate to each of them.
The first point is that democratization in post-conflict situations is different. The first reason for that difference is that in almost all cases, given the nature of the institutions, the idea that democratization should be part of the post-conflict scenario is built into the peace agreement that brings an end to these conflicts. That means a couple of things. It may mean that the nature of the process established and the nature of the institutions envisaged are not necessarily conducive to long-term stability or peace. It also means that the international community, both through organizations like the UN and also through individual states that might come to support the process, tends not to make a judgment about those assumptions. The peace agreement is treated as a product of negotiations that brought the warring groups together, and as such is left intact. So the fact that it may sow within it seeds for future problems is not something the international community engages with.
That relates to another point, which is that elections are important. In the peace agreements of post-conflict situations, the international community and other states as a group tend to attribute multiple goals to elections in post-conflict environments. They're seen as an exit strategy. There's a tendency to hold them earlier rather than later in the process, and in general there's an overemphasis on them. One outcome that early elections can generate is further instability. To the extent that they are seen as an exit strategy, they can also become symbolic of an end to a conflict that may not be there. They become a link to the exit for the international community as well.
One of the things that have been learned since the end of the Cold War in particular is that elections do not mean that democracy is in place or even that a democratization process is ongoing. We have a tendency to judge elections, when they happen, on the basis of whether they're free and fair, rather than a tendency to judge whether or not they are playing a positive role in the post-conflict environment.
One of the related issues on the election question is this question of inclusion. Who gets included in the political process in a post-conflict environment, and how? A key question here is what we do with groups that in international relations terms are often called “spoilers”--spoilers meaning a group that will seek to undermine the peace process or the post-conflict process.
Extremists groups can be spoilers or separate actors. How do we incorporate them into the process, and is it a correct assumption that doing so is a positive attribute to the process? Is the inclusion of extremist groups, potential spoilers, based on the assumption that doing so will ultimately lead to moderate their goals, their aims, their methods? It's not clear yet whether or not that is a fair assumption.
The other way in which inclusion matters is that it relates to the idea that democratization is not just about process and institutions, but about the development of a political culture that supports the idea of democracy and democratization. And in post-conflict situations that is a particularly difficult thing to achieve and it takes a long time. It's another factor that we tend not to build into the equation because we tend to take more of a functional approach to these things.
Still under this heading of democratization being different in post-conflict situations is the question of timing. My last point related to the fact that democratization is a long-term process. In post-conflict situations it has a lot of key requirements in the very short term. One of the things we've learned about post-conflict internal conflict situations since the end of the Cold War is that what we do or don't do in the immediate aftermath of a peace agreement matters a great deal. If there's a delay in terms of international community support or outside support coming to the peace agreement, it paves the way for a number of things to happen.
It opens the way for groups to rearm, for groups to read the situation as one that is continuing to be unstable and therefore start to shift their own priorities and their own basis of support in anticipation of things going downhill. All of those factors together contribute to ongoing instability that sends messages to all of the parties to the conflict. In addition, it also sends the message of a less than full political commitment on the part of the international community and outside states, which is also built into the assumptions and perceptions of the warring groups.
More broadly, the question of timing goes to the question of what in the literature is often called “sequencing”. This is the broader question of when we emphasize which institutions as part of the process. At what point is it correct or is it useful to have elections? When should those elections occur with respect to what we do with respect to rights? And this goes to some of the issues that John was raising. Is it possible to engage in democratization in a situation that is less than fully secure, or does democratization contribute to making the situation more secure over time? Again, these are questions that we now understand are important, but we still don't have a lot of answers about what matters and when.
The second broad point is democratization can be conflict-inducing. One way in which this happens relates to the question of how minorities or other groups in society are treated. We need to build in greater recognition that democratization can both empower and disempower. It can disempower our groups that are used to having exclusive access to power before the conflict or the post-conflict situation, and it can empower groups that have longstanding grievances with other groups in society and that will then use the process as a way to deal with those grievances.
A related point is the question of how citizenship is defined. This goes to the question of who gets included, on what basis they get included in the process, how power-sharing arrangements might work. So the question of citizenship, especially in post-conflict situations that are ethnic or at least divisive in terms of minority groups, matters a great deal. We can see that in some of the conflicts that are ongoing today.
The second way it can be conducive to creating conflict, either in the immediate or longer-term, is the extent to which democracy is seen as a foreign policy product. What I mean by this is that democracy and the idea of democratization is often seen as a product of western societies, western interests, as opposed to a value in and of itself. A related question here is also the extent to which the democratization process, the delivery of democracy, if you like, is now increasingly associated with militarization, or military operations.
We can now talk about the militarization of delivery of democracy. Iraq is the obvious example here, but there are a number of others, such as Afghanistan and any number of other post-conflict situations in which there has been a UN operation where force has been part of the picture. For those on the ground, the perception is a correlation between the use of force and the arrival of democracy. We need to understand that connection better.
The question of whether democracy is a western construct or western value or a universal one is key for the UN. As the UN has increasingly become involved in post-conflict situations within states, it has had, as I said in the beginning, to face these questions about where democracy plays a role and how it plays a role. As a result, the UN has often been in a situation where it has been an advocate of democracy.
Since the end of the Cold War, the two secretary-generals themselves, first Boutros-Ghali and then Kofi Annan, have increasingly been acting, in their own positions, as advocates of democracy. This has particularly been the case under Kofi Annan. This is, as I'm sure you can imagine, quite controversial. There are a number of member states that are not happy about the fact that the UN should play a role in advocating democracy, even when it comes to post-conflict situations where parties have agreed to democracy as part of the peace agreement.
This relates partly to the ongoing questions about sovereignty. With the responsibility to protect, for example, there's been an increasing acceptance that sovereignty is not sacrosanct, and for those who are resistant to these ideas, the idea that democratization or democracy is an important universal value is seen as yet another hook that western states can use as a criterion for intervention in states.
If democracy is to be put forward as a universal value, we need to be able to make that case more effectively than we are now. That's a factor the United Nations is grappling with, but I think it goes across the board for states as well. On this point, the questions of perceptions relate as well to the image or the perception in a number of states that the UN engages in a number of double standards. Why do we, through the United Nations, react to some conflicts and by extension then deal with some post-conflict scenarios with resources and commitment, and not others? When we feed that into the broader question about whether democracy is a western value or not, you can see how the whole package becomes an issue.
Finally, that sort of sequence that I've touched on in a very broad-brush way leads to the third point, which is that how and when we do things matters. We have a much greater requirement, I think, to understand the importance of context specificity. One of the things that's happened in the post-Cold War environment is there's been a wave, if you like, or an explosion of the number of states in the world that call themselves democratic, or who we consider to be democratic. That means, 15, 17, or 18 years on, that our data base, if you like, has grown significantly. But we have not yet engaged in either the academic literature or at the policy level in an indepth lessons-learned process that looks at all of this experience in an effort to determine how the nature of certain contexts affects the democratization and post-conflict peace process.
With respect to Canada, for example, one of the arguments you can make on this basis is that it's not just enough to have democracy or democratization as one of the three Ds, or part of the joined-up approach, whatever title we're going to give it. As a leader on these issues Canada could work towards developing greater awareness of the nuances and complexities involved in this process, and lead or commission a study that would undertake that long, in-depth examination of the importance of context specificity, and what works when. A certain model of democracy and democratization might work in one instance, but in a second instance, which is not necessarily dramatically different, only somewhat different, have a completely different impact, including, as I mentioned, in fact sowing the seeds for long-term instability and even a return to conflict.
All of these questions do relate in fact to our understanding of political violence, not just conflict in the sense of within states or external to states, but civil war, ethnic conflict, terrorism--the idea of political violence being on a spectrum, if you like. And in the academic world that's increasingly becoming an issue of study--what situation leads to what kind of political violence? So what I'm suggesting is that it's useful to think of democracy in the same way and link that back to our understanding.