“The United Nations Democracy Fund (UNDEF) is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Roland Rich, an Australian national, as its Executive Head. Mr. Rich took up his duties on 1 October 2007. He brings to the task broad experience in diplomacy and democracy promotion.” UN Democracy Fund (October 5, 2007) 

For busy progressive activists this important news will not visibly effect their lives, accordingly a totally understandable response from them may be to simply respond: so what? This is largely due to the lack of critical information surrounding the work of Roland Rich and the UN Democracy Fund: It follows that most people reading this article will be asking themselves a three part question: who is Roland Rich, what is the Democracy Fund, and why is it important to my activism? This article will answer these fundamental questions. It will further demonstrate that the UN Democracy Fund is playing a critical role in promoting the global uptake of what has been referred to as low-intensity democracy.  It is hoped that an awareness of this will help enable activists all over the world to work to promote a more progressive world order.

The promotion of low-intensity democracy is “usually accompanied by neoliberal economic policies to restore economic growth”, which are “designed to promote stability” and not participatory forms of democracy. It has been suggested that the adoption of low-intensity democracy “may ‘work’ in the short term, primarily as a strategy to reduce political tension, but is fragile in the long term, due to its inability to redress fundamental political and economic problems.”[1] William I. Robinson – who has referred to the strategy of facilitating the global spread of such neoliberal forms of democracy as Promoting Polyarchy (1996) – observes that the “concept of polyarchy is an outgrowth of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century elite theories developed by Italian school social scientists Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto.” Robinson argues that, whereas Parento “embrace[d] fascism as the best method” to maintain the elite driven status quo, Mosca supported the idea “that ‘democratic’ rather than fascist methods are best suited to defend the ruling class and preserve the social order”. Indeed, Robinson (2000) points out that:

“Building on this elitism theory, a new polyarchic or institutional redefinition of democracy developed within U.S. academic circles closely tied to the U.S. policymaking community in the post-World War II years of U.S. world power. This redefinition began with Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 classic study, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, in which he rejected the ‘classic theory of democracy’ defined in terms of the ‘will of the people’ and the ‘common good.’ Instead, Schumpeter advanced ‘another theory’ of democracy as ‘institutional arrangements’ for elites to acquire power ‘by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.’ ‘Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them,’ explained Schumpeter. This redefinition culminated in 1971 with the publication of Robert Dahl’s study, Polyarchy. By the time the United States assumed global leadership after World War II, the polyarchic definition of democracy had come to dominate social science, political and mass public discourse.”

Awarding Polyarchy

Given that Robert Dahl provided the interpretative framework, which was utilised within Robinson’s seminal critique of ‘democracy promoting’ organisations, Promoting Polyarchy (1996), it is worth briefly pointing out that in 1995 Dahl – a former president of the American Political Science Association – was awarded the inaugural Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science from the Skytte Foundation at Uppsala University. His receipt of the award is not surprising given the elitist nature of the prize, it is interesting to note, however, that a number of this award’s laureates are linked to key ‘democracy’ (read: polyarchy) promoting groups. Here it is important to observe that one of the key ‘democracy’ promoting (manipulating) organizations in the US is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). For those desirous of greater familiarity with this quasi non-governmental organization, I provide the following link to a review of the group’s antidemocratic activities. In addition, where the names of (perhaps) unfamiliar organizations arise, an internet link will direct the reader to a summary of that groups relevant ‘democratic’ activities and ties.

Returning to the Johan Skytte Prize, in 1996, the year after Dahl received the prize, Juan J. Linz, “one of the most prominent researchers in the study of democracy and its enemies in the 20th century” received the award. He is particular famous amongst democracy manipulators because in the late 1980s he co-edited the influential Democracy in Developing Countries trilogy with Larry Diamond (who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, co-director of the NED’s International Forum for Democratic Studies, as well as a member of USAID’s Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid), and the late Seymour Martin Lipset (who is a former director of the US Institute for Peace, the Albert Shanker Institute, and the Committee for the Free World). Linz has also co-authored and edited The Failure of Presidential Democracy (1994), with ‘democratically’ connected Arturo Valenzuela, and presently serves as a member of the international advisory committee of the NED’s International Forum for Democratic Studies’ Journal of Democracy.

 

Other ‘democratic’ Johan Skytte Prize winners include:

 

The late Alexander L. George – who has been a distinguished fellow at the US Institute for Peace, an emeriti director of the Watson Institute for International Studies, and member of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict

 

Robert O. Keohane – who in 2003 co-edited the book, Humanitarian Intervention, a number of whose contributors have well established ‘democratic’ credentials, i.e. Tom J. Farer, Michael Ignatieff,[2] Simon Chesterman,[3] and Thomas M. Franck [4]

 

Robert D. Putnam – whose highly influential book, Bowling Alone (2000), built upon earlier work that first received widespread attention after it was published in the NED’s Journal of Democracy in 1995;[5] Putnam also formerly headed the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and is an associate of the Center for International Development [6] and

 Theda Skocpol – who has been “included in policy discussions with President Bill Clinton at the White House and Camp David”, is an academic advisor to the Open Society Institute-supported Roosevelt Institution.[7]

 

These, ‘democratic’, Johan Skytte Prize connections demonstrate nothing new and merely illustrate how elite democracy manipulating groups’ are a central part of mainstream liberal thinking in the US. Other, more detailed, examinations of such entwined agendas are provided in two of my more recent articles Hijacking Human Rights and Operation ‘Peace’ and the Iraq Study Group. Yet, to date, most studies have simply focused on links to obvious democracy manipulators like the NED and USAID, failing to mention the vital role that the United Nation’s provides in supporting the global promotion of low-intensity democracy.

 

The lack of critical analysis of the United Nation’s polyarchal function can be understood to some extent as the Democracy Fund, which established the dedicated bureaucracy which frames the UN’s ‘democratic’ work, was only created in 2005. Furthermore, the appointment of Roland Rich as the new head of this Fund, which drew my attention to the Fund’s work, only occurred this past October, 2007. The rest of this article will provide the first critical investigation of Roland Rich’s and the UN Democracy Fund’s international activities. It should be highlighted that, while the following is a critique of the ‘democratic’ work of the UN, it does not consequentially imply that I would level the same critique against all of their activities without further critical investigations. In addition, given the exploratory nature of this essay, I will be focusing on the ‘democratic’ ties of the UN Democracy Fund, and not the people and groups linked to the Fund that, for all intents and purposes, appear to be carrying out progressive work (that is, promoting participatory forms of democracy). It is therefore appropriate to preface my criticisms of the UN with a quote from Robinson (2004) who noted that:

 

“It is important to emphasize that many individuals brought into US ‘democracy promotion’ programs are not simple puppets of US policy and their organizations are not necessarily ‘fronts’ (or in CIA jargon, ‘cut-outs’). Very often they involve genuine local leaders seeking to further their own interests and projects in the context of internal political competition and conflict and of heavy US influence over the local scene. Moreover, old and new middle classes, professional and bureaucratic strata may identify their interests with the integration or reintegration of their countries into global capitalism under a US canopy. These classes may be politically disorganized or under the sway of counter-elites and of nationalist, popular, or radical ideologies. They often become the most immediate targets of ‘democracy promotion,’ to be won over and converted into a social base for the transnational elite agenda.”
 

Who is Roland Rich?

Roland Rich is an Australian lawyer who displays extraordinary ‘democratic’ connections, and, since October 2007, has been heading the recently formed UN Democracy Fund. To begin with, his various online biographies note that he has “served for more than 20 years as an Australian Foreign Service officer”, and that from 1994 to 1997 he served as Australia’s Ambassador to Laos: they also mention that he has undertaken diplomatic postings in France (1976-9), Burma (1982-4) and the Philippines (1987-9), and has “held the position of legal adviser to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade” (1997-8). Of most significance to this essay, though, was his 1998 appointment as the founding director of the Australian Centre for Democratic Institutions. This appointment, however, did not occur without controversy, as according to Stuart Macintyre (2006), in 1998:

 

“A selection committee chose Dr John Uhr, a highly qualified political scientist, as the director of the centre [for Democratic Institutions]. That decision was then put to Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer for approval, and it is alleged that he consulted the Prime Minister. In the event a former Australian ambassador, Mr Roland Rich, who had no research qualifications, was appointed the foundations director.”[8]

 

Irrespective of this little snippet of political intrigue for all intents and purposes the Centre for Democratic Institutions is Australia’s version of the American NED. In fact, just before the Centre was established, the NED’s program officer for Asia, Louisa Coan, commented that they were “pleased to see the establishment of such a sister institution in Australia.”[9] The Centre’s ‘democratic’ credentials were further solidified when their inaugural annual address was given by the former president of the Philippines, Fidel Ramos, an individual who had directly benefited from the NED’s manipulative intervention into the Philippines’ 1986 people’s revolution. Ramos’s ‘democratic’ background was obviously considered perfect for launching the Australian NED, and with no irony Rich waxed lyrical about Ramos at his Centre’s launch, noting that: 

“There would not be a more appropriate voice to speak on democracy in Asia than President Fidel Ramos. As I well recall from my time serving at the Australian Embassy in Manila [from 1987-9], the Philippines has an exuberantly free press that loves to employ popular sobriquets. President Ramos is known as ‘Steady Eddy’, a term often accompanied by a descriptor like ‘cigar-chomping’ or ‘straight-shooting’. They are well chosen.”

 

No critical studies have investigated the ‘democratic’ work of the Centre for Democratic Institutions, but Rich himself – during his seven year tenure there – was involved in a number of other significant ‘democratic’ consultancy projects: in April 1999, Rich served as a consultant for the Ford Foundation for whom he organised a workshop in Canberra which focused “on managing transition in East Timor”; then between 1999 and 2002 he worked in varying capacities for the Australian Agency for International Development (AUSAID) on ‘democracy promoting’ projects in Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam; and in November 2003 he undertook a consultancy for the National Democratic Institute (a core NED grantee), which involved a “study tour by Timor-Leste National Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and National Security”.

 

In 2004, Rich bolstered his ‘democratic’ pedigree by joining the editorial board of the International Foundation for Election Systems’ new magazine Democracy at Large to allegedly “help bring an Asia-Pacific focus” to it’s work. As might be expected all the members of Democracy at Large’s editorial board have strong ‘democratic’ ties, and a few particularly notable members of their board are Carl Gershman (who is the president of the NED), Miklos Marschall (who is Transparency International’s director for Central and Eastern Europe, and is the former executive director of CIVICUS), and Shauna Sylvester (who is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society – whose board of directors includes Ed Broadbent, who is the former president of the Canadian equivalent to the NED, Rights and Democracy).

 

As a brief aside, given Shauna Sylvester’s ‘democratic’ connections, it is worrying to observe that in 2007 she was also a member of the international founding committee of the new progressive media outlet The Real News Network. This tie certainly deserves future investigation given that one of the directors of The Real News Network, Michael Ratner, is also a director of the International Endowment for Democracy – a group that vehemently critiques the activities of global ‘democracy promoters’ like Rights and Democracy.

 

Rich stepped down as the executive director of the Centre for Democratic Institutions in late 2005, and, not coincidentally, at around this time he served as a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the NED’s International Forum for Democratic Studies (from August to December 2005).[10] His replacement at the helm of the Centre for Democratic Institutions was Benjamin Reilly, who in the past has “worked for the United Nations Development Program in New York, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) in Stockholm, and the Australian government in Canberra.” In addition, Reilly has undertaken consultancy work for the National Democratic Institute and AUSAID, while his “work has been supported by” ‘democratic’ groups that include the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the US Institute for Peace.

In the time between leaving the Centre for Democratic Institutions and joining the UN Democracy Fund, Rich has been working at the Australian Defence College “teaching and mentoring senior officers studying at the Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies.” However, Rich’s recent uptake of the reigns of the UN Democracy Fund should not be as unexpected, as in 2004 he co-edited a book with Edward Newman titled The UN Role in Promoting Democracy: Between Ideals and Reality. Contributors to this book, with ties to the wider ‘democracy promoting’ community, include the aforementioned trio Simon Chesterman, Tom J. Farer, and Benjamin Reilly, but other ‘democratic’ writers in the book include Tanja Hohe (who is a former fellow at the Watson Institute), Ylber Hysa (who is the director of the Kosova Action for Civic Initiatives – a group that received NED funding in both 2001 and 2003), and Laurence Whitehead (who works as an expert for the Cuba Study Group, and in 2002 edited the book Emerging Market Democracies: East Asia and Latin America, which was published by Johns Hopkins University Press for the NED’s Journal of Democracy – where not coincidentally Whitehead then served (and still serves) on their editorial board).

In a recent (2007) interview on ABC radio concerning his appointment to the UN Democracy Fund, Rich highlighted that the Fund could “be most effectively involved [in promoting democracy by]… using the legitimacy that the UN brings to be involved in countries where bilateral democracy promotion projects are finding it difficult to be effective.” This statement is integral to understanding the significance of the role of UN-led ‘democracy promoting’ ventures around the globe, and although many activists in the West may still be unfamiliar with the democracy manipulating work of groups like the NED, civil society activists (and governments) in the rest of the world are becoming increasingly aware of insidious anti-democratic work of such decidedly anti-democratic interventions. To make such ‘democratic’ interventions more palatable to the global community, democracy manipulators, like Rich, realise that such political meddling is best done under the guise of multilateralism, and the UN provides an important forum for such practises. Indeed, as Rich noted in 2001, when writing for the NED’s Journal of Democracy, the “last ten years have witnessed the emergence of a new form of international engagement: cooperation in promoting democracy.” [11]

 

Returning to the ABC radio show, it was nice to see Rich’s interviewer take a critical stance towards the Democracy Fund’s work by highlighted how democracy may be used “as a political diplomatic weapon”, with China arguing “about the danger of the idea of an alliance of democracies led by the United States and Japan… introducing new divisions into Asia.” However, not too surprisingly Rich didn’t seem to be concerned with such, arguably illegitimate, interventions into other countries – which, incidentally, “would be illegal for foreign groups operating in the United States” – and so he noted that: “If countries want to use democracy for those sort of polemical and political purposes, well that’s for country governments to work with.” The interviewer then asked if Rich thought this was what President George W. Bush was doing, “when at the Asia Pacific summit he announced that the US wants to setup an Asia Pacific partnership of democracies?” Rich responded, oddly, for someone at the forefront of attempts to manipulate democracy across Asia, by saying: “Actually I’m not quite sure, I had a look at that and there was so few details that it was very hard to tell exactly what the role of that partnership would be.” This non-answer is disturbing to say the least, but is entirely consistent with his ‘democratic’ background, for, as I will demonstrate in the following section, the UN agenda has, for some time now, been linked closely to US led efforts to promote neoliberal forms of democracy all over the world.

 

To be continued… The next part of this article will provide a critical examination of the ‘democratic’ background of a key former UN staffer, Mark Malloch Brown. Part three of this series will then examine the history of the UN Democracy Fund itself, and introduce some of the individuals who work with the Fund. And the final part of this four part series will examine the ‘democratic’ credentials of some of the recipients of the UN Democracy Fund’s first round of funding. It will then conclude by offering some suggestions for how progressive activists might potentially deal with some of the worrying issues that have been raised about the UN’s global role as a key democracy manipulator.

 

Michael Barker is a doctoral candidate at Griffith University, Australia. He can be reached at Michael.J.Barker [at] griffith.edu.au, and some of his other articles can be found here.

Endnotes

[1] Barry Gills, Joen Rocamora, and Richard Wilson, Low Intensity Democracy: Political Power in the New World Order (London: Pluto Press, 1993), pp.26-7.

[2] Edward S. Herman and David Peterson (2005) ironically observe that Michael Ignatieff belongs to a ‘democratic’ group that they refer to as The New Humanitarians.

[3] Simon Chesterman is the former director of UN relations at the International Crisis Group, and has published War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law (2001), which was awarded the American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit, and also co-edited Making States Work: State Failure and the Crisis of Governance (2005) with Michael Ignatieff and Ramesh Thakur.

[4] Thomas M. Franck serves on the executive council of the American Society of International Law, and is also a director of the International Peace Academy (a group that receives funding from the US Institute for Peace).

[5] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital, Journal of Democracy 6(1), Jan 1995, pp.65-78.

[6] The Watson Institute points out that “[a]t the heart of the concept of civic community is the concept of social capital, popularized by Robert Putnam”: they go on to make the significant observation by noting how Putnam’s work on social capital “attracted the attention of President Clinton, who was looking to reorganize foreign aid in the mid-1990s.” In an uncritical assessment of Putnam’s scholarly output, Omar G. Encarnacion (2002) suggests that: “Putnam’s views are shared by the international aid community, which in recent years has embraced the mission of fortifying civil society as a programmatic priority in nations that have recently inaugurated democratic governance. The United States Agency for International Development (AID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) have taken the lead in boosting the development of groups thought to comprise the heart of civil society: grass-roots social movements, unions, a free media, and a wide range of nongovernmental organizations involved in promoting such causes as human rights, governmental transparency, and protection of the environment.” In another article written in 2003, Encarnacion group’s Putnam’s works as falling within that of “neo-Tocquevillean,” like Larry Diamond, and Francis Fukuyama (who is a director of the NED).

In a brilliant critique of Putnam’s work, David Gabbard (2006) writes that: “Though he accurately identifies the fact of America’s civic disengagement, Putnam’s efforts to identify the factors behind it strike us as paradigmatic of what “the lively 19th century working class press” called “‘the bought priesthood’” (cited by Chomsky, 1995) of respectable intellectuals. Putnam, after all, holds the position of Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy, at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In spite of all of the recent uproar over the alleged liberal bias of the American professoriate, you simply don’t get hired into such “prestigious” positions in elite universities (whose elite status is largely determined as a factor of how much money students’ parents can afford to pay) by discussing structural factors that have contributed to civic disengagement.”

[7] Other ‘democratic’ members of the Roosevelt Institution’s academic advisory board include Larry Diamond, Richard Celeste (who is a former head of the Peace Corps, and has been the co-chair of the Century Foundation Homeland Security Project), Elizabeth Coleman (who is a former director of the Council for a Community of Democracies), James D. Fearon (who works at Michael McFaul’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law), and Kermit Roosevelt (who is famous for masterminding the CIA-led 1953 coup in Iran).

[8] Stuart Macintyre, ‘Universities’, In: S. Maddison and C. Hamilton (eds.) Silencing Dissent: How the Australian Government is Controlling Public Opinion and Stifling Debate (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006), pp.49-50.

[9] Louisa Coan, Promoting Democracy in Asia, Congressional Testimony by Federal Document Clearing House, 1997.

[10] “During his fellowship, Mr. Rich wrote a book entitled Pacific Asia in Quest of Democracy, forthcoming from Lynne Rienner in 2006. Through an examination of institutional, structural, and cultural trends in countries ranging from Japan, Korea, and Taiwan to Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, he surveyed the democratic strides the region has made thus far and gauged its potential for consolidating democracy in the future.”

[11] Rich continues that: “The turning point came with the International Conference of Newly Restored Democracies, held in Manila in June 1988. I had the privilege of attending this conference as an observer from the Australian Embassy. It owed its inspiration and intellectual rigor to the late Philippine foreign secretary Raul Manglapus; its strength came from its independence from great-power politics and the commitment of the 13 participating countries to the ideal of democracy. The Manila Declaration adopted by the conference spoke of mutual support among the participating countries to strengthen their democracies and overcome ‘internal and external forces endangering emerging democracies.’ The post-Cold War concept of international democracy promotion and cooperation outside the domain of the world powers was born.”  Roland Rich, Bringing Democracy into International law, Journal of Democracy, 12 (3), (2001), pp.20-34.