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> It should be emergent and home-grown, not exported. It's amazing how bad government "democratic nation-building" is at realizing this. Democracy is, at best

by ethbro 8y ago

> It should be emergent and home-grown, not exported. It's amazing how bad government "democratic nation-building" is at realizing this. Democracy is, at best, a generational project. This issues we're seeing in autocratic -> democratic states are almost inherent in an overly quick transition. From a game theory perspective, why would any leaders act in the best interest of the country when there are no institutions and no expectation of democratic continuity?

UncleEntity 8y ago
IDK, (most of) the Eastern European former Soviet satellite states did a pretty good job of it in less than a generation. Most people tend to point to Iraq as the model of "democratic nation-building" but that was probably the best example of what not to do -- send all the bureaucrats (who were, by necessity, members of the Ba'ath party) home and deny them a say in the new government, disband the police and military forces, basically let the people do whatever they want with revenge killings and ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods and keep the people who are (presumably) in charge of law and order bottled up on the military bases with limited contact with the local population. It still boggles my mind the total shitshow post-invasion Iraq turned into...
- ethbro 8y ago
  I'd defer to someone more intimately aquatinted with Eastern Europe's pre-Soviet history, but my impression is that it followed many of the same themes as Western Europe. Which is to say the area was likely primed for democracy over hundreds of years in a similar manner. And as anthithetical as communist mono-party government is to pluralist democracy, one can certainly make the case that it can be credited with building institutions and a functioning bureaucracy. Many organs of which directly mapped to democratic equivalents, as near as I can tell. As for Iraq, absolutely agreed. And I think essentially everyone still working in foreign policy now believes de-Ba'ath-ization was a terrible mistake.

by ethbro 8y ago

UncleEntity 8y ago

IDK, (most of) the Eastern European former Soviet satellite states did a pretty good job of it in less than a generation. Most people tend to point to Iraq as the model of "democratic nation-building" but that was probably the best example of what not to do -- send all the bureaucrats (who were, by necessity, members of the Ba'ath party) home and deny them a say in the new government, disband the police and military forces, basically let the people do whatever they want with revenge killings and ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods and keep the people who are (presumably) in charge of law and order bottled up on the military bases with limited contact with the local population. It still boggles my mind the total shitshow post-invasion Iraq turned into...

ethbro 8y ago
I'd defer to someone more intimately aquatinted with Eastern Europe's pre-Soviet history, but my impression is that it followed many of the same themes as Western Europe. Which is to say the area was likely primed for democracy over hundreds of years in a similar manner. And as anthithetical as communist mono-party government is to pluralist democracy, one can certainly make the case that it can be credited with building institutions and a functioning bureaucracy. Many organs of which directly mapped to democratic equivalents, as near as I can tell. As for Iraq, absolutely agreed. And I think essentially everyone still working in foreign policy now believes de-Ba'ath-ization was a terrible mistake.