From Recipients to Donors: Why Young Democracies Become Democracy Promoters

Exporting democracy has become a significant element of the foreign policy of many countries and of the operation of many international organizations. Much of our knowledge about democracy promotion, however, comes from studying the activities of a few Western countries. In this paper, I look instead at a group of little-studied but ardent democracy promoters – the Eastern European members of the EU. I ask: What motivates their efforts and what is the logic behind them? In answering this empirical question, I am also interested in what these democracy exporters teach us about democracy promotion in general. Accordingly, I build on existing studies of Western support for democracy abroad to define two distinct approaches to understanding the place of democracy promotion in the foreign-policy process: democracy promotion as a normative commitment and democracy promotion as a strategic commitment. I then examine the activities of Poland and Slovakia – typical cases among the Eastern EU democracy promoters – as new cases against which to test and then refine the two types of previous accounts of democracy promotion. I find that like most Western democracy promotion and despite its reputation as “idealism,” Eastern European democracy promotion is best understood as a strategic commitment - a means to creating a more secure international environment. In Poland, democracy promotion became an element of a geo-political strategy to deter Russian aggression and in Slovakia, democracy promotion emerged as the solution to the political and economic destabilization in the neighboring former Yugoslav and Soviet republics. Moreover, I find that these logics of Eastern European democracy promotion were defined by the norm entrepreneurs who prepared the democratic transitions in these countries and who subsequently also sought to incorporate democracy promotion in their country’s foreign policy by arguing for its strategic benefits. This paper thus suggests that studies of democracy promotion should pay more attention to the role of domestic (civil society) actors in formulating the motivations behind democracy promotion as well as to the interactions of strategic and principled commitments through the deliberate strategic framing of moral causes by these norm entrepreneurs.