Re: Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Ea
Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2017 1:12 am
Part 4 of 4
The German Democracy Foundations
On the other hand, as several German party/democracy foundation leaders report, American foreign policy leaders tend to think in short-term goals, including the deposing of distasteful heads of state. Given the history of German and British militarist interventions against their neighbors, this is a far more delicate matter for European governments. It is a particularly sensitive matter for Germany, given the historical incursions in Eastern Europe under the Nazi onslaught. It is also important from a political economic standpoint that for the European Union as a whole, Russia, which puts up the greatest resistance to regime change initiatives, is their third largest trading partner.
Another difference in the way the German foundations describe their corporate capitalist approach: social market economies (soziale Marktwirtschaft). Indeed, it was the conservative Christian Democrats who developed the concept, which consists of regulated markets, collective bargaining, national health care, and other welfare functions of the state, and it is generally embraced by Germany's other parties. This comparatively positions the center-right Christian Democrats to the left of the Democratic Party in the United States, which flees from such concepts as "social welfare." The notion of the social market economy is also embraced by the rest of Western Europe and is written into the constitution of the European Union. Both major U.S. parties conceive of markets more in terms of laissez faire - even if in practice they support extensive welfare supports for corporations in the form of massive subsidies, huge tax breaks, regulation waivers, cost-plus contracts, and the like.
In Europe there are 32 political foundations, 27 of which had a combined budget of almost €400 million in 2004, of which almost 60 percent came from the two largest German political party foundations (Stiftungen) and 90 percent from the six German foundations overall. Most of these foundations were founded after 1989 (in response to the breakup of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact), and most concentrate their work on supporting likeminded political parties overseas, though half of them regard the absence of established party traditions in less developed countries as a major impediment to that objective. Eastern Europe and Central Asia receive the largest share of attention and financial support. North Africa and the Middle East receive the least attention (Wersch and Zeeuw 2005, xiii, xiv), though those latter regions are among the least democratic.
Among the democracy promotion foundations in Western Europe, the major source of assistance comes from Germany (NED 2006, 10 f16), principally from the party foundations, which contribute the overwhelming share, about 90 percent, of the region's total assistance. The principal party foundations are the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, established 1925, [23] affiliated with the Social Democratic Party, and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (originally established 1955, renamed for Chancellor Adenauer in 1964), affiliated with the Christian Democratic Party; each employing more than 600 individuals (Scott 2002, 194). Both were established as democracy training centers within Germany itself, and this history has tempered their style of behavior abroad. A third significant party institute, the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, established 1958, represents the Free Democratic Party. [24] They are joined by the Hanns Seidel Stiftung (Christian Social Union), established 1967, the Heinrich Boll Stiftung (Green Party), established 1998, and the much smaller Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Democratic Socialist Party), established in 1990. The largest five of these stiftungen contributed $418.7 million in 2004 in various international programs they support. The leftist and smallest foundation, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, had a budget of $10.8 million (Carothers 2006b, 84-85). Of the five, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung has been the most influential in terms of overseas political party assistance.
In their democracy initiatives, although most share similar strategic opposition toward nationalist regimes in Eastern Europe, the European foundations are more transparent than the IRI or NDI in their political objectives regarding the region, which rest on hopes of preparing them as future allies in the European Parliament. "[A]ssistance to political parties is the core business of the European political foundations" (Wersch and Zeeuw 2005, 14). However, it is more the center and center-right parties that are actively engaged in party-to-party relations than parties on the left, which are more skeptical of finding stable counterparts. Friedrich Ebert (FES), for example, focuses much of its support to Eastern European trade unions (personal communication, Pia Bungarten, 2008). Similarly, the Republican Party in the United States has taken a more active role than the Democrats in supporting campaign victories for favored (rightist) parties in the CEE countries. Hence, party support is less about building democratic institutions and more about consolidating political power (Carothers 2006b, 144-145, 154). The European Union, according to one study, takes a less direct hand in administering democracy assistance at the citizen level, relying for its NGO support more on "a network of local Civil Society Development Foundations" (Ottaway and Carothers 2000, 307).
As Western Europe on the whole has more diverse and articulated political parties and ideological streams, one might expect their party foundations to have greater influence in Central and Eastern Europe than their U.S. counterparts. And despite the fact that the former spends more money on democracy assistance, this appears not to be the case, at least in the short-term. Francis Fukuyama insists that it was only the United States that supported the CEE countries in their resistance to communist rule and therefore enjoys greater trust than Western Europe in the eastern regions. On the other hand, the director of a Polish organization funded by USAID and formerly administered by Freedom House, says that it's because U.S. political advice in Ukraine proved to be irrelevant, that his organization separated itself from USAID in 2005 (Pieklo, personal communication, 2007).
A German head of the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung (FNS) section for the CEE region claims that there is a general distaste for politics, at least in Central Europe, given its experience under communist party systems. Hence the recent emphasis given to NGOs (Tamm, personal communication, 2008). This is hard to determine, as FNS takes a "liberal" view (in the European economic sense, more like libertarianism in the U.S. sense) of these matters and may therefore downplay the importance of statist institutions and practices. He also points to the anxious disposition of most Poles toward Russia, an attitude that does appear to have much resonance, for which reason the United States, which led the Cold War, stands as a stronger ally than Western Europe. Hence the general acceptance in Poland of the Bush administration's "missile shield" defense in that country, a move that was widely understood to be directed at Russia even while cast as a response to Iran's supposed nuclear ambitions. Obama's position toward the shield appeared to be of low priority during his first months as president.
Apart from the way that states relate to superpowers, pro-Western CEE leaders express appreciation for the "flexibility" that the United States exercises in taking action and its "short decision process" (Tamm, personal communication 2008) in moving money and other resources to projects that advance the interests of the donor agencies on whom they are dependent for grants. This renders local NGO actors as little more than relatively well paid professional employees who are often out of touch with the majority of people whose interests they supposedly serve but on whose support they need not rely (Matveeva 2008). The array of foreign- supported NGOs, think tanks, university intellectuals, legal and other professionals, business entrepreneurs, private media executives, and other influentials creates a formidable set of interests that together tend to dominate public opinion, strengthen an elite polyarchy, drive talented people away from government service, and, for all of these reasons, weaken the role of the state. Political leaders and political parties come to increasingly lean on the professional sectors, rather than the majority of their constituents, as the means by which they structure political communication, get elected, and continue to hold power.
More than one German democracy foundation leader does not appreciate the "flexible" means by which the United States operates overseas. Germans and other European governments tend to rely more on a stricter accounting and "conditionality" when giving assistance. That is, they scrutinize how assistance funds are spent and demand the demonstration of indices of change (e.g., democratization) before extending further aid (Agh, personal communication, 2007). According to an FES official, "[T]hey [the American party foundations and other state democracy promotion agents] are in fact flexible in the way that they shift activities according to new ideas about how this best can be done easily, and they don't have scruples [about it]." In Germany, he argues, the constraints of the foreign ministry bureaucracy direct overseas policy toward long-term, and less "flexible," solutions. Moreover, German foundations are considerably more restrained than the United States in confronting state authorities in other countries and prefer to work at a party-to-party or parliamentary training level to effect change (Buhbe, personal communication, 2008). Another German democracy foundation officer on the left shares this view, believing that Eastern European political parties will take American money but prefer the careful governing ideas of the German foundations (Georgiev, personal communication, 2008).
A Heinrich Boll Stiftung (HBS) project director for the Eastern European region also expressed doubts about what she sees as the short-term thinking in U.S. democracy promotion. "We have long-term programs, so we are not really so flexible, not so quick, but we work for a long time with partners [in Eastern Europe] that grow up somehow." Boll, she says, is more concerned with the people, the organizations, and the infrastructure in civil society: "This is the difference" (from the U.S. approach). From her experience in the region, she finds that the United States has contributed to an undemocratic "professionalization" and "commercialization" of civil society. What is happening, she asserts, is that the donor-driven programs in Central and Eastern Europe mirror the wishes of the American funding agencies, and with a contract bidding process and loose oversight of how funds are spent, the local professionals who are hired treat civil society as a kind of profit-seeking business and meet the conditions of the American foundations in ways that generate for themselves the most income.
Given the hundreds of billions of U. S. dollars that have" disappeared" in Iraq, including equipment, weapons, and cash payoffs, this comment seems not in the least overstated (Ritchey 2009).
Compared to their U.S. counterparts, the German foundations have a more nuanced position toward Russia. In part, this is historical in nature, reflecting a sense of responsibility for the brutal and disastrous Nazi invasion of that country during the Second World War that led to the deaths of some 27 million Russians. Because of that shameful past, according to the head of the British Westminster Foundation for Democracy, Germany feels a greater need to demonstrate its democratic character and to devote more resources than either Britain or the United States to its democracy projects abroad (French, personal communication, 2008). Just as important perhaps, Germany's close ties to Russia represent the strong current trade ties between the two countries, plus the fact that Germany heavily depends on Russia for oil and natural gas. The Social Democrats in particular have cultivated good relations with Russia, and the current (2009) post of minister of foreign affairs (and deputy chancellor), Frank Steinmeier, is held by a member of that party.25 Former German chancellor, also a Social Democrat, Gerhard Schroder is supervisory board chair of the Baltic Sea (Nord Stream) gas pipeline company that is partnered with Russia's Gazprom and which bypasses Poland, as well as Ukraine and Lithuania.
German foundation leaders with whom I spoke generally concurred in the view that the United States tends to take a more aggressive, short-term approach to political and economic transition in Europe. In the American state approach, bridges to the neoliberal political economy have to be built quickly before the opportunity passes, whereas German officials see the issues in long-term relations with neighboring countries. This, no doubt, has to do with the fact that Germans have to live with consequences of failed states in the region far more than Americans, separated by an ocean and an isolated history over the past 400 years. The one exception to this is the right-wing Hanns Seidel Stiftung, which represents the Christian Social Union Party (the Christian Democrats in Bavaria). Seidel actively intervened in El Salvador to try to block the FMLN from coming to power in 2009. Its interventionist behavior on behalf of right-wing parties abroad, similar to IRI, has drawn the criticism of The Left Party (Die Linke) in Germany and even the embarrassment of the right-wing Christian Democrats (Georgiev personal communication, 2008; Momkes, personal communication, 2008).
Speaking for FES, its director for international dialogue expressed a widely held concern among German foundations that their American counterparts (IRI, NDI) do not always respect the regulations and laws of the countries in which they engage. Second, there is "the perception of the great proximity between the [U.S.] foundations [party institutes] and the State Department ... [such that in several cases] they availed themselves of the immediate help directly from the state." What is lacking, she says, is a proper firewall between democracy promotion and government, the absence of which inevitably leads to local backlash against foreign organizations, affecting German as well as U.S. democracy foundations. However, the German foreign ministry, "prompted by observing the American role" overseas, is reconsidering its position about leaving democracy promotion to party foundations and is considering taking a more active statist position in such matters (Pia Bungarten, personal communication, 2008).
Is there some rivalry between the U.S. and German democracy promotion foundations? Undoubtedly, there is, as both countries are vying for influence within the CEE region and elsewhere. From the perspective of the director for the Ebert Foundation's CEE program, there is a certain arrogance in the way American democracy promoters regard their task - that they "are convinced that the best possible world we have invented so far is the American Constitution and the American way of life. So they only need to export it, and the world would be better. They are so convinced that this [should be] done" (Buhbe, personal communication, 2008). (Pia Bungarten, personal communication, 2008).
Britain's Westminster Foundation for Democracy
Britain's democracy promotion program was established with the formation of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) in 1992, in response by the Conservative John Major government both to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the earlier creation of NED. WFD is a considerably smaller version of its American counterpart, NED, or the German foundations, with a current (2009) annual Foreign and Commonwealth Office grant of £4.1 million. Only half of this amount goes to the political parties, primarily the Conservatives and Labour. Its board of governors has representatives from the three major British parties, together with the trade unions, business, academia, and NGOs.
WFD focuses its assistance in the areas of democratization, human rights, political participation, and conflict resolution (Scott 2002, 196). As one study on comparative approaches to democracy promotion finds, "while the British and Canadian foundations appear as regional specialists, the US foundation is not only global, but also seems to be something of a roving democracy promoter, shifting its regional emphases with opportunity and need" (Scott and Walters 2000, 253). One difference between the Conservatives and Labour is that the former emphasizes direct party relations and campaigning capacities, whereas the latter, finding party-to-party relations difficult to sustain, focuses more on parliamentary training (Sattar, personal communication, 2008; Thomas, personal communication, 2008).26 Unlike NED or USAID, neither party puts much emphasis on the presence of open business markets as a precondition for assistance to targeted countries. And neither engages in civil society projects.
With its small budget and absence of private funding supports, WFD does not maintain offices overseas and concentrates primarily in providing training in Britain in politics and parliamentarian procedures for visitors from other countries. However, they nonetheless maintain a presence within countries targeted for democracy promotion. According to a spokesperson for the British Conservative Party's international division, British and U.S. regime change agents often coordinate their efforts overseas "under the radar." But the WFD is considerably more explicit, ideological, and explicitly "partisan" in doing political party work than either NED or the German Stiftungen, the latter of which the Conservatives consider too "academic" in their approach. The WFD Conservative's international office director, Philippa Broom, notes that they work closely with IRI and occasionally with NDI to bring about common political objectives (Broom, personal communication, 2008; Thomas, personal communication, 2008). Comparing WFD with the German foundations, the chief executive of the WFD, David French comments: "We don't bother with the niceties of the German system of a clear demarcation between the political party and the stiftung that's affiliated to it" (French, personal communication, 2008).
To make the point about British open partisanship and the shared U.K'/U.S. vision of political change in Eastern Europe, Broom gave the example: "If you look at Ukraine in particular, we all wanted regime change. Heck, we wanted those boys [the Yanukovych government] out, we wanted Yushchenko in." Despite the shared strategic objective, she also critiques the short-term U.S. approach: "For American agencies, it's more political, it's an absolute: 'We want regime change, and we're damn well gonna get it.''' She also has reservations about the more reserved German approach, which, she says, "keep ignoring parties ... you cannot have good governance, you can have as many excellent NGOs as you like, but they're not at the end of the day pressure groups" (Broom, personal communication, 2008).
Other European Democracy Promotion Foundations
There are other, small European democracy promotion institutes, but none compares in scale to the German program. In the Netherlands, the Institute for Multiparty Democracy (NIMD) established 2000 by seven Dutch political parties, works with political parties in over 150 countries, including Eastern Europe. In 2008, it had an annual budget of €10.3 million. NIMD appears to have a more direct style in dealing with other political systems. On its webpage, for example, it describes the breakdown of interparty communication under the Saakashvili presidency in Georgia and the fraud that accompanied both the presidential and parliamentary elections in early 2008 that favored his ruling United National Movement party (NIMD 2009). No "color revolution" support came from the West on this occasion despite massive demonstrations that have occurred calling for his resignation. Saakashvili is regarded by the United States as a reliable ally in opposition to Russian influence in the Caucasus region.
In Sweden, the Olof Palme International Center (OPIC), established in 1992 by the Swedish Social Democratic Party is closely associated with the country's national labor movement. Its funding comes from the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, the Swedish Social Democratic Party, and the Swedish Co-operative Union. In Europe, it works in the Baltic states, the Balkans, and Russia. In 2004, the Center had an annual budget of €12.5 million. The principal target of its work is civil society issues (Wersch and de Zeeuw 2005). In Belarus, OPIC works to help build and unite social democratic movements against what it sees as the undemocratic character of the Lukashenko government. In Ukraine, its position was weakened after its partner organization, the Socialist Party of Ukraine, failed to gain representation in the parliament in the 2007 election. Compared to the United States, OPIC plays a minor political role in the region and appears to share the larger objective of wanting to bring Eastern Europe into the fold of the European Union and the global market economy.
Although leaders of both the German and British party foundations express deep concerns about the U.S. approach to democracy promotion, they cooperate closely with their American counterparts. According to one long-time democracy promotion practitioner:
In the next chapter I look at the work of democracy promotion in Eastern Europe. The main studies of "color revolutions" are from Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. An important aspect of democracy promotion in this region is rooted in the Cold War past and the continuing aggressive posture that the United States has taken toward the Russian government in the Putin era. Democracy promotion is also embedded in residual anti-Russian and anti-socialist sentiments shared by different local groups and individuals involved in foreign-sponsored political projects, precisely the factions that the United States helped to bring to power
The principal focus of Chapter 4 is on the "transition" projects of U.S. government and private agencies, with emphasis on the symbolic aspects in the pursuit of regime change. When foreign change agents, as they like to think of themselves, lack knowledge about the region in which they seek to institute democracy, they tend to rely more on their technical expertise in public persuasion than praxis via experiential understanding. The foundation of democracy building is thus built on instrumental communication and opportunistic patron-client relations. As part of the mission, the United States brought a range of tools to effect its political ends, many of them associated with commercial marketing and PR practices and media propaganda.
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Notes:
1. Cited in Brown, no date. Allen's commentary (1949) was published in his "Propaganda: A Conscious Weapon of Diplomacy," The Department if State Bulletin, 21 (546), December 19. Pp. 941-943.
2. Hill & Knowlton gained notoriety prior to the first Persian Gulf invasion of 1991 when, working on retainer for the Kuwaiti government, it organized a propaganda campaign in support of U.S. intervention by the Bush Sr. administration. Craig Fuller, head of the Washington, D.C. office of H&K at the time, was a former chief of staff and close friend of the U.S. president. The consulting firm falsified a report that the soldiers of Saddam Hussein has thrown Kuwaiti babies from hospital incubators, which Bush and others used on several occasions to justify the invasion.
3. Rendon's projects in the Middle East included the promotion of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) under the controversial leadership of Ahmed Chalabi, who hadn't been to Iraq since 1958, when he was 13. Rendon also aided the development of the Iraqi Broadcasting Corporation and Radio Hurriah (which during Saddam's time transmitted from Kuwait to Iraq the messages to Iraqi opposition leaders), did propaganda work for the Kuwaiti exile government during the Iraq invasion of that country in 1990-1991, and other projects - by its own claim, in a total of 91 countries. According to New Yorker correspondent Seymour Hersh, the CIA paid Rendon close to a hundred million dollars for its services on behalf of the INC. See Kennedy and Lucas 2005; Wikipedia 2007b; and Bamford 2005.
4. On the other hand, the CIA chose to hide images of its program of torture of Al Qaeda suspects by destroying at least 92 videotapes that captured such techniques as waterboarding (Mazzetti 2009). The Obama White House declared that it would overturn the policy of torture exercised under the Bush administration.
5. The Lincoln Group and Rendon Group, once partners, both provide psychological operations services for the U. S. government, especially on behalf of the military in' the Middle East. The Lincoln Group was one of three PR organizations to share up to a $300 million five-year contract for the Pentagon in "psychological operations efforts to improve foreign public opinion about the United States, particularly the military" (Merle 2005). One of its objectives was to pay Iraqi news media to place unattributed articles written by the U.S. military, which raised concerns that deceptive reporting "could easily migrate into American news outlets" (Shanker 2006). The Rendon Group, which has rendered media services for presidential candidates in both U.S parties, received $100,000 per month from the Kuwaiti royal family during Desert Storm and also won a $23 million contract from the CIA to produce anti-Saddam propaganda (Cockburn and St. Clair 2004, 322).
6. Obama closed the Pentagon's "Support for Public Diplomacy" office in 2009 but retained the position of undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department.
7. During his first administration, G. W. Bush appointed at least 32 officials linked to the arms industry, among them 17 with ties to major defense contractors. These included Secretary of the Navy Gordon England, a former vice president of General Dynamics and Secretary of the Air Force James Roche, and a former Northrop Grumman executive (Hartung and Ciarrocca, 2004).
8. Such restrictions originate with the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 7, clause 7), which forbids the use of federal funds without legal appropriation. Subsequent legislation (5 U.S.C. 3107) in 1913 prohibited federal funding "to pay a publicity expert unless specifically appropriated for that purpose." P.L. 108-447, Div. H. Sec. 624 restricts U.S. agency communications directed at Americans "for publicity or propaganda purposes" (in its words for content that is for "self-aggrandizement," contains "puffery," is "purely partisan in nature," or is engaged in "covert propaganda") unless authorized by Congress (Kosar 2005, 5-6).
9. When the Bush administration raised the profile of the State Department undersecretary for global affairs to democracy and global affairs and created a deputy national security advisor for "global democracy strategy" in support of Bush's "freedom agenda," USAID also redesignated a deputy assistant administrator position to take on the portfolio for democracy promotion (Melia 2005, 11).
10. IRI is often partnered in its anti-leftist 'non-partisanship' with another NED-funded organization, the AFL-CIO's Free Trade Union Institute. In the 1980s, one of the FTUI's "democracy assistance" projects was a $1.5 million grant in support of a rightwing extremist group, the National Inter-University Union, for the purpose of blocking what the labor group saw as dangerous communist influences in Francois Mitterand's socialist government (Conry 1993).
11. Among other American consultants in Bucharest was the peripatetic Dick Morris (a former Bill Clinton political adviser), working in the service of an American of Romanian ancestry, Lia Roberts., former chair of the Nevada Republican Party, whose campaign was quickly aborted. Israeli consultant Tal Silberstein, together with American consultants James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, worked in the 2004 presidential election on behalf of the prime minister Adrian Nastase. Oddly enough, an Israeli PR firm run by Eyal Arad worked in the presidential campaign for a right-wing nationalist and Holocaust denier, Vadim Tudor and his Greater Romania Party (PRM). In 2007, Silberstein and a team of Israeli consulting partners, together with the well-traveled American consultant Arthur Finkelstein and a Romanian commercial television manager, Dan Andronic, worked in support of the prime minister, Calin Tariceanu and his Liberal Party. American political consultants working abroad frequently switch alliances between leftist and rightist parties, reflecting the collusion between Democrats and Republicans on matters of neoliberal foreign policy.
12. Reagan's image served as a simulacrum, inasmuch as it was not clear whether, given his background and personality, he saw himself as president or as someone playing the president.
13. The current (2009) State Department coordinator of U.S. assistance to Europe and Eurasia, Daniel Rosenblum, was senior program coordinator of the FTUI from 1991 to 1997, a NED grantee that was very active in support of Boris Yeltsin and in the demise of the Soviet Union during the 1980s. Rosenblum had been "a public spokesman for the AFL-CIO on the labor movement in the former Soviet Union."
14. In 2009, street protests erupted in Tehran following the contested election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. According to a former U.S. government official from the Reagan administration, the C.I.A. and NED were involved, respectively, in destabilizing Iran and channeling funds to the opposition presidential candidate, Hossein Mousavi. The head of a NED-funded organization, the Foundation for Democracy, Kenneth Timmerman, said that NED was involved in fomenting a "green revolution" in Iran, providing money to "pro-Mousavi groups who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds" (Roberts 2009).
15. Richard Nixon's close political advisors, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Charles Coulson, had come from}. W. Thompson - all three were eventually convicted for their roles in the Watergate scandal.
16. Soros, born in 1930, is a contemporary of the German economist Ralf Dahrendorf; both studied under the philosopher Karl Popper at the London School of Economics. Dahrendorf, who died in 2009 and took up British citizenship, was a lifelong proponent of a libertarian version of a civil society, whereas Soros held to a social democratic approach. Both were ardent anti-fascists and anti-communists and shared Popper's advocacy of the "open society" and his anti-communism and skepticism toward Marxian socialism.
17. In early 2009, Obama's national security adviser, James L Jones declared at a meeting of 45th Munich Conference on Security Policy: "As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger, filtered down through General Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger, who is also here" (Council on Foreign Relations 2009).
18. One of the more explicitly partisan foreign policy NGOs, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which ironically refers to itself "non-partisan," is in fact a predominantly neoconservative organization founded after 9/11 for the purpose of "fighting the ideologies that threaten democracy." Largely focused on the Middle East, Iran, and the defense of Israel and an advocate for the invasion of Iraq, its board includes prominent political conservatives including Newt Gingrich, William Kristol, and Steve Forbes, conservative journalists, former CIA director James Woolsey, Senator Joseph Lieberman, as well as former government officials appointed by Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, and (Foundation for Defense of Democracies (2008).
19 The European election monitoring organization, OSCE, declared the April 2009 election results, won by the Party of Communists, as valid. Russian political leaders declared their suspicions about interference by Western intelligence to undermine the Moldovan state, achieve anschluss within a greater Romanian state, and extend NATO's reach into Eastern Europe (Trabanco 2009).
20. The Ford Foundation has financially aided a number of political and security-oriented foundations and think tanks in the region, including the Institute of Public Affairs in Warsaw, which also receives substantial grants from the Soros foundations.
21. In January 2009, McFaul was named by the Obama administration as senior director at the National Security Council for Russian affairs and as an adviser to the president.
22. Significantly, compared to the United States, there are few political appointments in the German foreign service and in general less politicization of overseas work and less unilateralism by the party that happens to be in power (Momkes, personal communication, 2008).
23. Friedrich Ebert was German chancellor from 1918 to 1919 and president from 1919 to 1925, when he died in office. He represented the right wing of his party, the Social Democrats (SPD), and used the military (the pro-monarchist Freikorps) to end Germany's communist-led (the Spartacist League) uprising in the early post-World War period and had the radical left movement's leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, murdered. The Social Democrats remain strongly anti-communist in their domestic and foreign policies and played a significant role in preventing the Communist Party of Portugal from gaining power in the 1970s.
24. Somewhat ironically, the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, representing the pro-free trade Liberals in Germany, has its headquarters in Potsdam on Karl Marx Strasse.
25. The Social Democrats lost their position in the ruling coalition of the German government following the September 2009 federal election.
26. It appears that conservative parties and foundations in the West find it easier to support parties, because right-wing ideology has a long history in Central and Eastern Europe (and elsewhere), whereas social democracy has a much weaker footing. The Western political foundations are generally unwilling to provide support to communist parties overseas, and suspicion appears to be mutual.
The German Democracy Foundations
On the other hand, as several German party/democracy foundation leaders report, American foreign policy leaders tend to think in short-term goals, including the deposing of distasteful heads of state. Given the history of German and British militarist interventions against their neighbors, this is a far more delicate matter for European governments. It is a particularly sensitive matter for Germany, given the historical incursions in Eastern Europe under the Nazi onslaught. It is also important from a political economic standpoint that for the European Union as a whole, Russia, which puts up the greatest resistance to regime change initiatives, is their third largest trading partner.
Another difference in the way the German foundations describe their corporate capitalist approach: social market economies (soziale Marktwirtschaft). Indeed, it was the conservative Christian Democrats who developed the concept, which consists of regulated markets, collective bargaining, national health care, and other welfare functions of the state, and it is generally embraced by Germany's other parties. This comparatively positions the center-right Christian Democrats to the left of the Democratic Party in the United States, which flees from such concepts as "social welfare." The notion of the social market economy is also embraced by the rest of Western Europe and is written into the constitution of the European Union. Both major U.S. parties conceive of markets more in terms of laissez faire - even if in practice they support extensive welfare supports for corporations in the form of massive subsidies, huge tax breaks, regulation waivers, cost-plus contracts, and the like.
In Europe there are 32 political foundations, 27 of which had a combined budget of almost €400 million in 2004, of which almost 60 percent came from the two largest German political party foundations (Stiftungen) and 90 percent from the six German foundations overall. Most of these foundations were founded after 1989 (in response to the breakup of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact), and most concentrate their work on supporting likeminded political parties overseas, though half of them regard the absence of established party traditions in less developed countries as a major impediment to that objective. Eastern Europe and Central Asia receive the largest share of attention and financial support. North Africa and the Middle East receive the least attention (Wersch and Zeeuw 2005, xiii, xiv), though those latter regions are among the least democratic.
Among the democracy promotion foundations in Western Europe, the major source of assistance comes from Germany (NED 2006, 10 f16), principally from the party foundations, which contribute the overwhelming share, about 90 percent, of the region's total assistance. The principal party foundations are the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, established 1925, [23] affiliated with the Social Democratic Party, and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (originally established 1955, renamed for Chancellor Adenauer in 1964), affiliated with the Christian Democratic Party; each employing more than 600 individuals (Scott 2002, 194). Both were established as democracy training centers within Germany itself, and this history has tempered their style of behavior abroad. A third significant party institute, the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, established 1958, represents the Free Democratic Party. [24] They are joined by the Hanns Seidel Stiftung (Christian Social Union), established 1967, the Heinrich Boll Stiftung (Green Party), established 1998, and the much smaller Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Democratic Socialist Party), established in 1990. The largest five of these stiftungen contributed $418.7 million in 2004 in various international programs they support. The leftist and smallest foundation, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, had a budget of $10.8 million (Carothers 2006b, 84-85). Of the five, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung has been the most influential in terms of overseas political party assistance.
In their democracy initiatives, although most share similar strategic opposition toward nationalist regimes in Eastern Europe, the European foundations are more transparent than the IRI or NDI in their political objectives regarding the region, which rest on hopes of preparing them as future allies in the European Parliament. "[A]ssistance to political parties is the core business of the European political foundations" (Wersch and Zeeuw 2005, 14). However, it is more the center and center-right parties that are actively engaged in party-to-party relations than parties on the left, which are more skeptical of finding stable counterparts. Friedrich Ebert (FES), for example, focuses much of its support to Eastern European trade unions (personal communication, Pia Bungarten, 2008). Similarly, the Republican Party in the United States has taken a more active role than the Democrats in supporting campaign victories for favored (rightist) parties in the CEE countries. Hence, party support is less about building democratic institutions and more about consolidating political power (Carothers 2006b, 144-145, 154). The European Union, according to one study, takes a less direct hand in administering democracy assistance at the citizen level, relying for its NGO support more on "a network of local Civil Society Development Foundations" (Ottaway and Carothers 2000, 307).
As Western Europe on the whole has more diverse and articulated political parties and ideological streams, one might expect their party foundations to have greater influence in Central and Eastern Europe than their U.S. counterparts. And despite the fact that the former spends more money on democracy assistance, this appears not to be the case, at least in the short-term. Francis Fukuyama insists that it was only the United States that supported the CEE countries in their resistance to communist rule and therefore enjoys greater trust than Western Europe in the eastern regions. On the other hand, the director of a Polish organization funded by USAID and formerly administered by Freedom House, says that it's because U.S. political advice in Ukraine proved to be irrelevant, that his organization separated itself from USAID in 2005 (Pieklo, personal communication, 2007).
A German head of the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung (FNS) section for the CEE region claims that there is a general distaste for politics, at least in Central Europe, given its experience under communist party systems. Hence the recent emphasis given to NGOs (Tamm, personal communication, 2008). This is hard to determine, as FNS takes a "liberal" view (in the European economic sense, more like libertarianism in the U.S. sense) of these matters and may therefore downplay the importance of statist institutions and practices. He also points to the anxious disposition of most Poles toward Russia, an attitude that does appear to have much resonance, for which reason the United States, which led the Cold War, stands as a stronger ally than Western Europe. Hence the general acceptance in Poland of the Bush administration's "missile shield" defense in that country, a move that was widely understood to be directed at Russia even while cast as a response to Iran's supposed nuclear ambitions. Obama's position toward the shield appeared to be of low priority during his first months as president.
Apart from the way that states relate to superpowers, pro-Western CEE leaders express appreciation for the "flexibility" that the United States exercises in taking action and its "short decision process" (Tamm, personal communication 2008) in moving money and other resources to projects that advance the interests of the donor agencies on whom they are dependent for grants. This renders local NGO actors as little more than relatively well paid professional employees who are often out of touch with the majority of people whose interests they supposedly serve but on whose support they need not rely (Matveeva 2008). The array of foreign- supported NGOs, think tanks, university intellectuals, legal and other professionals, business entrepreneurs, private media executives, and other influentials creates a formidable set of interests that together tend to dominate public opinion, strengthen an elite polyarchy, drive talented people away from government service, and, for all of these reasons, weaken the role of the state. Political leaders and political parties come to increasingly lean on the professional sectors, rather than the majority of their constituents, as the means by which they structure political communication, get elected, and continue to hold power.
More than one German democracy foundation leader does not appreciate the "flexible" means by which the United States operates overseas. Germans and other European governments tend to rely more on a stricter accounting and "conditionality" when giving assistance. That is, they scrutinize how assistance funds are spent and demand the demonstration of indices of change (e.g., democratization) before extending further aid (Agh, personal communication, 2007). According to an FES official, "[T]hey [the American party foundations and other state democracy promotion agents] are in fact flexible in the way that they shift activities according to new ideas about how this best can be done easily, and they don't have scruples [about it]." In Germany, he argues, the constraints of the foreign ministry bureaucracy direct overseas policy toward long-term, and less "flexible," solutions. Moreover, German foundations are considerably more restrained than the United States in confronting state authorities in other countries and prefer to work at a party-to-party or parliamentary training level to effect change (Buhbe, personal communication, 2008). Another German democracy foundation officer on the left shares this view, believing that Eastern European political parties will take American money but prefer the careful governing ideas of the German foundations (Georgiev, personal communication, 2008).
A Heinrich Boll Stiftung (HBS) project director for the Eastern European region also expressed doubts about what she sees as the short-term thinking in U.S. democracy promotion. "We have long-term programs, so we are not really so flexible, not so quick, but we work for a long time with partners [in Eastern Europe] that grow up somehow." Boll, she says, is more concerned with the people, the organizations, and the infrastructure in civil society: "This is the difference" (from the U.S. approach). From her experience in the region, she finds that the United States has contributed to an undemocratic "professionalization" and "commercialization" of civil society. What is happening, she asserts, is that the donor-driven programs in Central and Eastern Europe mirror the wishes of the American funding agencies, and with a contract bidding process and loose oversight of how funds are spent, the local professionals who are hired treat civil society as a kind of profit-seeking business and meet the conditions of the American foundations in ways that generate for themselves the most income.
The problem is that this kind of organization is not non-governmental, but they are commercial.. .. This year they [local NGOs] do this kind of work, and next year they do something else. And then the next year they do something totally different, because the labels [specifications] of the donors change. So they don't develop as an organization (Fischer, personal communication, 2008).
Given the hundreds of billions of U. S. dollars that have" disappeared" in Iraq, including equipment, weapons, and cash payoffs, this comment seems not in the least overstated (Ritchey 2009).
Compared to their U.S. counterparts, the German foundations have a more nuanced position toward Russia. In part, this is historical in nature, reflecting a sense of responsibility for the brutal and disastrous Nazi invasion of that country during the Second World War that led to the deaths of some 27 million Russians. Because of that shameful past, according to the head of the British Westminster Foundation for Democracy, Germany feels a greater need to demonstrate its democratic character and to devote more resources than either Britain or the United States to its democracy projects abroad (French, personal communication, 2008). Just as important perhaps, Germany's close ties to Russia represent the strong current trade ties between the two countries, plus the fact that Germany heavily depends on Russia for oil and natural gas. The Social Democrats in particular have cultivated good relations with Russia, and the current (2009) post of minister of foreign affairs (and deputy chancellor), Frank Steinmeier, is held by a member of that party.25 Former German chancellor, also a Social Democrat, Gerhard Schroder is supervisory board chair of the Baltic Sea (Nord Stream) gas pipeline company that is partnered with Russia's Gazprom and which bypasses Poland, as well as Ukraine and Lithuania.
German foundation leaders with whom I spoke generally concurred in the view that the United States tends to take a more aggressive, short-term approach to political and economic transition in Europe. In the American state approach, bridges to the neoliberal political economy have to be built quickly before the opportunity passes, whereas German officials see the issues in long-term relations with neighboring countries. This, no doubt, has to do with the fact that Germans have to live with consequences of failed states in the region far more than Americans, separated by an ocean and an isolated history over the past 400 years. The one exception to this is the right-wing Hanns Seidel Stiftung, which represents the Christian Social Union Party (the Christian Democrats in Bavaria). Seidel actively intervened in El Salvador to try to block the FMLN from coming to power in 2009. Its interventionist behavior on behalf of right-wing parties abroad, similar to IRI, has drawn the criticism of The Left Party (Die Linke) in Germany and even the embarrassment of the right-wing Christian Democrats (Georgiev personal communication, 2008; Momkes, personal communication, 2008).
Speaking for FES, its director for international dialogue expressed a widely held concern among German foundations that their American counterparts (IRI, NDI) do not always respect the regulations and laws of the countries in which they engage. Second, there is "the perception of the great proximity between the [U.S.] foundations [party institutes] and the State Department ... [such that in several cases] they availed themselves of the immediate help directly from the state." What is lacking, she says, is a proper firewall between democracy promotion and government, the absence of which inevitably leads to local backlash against foreign organizations, affecting German as well as U.S. democracy foundations. However, the German foreign ministry, "prompted by observing the American role" overseas, is reconsidering its position about leaving democracy promotion to party foundations and is considering taking a more active statist position in such matters (Pia Bungarten, personal communication, 2008).
Is there some rivalry between the U.S. and German democracy promotion foundations? Undoubtedly, there is, as both countries are vying for influence within the CEE region and elsewhere. From the perspective of the director for the Ebert Foundation's CEE program, there is a certain arrogance in the way American democracy promoters regard their task - that they "are convinced that the best possible world we have invented so far is the American Constitution and the American way of life. So they only need to export it, and the world would be better. They are so convinced that this [should be] done" (Buhbe, personal communication, 2008). (Pia Bungarten, personal communication, 2008).
Britain's Westminster Foundation for Democracy
Britain's democracy promotion program was established with the formation of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) in 1992, in response by the Conservative John Major government both to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the earlier creation of NED. WFD is a considerably smaller version of its American counterpart, NED, or the German foundations, with a current (2009) annual Foreign and Commonwealth Office grant of £4.1 million. Only half of this amount goes to the political parties, primarily the Conservatives and Labour. Its board of governors has representatives from the three major British parties, together with the trade unions, business, academia, and NGOs.
WFD focuses its assistance in the areas of democratization, human rights, political participation, and conflict resolution (Scott 2002, 196). As one study on comparative approaches to democracy promotion finds, "while the British and Canadian foundations appear as regional specialists, the US foundation is not only global, but also seems to be something of a roving democracy promoter, shifting its regional emphases with opportunity and need" (Scott and Walters 2000, 253). One difference between the Conservatives and Labour is that the former emphasizes direct party relations and campaigning capacities, whereas the latter, finding party-to-party relations difficult to sustain, focuses more on parliamentary training (Sattar, personal communication, 2008; Thomas, personal communication, 2008).26 Unlike NED or USAID, neither party puts much emphasis on the presence of open business markets as a precondition for assistance to targeted countries. And neither engages in civil society projects.
With its small budget and absence of private funding supports, WFD does not maintain offices overseas and concentrates primarily in providing training in Britain in politics and parliamentarian procedures for visitors from other countries. However, they nonetheless maintain a presence within countries targeted for democracy promotion. According to a spokesperson for the British Conservative Party's international division, British and U.S. regime change agents often coordinate their efforts overseas "under the radar." But the WFD is considerably more explicit, ideological, and explicitly "partisan" in doing political party work than either NED or the German Stiftungen, the latter of which the Conservatives consider too "academic" in their approach. The WFD Conservative's international office director, Philippa Broom, notes that they work closely with IRI and occasionally with NDI to bring about common political objectives (Broom, personal communication, 2008; Thomas, personal communication, 2008). Comparing WFD with the German foundations, the chief executive of the WFD, David French comments: "We don't bother with the niceties of the German system of a clear demarcation between the political party and the stiftung that's affiliated to it" (French, personal communication, 2008).
To make the point about British open partisanship and the shared U.K'/U.S. vision of political change in Eastern Europe, Broom gave the example: "If you look at Ukraine in particular, we all wanted regime change. Heck, we wanted those boys [the Yanukovych government] out, we wanted Yushchenko in." Despite the shared strategic objective, she also critiques the short-term U.S. approach: "For American agencies, it's more political, it's an absolute: 'We want regime change, and we're damn well gonna get it.''' She also has reservations about the more reserved German approach, which, she says, "keep ignoring parties ... you cannot have good governance, you can have as many excellent NGOs as you like, but they're not at the end of the day pressure groups" (Broom, personal communication, 2008).
Other European Democracy Promotion Foundations
There are other, small European democracy promotion institutes, but none compares in scale to the German program. In the Netherlands, the Institute for Multiparty Democracy (NIMD) established 2000 by seven Dutch political parties, works with political parties in over 150 countries, including Eastern Europe. In 2008, it had an annual budget of €10.3 million. NIMD appears to have a more direct style in dealing with other political systems. On its webpage, for example, it describes the breakdown of interparty communication under the Saakashvili presidency in Georgia and the fraud that accompanied both the presidential and parliamentary elections in early 2008 that favored his ruling United National Movement party (NIMD 2009). No "color revolution" support came from the West on this occasion despite massive demonstrations that have occurred calling for his resignation. Saakashvili is regarded by the United States as a reliable ally in opposition to Russian influence in the Caucasus region.
In Sweden, the Olof Palme International Center (OPIC), established in 1992 by the Swedish Social Democratic Party is closely associated with the country's national labor movement. Its funding comes from the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, the Swedish Social Democratic Party, and the Swedish Co-operative Union. In Europe, it works in the Baltic states, the Balkans, and Russia. In 2004, the Center had an annual budget of €12.5 million. The principal target of its work is civil society issues (Wersch and de Zeeuw 2005). In Belarus, OPIC works to help build and unite social democratic movements against what it sees as the undemocratic character of the Lukashenko government. In Ukraine, its position was weakened after its partner organization, the Socialist Party of Ukraine, failed to gain representation in the parliament in the 2007 election. Compared to the United States, OPIC plays a minor political role in the region and appears to share the larger objective of wanting to bring Eastern Europe into the fold of the European Union and the global market economy.
Although leaders of both the German and British party foundations express deep concerns about the U.S. approach to democracy promotion, they cooperate closely with their American counterparts. According to one long-time democracy promotion practitioner:
"The two institutes [IRI and NDI], meanwhile, are in regular, friendly communication with counterpart party institutes in other countries, from the German Stiftungen to the British Westminster Foundation for Democracy and the Institute for Multi-Party Democracy of the Netherlands, all of whom provide similar kinds of advice and assistance (though on much smaller scales than do the Americans). The two party institutes have begun to accept funding from some other countries' aid agencies for programs with political parties" (Melia 2005, 24-25).
In the next chapter I look at the work of democracy promotion in Eastern Europe. The main studies of "color revolutions" are from Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. An important aspect of democracy promotion in this region is rooted in the Cold War past and the continuing aggressive posture that the United States has taken toward the Russian government in the Putin era. Democracy promotion is also embedded in residual anti-Russian and anti-socialist sentiments shared by different local groups and individuals involved in foreign-sponsored political projects, precisely the factions that the United States helped to bring to power
The principal focus of Chapter 4 is on the "transition" projects of U.S. government and private agencies, with emphasis on the symbolic aspects in the pursuit of regime change. When foreign change agents, as they like to think of themselves, lack knowledge about the region in which they seek to institute democracy, they tend to rely more on their technical expertise in public persuasion than praxis via experiential understanding. The foundation of democracy building is thus built on instrumental communication and opportunistic patron-client relations. As part of the mission, the United States brought a range of tools to effect its political ends, many of them associated with commercial marketing and PR practices and media propaganda.
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Notes:
1. Cited in Brown, no date. Allen's commentary (1949) was published in his "Propaganda: A Conscious Weapon of Diplomacy," The Department if State Bulletin, 21 (546), December 19. Pp. 941-943.
2. Hill & Knowlton gained notoriety prior to the first Persian Gulf invasion of 1991 when, working on retainer for the Kuwaiti government, it organized a propaganda campaign in support of U.S. intervention by the Bush Sr. administration. Craig Fuller, head of the Washington, D.C. office of H&K at the time, was a former chief of staff and close friend of the U.S. president. The consulting firm falsified a report that the soldiers of Saddam Hussein has thrown Kuwaiti babies from hospital incubators, which Bush and others used on several occasions to justify the invasion.
3. Rendon's projects in the Middle East included the promotion of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) under the controversial leadership of Ahmed Chalabi, who hadn't been to Iraq since 1958, when he was 13. Rendon also aided the development of the Iraqi Broadcasting Corporation and Radio Hurriah (which during Saddam's time transmitted from Kuwait to Iraq the messages to Iraqi opposition leaders), did propaganda work for the Kuwaiti exile government during the Iraq invasion of that country in 1990-1991, and other projects - by its own claim, in a total of 91 countries. According to New Yorker correspondent Seymour Hersh, the CIA paid Rendon close to a hundred million dollars for its services on behalf of the INC. See Kennedy and Lucas 2005; Wikipedia 2007b; and Bamford 2005.
4. On the other hand, the CIA chose to hide images of its program of torture of Al Qaeda suspects by destroying at least 92 videotapes that captured such techniques as waterboarding (Mazzetti 2009). The Obama White House declared that it would overturn the policy of torture exercised under the Bush administration.
5. The Lincoln Group and Rendon Group, once partners, both provide psychological operations services for the U. S. government, especially on behalf of the military in' the Middle East. The Lincoln Group was one of three PR organizations to share up to a $300 million five-year contract for the Pentagon in "psychological operations efforts to improve foreign public opinion about the United States, particularly the military" (Merle 2005). One of its objectives was to pay Iraqi news media to place unattributed articles written by the U.S. military, which raised concerns that deceptive reporting "could easily migrate into American news outlets" (Shanker 2006). The Rendon Group, which has rendered media services for presidential candidates in both U.S parties, received $100,000 per month from the Kuwaiti royal family during Desert Storm and also won a $23 million contract from the CIA to produce anti-Saddam propaganda (Cockburn and St. Clair 2004, 322).
6. Obama closed the Pentagon's "Support for Public Diplomacy" office in 2009 but retained the position of undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department.
7. During his first administration, G. W. Bush appointed at least 32 officials linked to the arms industry, among them 17 with ties to major defense contractors. These included Secretary of the Navy Gordon England, a former vice president of General Dynamics and Secretary of the Air Force James Roche, and a former Northrop Grumman executive (Hartung and Ciarrocca, 2004).
8. Such restrictions originate with the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 7, clause 7), which forbids the use of federal funds without legal appropriation. Subsequent legislation (5 U.S.C. 3107) in 1913 prohibited federal funding "to pay a publicity expert unless specifically appropriated for that purpose." P.L. 108-447, Div. H. Sec. 624 restricts U.S. agency communications directed at Americans "for publicity or propaganda purposes" (in its words for content that is for "self-aggrandizement," contains "puffery," is "purely partisan in nature," or is engaged in "covert propaganda") unless authorized by Congress (Kosar 2005, 5-6).
9. When the Bush administration raised the profile of the State Department undersecretary for global affairs to democracy and global affairs and created a deputy national security advisor for "global democracy strategy" in support of Bush's "freedom agenda," USAID also redesignated a deputy assistant administrator position to take on the portfolio for democracy promotion (Melia 2005, 11).
10. IRI is often partnered in its anti-leftist 'non-partisanship' with another NED-funded organization, the AFL-CIO's Free Trade Union Institute. In the 1980s, one of the FTUI's "democracy assistance" projects was a $1.5 million grant in support of a rightwing extremist group, the National Inter-University Union, for the purpose of blocking what the labor group saw as dangerous communist influences in Francois Mitterand's socialist government (Conry 1993).
11. Among other American consultants in Bucharest was the peripatetic Dick Morris (a former Bill Clinton political adviser), working in the service of an American of Romanian ancestry, Lia Roberts., former chair of the Nevada Republican Party, whose campaign was quickly aborted. Israeli consultant Tal Silberstein, together with American consultants James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, worked in the 2004 presidential election on behalf of the prime minister Adrian Nastase. Oddly enough, an Israeli PR firm run by Eyal Arad worked in the presidential campaign for a right-wing nationalist and Holocaust denier, Vadim Tudor and his Greater Romania Party (PRM). In 2007, Silberstein and a team of Israeli consulting partners, together with the well-traveled American consultant Arthur Finkelstein and a Romanian commercial television manager, Dan Andronic, worked in support of the prime minister, Calin Tariceanu and his Liberal Party. American political consultants working abroad frequently switch alliances between leftist and rightist parties, reflecting the collusion between Democrats and Republicans on matters of neoliberal foreign policy.
12. Reagan's image served as a simulacrum, inasmuch as it was not clear whether, given his background and personality, he saw himself as president or as someone playing the president.
13. The current (2009) State Department coordinator of U.S. assistance to Europe and Eurasia, Daniel Rosenblum, was senior program coordinator of the FTUI from 1991 to 1997, a NED grantee that was very active in support of Boris Yeltsin and in the demise of the Soviet Union during the 1980s. Rosenblum had been "a public spokesman for the AFL-CIO on the labor movement in the former Soviet Union."
14. In 2009, street protests erupted in Tehran following the contested election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. According to a former U.S. government official from the Reagan administration, the C.I.A. and NED were involved, respectively, in destabilizing Iran and channeling funds to the opposition presidential candidate, Hossein Mousavi. The head of a NED-funded organization, the Foundation for Democracy, Kenneth Timmerman, said that NED was involved in fomenting a "green revolution" in Iran, providing money to "pro-Mousavi groups who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds" (Roberts 2009).
15. Richard Nixon's close political advisors, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Charles Coulson, had come from}. W. Thompson - all three were eventually convicted for their roles in the Watergate scandal.
16. Soros, born in 1930, is a contemporary of the German economist Ralf Dahrendorf; both studied under the philosopher Karl Popper at the London School of Economics. Dahrendorf, who died in 2009 and took up British citizenship, was a lifelong proponent of a libertarian version of a civil society, whereas Soros held to a social democratic approach. Both were ardent anti-fascists and anti-communists and shared Popper's advocacy of the "open society" and his anti-communism and skepticism toward Marxian socialism.
17. In early 2009, Obama's national security adviser, James L Jones declared at a meeting of 45th Munich Conference on Security Policy: "As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger, filtered down through General Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger, who is also here" (Council on Foreign Relations 2009).
18. One of the more explicitly partisan foreign policy NGOs, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which ironically refers to itself "non-partisan," is in fact a predominantly neoconservative organization founded after 9/11 for the purpose of "fighting the ideologies that threaten democracy." Largely focused on the Middle East, Iran, and the defense of Israel and an advocate for the invasion of Iraq, its board includes prominent political conservatives including Newt Gingrich, William Kristol, and Steve Forbes, conservative journalists, former CIA director James Woolsey, Senator Joseph Lieberman, as well as former government officials appointed by Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, and (Foundation for Defense of Democracies (2008).
19 The European election monitoring organization, OSCE, declared the April 2009 election results, won by the Party of Communists, as valid. Russian political leaders declared their suspicions about interference by Western intelligence to undermine the Moldovan state, achieve anschluss within a greater Romanian state, and extend NATO's reach into Eastern Europe (Trabanco 2009).
20. The Ford Foundation has financially aided a number of political and security-oriented foundations and think tanks in the region, including the Institute of Public Affairs in Warsaw, which also receives substantial grants from the Soros foundations.
21. In January 2009, McFaul was named by the Obama administration as senior director at the National Security Council for Russian affairs and as an adviser to the president.
22. Significantly, compared to the United States, there are few political appointments in the German foreign service and in general less politicization of overseas work and less unilateralism by the party that happens to be in power (Momkes, personal communication, 2008).
23. Friedrich Ebert was German chancellor from 1918 to 1919 and president from 1919 to 1925, when he died in office. He represented the right wing of his party, the Social Democrats (SPD), and used the military (the pro-monarchist Freikorps) to end Germany's communist-led (the Spartacist League) uprising in the early post-World War period and had the radical left movement's leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, murdered. The Social Democrats remain strongly anti-communist in their domestic and foreign policies and played a significant role in preventing the Communist Party of Portugal from gaining power in the 1970s.
24. Somewhat ironically, the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, representing the pro-free trade Liberals in Germany, has its headquarters in Potsdam on Karl Marx Strasse.
25. The Social Democrats lost their position in the ruling coalition of the German government following the September 2009 federal election.
26. It appears that conservative parties and foundations in the West find it easier to support parties, because right-wing ideology has a long history in Central and Eastern Europe (and elsewhere), whereas social democracy has a much weaker footing. The Western political foundations are generally unwilling to provide support to communist parties overseas, and suspicion appears to be mutual.