Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Introduction: The Reagan Administration and Democracy Promotion

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Reagan Administration, the Cold War, and the Transition to Democracy Promotion

Abstract

During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, a distinctive form of democracy promotion emerged as a central pillar of US foreign policy. The administration integrated democracy promotion into US strategy towards communist and non-communist governments, deploying diplomacy and support for anti-Soviet guerrillas, as well as new tactics such as electoral and political assistance for foreign actors delivered through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID), to foster political, institutional, and economic change compatible with US interests. Historically, the US record on democracy promotion was mixed. However, rising support for human rights in the US and global geopolitical and geo-economic change during the 1970s created an opening for a new mode of US democracy-based hegemony pressed by administration officials, neoconservatives, and non-state actors.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Reagan, ‘First Press Conference,’ January 29, 1981, Transcript, http://millercenter.org/president/reagan/speeches/speech-5853.

  2. 2.

    Peter Burnell, ‘Democracy Assistance: The State of the Discourse,’ in Democracy Assistance: International Co-operation for Democratization, edited by Peter Burnell (London and Portland, Or: Frank Cass & Co Ltd., 2000): 3–34.

  3. 3.

    Thomas Carothers, Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004), 16–18; David Adesnik and Michael McFaul, ‘Engaging Autocratic Allies to Promote Democracy,’ The Washington Quarterly 29 no. 2 (2006): 5–26.

  4. 4.

    Conry, Barbara, ‘Cato Institute Foreign Policy Briefing No. 27: Loose Cannon: The National Endowment for Democracy,’ (Washington, D.C.: The Cato Institute, 1993).

  5. 5.

    David Held, Models of Democracy. 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006).

  6. 6.

    Christopher Hobson, ‘The Limits of Liberal-Democracy Promotion,’ Alternatives 34 (2009): 386.

  7. 7.

    Barry Gills, Joel Rocamora and Richard Wilson, ‘Low Intensity Democracy,’ in Low Intensity Democracy: Political Power in the New World Order, eds. Barry Gills, Joel Rocamora and Richard Wilson, (London and Boulder, Colo: Pluto Press, 1993): 3–35; William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention and Hegemony, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Steve Smith, ‘U.S. Democracy Promotion: Critical Questions,’ in American Democracy Promotion: Impulses, Strategies and Impacts, eds. Michael Cox, John Ikenberry and Takashi Inoguchi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 63–85.

  8. 8.

    Reagan, ‘Address to the British Parliament,’ June 8, 1982, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library [RRPL], https://reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches/1982/60882a.htm; Reagan, ‘Message to the Congress on Freedom, Regional Security and Global Peace,’ March 14, 1986, RRPL, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/archives/speeches/1986/31486d.htm; Reagan, quoted in Andrew E. Busch, Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Freedom (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001), 203.

  9. 9.

    Neil A. Burron, The New Democracy Wars: The Politics of North American Democracy Promotion in the Americas (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 29.

  10. 10.

    On Truman and Eisenhower, see Scott Lucas, ‘Campaigns of Truth: The Psychological Strategy Board and American Ideology, 1951–1953,’ The International History Review 18, no. 2 (1996): 279–302; Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). On Kennedy, see David Schmitz, The United States and Right-wing Dictatorships, 1965–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 237–244; Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation-Building’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century, Expanded ed. (Princeton. Princeton University Press, 2012), 214–236.

  11. 11.

    Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy; Marilyn Anne Zak, ‘Assisting Elections in the Third World,’ The Washington Quarterly 10, no. 4 (1987): 175–193.

  12. 12.

    On democracy promotion in the Clinton and Bush administration’s respective national security strategies, see Douglas Brinkley, ‘Democratic Enlargement: The Clinton Doctrine,’ Foreign Policy 106 (1997): 110–127; White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Department of State, 2002) https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/63562.pdf; White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Department of State, 2006) https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/64884.pdf; Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, ‘Bill Clinton’s “Democratic Enlargement” and the Securitisation of Democracy Promotion,’ Diplomacy & Statecraft 26, no. 3 (2015):534–551. On the expansion of US government infrastructure for democracy promotion, see James D. Boys, Clinton’s Grand Strategy: US Foreign Policy in a Post-Cold War World (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 218–219; Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy, 100; Thomas O. Melia, ‘The Democracy Bureaucracy: The Infrastructure of American Democracy Promotion.’ Princeton Project on National Security (2005) https://www.princeton.edu/~ppns/papers/democracy_bureaucracy.pdf, 10. On increased funding, see Nicole Bibbins Sedaca and Nicolas Bouchet, ‘Holding Steady? US Democracy Promotion in a Changing World,’ Chatham House: US and the Americas Program (2014) https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/papers/view/197475, 15.

  13. 13.

    Gershman, Carl, ‘Freedom remains the Touchstone,’ in America’s Purpose: New Visions of US Foreign Policy edited by Owen Harries (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1991): 40.

  14. 14.

    For triumphalist accounts of Reagan’s first term, see Peter Schweizer, Victory: the Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 1994); Paul Kengor, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the fall of Communism (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007). On Reagan’s engagement with Gorbachev, see James Mann, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War (London: Viking, 2009); James Wilson, The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagement, and the End of the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).

  15. 15.

    Mark Lagon, ‘The International System and the Reagan Doctrine: Can Realism Explain Aid to ‘Freedom Fighters’?’ British Journal of Political Science, 21 (1992): 39–70; James M. Scott, Deciding to Intervene: The Reagan Doctrine and American Foreign Policy (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996); Chester Pach, ‘The Reagan Doctrine: Principle, Pragmatism, and Policy’ Presidential Studies Quarterly, 36 no. 1 (2006): 5–88; Malcolm Byrne, Iran-Contra: Reagan’s Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017).

  16. 16.

    Nicolas Bouchet Democracy Promotion as U.S. Foreign Policy: Bill Clinton and Democratic Enlargement (New York: Routledge, 2015); Hal Brands Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post-war Cold War Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016); Robert Pee, Democracy Promotion, National Security and Strategy: Foreign Policy Under the Reagan Administration (Abingdon, Oxon, and New York: Routledge, 2016).

  17. 17.

    On human rights and US foreign policy, see, for example, Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (New York. The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2012); William Michael Schmidli, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy toward Argentina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Mark Philip Bradley, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). On human rights and US foreign policy in the 1980s, see Kathryn Sikkink, Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Joe Renouard, Human Rights in American Foreign Policy: From the 1960s to the Soviet Collapse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

  18. 18.

    Michael, G. Cox, John Ikenberry, and Takashi Inoguchi, eds. American Democracy Promotion: Impulses, Strategies, and Impacts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Michael Mandelbaum, Democracy’s Good Name: the Rise and Risks of the World’s Most Popular Form of Government (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007); Michael McFaul, Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should and How We Can (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010).

  19. 19.

    Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992).

  20. 20.

    Michael W. Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (July 1983):205–235; Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 2,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 12, no. 4 (October 1983): 23–353; Piki Ish-Shalom, ‘The Civilization of Clashes: Misapplying Democratic Peace Theory in the Middle East.’ Political Science Quarterly 122, no. 4 (2008): 533–554.

  21. 21.

    Larry Jay Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (New York: Times Books, 2008); Thomas Carothers and Marina Ottaway, eds., Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000).

  22. 22.

    Thomas Carothers, In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy Toward Latin America In the Reagan Years (Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991); Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century Expanded ed. (Princeton. Princeton University Press, [1994] 2012).

  23. 23.

    Cox, Ikenberry, and Inoguchi, American Democracy Promotion; Michael Cox, Timothy J. Lynch, and Nicolas Bouchet, eds. US Foreign Policy and Democracy Promotion: From Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama (New York: Routledge, 2013).

  24. 24.

    Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy.

  25. 25.

    See, for example, Rita Abrahamsen, Disciplining Democracy: Development Discourse and Good Governance in Africa (London: Zed Books, 2000); Milja Kurki, Democratic Futures: Revisioning Democracy Promotion (Abingdon. Routledge, 2013); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books. 2015).

  26. 26.

    Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); John A. Thompson, Woodrow Wilson: Profiles in Power (New York: Longman, 2002); Smith, America’s Mission.

  27. 27.

    G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

  28. 28.

    Quoted in Martin H. Folly, ‘Harry S. Truman,’ in Cox, Lynch, and Bouchet, eds., US Foreign Policy and Democracy Promotion, 96.

  29. 29.

    Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge. Harvard University Press, 2009); Kaeten Mistry, ‘The Case for Political Warfare: Strategy, Organization and US Involvement in the 1948 Italian Election,’ Cold War History, 3, no. 6 (2006): 301–329.

  30. 30.

    Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, ‘Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War: Some Reflections on the 1945–8 Conjuncture,’ Journal of Latin American Studies 20, no. 1 (1988): 167–189; Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

  31. 31.

    Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004).

  32. 32.

    Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  33. 33.

    David Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

  34. 34.

    Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill. The University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

  35. 35.

    Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 130.

  36. 36.

    Steven G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 148.

  37. 37.

    Quoted in Schmidli, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere, 43.

  38. 38.

    Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: The New Press, 2003).

  39. 39.

    Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2014).

  40. 40.

    Reagan, Untitled, ‘Statement by Ronald Reagan’ January 31, 1980, Richard V. Allen Papers, Box 30, Folder: ‘RR: Selected Foreign Policy and Defense Statements,’ Hoover Institution Archives.

  41. 41.

    Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards,’ Commentary 68, no. 5 (1979): 34–45.

  42. 42.

    John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment revised and expanded ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, [1982] 2005), 353.

  43. 43.

    Kirkpatrick, ‘Dictators and Double Standards.’

  44. 44.

    Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side, 199; Schmitz, The United States and Right-wing Dictatorships, 180–182.

  45. 45.

    Richard A. Melanson, American foreign policy since the Vietnam War: The Search for Consensus from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush. 4th ed. (Abingdon, Oxon, and New York: Routledge, 2015), 18–22.

  46. 46.

    Kenneth Cmiel, ‘The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,’ Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1233–1235.

  47. 47.

    Julian E. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—From World War II to the War on Terrorism (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 263.

  48. 48.

    Richard Saull, The Cold War and After: Capitalism, Revolution and Superpower Politics, (London: Pluto, 2007), 136–137.

  49. 49.

    Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

  50. 50.

    Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy; Howard J. Wiarda, The Democratic Revolution in Latin America: History, Politics and U.S. Policy (London: Holmes & Meier, 1990), 72–83.

  51. 51.

    Stephen Kotkin, ‘The Kiss of Debt: The East Bloc Goes Borrowing,’ in The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, eds. Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela and Daniel J. Sargent (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2010), 80–97.

  52. 52.

    Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, ‘Economic Constraints and the Turn towards Superpower Cooperation in the 1980s’ in The Last Decade of the Cold War: From Conflict Escalation to Conflict Transformation, ed. by Olav Njølstad (London and New York: Frank Cass Publishers, 2004), 91.

  53. 53.

    Ibid, 83–91.

  54. 54.

    Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (London: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 173.

  55. 55.

    James Wilson, ‘How Grand was Reagan’s Strategy, 1976–1984?’ Diplomacy & Statecraft 18 no. 4 (2007), 778.

  56. 56.

    White House, ‘National Security Decision Directive 75: US Relations with the USSR,’ 1983, Federation of American Scientists, National Security Decision Directives—Reagan Administration, https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd/nsdd-75.pdf.

  57. 57.

    Quoted in Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment, 179.

  58. 58.

    Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003); Duncan Green, Silent Revolution: The Rise and Crisis of Market Economics in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003).

  59. 59.

    Kurt Gerhard Weyland, ‘Neoliberalism and Democracy in Latin America,’ Latin American Politics & Society. 46, no. 1 (2004): 135–157; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Robert Pee

  2. Institute for History, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    William Michael Schmidli

Authors
  1. Robert Pee
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. William Michael Schmidli
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Robert Pee

  2. Institute for History, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    William Michael Schmidli

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Pee, R., Schmidli, W.M. (2019). Introduction: The Reagan Administration and Democracy Promotion. In: Pee, R., Schmidli, W. (eds) The Reagan Administration, the Cold War, and the Transition to Democracy Promotion. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96382-2_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96382-2_1

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96381-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96382-2

  • eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation