Democracy Assistance as ἄτεχνον

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes Greek characters omitted (or Cyrillic characters omitted.))Westerners have been advising Arab leaders on how to organize themselves for a long time, and it has not always gone well. In the 1962 film by David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia, British assistance to the Arabs in their revolt against the Ottomans is dramatized. Arab leaders reject the advice of British army officers to build and train a modem, mechanized land force, and with the encouragement of TE. Lawrence, choose to adapt traditional Arab forms of warfare. The result is a series of Arab victories over the Turks. As allegory, this story brings us right up to the perpetual problem of the democracy assistance business: the inclination of benefactors to style themselves as dispensers of superior, technical expertise without sufficient deference to local practices and tradition. Lawrence's insight offers a more effective approach: jettisoning foreign models in favour of indigenous ones that can be understood and embraced by those we are attempting to assist.Although democracy assistance organizations are staffed by earnest young people with experience in the political systems of their home countries, few of them have Lawrence's affinity and knowledge of the history and traditions of the countries they hope to help. The gap between what is known by democracy assistance staff, and what by those they hope to help, can be wide and too often invisible to staff at foreign aid organizations. This is because foreign democracy assistance entails not only the transfer of technical information about good governance practices and international norms, but also another type of knowledge that only a local, or a rare outsider to a society, such as Lawrence, can understand. This elusive or protean knowledge can be described by the Greek adjective ?te????, or atechnon, which is most literally rendered as atechnical or nontechnical knowledge. If politics is sometimes considered a science, it nonetheless has a nontechnical side where the grasping, fumbling, practical art of politics takes over.Foreign democracy assistance is best able to address the technical side of governance, such as how to organize an election or how to use polling data to inform a campaign strategy, but when tasked with supporting indigenous institutions, democracy assistance must make use of the nontechnical as well. The challenge is to assist in the development of institutions by conveying knowledge in a manner that bridges the distance between internationaltechnical and local-nontechnical understandings.Given that the success of a representative democracy depends on an informed class of representatives as well as citizens, both groups ought to be the beneficiaries of international efforts. In practice, US and other foreign democracy assistance has tended to concentrate on public education through media and indigenous civil society advocacy organizations and on governmental education through technical training and on-the-ground advising. At the same time, valuable policy ideas can also emerge from domestic think tanks, whose scholars have an intellectual and cultural affinity for the society whose leaders they hope to advise, and who research the country's problems and recommend solutions in the language of local history and political idiom.As part of a larger effort to support the restoration of democratic self-government in Iraq, the International Republican Institute designed and conducted a training program to help develop independent, nongovernmental Iraqi policy research institutions - think tanks - from 2004 on. The initiative was part of a larger U S -government-funded effort to promote the development of civil society and democratic institutions in Iraq. The unusual scale of funding for Iraq made this experimental effort possible.The institute was not responsible for the creation of think tanks in Iraq. The country had the benefit of a group of scholars at home and abroad with knowledge of political science, democratic institutions, law, and public policy. …