National Endowment For Democracy Research Articles

Coverage of the Tibet Crisis (March 2008) and the Olympic Games in China (August 2008) in the German-language mass media

The perception by the German media of Tibet, on the one hand, and China, on the other, could not be more contrary: the current image of China is fully in the tradition of the threatening yellow - respectively red - threat and so is strongly opposed to the positive image of Tibet (peaceful, esoteric, in need of protection). Given this double agenda setting and framing, an almost insurmountable communicative and media-political obstacle stood in the way of positive reporting on the Beijing Olympics in summer 2008. The media reports on the social unrest in Tibet in March 2008 and those on the Olympic Games several months later reveal the following. (1) The numerous, highly professional media activities by groups of exiled Tibetans relating to Tibet and the Olympic Games were planned long in advance and were well coordinated The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Washington played a vital role here. (2) Important parts of the anti-Chinese media work were done before and during the Olympics by the British advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi commissioned by the supposedly independent NGO Reporters without Borders. (3) Essential parts of the pro-Chinese media work were done before and during the Olympic Games by the US-American PR Agency Hill & Knowlton. This supports the conclusion that during the period of time in question German media recipients were provided with authentic news neither about Tibet nor about China. Instead, they were victims of competitive rivalry between two western PR and advertising agencies.

Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds. Democratization in Africa: Progress and Retreat. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press and the National Endowment for Democracy, 2010. A Journal of Democracy book, xxvii + 360 pages. Figures. Tables. Maps. Index. $30.00. Paper.

Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds. Democratization in Africa: Progress and Retreat. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press and the National Endowment for Democracy, 2010. A <i>Journal of Democracy</i> book, xxvii + 360 pages. Figures. Tables. Maps. Index. $30.00. Paper.

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009)

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Nadia Diuk, Richard Pipes, George Weigel, Abbas Milani, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jerzy Szacki, and Carl Gershman The eminent Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski, who had a major influence on the development of the Polish democratic opposition, died on 17 July 2009. A memorial symposium entitled "Democracy, Totalitarianism, and the Culture of Freedom" was held in his honor at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C., on October 15. Kolakowski had been a founding member of the Journal of Democracy's Editorial Board and had spoken at several major NED conferences. His thinking influenced the Endowment's strategy in Central and Eastern Europe. The event was introduced by NED president Carl Gershman and moderated by former U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Other speakers included NED vice-president Nadia Diuk, longtime director of NED programs in Central Europe and Eurasia; Richard Pipes, Baird Professor Emeritus of History at Harvard University; George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center; and Abbas Milani, Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University. A second memorial symposium was held on October 24 at the University of Warsaw, organized by the Stefan Batory Foundation. Moderated by Aleksander Smolar, it featured as speakers Jerzy Szacki, professor emeritus of the University of Warsaw; philosophy professor Jan Andrzej Kłoczowski, O.P.; and Jerzy Jedlicki, professor at the Historical Institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the former prime minister of Poland (1989–91), sent an audio message. At the conclusion, Carl Gershman presented NED's Democracy Service Medal to Kolakowski's widow, Tamara Kolakowska, and read a tribute that accompanied it. A video of the NED symposium is available at www.ned.org/events/kolakowski.html, and an audio recording of the Warsaw symposium is available at www.batory.org.pl/debaty/Kolakowski.htm. Selected excerpts from speeches at these two events appear below: Nadia Diuk: In an article entitled "In Stalin's Countries: Theses on Hope and Despair," Kolakowski dissected the operations of what he called alternately the communist social system, bureaucratic socialism, socialist despotism, or monopolistic power. Even though he was referring to the Soviet model of socialism, his analysis of the way a totalitarian regime seeks to exercise power relates to all kinds of despotisms and thus is decidedly [End Page 184] relevant today. "The natural need of despotism," he wrote, "is to terrify individuals while depriving them of the means of organized resistance." He elaborated further, applying his well-honed skills in dialectical reasoning: "If this concentration of power is a source of strength, it also conceals weaknesses." This was his main thesis: the paradox that the more a regime tries to assert control over political and social life, the weaker it becomes, "deprived of plasticity and self-regulatory devices," as he put it. He had thus turned Marxist dialectics on its head. . . . By poking holes in the totalitarian monolith and highlighting weaknesses in the system, Kolakowski identified areas where opponents of the system could work and how society could organize in its own self-defense. These ideas were elaborated further by Jacek Kuroń, who added the idea of "self-organization" by society, and Adam Michnik, who took this analysis further in his essay "The New Evolutionism." The notion was gradually being accepted that engaged citizens could reclaim the public space monopolized by the regime and that social and cultural activities could take place outside of the officially sanctioned realm, bypassing the "leading role" of the Communist Party and other state-controlled instruments. . . . Even after martial law was imposed at the end of 1981, the Polish opposition continued its newly adopted strategy of building parallel structures underground, by establishing a thriving underground press, a flying university, and many publishing houses, and gaining the moral authority that had been lost by the ruling elite, all in accordance with Kolakowski's original thesis. Kolakowski wrote many other pieces about the Polish opposition, and also on the unique role of the Polish nation and its intellectuals, and in later years he warned, "The victory of democracy is by no means assured—there are various noncommunist forms of tyranny." But his analysis of the...

Accomplice to Impunity?: Rethinking the Political Strategy of the International Criminal Court in Central Africa

In March of 2009, the International Criminal Court made what was undoubtedly its most audacious move yet: to issue an arrest warrant for a sitting head of state—which in this case, befell the president of Sudan, Omar al Bashir, for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Sudan’s western region of Darfur. The ICC warrant stunned many casual observers of the court, while delighting scores of human rights activists, and absolutely inflaming many an autocrat-leaning head of state throughout the world—especially those in Africa who have close diplomatic ties with Sudan. But perhaps the single most memorable response to the warrant came from Bashir himself, whose image was broadcast across the globe, dancing before Angelo Izama is the founding director of Fanaka Kwa Wote, a think tank in Kampala, Uganda that focuses on regional security and economic development in the Great Lakes region of Africa. A long-time journalist, Izama is director of special projects at the Daily Monitor, Uganda’s only independent daily newspaper, and is a researcher, consultant, and analyst of government affairs. In 2007, Izama was a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C., during which time he researched regional options for peace in northern Uganda, with a special focus on the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Template Revolutions: Marketing U.S. Regime Change in Eastern Europe

Between 2000 and 2005, Russia-allied governments in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and (not discussed in this paper) Kyrgyzstan were overthrown through bloodless upheavals. Though Western media generally portrayed these coups as spontaneous, indigenous and popular (‘people power’) uprisings, the ‘color revolutions’ were in fact outcomes of extensive planning and energy ─ much of which originated in the West. The United States, in particular, and its allies brought to bear upon post-communist states an impressive assortment of advisory pressures and financing mechanisms, as well as campaign technologies and techniques, in the service of ‘democracy assistance’. Their arsenals included exit and opinion polling, focus groups for ‘revolutionary messaging’, and methods and training in ‘strategic nonviolent conflict’. Among the key foreign agents involved in the process of creating ‘transitional democracies’, as discussed in this study, are the United States Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and its funded institutes, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, Freedom House, and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. These developments are conceived as aspects of the larger neoliberal program of opening the Eastern European region for commercial, strategic military, cultural, and political domination by the G-7 countries. Four types of foreign assistance studied are: (1) political; (2) financial; (3) technical training; and (4) marketing (propaganda).

A Forward Strategy for Democracy Promotion in 2008 and Beyond: Regaining the Momentum

This is the text of the address by Carl Gershman, President of the National Endowment for Democracy, to the Henry Jackson Society and the Westminster Foundation for Democracy at the House of Commons, Westminster, 21 January 2008.

Lessons from Russia: Clinton and US Democracy Promotion by Lee Marsden (review)

REVIEWS 185 Marsden, Lee. Lessonsfrom Russia: Clinton and US DemocracyPromotion. Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2005. xii + 218 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?50.00. Lee Marsden here offers an original, meticulously researched account of the policies of theUS Administration of President Bill Clinton towards Russia. Readers of SEER will appreciate that this is a studyprimarily ofUS foreign policy, rather than one of Russian democratization. Russian specialists will, however, find very useful and enlightening discussions of the complex Russian-American interactions of the 1990s. The close and well known relationship between Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin was just one aspect of the connective web that bound together officials from both countries. Marsden also demonstrates the way in which agencies such as theUS Agency for International Development and the (US) National Endowment forDemocracy became sponsors of interna tional and Russian non-governmental organizations, committed to practical democratization and to the liberalization ofRussian civil society. At the implementation/NGO level, US-sponsored democratization, fun nelled through some twenty-threeor so departments and agencies, had some impact, although Marsden ? quite understandably ? finds it difficult to assess, for example, the results achieved by US-backed local human rights groups inNizhnii Tagil. His main interest is, in fact, at the general, 'macro' level of policy development. He sees Clinton's role as central, not least in steering the democracy-promotion policy through the choppy waters of the second term: not only in connection with the conflicts inChechnya and the rise of theRussian oligarchs, but also in the difficultpolitical circumstances following theRepublican victories in the 1994US midterm elections. (Among other things, the book is a testament to Clinton's political skill and ability to overcome domestic enemies.) Marsden analyses persuasively Clinton's commitment to the brittle reformism of Boris El'tsin: the policy known in Washington at the time as 'Yeltsin drunk orYeltsin sober'.Marsden concludes that 'Clinton's backing forYeltsin was calculated to grant specific national security benefits to the United States' (p. 83), notably in regard to nuclear weapons proliferation and to Russian cooperation (via the Partnership for Peace) with an expanded NATO. Clinton, the president of economic globalization, also clearly conceptualized 'democracy' to an important extent as a function of free markets. Clinton declined to develop any significant relationship with theRussian legislature and 'took the view thatYeltsin must be supported by undemocratic means if necessary' (p. 129). In general terms, we are here offered a picture of US democracy-promotion in Russia which emphasizes the primacy of strategic American interest over any overarching commitment to democratization per se. As Marsden puts it in his conclusion: 'a democratic government representing the electorate would not have pursued economic reforms that inflicted somuch damage for so littlebenefit on itsown people' (p. 197). Some readers may findMarsden's conclusions naive. Was Washington in the 1990s ever likely to uncouple 'markets' and 'political democracy'? Clinton was elected in 1992 to promote domestic prosperity and to safeguard US i86 SEER, 86, I, 2008 security, not least in respect of the former Soviet 'loose nukes'; in both respects, he did pretty well. Russian specialists may also have particular quarrels about the account given here of thepossibilities for real democratiza tion in this era. Itmay also be feltby some that the book's theoretical and conceptual framework ? rooted in competing versions of decision-making theory ? is a little too intrusive, and too redolent of this study's origins as a doctoral thesis. It is also not entirely clear why, ifdecision-making theory is to be taken so seriously, the author steers so far clear of International Relations theory.After all, at one level, thisbook represents an exemplifica tion of tenets of traditional realism.Marsden also does not really engage with the huge literature, reaching back toThomas Jefferson, on ideals and interests inAmerican foreign policy. My own view is that this is an outstandingly good piece of research. Inter nal Clinton Administration documents are not yet available for academic investigation. The Clinton Presidential Library in Litde Rock, Arkansas, is unlikely to offermuch in the foreseeable future to researchers intoClinton's foreign policy. Lee Marsden demonstrates what can be achieved by conscien tious reading of published public records...

US Counter–terrorism Options: A Taxonomy

US Counter–terrorism Options: A Taxonomy

The Myths of 'Democracy Assistance': U.S. Political Intervention in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe

One of the notable shifts in post-Soviet world politics is the almost unimpeded involvement of Western agents, consultants, and public and private institutions in the management of national election processes around the world—including those in the former Soviet allied states. As communist party apparatuses in those countries began to collapse by the late 1980s and in almost bloodless fashion gave way to emerging political forces, the West, especially the United States, was quick to intercede in their political and economic affairs. The methods of manipulating foreign elections have been modified since the heyday of CIA cloak and dagger operations, but the general objectives of imperial rule are unchanged. Today, the U.S. government relies less on the CIA in most cases and more on the relatively transparent initiatives undertaken by such public and private organizations as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Freedom House, George Soros's Open Society, and a network of other well-financed globetrotting public and private professional political organizations, primarily American, operating in the service of the state's parallel neoliberal economic and political objectives. Allen Weinstein, who helped establish NED, noted: "A lot of what we [NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Change within continuity: The political economy of democratic transition in Mexico

On 5 September 2001 President Vicente Fox Quesada of Mexico received the Annual Democracy Award from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) at a Capitol Hill ceremony in Washington DC. The awar...

Inaugural Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture

On December 6, 2004, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the Canadian Embassy to the United States inaugurated the Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World. The lecture, named for one of the great democratic scholars and public intellectuals of the 20th century, is an important new forum for discourse on democracy and its progress worldwide. The inaugural lecture was given by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil and one of Latin America's most distinguished social scientists and statesmen. His lecture will be published in the NED's Journal of Democracy.

Documentation

Document Number 1, Richard L. Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State, Testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Washington, D.C., October 28, 2003, “U.S. Policy and Iran”Document Number 2, Statement by Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, William J. Burns, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Washington, D.C., October 30, 2003Document Number 3, Remarks by President George W. Bush at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, United States Chamber of Commerce, Washington, D.C., November 6, 2003

Globalization and Self-Government

Two broad international trends have dominated the last quarter of the twentieth century and the initial years of the twenty-first: globalization and democratization. Although both globalization and democratization have long and complex histories, each was greatly accelerated by the collapse of Soviet communism in the revolutions of 1989–91. These two trends have been interrelated and, for the most part, mutually reinforcing. That is to say, globalization has fostered democratization, and democratization has fostered globalization. Moreover, both trends generally have furthered American interests and contributed to the strengthening of American power. Yet while the impact of globalization on democracy has been largely positive until now, this will not necessarily be the case in the future. As the new century unfolds, globalization may come to pose a threat to democracy and a set of difficult dilemmas for the United States. Globalization is probably the most prominent social science “buzzword” of our day, having recently wrested that distinction from the term “civil society.” Having by now read literally dozens of attempts to fix a precise definition for “civil society,” I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to establish an exact, let alone consensual, meaning for such buzzwords. They simply are used and misused by too many different authors in too many different ways. On the other hand, if we are seriously to discuss the nature and potential consequences of globalization, it will hardly suffice to apply to it U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous pronouncement about obscenity: “I know it when Marc F. Plattner is coeditor of the Journal of Democracy, codirector of the International Forum for Democratic Studies, and vice president at the National Endowment for Democracy. This essay is based on a lecture that he delivered on March 20 as part of a series on “Globalization, Americanization, and American Hegemony” sponsored by the LeFrak Forum at Michigan State University.

The Balkans: Democracy Without Choices

The Balkans today still appear to be an explosive mixture of weak states, nonstates, and present or future protectorates. In reports to policy makers, the region is described as a place where borders (when defined) are soft, identities are hard, reform policies have failed, and the future is cloudy. While we do not know just how many of Southeastern Europe’s de facto states are functioning, and to what extent, we do know that today they are all democracies: The parliamentary elections that took place on 17 November 2001 in the former Serbian region of Kosovo mean that each country or entity in the region now has a representative assembly. A decade ago, the region’s biggest problem was the prevalence of nondemocratic states. Today the problem is that there are more democracies than sovereign states in the region, and yet there has been less political change than supporters of democracy had expected. These contradictory trends make toting up democracy’s balance sheet in the Balkans a daunting task. On the positive side, the major political actors in the region do not question democracy’s status as the only legitimate and desirable form of government. Citizens are sorely disappointed with the status quo, but are not—or at least not yet—drawn to undemocratic alternatives. The military is in its barracks; Slobodan Miloseviae is in the dock at The Hague; elections are regularly held. In comparison with, say, the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia, Southeastern Europe shows constant progress in democratization. On the negative side, there is a justified fear that the Balkan democracies as a group are more fragile than we had suspected. Trust in Ivan Krastev is director of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria. This essay is drawn from “The Inflexibility Trap: Frustrated Societies, Weak States, and Democracy,” a report on the state of democracy in the Balkans that he initially drafted in February 2002. The final version of this report will appear on the National Endowment for Democracy’s website (www.ned.org).

Whom do international donors support in the name of civil society?

International funding of civil society organisations within the framework of support for democratisation processes has increased significantly in recent years. Yet this raises a set of questions quite apart from the effectiveness of the activities of the recipient organisations. Who are these groups? Whom do they represent? What effect does international funding have on their organisational workings and their rootedness in their local societies and political systems? This article presents the results of a survey that examined the sources of financing, level of organisation, domestic constituencies, and relationships to political parties of 16 civil society groups in Latin America that received support from the National Endowment for Democracy in 1999. It finds that while the groups demonstrate a remarkable diversity in their sources of funding, all of them receive the lion's share of financing from international donors. The author argues, however, that given the scant possibilities for domestically generated funding, this dependence is to be expected. The article concludes with a series of questions about the meaning of international support for local groups in developing democracies and the potential effects it may have on de-linking such groups from their broader political and party system.

Mapping US Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century

This article tracks how the US is adapting its public diplomacy architecture to suit the needs of the information age. The areas of public diplomacy used to influence foreign target audiences are media diplomacy, public information, internal broadcasting, education and cultural programs, and political action. The agencies involved are the State Department, the International Broadcasting Bureau and the National Endowment for Democracy. Key features are the use being made of the Internet as a major tool for information dissemination and interactive communication between US public diplomacy practitioners and their target publics and the 'deep coalitions' being fostered with civil society actors to shape the norms and values of the post Cold War. This strategy is described by Arquilla and Ronfeldt as 'noopolitik' as opposed to state-centred realpolitik. Noopolitik emphasises the shaping and sharing of ideas, values, norms, laws, and ethics though soft power and is recognised by its authors as being very similar to the academic school of constructivism.

Promoting Democracy and Reconciliation in Southeastern Europe

John Brademas is president emeritus of New York University and chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1959 to 1981, the last four years as majority whip. This essay was adapted from a 17 June 2000 presentation at the opening ceremony of the Interbalkan Medical Centre in Salonika, Greece, and from the“Chairman's Message” in the winter 2000 issue of the NED's newsletter.

Teaching Democracy in Postcommunist Countries

Teaching Democracy in Postcommunist Countries Krzysztof Stanowski (bio) In Poland there has been a very strong tradition of independent civic education. Underground education was conducted by the first Polish youth organizations at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and informal educational cells were active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This was a crucial element of Poland’s independ-ence movement, enabling Poles to preserve their language, culture, and national history in spite of well over a century of partition and foreign occupation. Later, during the period between the two World Wars, informal “peasant universities” forged an elite group of peasant activists. Under the Nazi occupation (1939–44), the Polish underground state included a clandestine educational system that involved thousands of students throughout the country. Similarly, the democratic opposition to communist rule during the 1970s and 1980s gave rise to “flying universities” and other independent education groups. The imposition of martial law in December 1981 only led to a new burst of underground educational activity. [End Page 157] The Foundation for Education for Democracy (FED), established in 1989, is carrying on the tradition of independent civic education in Poland. It was created out of the conviction that educating citizens to assume responsibility for their families, their local communities, and their country is essential to the creation of an open society. The FED’s mission is to improve understanding of the rights and responsibilities that go with democracy and a free market. Through its training and publications programs in Poland, Eastern Europe, and the New Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union, the Foundation promotes the skills necessary to perform civic duties in a democratic society among teachers, students, and democratic activists. The FED is the outgrowth of a joint program, created by Polish and American teachers in 1982 as a response to the introduction of martial law in Poland, that became one of the first grantees of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Workshops in union skills organized since 1990 by trainers from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) led to the creation of a team of Polish volunteer trainers, which then began conducting independent training courses based on the AFT model. Finally, the Polish team established its own organization and began producing its own programs and training materials. Over the past eight years, the Foundation for Education for Democracy has recorded the following accomplishments, made possible in large measure by NED financial support: • Organized over 300 workshops, three to six days in length, in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia; • Educated more than 5,500 participants, including teachers, students, and activists from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); • Produced, translated, and adapted 52 publications and hundreds of pages of training materials for workshop participants in Polish, Russian, English, Latvian, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Crimean-Tatar, Albanian, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Mongolian; and • Trained over 100 teacher-trainers from Poland and eight NIS countries to run workshops and seminars that are either organized jointly with the FED, or independently, using FED models. Structure and Activities The Foundation for Education for Democracy is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization based in Warsaw, Poland. Its founders included Jan Piotr Lasota-Hirszowicz; Andrzej Janowski, former minister of education; Wiktor Kulerski, former deputy minister of education; Janusz Onyszkiewicz, minister of defense; Edward Wieczorek; Jacek Woznikowski; Albert Shanker, Sandra Feldman, and Herbert Magidson of the American Federation of [End Page 158] Teachers (AFT); and Diane Ravitch of New York University. The FED is registered as a Polish NGO, and is run by an elected board of directors. Its day-to-day activities are conducted by a director and a staff of six. The first programs undertaken by the Foundation were courses in leadership training for union activists from the local structures of Teachers’ Solidarity. In the years that followed, the FED’s activities grew to embrace wider audiences both within and beyond Poland. The Foundation is currently conducting six types of programs: • Democracy in Schools—a training program for teachers, students, and parents that seeks to disseminate democratic culture in schools and to raise the level of civic education being taught; • Philosophy for Children—a training program for teachers that uses an educational...

Exploding the Myth of the Authoritarian Advantage

racy (Diamond and Plattner 1994), Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy Revisited (Diamond and Plattner 1993a), and The Global Resurgence of Democracy (Diamond and Plattner 1993b). Like the other books in this series, Economic Reform and Democracy is a collection of articles commissioned for a conference sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy, revised, printed in the journal, and finally reprinted in book form. Thus, this book, like the others in the series, was produced with an explicit ideological commitment to the promotion of democracy. This prodemocracy bias notwithstanding, the chapters in the book are without exception cautious in their claims, thorough in their examination of the evidence, and convincing in their modest conclusions.

Serbia's Opposition Speaks

Serbia’s Opposition Speaks Vesna Pesic, Vuk Draskovic, Zoran Djindjic, and Paul McCarthy introduction The following remarks by the leaders of Serbia’s Zajedno (“Together”) coalition are adapted from talks they delivered at a forum co-sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace and the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C., on 4 April 1997. The remarks are introduced here by Paul McCarthy, program officer for Central and Eastern Europe at the National Endowment for Democracy. An Introduction Paul McCarthy On the evening of 21 February 1997, the streets of Belgrade echoed with the cheers of 100,000 jubilant citizens as the large metal communist star atop City Hall was pulled down. The crowds were celebrating the triumph of their 12-week protest against Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and the takeover of municipal councils in the country’s largest cities, including the capital, by the opposition coalition Zajedno (“Together” in Serbo-Croatian). Zoran Djindjic, one of the opposition leaders, was set to become Belgrade’s first noncommunist mayor since 1945. Zajedno’s place in history seemed assured: It had mounted the most serious challenge to Milosevic since his rise to power more than a decade before. With opposition representatives taking office in municipal councils throughout the country, it appeared that the Serbian political system would never be the same again. The Zajedno coalition was formed in early 1996 when the two main parties of an older opposition grouping called the Serbian Democratic Movement (DEPOS)—the Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) and the small Civic Alliance of Serbia (GSS), led by Vuk Draskovic and Vesna Pesic, respectively—were joined by the Democratic Party (DS), led by Zoran Djindjic. Following the formal signing of the Dayton Peace [End Page 3] Agreement in December 1995, the three leaders had worked together briefly in a shadow parliament created after opposition parties boycotted the Serbian parliament to protest the regime’s termination of televised broadcasts of the body’s sessions. What united them a few months later was a desire to make Serbia a “normal country” and to save it from what they viewed as the disastrous decade-long rule of Slobodan Milosevic of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), which included years of war, economic decline, and international isolation. Despite this common resolve, Pesic, Draskovic, and Djindjic were seen from the beginning as strange bedfellows with very different backgrounds as well as varied, and sometimes contradictory, party platforms. Zajedno’s Leaders Of the three Zajedno leaders, Vesna Pesic has been the most constant in her dedication to democratic principles and human rights. In contrast to Djindjic and Draskovic, she has consistently opposed the ethnonationalism sponsored by the regime, in particular its drive to create a “Greater Serbia” and Serbia’s involvement in the Bosnian war. Above all, she has decried the war crimes committed in the name of the Serbs. Like her Zajedno partners, Pesic has roots in the Belgrade intellectual community. She received a doctorate in sociology from the University of Belgrade in 1977. Since 1991, she has been a senior research fellow at the University of Belgrade’s Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, where her work has focused on ethnic nationalism, conflict resolution, and human rights. Pesic was active in Yugoslav dissident movements throughout the 1980s. She helped establish the Committee for the Defense of Free Speech in 1984 and Belgrade Helsinki Watch in 1985. In 1989, she cofounded the Association for a Yugoslav Democratic Initiative (AJDI), which was dedicated to the democratic transformation of the former Yugoslavia. When the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army attacked Slovenia and Croatia after those republics’ declarations of independence in June 1991, Pesic established the Center for Anti-War Action, Serbia’s first peace organization. Politically, Pesic has always been supportive of the reformist option. In the 1990 parliamentary elections, she was a member of the Alliance of Reform Forces of Yugoslavia of then-Yugoslav premier Ante Markovic. After the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and AJDI’s subsequent dissolution, she became president of the short-lived Reform Party of Serbia. In June 1992, Pesic founded the GSS on a strong antiwar and prodemocratic platform. In the parliamentary elections the following year...