Egypt blinked. On Thursday, Egypt's interim military government, known as the SCAF, decided to end the crisis it had provoked, or perhaps stumbled into, by raiding the offices of four American organizations which promote democracy abroad, and arresting sixteen U.S. citizens. Rather than risk the loss of $1.3 billion a year in military funding, as the U.S. Congress had threatened, Egypt allowed the Americans to leave. But the breach in U.S.-Egyptian relations will not be healed so easily, nor will the fears for Egypt's democratic future be put to rest. And the whole affair has raised a collateral worry: Is it a fantasy to believe that outsiders can promote democracy in non-democratic states?
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Foreign groups have made a difference in the past. The National Democratic Institute (NDI), one of the organizations targeted in Egypt, first cut its teeth in Chile helping local NGOs defeat the dictator Augusto Pinochet in a 1986 referendum. Both quasi-governmental bodies like NDI, which receives federal funding, and private groups like George Soros's Open Society Institute, played an important role helping to organize democracy activists in the 2000 election that unseated Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and in the "color revolutions" in Ukraine in 2003 and Georgia in 2004.
But autocrats don't hold onto power by being stupid. Vladimir Putin in Russia and his brethren in Central Asia "were shaken by the color revolutions" as Larry Diamond, a leading democracy scholar at Stanford University, puts it. And they fought back. In 2006, the National Endowment of Democracy -- the parent body to NDI and to the International Republican Institute (IRI), also targeted in Egypt -- produced a report titled "The Backlash Against Democracy Assistance," which documented the growing efforts by autocratic states to block democracy assistance, including by expelling foreign organizations and harassing their staff. The color revolutions, Diamond points out, posed less of a threat to totalitarian regimes like those in Beijing or Havana than they did to the more numerous states, like Russia or Venezuela, which practiced "authoritarian pluralism," in which elections offered the illusion of democratic choice without threatening the regime's control. International groups could help local activists seize these empty rituals to threaten or unseat authoritarian rulers. And this was where the backlash was concentrated.
Groups like NDI and IRI strenuously defend their "nonpartisan" status, but they are not, of course, impartial when it comes to democracy vs. non-democracy. It's hard to fathom why a sensible autocrat would tolerate them. Autocrats used to do so because they didn't know any better. Eduard Shevardnadze, the strongman of Georgia a decade ago, never knew what hit him, says Lincoln Mitchell, a scholar who worked with NDI in Georgia at the time. "Now these people get it." Mitchell argues that leaders often feel that accepting these groups is the price they have to pay to earn U.S. foreign aid, and to ensure a warm White House reception. But he sees the standoff in Egypt as evidence that rulers who seek to cling to power are concluding that the game may not be worth the candle, and thus that what was possible ten or 15 years ago is not possible today.
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