Vol. 58
•
July 2006
•
No. 4
CO N T ENTS
Original Sin, Good Works, and Property
Rights in Russia
Timothy Frye 479
Did Government Decentralization Cause
China’s Economic Miracle?
Hongbin Cai and
Daniel Treisman 505
A Geographic Incremental Theory of
Democratization: Territory, Aid, and
Democracy in Postcommunist
Regions
Tomila V. Lankina and
Lullit Getachew 536
The Role of Leaders in Democratic
Deliberations: Results from a
Field Experiment in São Tomé
and Príncipe
Macartan Humphreys,
William A. Masters,
and Martin E. Sandbu 583
REVIEW ARTICLE
Inspiration, Coalition, and Substitution:
External Influences on Postcommunist
Transformations
Index to Volume 58
Wade Jacoby 623
652
The Contributors
ii
Abstracts
iii
Referees 2005
v
Review Article
INSPIRATION, COALITION, AND
SUBSTITUTION
External Influences on Postcommunist
Transformations
By WADE JACOBY*
Thomas Carothers. Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion. Washington,
D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004, 299 pp.
James Hughes, Gwendolyn Sasse, and Claire Gordon. Europeanization and Regionalization in the EU’s Enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe: The Myth
of Conditionality. London: Palgrave, 2004, 248 pp.
Judith Kelley. Ethnic Politics in Europe: The Power of Norms and Incentives. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, 264 pp.
Randall Stone. Lending Credibility: The International Monetary Fund and the Post
Communist Transition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, 304 pp.
Janine Wedel. Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern
Europe. Rev. ed. New York: St. Martin’s, 2001, 304 pp.
I. INTRODUCTION: OUTSIDERS AND INSIDERS
F
IFTEEN years after the collapse of communist regimes, the time
is ripe to reappraise the sources of institutional change in the postcommunist world. In particular, the books under review all consider
the role that outsiders from the United States or Western Europe have
played in encouraging postcommunist institutional change. The question has substantial relevance for political science theory and for policy
debates about marketization and democratization. Moreover, given the
sustained efforts of a variety of different kinds of outside actors, the
postcommunist region is the ideal location to develop and test better
explanations for external influences.
* Previous versions of this article have benefited from comments by Scott Cooper, Zachary Elkins,
Rachel Epstein, Darren Hawkins, Jon Pevehouse, Kendall Stiles, Milada Vachudova, Kurt Weyland,
and two anonymous reviewers and from seminars at Brigham Young University, the University of
Cagliari, Syracuse University, and Yale University.
World Politics 58 ( July 2006), 623–51
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Early in the postcommunist transformation, social scientists focused
almost exclusively on forces internal to the region, with the debate centering largely on which domestic factors mattered most. Regional specialists
often warned the broader discipline that the cross-regional democratic
transition literature’s interest in institutional design, the spread of best
practices, and external influence might be misused in studying postcommunism.1 More recently, however, there has been an explosion of interest
in the external influences on the various political and economic transformations of the broader region.2 This literature describes a range of Western actions to promote change, though much of it still leaves unexplained
how, if at all, the postcommunist states take up these Western policies.3
1
Most important here were a series of articles by Valerie Bunce. For a summary, see Bunce, “Rethinking Recent Democratization: Lessons from the Postcommunist Experience,” World Politics 55
( January 2003). For the same “domestic bias” in the broader democratization and political economy
literatures, see Beth Simmons, Frank Dobbin, and Geoffrey Garrett, “The International Diffusion of
Liberalism,” International Organization 60 (October 2006).
2
Other books that treat external influences on postcommunism and are not reviewed here include
Heather Grabbe, The EU’s Transformative Power: Europeanization through Conditionality in Central
and Eastern Europe (London: Palgrave, 2006); Elizabeth Pond, Endgame in the Balkans: Regime Change
European Style (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2006); Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier,
eds., The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005);
Benjamin Goldsmith, Imitation in International Relations: Observational Learning, Analogies and Foreign
Policy in Russia and Ukraine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Geoffrey Pridham, Designing Democracy: EU Enlargement and Regime Change in Post-Communist Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005); Milada Vachudova, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration after Communism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); John Pevehouse, Democracy from Above: Regional Organizations and Democratization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Cindy Skach, Borrowing
Constitutional Designs: Constitutional Law in Weimar Germany and the French Fifth Republic (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005); Wade Jacoby, The Enlargement of the European Union and NATO: Ordering from the Menu in Central Europe (New York: Cambridge, 2004); Renee DeNevers, Comrades
No More: The Seeds of Change in Eastern Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003); Grzegorz Ekiert and
Stephen Hanson, eds., Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2003); Sunil Bastian and Robin Luckham, eds., Can Democracy Be Designed? The
Politics of Institutional Choice in Conflict-torn Societies (London: Zed Books, 2003); Sarah Henderson,
Building Democracy in Contemporary Russia: Western Support for Grassroots Organizations (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 2003); Sarah Mendelson and John Glenn, eds., The Power and Limit of NGOs
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Richard Quandt, The Changing Landscape in Eastern
Europe: A Personal Perspective on Philanthropy and Technology Transfer (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002); Gerald McDermott, Embedded Politics: Industrial Networks and Institutional Change in Post
Communism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Ronald Linden, ed., Norms and Nannies: The Impact of International Organizations on the Central and East European States (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); Wade Jacoby, Imitation and Politics: Redesigning Modern Germany (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); Jan Zielonka and Alex Pravda, eds., Democratic Consolidation in
Eastern Europe: International and Transnational Factors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Sam
Vaknin, After the Rain: How the West Lost the East (Prague: Narcissus Books, 2000); Marina Ottaway
and Thomas Carothers, eds., Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion (Washington,
D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000); Karen Dawisha, ed., The International Dimension of Postcommunist Transitions in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe,
1997); Geoffrey Pridham, Eric Herring, and George Sanford, eds., Building Democracy? The International Dimension of Democratisation in Eastern Europe (London: Leicester University Press, 1997).
3
The term “postcommunist” remains useful for the issue of external influence, in part, due to the weakness
in most postcommunist societies of two “threatening” actors that play crucial roles in the general comparative
literature on external influences on democracy and market transitions: the bourgeoisie and the army.
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Understandably, some of this work was written too early to gauge whether
policies adopted by postcommunist governments were also being implemented.4 Moreover, initial research was busy just cataloging the various
modes of external influence and produced no clear consensus on a conceptual framework.5 In the past few years—in part thanks to the books
reviewed here—such a framework is emerging. This article consolidates
these analytical advances and characterizes three main functions of external actors, namely, to lengthen the time horizons of postcommunist
politicians, to expand the circle of interested reformers, and to deter opponents of reform.
Externally influenced reforms have occasionally been constitutional
(for example, electoral formulas or constitutional court designs), but much
more often they have prompted policy changes to promote either better
economic performance (for example, privatization programs, fiscal controls, or tax laws) or better democracies (for example, minority protection
laws, rule of law programs, or better civilian control of the military).
We now have the beginnings of a literature that can both explain
external influences on institutions and connect these influences to
broader debates in international relations and comparative politics. I
argue here that a focus on external influences is a growth area for good
conceptual work only if it addresses the union of foreign and domestic influences. My central point is that we should see outside actors
as striving to influence the choices of existing domestic actors with
whom they can be seen to form a kind of informal coalition. At bottom,
outsiders do best through a combination of strategies: strengthening
domestic actors already committed to their approach, winning new domestic actors to their priorities, and preventing the unconvinced from
obstructing reforms.
This “coalition approach” is by no means the only way outsiders can
influence insiders—it is occasionally possible for outside actors to build
their domestic constituency entirely from scratch or to coerce change in
a reforming state’s policy without ever convincing its leadership that the
change is a good idea. And insiders can sometime learn from outsiders
without any kind of formal or informal “coalition.” But I argue that the
4
On the gap between adoption and implementation, see Andrew Janos, “From Eastern Empire to
Western Hegemony: East Central Europe under Two International Regimes,” East European Politics
and Societies 15 (March 2001); on feigned compliance, see Wade Jacoby, “Priest and Penitent: The
European Union as a Force in the Domestic Politics of Eastern Europe,” East European Constitutional
Review (Winter–Spring 1999).
5
This essay uses “external” and “outsider” as synonyms to represent Western IOs and nation-states
whose practices or policies affect postcommunist choices about institutional design. Similarly, “internal,” “domestic,” and “insider” are synonyms for postcommunist actors whose choices are affected by
the policies or practices of the Western actors. “Institutions” are formal rules, laws, and state policies.
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coalition approach deserves analytical prominence precisely because
policymakers—who often reinvent it without talking about it—find
it most effective. I trace this approach through the books reviewed,
making explicit what is often implicit in the research and showing the
pitfalls as well as the promise of the approach.
By contrast, setting up external influences as a freestanding alternative explanation to domestic considerations is not promising, for two
reasons.6 First, empirically, these books show that external influences
can almost never have any real purchase unless they operate in tandem
with domestic influences. Second, conceptually, if we cast external influences as an exotic alternative form of policy change, we are likely to
produce ad hoc theories with no clear relationship to the broader literature.7 Instead, I compare the coalition approach with two alternatives
in which the external agent plays, respectively, more passive and more
active roles that obviate the need for informal outsider-insider coalitions. The article next develops all three modes in detail before reviewing empirically what worked and what did not. Fortuitously, the review
essay format allows us to aggregate the results of a series of excellent
medium-N studies, each of which contains a number of controlled
comparisons or detailed case studies with resolution high enough to
capture outsider-insider coalitions.
Though all the books under review take as a point of departure the
efforts of Westerners to influence state structures and policies during the
postcommunist transformations, I chose three books that focus on international organizations (IOs) and two that focus on bilateral programs. I
selected books on IO and nation-state actors with substantial power, resources, and prestige. This increases the chances that some postcommunist
reformers will see these outsiders as attractive partners; further research is
needed to check whether similar dynamics obtain with other actors.8
6
Conor O’Dwyer, “Reforming Regional Governance in East Central Europe: Europeanization or
Domestic Politics as Usual?” East European Politics and Societies 20 (May 2006). Jeffrey Henderson,
Károly Balaton, and György Lengyel, eds., Industrial Transformation in Eastern Europe in Light of the
East Asian Experience (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Beverly Crawford and Arend Lijphart,
“Explaining Political and Economic Change in Post-Communist Eastern Europe: Old Legacies, New
Institutions, Hegemonic Norms, and International Pressures,” Comparative Political Studies 28 ( July
1995); John Campbell, “Institutional Theory and the Influence of Foreign Actors on Reform in Capitalist and Post-Socialist Societies,” in Jerzy Hausner and Bob Jessop, eds., Institutional Frameworks of
Market Economies (Aldershot: Avebury, 1993).
7
For a criticism of this tendency in the “policy learning” and “policy transfer” literature, see Oliver
James and Martin Lodge, “The Limits of ‘Policy Transfer’ and ‘Lesson Drawing’ for Public Policy
Research,” Political Studies Review 1 (April 2003).
8
The review thus leaves out the effect of these same actors on postcommunist civil society or regime
type. On postcommunist civil society, cf. Ann Phillips, Power and Influence after the Cold War: Germany
in East Central Europe (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). On regime type, see Vachudova (fn. 2);
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The books are also chosen to cover a broad range of reforms. In Section
III Kelley’s book looks at democratic reforms, Stone’s looks at macroeconomic reforms, and Hughes, Sasse, and Gordon’s looks at microeconomic reforms. Section IV covers bilateral efforts. While both books
focus on USAID efforts to transform postcommunist states, Carothers
focuses more on democracy-building programs while Wedel focuses
much more on promoting economic reform. Section V summarizes the
conditions under which all three modes of external influence can work
and links these generalizations to findings from the non-postcommunist
world. Section VI concludes by reexamining the three central mechanisms of the coalition approach and sketching a research agenda. To
begin, Section II lays out three modes of external influence.
II. THREE MODES OF EXTERNAL INFLUENCE: INSPIRATION,
COALITION, SUBSTITUTION
In principal, external actors could both promote reforms they would
welcome in another country and/or help protect reforms that have
already occurred there. In practice, the postcommunist area has been
one in which “promotion” tasks have been, by far, the dominant preoccupation of outsiders since 1990. Even within this domain, there are
many ways in which the West could influence postcommunist transformations.9 From the broad range of factors identified in the literature,
I distill three modes of Western influence: inspiration, coalition, and
substitution. I treat these modes as procedural, that is, as independent
of the substantive goals external actors seek to achieve. I will introduce
them in order of the extent of intervention on the part of outsiders
that characterizes each approach, from least to most intervention. I pay
special attention to the character of linkages between the outsider ofMark Beissinger, “Structure and Example in Modular Political Phenomena: The Diffusion of Bulldozer/Rose/Orange/Tulip Revolutions” (Lecture at University of Toronto, February 16, 2005); David
Cameron, “The Quality of Democracy in Postcommunist Europe” (Paper presented at the annual
meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., September 1, 2005). It also
leaves out the effects of individuals; cf. Quandt (fn. 2). It leaves out the effects of international NGOs;
Henderson (fn. 2). And finally it leaves out the influence of Western businesses; cf. Dorothee Bohle
and Béla Greskovits, “Capital, Labor, and the Prospects of the European Social Model in the East,”
Central and Eastern Europe Working Paper, no. 58 (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2004).
9
For typologies, see Frank Bönker, “External Determinants of the Patterns and Outcomes of East
European Transitions,” Emergo 1, no. 1 (1994); Heather Grabbe, “How Does Europeanization Affect
CEE Governance? Conditionality, Diffusion, and Diversity,” Journal of European Public Policy 8, no.
6 (2001); Zielonka and Pravda (fn. 2); Judith Kelley, “International Actors on the Domestic Scene:
Membership Conditionality and Socialization by International Institutions,” International Organization 58 (Summer 2004), 20; Hughes, Sasse, and Gordon, Europeanization and Regionalization 4.
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ficials from IOs, Western states, or NGOs and the insider postcommunist
reformers (PCRs). Obviously, these modes are heuristic devices, so more
than one mode is often in play in any given case.
The first mode of external influence is “inspiration,” in which ideas
flow from outside to inside and concern either the end state of particular institutional or policy reforms or how to execute such reforms.
Inspiration is an age-old impetus for institutional change. According
to Plato, “It is always right for one who dwells in a well-ordered state
to go forth on a voyage of enquiry by land and sea so as to confirm
thereby such of his native laws as are rightly enacted and to amend any
that are deficient.”10 If the ideas come from outside, the agency lies
with PCRs.
When PCR insiders start a policy reform from scratch, inspiration is the mode they most often use. The extensive literature on
policy and institutional transfer and policy learning has elaborated
a number of useful concepts that underscore the possibility of a
kind of “conversion experience” among political elites that leads
them to emulate—though often with significant modifications—
institutions that exist elsewhere.11 This mode underscores that, in
some cases, external influences can come without much external
effort because while external actors may self-consciously attempt
to promote their own ideas to PCRs, they also may simply be passive
exemplars whom PCRs choose to emulate.12 Reform ideas could embody the potential for realizing more efficient strategies or specific
normative goals.
While outsiders may readily give advice or small inducements to help
insiders reform, the central idea behind the inspiration mode is that
PCRs will be “doing well by doing good”—that democratic or economic
gains will accrue to those who devise policy improvements inspired by
examples that already work somewhere else. As I show below, a large
“diffusion” literature has developed around these premises, especially
the premise that the motive for institutional change has its roots pri10
Quoted in Richard Rose, Learning from Comparative Public Policy: A Practical Guide (London:
Routledge, 2005), 1.
11
David Dolowitz and David March, “Learning from Abroad: The Role of Policy Transfer in Contemporary Policy-Making,” Governance 13 ( January 2000); Jacoby (fn. 2, 2001); Peter Hall, ed., The
Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1989).
12
Cf. Vachudova (fn. 2) on “passive leverage”; Peter Haas, ed., Knowledge, Power, and International
Policy Coordination (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997); Rose (fn. 10); On “unchanneled Bayesian updating,” see Beth Simmons and Zachary Elkins, “The Globalization of Liberalization: Policy Diffusion in the International Political Economy,” American Political Science Review 98
(February 2004); Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett (fn. 1).
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marily in the reforming country.13
As already noted, the second mode—and the one that animates this
article—is the “coalition approach.” This approach is more interventionist and, from the perspective of outsiders, is usually meant to more
actively “help reformers help themselves.” In the coalition approach,
outside actors strive to influence the choices of existing domestic actors
with whom they have a much deeper engagement, indeed with whom
they can be seen to form a kind of informal coalition. The prerequisite, then, is some domestic faction with whom the outsiders can work.
Here, starting from scratch is usually deemed too slow.
In order to persuade or induce PCRs to undertake the reforms outsiders favor, outsiders must often seek to bolster minority traditions that
already exist rather than relying exclusively on the conversion experience noted above. Minority traditions are domestic movements, parties, or subsets of state officials who have pursued, but never achieved,
a particular institutional solution to an important political problem.14
All societies—not just postcommunist ones—have minority traditions.
For example, U.S. advocates of a single-payer health care system and
advocates of a fully privatized social security system both remain, as of
this writing, minority traditions in the United States. Outsiders may be
able to provide material or intellectual resources that allow such minorities to finally get their way. As will be clear, it matters greatly whether
such minority traditions already occupy powerful positions inside the
state, such as within the Finance Ministry, or are buried deep in civil
society.
The coalition approach thus emphasizes how outsiders could help
insider minorities gain influence.15 Beyond mere subsidies, outsiders
have other tools to strengthen like-minded reformers and thus increase
the chance that the reforms will endure. In particular, the coalition approach emphasizes that outsiders may lengthen PCRs’ time horizons
such that they are willing to trade off short-term benefits against longer-term benefits that may flow from better policies. Outsiders can
also broaden the circle of interested reformers and even help them deter their domestic opponents. All three mechanisms can help prevent
13
Kurt G. Weyland, “Theories of Policy Diffusion: Lessons from Latin American Pension Reform,” World Politics 57 ( January 2005).
14
I prefer the term minority “tradition” to “faction” because the former better connotes the historical domestic antecedents that are sometimes critical to the success of foreign-inspired reforms. Obviously, “minority” does not refer here to ethnic minorities.
15
Thomas Risse, Stephen Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Jacoby (fn. 2,
2001); Vachudova (fn. 2).
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backsliding that might otherwise occur after PCRs receive inducements
to modify their institutions or policies.16 These inducements often include gifts with no strings attached, but outsiders can also make their
inducements conditional on what they deem desirable insider behavior.
Such conditionality can help minority traditions favored by outsiders
gain the upper hand over domestic opponents.
A third mode, “substitution,” occurs when external actors attempt
to promote and execute specific reforms on their own. As a result, this
mode largely eschews linkages with minority traditions if such exist,
and outsiders using this mode spend relatively little effort trying to get
the dominant insiders to rethink their institutional preferences. This
may be because no plausible minority traditions exist or because insider
elites are clearly opposed to outsider preferences, but it may also be
because outsiders simply are too uninformed to identify potential allies
or too impatient to work through them.
Substitution occurs when outsiders intervene directly, without active insider support, to push a reform outsiders favor. The archetypal
form of substitution is military occupation, deployed in both Bosnia
and Kosovo in the postcommunist period.17 The former case is perhaps more telling because Bosnia-Herzegovina has been an internationally recognized state since the Dayton Accords in 1995, and it
has highly differentiated domestic institutions and a complex set of
domestic actors. Nevertheless, Bosnia essentially has been ruled as
a protectorate by the Office of High Representative (OHR) and protected by the NATO Stabilization Force (SFOR) (until the end of 2004)
and, since then, by the European Union Force (EUFOR). Not only have
these outsiders been responsible for foreign policy but they have also
had extensive involvement in setting domestic policy. This “European raj” instituted so many top-down reforms that at one point it
was decreeing an average of three laws per week.18 The OHR also has
removed dozens of elected politicians that struck them as either unreconstructed nationalists (mostly Serbian) or corrupt (a cross-ethnic
phenomenon).
16
Andrew Moravcsik, “The Origins of Human Rights Regimes: Democratic Delegation in Postwar Europe,” International Organization 54 (Spring 2000); Stone, Lending Credibility.
17
Sumantra Bose, Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia,
Kosovo, and Afghanistan (London: Vintage Books, 2003); Laurie Effron and F. Stephen O’Brien, Bosnia and Herzegovina: Post-Conflict Reconstruction and the Transition to a Market Economy (Washington,
D.C.: World Bank Publications, 2004); Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); Pond (fn. 2).
18
Pond (fn. 2), 154–56; Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, “Lessons from Bosnia: Travails of the
European Raj,” Journal of Democracy 14 ( July 2003).
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Imposed sanctions also fit the category of substitution. Unlike threatened sanctions, imposed sanctions actively seek to substitute the will
of outsiders for that of the country’s ruling officials. And unlike the
membership conditionality used so often in the coalition approach as
an incentive for improved future behavior (see below), imposed sanctions
usually seek to take away trade or other benefits already enjoyed by the
target state.19 Finally, outsiders can deploy the substitution mode by going around PCRs rather than through them, as shown by examples from
Ukrainian fiscal policy and Russian privatization policy given below.
This article focuses on the coalition mode both because it has been
central to postcommunist reforms and because it is perhaps hardest
to see with the naked eye. The coalition mode is implicit in a large
number of studies that, unfortunately, are not self-conscious about it.20
Making these linkages explicit is not easy. To see why, we turn to a
well-developed literature on inspiration, because it shows that even a
mature literature confronts scholars with characteristic pitfalls in accounting simultaneously for external and internal dimensions without
setting them up as “alternative explanations.”
The diffusion literature is the strongest current literature that nominally includes both external and internal variables, and it is ideally suited
to tracking the inspiration mode of external influence. In diffusion processes, the “prior adoption of a trait or practice in a population alters the
probability of adoption for remaining non-adopters.”21 The diffusion
approach is very good at what it does: demonstrate that the institutional
choices of political units often affect the choices of their neighbors and
peers. An excellent recent example is Simmons and Elkins, which tracks
the spread of liberal economic policies over the past thirty years. The
authors note that their aim is to model the “major policy shifts” of a
“wide range of countries around the world.”22 To do so, they use binary
measures of dependent variables in the areas of current account, capital
controls, and exchange rate mechanisms. To have this broad coverage,
however, the approach generally flies at far too high an altitude to help
us see clearly how external influences work on the ground.
19
Jon Hovi, Robert Huseby, and Detlef F. Sprinz, “When Do (Imposed) Economic Sanctions
Work?” World Politics 57 ( July 2005); Kelley (fn. 9), 9–10.
20
For exceptions, see Vachudova (fn. 2); Rachel Epstein, “Diverging Effects of Social Learning and
External Incentives in Polish Central Banking and Agriculture,” in Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich
Sedelmeier, eds., The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 2005), 178–98.
21
David Strang, “Adding Social Structure to Diffusion Models: An Event History Framework,”
Sociological Methods and Research 19 (February 1991).
22
Simmons and Elkins (fn. 12), 176.
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None of the books reviewed here even considers the diffusion mechanisms as suitable explanations for its findings. Though Simmons and
Elkins take significant steps beyond most diffusion literature in showing causal pathways—emphasizing in particular the way that policy
diffusion alters payoffs for nonadopters—they end with a call for research that helps us see “how and why this takes place.”23 Similarly,
recent sociological literature on diffusion affirms the importance of
external influences but bemoans its inability to go beyond “relatively
coarse indicators of the micro-level influences at work” and calls for
“complementary” research that does so.24
In general, most diffusion studies are better at rejecting the null hypothesis—that the sources of institutional change are indigenous to
each location—than they are at actually explaining how that change
occurs.25 In particular, the diffusion approach takes much of its power
from two assumptions: that institutions remain much the same as they
spread from place to place and that the key dependent variable is the
elite decision to adopt (or not) a particular innovation. The first assumption winnows out diversity and adaptation; the second winnows out
politics. These assumptions make possible comparisons across large-N
data sets, and they contribute so much of the diffusion approach’s explanatory power that it makes little sense to adapt it. Rather, we need
to develop related literatures on the coalition and substitution modes as
necessary complements to the diffusion approach.
For reasons of space and the fact of the central importance of the
coalition mode in postcommunism, much of the rest of this article is
devoted to developing that approach. Stone’s book is exemplary of the
potential of the coalition approach to show the external activation and
promotion of minority traditions located inside postcommunist states.
But the next two books show that the temptation to turn to either/or
approaches remains substantial. Kelley’s book strongly emphasizes external effects, while the book by Hughes, Sasse, and Gordon takes the
opposite course and stresses domestic causes. I argue that both books,
23
Ibid., 187. A similarly subtle account focused on postcommunist areas and calling explicitly for the
kind of complementary approach offered here is Jeffrey S. Kopstein and David A. Reilly, “Geographic
Diffusion and the Transformation of the Postcommunist World,” World Politics 53 (October 2000).
24
Witold Henisz, Mauro Guillen, and Bennet Zelner, “The Worldwide Diffusion of Market-Oriented Infrastructure Reform, 1977–1999,” American Sociological Review 70 (December 2005), 893.
25
Weyland (fn. 13) quickly dismisses external pressures and subsumes most diffusion processes
under “domestic initiative” before sorting out whether the domestic motives are best explained as the
result of a quest for legitimacy, rational learning, or cognitive heuristics (pp. 268–73). In this approach
to diffusion, external influences do sometimes reemerge, especially when domestic actors ask IOs to
“please impose this condition on us” (p. 273). But, as with the other diffusion approaches reviewed
here, the key impetus for institutional change lies with domestic actors.
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for all their merits, also tend to obscure important insights when they
either oversell (Kelley) or undersell (Hughes, Sasse, and Gordon) external influences. Crucially, my argument that the coalition approach is
an important analytical step is not a normative argument that external
actors who seek such coalitions will always succeed. Thus, in Section
IV, I show how the book by Carothers traces the pitfalls of weak minority traditions and how the last book, by Wedel, provides a warning
about minority traditions that are too strong.
III. VEHICLES AND VETOES: HOW IO INFLUENCES ARE
PROCESSED DOMESTICALLY
The central issue in this article is the extent to which reform projects
promoted by outsiders can win the support of domestic interest groups
or clusters of state actors. This theme is not formulated explicitly in all
of the books under review, but it is always at least an implicit concern.
Broadly, two perspectives stand out. First, domestic interests could be
vehicles for the promotion of externally induced changes. When this
amounts to clarification of ideas and norms or gentle nudging to adopt
them, one can plausibly speak of inspiration, though often a more interventionist coalition approach is necessary to spur change. Second
and much to the contrary, domestic interests can play the role of veto
players that block (or at least hinder) the transformation goals of external actors. In some cases, external actors attempt to circumvent such
vetoes by the substitution mode, either by imposing sanctions meant to
raise the cost to governments that defy them or by making and implementing policies over the heads of domestic actors inside international
protectorates like Bosnia and Kosovo.26
Stone’s book is a good place to begin since it takes what I am calling
the coalition approach to be central, though the inspiration and substitution modes make brief cameo appearances. Stone sees inflation control
as the key task for PCRs, who often have short-term incentives to stimulate the economy or subsidize sectors even if this damages the country’s
long-term fiscal health. According to Stone, the fear of inflation and
26
In fact, however, imposed sanctions have been rare in postcommunism. Between 1990 and 2000,
Western powers levied sanctions against postcommunist countries only four times: the UN against
Yugoslavia (1991–2001) to end Serb involvement in civil wars in Bosnia and Croatia, the U.S. against
the USSR (1991) to restore Gorbachev to power, Greece against Macedonia (1994–95) to force a
name change, the U.S. and the EU against Yugoslavia/Serbia (1998–2001) to destabilize Milosevic
and stop aggression in Kosovo; Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, Case Studies
in Sanctions and Terrorism, http://www.iie.com/research/topics/sanctions/sanctions-timeline.cfm (accessed January 10, 2006).
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currency collapse can sometimes sustain PCRs’ focus on macroeconomic
reforms. But if those feedback mechanisms don’t work properly in a
given country, the IMF sometimes can serve as a support (coalition) or
even a proxy for (substitution) indigenous mechanisms (p. 165). He
locates the key in IMF credibility. Credible IOs can find and support
domestic vehicles while noncredible IOs often face insurmountable vetoes. Stone shows that the IMF was able to act credibly against Poland
and Bulgaria but not against Russia and Ukraine, on whose behalf the
Clinton administration pushed the IMF to soften its conditions.
In Poland and Bulgaria a credible IMF could then “lend credibility”
by functioning as the glue for fractious and weak governments. Here,
informal coalitions were far more crucial than inspiration.27 Polish reformers largely knew what they wanted to do, but they often needed
external help in doing it. Stone shows how the “IMF bolstered the position of the [Polish] reformers” and helped them stay the reform course
in the face of substantial domestic opposition (p. 115).28 The primary
mechanisms were the carrot of positive IMF signals to capital markets—
which would be jeopardized by a policy reversal—and the constant
stick of threatened IMF suspension of programs.29
In Russia, however, the IMF largely failed. Stone focuses on Russia’s
ruinous six-year bout of fiscal irresponsibility under successive Yeltsin governments. The ruble collapsed in 1998, and Russian purchasing
power dropped by 46 percent between 1998 and 2000 (p. 116). During
this lost decade, the country also exported over $150 billion worth of
badly needed capital. Calling the IMF advice to Russia “sound,” Stone
lays the blame for profligate spending at the doorstep of Russian politicians. The IMF constantly faced Russian backsliding on prior commitments and struggled within constraints of U.S. policy to credibly insist
that Russia meet its commitments. The Clinton administration supported Yeltsin by pushing the IMF to back off on its demands. Thus, in
a period when more than inspiration was needed, U.S. policies blunted
IMF efforts to enforce agreements.
27
Béla Greskovits, The Political Economy of Protest and Patience: East European and Latin American
Transformations Compared (Budapest: Central European University, 1998); Johana Bockman and Gil
Eyal, “Eastern Knowledge as a Laboratory for Economic Knowledge: The Transnational Roots of
Neoliberalism,” American Journal of Sociology 108 (September 2002); Hilary Appel, A New Capitalist
Order: Privatization and Ideology in Russia and Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg
Press, 2004).
28
See also Epstein (fn. 20); Juliet Johnson shows that postcommunist central bankers often used
alliances with transnational actors to contest economic reforms against domestic rivals; Johnson, “TwoTrack Diffusion and Central Bank Embeddedness: The Politics of Euro Adoption in Hungary and the
Czech Republic” (Manuscript, Department of Political Science, McGill University, 2005).
29
These threats were not hollow. The IMF suspended programs in both 1990 and 1991.
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The U.S. played a similar role in Ukraine, Stone’s disaster case. As in
Russia, external subsidies were easily swallowed up without making any
long-term difference. The IMF explicitly tried to strengthen the hand of
what, for it, was the most promising segment of the Ukrainian state,
the Ministry of Finance (MoF). For years, the MoF struggled in vain
to develop checks against the runaway spending of other ministries
(pp. 196–99). But the MoF generally failed, so Stone portrays the IMF
as the only consistent voice of reason in Ukrainian politics. And when
the IMF’s efforts at promoting a reform coalition with the MoF failed to
effect any fundamental change in government policy, the IMF had few
tools left. But if the coalition approach failed for lack of allies, the substitution mode failed for lack of leverage. Like Russia, Ukraine was too
important to be allowed to fail, and its corrupt politicians still received
external support (pp. 206–8).
The external-internal partnerships help explain the variance just observed. Sometimes, the IMF was an (ineffective) substitute for an internal reform coalition (Ukraine), but usually it had to act in concert—to
tip the balance—with internal forces with which it was in close contact
(in Poland and Bulgaria, successfully; in Russia, unsuccessfully). Where
the coalition approach worked, it did so mainly because the Fund was
able to engage a minority tradition and stretch these politicians’ time
horizons, making them more aware of and responsive to their own medium-term benefits from anti-inflationary policies, rather than exclusively the short-term pull of electoral constituencies (p. 234).30
But where does IO credibility come from? Unfortunately, Stone
does not systematically consider the causal importance of the fact that
his two success cases—Poland and Bulgaria—were also candidates
for EU membership.31 As Vachudova (2005) has shown, the carrot
of EU membership often meant that the EU could itself lend credibility to the demands of other IOs, and indeed Bulgaria’s compliance,
as Stone does note, increases considerably after the 1997 election of a
pro-EU coalition. The EU had a large effect on its prospective members because it both offered a lot and asked a lot while other IOs (and
individual states) both had less to offer and asked for less in return.
Vachudova also shows that the EU’s leverage amplified the influence
of other transnational actors in two important ways: First, it formally
30
Stone tends to ignore other areas where IMF policy advice was arguably less appropriate to postcommunist settings. See Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton
and Company, 2003), chap. 5; Daniel Treisman, After the Deluge: Regional Crises and Political Consolidation in Russia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).
31
Stone mentions the EU in passing on page 113 (for Poland) and on page 228 (for Bulgaria).
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outsourced compliance with standards on democracy and the protection of minority rights to other actors. Second, the powerful incentives
to move forward in the EU’s preaccession process increased the interest of politicians, bureaucrats, and political parties in learning from an
array of external actors about the content of an EU-compatible political and economic agenda.32
This is where Kelley’s work comes in. Where Stone focuses on economic reform, Kelley’s book on ethnic politics in Europe looks at the
democratic side of the transformation. Her key concern is civil protection of ethnic minority rights. Like Stone, Kelley identifies IOs with the
task of confronting politicians whose short-term incentives may lead to
populist policies that damage the country in the longer run. She looks
at the universe of legislation on ethnic minorities from 1990 to 1999
in Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, and Romania (sixty-four cases in total).
Various IOs became involved in forty-four of these cases and secured
outcomes partly or fully compatible with their demands in just over half
of these cases (twenty-three total) compared with only four partly or
fully compatible outcomes in the twenty remaining cases in which the
IOs did not get involved.
Where outsiders lengthen insiders’ time horizons in Stone’s account, they essentially broaden the circle of insiders in Kelley’s account.
Rather than stiffen the resolve of their minority tradition allies, Kelley’s
outsiders confront (and often overcome) domestic veto players. To do
so, they need strong medicine, for in her telling they have few domestic
allies. Unlike the IMF, however, the EU, in particular, could wield membership conditionality as a key tool, and it faced far fewer credibility
problems in doing so. Kelley shows that the Council of Europe (CE)
and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)
both used fairly light membership criteria, but the EU was much more
demanding and effective. Thus, even though the EU had remarkably
thin precedents for intervening in minority rights issues, its high credibility allowed it to be effective (indeed, it borrowed substantive suggestions from the CE and OSCE).33 When an IO could credibly threaten a
holdup in membership, it could make its concerns in an isolated policy
area the “problem” of a much wider circle of insiders. In the area of
Vachudova (fn. 2). See also Grabbe (fn. 2); Pridham (fn. 2); Jacoby (fn. 2, 2004).
See also Guido Schwellnuss, “The Adoption of Non-Discrimination and Minority Protection
Rules in Romania, Hungary, and Poland,” in Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier, eds., The
Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 51–70; Mitchell A. Orenstein and Umut Ozkaleli, “European Union as a Network Actor in Roma Minority Policy”
(Manuscript, Syracuse University, 2005).
32
33
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637
ethnic minority policy, then, the IO challenge was less to find vehicles
than to overcome vetoes.
Like Stone, Kelley posits variance in resistance to material and/or
normative pressure from IOs. To illustrate, domestic opposition to minority protection rules favored by the IOs can be high or low. The IOs
can use normative pressure alone or normative pressure plus conditionality. Where normative pressure alone meets high domestic opposition,
Kelley predicts no policy change. Where normative pressure meets low
opposition, Kelley expects that longer durations of pressure increase the
probability of IO success. Where IO conditionality meets low domestic
opposition, the theory predicts that change will occur. Finally, where
conditionality meets high domestic opposition, the theory is indeterminate.34 The model suggests that Central and Eastern European (CEE)
states prefer admittance to IOs without paying the costs of compliance
but that they prefer admission with the costs to no admission at all (pp.
42–44). Thus, while diplomatic missions from the CE or OSCE could
occasionally clarify European norms such that inspiration occurred, in
most cases the key insiders opposed these practices. This surely complicated the coalition mode.35
But it did not make the coalition mode unworkable. Recalcitrant
governments still often came to believe that the benefits of compliance
exceeded those of further resistance. Thus, in Latvia, nationalist forces
sustained discriminatory practices much less in policy areas where the
IOs used membership conditionality (for example, citizenship laws)
than in areas where the IOs used normative pressure alone (for example,
education laws) or no conditionality at all (for example, electoral laws).
In Estonia, the EU membership incentives were similarly effective,
particularly on the issues of citizenship laws and laws regarding stateless children. In Slovakia, even against determined nationalist leadership under Meciar, the EU was able to prevail in two of the five key
cases (the treaty with Hungary and a draconian penal code), though
it failed in the other three (laws on elections, school certificates, and
minority languages).
Like Stone, Kelley provides ample implicit evidence that the coalition approach is a difficult but potentially fruitful route for external
See also Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier (fn. 2).
Given the statutory nature of the required changes and the ineffectiveness here of the inspiration
mode (only four case of voluntary success), the IOs were dependent upon a coalition approach. For
membership IOs, in the premembership period, IOs could inspire insiders or work with them but not
go around them. Postmembership, the EU, OSCE, and CE all have recourse to the substitution mode by
suspending a state’s membership.
34
35
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assistance. Unlike Stone, she is oddly reluctant to see domestic elites
as vehicles for these reforms. The central image one draws from her
book is of PCRs gritting their teeth and doing what the IOs demand.
That image is both plausible and important. But her own data sometimes tell another story as well. For example, Kelley notes that cases
in which ethnic minorities were part of the governing coalition had
outcomes “compatible” with IO demands 75 percent of the time as compared with only 21 percent with no minority representation.36 Kelley
does not count these as cases of external influence, and while she thus
avoids biasing her research in favor of IO influence (when part of the
causal mechanism lies in the orientation and strength of domestic actors), she may actually overstress IO power as the mechanism of change
(cf. pp. 37–38, 182–85). In turn, this move might reinforce an expectation that our standard for demonstrating external influence is that
there be no antecedent minority tradition. The methodological gains of
avoiding any “mixing” of domestic and international causes may have
the high cost of narrowing our scope to only those policy areas where
no domestic agents are needed to implement what has been decided.
This narrowed scope, combined with the overemphasis on power, may
lead us both to undercount external influence and to misperceive how
it works.
None of this undercuts Kelley’s findings, but it does imply that longer time horizons may lead scholars to see how specific countries and
even specific political movements can, over time, shift from being veto
players to becoming neutral or even vehicles for external actors.37 Here,
Kelley’s work is extremely helpful because it shows that the EU increased the size of the domestic policy community by making adequate
progress in a given policy the business of a wider range of insiders. In this
way, elites in one area may bring pressure to bear on their compatriots
in order to avoid a general membership holdup. Such pressure raises
the costs of continued recalcitrance.
Hughes, Sasse, and Gordon take a more skeptical view of external
actors, including the EU. They argue that domestic actors have driven
institutional change without much need for IO assistance. In this, they
reflect the postcommunist transition literature before the “external
turn” of recent years that is the focus of this article. Focusing on region36
Moreover, IOs would not necessarily need an ethnic partner as a minority tradition, but only a
liberal one, so it is quite conceivable that an implicit coalition existed in other cases as well.
37
On this point, see exemplary work by Schwellnuss (fn. 33); Frank Schimmelfennig, Stefan
Engert, and Heiko Knobel, International Socialization in Europe: European Organizations, Political
Conditionality and Democratic Change (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Vachudova (fn. 2).
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alization in Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, and Estonia, the authors attend
both to politics (the administrative structure of the state) and to microeconomics (regional development in poor areas). Their central claim
is that “domestic institutional choices made during the early transition period outweigh and actually constrain the importance of external
factors during enlargement” (p. 8). The authors present this finding as
a corrective to the “myth” of Europeanization, an idea that holds that
European IOs are driving reform in CEE. Thus, while these CEE states
drew inspiration from a range of existing Western national models (cf.
pp. 118–23), the EU’s specific contribution was limited because its
ideas were diffuse, inconsistent, and poorly anchored in the EU’s own
legal corpus. They argue further that EU subsidies that might have
been thought to support its ideas or activate a latent outsider-insider
coalition actually came well after crucial domestic choices had already
set the main contours of regional reforms. In short, much of the book
denies that external influences mattered at all, but where they did matter, they did so through inspiration.
The authors show how the EU’s “nebulous and oscillating” annual
reports on the CEE states could be wildly inconsistent, and they demonstrate that little knowledge filtered down to regional elites the authors
surveyed. Yet the authors’ broader dismissal of external influences is
hard to square not only with many of the works in footnote 2 but also
with some of their own evidence. If Kelley relies too exclusively on
external factors as causal mechanisms, Hughes, Sasse, and Gordon go
to the opposite extreme. In particular, three of the authors’ rhetorical
strategies overstate the either/or nature of external and domestic politics, a strategy common in the postcommunism literature.38 First, they
argue that EU policy inconsistency exposes the “myth” that IOs are driving policy reforms in CEE (pp. 3, 19, 25–29). Yet the EU’s policy zigzags
hardly falsify conditionality arguments. Kelley, for example, notes many
instances where the EU changed its policies, yet does not find that this
undercut its ability to affect CEE policies. Powerful external actors can
often recover from mistakes and inconsistencies.
Second, the authors often imply that if domestic politics are demonstrably important—and they are—this too undermines the Europeanization hypothesis. But why should external influences count only where
domestic politics does not? Indeed, this article argues that the opposite is
more plausible: external influences matter precisely where they best con38
In different ways, the external-internal dichotomy is also exaggerated in O’Dwyer (fn. 6); Henderson, Balaton, and Lengyel (fn. 6); Crawford and Lijphart (fn. 6); Campbell (fn. 6).
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nect with domestic processes, not where they act independently.39 Third,
they imply that Europeanization predicts convergence, so that evidence of
cross-national diversity in CEE equals disconfirmation (pp. 140, 168–69).
Yet the best recent work on Europeanization in CEE explicitly disavows
the claim that the process must lead to identical outcomes.40
In short, all three rhetorical frames that Hughes, Sasse, and Gordon
deploy here—dynamism, domestic politics, and divergence—stretch the
external-internal dichotomy beyond reason. If we expect external influence to consist only of clear external commands, clear domestic responses
unanticipated by domestic precursors, and convergent cross-national
outcomes (pp. 2–3), we will always conclude that external influences
do not exist. Here, the diffusion literature makes a major contribution
by showing so clearly that policies and practices often do spread. And
indeed other accounts of this same set of policy shifts do emphasize outsider-insider coalitions that often depended on a change of government
to activate (for example, the Czech Republic case, where Václav Klaus’s
departure as prime minister opened the door for substantial progress).41
In sum, not only must IOs be credible in their demands but they must
also be both capable of and inclined to support the minority traditions
that represent their potential partners in reform. These minority traditions, in turn, are most effective when they already form part of a
government or can accede to power, in some cases at least in part because they convince voters that they have the sympathy of powerful IOs.
Stone’s research exemplifies a variant in which IOs act to lengthen the
time horizons of politicians, while Kelley’s research shows how certain
IOs have broadened the circle of interested politicians by making what
might be a policy backwater into an area of central concern.
IV. MONOPOLIES AND MISSIONS: BILATERAL EXTERNAL INFLUENCE
Whereas Hughes, Sasse, and Gordon cast external influence as unnecessary, Wedel casts it as perverse. She argues that since bilateral aid
programs in CEE and the Former Soviet Union failed to consider cultural and historical factors, they re-created communist patterns without
39
See also Thomas Carothers and Marina Ottaway, eds., Uncharted Journey: Promoting Democracy
in the Middle East (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), 15; Ann
Phillips, Power and Influence after the Cold War: Germany in East Central Europe (Lanham: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2000), 180.
40
See the essays in Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier (fn. 2).
41
Dan Marek and Michael Baun, “The EU as a Regional Actor: The Case of the Czech Republic,”
Journal of Common Market Studies 40 (December 2002); John Glenn, “From Nation-States to Member
States: Accession Negotiations as an Instrument of Europeanization,” Comparative European Politics
2 (April 2004).
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meaning to.42 USAID comes in for particular criticism as it avoided governments and generally implemented what Wedel characterizes as an
inappropriate Third World aid model (p. 38). By this, she means it presumed the need for a lot of direct delivery of services that would substitute for indigenous reform capacity that was assumed to be lacking. She
notes, for example, that USAID conceived of and paid for public relations
efforts on behalf of privatization plans to which the Russian parliament
was strongly opposed (and which fed an anti-Western backlash).
But the coalition approach caused even more problems than did substitution.43 In Russia, Wedel highlights the relationship between USAID,
the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID), and what
she calls the “Chubais Clan,” after its leader Anatoly Chubais. USAID in
Russia worked through a monopoly with close ties to President Yeltsin. When USAID “delegated” its job to HIID, the outsider-insider divide
blurred, and HIID/Chubais became one large group with uncertain internal divisions. Wedel claims that this outsider-insider “clique” inspired
economic reforms that damaged the Russian economy and democracy.
Where Stone argues that IMF decisions became a proxy for the judgments of much larger (anonymous) private capital markets, Wedel aims
her critique at specific Russian and U.S. actors. This sometimes leads
her to neglect the broader economic reform context in her effort to
document the misdeeds of the central U.S.-Russian clique (or to strain
credulity by including Putin as a member of the “clan”). Wedel also
overplays the length of Russia’s shock therapy period and the IMF’s role
in promoting it, and she argues unconvincingly that shock therapy actually caused hyperinflation (p. 128).44 Still, the book successfully captures an enduring dilemma of the coalition approach. Wedel quotes one
practitioner as saying “by coming in with our own set of rules, we’re
in essence elevating the set of people that have skills appropriate to
those goals, even if those aren’t the right goals” (p. 120). This finding
resonates strongly elsewhere in the literature on external assistance to
Russia.45 Where the coalition approach can lengthen insiders’ time ho42
On Leninist legacies, see Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992); Ekiert and Hanson (fn. 2); Bunce (fn. 1); Anna Khakee, “Democracy and Marketization in Central and Eastern Europe: Case Closed?” East European Politics and
Society 16 (May 2002); Crawford and Lijphart (fn. 6).
43
Wedel downplays inspiration, saying the operative principle generally was that “the donors pretend to help us, and we pretend to be helped” (p. 79).
44
For evidence that shock therapy was not the cause of Russia’s hyperinflation, see M. Steven Fish,
Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2005), 139–92.
45
Henderson (fn. 2); Valerie Sperling, Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
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rizons (Stone) or broaden the circle of reformers (Kelley), Wedel shows
that outsider-insider coalitions can sometimes both narrow the circle of
reformers and shrink their perspectives.
Wedel argues that the major USAID fallacy lay “in thinking that lasting institutions can be built by supporting particular people, instead
of helping facilitate processes and the rule of law” (p. 171). Carothers
shows just how difficult promoting the rule of law has proven to be.
Noting that donors are spending up to $2 billion per year worldwide on
democracy-promotion programs—roughly half from public and private
sources in North America and the other half mostly publicly funded
from Europe—Carothers finds that the results have been modest.46 As
a corrective against overstated claims and fads in democracy promotion, Carothers pleads for modesty and sustainability. The “mission,” he
says, is critical, but the missionaries have been flawed.
In particular, Carothers emphasizes a Western attachment to “checklists” that inform many democracy-promotion programs. By this, he
means that outsiders often fetishize particular institutional forms, so
that reforming the rule of law by focusing mostly on rewriting formal
legal codes has often remained too superficial. For Carothers, a major
problem is that such checklists embody an “overattachment to forms
and underattachment to principles” (p. 154). He argues that real reform
demands, instead, “powerful tools that aid providers are only beginning
to develop, especially activities that help bring pressure on the legal system from the citizenry and support whatever pockets of reform may exist” (p. 129). Thus, his book shows us that this form of inspiration tends
to produce reforms that are superficial and poorly thought through.47
Of course, the coalition approach requires that outsiders identify, reach,
and assist “pockets of reform” or minority traditions. Carothers is at his
best in showing why the coalition approach to external change so seldom
occurs: it is demanding for both insiders and outsiders. But it can make a
difference. His chapter on ousting Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic emphasizes the strengthening of minority traditions that lies at the
heart of the coalition approach. As he notes, the core Western objective
was to “defeat Milosevic in credible national elections and simultaneously
build core institutions and processes for a long-term process of democratization” (p. 54). Doing this clearly required inside partners. Carothers
notes that the Western democracy-promotion programs in Serbia had
46
The book was published prior to efforts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. On the Middle East,
see Carothers and Ottaway (fn. 39).
47
Those diffusion studies that use laws on paper as proxies for real reform also are vulnerable to
this form of superficiality.
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several advantages: both the U.S. and EU programs were large and sustained. They were also decentralized, sending aid directly to Serbian civil
society. Finally, aid reinforced diplomatic and military efforts and was well
coordinated between U.S. and European donors (pp. 57–59). Carothers
concludes, however, that specific Serbian traditions of rule of law, civil
society, and pluralism will make this pattern hard to replicate elsewhere.
As he put it: “What U.S. democracy promoters have been holding out
as key accomplishments of their work generally entailed strengthening
features of Yugoslav political life that already existed” (p. 56).
The current state of Serbian democracy is a further caution against
promising too much for externally driven reforms. After Serbia’s failure to hand over the indicted war criminal General Ratko Mladic, the
EU suspended membership negotiations. Still, external initial support
for democratic breakthroughs demands less than support for the long,
slow job of institution and polity building. Thus, Beissinger argues that
U.S.-supported NGOs were similarly active in successful protests against
governments in Georgia in November 2003, Ukraine in November
2004, and Krygystan in March 2005.48
The coalition approach is an alternative to Western actors who stand
as relatively passive examples of institutional and policy reform or, to the
contrary, intervene deeply without working through domestic partners.
The former is common in federal systems where units watch one another’s performance closely, while the latter is familiar from the developing
world, where aid projects often presume that domestic actors are too
weak or corrupt to make good partners. This section on bilateral programs has underscored two common pitfalls of the coalition approach,
namely, that both monopolistic relationships and superficial “missionary
work” have borne little fruit in postcommunism. Wedel’s narrow cliques
essentially stole from the commons, while Carothers’s shallow state missionaries did little of lasting importance despite their laudable intentions. That the coalition approach can work hardly means that it must.
V. CONDITIONS AND EXTENSIONS
This article’s central point is that in postcommunism external actors
have rarely made substantial and sustained contributions without an
implicit partnership with domestic actors. But even the scholarship
most enthusiastic about such linkages between insider pioneers and
48
Beissinger (fn. 8). Putin’s tough stance on foreign-funded
these events.
NGOs
may well be a response to
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outsider patrons shows how difficult this route is. Kelley and Stone
each found strong external effects, but each identified real success in
only about half the cases. Carothers emphasizes policy tools that might
build and sustain such coalitions, even if his empirical findings suggest it seldom happens. And elsewhere the networks that resulted from
Western assistance were characterized as unnecessary (Hughes, Sasse,
and Gordon) or even perverse (Wedel).
The important general question, then, is under what conditions the
three modes of influence can be productive. The conditions for inspiration to work are least demanding: the existence of domestic actors
who expect that policy reforms will bring intrinsic benefits irrespective of external rewards or sanctions and who have the influence to
bring about such reforms. Such policy reforms have the promise of
being essentially self-financing, and PCRs may then have the incentive
to experiment with externally inspired reforms until they find a mix
that is both efficacious and politically sustainable. There is, however,
a potential downside to reliance on the inspiration of self-interested
domestic actors—they may emulate foreign practices in ways biased
in favor of their own constituency. In a recent global data set, for example, economic liberalization policies spread much faster than did
countermeasures that check the power of those who benefit most from
liberalization.49 Technocratic policy areas and countries where elites
are largely unchallenged may be the areas where inspiration works in
its purest form.50
The primary condition for substitution has been the power of outsiders to override or circumvent domestic preferences. These conditions have rarely been met in postcommunism. The classic venue
for substitution is military occupation, which in the postcommunist
region has been limited to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.51 Here,
there is an emerging form of governance by IO. Imposed sanctions
have been rare in the postcommunist region and, consistent with a
large literature, not notably effective. With some exceptions described
below, substitution is usually a product of desperation. Substitutionas-desperation comes through clearly in Stone’s book, where the IMF
essentially became a player in Ukrainian domestic politics in order to
articulate a position no other viable group would call its own. Substitution cases generally are ones with a deficit of domestic vehicles and
a surfeit of potential veto players. Meanwhile, outsiders who prioritize
Henisz, Guillen, and Zelner (fn. 24).
Haas (fn. 12); Fukuyama (fn. 17); Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett (fn. 1).
51
Bose (fn. 17); Ignatieff (fn. 17); Effron and O’Brien (fn. 17); Pond (fn. 2).
49
50
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service provision in the short term seem to find that it impedes their
ability to build capacity in the longer term.52
In the postcommunist setting, the optimal conditions for coalition have been politically divided target governments that are plausible candidates for IO membership. Here, outsiders need policy
areas and target countries that have more substantial levels of internal contestation. Unlike inspiration, which works from the inside,
outsiders have little chance of effecting change where one domestic
group is hegemonic. Unlike substitution, outsiders cannot avoid
entanglement with domestic actors. Rather, a central image developed in this article is one in which domestic developments or past
processes of inspiration have resulted in a minority tradition that
favors the principles pushed by outsiders but that has, so far, failed
to carry the day. External action on behalf of reforms favored by
such minorities is, for reasons developed above, exceedingly complex. But when the minority traditions are already part of the governing body or are well entrenched inside the state civil service,
outsiders have a fighting chance of seeing their institutional preferences achieved.53
Outsider-insider coalitions have one key advantage over normal
domestic coalitions. In both cases, a party seeks a coalition partner because it needs something from it. Typically, entering a formal
domestic coalition gives a party more support in parliament but at
the cost of some compromise in its governing agenda. In the outsider-insider coalitions discussed here, however, such a “resourcesrivalry” trade-off is not so sharp. Since outsiders cannot provide
direct parliamentary support, they are not potential rivals, and yet
they may provide other valuable resources. Not competing directly
with their coalition partner for votes minimizes a host of potential
rivalries familiar from formal coalitions. In the best case, outsiders
can help a party achieve its domestic goals because they are goals
it fully shares. This is consistent with theoretical insights outside
the postcommunist world and even outside the state-based coalition partners emphasized here. For example, the “boomerang theory”
from the transnational social movement literature also demonstrates
52
See Fukuyama (fn. 17); Henderson (fn. 2); for a similar argument in the development literature, see Robert Calderisi, The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn’t Working (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006).
53
Subsequent research is needed along three lines: (1) to further specify the kinds of divided government likely to increase time horizons, broaden their circle of allies, and deter potential veto players;
(2) to test which external factors besides membership incentives can influence domestic choices; and
(3) to further explore which of the three mechanisms are important in non-postcommunist settings.
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that it is possible for alliances between IOs and civil society to jointly
pressure recalcitrant states.54
Coalitions have worked best when outsiders wield the carrot of membership in a regional organization. When states were too far from membership to be plausibly rewarded or too close to be plausibly threatened
with exclusion, the coalition approach suffered. Of course, few IOs have
membership that is as attractive as that of the EU. Neither the Council
of Europe, nor OSCE, nor NATO had anything like the EU’s effect on CEE
states.55 Yet membership conditionality is clearly not the only structural
setting in which the coalition approach can work. Stone’s research suggests that outsiders can find sympathetic PCRs and move a state toward
a new set of policies even with no membership conditionality.
Crucially, in demonstrating the achievements of certain outsiderinsider coalitions, it is important to reemphasize that the concept of
minority traditions is not a normative one, and minority traditions are
not always selfless and heroic reformers. This finding also resonates in
the broader theoretical literature. Work on the IMF in LDCs shows that
LDCs often commit voluntarily to IMF arrangements at the behest of
their own domestic owners of capital, who profit from the new policies
even while those countries’ overall economic indicators get no better
or even deteriorate.56 And private investors have even had their own
preferences written into the conditionality agreements of some IFIs.57
Wedel essentially shows the damage that such linkages can do when
the inducements go exclusively to one cabal rather than to providing
public goods.
A broader analytical point flows from the emphasis on coalitions:
spectacular failures of external influence are easy to observe (and to attribute blame to misguided or ignorant IO or Western state officials).
But quiet successes are much harder to spot because they often look like
plausible extensions of prior domestic trajectories. Thus what makes
the coalition approach good public policy tends to disguise it from social scientists. This is increasingly true as we move toward more and
more high profile interventions, where blame for failure is apportioned
very publicly. In short, reforms that share external and internal authors
are both harder to see and harder to code.
54
Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1998).
55
Kelley (fn. 9); Grabbe (fn. 2); Vachudova (fn. 2); Jacoby (fn. 2, 2004).
56
James Vreeland, The IMF and Economic Development (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2003).
57
Erica Gould, Money Talks: The International Monetary Fund, Conditionality, and Supplementary
Financiers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
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VI. CONCLUSION: THE COALITION APPROACH AND OPEN QUESTIONS
The coalition approach shows how outsiders can act as glue that binds
together the domestic players that share their reform preferences. This
essay has argued that the glue generally takes three forms: it changes
the time horizons of their insider partners, helps them win over the
undecided as further allies, and deters their domestic opponents.58 All
three mechanisms help explain why external actors have achieved more
in the postcommunist region than in other areas of the world.59
First, outsiders often stiffened the resolve of their insider allies.60
Postcommunism is full of minority traditions. Indeed, these books
reveal few cases where substantive ideas brought by Westerners were
truly novel: most of the key ideas pursued in postcommunist transformations were already available in the region, but many were locked into
weak minority traditions. The collapse of communism catapulted some
of these policy traditions into majority status, but others would have
remained in the background but for Western intervention.
Stone’s findings show one way in which outside actors stiffened
the resolve of their domestic allies in Poland and Bulgaria: they convinced the various Polish (and later) Bulgarian governing parties of the
benefit of longer-term fiscal discipline over the short-term benefits of
deficit spending. But in Russia and Ukraine, U.S. intervention undercut IMF leverage. Stone’s findings on IO credibility resonate strongly
with the broader democratization literature. For example, Pevehouse
shows that in the 1970s, the EU was an effective agent of democratization everywhere in Southern Europe except in Turkey, where the
58
Two of these books’ findings overlap with strategic mechanisms identified by the two-level
games literature, which investigates how national negotiators can benefit from their own domestic
constraints; see Robert Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games,”
International Organization 42 (Summer 1988); Helen Milner, Interests, Institutions, and Information:
Domestic Politics and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). First, some
domestic negotiators did occasionally invite IOs to “tie their hands,” as in Ukrainian and Russian
negotiations with the IMF (Stone, Lending Credibility). Second, the EU did “target” populations to
increase the win-set of their national negotiators in Romania, Slovakia, and Bulgaria in the late 1990s;
Vachudova (fn. 2). There is, however, a profound difference between the coalition approach here and
the two-level games literature: postcommunist states’ bargaining has not really been about negotiations for new, mutually acceptable regimes like those in two-level games. Rather, the “negotiations” are
really about the terms under which postcommunist states join existing regimes. When, as here, terms
are largely nonnegotiable, domestic constraints are more hindrance than help.
59
For an excellent recent summary of the modest effects of external actors in the developing world,
see Helen Milner, “Globalization, Development, and International Institutions: Normative and Positive Perspectives,” Perspectives on Politics 3 (December 2005).
60
There is a large literature on using IOs to lock-in policies. On the economic side, see Fiona
McGillivray and Alastair Smith, “Trust and Cooperation through Agent-Specific Punishments,” International Organization 54 (Autumn 2000); Edward Mansfield, Helen Milner, and B. Peter Rosendorf, “Free to Trade: Democracies, Autocracies, and International Trade,” American Political Science
Review 94 ( June 2000). On democratization, see Pevehouse (fn. 2).
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U.S. pushed the EU to soften its demands in deference to Turkey’s
strategic importance.61
The substantial benefit of early and consistent economic reforms in
the postcommunist region is now widely understood: where minority
traditions of reformers have sustained reforms—often bolstered by IO
assistance—the benefits have been not merely economic but also political, as additional increments of private business activity expanded
the base for pluralist politics.62 Overall, this mechanism is especially
prominent in what might be labeled “technocrat coalitions” for the
way they often link IO officials with government civil servants against
elected politicians, a pattern most familiar from Latin America.63 In
addition to examples just noted, one could point to postcommunist
national technocrats allied with EU Commission officials to promote
tenure for national civil servants or national central bankers allied with
IMF officials to achieve the independence of central banks.64
Further research is vital to see whether the many cases of patronagedriven “runaway state building” will endear postcommunist politicians
to bureaucrats and close this point of access for IO-based technocrats.65
More generally, we need clearer explanations for how external actors
get and keep access to reforming states. One promising step is to connect the variables highlighted by the large-N diffusion studies to the
implementation mechanisms highlighted by the books under review.
For example, if the “economic policymaking of the most ‘successful’
[countries] becomes data for updating policy beliefs” elsewhere, then
how precisely does that happen when the same research shows that
the obvious communication channels seem not to be the answer?66 Or,
to the contrary, are networks growing in importance relative to traditional interstate diplomacy? The research suggesting they are is, like
the literature reviewed here, focused heavily on Europe.67 Comparative
research should systematically test this claim, but also look at the basis
for the persistence of such networks.
The second mechanism emphasizes that outsiders often help their
allies win over the uncommitted and thus expand existing minority traPevehouse (fn. 2), 204.
Fish (fn. 44); Joel S. Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,” World Politics 50 ( January 1998).
63
I thank Kurt Weyland for helpful conversations on this point
64
Epstein (fn. 20); Johnson (fn. 28).
65
The term “runaway state-building” is from Conor O’Dwyer, Runaway State-Building: Patronage
Politics and Democratic Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
66
Simmons and Elkins (fn. 12), 182.
67
Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
61
62
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649
ditions.68 In most cases, these coalitions built upon IO links with elected
officials, not technocrats. But how? Where membership in regional organizations was a priority, outsiders had the clearest effects. Kelley’s
work demonstrates, for example, that the EU essentially made minority protections the business of a much larger circle of domestic elites.
Any Latvian or Estonian elite who supported the cross-party consensus
that EU membership was their state’s leading foreign policy priority
had to be concerned that lack of progress on ethnic legislation would
threaten overall progress toward membership. But if outsiders helped
broaden the demand for reform, they often helped on the supply side as
well. Well-endowed IOs or Western states were sometimes in a position
to offer what might be termed “dynamic side payments.” Essentially,
the externally provided inducements stressed by the coalition approach
often helped PCRs respond to unexpected domestic barriers over long
periods of time. Such external inducements matter most when the PCRs
are barely winning or barely losing, for it is then that outsiders can
make the difference.
Nowhere were these supply and demand mechanisms more prominent than in the EU’s enormous “screening” program, in which the
legislation of all “candidate countries” in thirty-one different policy areas was screened for compatibility with EU measures. Put simply, this
was history’s most ambitious deployment of the coalition approach. It
required specific domestic actors—usually cabinet ministers—to work
with officials of the EU Commission and take responsibility for developing and implementing new legal measures. And clearly, EU money
mattered a lot in helping PCRs lubricate massive institutional change
by funneling resources to skeptical domestic actors.69 But other regions
have lacked organizations that combined the EU’s high demands on
new members with the widespread perception of high benefits for joining that make states willing to pay this price. Of course, external subsidies could sometimes work in the absence of membership perspectives. Yet Carothers also shows that subsidies that would help reformers
identify and sustain good ideas have been underprovided by the West.
Especially in democracy promotion, the West’s subsidies have not been
generous or commensurate with the West’s stated ambitions for postcommunist reform. Such stinginess matters, because these external co68
Beyond the two-level games literature already cited, other bargaining models are complementary
to the minority traditions approach. Leonard Schoppa shows U.S. trade pressure on Japan worked best
when it pushed demands in line with those of Japanese consumer groups; see Schoppa, Bargaining
with Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
69
Grabbe (fn. 2).
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alitions with elected PCRs expand the circle of insiders, in part, through
dynamic side payments noted above.
In terms of future research, CEE remains a vital set of cases in developing and testing related hypotheses, both because of what did not
vary—the strong desire of all CEE states to seek EU membership—and
because of what does vary. In terms of the latter, not only do national
institutional legacies vary widely, but some of the thirty-one policy domains in which screening occurred are richly endowed with domestic
actors and policy traditions (for example, agriculture) while others were
almost entirely novel in CEE (for example, regional policy). In the latter cases, many actors did not have strong prior conceptions, making
it much easier for EU understandings to predominate.70 Indeed, there
are many cases in which the minority traditions began as extraordinarily modest but grew rapidly as they embraced EU institutional conceptions (inspiration mode) and championed those ideas domestically
(with help through the coalition mode) at a time when the country was
strongly oriented toward achieving membership.71
Third, outsiders can help deter challenges to their domestic allies.
Here again, the democratization literature emphasizes the importance
of external actors in protecting nascent democracies from homegrown
antidemocratic actors, especially in deterring antidemocratic backsliding driven by the army and the bourgeoisie.72 While both of these actors have been weak throughout most of the postcommunist period,
nationalist-chauvinist movements have held power in several postcommunist states. In what might be termed the hardest cases—ones where
states had been shattered by civil war—the substitution mode may have
played an important role in paving the way for coalition. For example,
in Bosnia-Herzegovina after the Dayton Accords, only outsiders could
check the chauvinist executive of the Republika Srpska and level the
playing field for reformist groups.73 On occasion, outsiders did this
directly, often removing the most tainted elected politicians from office. In other cases, they worked indirectly by channeling what they
saw as promising Serbian minority traditions toward engagement with
sympathetic local courts, whom the High Commissioner would protect
from meddling by ardent nationalists and whose rulings it helped carry
out. The result was that, over time, economic issues (which were susFor this argument in regional policy, see Marek and Baun (fn. 41).
Epstein (fn. 20).
72
Pevehouse (fn. 2); Darren Hawkins, International Human Rights and Authoritarian Rule in Chile
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
73
Pond (fn. 2), 148–50, 166–67.
70
71
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ceptible to compromise among local actors) gained salience over ethnic
issues (which largely were not).
Fortunately, outsiders could often deter challengers with less invasive
measures. Especially where the postcommunist states might otherwise
qualify for membership (for example, in CEE), EU threats of sanctions
seem to have mattered. There, even when such governments were unmoved by EU demands, the EU helped bolster what was quite weak in
the illiberal democracies, namely, a coherent and moderate opposition.
The EU’s public evaluations of such states provided alternative information on the political and economic performance of the government,
and the EU served as a focal point for cooperation for disparate groups
that opposed the ruling parties, created incentives for insiders to adapt
their agenda to be compatible with OSCE, CE, and other international
organizations, as well as with the EU.74 Moreover, political parties that
promised to move the country toward EU membership then followed
through with the implementation of specific reforms once in office in
order to move forward in the preaccession process.
Here, two further issues deserve to be the topic of future research. First,
we need research on whether membership IOs have any ability to deter
challengers in settings where membership is a long way off. If some observers think the EU “may have stayed the hand of the hard-liners” during Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, it remains unclear what role the
range of Western IOs played in the Orange, Rose, and Tulip revolutions
of recent years.75 Second, we need more fine-grained causal explanations
of how substitution and coalition can work together. In particular, even if
further research casts doubt on the power of external actors to stimulate
democratic “breakthroughs,” it may be that the outsiders can continue to
have an effect on the consolidation of such breakthroughs, as anecdotal
evidence from Bosnia-Herzegovina seems to indicate.
It is commonplace for scholars to assert the need for better integration of the research questions of comparative politics and international
relations. The research agenda just sketched shows one way to do this.
If pursued, these questions of external influence should enjoy significant
staying power in the discipline, not as static snapshots of transitory best
practices or as a shallow “alternative explanation” to domestic politics.
Indeed, as these books and others show, anywhere external influence
has real effects, it is deeply implicated in domestic politics.
Vachudova (fn. 2); Pridham (fn. 2).
Jeffrey Kopstein, “The Transatlantic Divide over Democracy Promotion,” Washington Quarterly
29 (Spring 2006), 92; Beissinger (fn. 8).
74
75