 Hello, my name is Sean Burgess. I'm a senior associate with the Australian National Center for Latin American Studies here at the Australian National University and Today it's my pleasure to be talking with Professor Abraham Lowenthal. Professor Lowenthal is a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California and at the Pacific Council of International Affairs as well as a research professor with the Watson Institute at Brown University. He's also a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, and he is significantly, particularly for those of us working on Latin America, the founding director of both the Latin American program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Center for Scholars and at the Inter-American Dialogue. Author of numerous books and countless articles, and I think it's safe to say that if you work on the Americas, if you work on democratization, whether you remember that you've read Professor Lowenthal's work, everything that you've looked at has been touched by it. His work runs as a theme through pretty much the entire canon in about eight different languages. So it's a pleasure today, Professor Lowenthal, to have you with us. Thank you very much. If I might start with the questions, is just to ask you, can you tell us a little bit about the current project that you're working on? The project that I've just finished and will now be spending some time spreading the word on it is a project sponsored by International Idea in Stockholm, in which Sergio Bitar from Chile, a well-known public intellectual and political figure there, and I had the opportunity to go around the world interviewing former presidents and prime ministers, 13 of them in nine different countries, three in Latin America, two in Asia, two in Africa, and two in Europe, who have played important roles in leading transitions from authoritarian rule toward democratic governance. The object of the exercise of interviewing these leaders, which we did on a well-prepared basis and with adequate time to really explore the issues, is to see whether we can learn from the experience of people who've actually been successful at crafting democratic transitions, whether there are some principles and procedures and points that would be relevant to people elsewhere in the world today and tomorrow who want to try to make democracy happen in their countries, whether it be in Myanmar or in North Africa or the Middle East or in Cuba or wherever, and so we had the opportunity to talk with these leaders and to hear them expressed in their own voices and in their own words what the tough choices were they had to face, how and why they made their decisions, and how they pulled off. What, when you think about it, is a pretty implausible assignment to undo authoritarian rule and move toward democratic governance. It's no easy trick. Now the democratic transition, it is big social upheaval, and it's a big change within a country, but how important is the role of a specific leader within that process? We felt based on these nine cases and the 13 interviews that, in a way, not enough attention has been paid by the professional social science community that is looking for quantifiable data and looking for underlying social structures and economic data and so on. Not enough attention is being paid perhaps to the fundamental importance of good political leadership, of political leaders who are able to broaden the support base for a move toward democracy, to reconcile differing, often extremely polarized groups in the opposition to an incumbent authoritarian regime, who are able to build bridges to people within the authoritarian regime, who understand they need an exit strategy, who are able to make hard decisions about who gets excluded from the opposition movement because their demands are too destabilizing for a transition, who are able to make compromises and reach judgments about what issues need to be dealt with now and which can be postponed, who are able to deal with issues of transitional justice, of civil military relations, of a variety of recurrent issues that cannot be resolved by swallowing a particular pill. They require consistent movement in a direction with a strategy, with a nimbleness about responding to opportunities and contingencies. In every one of these transitions, there were unexpected events, for example, that really required deft leadership to respond to. In the case of Brazil, for example, which you know well, you know, Tancredo Neves was central casting's answer to the question, how to have a civilian opposition political figure who could credibly win an election and govern. And then, having been elected, he suffered a mortal illness. He was never inaugurated. His vice presidential candidate, who had been chosen in order precisely to build a basis for a consensual approach and to broaden the support base, was in fact a conservative from the inner sanctum of the military government. So after all this effort to build an electoral democratic strategy, they wind up with somebody from the military regime. That was something that the people who are trying to bring democracy to Brazil hadn't counted on. And yet they were able to respond and to deal with it. So with all of these challenges then, and the challenges that we know that there will be challenges in a democratic transition, what are some of the things that you've found in the research that point to the characteristics of somebody who makes a good leader for a democratic transition? Well, I think in a sense it, some of it has to do with leadership skills more generally. But I think we found, these are people, first of all, who had a strong preference for incremental step-by-step approaches rather than thinking there was some breakthrough quick solution. Who understood that it will take time and who had patience and not only had patience themselves, but were able to communicate to their followers not to lose heart and to hang on. Who were able to make compromises. It's not a task for the dogmatic. But on the other hand, who had some basic principles that they stuck to. Who understood, for example, that in the making of a constitution, which is a fundamentally important part of getting to democratic governance, it's not, it's, of course, important what the constitution says and provides. But it's not necessary to have a perfect solution for all time to every issue. And what's really important is to have a fundamental approach which has broad buy-in, which people understand is a way forward. And to even if it's necessary to accept some provisions that you don't really want to be permanent, but you can be dealt with at a later stage. You think, for example, of Chile, a country I know you also know well, where, you know, they incorporated frankly, undemocratic provisions, but with the understanding that there was no way to get out of the hole they were in without giving some reassurance to the armed forces and to conservative business sectors, and that they could deal with some of those issues at a later stage, as they have done to a large extent. So democratic transitions, it remains something that's very much in the news today, and we could talk about it in the context of what's going on in Iraq, the of Afghanistan, and for Australian foreign policy, there's not getting much media play at the moment, questions to do with Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and the general Asia Pacific region. So I know in the past you've done an awful lot of work on the international aspects of democratization. So I wonder if you could, pulling a bit from the findings from your research, give us a bit of a sense of what's the role of the international community in supporting and advancing these processes? That's a good question. In the early literature on democratic transitions, the famous O'Donnell-Schmuder Whitehead Volumes and those that followed it, I think the role of the international sector of international actors of the foreign policies of major governments, international organizations, transnational civil society organizations, the media, religious groups, trade unions, and so on, was under-studied and was not given enough attention. There was really, I think, a commitment to thinking of this as something which was done nationally, and after all, the very notion of democratic governance, of self-governance, is that it is the people themselves in a given jurisdiction who are taking responsibility. But as we look at these cases, it's clear that international actors played an important role, the sanctions in South Africa, the pressure on the Pinochet government to allow free access, or at least reasonable access, by the opposition to the media. The roles of various actors in, perhaps most strongly in Ghana, but in every one of these cases, the role of the U.S., first as a bulwark of the Marcos regime, and then as a real supporter of the the People Power movement and of Corri Aquino and the transition to Ramos in the Philippines. And so we tried to look at, first of all, realistically, international actors played an important role, and they seem to have been helpful in these cases, by and large, and why was that? And I think it was because there were in these countries domestic, national, political actors, parties, and leaders who knew how to mobilize international sanctions, international pressures, international advice, international experience, in line with a strategy that they developed. In other words, it was not that democracy was being exported from the United States, the EU, Australia, or anybody else. It was that political actors in South Africa, and Chile, and Poland, and a number of other countries were able to mobilize international energies and and resources to support their efforts. I think that's a very important lesson. That is international support and international interest in democratization should not be ignored. It is important. It cannot be successful by trying on a cookie-cutter approach to just take a set of institutions and say, here, do this. Certainly, some of the things that have been done in in Iraq, for example, to take a case you mentioned, are very far from the approach that we see in these cases and that have been successful. It doesn't make sense for international actors to try to replace domestic political processes, but they can be helpful if they have the right time frame, which is medium to long-term, not next week, and if they are backing and supporting genuinely democratic local actors who have a strategy and an ability to move forward. It's wonderful. Thank you very much for sharing us with some of the findings from your book, which is going to be out in 2015, and it is one that we'll definitely be looking for and is definitely going to be making the reading lists here at the ANU, and I can't wait to see it myself. Thanks very much.