 Good afternoon. I'm Thomas Carruthers. I'm Vice President for Studies here at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. My pleasure to serve as the moderator at today's event, which we're launching Richard Young's book, The Puzzle of Non-Western Democracy. As I think everyone in this room would know, in recent years the field of international democracy support has come under a lot of pressure from different developments on the international political stage. We've seen democracy itself enter a period of stagnation, or in the view of some recession. We've seen a number of non-democratic powers assert themselves more forcefully on the global stage, with consequences for democracy. And we've also seen the rise of more discussion about political models. Western liberal democracy has become somewhat frayed, both in the United States and Europe as a model to other countries due to its own deficiencies and debilities. A number of non-democratic alternatives have presented themselves to the world, and in some cases been found attractive by people in some quarters. And of course a number of non-western democracies are also gaining a larger place on the international stage and asserting themselves in different ways politically and geostrategically as well. And this question of models is what we're going to discuss today. I think Richard Young's and I both had the experience in recent years of when we give talks to audiences in different parts of the world about democracy. One of the first questions that we'd usually confront, not always from a happy audience member, was we're interested in democracy, but we don't want your democracy. We want our democracy. And that encountering that question many times got us both thinking about what do they mean by your democracy. In many cases we would ask and say, well, tell us what you mean by your democracy. And in having those discussions we felt actually often the thought process had not been taken very far beyond the immediate sense of please don't tell us what kind of democracy to have. And so Richard set about to explore this issue in greater detail and it led to this book. And I would just say that this book is informed by a sort of a parallel temperament that Richard tried to pursue very decidedly. On the one hand he started with a strong dose of, I would say, healthy skepticism about this concept of whether it is really meaningful. Yet he tried to pursue that together with also a genuine openness towards what does this mean and what could it mean. And this balance between the skepticism and openness is not easy to maintain. But I think it's a credit to Richard the way he pursued it. I think this book embodies both of those qualities in a very interesting way. Richard Young's is a senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law program at Carnegie. He's based in Europe and works with our center Carnegie Europe. He's the author of just four books in the last two years of this book, a book on climate change and European security, a book on Europe's responses to the Arab Spring, and also a book on European foreign policy generally. Before that he's a well-known writer and commentator on European foreign policy and also a specialist in European democracy support and human rights support around the world. And I'm really delighted we have with us two great commentators. We have Shadi Hamid, who's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in the Center for Middle East Policy. And before that in Brookings Doha Center, Shadi is the author of an excellent book, which I recommend to you. If you haven't read it, Temptations of Power, Islamists and a Liberal Democracy in the New Middle East. And he's got a new book coming out in May next year that looks at some of the evolution of the religion comparing Christianity and Islam and their relationship to politics historically, which I'm sure will be equally good and provocative and useful to the policy community and many others as well. And Sandra Pappara, who is the Director for Gender, Women and Democracy at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. Sandra took up that position just about a year ago, and she came to it with a very wide-ranging array of experience in international development work. She was with the UK Department for International Development for 13 years and in that capacity served in a number of different parts of the world, including in Sudan and Burundi and the Caribbean. And before that, work and analytic work on African politics at universities and other organizations in the UK and Africa. So she brings a wealth of experience to the topic as well. We're going to start. I'm going to turn it over to Richard. He's going to talk for about 20 minutes. And we're going to turn to our two commentators. And then I might go back to Richard just for a comment or two, but then we'll turn it to you for questions and comments. Richard? Thank you, Tom, for the introduction. And thank you to everyone for coming along. As Tom indicated, I wrote this book because the interest in different models of democracy has been growing in recent years. You all know that debates about different regional models of democracy are not new. They've existed for many years. But it seemed to us these calls for different types of democracy, different variations in democracy were once again becoming very prominent on the international policy agenda. So it seemed to us this was set to become an increasingly important issue in global politics and one that warranted some critical exploration. This issue of whether or not there are non-Western models of democracy is one that elicits very strong opinions for and against. Some people are entirely skeptical of the whole issue. They feel that when people call for non-Western models of democracy or different variations in democracy, often they are calling for lesser degrees of democracy really serving as a kind of cloak for rather authoritarian practices. At the other end of the spectrum, other people would argue that Western democracy or liberal democracy has fundamentally failed to deliver and that the whole future of global democracy depends on us being far more open to radically different models of democratic institutions and democratic practices well outside the traditional Western or liberal template. My book comes down in the middle of these two extremes to the argument. It suggests that the search for variation is important, is justified, it is not always a cloak for authoritarianism. It is often coming from genuinely democratic impulses and therefore being more open to exploring democratic variation is necessary and will be increasingly important. But at the same time, we should not be overly seduced by these calls for non-Western democracy and recognize that these calls themselves are subject to some very real problems. So we should take seriously the search for variation, but at the same time, take care to understand where the red lines exist in these calls. For me, the answer to this conundrum is that it's most useful, it is most useful not to frame this debate in terms of a sharp dichotomy between Western and non-Western democracy, but to look at very specific areas of democratic reform and explore where there is potential for healthy democratic variation, but also where the limits to such variation also lie. So that's my basic thesis in the book. Start from the beginning. Why is this such a potent, prominent issue at the moment? It is because a number of factors have coincided. A number of factors exist today in combination to have pushed this search for democratic variation to the top of the international agenda. As Tom indicated, there is a widespread feeling around the world that Western democracy is failing to deliver. Western democracies themselves don't stand as such and a detractive reference point for reformers around the world. There's a feeling that as non-Western rising powers have become more prominent economically, they want their political ideas to be taken more seriously as well. Over the last five to seven years, we've seen an unprecedented intensity of protest movements, of large-scale civic mobilizations. This has nourished a debate about new forms of representation, new forms of civic activism that have themselves fed into these debates about different models of democracy. Academic evidence suggests that as globalization deepens, the flip side to that is the communities around the world search for more authenticity, stronger ownership over their local forms of politics. So in a way, this search for authenticity and variation is the flip side as the other side of the globalization coin. Then there's the fact that there have been many high-profile conflict interventions around the world have failed over the last 10 or 15 years, particularly Afghanistan and Iraq. This has led people to question the whole liberal peace-building agenda and the supposed utility of liberal or Western-style democracy as a means of mitigating conflict. Then there is the debate about hybrid transitions, the fact that today hybrid regimes seem to be a new normal rather than an anomaly, and this has encouraged many people to start exploring or trying to distinguish what are the more benign or positive aspects of hybrid regimes and distinguish those positive elements from their more problematic elements. And the last factor, why I think this is such a powerful and important issue today, is the fact that the international community, democracy support organizations have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars and euros into trying to support democratic reform around the world over the last decade, often with relatively disappointing or limited results. This is engendered, I think, more of soul-searching and more rethinking on the part of practitioners as well. So that's the cluster of issues, the cluster of reasons why I think this issue is important. What are some of the problems when we hear calls for non-western forms of democracy, different models of democracy? What are some of the problems? I think one problem exists in the social sphere. An argument you hear very frequently from around the world is from people saying, our societies adhere to very conservative social values, and because of that, we need a fundamentally different type of political system. This is a very powerfully made argument, but that correlation between certain social values and the political system is, I think, rather questionable. There are many societies around the world where opinion polls suggest that people adhere to relatively conservative social values, but whose political institutions are relatively liberal, democratic in nature. So this is a linkage between the social and the political that requires, I think, some critical exploration. Another area where the argument is problematic is in the economic realm. Another argument that is very frequently made from people around the world is, we are skeptical about Western liberal democracy because that seems to come hand in hand with neoliberal economics, and it's the neoliberal economics to which we object. Whether or not one agrees with these preferences for a different type of economic model, we need to be careful not to posit this very simplistic relationship between certain types of economic reforms and different models of democracy. This linkage between economic change and political change is very complex, it's been debated by theorists for over 200 years, but what's significant in the context of these debates is that when people are calling for different models of democracy, often what they're looking for is different types of economic outcomes, different types of economic policies, and one should be careful about not conflating those two things. Then I think a third and final aspect of the argument that is problematic is the whole notion that there are kind of essentialist cultural values and tradition that in some ways are eternal and not subject to change. For me, what they're really significant thing seems to be that although the calls for non-Western forms of democracy are themselves made more loudly today, so is the push back against those arguments. And actually what we see in many societies is not so much a really strong or widespread consensus in favor of traditional forms of politics, but many people arguing for those traditional politics and other people pushing back against them. So it's a degree of polarization that seems to characterize debates between traditional and more modern views. So one should not overstate the extent to which there is really a consensus around these very traditional notions of cultural values. So there I think the three or four reasons why I think we need to be skeptical and why ultimately I think these calls for non-Western democracy are not entirely convincing. It's also the case that while calls for democratic variation are not always a question of authoritarianism in disguise, at least sometimes they are. And we should be aware of that and critically alert to that rather disingenuous aspect behind these calls. So it gives you an idea of why the issue is important, some of the problems to these arguments made for different forms of democracy. What then is the solution? I think if there are not easily identified whole sale models of non-Western democracy out there ready to be implemented, then we need to debate what degree of democratic variation is really possible and healthy. And I think there are a number of very specific areas breaking down the puzzle, a number of very specific areas where we can usefully debate the potential but also the challenges for democratic variation. The first area is in the area of rights. What democratic rights really mean. It seems to me that the challenge here is how far we can retain the essential liberal concept of the individual being protected from the state but at the same time do more to foster community rights, communal senses of morality or religious identity. Of course, this is not an easy circle to square. There will always be tensions between individual rights and communal rights but I think there is scope, arguably there is scope for trying at least to minimize those tensions and getting away from the feeling that many people have around the world. There's somehow liberal forms of democracy are a threat to community identities or senses of morality or religion. A second area where I think it's useful to explore the case for democratic variation is in the economic sphere. I think there is a case for exploring how far it is possible to widen the range of voices that have input into economic decision-making even though these types of decision-making may not look completely like Western templates. I don't believe this is about advocating one set of economic policies over another. It's about the process, about the need for participative processes over economic decisions and as I say although these may not look completely like Western processes, I think there is scope variation and here variation can help re-legitimize the agenda of democratic reform. The third area is what we might call communitarian power sharing. I think in many places around the world there is a strong case for power sharing deals between different entities of a nation state. Again, even though this may not look like Western templates of democracy and these kinds of power sharing deals will be important for trying to temper the worst of conflict dynamics in places like Ukraine, Syria or Iraq. It seems to me that the challenge is where one has these power sharing deals in the name of conflict resolution between different entities of a society that each of those entities are also functions in a democratic way internally. So that democracy spreads down to the level of the individual citizen and you don't get a situation where power is being shared out between different entities that then internally end up operating in a way that's very oligarchic or kleptocratic and not very democratic in practice. So I think we need a form of communitarianism that's perhaps less elite centered and more centered on the citizen. Fourth and final area that I think merits some exploration is that of legal pluralism. There have been many debates over the last 10 or 15 years about the scope that may exist for using traditional dispute resolution mechanisms but in a way that does not circumvent the rights, standards and norms of the unitary legal system but operating a way to offer better access and efficiency of justice but in a way that reinforces core human rights standards. So there are four areas where I think at least some scope exists for variation. I think breaking down the puzzle in this way helps us identify where there's genuine scope for democratic variation, meaningful democratic variation but also helps us identify where the red lines exist and where the limits to variation exist. These do not provide complete solutions, they're just areas or guidelines that might orientate our debate about what kind of healthy degree of democratic variation may exist. I'll conclude here. I would say the basic ethos of my book is to say instead of debating this issue in terms of Western versus non-Western democracy or specific regional models of democracy, the challenge for the future is for there to be much more fluid exchange of ideas, experiences and learning between all areas of the world as all areas of the world struggle with the need to revitalize and improve the way that democracies function. This is a very important analytical issue. It's also a very important policy relevant issue. I think the donor community organizations acting to try to support democracy around the world have begun to take this issue seriously. I think they have made more steps towards incorporating the search for democratic variation than many of their critics would give them credit for, but clearly more can be done than has been done so far. Cooperation with non-Western democracies will itself be important. Often many of these non-Western democracies can themselves offer very distinctive experiences of democratic transition, but they themselves will also need to think about the specificities of their own transition. So I think my one-line conclusion would be that this is a very complicated issue and there's a very fine line, as Tom was indicating at the beginning, a very fine line to walk between needing to further a healthy degree of democratic variation on the one hand and not going too far towards the other extreme of thinking that there is a model of non-Western democracy out there that offers a kind of easy panacea to all the troubles that democracy is going through at the moment. Thank you. Thank you, Richard. I have a couple of questions, but I want to turn to our commentator, Shadi. Shadi Hamid. Thank you, Tom and Richard for having me. So let me just start by saying that this is an important book and I've been reading it and digesting it over the past few days and there's a lot to think about and granted I am biased because I am on this panel but I really do mean it. You should go buy a copy after this event. So let me just start. So I think it's hard for us as Americans and perhaps Westerners more generally to have this debate because we see liberal, when we talk about democracy, we think automatically liberal democracy and when they come into tension, these two concepts, how do we as Americans, let's say, as small L liberals and small D Democrats, which do we prioritize? How do we prioritize these two different concepts? And what I think is really useful in the book is that Richard offers a framework for understanding the tensions between liberalism and democracy and it has a very good line, which I like, which has stuck with me a little bit where he says that historically, liberalism and democracy have not in fact been bad fellows. Rather, they've been rival notions. Now, I think this is also an auspicious time to have this discussion because the idea of illiberal democracy is not just foreign anymore if it ever was. And now we have top presidential candidates who I would say really bring to the fore some of these challenges. So, for example, I don't think anyone's described Donald Trump in this way yet, but I'll be the first, I guess, but I would consider Donald Trump to be a kind of classic illiberal Democrat. So, we're facing these issues here. We can talk about in Europe where someone like Marine Le Pen might actually become the next president of France. Now, Donald Trump's illiberalism is of a particular kind and I think it's useful to talk about different kinds of illiberalism when we're talking about varieties of liberalism or varieties of democracy. And I would say his kind is this kind of undefined, vague, populist nativism of some sort. He doesn't actually seem to have an alternative ideological project. So, that's one kind, this vague kind. Now, another kind which I think is the one that we have to be particularly vigilant about and more vigilant about and I think that Richard has a very clear warning about this kind of a liberalism in his book is that when we allow leaders in weak or fragile democracies to monopolize power under the guise of non-western democracy or illiberal democracy where they say essentially we're different culturally or religiously and therefore our people aren't ready for the true democracy. Here's our different sort of democracy. But what that's really about is about consolidating power. And I would put leaders like Chavez here where illiberalism is not necessarily intrinsic to his model. So, if we talk about the Bolivarian economic revolution, you don't need to have illiberal or authoritarian institutions to produce more fair or equitable economic outcomes. So, you could still believe in this economic revolution but do so within the confines of liberal democratic political institutions. So, what I would say is actually going on with someone like Chavez is more of using these ideas to justify the seizure or consolidation of power. In other words, it's not intrinsic to the model. But then it raises the question, what if illiberalism is intrinsic to the model? And I'll bring up an example which isn't often discussed in these contexts but I think is quite relevant. So, Israel is a very successful democracy, but perhaps more interesting, it's a successful illiberal democracy. We don't often look at it that way. But the illiberalism of Israel is actually intrinsic to its model. The state is supposed to have a particular ideological orientation. And that doesn't mean that Israel is more authoritarian and in that sense Israel has remained and probably will continue to remain at least for some time a viable democracy. We can also talk about the illiberalism of Islamist parties. And as someone who focuses a lot on Islamist movements, let me just say a few words about this. So part of the difficulty in talking about this and Richard alludes to this in the book is we don't actually have models of this really. It's never actually been tried for a significant period of time. I guess the closest example we have today is Turkey and that's sort of been in process since 2002. It's still pretty early on in this experiment. But we do have a sense, or at least I think we have a sense of what Islamist illiberalism might look like in practice. So for example, it could be about democratic majorities or popular majorities passing legislation about things like restricting or banning alcohol consumption, banning coeducation at some levels of schooling, formalizing advisory role for clerics in the process of drafting national legislation. It could be about Islamizing the educational curricula. It could be about incentivizing as in Turkey, incentivizing young couples to have three kids or more through financial stipends, things of that nature. These are all examples that we can think about. At a deeper level though, it's interesting to kind of have a somewhat hypothetical discussion about what a deeper constitutional illiberalism might look like. So for example, Turkey has unchangeable constitutional principles, so the first several articles of their constitution enshrine secularism. So even if you had an 80% supermajority, you wouldn't be able to change those so-called irrevocable articles of the constitution. And those articles essentially say that the judiciary can dissolve parties that are anti-secular, right? What if we had the mirror image of that, but in the other way, where you had an Islamist constitution where there were restrictions on secular parties and the judiciary or Supreme Court would have the authority of dissolving secular parties. So I think a lot of us and a lot of Westerners were in fact okay with the idea of the Turkish constitution banning religious parties, but presumably were less comfortable with what essentially is the mirror image of banning secular parties. So that's kind of an interesting thing to think about, how would we react to that? So in these kinds of, and you can also have in the case of Israel, and some people do advocate this, including from the major parties, that parties that object or do not believe in Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state should be banned. And that hasn't actually been passed yet, but there are many who would like to pass those kinds of restrictions. Now, what all this gets to is the question that Richard touched on is where is the red line? And it's not a dichotomy, it's not as if we have liberal democracy and illiberal democracy. Most countries are somewhere in between, although I would argue these tensions are more pronounced in the Middle East because of the outsized role of religion. But one of the red lines, if you will, that Richard mentions in his book is that, quote unquote, serious infringements on individual freedoms should be avoided. But then, which is fair, but I think that raises the question, how do we judge serious infringements on personal freedom? Where is the red line? And I think it's very difficult to come up with that answer because each society will presumably produce different kinds of red lines. Now, let me just, I wanna just say something more on the kind of political theory aspect of this. Those of us on the panel, and presumably, I don't wanna be presumptuous, but I assume most of the people in the room are both small L liberals and small D Democrats. But I think the question that I struggle with is I think liberalism is better as a political system, but why should Egyptians, Jordanians, or Pakistanis be subject to my ideological preferences? Liberalism is not actually neutral, though it's often treated as a neutral, as a neutral political system, but liberalism is only neutral to those who are already liberal. I would also say aspects of liberalism are not in fact universal because they're not actually universally held from a purely descriptive standpoint. And then we could also even argue that liberalism is not in fact the natural default setting for humankind. I don't wanna get too much into that. It's a little bit more philosophical, but the question that I often deal with is should a particular society or country or group of people have the right to decide through the democratic process that they would like to try out an alternative ideological system outside the confines of liberal democracy. And that's a difficult question, and I'll kind of pose that as an open question. Now, and I just wanna emphasize here is that, I'm thinking about this more in the context of our own liberal democracy, and I think what's really good about Richard's book is he emphasizes that we're having our own crisis as Westerners with how to get this balance right and more and more people are losing faith in the liberal democratic project. So this is why the non-Western-Western dichotomy is, wasn't applicable before, but it's definitely not applicable or appropriate today. And I'm well aware, for example, that as an American Muslim, there are maybe 20 or 30% of Americans that would probably like to have me register in a database or have a special ID card that says that I'm Muslim. That's the reality of the situation. Luckily, we have a Bill of Rights that protects us against those abuses, but even there, hypothetically, if you had two thirds of Congress and 75% of the states, they could repeal certain parts of the Constitution, and you could actually constitutionally restrict the individual rights and freedoms of certain minorities. So even in a liberal democracy with a strong tradition of constitutional liberalism, if you had 80 or 90% of the population that said we wanna do this, they could theoretically do it, which goes back to this question of every society has this question of where exactly do you put the bar? The bar of majoritarianism, if you will. And I'll just end now, but I'll just say a couple things quickly on another reason why I think this is important, especially the last two chapters of the book which go into how Western policymakers should try to apply some of these ideas. And I'll say this, I think in an ideal world, I would like to think that every US and European policymaker who works on supporting democracy abroad would have this book in their bookshelf or preferably on their table. And especially now because as you know, democracy has become a kind of bad word in certainly I think to some extent here in Washington, but also more generally in Western capitals, we don't talk about democracy promotion that much anymore. So I think it's important to kind of go back to first principles to talk about what we mean by these ideas and concepts, whether it's liberalism or democracy and think more systematically about the variation when we're talking about how international actors can support political reform, liberalism or democracy abroad. Thank you. Shadi, thank you very much. Lots to think about there. Let's go directly to Sandra. You want to pull the microphone down a little closer to you. Thanks very much. I have to take these off, but I mean, I'm sort of squinting at you all out there. So good afternoon. And thank you very much, Tom, for asking me to do this. It's a rare treat to revisit my skills as a somewhat lightweight political scientist. And great thanks to Richard for writing the book. I mean, I learned a lot and I've had a good intellectual work out while reading it. I have three sets of comments and I hope they hang together as I go through them. The first is the most prosaic. There's something about the structure of the book that was a little uncomfortable for me. I think while the central hypothesis and the analysis definitely resonated, and I share a lot of the thoughts that Shadi's just put forward, it felt a bit like my youngest daughter's view of Barbados, which is that there are only six things that you can do, but you can do each 10 different ways. So I understand, I understood that Richard was saying Western democracy is in crisis and increasingly challenged by a loss of confidence in the system at home, changing international orders and savvy champions of non-Western varieties. That most non-Western varieties lean towards the liberal, but need not be so. There is as much debate and variation within Western democracies as within non-Western democracies. Some of this is about principles and values, some about structure and policies, and I think Shadi took us through some of those arguments about constitutionalism versus policies and so forth. So it's a kind of intrinsic versus manifest distinction. That innovation and deviation should not be foreclosed and Richard's core, if you like, offer on this issue is liberalism plus, which posits the framing of variations within the parameters of core liberal principles, but it need not exclude non-Western innovations. So at the heart of this, reframing is a focus on inclusion, which I certainly heartily share and endorse. And then finally, the challenge for Western democratic assistance practitioners is how to present a credible and impactful portfolio of support abroad. Given the democratic contestation that we endure at home, and again Shadi's spoken to that quite clearly, the foreign policy drivers that support the whole democratic enterprise in a way, and the rather more nimble adaptation for good or ill that emerging non-Western Democrats in Vodakomas are serving up. But I got all this the first time it was laid out. And then I felt a little bit cheated in the book. In short form, I think this would have been a really good punchy 30-page article where less would have been more. In the long form, it should be a 300-page textbook, really. At the moment, I feel like I've got the study guide and I'm wanting more. To my mind, in both the short and the long form, it would draw into the body of the actual text at least three things. More political science theory, more selectivity about the range of regional examples, and importantly, a greater discrimination between Western donors. I'm British, I'm also European. I suspect that the focus from that side of the Atlantic around this issue, democracy assistance, even the central contestation here, which is about what sort of democracies we are engendering around the world, would be taken in a quite different way if we were sitting in Paris or London or Brussels. So my second point is that although the book starts with the fashionable democracies in crisis and retreat cry, which I am not a complete follower of, it's a very sort of sunny book. State capture by vested elites, autocratic rulers, and financial greed for the purposes of accruing and keeping power are almost politely referred to. On page five, Richard suggests the need to distinguish between the benign and the bogus in calls for non-Western democracy. I think we should also add just the plain bad and anchor some of the discussion in analysis of interests and incentives, because as we know from the so-called African developmental states, why a ruling elite opts for the institutional forms and structures of democratic governance without, for example, an assumption of pluralism is not solely about a deep-rooted desire to lift their fellow citizens out of poverty or to spread the benefits of social justice more widely. I pondered for far longer than I should have done, probably, why the title had puzzle in it, because I realized, before I realized that what was challenging me was why it had non-Western in it. As Richard says, many of today's challenges outside the West, as far as democracy is concerned, are similar to those within it. I could give a Western institutional practice for each of the features of the non-Western, if you like, agenda that are the core of the book. If we're talking about what some of the rallying cries for democratic reform in the West are, then I would also cite a rebalancing between individual rights and collective empowerment. And from where I sit in my day job on gender and women, this is absolutely key in the context of achieving gender equality and women's empowerment. I would also cite an increasing questioning of the power of economic elites in seemingly unregulated and unfettered markets. And I would also cite an interest in movements of greater social solidarity. I think it is indeed about the citizen and where the citizen sits. And I fully subscribe to that issue. Thirdly, when I got to the, so what does this mean for democracy assistance? Section of the book. I wondered whether this was really a debate about the democracy assistance community itself evolving from a model of foreign policy inspired peer solidarity in a way to a practice that more mirrors general development. I come from the development field and I come from, most recently from the department for international development. And if I was to look at democracy assistance and development assistance culturally, they sometimes feel like in our organizational terms in the UK the difference between being in the department for international development and being in the foreign office. Very different cultures, very different mechanisms and ways of doing things to support ostensibly the same kind of outcomes. I felt like the issues around respect for difference and local ownership, a focus on institutionalization rather than institutions, the attempt to do no harm as foreign interlopers in an intensely particular set of change processes, south, south learning and exchange, if you like. Managing expectations and taking a long-term view. All these sorts of issues that Richard raises merit conversations that have long been part of the development lexicon. In a way, do we have the right people, mechanisms and understanding to move democracy assistance or democracy promotion more towards democracy development? Finally, I sympathize with Richard because this is difficult. It's difficult to produce a book that after 100 pages of careful definition and delineation of Western and non-Western, liberal and illiberal, regional, real and imagined democratic variations, basically comes down to a place that says it's really, really difficult to break out of the box. So he asserts clearly and I think very bravely that the appropriate metric is one of variation that is bounded within the parameters of core liberal principles. And I think absent a reformulation of those core liberal principles, which have already withstood and survived evolution, contestation and variation within the Western fold, we will be faced with reform and change that is focused on modifications which embrace and actually engage with the greater complexities and diversities of our societies. But I think at the end of the day, I also would have to vote for what Richard quotes the Tocqueville saying, it's about the habits of the heart rather than a former head of state, military head of state, of Ghana, Colonel Ignatius Kay, a champon, late and lamented, or well, late and not lamented probably, who actually posited the full belly thesis of democracy in the 1970s. After all, 80% of citizens across the world support democracy as the preferred system of government. And perhaps as throughout the ages, the key tension lies in the interplay of relationships and power within society and ultimately between the rulers and the ruled. Sandra, thank you very much. Let me just if I might make one or two comments. I think I'm guilty for about two things that you mentioned rather than Richard. One is I pushed Richard actually to write a book which was neither 30 pages nor 300 pages, but 130 pages, because I said there is a kind of a sweet spot in the US policy community at least, or the Western policy committee for books that are not too long but not too short. And so he was the one who I had to restrain him from the 300 page version. But I think that's one thing. And then secondly, the title is interesting because in a way the book is a bit of a journey and Richard's thinking in mind in association with it as we started from having been struck in many non-Western contexts of people saying to us in the Arab world or in parts of Africa or Asia, we want our own authentic non-Western democracy. But what we came to his idea, the book is really about democratic variation in all democracies and that as we looked at what the issues they want to push for variation on as you exactly say and as Richard recounts the book they're the same ones that are being debated within the West. Yet a title, the puzzle of democratic variation which is in a sense what the book reaches is less grabby than the title of the puzzle of non-Western democracy. And so because but in a way non-Western it was our starting point but it's not his ending point. And I think what I would say with that is that the puzzle of democracy is, it's a real puzzle and it's a live puzzle. So for me the non-Western. Yes. Yes. It is a bit of a trope, you're right. It'll probably take the book off the shelf, definitely. But it's not, for me it's not the heart of the tension. No, in a sense we debated about on what page of the book does he dispense with the distinction and say actually that's not really the right distinction to focus on given that's where he started. Yeah, so I take that. Richard would you like to comment and then I want to come to some comments. Just very, very briefly. I actually think that the 300 page point it does actually reflect something fairly serious and that is that these are not new debates they've been going on for many years but at a rather high level of abstraction and as much as I would have loved to have filled pages with political science theory it seemed to me that the real need is to try and connect to all the very theoretical, almost philosophical debates to everyday practice which is difficult to do because people are thinking in very different terms but that was really the aim we set ourselves with this project. In terms of your basic recommendations I would concur. It's about a fashioning variation in democracy not a long or western, non-western divide but variations in democracy that are better, more effective in doing exactly the kind of things you refer to, tackling vested elite interests, mobilizing collective identities, collective empowerment and fashioning a kind of deeper sense of social solidarity. That seems to be what citizens are looking for whether in western countries or non-western countries. The one point where I would slightly disagree is in your suggestion that what I'm largely suggesting is that we try and support political reform in the same way that development objectives have been supported over the last 10 or 20 years. I thought in my mind it was almost the opposite that it seems what we need is a much more political understanding of the way that the international community operates in different countries around the world to understand local political contexts, expectations of citizens and to make this very difficult linkage between people's social values, their economic expectations and the nature of political systems that we are supporting. I agree with you that it would be important to make more distinction between different donors. It's clear that different international organizations, different donors have different views on this puzzle of whether or not one should be supporting variation in democracy. And not some get it more than others and not all are following the same approach on that. I'm not convinced that even certain European donors have got this better than the United States or multilateral organizations. Or I mean, including DFID, the narrative there is that we do not support our own model, we are very strongly committed to supporting variation, which is fine as a kind of overarching narrative. But when you look at particular projects, individual initiatives being supported, they don't necessarily reflect this search for variation or commitment to variation in any kind of tangible way. Then very, very briefly on the issue of illiberalism, which is an enormously complex issue. And it's actually, Shadi has done some brilliant work on different forms of illiberalism that in a way kind of inspired my book. One point I do try to make is that some often critics would say, this is not a very legitimate agenda because variations in democracy, different regional models of democracy basically boil down to more illiberal forms of democracy. And in many cases, that clearly is the case. And we need to be alert to that. But it's not always the case. It's not always the case. And the prompt, the search for different types of democratic practice and value in institutions doesn't always come from a search for illiberalism. And that's the first point. I mean, it may be in certain parts of the Middle East that you've studied a lot. But it's not universally the case, not globally the case. I think the distinction that Shadi makes between illiberal democracy that is somehow kind of being imposed from top down and that which kind of percolates from the bottom up, it's a very important distinction. The only question I ask myself, which becomes a very, very complicated issue is whether what is intrinsic to certain societies or political projects is conservatism or it's illiberalism. I just ask myself the question. I don't have an easy answer, but I sometimes wonder if that's the distinction we need to be making is between political projects or Islamism or certain projects in Asia that are dear to very conservative notions of social values on whether those kinds of moral or religious or social projects really require restrictions on political rights in order to be developed. And it may be sometimes they do, but it may be that in a way they're using their advocacy of restrictions on rights in a disingenuous way for the advancement of their own political projects, but it just seems that that's the terrain on which we need to be debating this distinction between what's a kind of genuine degree of support for what we might term as illiberalism and what's really therefore for political purposes that don't actually not intrinsic to a certain social project. Shadi, I'd like to ask you one question just as you were speaking and then something Sandra said. Shadi does a lot of work with Islamist currents of thinking and action in the Middle East and elsewhere. If the statistic that Sandra cites, which I think is absolutely correct, is somewhere around 70% of Arabs in public opinion polls affirm a belief in democracy as the most preferable political system. It's always quite striking how consistent and how high that is. How would an Islamist interlocutor interpret that statistic do you think? If you presented to them and said, well, my understanding is that 70% of Arabs believe democracy is the best form of system. How would they react to them? Well, in some countries the polling is even higher, 80 to 90% support for democracy. And actually, some polling has suggested that Islamists are sometimes more supportive of democracy than their secular counterparts, which when you think about it, isn't too surprising but might seem counterintuitive at first. But I think that the problem with those kinds of polling questions which were very popular pre-Arab spring is that they didn't really go into detail about what people meant by democracy. So democracy was sort of a stand-in for things that I like or anything that's good in some abstracts. I think that's different than what I have. Yeah, exactly. So I think Islamists would respond to it and say, yes, democracy. I mean, one of the big developments I would say of the last three decades or so is that the vast majority of mainstream Islamist movements, so by mainstream I mean affiliates or descendants of the Muslim Brotherhood have embraced the word democracy. I mean, if you look at their political platforms and they quite aggressively pepper their public statements with the word where if we were talking maybe 70s or early 80s, they still saw democracy as foreign and they prefer to use the word shura, which means consultation. So I think that in many ways everyone's come to terms with the idea that democracy is good but the problem is what does that mean in practice? And that's where Islamists would say, well, we like democracy but not liberal democracy or not American or Western democracy, we might have our own Islamically infused version of it. I'd like to ask you a similar question, Sandra, then I'll turn to the audience. If you were at a meeting of, I don't know what the forum would be an African regional forum, whether the AU or one of the other African mechanisms and there was a talk in the room in a sense of consensus around democracy as a principle for Africa, would that represent a real consensus to you in a sense or what would you hear in that when you heard that? Well, it's going to depend on who's in the room, isn't it really? I mean, if you... I'm thinking elites from a majority of African countries. Yeah, the problem is with the elites from majority of African countries. I think that's for me at the core of some of this and the analysis is that it doesn't do enough to get at the issues around interests and incentives for change. I think, you know, there's a sort of a... I think even as Richard, you responded to some of our comments, you know, when you said that the drivers towards democratic practice and democratic institutionalization are many and varied and they are not always a liberal. And in fact, you almost went as far to say as that they are more likely to be somewhat benign. Now, maybe I'm just an old cynic, but my view of the world is almost the other way around. I think that there is a lot that is done in order to acquire and accrue power that may have some, if you like, beneficial developmental spin-offs. And certainly in Africa, that's what we're seeing. We're seeing a lot of development progress being made without the assumption of pluralism or even communitarianism or any kind of real space for competition and contestation and new voices to come through. So I think, you know, if you were sitting at the AU in Addis Ababa with, I think, is it still President MacGarvey as the chair of the AU this year? Well, yeah, you're not gonna get a very kind of, you know, forthright and engaging and inclusive view of democracy. But I think the African populations through things like Afrobarometer, we know very clearly, have, you know, marked the card for democracy. And that's what I think in terms of supporting democratic development, we should go with the citizens. We should go with the grassroots. Okay, let's turn to the audience. Let me, I've got a number of hands. Let me start with two in the back and I'll get you guys there. Yeah, this gentleman right here. And then, okay, yeah. There's a microphone coming on your left, yeah. There's a microphone on your left. If you could introduce yourself and then just... Thank you, my name is Kenneth Button. I'm an economist, international economist, my background. Mr. Young, thank you for the discussion in the book. I've not yet had the pleasure of reading and I look forward to it. But I would appreciate it if you could identify for me what you would view as the four examples of successful non-western democracies and identify for us what you think makes them non-western in their structure or operation. Yeah, we had another, let me take one more of this gentleman right here, yeah. Yeah, there's a microphone coming on your right. Vijendra Kumar and I'm retired, but I'm from India and I go back there and we have our families and business. And Richard, I'd like for you to know if you've studied India at all in terms of how democratic values have really seeped into the village level. They have panchayats, which are democratically elected. So a poor country with a variety of diversity and religions has succeeded in being a democratic country. And so that has not been mentioned. The other thing is, as far as Africa is concerned, my wife was recently sent to Nigeria to assist in the transition of President Buhari to assist in that. So she had a perspective on that as to what, that one is that you really have to go to a country where they're ready for accepting advice, and Buhari was. So he asked for advice and NDI sent her there in terms of formulating how transition takes place because he's been involved for about six months now and he still doesn't have a cabinet. So she's assisting in drafting of laws and rules as to how power can be transitioned or transferred from one government to another. So that is essential. Thank you. Richard, do you want to respond to this question? Yeah. No, only to say that the spine of the book is precisely that we cannot identify non-Western democracies. I mean, that's the basic argument. So it's more, can you identify interesting democratic practices or practices that have a degree of democratic legitimacy within their local societies that may not look like the way that democratic institutions or Western institutions function or Western democratic practices function, but do lend a useful, a benign degree of variation to their local context. I don't think we can, for me we can't identify, it's impossible to identify a whole country and say that is a non-Western democracy in any kind of systemic sense. I think it's more useful to drill down and say in places like Bolivia, interesting in Brazil, interesting experiments are going on, innovations are going on about including ethnic groups into economic decision-making. The, I think it's probably more skeptical than I am on Tunisia in terms of reconciling protection for individual rights and communal religious rights, maybe some kind of pointer towards the future. Interesting power-sharing experiments in places in Africa, parts of the Middle East as well. And then places like Sierra Leone where you've got some usage of traditional settlement mechanisms and efforts at least to try and make sure they filter into national, constitutional processes and guarantees and don't circumvent core human rights standards. So I would say we should be learning more at that level than trying to identify any kind of ideal complete wholesale system that is non-Western in nature. We do have a, there's a section in the book on India that basically says precisely in this management of diversity, many of India's institutions and practices don't look qualitatively different from what exists in many Western countries, but there are, again, interesting supplements and compliments to what may exist in the West. Really, really, that's the kind of, the thrust of the book, this concept of liberalism plus that I try to flesh out, tries to give this idea that it's not about retracting from core liberal rights, it's about recognizing there's a kind of core of universal standards, but there's plenty of scope to build upon those in a way that's healthy and gives democracy more meaning to certain national and local contexts. Okay, I'm gonna take this gentleman here and then I'll come back to you. There's two right here and then I'll come back to you. Yeah, on your left, there's a microphone coming, thanks. Thank you. Wayne Mary, the American Foreign Policy Council. I'd like to press you a little more on the meaning of the term Western and the West because I've lived in a number of countries which include Russia, Germany and Greece where I've encountered very conflicting notions of what that term means. For example, many people in Germany do not consider their own country to be part of the West. I think almost all Americans would and it certainly is a democracy. So I'd like to pin you down by asking you specifically, do you consider Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore to be Western? Not do you consider them to be democratic, but do you consider those countries individually or as a group to be part of your notion of the West? Okay, next to you, there's a, right there, yeah. Hi, I'm Shashank from Georgetown University and to something that Richard said about economic transformation, well there is an argument to be made about in infragile states coming straight out of conflict, it might be easier to let the free markets prosper because the government in the initial days is weak. And then you talk about how there is a certain amount of resistance in the community towards the idea of neoliberal economics. So how does that dichotomy sort of sit with you? Let me take one. And if I may ask a question to Shadi because Shadi spoke on US policy and I know this could be slightly ambiguous but in light of the Richard's book, is there something on many more things that you would change about the US policy in terms of intervention? And do you see some of those, some past models could have come out differently, had those things been done? Yep, and then I wanna take one more here, please, sir. I'm Radwan Masmoudi with the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy. Thank you for a very interesting and timely discussion. I haven't read the book but my comment or my feeling is that democracy is not a state, it's a process. And it's an evolutionary process. And it took the United States 200 years to become the democracy that it is today. It was very different 50 years ago. I've been here for 31 years, it was very different 30 years ago. So, you know, democracies evolve over time. And this is very important because I think we're expecting these authoritarian regimes or countries to jump almost overnight from where they are or where they've been to where we are today, forgetting that it took us decades and maybe centuries to get where we are today. And I think the best example is the gays and lesbians issue and rights. You know, 10 or 20 years ago, it certainly was not a right in the United States. It, you know, gays and lesbians were in the closet. And they had no rights. And now that it changed in the United States, you know, we're expecting the whole world to change with us and to follow, you know, this and to take gays and lesbians rights as a given part of democracy or human rights or whatever. And this is where I'm really worried and alarmed because we're putting obstacles in front of many countries that want to follow the path of democracy. But, you know, by imposing these conditions or these standards, you know, that they have to be a democracy and you have to be like this or you're not a democracy. You know, and we're not giving them a chance again to evolve and to have these, you know, this process that took a long time in the United States or in the West or in many other countries. I'm going to turn back to the panel and I'm just going to turn to Richard a minute, but I want to put Sandra on notice. That last question, if you substitute gays with gender women, I wonder if you could speak to it. You must hear that argument here and there. And again, in the work that you do at NDI on promoting gender rights in the world. So be curious, your reaction to that. I'd like to come to Richard and Shadi to first respond. Well, on the question of what is Western? I certainly hope Germany is Western, otherwise the EU is in real problems. So I think a few Germans would contest the Germany's part of the West. But I think the core of your question was that you mentioned several Asian cases. I mean, as I'm sure everyone here knows, I mean certain sections of Singaporean society that have really led this kind of intellectual charge against Western notions of democracy. So they would probably reject being defined as Western. I mean, I have a section on each region in which I point out that within Asia, within Latin America, within Africa, there's just so much variation and diversion. And you have some countries whose institutions don't differ radically from what exists in the West. Others where there are differences, countries that are really authoritarian and may make claims to be democratic, but not in any kind of convincing way. So I think within each region you get the full spectrum from relatively consolidated full democracies through to quite untrammeled authoritarian regime. So I think that makes it difficult for those who purport to speak in the name of an Asian model or an African model or a Latin American model. Although he was asking not whether they're democratic, but just whether they're Western in some sense, separate from the question of whether they're democratic or not. Well, part of the West has different meanings. Yes, but I keep, I mean, strategically perhaps, but the issue of the book is to say, well, is its democracy meaningfully different from democracies that exist in the West? That's your question. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay, Shadi, you want it? There's more, hold on. Yeah. No, I think that the main question was about the neoliberal economics. My point was this, that I think there was a period in the 1990s when the international community was probably guilty of wrapping up their programs in support of neoliberal economics with support for democratic reform. So people got the perception that these two things were inextricably entwined. That means many people now have gone to the, politicians and analysts go to the other extreme and say that to improve democratic quality, to have healthy democratic variation, any kind of policies that deepen market dynamics is somehow unhealthy or negative, which isn't necessarily the case because I think in the right conditions, if you get economic liberalization taking place, it can disperse power, it can help tackle vested interests in a way that can underpin better democratic practices. But I do think it's when people say that there needs to be some kind of separation between certain types of economic reforms and certain types of political development, that is a legitimate argument to make and that there needs to be greater separation. Shadi? Yeah. So, you know, on the US policy question, I think this is a particularly dark time for those of us who believe that the US should play a more active role in supporting democracy abroad. It's probably even worse in Europe. But I mean, just think about it. When was the last time you heard Obama give a speech and use the word democracy and Middle East in the same sentence? I can't remember personally. So, that tells you something about where we are. And, you know, I think one challenge is that conceptually every US policymaker is going to say that they believe in supporting democracy in the Middle East. But it's more of a question of practice. And I think also, you know, I sometimes I wonder about this that if, say, a liberal party had come to power in Egypt and was threatening the military's grip and the military staged a coup like we had in July 2013, I would posit that the US and Europe would have a much more forceful response to the military coup. So, even if we say we're open to alternative forms of democracy or that if Islamists should have the right to participate, when it's actually happening, that's when I think American, I mean, it's understandable. Americans are instinctually uncomfortable with religion playing an outsized role in government. At least, well, not all Americans, but at least usually American policymakers have that discomfort. So, I would say that. And one thing on Ridwan's question very quickly is that the way democratization happens is just different today. So, you're exactly right that it took, you know, hundreds of years, but that's because there was a particular sequencing that first constitute the foundations of constitutional liberalism were established. And then and only then did you have democracy in the sense of full political equality for all citizens and universal suffrage. The problem, if you wanna call it a problem now is that you can't go to Egyptians or Tunisians after they have a revolution and say, well, you guys gotta do constitutional liberalism first and then you can think about electing your own leaders on the national level. So, the kind of sequencing has been reversed in a way. Sandra, did you wanna comment here? Yeah, I mean, I understand what you're saying about the sequencing being reversed, but I think it still goes to my point about, you know, the difference between institutionalization and institutions. And I think what we have is a tension between the ability for a society to evolve in some areas. But the evolutionary point, I think the danger for me in that evolutionary point which comes to what Tom really asked me to address is that, you know, we don't all need to have epidemics of lung cancer to understand that lung smoking is bad for us. You know, there must be some learning. We must be able to learn from other environments and other times. And to that extent, my disappointment really is in a way parallel to yours in that it does seem to be that gender equality remains the highest hurdle. You know, there are all sorts of other equalities that seem to have moved ahead faster than actually achieving gender equality, whether here or anywhere else in the world. So there are issues in that and that comes down to a different set of power relations around the relations between the genders and the sexes, which is a different conversation altogether. We're gonna stop here. The book is on sale outside for a special price of $15. There's people to sell it. The author is here with a right arm ready to sign books. I wanna thank everybody above all, Richard Young's for the book. And Shadi for the comments and Sandra as well. Thank you. It's a minute for me. Yeah. Yes, we have for him to, to Chris, it's nine of us to talk about. Next week we'll show you some of the sex that we're able to learn here. Some of this on this part of the book actually you know, is that because, for example, I think there's a limit to how far you can think about it. Christianity doesn't have sex, I don't believe it or I don't. It's like Islam has a limit to how far you can go. But there isn't an equivalent notion about how the canon law is going to be the same. I'm sure we all have a limit to how far you can go. I mean, that is canon law, so actually I think a lot of some of the summons of that, of law, I don't know about the law. Do you think of these names on the data? I don't think it's so far. Do you think it's so far? I don't think it's so far. I don't think it's so far. I don't think it's so far. One more question. I think that's quite consistent with what I'm saying. There's a kind of basis and then there's ways of building a variation on Torah. But my variation is not about that completely circumventing the importance of a canon law. I would not mention what you're talking about, the rule of law. I wouldn't say that that variation is about weakening the notion of law. the way it's delivering rules-based justice, not about setting up the rule-based justice movement. What we can do, I mean, do you want to... Yeah, for me, though, those are the kinds of tool, non-negotiable, I mean, I mean, many people say that those...that's still liberal, I still... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...