Canada in the World: Canadian International Policy

Video Interview Peter Ackerman Subscribe to eNewsletter and/or Email Alerts and Podcasts

Civil Disobedience - Duration 4:15

Other video formats - Windows Media | QuickTime

Transcript:

My name is Peter Ackerman, and I am the founding Chair of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. Non-violent conflict is what people do when they are living under oppression and they have no viable military option as a way to counter that oppression. So what they instead turn to is a variety of civilian-based techniques that are not violent, but that do place a great deal of pressure on authoritarians. Examples of those technique might be strikes, boycotts and mass protests, forms of civil disobedience. And the purpose of these elements of what I would call civic disruption is to undermine the legitimacy of an authoritarian, because at the end of the day an authoritarian wants tranquility, he wants obedience, he wants a population that doesn’t argue with him in any respect. This kind of resistance undermines that goal of his, and indeed puts in question his ability to even control his own military, his own key institutions, and even for example the business community.

The need to promote democracy overseas shifts depending on the country involved. For example, during the period after the Cold War and until let’s say 9/11, there were many countries that were anxious to receive information about best practices, including democracy, about how to have an independent judiciary, a functioning parliament, an honest bureaucracy. And so what you are getting is information transferred to recipients who really wanted the information.

Right now, I think the need is for governments to support, both in principle and as directly as possible, private organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to have the ability to maintain their presence in places like Russia or Uzbekistan or Belarus without fear of reprisal, without being thrown in jail. So they should take measures, using their power as a government, to basically seek that those governments do not repress their own populations.

So that is a large part of what democracy promotion is today: just getting those people who don’t want it to step aside. And then, of course, there is the need for information transfer about best practices, and I think NGOs are very capable of doing that. In cases, again, that are intractable, like the ones I just mentioned, there are also opportunities to put pressure in terms of directed sanctions on those leaderships. Mugabe, for example, and his closest associates should not be allowed to fly outside of Zimbabwe. Nobody mentions this, but there have been directed sanctions against North Korea, by having the United States shut down the bank accounts of the North Koreans in Macau. That is one of the reasons I believe we are sitting in the position we are right now, because that is what really hurts.

I think what you have to be careful about is not to use wholesale sanctions like we used in Iraq, where there is no internal movement that could direct the sanctions to the right place. So in South Africa, we had sanctions against the white regime, but they were called in by the anti-apartheid movement, and they were directed by corporations against white South Africans. In Iraq, the sanctions really took the biggest bite out of the general population, because they controlled the flow of oil and they basically were negotiated out with Saddam. So he always got the benefit, and you saw that with the oil for food scandal, and the people of Iraq basically suffered greatly.

The Culture of Democracy - Duration

Other video formats - Windows Media | QuickTime

Transcript:

Everybody has a different experience with democracy, but I think the United States and Canada have an awful lot to teach people around the world, but not with the idea that we have the monopoly on all best practices. Hardly. As the Chairman of Freedom House, we are going to do a book next year called Today’s American: How Free? and we shine a spotlight on ourselves—there is plenty of room for improvement.

For example, if you look at California, every single congressional election in California will not be competitive. Before all this recent flap, it was projected that fewer than 20 congressional campaigns were going to be competitive. That is a bad system.

So I think we have things to teach and I think we have weaknesses to address, but the one thing I don’t believe in is the use of this idea that, “Well, American democracy is very different than our democracy,” which is really an excuse for people in power to basically take democracy and rights away from the people underneath them. We had a similar debate about this in the 1960s, when people would say, “Well, you know, the developed world’s way of economic growth is different than the less developed world’s way of economic growth; development is different in these two because the cultures are different.” Well, that was marginally true, but the biggest truth behind that was the excuse for the tyrants in Africa to steal all the aid money that was coming to them. So it was an excuse not to live under certain common disciplines.

So, what are those common disciplines? Well, in a democracy or a free society some of those common disciplines include free and competitive elections. You can’t have democracy—whether you are an African, you are from Antarctica, you are from Sri Lanka, you are from Latin America—you can’t have free and fair elections without everybody’s ability to run, and the results of the election are counted accurately, and nobody is intimidated in the process. That is the bottom line, that is basic. You need civil liberties. People have to have the freedom to express and assemble. You need gender equality.

I don’t think a democracy today is really a democracy when people are excluded from participating. You need an independent judiciary. I don’t believe there can be a democracy in the world today where the court is corrupt and is being paid off by a branch of government. You need an independent press, because I don’t believe a democracy today—whether it is East Africa or the western United States—can succeed without a robust media. You need some form of property rights; you can’t have government constantly expropriating the fruits of the labour of its citizens. You need some kind of redistribution protection, because if the poor people become so oppressed and eviscerated, like you see in North Korea, at some point your economic circumstances are so bad that democracy has no meaning.

So when you disaggregate the elements of democracy, you find there is a lot of commonality. When you use it as a punchline—well, democracy is an American term, or it’s a First World term; freedom is an American term or a First World term—that is easy to do, but I think you are hiding a lot of data and evidence that need to be examined more closely.

(Video players are available here: QuickTime |  Windows Media)

Last Updated:2007-02-02

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