RSS 2013 Abstracts
1st Seminar
Political liberalism and the ‘internal resistance’ to democracy promotion
Elisa Piras
Political liberalism is the philosophical foundation of democratic agency. In envisaging possible foreign
policy guidelines to cope with global political pluralism, both liberal scholars and democratic leaders face a
dilemma between alternative conceptions of democracy promotion. The problem is how to reconcile the
theoretically sound principles of self-determination and democratic governance when they clash in the
empirical realm and a prioritization of one over the other is needed. This accounts for the internal – that is,
intra-liberal – contestation of mainstream democracy promotion strategies and discourse. Furthermore,
this ‘prioritization dilemma’ reflects the liberal tension between the attitudes of toleration and
assertiveness towards the ‘other’, i.e. the non-liberal. This paper analyses two influent theoretical positions
on democratic foreign policy advocating different guidelines for policy-makers confronting global political
pluralism – John Rawls’s and Amitai Etzioni’s – and it argues that their choice of guidelines reflects two
slightly different, though not mutually exclusive, conceptions of democracy promotion relying on different
accounts of political liberalism. Also, the paper argues that the impact of this divide goes beyond the
philosophical debate to permeate alternative foreign policy strategies. In order to show the empirical
implications of liberalism’s aporia, the paper considers the problem of the prioritization between the
principles of self-determination and democratic governance in US foreign policy strategies explicitly
addressing democracy promotion abroad after the end of the Cold War. After the analysis of the different
solutions proposed to the problem – and the tools adopted from time to time – and the different outcomes
of democracy promotion policies, the paper concludes that the liberal dilemma is still alive and its
implications are visible in the incoherence of democracy promotion policies as well as in their mixed
results. In order to address the dilemma, it is argued, a convergence of research agendas for scholars in
political theory and foreign policy analysis over the prioritization dilemma is a needed first step towards the
policy-oriented redefinition of democracy promotion.