Secretary Clinton got some unpleasant news as she was working to round up support for US regional diplomacy in the United Arab Emirates this week: the UAE announced that it was closing down the offices of a prominent American quango linked to the Democratic Party. Though the incident lacked the drama of the arrests of quango employees in Egypt earlier this year, it was a slap in the face and a sign of just how tired many world governments are growing of this new cross between government and the private philanthropic sector.
A quango is a quasi NGO and in the United States many of them are focused on promoting democracy overseas. Although organizations like the National Democratic Institute and its counterpart the International Republican Institute are largely funded by the federal government, they operate under more or less independent boards of directors. They are modeled in some ways on the German political party foundations, again funded largely by taxpayers but operated under the authority of political parties rather than the government itself. The democracy quangos are set up to interfere with the politics of other countries. They donÂ’t necessarily take partisan positions in their elections, but they train democracy activists, provide them with support, and generally work to open up political space in target countries as a way of promoting the kind of political change Americans like to see.
The US and some other countries have enjoyed a free ride for a while. These organizations have been able to operate pretty freely in a large number of countries; we have in effect found a way of getting government-funded activities and organizations on foreign soil without having to observe all the tiresome, tedious formalities of diplomatic custom and usage.
When countries like the UAE start slamming the doors (and on the German foundations as well as the American ones) this is a sign that the free ride may be coming to an end. In the future, foreign countries may well demand that entities directly or indirectly funded by foreign governments operate only on the basis of a negotiated and mutually acceptable agreement. To many in the west, this will feel like a crackdown on free speech; to many in other countries it will feel like an anti-colonial assertion of national sovereignty.
Unfortunately, genuine NGOs are getting smeared with the quango label. It is easy for demagogic or anti-democratic politicians to attack authentic civil society movements and institutions by fuzzing the line between quangos and the rest. The west has colluded in fuzzing the difference as well, and that may have been a mistake. Quasi-NGOs have had a good run, but the combination of budgetary stringency at home and resistance abroad puts a question mark over their future. |