In her book, Marketing Democracy, Erin Snider unpacks the “blackbox” of U.S. democracy promotion aid, elucidating its practices and construction in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) from the late 1990s until the mid-2000s. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, extensive archival research, and novel statistical data, Marketing Democracy is a timely and fascinating book, rich in both its empirical and theoretical contributions. Comparing U.S. democracy promotion aid to Egypt and Morocco, Snider seeks to address two main questions: First, why have U.S. democracy promotion programs seemed to have such little impact in the MENA? And, second, why does this region’s nondemocratic regimes—which intrinsically want to continue their hold on power over politics—tolerate the presence of such programs ostensibly committed to their own demise? Although both questions drew the curiosity of this reader, I found the second particularly interesting and counter-intuitive, without a clear answer found in the existing literature. In short, Snider argues, the United States has to figure out how to “sell” democracy promotion programs to nondemocratic regimes, which are suspicious that they may work to undermine their own stability and control over politics (p. 113).
Snider’s theory, familiar to those who study forms of foreign aid in other policy realms, hinges on the notion of perverse unintended consequences—the idea that actions can sometimes have the opposite of the desired effect in a negative fashion. On this score, Snider argues that U.S. democracy aid helps to reinforce the nondemocratic regimes that receive it, rather than increasing whatever momentum might exist toward democratization. That’s why nondemocratic regimes in the MENA will tolerate it (and perhaps sometimes even like such aid). To explicate this argument, Snider deploys a political economy approach that considers democracy programs as “negotiated deals” between donor and recipient states (p. 8). Rather than accepting these democracy programs as hand-outs with no questions asked, like Christmas dinner at a soup kitchen, recipient states actually impose numerous conditions upon them, which reconfigure them to align with the economic and political interests of the regime’s elites (p. 8). These economic and political interests, Snider argues, often relate to elites’ desires to promote market economy reforms or improve the effectiveness of existing regime institutions.
Snider subsequently provides several examples showing how her theory works. One of the best comes from her extensive fieldwork in Egypt. In Egypt, the United States wanted to promote the expansion of civil society (p. 109). Egyptian elites, however, feared such programs would empower the Muslim Brothers (i.e., Muslim Brotherhood), which was an illegal group though the largest and most powerful in civil society. So, due to the group’s illegal status it was, as Snider writes, “excluded from any discussions of democracy assistance support” (p. 109). Rather, most U.S. democracy aid in Egypt ended up being channeled through Economic Support Funds (ESF) under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. These ESF funds reflected the “U.S. government’s conviction that support for a market economy is necessary for the development of and transition to democracy” (p. 110). Ultimately, this U.S. democracy aid linked to promotion of a free market became much more successful, due to its popularity in the U.S. Congress and also among Egyptian elites, notably Gamal Mubarak (son of the dictator and heir-apparent). During this period, Gamal Mubarak and his business allies had been simultaneously pushing for a “privatization boom” in the state-owned industries to enrich themselves (p. 198). The fact that democracy promotion became bound to market economy promotion aligned with the interests of Egypt’s regime, one that was actively implementing neoliberal reforms. More broadly, Snider suggests, the regime would also likely benefit from these reforms if they were to spur economic growth, which could trickle down to benefit the masses (and make them less prone to cause unrest). This was a concern on the minds of Egyptian regime elites in these years, as a wave of labor strikes increased dramatically in Al-Maḥallah al-Kubrā and other secondary cities in the mid-2000s, presaging the 2011 revolution.
Snider should be congratulated for this excellent book. Its timeliness and richness of empirical detail will attract not only scholars but also policymakers in the U.S. democracy promotion community. One particularly interesting chapter of the book examines “job switch” data on U.S. democracy promotion professionals in Washington, who pass through a revolving door between working at U.S. public agencies (e.g., State Department, USAID), to nonprofit organizations (like the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute), and even to for-profit contractors (pp. 81-82). One topic this reader would have liked Snider to unpack a bit more was the presumed uniformity of regime elites’ economic interests. She may have somewhat overstated the homogeneity of economic preferences of elites, both in Egypt and Morocco. Before the 2011 revolution in Egypt, neoliberal reform—especially privatization and similar pro-market measures—became in vogue in some elite circles. Yet other Egyptian elites, especially generals and other top brass within the military apparatus (as Hicham Bou Nassif, Zoltan Barany, and others have shown) benefited (and continue to benefit) handsomely from state-owned factories and other industries. From that perspective, in theory, U.S. democracy aid’s link with promoting market reforms would have run contrary to their interests and, thus, the military leaders would likely have been more likely to work to outwardly oppose it (than, say, Gamal Mubarak and his business allies in favor of privatization). Though it has a much smaller public sector than Egypt, some of Morocco’s elites similarly have a vested interest in sustaining the royal conglomerates, like Al Mada Holding (formerly the Société Nationale d’Investissement). Yet no book can unpack all topics, cover all areas, and answer all questions, so this is to be expected and it emerges as a possible avenue of research for future scholars.
In short, I recommend Marketing Democracy for any student, scholar, or policymaker interested in learning more about the perverse, unintended consequences of U.S. programs aimed at encouraging democratization. Marketing Democracy is an exemplar in showing how the United States can do more for the Arab world by doing less.
