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2013 27: 228International Relations
William I Robinson
Promoting polyarchy: 20 years later
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228 International Relations 27(2)
Promoting polyarchy: 20 years later
William I Robinson
University of California at Santa Barbara
It has been nearly 20 years since I finished the research for my 1996 study, Promoting
Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony.1 Here, I want to summarize
that study and discuss what has happened over the past two decades, in particular, as
concerns the global crisis and the future of global polyarchy.
I first became interested in the topic of U.S. polyarchy promotion in the late 1980s. I had
served as an advisor to the Nicaraguan foreign ministry on elections and U.S. policy as that
country underwent an electoral process in the midst of war and U.S. intervention. The U.S.
government had supported the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over four decades and
then organized a counterrevolutionary movement against the Sandinista government in the
wake of the 1979 insurrection that overthrew the dictatorship. But Washington switched its
strategy in the second half of the 1980s, from pursuing the military defeat of the Sandinistas
to internal political and electoral intervention in the name of ‘democracy promotion’. The
change in strategy towards Nicaragua formed part of a more general shift in U.S. foreign
policy, from supporting dictatorships and promoting authoritarianism in the post World
War Two era to promoting what it referred to as ‘democracy’.
In attempting to make sense of this policy shift, I turned to a combination of world-
systems theory, global political economy – especially an analysis of globalization – and
neo-Gramscian perspectives in international relations. I concluded, in a nutshell, that
capitalist globalization generates escalating conflicts, large-scale social displacement
and political instability. Globalization has involved new rounds of primitive accumula-
tion worldwide that have shaken up existing power arrangements everywhere, not only
by disrupting the popular classes but also by undermining the terms of intra-elite accom-
modation. Prior to this new epoch of globalization, dictatorship and authoritarianism
constituted the predominant form of international social control – modalities of control
that had replaced, in turn, earlier colonial and oligarchic modes of political domination
in the international system. But dictatorships could not manage the tensions generated by
neo-liberal restructuring and integration into the emergent global economy. Mass move-
ments from below for democratization sought not just elections and civilian rule but
fundamental change in the socio-economic order. These rebellions against the depreda-
tions of capitalist globalization threatened to snowball into revolutions that challenged
the social order itself in the latter decades of the twentieth century.
As capitalist globalization advanced, global elites forged consensus around what I
referred as the transnational agenda of neo-liberalism and polyarchy (‘democracy’).
Neo-liberalism is a policy model for establishing the conditions that allow for transna-
tional capital mobility and globalized circuits of production and distribution. In turn,
global elites hope that polyarchic (‘democratic’) political arrangements will prove to be
a more resilient form of social control than authoritarian and dictatorial rule. As coun-
tries and regions have integrated into global capitalism, they have seen the rise of new
transnationally oriented elites organized in business associations, political parties, civic
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Kurki et al. 229
groups, the mass media and so on that are supported by the United States’ and Western
political intervention programmes conducted under the rubric of ‘promoting democ-
racy’. ‘Democracy promotion’ programmes seek to cultivate these transnationally ori-
ented elites who are favourably disposed to open up their countries to free trade and
transnational corporate investment. They also seek to isolate those counter-elites who
are not amenable to the transnational project and also to contain the masses from
becoming politicized and mobilized on their own, independent of or in opposition to the
transnational elite project by incorporating them ‘consensually’ into the political order
these programmes seek to establish.
From Managua to Manila and back to Managua
The 1980s thus began a season of elite transitions around the world. The shift in US
policy can be mapped from 1979 to 1985. As the Nicaraguan revolution brewed in 1978
and 1979, the Carter White House debated whether to continue its support for Somoza
or to back the non-Sandinista elite opposition. In the end, Washington chose to back
Somoza up to the bitter end and could not avert a revolutionary outcome to the crisis of
dictatorship. Several years later, in the Philippines, a similar revolution was brewing as
the Marcos dictatorship began to crumble. Inside the Reagan White House, a repeat
debate gripped policymakers: whether to shore up support for Marcos or shift it to the
elite opposition. This time, policymakers chose the latter course at a decisive moment
in the ‘People’s Power’ uprising, and as a result, power was passed from the dictatorship
to the anti-Marcos bourgeoisie, in the form of Corazon Aquino, and a popular revolu-
tionary outcome was adverted. As dictatorships and authoritarian regimes continued to
falter around the world in the face of popular democratization movements, from Chile,
to South Africa and Eastern Europe, the lessons of Nicaragua and the Philippines were
not lost on policymakers.
These lessons came full circle at the end of the 1980s, when Washington shifted the
strategy of counterrevolution in Nicaragua, from a military overthrow to internal
political intervention culminating in an electoral coup d’etat in 1990. As I documented
in my 2002 book, A Faustian Bargain, the US funders provided tens of millions of
dollars to the internal anti-Sandinista opposition as operatives poured into the coun-
try, pushed the unification of these anti-Sandinista forces, forged elite consensus and
designed and guided their media and electoral campaigns. They adroitly used the
leverage of years of military attrition and economic sanctions against an exhausted
population to turn the vote into a referendum on endless war and economic hardship
if the Sandinistas were to win at the polls, or peace and US aid if the opposition
emerged triumphant.2 With the success in Nicaragua, policymakers learned that these
new modalities of internal political intervention could be wielded to remove leftist
regimes just as effectively as they could be wielded to nudge out recalcitrant pro-
capitalist dictatorships.
In conclusion, it became clear that authoritarian forms of social control and interna-
tional order are not viable in the age of globalization. Dictatorships are unstable, and
their crony capitalism is not compatible with free market capitalism. Fluid global accu-
mulation requires flexible political systems that allow for competition and circulation
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230 International Relations 27(2)
among elites and the consensual incorporation of masses; polyarchy facilitates hegem-
onic incorporation (as opposed to coercive exclusion). In this regard, there was a certain
elective affinity in the late twentieth century between capitalist globalization and polyar-
chy. Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes open up crises among elites and space for
popular classes to contest the elite order. Theoretically, the turn to United States’ ‘democ-
racy promotion’ constituted a shift from coercive to consensual mechanisms of domina-
tion in the international system.
Passive revolution and the battle for global civil society
In the ensuing two decades, polyarchy as a policy has transnationalized and become
integrated into international relations. The EU is now deeply involved in such pro-
grammes, as are regional organizations such as the Organization of American States,
and international organizations such as the United Nations and the IFIs (in the 1990s,
the World Bank made lending conditional on ‘democracy’). But what is it that the
United States and transnational elites actually promote? Democracy, we should recall,
is an essentially contested concept. Like all such concepts, the definition itself is part
of ideological and political battles. I have borrowed the term ‘polyarchy’ from Robert
Dahl and modified what I mean by its invocation. What the United States actually
promotes when its policymakers speak of ‘democracy’ is elite rule by transnational
capitalists and agents or allies, in which the participation of the masses is limited to
choosing among competing elites in tightly controlled elections. As we entered the era
of globalization, the key challenge for transnational elites was how to make the world
safe for transnational capital (hence polyarchy) and available to transnational capital
(hence neo-liberalism)?
Polyarchy claims to be a process conception of democracy – procedurally free elec-
tions. But the claim is antinomious, since social and economic democracy is explicitly
excluded yet implicitly included. Policymakers and their organic intellectuals are quite
clear that ‘capitalism is necessary for democracy’; that to qualify as ‘democratic’, a
country must be capitalist and pursue the neo-liberal programme; and that a challenge to
capitalism is a threat to democracy. Thus, the conception behind United States’ ‘democ-
racy promotion’ is not really process (procedurally free elections) but outcome – neo-
liberal global capitalism. This is the political and the ideological sleight of hand in
‘democracy promotion’. What is crucial is that the ability to translate economic power
into political influence and to determine political outcomes. The structural power of
transnational capital is deeply at work in the United States’ polyarchy promotion.
In Promoting Polyarchy, I observed the actual mechanisms of the new political inter-
vention through six case studies: Nicaragua, Chile, Haiti, the Philippines, South Africa
and the former Soviet Bloc countries. The United States’ strategy was to intervene in the
civil society of these countries. This intervention sought to fund and guide more moder-
ate organizations attuned to the United States and transnational elite agenda, or to create
such organizations from scratch if they did not already exist, including student, youth
and women’s organizations, trade unions, peasant federations, community and civic
groups, business councils, media organizations and so on. These distinct sectors and their
organizations were brought into civil society networks, while more radical groups were
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Kurki et al. 231
scorned and marginalized. Simultaneously, elites were organized and helped to achieve
leadership positions in civil society organizations. Those transnationally oriented elites
that could take the reins of the transnational agenda were cultivated and bolstered while
more nationally oriented and/or authoritarian elites were subordinated. As these case
studies showed, elections often play a key role: United States’ political intervention pro-
grammes are organized around elections. Elections allow transnational elites and their
internal agents to harvest and channel legitimate grievances into a change in regime and
a project of neo-liberal integration into global capitalism.
As became clear in these case studies and in other instances of United States’ politi-
cal intervention over the past two decades, ‘democracy promotion’ and electoral inter-
vention programmes are combined with overall US and transnational elite policy,
including coercive and other forms of diplomacy, economic aid or sanctions, interna-
tional media and propaganda campaigns (‘public diplomacy’ and psychological opera-
tions or Psy-Ops), military or paramilitary actions, covert operations and so on. These
diverse strands of the US policy are woven together into a coherent unitary strategy,
often mounted around key conjunctures. The countries targeted for such operations fall
into three categories:
1. Removal of revolutionary, leftist and nationalist governments. This category
would include Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia,
Honduras prior to the 2009 coup d’etat and so on. Here, the goal is destabilization
of these regimes.
2. Removal of dictatorships and authoritarian or crony capitalist regimes. This cat-
egory would include Chile under Pinochet, South Africa under white minority
rule, the Philippines under Marcos, the countries of the so-called ‘colored revolu-
tions’, Iran and so on. Here, the goal is controlled destabilization of the regime
and transition to a new set of elites that embrace neo-liberalism.
3. Bolstering weak neo-liberal states and elites, such as United States’ programmes
in recent years in Mexico, Thailand, Jordan, Kenya, Peru, in Iraq after the
removal of Saddam Hussein, Honduras following the 2009 coup d’etat and so
on. Here, the goal is stabilization of the elite order – warding off threats through
‘political development programs’ and strengthening the underlying stability of
these regimes.
The objective is a deep penetration of the civil society and political system of the inter-
vened country – in Gramscian terms, of the extended state (‘political society + civil soci-
ety’). Neil Burron has cogently shown how escalating struggles from below by popular
classes for more thoroughgoing democratization in recent years have been countered from
above with a strategy of ‘capillary power’ and greater flexibility. United States and trans-
national elites have fine-tuned their strategies to bring popular sectors into the administra-
tion of their own domination through what he calls ‘inclusive neo-liberal governance’.3
The goal is to prevent any radical (leftist or otherwise) outcome to popular struggles for
democracy, to shape the outcome of political transitions, preserve neo-liberal policies and
to be open to global capitalism – in a nutshell, to assure that there will be no alternation of
fundamental class and power relations during political crises and transitions.
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232 International Relations 27(2)
In the broader picture, what was taking place was the battle for global civil society. In
this battle, US policymakers and organic intellectuals became good Gramscians. They
came to understand that hegemony is constructed in civil society, beyond what groups or
individuals are in charge of the state apparatus. They attempted to carry out a global pas-
sive revolution in the wake of the breakup of dictatorships and authoritarian arrange-
ments around the world. The Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of
passive revolution to refer to efforts by dominant groups to bring about mild change from
above in order to undercut mobilization from below for more far-reaching transforma-
tion. Integral to passive revolution is the co-optation of leadership from below, its inte-
gration into the dominant project.
US policymakers and transnational elites have attempted to carry out passive revolu-
tion in Egypt, by way of example, as a response to the Arab Spring. In January 2011, the
Egyptian people began a popular uprising against the dictatorial regime of Hosni
Mubarak – the so-called Papyrus Revolution – inspired by a similar uprising weeks ear-
lier in Tunisia that sent the president of that country into exile. Thus began the Arab
Spring that soon spread to Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere in the
volatile Middle East. In the days following the February 11 resignation of Mubarak, the
United States convened the Western powers to put together a multi-billion dollar ‘aid’
package to post-Mubarak Egypt. The package was to include tens of millions of dollars
to ‘promote democracy’. For over three decades, the United States had propped up the
repressive Egyptian state and its backbone, the military, with billions of dollars each year
and unflinching political support. The ‘democracy promotion assistance’ was intended to
contain the popular rebellion within manageable boundaries. Political regime change
could be tolerated – actually encouraged – so long as Egypt’s popular masses did not
challenge the pillars of the Egyptian social order itself – domination by an increasingly
transnationally oriented civilian–military elite and a neo-liberal programme of integra-
tion into global capitalism.
Global crisis and the future of polyarchy promotion
Eighteen years have passed since I completed the draft of Promoting Polyarchy in 1994.
On the one hand, capitalist globalization has deepened many times over in these past 18
years, and ‘democracy promotion’ intervention campaigns have been undertaken in one or
another form in most countries around the world. On the other hand, in these 18 years, the
transnational elite has moved from the offensive – with its confident ‘The End of History’
proclamation – to the defensive as global capitalism has spiralled into an ever-deeper
crisis. This crisis is unprecedented, given its magnitude, its global reach, the extent of
ecological degradation and social deterioration and the scale of the means of violence. We
truly face a crisis of humanity in this second decade of the twenty-first century. We have
entered into a period of great upheavals and uncertainties, of momentous changes.
Facing this crisis calls for an analysis of the ‘big picture’ of the capitalist system,
which underwent restructuring and transformation in recent decades. The current moment
involves a qualitatively new transnational or global phase of world capitalism that can be
traced back to the 1970s, and is characterized by the rise of truly transnational capital and
a transnational capitalist class (TCC).4 Transnational capital has been able to break free
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of nation-state constraints to accumulation of the previous epoch, and with it, to shift the
correlation of class and social forces worldwide sharply in its favour and to undercut the
strength of popular and working classes around the world in the wake of the global rebel-
lions of the 1960s and the 1970s. Emergent transnational capital underwent a major
expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, involving hyper-accumulation through new technolo-
gies such as computers and informatics, through neo-liberal policies and through new
modalities of mobilizing and exploiting the global labour force – including a massive
new round of primitive accumulation, uprooting and displacing hundreds of millions of
people, especially in the Third World countries, who have become internal and transna-
tional migrants. We face a system that is now much more integrated, and dominant
groups have accumulated an extraordinary amount of transnational power and control
over global resources and institutions.
But by the late 1990s, the system entered into chronic crisis.5 Sharp social polariza-
tion and escalating inequality helped generate a deep crisis of over-accumulation. The
extreme concentration of the planet’s wealth in the hands of the few and the accelerated
impoverishment and dispossession of the majority even forced participants in the 2011
World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos to acknowledge that the gap between
the rich and the poor worldwide is ‘the most serious challenge in the world’ and is ‘rais-
ing the specter of worldwide instability and civil wars’. Global inequalities and the
impoverishment of broad majorities mean that transnational capital cannot find produc-
tive outlets to unload the enormous amounts of surplus it has accumulated. By the
twenty-first century, the TCC turned to several mechanisms to sustain global accumula-
tion, or profit making, in the face of this crisis.
One is militarized accumulation: making wars and interventions that unleash cycles
of destruction and reconstruction and generate enormous profits for an ever-expanding
military–prison–industrial–security–financial complex. We are now living in a global
war economy that goes well beyond such ‘hot wars’ in Iraq or Afghanistan. A second
mechanism is the raiding and sacking of public budgets. Transnational capital uses its
financial power to take control of state finances and to impose further austerity on the
working majority, resulting in even greater social inequality and hardship. The TCC has
used its structural power to accelerate the dismantling of what remains of the social wage
and welfare states. And a third is frenzied worldwide financial speculation – turning the
global economy into a giant casino. The TCC has unloaded billions of dollars into specu-
lation in the housing, food, energy and other global commodities markets; in bond mar-
kets worldwide (i.e. public budgets and state finances); and into every imaginable
‘derivative’, ranging from hedge funds to swaps, futures markets, collateralized debt
obligations, asset pyramiding and Ponzi schemes.
I concluded Promoting Polyarchy by observing the irresolvable contradiction of pro-
moting polyarchy and promoting neo-liberalism. The widening inequalities generated by
capitalist globalization generate conflict and instability that break down the bases for
consensual mechanisms of social control. The 2008 collapse of the global financial sys-
tem triggered a global rebellion that has been simmering for many years. Under these
conditions, consensual domination is increasingly difficult to sustain. Hegemony is
breaking down. The rise of an ultra right in many countries and the spectre that it will
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234 International Relations 27(2)
pursue a project of twenty first–century fascism points to the dangers of more general-
ized coercive forms of social control.
Central to the story of global capitalism and global crisis is a mass of humanity involv-
ing hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people who have been expropriated from the
means of survival, yet also expelled from capitalist production as global supernumeraries
or surplus labour, relegated to scraping by in this ‘planet of slums’ and subject to all
pervasive and ever-more sophisticated and repressive social control systems. The state
responds to those expelled from the labour market and locked out of productive labour
not with expanded social welfare and protection but with abandonment. In this transition
from social welfare to social control or police states, the state resorts to a host of mecha-
nisms of coercive exclusion: mass incarceration and prison–industrial complexes, perva-
sive policing, manipulation of space in new ways, highly repressive anti-immigrant
legislation and ideological campaigns aimed at seduction and passivity through petty
consumption and fantasy. From the vantage point of dominant groups, the challenge is
how to contain the mass of supernumeraries and marginalized and the resistance of
downwardly mobile majorities. This need for dominant groups around the world to
assure widespread, organized mass social control of the world’s surplus population and
of rebellious forces from below gives a powerful impulse to a project of twenty-first-
century global fascism.
Simply put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy can-
not easily be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control and through
hegemonic domination. The future of global polyarchy is uncertain. The only viable
solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power
downward towards the poor majority of humanity. And the only way such redistribution
can come about is through mass transnational struggle from below to achieve popular
democratization against the mechanisms of domination imposed in the name of ‘promot-
ing democracy’.
1 William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
2 William I. Robinson, A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and
American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).
3 Neil Burron, The New Democracy Wars: The Politics of North American Democracy
Promotion in the Americas (Williston, VT: Ashgate, 2012).
4 In particular, see William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); chapter 1 of Robinson, Latin America and Global
Capitalism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
5 On the crisis of global capitalism, see William I. Robinson, ‘The Great Recession of 2008 and
the Continuing Crisis: A Global Capitalism Perspective’. International Review of Modern
Sociology, 38(2): 169–198, 2012.
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