20 Years of Promoting Democracy
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
President Bush will be the keynote speaker today at an event celebrating the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, a congressionally funded but largely independent institution that gives grants to promote democracy and civil society abroad. The president’s speech is expected to focus on the need to build democratic institutions in the Middle East. It could have no more appropriate backdrop than the NED. The mission of the Endowment, created during the Cold War, has become all the more vital in the current world war.
“People have come to appreciate the work even more now than during the Cold War period,” the Endowment’s president, Carl Gershman, told The New York Sun yesterday. “There’s an understanding that the only way to deal with these problems is establishing the rule of law in the societies where there has been trouble.… Democracy is a precondition of that.”In Afghanistan and Iraq, the Endowment is supporting non-governmental organizations in developing the capacities and abilities of local civic education and human rights institutions. Even before the liberation of Iraq, the Endowment was working to lay the groundwork for a democratic transition.
The value of the Endowment lies in its freedom from reliance on a single political patron. It has the support of both political parties, as well as the free trade union movement and business. Being outside the State Department, it is able to work with dissident groups that the polite foreign service establishment shies away from. The value of the Endowment also comes from the long-term commitment that is its founding vision, laid out in a 1982 speech by President Reagan, where he called for an initiative “to foster the infrastructure of democracy — the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities — which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.”
“No one has any delusions that this can be done even in a generation,” Mr. Gershman said. Maybe not. But Mr. Bush, in his speech, will further clarify his plan for what this generation can do.
