Promoting democracy? Or supporting Bush war policies?

Ramesh Jaura reports Europeans Reluctant To Back UN Democracy Fund Inter Press Service 04/26/06:

The world's largest democracies, India and the United States, have emerged as the two biggest supporters of a global fund to promote democratisation.

European nations, on the other hand, have been reluctant to shore up the new facility known as the UN Democracy Fund (UNDEF), a United Nations document released in Brussels last week reveals.

Why would the EU democracies oppose such a thing? Jaura's article doesn't go into much detail on that.

But the main answer isn't complicated. It's the Iraq War. The war still is one of the biggest problems in cooperation on antiterrorism efforts between the US and the EU, even though there has been improvement recently in some areas. Daniel Benjamin, et al, report in Currents and Crosscurrents of Radical Islamism (April 2006) write:

Transatlantic cooperation has faltered when Europeans have felt they are being handed diktat instead of being genuinely consulted. Style, European Dialogue participants tell their American partners, matters. In addition, because the war in Iraq remains deeply unpopular with ordinary Europeans, any perceived link with the U.S. agenda in Iraq can make joint undertaking difficult or impossible. For example, U.S. calls for deeper transatlantic cooperation in the area of democratization have been interpreted by Europeans as a cloaked U.S. effort to gain more support for missions like Iraq. (my emphasis)

We couldn't exactly call it "giving democracy a bad name". But it is giving "democracy promotion" a bad name.

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