Helping freedom take root

As we celebrate our own, we seek new ways to spread it around

Clarke Thomas
July 02, 2008

As during this Fourth of July week we celebrate freedom, what is the future of democracy around the world? Public attention on Iraq and Afghanistan has obscured the important behind-the-scenes struggles for freedom being waged across the world by millions of citizens, some of them supported by the United States.

I have been alerted to these important efforts by Mike Staresinic, a Highland Park neighbor. A Penn State electrical engineering graduate, Mike in recent years has been involved as a freelancer in pro-democracy efforts in 20 countries, notably Serbia, Kosovo and Lebanon. This past month his work has taken him to Africa and again to the Balkans.

But, first, the overall story.

In 1982, President Reagan proposed an initiative "to foster the infrastructure of democracy -- the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities." The result: Congress in 1983 established a bipartisan, nonprofit corporation called the National Endowment for Democracy, which, though nongovernmental, would be funded primarily with federal dollars.

In turn, Congress established four "core institutes" for which NED would be the grant-making organization. They are the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity and the Center for International Private Enterprise. This meant the skills of the two major political parties, the labor movement and the business community could be put to work, depending upon whether the best bet for pro-democracy efforts in a given country was a rightist party, a leftist party or a labor or business confederation.

Example: the American labor movement was key in aiding the Polish Solidarity movement, the first crack in Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe.

Note: In some cases, the efforts have been athwart official U.S. policy, where the U.S. government has not wished to support democracy because it might destabilize an allied regime.

At the same time, there have been numerous private organizations at work -- such as Freedom House, a monitoring and advocacy organization; the Open Society network founded by billionaire George Soros; and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. It's important to note that the NED system brought more into the open the work done in clandestine ways by the CIA during the Cold War.

At present, Congress appropriates about $100 million annually to NED for grant-making to its core institutes. Expert Larry Diamond estimates about $1 billion a year flows through American government and nongovernmental agencies for the worldwide pro-democracy cause. Active work by similar European institutions is over and above that figure.

Back to Mike Staresinic. After Penn State, he served in the Peace Corps in Swaziland, Africa, for two years. That gave him a yen for international work for democracy. Of Slovenian heritage, he became involved in Bosnia and in the student-led Optor dissent movement in Serbia which ultimately ousted dictator Slobodan Milosevic. "Seeing a bloody dictator fall without a shot fired," he said, "inspired the whole world." Part of this work was on contract with Freedom House. That experience led to a similar role in Kosovo. While in the Balkans he met his future wife, Nevena, a Serbian.

To regularize his efforts, Mike in 2006 formed a company, Breakthrough Leadership. Mike says that what he has found is "around the world, there is an incredible demand for sharing experiences." Thus he has been involved in sharing the Serbian experience with pro-democracy forces in Georgia and in Ukraine (site of the so-called Orange Revolution). He tells of Lebanese dissident students using tents in the main square. Why? "Because that's what they saw they did in the snows and rain in Ukraine!"

Mike and I have discussed the best work on the subject, "The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies throughout the World," by Mr. Diamond of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Mr. Diamond describes the gloom about democracy in the early 1970s when three-fourths of nations were dictatorships. Then came the first wave of democratic transitions -- Portugal, Spain and Greece.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ushered in a democratic wave in ex-Soviet slave states. Meanwhile, numerous Latin American countries made the switch. By the new century, things looked good, with more than half of the nations democratic in some major sense.

Lately, though, there has been what Mr. Diamond calls the "democratic recession," with Russia, Venezuela and Nigeria returning to autocracies. This has made the demand for workers like Mike all the greater.

Mike remains optimistic:

"There is an incredible ferment for freedom in many countries. People keep standing up whether the conditions are enabling or not, and we should admire and support that. You can't impose democracy. If people want it, they do all the work for it, and they are the ones who make it happen."

Clarke Thomas is a Post-Gazette senior editor.