New
or
Restored
Democracies
What
is
the
Process undertaken
by
the
movement
of New
or
Restored
Democracies?
The New or Restored Democracies Process took off in Asia in the late 1980’s on the initiative of the Philippines. The constitutive idea of the process is that democratization of States can be supported through international cooperation. These states gathering and working together assumed that, with mutual support, internal and external tendencies and forces endangering the processes of democratization could be overcome.
The process continued with a Second International Conference on New or Restored Democracies in 1994 in Latin America, (in Managua, Nicaragua), and from there the baton was passed on to Europe and Romaina, where the Third Conference was held in Bucharest in 1997. The Fourth Conference was held on 3-6 December 2000 in Africa, with Cotonou in Benin as host. The Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar served as host for the Fifth Conference in September 2003 and the Sixth Conference will be held in Qatar in the period October 29-Nov.1, 2006.
The
United
Nations
The United Nations was introduced to the process in 1994, well after the end of the Cold War. UN Secretary-General ,then, Mr Boutros Boutros-Ghali, with the General Assembly saw a specific role for the UN to play in this process. The expertise of the the UN Department of Political Affairs and that of various specialized agencies of the UN could open up new possibilities for envisaging the problems and prospects for democratization as well as contributing to efficient problem-solving at various levels. So far, the main and direct achievements of the UN system have been reflected by the work of various entities within the UN system studying and concretely supporting democratization, including the works of United Nations University, UNU and United Nations Development Program, UNDP, let alone the Secretary-General’s annual reports on Democratization, "An Agenda for Democratization", and the UN contributions to the Managua and Bucharest Conferences. The UN has developed a website devoted to its work in this process.
At the UN, Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s "An Agenda for Democratization" also included the idea that some aspects of international relations and global systems of governance should be democratized alongside democratization of the nation states. Naturally, this turned out to be a rather controversial point of view, resisted as it were by the US and some big member countries of the European Union. However, in his first democratization report, issued in October 1997, Kofi Annan emphasised the continuity of the agenda of Boutros-Ghali. In practice, it is perhaps more in line with the now standard Western neoliberalist interpretation of democratization, the report does not forget to mention that "more research is needed on the links between globalisation, including the role of financial markets, and threats to democratization".
As far as the New or Restored Democracies process is concerned, it was stated already in the Managua Declaration and Plan of Action (1994) that the inside of a state is not independent from the outside, as exemplified by the power of IMF and the World Bank over the social developments of many states. In the Final Document of the Bucharest Conference (1997), it was stated that: "Managing globalisation is a very important process that affects all sectors of international society. In the current international environment it may be necessary to adopt new accords of global governability. This implies, in itself, a new moral contract for peace as well as new agreements on economic flows, equity, control of financial speculation and the democratization of communications."
Network Institute for Global Democratization, NIGD (http://www.nigd.org/) forms part of the follow-up mechanism of the Civil Society Forum of the New or Restored Democracies' -process preparing for the Civil Society Forum at the Sixth Annual Conference On New and restored Democracies, ICNRD-6, taking place in Doha, Qatar in Fall 2006.
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