Sabotage: When Motherlands Ruin Foreign Democratization Efforts

Why do some international efforts to promote democracy abroad fail? A few conventional answers: the target country lacks the necessary institutions; leadership is incapable of making the changes required; and third-parties have insufficient influence needed to motivate a new system. My research, however, suggests something else entirely: democratization efforts fail when nearby ethno-nationalist homelands, or <i>motherlands, </i>interfere in the democratization processes of their neighbors as they seek to contest the political borders of the states with whom they share transnational ethnic kin. Democratization is seen as a barrier to promoting the convergence between ethnic and political boundaries. Building on the theory of peace spoilers, I contend that a motherland can opt for a variety of strategies to challenge the democratization of a target state. Strategies can range from helpful to harmful to democratization of a target state. Their level of effectiveness at spoiling democratization efforts is a function of the intensity and frequency of events (conflict or cooperative) that a motherland initiates against a target state. Relying on new datasets from Varieties of Democracy, Ethnic Power Relations and Phoenix Events Data, and different statistical models, my research shows through a large-N study and a case study that the level of democracy of a target country is lower when a motherland displays high levels of intensity and frequency of conflictual. Also, democratization emerges as an ethno-national homeland exhibits low levels of motivation and opportunity to contest the borders. My findings show that motherlands can act as spoilers when they are a non-democratic regime that has recently lost territories populated by ethnic kin to a nearby state; and enablers of democratization when they are a democracy and were separated from kin long ago.