US Public Diplomacy and Democracy Promotion in the Cold War, 1950s–1980s

Abstract

The promotion of democracy has widely been regarded as a central theme, if not a driving force, behind US foreign policy during the twentieth century, with its starting point firmly located with President Wilson, and its influence being consistently and widely felt through the Cold War and into the post-Cold War era. We can define democracy promotion as the attempt to establish and/or strengthen forms of democratic governance in another nation-state, involving the use of force, the leverage of (economic) conditionality to change forms of domestic governance, and/or various instruments (technical, financial, political) through which to assist local processes of democratization.1 The different methods have been used in different contexts at different times, but the common characteristic is that they all represent forms of intervention in another state’s political affairs for the local and general good. Based on this definition, as Bridoux and Kurki argue, “It is difficult not to consider the United States as the cradle of democracy promotion.”2