Conclusion

Zusammenfassung

Recent elevations of democracy promotion as a central objective of foreign policy agendas have not resulted in more people living in freedom. According to Freedom House (2008), “as the second consecutive year that the survey has registered a global decline in political rights and civil liberties, friends of freedom worldwide have real cause for concern”²⁵⁹. In spite of the massive resources invested and twenty-five years of experience since Reagan's ‘Project Democracy’ in engineering democracy abroad, serious doubts arise as to whether external democracy promotion matters after all. The real concern of policymakers and “friends of freedom” is that democracy promotion has seemingly no impact on the global spread of democratic regimes. This sobering net effect of efforts at external democratization allows two interpretations.