Ukraine visit highlights hope for democracy

Democracy's global march will take the Washington spotlight this week as Viktor Yushchenko - who rode a wave of people power and braved a near-fatal poisoning to become Ukraine's president in January - makes calls on the White House and the US Congress.

Mr. Yushchenko, who visits President Bush Monday and speaks to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, will discuss matters ranging from economic ties to prospects for NATO membership.

But symbolically he comes as a poster boy for democracy's spread to new corners of the globe, as the Bush administration settles on democratization - especially of the Arab and Muslim worlds - as its principal foreign-policy goal.

Indeed, the parade of new democrats, including leaders who came to power in high-profile elections, will probably maintain a brisk pace. Palestine's Mahmoud Abbas will be greeted at the White House later this spring.

Yet for all the basking in democratic progress, the Yushchenko visit also provides a setting for gauging the US role in democracy promotion. In particular, questions are being asked from Latin America to Eastern Europe and beyond about whether the US and American prodemocracy groups are promoting universal values - or siding with favored leaders and furthering national interests.

At the same time, questions are likely to intensify over intervention in nations' internal affairs at a time when much of the "low fruit" - the easier cases for democratization - is already picked. This will be especially true as pressures for change mount in countries that may not have a robust civil society to cushion the turmoil that accompanies political change. One example is Zimbabwe, where the regime of Robert Mugabe last week tightened its grip in what are widely viewed as fraudulent parliamentary elections.

"We're at a crucial moment that calls for being especially careful about supporting certain universal values and not political tendencies," says Thomas Carothers, a democratization expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. After a post-cold-war decade of democratic advancement, he adds, "barriers may be rising again as regimes recognize how involvement from outside [of prodemocracy forces] may hurt them."

President Yushchenko's own political opponents in the authoritarian regime he battled portrayed his struggle and ultimate victory as an American- and Western-engineered power play. The thousands of Ukrainians who kept a frigid vigil over the elections, and the judiciary that stood firm against the pressures of the ruling powers, belied such claims.

But the more recent case of Kyrgyzstan, the former Soviet republic where protests over fraudulent parliamentary elections led to the president's flight to Russian refuge last month, offers a different picture.

There, more than a decade of US funding for prodemocracy groups and civil-society development in a particularly poor country has been judged as critical to the departure of President Askar Akayev and the rise of new Prime Minister Kurmanbek Bakiyev. The new leader had visited America on a US government grant to study democracy development. The political opposition was nourished by US and European funding. And the population had expanding access to newspapers and electronic media funded by Western sources.

Some experts see a fine line between encouraging democratic reforms and provoking instability, and argue that the US must take care not to appear to be crossing over to the latter - particularly for the chilling effect it could have on long-term reform efforts.

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