Negative Districts

Placing political conditions on humanitarian aid is unjust

Definitions: Merrium Webster
Political is of or relating to politics or governments.
Politics is the activities that relate to influencing the actions and policies of a government or getting
and keeping power in a government
A condition is something essential to the appearance or occurrence of something else.
A political condition is a governmental change that is needed to receive humanitarian aid.
Value: Justice
The quality of being just, impartial, or fair
Criterion: Democracy
In the words of Winston Churchhill, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except
for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." He means although democracy has
flaws, it has less flaws than all the other systems, therefore it is the best system.
I have five compelling arguments to support why democracy is the best system.
First, and certainly the most compelling, it supports freedom, we have more freedom of
speech and expression than other governments and have the freedom to criticize our own
government. And most obviously we have the right and freedom to vote.
Secondly, democracies represent the people. Unlike other governments, democratic
governments uphold what the citizens want and the people have the power to throw out the
government if they are not following what they want.
Third, democracies have more transparency. Nearly all sectors of the government keep an
eye on what is being done with the peoples money. This results in less deals being made behind
closed doors and results in less corruption.
Fourth, democracies respect and promote human rights. As we know, democracies are
understood as a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Therefore, human
rights are upheld.
Fifth, democracies are less violent. Larry Diamond (1995), a senior at the Hoover Institute
writes in a report to the Carnegie Commission that the experience of this century offers important
lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one
another. Democracies do not (Go to war with each other) aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize
themselves or to glorify their leaders. Democratic governments (they) do not ethnically "cleanse" their
own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor
terrorism against one another. They do not build Weapons of Mass Destruction to use on or to
threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading
partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more
environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest
the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they
value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements
in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties,
property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world
order of international security and prosperity can be built
Political conditions that create democracy are just.
Contention 1: United States political conditions are just.
According to the Global humanitarian assistance organization, the United States donates more
humanitarian aid than any other country. Because of this, when we judge whether political
conditions are just or not, we must look at the United States political conditions because we donate
the most aid
Since the majority of humanitarian aid goes to Africa, Ill read a piece of evidence from Thad
Dunning, a professor of Political Science at the University of California. He writes: The end of the Cold
War could make threats to withhold development assistance to African states more credible, and
therefore more effective, in two ways. First, the diminished geostrategic importance of African clients
in the postCold War period would imply that the loss of such clients would impose a negligible
geopolitical cost on powerful donors. Second, the dissolution of the Soviet Union may not only have
removed a geopolitical threat to the West but may have vindicated the liberal values of Western
donors, lending them a sense of the possibility of democratization all over the world. Thus the
perceived benet of promoting democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa rose even as the cost of losing
African clients declined dramatically. African leaders lost signicant leverage with which to resist aid
conditionality, because only one donor ~or group of donors! offered aid to them in the postCold War
period. No longer able to take refuge in balance-ofpower politics, recalcitrant African states could be
more effectively pressed to undertake the democratizing reforms that Western donors had de-
emphasized during the Cold War. Proponents and opponents of the perversity thesis of foreign aid
alike provide no reason to expect the inuence of the putative moral hazard to increase or decrease
over time. In contrast, the clear prediction of the credible commitment story is that aid conditionality
should become more effective in the postCold War period. One should therefore expect a positive
relationship between aid and democracy in the postCold War period. This causal mechanism and its
empirical prediction [is] supported by the qualitative evidence offered by previous studies of
democratic reform in Sub-Saharan Africa. For example, Claude Ake has described a legacy of
indifference to democracy among Africas political leaders, a legacy [is] rooted in both the
continents colonial past and the attitudes of many African politicians after independence. 9 Faced
with challenges to their newfound political power, post-independence elites opted for a unifying
developmental ideology that sought to repress internal dissent. Importantly, however, this ideology
found obliging complicity from Western countries that were most concerned with the grand strategies
of Cold War politics. Rather than press for democratization, Ake argues that Western powers ignored
human rights violations and sought clients wherever they could. 10 This was as true for the Soviet
Union as for the Western powers. At a time when Western donors overlooked their liberal principles
and the Soviet Union put priority on the advancement of socialist and revolutionary vanguard parties,
there was little external incentive for African states to undertake democratizing reforms. ith my claim
that threats to withhold aid became more credible as the importance of retaining African clients
diminished, however, Ake points to signicance of Africas greatly diminished strategic importance for
the adoption of democratic reforms in the postCold War period: The marginalization of Africa has given
the West more latitude to conduct its relations with Africa in a principled way. In the past, the West
adopted a posture of indifference to issues of human rights and democracy in Africa in order to avoid
jeopardizing its economic and strategic interests and to facilitate its obsessive search for allies against
communism. Now that these concerns have diminished, the West nds itself free to bring its African
policies into greater harmony with its democratic principles. 11 The failure to tie aid to democratic
reforms during the Cold War period, therefore, stemmed from the geostrategic priorities of donors+ On
a more fundamental level, however, the greater latitude of the West to demand democratic reforms
in the postCold War period may have its source in the credible commitment issue. Once competition
with the Soviet Union for African clients had receded, Western donors could much more credibly
threaten to withdraw aid if democratic reforms were not enacted by recipient states. If the argument
advanced above is correct, one should expect to see the relationship of aid to regime type in Sub-
Saharan Africa to be characterized by temporal discontinuity. Previous quantitative studies of the
relationship between foreign aid and democracy have failed to take this source of heterogeneity into
account, instead assuming that parameter coefcients are constant over the two periods. In the
following section, I provide empirical evidence in support of the alternate hypothesis that a structural
shift in the effect of aid on democracy occurred with the end of the Cold War. This evidence takes into
account the politics of countries involved. Not only does Africa receive the most aid, it is the only
place that has long-term conditional aid. This makes this evidence very conclusive and accurate.
In case my previous evidence was not enough to sway you to promote democracy, I will tell
you what will happen if we do not promote democracy. According to RJ Rummel, a political science
professor at the University of Hawaii, This is a report of the statistical results from a project on
comparative genocide and mass-murder in this [the twentieth] century. Most probably nearly 170
million people have been murdered in cold-blood by governments, well over three-quarters by
absolutist regimes. The most such killing was done by the Soviet Union (near 62,000,000 people), the
communist government of China is second (near 35,000,000), followed by Nazi Germany (almost
21,000,000), and Nationalist China (some 10,000,000). Lesser megamurderers include WWII Japan,
Khmer Rouge Cambodia, WWI Turkey, communist Vietnam, post-WWII Poland, Pakistan, and communist
Yugoslavia. The most intense democide was carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, where they
killed over 30 percent of their subjects in less than four years. The best predictor of this killing is regime
power. The more arbitrary power a regime has, the less democratic it is, the more likely it will kill its
subjects or foreigners. The conclusion is that power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.


The United States donates the most aid. United states political conditons are beneficial. They create
democracy. Since the U.S. donates the most aid and U.S. aid is beneficial, political conditions are not
unjust.