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The Case for Foreign Electoral Subversion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 August 2018

Cécile Fabre
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Abstract

It is widely alleged that President Putin's regime attempted to exercise influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It is known that its Soviet predecessors funded Western communist parties for decades as a means to undermine noncommunist regimes. Similarly, the United States has a long history of interfering in the institutions and elections of its Latin American neighbors, as well as (at the height of the Cold War) its European allies. More recently, many believe that, absent U.S.-driven assistance, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia would have lost the 2000 Yugoslavian presidential election to Slobodan Milošević. As those examples suggest, attempting to subvert the democratic elections of a putatively sovereign country is a time-honored way of bending the latter's domestic and foreign policy to one's will. In this paper, I focus on the state-sponsored, nonviolent, nonkinetic subversion of nationwide elections (for short, subversion) through campaign and party financing, tampering with electoral registers, and conducting disinformation campaigns about candidates. I argue that, under certain conditions and subject to certain constraints, subversion is pro tanto justified as a means to prevent or end large-scale human rights violations.

Keywords

campaign financingdemocratic rightselectoral subversionpropagandaRussiaSerbiaUnited StatesVietnam
Type
Roundtable: Alternatives to War
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , Fall 2018 , pp. 283 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2018 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Cheyney Ryan, Matthew Mandelkern, James Pattison, and the editors of Ethics & International Affairs for invaluably helpful comments on an earlier version, and to Cyrus Jones for a myriad of stylistic suggestions.

References

NOTES

1 For studies of those alternatives to war, see Pattison, James, The Alternatives to War: From Sanctions to Nonviolence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar. See also Fabre, Cécile, Economic Statecraft: Human Rights, Sanctions, and Conditionality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

2 The joint CIA-FBI-NSA declassified report on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, entitled “Background to ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections’: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution” (January 6, 2017), is available at www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf. On the National Front and the loans it secured from Russian banks, see “Financement du FN : des hackers russes dévoilent des échanges au Kremlin,” Le Monde, April 3, 2015, www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2015/04/02/fn-des-hackers-russes-devoilent-des-echanges-au-kremlin_4608660_4355770.html. On the Australian case, see Jonathan Pearlman, “Australia Bans Foreign Donations to Political Parties after China Controversy,” Telegraph, December 5, 2017, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/05/australia-bans-foreign-donations-political-parties-china-controversy/.

3 For a recent empirical discussion of some of those cases, see Levin, Dov H., “When the Great Power Gets a Vote: The Effects of Great Power Electoral Interventions on Election Results,” International Studies Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2016), pp. 189–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ryan Grim and Arthur Delaney, “The U.S. Has Been Meddling In Other Countries' Elections For A Century. It Doesn't Feel Good,” Huffington Post, July 27, 2016, www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/the-us-has-been-meddling-in-other-countries-elections-for-a-century-it-doesnt-feel-good_us_57983b85e4b02d5d5ed382bd; and Michael Dobbs, “U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition,” Washington Post, December 11, 2000, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/12/11/us-advice-guided-milosevic-opposition/ba9e87e5-bdca-45dc-8aad-da6571e89448/?utm_term=.96076215fe9b.”

4 I develop an argument to that effect in Fabre, Cécile, Cosmopolitan War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 1; and in Fabre, Cécile, Cosmopolitan Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 1.

5 Levin, “When the Great Power Gets a Vote.”

6 For relevant provisions in the United Kingdom and the United States, see, respectively, the 2000 Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act (articles 54 and 71H), and the United States Code § 30121. Internet voting was banned in the 2017 French legislative elections.

7 On the right to do wrong in general, see Waldron, Jeremy, “A Right to Do Wrong,” Ethics 92, no. 1 (1981), pp. 21–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On democracy's right to do wrong, see Walzer, Michael, “Philosophy and democracy,” Political Theory 9, no. 3 (1981), pp. 379–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On those retortive measures specifically, see Pattison, Alternatives to War.

8 On protests and repression under Slobodan Milošević’s regime, see, for example, Vladisavljević, Nebojša, “Competitive Authoritarianism and Popular Protest: Evidence from Serbia under Milosevic,” International Political Science Review 37, no. 1 (2016), pp. 36–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Incidentally, the rationale for subversion in such cases also supports internal subversion, when some citizens of Blue tamper with Blue's elections on the grounds that some of their compatriots would vote for grievously unjust policies if unimpeded. I am grateful to Matthew Mandelkern for drawing my attention to this.

9 On preventive war, see, for example, Rodin, David and Shue, Henry, eds., Preemption: Military Action and Moral Justification (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

10 For an absorbing account, see Ellsberg, Daniel, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Penguin, 2002)Google Scholar, especially chs. 2–4.

11 I am grateful to James Pattison for drawing my attention to this kind of case.

12 The points I make in this paragraph apply mutatis mutandis to cases in which Jones would authorize severe rights-violations against Blue's ethnic minorities yet embark on social justice reforms to the benefit of the majority, while Smith would do the opposite, and in which Intervener would be inclined to subvert the election in Smith's favor.