Remarks by Ambassador Beyrle at the Opening of the Democracy that Delivers: Unlocking the Potential of Transition International Conference

Sheraton Hotel, Sofia
May 21, 2008, 10:00 am

Thank you, Ognyan, and thanks to everyone in the room today.  It’s a pleasure to see that we were actually moving chairs in.  I was worried when I saw people standing.  We are going to cover a lot of ground today and sometimes you don’t think as well on your feet.

A lot of you traveled a great distance to be here today.  I want to, as an American Ambassador, especially recognize our American panelists in that respect, who traveled farther than anyone.  Beth Jones, Ambassador Beth Jones, former Assistant Secretary of State, my good friend and mentor and Andrew Natsios, former Administrator of USAID.  Thank you both very much for joining us.  And thank you to the many Bulgarians that I see in the audience today who are really pioneers in the democratic transition and development of this country, people like former Prime Minister Filip Dimitrov, Anastasia Mozer, I’m glad to see UN, the United Nations, the World Bank represented here today.

If we’re going to tackle an issue like democratic transition in a one-day conference, we need to be ambitious, but we also need to have a little bit of conceptual thinking that goes into it ahead of time.  Democracy is a very overused concept, as an organizing concept, but it’s never more relevant I think than it is today, and especially in this part of the world, as we look at the development of the Western Balkans in particular and the successes that Bulgaria has accomplished.  Taking accountable and participatory government for granted is the danger here.  You cannot confine democracy to a slogan and if you don’t re-invent your commitment to it almost every day then you’re running a big risk.

I speak to groups in this country all the time about democracy and one of my favorite quotes comes from probably one of the most notorious revolutionaries of the 1960s, an American named Abbie Hoffman.  Not someone that you’d consider to be a poet.  Someone that Quentin and I were talking about indirectly last night when we were reminding ourselves of what happened in the United States in the 1960s.  Abbie Hoffman said that democracy is not something that you believe in, it’s not a place that you hang your hat, it’s something that you do, you participate, and if you stop participating, democracy crumbles.

Now what gives us confidence that this conference can make some sort of meaningful contribution to all of this is that it is bringing together civic and political leaders from countries that are both important regional partners but also that have different traditions and perspectives.  I agree with President Putin when he says that not all democracies are alike.  Democracies come in different flavors.  We need to explore that issue here – we need to dip into that truth here.  We also thought that it was crucial to bring perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic as well – although Abbie Hoffman has passed on. 

The United States and European countries are strong partners of the countries in this region.  We are deeply invested in the success of Bulgaria, the Western Balkans, in consolidating the gains of democracy so that democracy really does deliver.

So why did we decide with CSD then to organize this conference at this moment, right here in Bulgaria?  The idea for the conference I think really sprang from my conversations that Mike Fritz and I had about a year ago as we were planning ahead, anticipating the events surrounding the close-out of USAID activity here.  And overall we were looking very carefully at what we had accomplished in Bulgaria with the help of USAID, with the help of UNDP, with the help of the World Bank, and others.  What were the successes and frankly what were the failures?  What were some of the things that just flopped flat and were there lessons we can draw from that?  Were there best practices and worst practices that we might be able to share?

Much of what we accomplished here I think was the result of a real synergy that was created between the American Embassy, and USAID in particular, and a lot of highly motivated and creative Bulgarians – some of whom I’m looking at right now – who were committed to taking advantage of that great window of opportunity that opened in the 1990s, what President Clinton called “the gift that history gave us,” to be able to make meaningful and sustainable changes.  And we felt especially as we looked at the best practices and some of the worst practices that we needed to be able to share this with our neighbors in the Western Balkans as well.  I think my own appreciation for all of this was only heightened by the fact that this is, as most of you know, my second mandate in Bulgaria.  I served here as a younger diplomat from 1985 to 1987, at a time when the first trembling was being felt.  That trembling was being felt out of Moscow and rolling very slowly as the shift from the epicenter of an earthquake down to Bulgaria.  Bulgarians here remember very well that this was the time that Todor Zhivkov recommended to his comrades that we all just sort of hunker down and let the storm blow over.  Of course, we know that history had something different in store for us.

We thought the timing of this conference frankly also was very apt because we were marking the end of development assistance, the partnership between the United States and Bulgaria that was forged and implemented by USAID.  And I am proud of nothing more than the contribution that the United States through USAID made to Bulgaria’s democratic development over the last 15, 16, 17 years.  We invested close to six-hundred million dollars in Bulgaria over that time.  That figure is cited many times and some people would say “Boy, that was a lot” and other people say “Boy, that was practically nothing at all.”  But we figured it out one day as we did the math at the table and it turned out that we spent less than ten dollars per year per Bulgarian over that time if I’m right on that.  So a lot of the work was done by Bulgarians here.  That work didn’t come for free, but you can’t put a price on it.

And that’s why we thought that again Bulgaria’s experience in this was, if not unique, very, very instructive for what still needs to be done – especially in the Western Balkans – and our support for civil society here as Ognyan said was really aimed at finding Bulgarian partners who got it, who understood what democratic change meant.  Because as Americans, the worst thing that we could do is think that we know the answers.  The best thing that we could do is recognize that Bulgarians have the answers and what they need from us is support.  What they need from us is everything we could do to enable them to win the debate and win the battle and I think and I would hope modestly that we were successful in that.

Today’s discussions I hope are going to help us enlighten the debate a little bit on how to counter threats to good governance that Ognyan already referred to here, how to ensure the long-term health of these still-fragile democratic institutions that we helped build here – both in Bulgaria and in other countries in the region.  Because to make a difference, the people, who are after all supposed to be the beneficiaries of democracy, have to feel that democracy is delivering something, and as I traveled around in this country, I’ve met many Bulgarians who do not feel that democracy delivered much to them, unfortunately.  We need to examine why that is so, we need to examine what role government and NGOs have in helping people better understand that even though they don’t, may not feel the direct benefits of democracy, that there has been improvement here.  That democracy does deliver.  Governments have to provide public services, they have to facilitate economic growth, they have to improve standards of living, they have to provide a level playing field for entrepreneurship.  People have to feel that that is real, not just words.  The democratic governments are defined by their responsiveness to public needs and demands.  And civil society, the general public, the media, all have to articulate the public interest in that as well.  Part of this is presentation.  Part of this is marketing, for lack of a better word, to the people of a democracy to help them understand things which are maybe buried a little bit below the surface.  I hope that at today’s conference we’ll be able to get at some of these issues to explore what went right and what went wrong and what application it has.

I am not going to do the usual ambassadorial drop-by of a conference.  I’m going to stay for almost all of the discussion here, not because I want to jump in and contribute things, but mostly because I want to take notes – because I will have a lot to learn and I am hopeful that some of what I learn today may prove useful as I go on to other challenges that Ognyan referred to, Senate confirmation willing.  So again, thank you all.  I look forward to being a participant with you in this debate. 

Thanks.